John Brunner - The Squares of the City

Oh, there were probably decent people on both sides—and that was half my personal trouble. Aside from Francis, who was now out of the calculation anyway, the Nationals were probably well-meaning enough, from Mendoza to Dominguez. In spite of her notorious grudge against Vados, Maria Posador seemed to have rational fears to back up her opposition, and certainly Judge Romero had treated Dominguez in a way no one of his eminence should have done.

But the political atmosphere here was of the hothouse kind. The least incident capable of being made to bear political fruit was being nurtured, protected from frost and fed with manure until it blossomed out of all proportion. The only hard case of grievance on either side, so far as I could see, was the death of Guerrero—and that, since Francis was in custody, was emotionally based.

At the time, I now realized, I had been oddly little affected by seeing Guerrero die. The incident was so brief, so nearly unreal. I’d seen men die before—twice in brawls between construction-gang workers, several times from accidents on the job or in the street. As the days slipped by and as the resentment engendered by Guerrero’s death continued to fester in the city, I was coming to see that people who had perhaps never met Guerrero in their lives had been far more affected by his death than I who had seen it take place.

And that could have only one implication. No man could have meant so much to so many strangers unless he was a symbol. A symbol of very great importance.

They buried him on Sunday, after a service in the cathedral at which Bishop Cruz officiated in person. The city stopped, and crowds lined the sidewalks to watch the cortege, the women almost all in black, the men with black bands on their arms or black ribbons on their lapels, and black ties if they wore ties at all. Symbol.

O’Rourke had every available police officer on duty along the route of the funeral procession, which was as well, for half a dozen attempts were made to start disturbances. I assumed at first that they were organized by the National Party; I learned later, however, that it was actually students from the university who had been responsible, and they were demonstrating against the National Party, not against Guerrero and the Citizens of Vados.

The funeral left renewed tension in its wake, as a ship crossing calm water leaves a swell that may endure for hours. Symbol, I said again to myself, and saw that perhaps I should seek a reason for my own unasked-for and unmerited notoriety here.

Maria Posador had said, “Had it not been you, senor, it might have been anyone else. It was what the situation dictated.”

Exactly. As a neurosis caused by repression manifests itself in ways that may bear no resemblance at all to the root of the trouble, so the repressed tension in Ciudad de Vados was showing itself—here, there, disconnected as though poking from a wall of fog, seizing what focal event or personality came to hand and crystallizing briefly around it.

Ill chance decreed that I should be one of the focal personalities it fastened on. And once the process had begun, how to fight it? How to struggle against that amorphous combination of emotions, desires, fears, jealousies, now ruling Ciudad de Vados? I was beginning to feel hemmed in, chained, a prisoner, pushed at by impersonal forces, denied the most essential liberty, which I had all my life prized: liberty to do the work I did best in the best possible way.

Yet, somehow, two more days of illusory calm slipped by. I spent most of them in the traffic department, trying to force some sort of order on a chaotic lot of computer figures, struggling to reduce abstract flow patterns to terms of what Jose and Lola would see, hear, think as they passed on their way. I contrived nearly to forget a lot of things—among them, the suit that Sigueiras was bringing against the traffic department.

But on Wednesday morning Angers warned me that the legal resources of his side were drying up. Lucas had secured one adjournment and had taken advantage of the time to organize his case against Sam Francis—but then, there was no question of the outcome of that trial.

I shuffled some papers together, lit a cigarette, and sat back to look at Angers, rearranging my thinking. I said, “So you mean that subpoena you gave me may have to be used?”

“So Lucas warns me,” said Angers.

“Now there’s a point,” I said. “I don’t get one or two things about this legal setup here. This Lucas seems to have fingers in a hell of a lot of different pies. I thought it was practically universal for lawyers to stick to either the criminal law or the civil law. Yet this guy Lucas keeps cropping up in both civil and criminal cases. Why?”

“You ask some complicated questions,” sighed Angers. “I suppose the short answer is that it’s part of the Mayor theory of government. Mayor has influenced Vados a hell of a lot, you know. And among his other principles is one to the effect that all contraventions of justice are the business of the state. So in Vados itself—although not yet in the rest of the country, I believe—there’s no real distinction between civil and criminal. A private citizen who can’t afford to litigate against someone he thinks has injured him can apply for the state to prosecute on his behalf, for example. And that kind of case actually occurs every now and then.

“But in Lucas’s case, it’s rather different. Actually, he is a criminal lawyer. It’s just that his position as legal adviser to the Citizens’ Party involves him in a good many associated cases. And, of course, having helped to draft the charter of incorporation for the city, he also gets called in when a case like this one of Sigueiras’s comes up.”

“He sounds like a busy man.”

“He is.”

“Didn’t you tell me to expect a subpoena from Fats Brown as well, by the way?” I recalled. “What happened? I never got it.”

“Things haven’t been going too well for Brown,” said Angers rather smugly. “I’m told that when he heard we were going to call you, he discarded the idea. Lucas says he’s been floundering a bit in court, too. Apparently he’s upset by what this fellow Dominguez did the other day.”

“Brown doesn’t strike me as the kind of man that upsets easily,” I said. “What did Dominguez do?”

“Oh, didn’t you hear? Well, there was a disgraceful article by Cristoforo Mendoza in Tiempo last weekend, in which he gratuitously defended Dominguez against what Judge Romero had said about him—and Dominguez wrote to them and to Liberdad saying he didn’t welcome assistance from the organ of a party whose leaders were given to committing murder in broad daylight.”

“And Tiempo published the letter?”

“No, of course not. But Liberdad did.” I nodded slowly. “So he’s transferred his allegiance to the party that commits its murders stealthily by night, I suppose?”

“What exactly do you mean by that, Hakluyt?” said Angers, his tone implying that I ought not to mean anything at all.

“Nothing,” I said peaceably. “Nothing. I’m neutral, remember? So I suppose it’s my duty to regard both political parties as equally repugnant.”

“There’s a difference between the Citizens of Vados and the National Party,” said Angers stiffly; before he could get going on the nature of that difference, I apologized and told him to finish what he was saying about Dominguez.

“There isn’t any more,” he said shortly. “Except that, of course, Judge Romero is sharpening a knife for Brown. Brown is supposed to have put Dominguez up to it—did you know?”

“Up to writing to Liberdad?”

“Oh, come now!” said Angers in a tone of irritation. “Of course not! I don’t quite see what you’re playing at, Hakluyt, but you seem to be deliberately obtuse today.”