John Brunner - The Squares of the City

They came, a short distance away, to a division of the passage. Angers gestured to Senora Brown to go after them; at first she hesitated, but a meaning jerk of Angers’ pistol persuaded her. She yielded and began to walk.

Helpless, I followed.

At the division of the passage the policemen had paused and were hotly disputing which way to go. Snatching his eyes from his captive for an instant, Angers snapped a command at them. “In the left fork there is no floor!” he said. “Go down the right branch, you fools!”

Indeed, the boards laid between the struts and girders gave out a few paces along the left-hand branch, and beyond was a yawning gap that swallowed up the light of the torches. The policemen nodded and went cautiously up the other passage. I think I was the only one who saw that the woman relaxed a little as they went. I didn’t say anything. Maybe if the police drew a blank, they would give up.

They were half out of sight behind a jutting partition, perhaps thirty or forty feet from us, when Angers again indicated to his captive that she should move to follow them. She went readily enough. Angers fell in behind her, and I was on the point of going after him when something moved in the left-hand fork of the passage, where there was only that open pit instead of a slatted floor.

A huge hand came out of the blackness.

It aimed for the nape of Angers’ neck; if it had struck fair, Angers would have dropped like a pole-axed steer. But it didn’t—maybe the reach was too far, maybe a foot slipped, maybe Angers detected its coming and managed to move aside a precious couple of inches. It struck him only behind the left shoulder.

I had time to think, dispassionately, that Brown had doubtless had the floorboards taken up along that branch of the passage in order to prevent people tracking him down; I had time to think that if he hadn’t been stupid-brave to save his wife from a danger that might have passed her by, he would have lived.

In fact, he died.

Angers turned with the blow; possibly the impact spun him around more quickly than he could have managed by himself. The gun in his hand belched sudden flame, and dust shook down about our heads with the explosion. It was chance, it was reflex, it was the hand of fate, and the bullet destroyed the face of Fats Brown like a drawing being wiped from a slate.

The police started to come back; the woman screamed one long terrible cry that echoed in my head for hours—and I ran.

I found my way to the outer air before the news of what had happened. That was all that saved me from having to join Angers and the police in their bloody retreat. For as soon as what had happened was known, the people of the slum turned on the intruders. When they came out, Angers, deathly pale, was bleeding from a cut across his face; one of the policemen was dragging his right leg as if he could not feel it any longer; all of them were smeared and spattered with filth.

I didn’t ask what had happened to Brown’s wife. I assumed she was with her dead.

The police ignored me. One of them went straight to the two-way radio in his car and called headquarters for reinforcements. Angers, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief, said something about fixing Sigueiras for good this time—for harboring a murderer—and I said something insane about a man being innocent until proved guilty.

He turned his eyes on me. I saw they were quite hard.

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong. Our laws are like the Code Napoleon. The onus is on the accused.”

Faces full of hate came to the entrance of the slum; eyes stared down at us, and children threw more filth that spattered across the clean shining cars. One of the policemen fired three shots, and the faces vanished.

Distantly we heard the howl of police sirens hurrying toward us.

I went up the slope to the station and caught a monorail to the Plaza del Sur. Nobody tried to hinder my going.

I wasn’t really thinking as I went. My mind seemed to have ceased its high-level functions, as though my skull had been poured full of cold water. Afterward quick snapshots of things I had seen on the way remained in memory—faces in the monorail car, the sight of traffic in the streets below, the reflection of sun on the windows of buildings, a headline in a paper from Puerto Joaquin that someone was reading as I left the car at Plaza del Sur station. But I wasn’t thinking. I had stuck, as though walking up a down escalator, in front of a billboardlike vision of Senora Posador, informing me that whether I liked it or not I had importance in the scheme of affairs.

Enough importance to kill a man.

If I had not conceived this irritable plan to enter the slum for myself, if I had not checked and turned as Senora Brown went by… Here you could point to decisions of mine; here you could say, “He did this, and therefore this followed.”

The afternoon lay hot and bright on the Plaza del Sur. It was almost empty of people. I went straight across it and entered the hotel.

Sitting alone in the lounge, the habitual unlit Russian cigarette between her fingers, was Maria Posador. Someone had been with her; two glasses rested on the chessboard-topped table beside her, two brands of cigarette were crushed in the ashtray. She was reading through a letter, with eyebrows drawn together.

I went over to her; she raised her face and gave me a cool nod.

“I thought you’d want to know,” I said harshly. My voice sounded unfamiliar in my ears, as though another man were speaking through my lips. “They found Fats Brown.”

She jerked upright in the chair. “Diablo! Where, in the name of God?”

“In Sigueiras’s slum—where else?”

“I had thought him safely out of the country! Senor, what have they done with him?”

“Angers put a bullet through his head,” I said, and the frozen golden face under the dark sleek hair with the violet eyes and the rich red lips was overlaid in my vision by the sight of the other face as it ceased to be a face at all.

Maria Posador had halted at my words like a movie when the projector motor fails; after a long second she flowed into motion again, but a mist had come up in her eyes, and I do not think she saw me clearly.

“Of course,” she muttered. “Of course, that was to be expected.”

I waited in silence. In a while she stood up, very erect, and gave me a little stiff half-bow. Then she walked away, crumbling the cigarette in her hand so that flakes of tobacco scattered behind her elegant, expensive shoes.

I turned toward the bar.

Later, they put television on, and I was too apathetic to move away. The program opened with news: Brown’s death. I saw the same graveled ground where I had stood earlier; there were military trucks deployed around it now, and people going to the monorail station crowded curiously in the background. Troops went into the slum, came out with Brown’s body; the watchers saw it, recognized it under its covering of sacks. Hats were lifted. People crossed themselves. Behind, many of the slum-dwellers were chased into sunlight, beaten with fists and batons, hurried along with the butts of carbines. Like impounded stray dogs, they were driven into the army trucks, sat with bowed heads, and waited to be taken away.

There was a hunt going on for Sigueiras. He was somewhere in the city. As soon as he was found, they would charge him with concealing a wanted man.

They interviewed Angers, looking heroically injured with a bandage on his head, on the current affairs program at five past eight. I was still in the bar; I hadn’t any stomach for food. I’d just been sitting there. They also put Bishop Cruz on, and he thundered episcopally about the wages of sin as he had done before, the day after Estrelita Jaliscos died.