John Brunner - The Squares of the City

There was only one reason that fitted his actions. He must have been damned sure that this demand by Estrelita hadn’t simply been hatched in the brain of a teen-age gold-digger. He must have known, or have convinced himself, that he would never be permitted to clear himself.

Who could be gunning for him that hard? His rival lawyer Lucas?

No, of course not. Lucas didn’t need that kind of out.

Or—didn’t he?

There were a lot of things I needed to know about Lucas before I could answer that question. The best person to tell me them would be his other legal opponent, who had also been a good friend of Fats Brown’s—Miguel Dominguez.

I wondered if I could get hold of him at this time of the evening. I got up from my chair, and the girl singing broke off with a hurt look.

“Oh, yes!” I said, remembering. “Manuel!”

The barman came down toward me, smiling.

“Bring the young lady her usual, and charge it up to me. I’ll be back.”

“Her—usual, senor?” He looked at me expressionlessly.

“Yes, whatever she has on these occasions. A double tequila con sangrita de la viuda, I should imagine.” I grinned at the girl’s outraged expression. “I’m sorry, senorita, but I think your song is terrible. Never mind—have two drinks on me while you’re about it, and you’ll get to be a big girl one day.” And why she didn’t spit in my eye I’m still not sure.

I must have got Dominguez away from his dinner table or something, because he sounded irritable when I called him. He thawed a little when I’d told him why I called, though not completely.

“Thank you for advising me, Senor Hakluyt,” he said. “You must, of course, understand that since Brown was never brought to trial, the character of this Jaliscos girl is of mainly academic interest. But it would be kind to his widow to do something toward clearing his reputation, if possible.”

I said, “But it mustn’t be allowed to go at that, senor. Fats Brown was a good man, better than most people I’ve met in Vados. And from the bishop on down, people continue to smear him. Now that Judge Romero’s attack on your good standing has been countered, your position in the legal world here is close to Andres Lucas’s—”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he put in rather frigidly.

“A lot of people are saying it. Look, Fats was convinced that Estrelita Jaliscos was no more than an amateur tart who wouldn’t have had the brains to pick on him without prompting. If there was someone behind her, then that someone ought to be hauled out of hiding—”

“Senor,” he said, sounding almost regretful, “I think you are building too much on the word of one young lady. It would be erring as much on our side as those who condemn Senor Brown have erred on theirs if we were to jump to the conclusion that this was a vile scheme to defame him. We simply do not know. I can promise no more than that we who are old friends of Senor Brown will do our best for him and especially for his widow.”

It wasn’t what I wanted. But I had to make do with what I got.

They were supposed to be burying Fats the following day. I was unable to find out where. A curtain of silence seemed to have been drawn—presumably disturbances were feared, as there had been on the day of Guerrero’s funeral. I wouldn’t have thought he was so poor that he had to be buried at city expense, and he wasn’t a convicted criminal, but when I called the two non-Catholic burial grounds in the neighborhood of the city, I was told that he was being buried in neither. He certainly hadn’t been a practicing Catholic, but I called the bishop’s secretary on the outside chance, and was told he was not a member of the Church and nothing was known of the arrangements for his funeral.

So Fats Brown was laid to rest somewhere—in obscurity— and I had to go back to work.

Things were going smoothly enough. Simple figuring had already chopped a quarter-million dolaros off my original estimates for the market district scheme, and the objections raised by Diaz turned out to be rather sensible ones. I let the costing clerks get ahead with it and went in to see Angers late in the morning.

He seemed to shrink a little when I entered his office, to draw further into his shell; bit by bit, as though he had at first been afraid I was going to strike him, he came back as we talked.

“The reason I’ve come in,” I said, lighting a cigarette, “is the need for a decision about Sigueiras’s slum.”

Angers didn’t say anything, just waited for me to go on.

I tried to sound impressive and didactic. “As I’ve said before, only it hasn’t penetrated, it’s essentially a matter of saying, ‘Get out.’ As things stand, apparently you have to add something like, ‘Get out, we want this for warehouse space.’ Fine; it’d make a good storage place. Trouble is, there’s no genuine need for storage space there. The center of this city was much too well planned for that. It boils down to this: is the city going to throw Sigueiras out on his face, or am I still supposed to fake an official reason?”

“We still can’t just throw him out,” said Angers wearily. “Harboring a wanted man isn’t a felony that carries automatic loss of citizens’ rights. If it were, the whole thing would be perfectly simple. We still need a redevelopment plan before we can pass legislation depriving him.”

I was silent for a moment, thinking back to that visit to the slum. I’d forgotten about the data I’d come to gather, the moment I recognized Senora Brown. But up till then I’d been reluctantly forced to the conclusion that there was nothing to choose between evicting the slum-dwellers and leaving them where they were. Left where they were, they had a home— of sorts. Evicted, their problem would become conspicuous enough to compel the government to act. They were plainly not equipped to inhabit modern dwellings—but hell, that question had to be faced every time you cleared tenement blocks or hovels, and they certainly wouldn’t learn any better down in their mucky pit.

“I think I’m going to compose a long memorandum,” I said. “A memorandum to Diaz.”

“I could arrange for you to see him personally if you prefer,” Angers suggested. The offer was like a kind of flag of truce.

“I don’t think I do prefer, thanks. I couldn’t be so persuasive in Spanish as I’d need to be, and an interpreter would waste time. I’ll tell you what I’m going to say, anyway.”

I looked at the wall map, which was open and hanging down, and took time to compose my thoughts.

“Roughly, it’s this,” I said at length. “I can fake a development plan that’ll allow the city to throw Sigueiras out with no objections from anyone. Purely incidentally, unless arrangements are made to absorb the slum-dwellers when it goes into effect, it will also trigger off a civil war.”

“That seems like a strong way of putting it,” said Angers, staring.

“I’m not kidding. I’m simply saying that the answer isn’t to—to build parking lots under the station or whatever. The best bet is to disperse the slum-dwellers on moral and health grounds, leave the monorail central as it is, and subsidize new villages for these people. Use the available funds, not to patch up the site, but to get them out of the city’s hair. Build ‘em new houses, buy ‘em livestock, give ‘em ground to cultivate and the tools to work it with. Hire a couple of U. N.-trained experts to teach them how to live in the twentieth century. That’ll cure the problem—and it’ll likely stay cured.”

Angers was slowly shaking his head. “Diaz wouldn’t accept that,” he said. “I agree it’s superficially the best answer, and of course it would be good for the city simply to get these peasants back into the country again. Mark you, I’m not sure they’d agree to go—a taste for sponging is hard to lose once it’s acquired, and even in Sigueiras’s stinking cubbyholes they’ve probably lived an easier and lazier life than they ever did in their villages. But that’s not the objection I’m quite sure Diaz would raise.