John Brunner - The Squares of the City

A newspaper placard had given me the key to these events as I drove past, and now people in the hotel bar confirmed what it said. No wonder Dominguez had been cagy when I spoke to him about Estrelita Jaliscos; he had already been preparing a pretty devastating attack, and while I was away he had fired his entire broadside.

Which is to say he had produced a witness—the dead girl’s brother—who swore not only that she had been put up to blackmailing Fats Brown, but that it was Andres Lucas who had made her do it.

The National Party had marched through the streets demanding retribution, Lucas’s house had been stormed and nearly set on fire, and Lucas himself was now in custody “for his own protection.”

It took me a little while to fill in all the subsidiary details, but it made one thing plain: whether he denied it or not, Miguel Dominguez was temporarily the most influential man in Ciudad de Vados, el Presidente himself not excepted.

I got hold of a paper and read the text of the announcement Dominguez had released to the press; it was a measure of his sudden eminence that Liberdad had printed it practically in full. Not content with going for Lucas alone, Dominguez had described this shameful affair as just one aspect of the widespread corruption of the moment; another, he declared, was Seixas’s barefaced insistence on new traffic developments to put business in the way of the construction companies in which he had an interest, and still another was the way in which Caldwell of the health department had exaggerated the situation in Sigueiras’s slum to secure public support for its clearance.

Enraged followers of the Citizens’ Party had come out on the streets to drive off the Nationals, and the National Guard had been called out to deal with the resulting riot. A curfew was now in force and would not be lifted till six o’clock in the morning.

I was very glad indeed to have missed this little set-to. Especially when Manuel, the hotel barman, pointed out to me the scar left by a rifle bullet that had careened through a window and ricocheted off his beautifully polished bar.

There was sporadic firing from the outskirts shortly before midnight, but the last news bulletin of the evening—broadcast over an army transmitter rigged as emergency substitute for the regular service—claimed that the situation was back to normal.

I wondered.

The first thing I heard in the morning was my bedside phone. The call was from Angers, asking whether I was all right and advising me, if I was, to stay put. I told him I was indeed all right and inquired whether there had been any reaction from Diaz on the memo I had sent him.

“Reaction!” snorted Angers—I could visualize his expression. “Don’t be funny! He’s got both hands full of this bloody rioting!”

The advice to stay put was good. I did walk around the plaza in the course of the morning, and watched a machine-gun post being set up in case someone was foolish enough to try to initiate the regular daily speakers’ meeting. No one took the risk, of course; any crowd collected today would have exploded like so much nitroglycerine.

After reading the paper and the typed bulletin on the board in the lobby, which explained that in the event of serious trouble the hotel’s cellars would be opened to clients, I played a couple of desultory left-hand-against-right games with my new chess set. That used up most of the morning. Eventually it got to be time for lunch, and to try to create an appetite I dropped in the bar for an aperitif.

“What’s the latest scandal, Manuel?” I asked the barman not expecting any news.

His reply almost made me drop my glass. “It is said there will be a duel, senor. It is said that Senor Arrio has challenged Senor Mendoza to a duel.”

“The hell you say!” I stared at him, half-suspecting he might be putting me on, but his face was quite serious. “What about?”

“It is about a story which Senor Mendoza has written—a very funny story about a man of affairs. Senor Arrio says it is meant to describe him. But if he goes to court and complains, then everyone will say, ‘So Senor Arrio thinks this is himself! Ha, ha! Yes, we see that it is very like Senor Arrio, truly.’ And so many people will laugh at Senor Arrio. This he does not like. So—” He spread his hands.

“But dueling isn’t legal in Aguazul—is it?”

“It is against the law, senor. But then, many things are against the law. Everyone knows privately, but of course no one will learn of it officially until afterwards.”

I saw the distinction. “And when is this due to happen?” I inquired.

“Ah, that one does not know,” Manuel answered sagely. “If it were known, many people might go to watch, and then the police would have to interfere. But most probably at dawn tomorrow, and somewhere in the country.”

“And who’s likely to win?”

Manuel assumed the thoughtful look of a racing tipster. “Since Senor Mendoza has been challenged, he has the right to choose the weapons. It is known that Senor Arrio is one of the finest pistol shots in all America. So it will be swords— and so who can foretell?”

The story went afterward that Arrio lost control when he drew first blood, and when his seconds managed to drag him back, Mendoza’s guts were hanging out of the front of his shirt. They got him to the hospital, but he died there two hours later from loss of blood and internal injuries. He was no longer a young man, of course.

I’d never read any of Mendoza’s work, yet the news of his dying—which had no personal meaning to myself—affected me curiously. I thought of the way people thousands of miles away were going to feel regret at his death, when the news of, say, Vados dying would not concern them at all. I felt almost a touch of envy.

And then the unexpected happened. There was this man Pedro Murieta, whom I had seen at Presidential House in company with the Mendozas; he has something to do with Dalban and something to do with the publishing house that issued Felipe Mendoza’s books, and everyone seemed to know of him once his name was mentioned but scarcely thought of it otherwise— that sort of a man.

And when he was through, Arrio was in jail on a charge of murder.

I wondered what the position of the two rival parties was now. The Nationals seemed to have made up ground; they had lost both Juan Tezol and Sam Francis under discreditable circumstances, but the Citizens had now had Andres Lucas impeached for conspiracy and Arrio jailed for murder. Both sides could now throw an equal amount of mud.

By the weekend, though, the rioting dissolved in a stalemate. Every cell in the city was full of people under arrest. The police had used the machine-gun in the Plaza del Sur— once. After that things were quieter. By Sunday night, aside from the few store windows boarded up and holes in the road where halfhearted attempts had been made to barricade a street, there was no sign that mobs had passed this way.

Nonetheless, I had believed when I came to this city that Aguazul was remarkably free of violence for a Latin American country. Either I’d picked the wrong time to come, or the official propaganda machine had spread a highly convincing untruth.

I was pretty sure that the first alternative was the correct one. Reactions like Angers’s couldn’t have been simulated. Angers dropped in to see me at the hotel on Sunday evening and told me, gray-faced, that he had never known such events in the decade he’d lived in Vados. He had just seen his wife off at the airport; he had sent her to stay with friends in California until the situation calmed down. And that was likely to be some time yet. The only other significant development over the weekend, though, was a stern and dignified challenge against Dominguez by Professor Cortes. Cortes made no attempt to defend Lucas—nobody was attempting to defend Lucas at the moment—but he maintained that Dominguez’s accusations against Caldwell were totally baseless. He had himself, so he claimed, seen far worse things in Sigueiras’s slum and in the shantytowns than found its way into the health department reports.