John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“Good luck then, and be assured that we will find out if it is at all possible who sought to destroy you by bringing you here this morning. Hasta la vista, y —”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but turned and went back indoors, shaking her head thoughtfully.

I thought, as I was getting into the car, that there was a hell of a woman. One of the first things I could recall noticing about her was the way she sought respect not for her femininity but for herself, and now she’d certainly got that respect from me. I could have imagined things developing a thousand different ways—only I couldn’t imagine them, after all. Suppose I’d come to Aguazul at leisure, rather than on business and restricted by my own self-imposed rules. I’d more than likely have done the usual things—the round of dinners and shows and so on; I’d have wanted a companion as charming and sophisticated as Maria Posador, and I wouldn’t have got her.

The hell with that sort of thing, though. I had a vague feeling that we might come out of this actual friends, and somehow that seemed like a very fair—even generous— reward.

The ride to Presidential House was a short one, for we were already half the distance from the center of the city to the hillside on which the great building was set. Almost before I knew it we were checked through the gates and up the driveway; evidently I was still expected. At any rate, the guards seemed to know I was coming.

A servant came to open the door of the car for me, and directed my driver where to park. Before going indoors, I looked down over the lawn and saw that the huge chessboard was once again unrolled on the grass. By the light of a floodlamp a few men were being rehearsed in the moves of another game.

From the outside, Presidential House was pillared and traditional; the interior, on the other hand, was superbly free of fuss. I waited under cool white discharge lamps on the buff-colored plastic floor of the entrance hall, looking at a magnificent piece of Inca sculpture set off by flowers so arranged as to resemble votive offerings to the god. The servant who had escorted me inside went to announce my presence. The result I wasn’t prepared for.

The door through which the man had gone reopened in a matter of seconds, to pass him and someone else—presumably, from his stately bearing and evening dress, the chief butler. His expression, however, was far from matching his bearing; he seemed to be thrown into consternation by the sight of me. “Senor Hakluyt!” he exclaimed. “You—you were delayed, yes?”

“I was delayed,” I said. “But that was this morning. Here I am as you see me. What’s wrong?”

“Senor, dinner is—has just been—I will inform his excellency the president—”

What had got into the man? I said harshly, “Don’t trouble yourself. Vados didn’t give me a time to come. If there are apologies to be made, I’ll make them myself. Is he in there?” I walked toward the door through which he had just come; he made a half-hearted move to block my way, and I sidestepped, feeling tension gather inside me. Before he could get in the way again, I was in the room.

“Buenos tardes,” I said. And took in the scene. This was an anteroom; beyond it, wide double doors were thrown back to reveal a table laid for dinner. The guests were taking an aperitif before going in. They looked at me.

There was Vados himself, gaping like a stranded fish, his face pale, his hands shaking. There was his wife, looking magnificent in a gown that had probably cost a thousand. Diaz was there, his long-boned face frozen in an expression that might have been comical. There was Garcia, looking more than ever like a schoolmaster, blinking behind his glasses and smiling a greeting to me. There was a woman who might be his wife or Diaz’s. And there were some servants.

A clock on the wall stated that it was five minutes to eight. I looked past the petrified gathering to the dinner table, and I counted. A place for Vados, one for his wife, one for Garcia, one for Diaz, one for the unidentified woman. I felt cold certainty clasp my mind.

Into the long moment before anyone recovered sufficiently to speak to me, I dropped the weightiest sentence I had ever uttered. I said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not dead.”

Diaz crossed himself with spasmic violence; Garcia, Senora Vados, and the unidentified woman gave a little unison gasp of astonishment. Only Vados remained outwardly calm. A hint of sweat made his forehead shine, but his voice was steady as he said, “Dead, Senor Hakluyt? Has an attempt been made on your life?”

A moment of dominance was upon me now, bringing with it a strange dreamlike calm, as though my mind were running a few moments ahead of the present and watching the inevitable consequences of what I said and did, ensuring that I could only say or do precisely those things which would be most effective.

I said, “Dead. Senor Presidente, did you invite me to dine with you tonight?”

“Of course.”

“Did you inform your servants that I was expected?”

“Naturally! I fail to see—”

“You didn’t set a time for my arrival, did you? It seems that eight o’clock is the time you dine. It is now”—I shot a glance at the clock—”four minutes to eight. You had given up expecting me. You had. The guards at the gatehouse hadn’t, but you had.”

“Senor Hakluyt, you are obviously overstrained—”

“Or do you tell your servants to lay another place at the dinner table each time another of your guests arrives?”

Garcia, as though realizing for the first time what all the fuss was about, turned and began to count the places at the table, jabbing his forefinger through the air. I looked not at him, though, but at Diaz, whose large, long stone-carving face bore an expression of resigned dismay.

Vados touched his moustache with a shaking finger. He said, “As to my not advising you of the time, senor, that is indeed a fault, and I apologize. But for the rest, you are making a great deal out of nothing at all. We have been told by the police that you were not to be found today, that you were missing from your hotel. There had been—uh—there had been an anonymous telephone call to say you were missing. And we had not been advised of your reappearance.”

“Listen, begetter of concrete and glass,” I said harshly, “and I will tell you of this city you have fathered. You have tried to govern it as one governs a game of chess; you have reduced your citizens to the status of pawns and attempted to direct their actions and even their thinking as though they were pieces of carved wood. You have tried to do this to me also, and here you have made your greatest and last mistake. I have not come here to sit at your table and eat your fine cuisine. I have come to say that a man is not a pawn, and if you try to make a man into a pawn, you must expect him sooner or later to turn on you and spit in your eye.”

And Diaz—that great-bodied horse of a man, huge enough, it seemed, to draw a plough or tear a tree from its roots— Diaz put his wide spatulate hands to his heart, closed his dark eyes, folded at the knees, and sprawled across the immaculate floor in a total faint.

I had intended until that instant to end my tirade there, to spin on my heel and walk out of the room, out of the house, out of Ciudad de Vados. If I had done that, I would never have discovered what my words—my random-chosen, metaphorical words—had done to Vados.

Two servants moved to help Diaz to his feet, to stagger under his weight to a couch. Absolute silence except for their shuffling and grunting. In that silence, my resolve to leave the room forestalled by Diaz’s collapse, I saw Vados’s face go gray and appear to crumble at the edges, like the face of a statue much exposed to weathering.