“That’s the arrangement.”
“Great — hate costing construction projects. Damn muddle of figures, all those loose ends like sickness losses an’ God knows what… Want I should put y’ on to the firms who’ll be doing the job?”
“That can wait. I’m not interested in who does it — it’s what has to be done that concerns me.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, regarding me thoughtfully. And then a second time, “Uh-huh.”
We spent about twenty minutes after that going into a few of the most significant figures — he sent for some recent records of work done under government contract so that I could get a rough picture of costs, and Angers sat impatiently at the side of the room while we got technical. I was rather surprised to find that under his casual exterior Seixas had a mind like a razor. Of course, I shouldn’t have been — Vados wasn’t the kind of man to tolerate easy riders in his beloved city’s administration.
Our interview over, Seixas got to his feet, beaming. “A helluva lot of luck, Hakluyt!” he said. “Me, I think it’s too damn much money to spend anyway — we could dig those sonsabitches out in half a day with bayonets. Then they’d come back, though, so maybe it ain’t a waste. See you!”
Evidently relieved, Angers got up eagerly, shook Seixas’ hand with a distant expression on his face, and hurried me out of the room.
“Quite a character, isn’t he?” I said when the door was closed behind me.
“By no means unique, I’m afraid,” said Angers glumly. “I mean — well, you saw for yourself. The empty bottles and the dirty clothes in his office desk — I ask you!” He sighed. “Still, one has to admit he’s clever enough. He’s a native, of course,” he added as an afterthought.
“He spoke very good English.”
“Says he taught himself at the cinema.” Angers looked about him as we emerged once more into daylight. “Well, we have to go about a quarter of a mile — do you feel like walking, or shall I call a cab?”
I mentally pictured the layout of this locality; the police headquarters were in a block a short distance north of the Plaza del Norte, behind the Courts of Justice. “I’d like to walk, if you don’t mind,” I said. “The more I can see of the city on foot, the better, at the moment.”
“As you like.”
We walked silently for a while. “By the way.” I said eventually, “why is the chief of police one of the first people I have to see?”
“Oh, a variety of reasons,” said Angers offhandedlv. “I don’t mind saying you may find him a little awkward — he seems to be in two minds about the whole affair.”
I digested the remark blankly. After a pause Angers explained further.
“Well — uh — the people squatting in these shantytowns, of course, are a thorn in his side; there’s a tremendous amount of petty thievery that goes on, and often enough a wanted man can just vanish into the hills with the help of relatives of people here. So he wants to get rid of the mess, like the rest of us. On the other hand, he’s rather the same kind of man as Diaz — country-born, not an educated man at all, or rather, not a cultured man. I’m told that this is one of the reasons why Vados preferred him as police chief — he’s far better able to enter the minds of native criminals than anyone from outside Aguazul. But he has a gruff sort of dislike for — well, for people like myself, for example. For the foreign-born citizens.”
“And what’s his force like?”
Angers shrugged. “Venal and corrupt by our standards, but pretty good, so I’m assured, for Latin America. Vados cleared out the worst offenders when he took office, and they come down very heavily on policemen who take bribes or falsify evidence out of personal grudges. That’s to say, they come down heavily on the ones they catch; I’m sure there’s a lot more going on than ever comes to light.”
“That was my impression,” I said, and told him about the policeman who had tried to steal from the beggar-boy’s pot.
“What can you expect?” said Angers in a tone of unexpected toleration. “After all, it’s probably only the fact that he has both eyes and both hands that divides the policeman from the beggar. It’s going to take a lot of determination to ensure that the substance of Vados matches the appearance of it. Some of these people are a few generations at most away from the Stone Age; it’s really asking too much of them to turn them into civilized city-dwellers. In another twenty years perhaps — not yet.”
El Jefe — Captain O’Rourke — looked as Irish as his name, aside from an Indian cast to his cheekbones. His short brown hair topped a stage-Irish face, knobby like a potato, with wide lips. He had a wart on his nose and another on the back of his left hand. His fingers were thick, stubby, and ill-kept; there was a mat of coarse hair on the back of each wrist. He wore black uniform pants and boots, a black shirt, and a red tie with the knot pulled down two inches so that he could open his collar. On a peg on the wall behind him hung a shiny-peaked cap and an automatic in a leather holster.
His office smelled a little of frying-oil, as though the air-conditioning had been turned off at noon and had failed to carry away the smell of his subordinates’ packed meals. A huge array of photographs of himself framed him as he sat behind his desk — from a faded street-photographer’s shot of him as a small boy en route to first communion, to a glossy eight-by-ten of him resplendent in dress uniform shaking hands with el Presidente.
On other walls there were also photographs — mainly gory ones. Three bodies being dragged out of a wrecked car. A man bleeding from the corner of his mouth, both eyes closed by bruises. A woman drawing down the top of her blouse to expose an ugly burn scar across one shoulder. Probably mementos of past cases.
He gestured us gruffly to a chair; it was almost a shock to hear his gutteral accented Spanish, in view of his name and his appearance.
“No habla inglés,” he said shortly, as though confessing to a serious fault — perhaps in his eyes, it was one. He added something else rapid, which I failed to follow. I glanced at Angers.
“Uh — in spite of his name,” Angers translated with a bad grace. “I’ll have to interpret for you, I suppose.” He turned to O’Rourke and spoke haltingly.
The interview, such as it was, took a long time and covered very little ground. Since it was practically all platitudes and dull questions to which the answers were obvious, I let Angers do the talking after a while, meantime looking at the pictures on the walls.
A sudden barking exclamation from O’Rourke brought me back to the here and now with a start. I glanced around to find his brown eyes fixed on me, and Angers looking uncomfortable.
“What’s the trouble?” I said.
“I — uh — well, I was telling him about this disgraceful affair of the policeman stealing from a beggar this morning, and—”
“You what?” I said.
“Well, it oughtn’t to be allowed to pass without action,” said Angers defensively.
“All right, if you’ve done it, you’ve done it. What’s the comment?”
Angers licked his lips, with a sidelong look at O’Rourke, whose face was like thunder. “I — I can’t quite make out. He either wants to sack the offender, because he was stealing from his own people — as though it would have been better for him to steal from you instead — or prove that there’s no truth in the accusation at all.”