Angers, serious-faced, interrupted the conversation to introduce his companion as Mr. Caldwell of the city health department, and waved me to a chair.
“I’ve just been hearing some rather interesting news, Hakluyt,” he said. “Caldwell, maybe you’d tell Hakluyt what you just told me. I think he ought to hear it right away.”
I sat down and looked attentive. Caldwell cleared his throat nervously and gave me one quick glance before settling his eyes on the wall behind me and speaking in a low, monotonous voice.
“It was yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I was making my regular visit to S-s-sigueiras’s — his s-slum. We’ve been trying literally for years to get him to improve the c-conditions down there. I th-think I must have been there about the s-same time you were.
“Because when he came back he was s-saving he was going to file s-suit against Mr. Angers for this attempt to get rid of his s-slum.”
“Citizens’ rights again, I suppose?” interjected Angers, and Caldwell nodded, swallowing. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
Angers turned to me. “Of course, immediately I heard this, Hakluyt,” he said, “I felt I must ask you to concentrate on this aspect of the problem first, if you can. We don’t want to exert pressure on you in any way — after all, you’re the expert — but you do see what we’re up against, don’t you?”
“I hope you see what I’m up against, too,” I answered dryly. “You asked me to keep personal considerations out of this, and I think that had better go on applying. You’ve given me a budget and a problem to solve; suppose you let me be the judge of the best way to tackle it, and you’ll get the best results. Besides — damn it, if the legal mills grind as slowly here as they do most other places, it’ll take months for Sigueiras to show results in his suit.”
Angers looked unhappy. “Well, that’s the unfortunate part of it,” he said. “The legal mills, as you put it, in Vados grind pretty quickly. It’s a different matter anywhere else in the country, but one of the things that Diaz has always insisted on ever since the city was built was quick handling of law cases — both civil and criminal. He was suspicious of us foreign-born citizens, you see, and he seems to have been afraid that we’d litigate the simple-minded native-born citizens out of their rights. Well, that’s beside the point — in the abstract, it’s a damned good thing that cases don’t hang around for months on end, of course, but Diaz has his own man in as Secretary of Justice — fellow called Gonzales — and he sees to it that if there’s a dispute involving a foreign-born citizen and a native-born citizen, it moves like lightning.”
He looked down at the top of his desk; he had picked up a paper clip and was nervously toying with it.
“I’ve got a nasty feeling that I haven’t been told the whole truth about this problem I’ve been asked to solve,” I said. “What is this legal question involving Sigueiras, anyway?”
“Well, it’s damnably complicated, actually. But I’ll try to boil it down for you.” Angers sat back, avoiding my eyes as Caldwell had done, but for a different reason. “When the city was incorporated, all of us foreign-born citizens, and those native-born citizens who’d qualified in particular ways by contributing to the creation of the city, were given what we call a citizens’ rights endowment. That’s to say, guarantees of options on particular official positions, at fixed levels of salary, or leases on undeveloped land, or something of the kind, and their duration was to be fifty years or the lifetime of the recipient, whichever was shorter. They can’t be inherited, you see — although citizenship as such descends to the progeny and all that.
“The problem with Sigueiras, of course, is that he managed to fiddle the undisputed use of that land under the monorail central as part of his citizens’ rights endowment, and it’s legally unassailable. The only loophole lies in the proviso that the city council retains powers of development, and it can dispossess any leaseholder on payment of compensation. Well, what we’ve got to try to do is dispossess Sigueiras — using this city development clause.”
Caldwell had been listening in mounting excitement to Angers; now he burst out as though unable to control himself any longer.
“We’ve got to get him out. Everybody s-says we must! The health problems are gh-ghastly; the education department is t-terribly worried; it’s affecting the tourists — it’s sh-shocking, Mr. Hakluyt!”
I got up. “Look,” I said, “for the last time. You hired me to do a job, and I’m going to do it if it can be done. I don’t have to be told that this slum development is a blot on the face of Ciudad de Vados — I can see. Suppose you try to be patient — and better still, let me get on with the work.”
I was leaving the traffic department building when I had my first sight of el Presidente in person — from a distance, but unmistakable. Well, how could one mistake him when he drove down the street and into the Plaza del Norte behind a flying wedge of black-uniformed motorcyclists with police sifens howling?
He sat in the back of an open convertible, one arm resting along the side. Next to him was a dark and very beautiful girl — his second wife, presumably. His first, so I had vaguely heard, was a girl he had married in his twenties and who had died soon after the foundation of Ciudad de Vados. He looked older than he had in the photograph at the airport, even behind the dark glasses that hid his eyes.
There was no doubt that he was still popular. People on the sidewalks and in the middle of the square stopped talking to turn and wave at the passing cavalcade, and a bunch of children ran yelling behind his car. El Presidente acknowledged the acclaim with no more than a languid lift of his hand, but his wife smiled and blew kisses at the children.
The car pulled up outside the City Hall, and Vados went inside — to attend to his mayoral duties, presumably. As soon as he had disappeared from sight, his wife leaned forward and said something to the driver; still attended by the motorcycles, the car purred off in the direction of the main shopping streets.
I strolled away, deep in thought, when the interruption was over. Angers, plainly, hadn’t much liked my parting remarks; it was certain that if he got to hear about my actions for the next few days, he wasn’t going to approve of that, either. I intended to spend the immediate future on foot, looking at the places I was supposed to clear up, with a camera slung around my neck, a white Panama hat on my head, and the biggest dark glasses I could find on my nose.
And, in direct contradiction to Angers’ request, I proposed to concentrate first on what I considered the major problem: the street market and the attendant slum area. Sigueiras’s set of pigsties were not in fact essentially a traffic problem; if there were as many people who wanted to get rid of them as Caldwell had claimed, they could be cleared away on the basis of something little stronger than a pretext. But to get rid of the market was going to call for some rather subtle and organic planning.
I’d arrived on Tuesday; today was Friday. The market area deserved at least three days’ close study, and the fact that I would have the end and beginning of the working week in the period meant that I would see it in both its busiest and slackest moments, which was ideal.
The slackest period of all, of course, was Sunday — there was no market at all, and I concentrated on the outward and return flow of cars bearing people out of town for the day.
But with that interruption, I stayed in and around the market area until Monday evening; three or four times a day I worked my way through the market and its surrounding streets, noting the volume of traffic on foot and on wheels at different times of day, estimating how many people had to pass this way, anyway, how many came here only because the market was here, and how many might come this way if it weren’t for the market and the resulting low character of the neighborhood.