He made a note on his scratch pad. “I’ll say something to Ruiz, if you like. Maybe he needs a rest.”
And yet, when I met him that evening at the appointed time and place, he seemed much calmer and more in control of himself. He wasn’t alone; there were two policemen and a photographer with him. I wondered whether O’Rourke knew about the policemen — I didn’t think he would approve of them helping Caldwell to gather evidence against him.
It was cloudy tonight, but warm, and the shantytown was like a set for an experimental film as we moved into it, Caldwell authoritatively taking the lead. An air of sullen hostility met us, brooding heavy over the beaten, unweather-proofed matchboard hovels, decorated if at all with torn oil-company posters and pinup calendars from the year before last. If we had not been a formidable group, we would probably have had things thrown at us. Rotten eggs, perhaps. Or knives.
Caldwell was carrying a flashlight; as we passed a patch of ground scratched with a hoe into some kind of cultivable condition, he stabbed the beam down at the plants growing there. He said, “Look!”
I looked; I saw only a plant growing. “Th-that’s hemp,” said Caldwell. “You g-get marijuana from th-that.” His voice was tense and triumphant. “S-see, Hakluyt?”
I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I wasn’t surprised at anything Caldwell showed me during our tour. We walked in on families sleeping five to a hut, and Caldwell invited me to express disgust, which I duly did. But this was no surprise; it was inevitable, given the conditions.
Before another hut we halted, and Caldwell turned to me, indicating silence. “A s-streetwalker lives here,” he hissed in confidential tones. “Th-there are d-dozens of them!”
“There are always dozens of them!” I said irritably. So far the biggest surprise he’d sprung on me was his comparatively reasonable manner this evening, his air of confidence.
He walked up and flung back the door of the hut. The beam of his flashlight speared around the empty interior. “Off after more customers,” he said in a low tone. “See here, Hakluyt — in this box.”
His voice shook a little. I shrugged and went to see what he had found. It proved to be a crude wooden chest containing a leather whip and some boxes of contraceptives.
His eyes searched my face for a reaction. Slowly his confidence began to evaporate.
“Look, Caldwell,” I said as kindly as I could, “you’ll always get this sort of thing where there’s poverty in a big city. You can’t legislate it out of existence. It’s been tried, over and over again. I’m afraid you haven’t proved anything that wasn’t self-evident.”
He drew himself up and kicked the wooden box aside. “It was a mistake for so many people to come,” he snapped, his stutter vanishing for the moment as it seemed to when he shot out a single phrase he had been turning over in his mind beforehand. “S-sorry, Hakluyt,” he added after a moment. “I ought really t-to sh-show you what g-goes on down in S-Sigueiras’s p-place, but it’s d-dangerous to g-go th-there.”
We went back in silence to the place where our cars were parked. Caldwell was muttering something under his breath when we stopped, and I asked for a repeat.
“I said Mendoza knew,” he declared. “He wrote about it in one of his b-books. He d-described exactly the s-sort of th-thing I s-saw. Someone is c-covering it up now. Who? Why? We’ve g-got to find out, Hakluyt!”
“For the last time,” I said, taking a deep breath, “how much of this alleged vice have you seen for yourself, and how much did you just get out of some dirty story by Felipe Mendoza?”
With dignity, he drew himself up. “I t-tell you I’ve s-seen for myself!” he forced out between his teeth.
“All right,” I said, losing patience. “I haven’t. And if nothing worse goes on than what you’ve demonstrated this evening, then all I can say is that this is one of the most moral places I’ve ever set eyes on. Good night!”
I walked away to my car, fuming, feeling his hurt stare following me.
Baseless or not, Caldwell found a willing audience for his accusations in other people than me.
Bishop Cruz was one of the first to join the fray. Addressing a class of graduates from the theological faculty at the university, he denounced Sigueiras as close kin to a child of Satan, and his slum as a short cut to hell.
He probably wasn’t looking for the response he got.
Somewhat puzzled — so I gathered — but prepared to accept the evidence of a bishop as superior to that of their own senses, the simple-minded inhabitants of the slum grew terribly worried about the state of sin they must be living in. Accordingly, a fair proportion of them bundled up their belongings and walked out, together with their livestock, to set up a brand new shantytown on the Puerto Joaquín road.
It took forty-eight hours for the police and the National Guard to get them back where they came from, and by that time there were a lot of stories going around about police brutality. Some people accused O’Rourke directly of being involved, but he ignored the accusations and went on hammering at Caldwell. It was said, also, that General Molinas had flatly refused to send in regular army troops against the new squatters, and that the cabinet was fighting regular pitched battles at its meetings.
The second influential voice to take up Caldwel’s accusations was that of Dr. Ruiz, his chief in the health department. Ruiz had been silent for a long time on this matter — cowed, perhaps, by the risk of exposing himself to further charges about the death of the first Señora Vados, or possibly feeling that Sigueiras was now done for in any case.
He wasn’t, by any means, as it turned out. After Dominguez’s revelations regarding Lucas and Estrelita Jaliscos, no further talk had been heard from official quarters about his harboring a wanted murderer, and bit by bit the feeling excited by the Jaliscos girl’s death had died down. Apparently this wasn’t to Ruiz’s taste; now he jumped back in the argument with both feet, reiterating the kind of statement he had made on the witness stand when facing examination by Fats Brown.
This time he piled it on so thick it was a wonder everyone living in Sigueiras’s slum hadn’t long ago suffocated in the foul air alleged to be there. With the three of them — Caldwell, Ruiz, and the bishop — on the job, clearing out that slum was going to have massive support.
One person whose support was less than lukewarm was I.
I made this perfectly clear to a correspondent from Roads and Streets, who’d flown down specially from New York to do a story on the redevelopment project. I took him aside into a bar and stood him a succession of whiskeys while I explained the whole sad situation.
When I was through, he looked at me sympathetically and said in a voice brimming over with emotion and straight rye, “Boy, you’re in a spot, ain’t you?”
After which he flew back to New York, intending to cancel the proposed story.
I was half-expecting Sigueiras to retaliate when Ruiz began to go for him; after all, he must know the stories that were current about Ruiz’s “successful treatment” of Vados’s first wife. Someone presumably advised him against it — which was sensible, because with Dominguez on his side and General Molinas refusing his troops for the eviction he was assured of a respite at least. All he did, in fact, was to invite half a dozen local doctors to go down into his slum and see whether there was in fact a reservoir of disease there.
“If there are sick people,” he said spiritedly, “why don’t people outside catch their diseases from them?”