Caldwell remained frozen to his chair. The newcomer raised his cane and pointed it as though it had been a gun at Caldwell’s chest. “You will pardon this intrusion, señores,” he said without taking his eyes off Caldwell’s chalk-white face. “But I have business with this cur.”
Angers got to his feet with dignity. “What do you mean by walking uninvited into my office?” he snapped.
“I,” said the intruder calmly, “am Pedro Murieta. I am informed that Señor Caldwell has told lies about me. He has said that I, a citizen of Ciudad de Vados against whom no man has ever breathed a foul word, am a pander. A pimp. A trafficker in immorality of the vilest kind. It is not true, before God it is not true!”
The cane whined across Caldwell’s face, raising a tiny red weal where the very tip touched the skin of his cheek.
“Sayit is not true, misbegotten son of a mangy mongrel bitch!”
And Caldwell burst into a flood of tears.
Bewildered, Angers glanced from him to Murieta to me, his eyes demanding explanation. While Murieta dropped the end of his cane to the floor and leaned on it, watching Caldwell with considerable satisfaction, I said, “Señor Murieta, do you know why he has been saying — saying this about you?”
“He is sick in the mind,” said Murieta after a long pause. He straightened up and turned away, sighing. “I am not a vindictive man, señor, but this I had to do when I learned what he had published to the world about me. Yes, no doubt he is sick in the mind. We have been to his apartment this morning in search of him — with the police, for he has committed a crime in our law — and we have found certain books and pictures which suggest that he is not normal.”
His sharp black eyes flashed to my face. “Did you not know? Could you or another not have stopped him? Although we shall show what he said was mere lunatic raving, it will nonetheless do me very great harm.”
I said wearily, “Señor, I cannot care any longer what happens in Ciudad de Vados. I live only for the day when I can leave it.”
“Leave it, then!” snapped Murieta, and turned his back on me.
The enormous man who had come in with him had lumbered out again; now he returned, with a policeman and two white-jacketed male nurses. Seeing them, Caldwell began to scream.
The complete disintegration of a human being is not pleasant. When it was over, and Caldwell was in the ambulance, I suggested we go out for a drink, and Angers, shaking like a leaf, agreed instantly.
Over a whiskey in a nearby bar, he said dully, “Who’d have expected it? He’s always been such a steady fellow — hardworking, reliable — and then all of a sudden, this!”
I said after a moment’s thought, “I’ll make a wild guess. I’ll bet you that when they go into the matter they’ll find that Caldwell probably laid some tart or other in one of the shantytowns some while back, and he’s collected a load of guilt in consequence. I imagine that he’s always suffered because of that speech impediment; he’s acquired a string of complexes a mile long.”
“All this is just words,” said Angers impatiently. “What I want to know is — what’s it going to do to the project? We relied on what the health department was saying, and so did the public. When it turns out that it was all the raving of an idiot, what will happen then?”
“They’ll probably laugh like demons,” I said. And I was right.
Having a pretty primitive attitude toward mental illness, most of the Vadeanos did laugh — loudly, long, and often. Not only at Caldwell, but also at everyone else who had swallowed his story, if only for a day.
The worst sufferer, naturally, was Professor Cortes, who had allowed the story currency in Liberdad. It was extremely galling for him to have to order the printing of a full-scale retraction. He tried to cover himself and distract attention from the matter by going for Miguel Dominguez again. But the lawyer’s personal position was now virtually unassailable, because of the way he had successfully demolished Andres Lucas and showed up his complicity in the fate of Fats Brown. He laughed the whole thing off.
I had half forgotten my own worries in the atmosphere of tension that followed Caldwell’s breakdown, but I still kept one eye open for any further rash statements by O’Rourke. I preferred not to provoke trouble with him so long as he didn’t repeat what he had apparently said about throwing me out of the country. And at the present moment he seemed to have something else on his mind — more exactly, someone else. Dr. Ruiz, in fact.
I had this from Manuel, as usual — the barman was getting to be quite a pipeline of information for me. He seemed to be dismayed because it was through him I learned about O’Rourke’s attack on me, even though I’d asked for it — literally — and he tried to make up for it by slipping me reassuring snippets of gossip.
According to him, O’Rourke had told Ruiz that if he went on with his accusations, the police would prosecute him for aiding and abetting Caldwell in publishing a libel, and still more than that would start investigating the allegations that he had murdered the first Señora Vados.
There was an air of desperation about this, as though Vados were gradually wearing down O’Rourke’s resistance to the eviction of the squatters. Of course, it was unthinkable that Dr. Ruiz should be officially accused of this crime — the mud that would splash on Vados would topple his regime, and el Jefe would find himself in one of his own cells before he was allowed to say a word in public. Nonetheless, Manuel assured me he had the story on excellent authority, so I took it for what it was worth.
“Any more news sheets, Manuel?” I asked. “Or have they been closed down again?”
“I do not know whether they have been closed down or not, señor,” Manuel said regretfully. “But I cannot obtain any more of them. Have you not seen today’s Liberdad ?”
He opened a copy of the official paper on the bar before me and jabbed his finger down on a large-headlined story. I read: Bishop Cruz had forbidden all practicing Catholics to buy or read the unofficial news sheets.
“I am a good Catholic,” said Manuel, with regret in his voice. “But I had hoped to collect all of these for the information about the chess championships; the name of my son is in many of them, for he has done very well in the tournament so far.”
“So you won’t have any more unofficial news for me, Manuel?” I suggested.
Manuel smiled. “Señor, behind a bar one has the news anyway.”
It was not a rash boast. A day later he was able to inform me of something else to which Cortes had refused space in Liberdad and time on the radio, which was scarcely known to most Vadeanos. General Molinas had pledged his entire support and that of the army for O’Rourke and the police; he had said that if rioting started because the squatters were evicted, he would be unable to keep his forces at the disposal of the Vados government. I found this far more interesting than what Ruiz had been saying, and what was reported at length by the official organs, which was approximately, “No smoke without fire,” in the question of immorality in Sigueiras’s slum. It looked as if Professor Cortes were making a desperate effort to save face over the Caldwell affair.
And that was the situation when Sigueiras exploded his bomb.
I hadn’t given another thought to the threat he had made to Angers on the first occasion when he took me to see the slum; I’d dismissed it as fine words and hot air. I’d realized that the Negro was a determined man, but now, when things were practically all going the Citizens’ way, he capped every desperate move the National Party had ever made with a gesture of spectacular defiance that made people all over the city — myself included — regard him with astonished admiration. The one person who didn’t, of course, was Angers.