The crowd was breaking up; two men of middle age carefully carrying a chessboard with an unfinished game went past us, dispersing like the rest back to their work. The speakers had come down from their platforms, and energetic youths were dismantling these and carrying them and the banners away.
We watched in silence for a few minutes. Then Señora Posador came to herself briskly. “Well, señor, I will delay you no longer — indeed, I cannot, for I have an appointment. But we shall meet again, and we must have this match at chess sometime. Hasta la vista!”
“Hasta la vista!” I echoed automatically; then she was gone, striding like a man with an air of purpose and determination across the square.
I stayed looking thoughtfully after her until she disappeared from sight. There had been a quality of bitterness in what she had said about Tezol that made me revise my original assessment of her as a woman of wealth with much leisure and no more.
Not just a person, plainly — a personality. I would have to find out more about her — and since she was not the sort of woman to be overlooked, almost certainly Angers would be able to tell me about her.
There was only one thing I regretted. I had almost failed when I started out as a free-lance, through inability to discipline myself; after two false starts I’d imposed rules on myself that included one about not chasing women while on a job, and now after ten or twelve years it had become second nature to me. Accordingly, I was making no effort at all to interest her in me.
But it seemed a pity, all the same.
I came back to the traffic department a few minutes ahead of time and was shown into Angers’ office. The Englishman was smoking at his desk, reading through a typed report; he gestured that I should take the same chair I had had this morning.
“Won’t keep you a moment,” he said. “Just got to finish this memo. Then we’ll go over to Seixas’ and get him to brief you on the financial side of it.”
I nodded and sat down. A few minutes passed in silence. At length Angers folded the report, rattled its sheets together, and scribbled a minute on the flyleaf before ringing for a secretary to collect it and pass it on its way.
“Fine,” he said with a glance at the clock. “We only have to go next door, and I’m afraid Seixas is like too many other people in Vados — doesn’t know what time is, I sometimes think. Still, that’s no reason why we should be late. Let’s go.”
We strolled through clean, bright passages out of the building and across the intervening lawns to the treasury offices. We were almost at the entrance when Angers said, as though struck by a sudden thought, “Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you — there’s a woman called Maria Posador who spends a lot of time around your hotel. Have you run into her?”
Surprised, I nodded.
Angers gave me his habitual wintry smile. “A word to the wise, and all that, then,” he said. “She’s not good company.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Well… just that maybe you oughtn’t to cultivate her acquaintance. Bear in mind what I said about remaining detached, won’t you?”
I don’t think I showed it, but I found the flat, dogmatic, English way in which Angers put his warning very unpleasant. I said shortly, “Why?”
“Uh—” He ushered me forward through the revolving door of the treasury building. “Well, she’s a well-known local personality and something of an opponent of the president — it’s a long story, and I won’t go into it. Take it from me, though: if you’re seen about with her, it would make people assume you weren’t a disinterested outside expert.”
“Well, here’s something for you to bear in mind,” I said. “The best way to ensure that I stay disinterested is to treat me as though I were and not to jump to the conclusion that because Señora Posador is prettier than you I’m going to take orders from her.”
“My dear chap!” said Angers, distressed. “I assure you—”
“Forget it,” I said.
A tense silence took us into Seixas’ office, which, although basically identical with Angers’, bore the stamp of an altogether different personality. Seixas, who rose from behind hisdesk to greet us with both hands outstretched, was a stout, sweating man with a round red face and black hair. A large black cigar like an exclamation mark jutted up from his wide-lipped mouth; it bore the widest band I had ever seen — gaudy with gold and red. He wore a sky-blue suit and a white shirt, down the front of which a tie with a design of pineapples poured like an illuminated cascade. As well as the office equipment on his desk, there was a large jug of something sickly-looking with ice cubes floating in it, and an enormous pinup calendar with a steatopygic nude hung from the tag of the rolled-up wall map.
“So you’re Hakluyt, hey?” he said. “Siddown, siddown! Have a drink! Have a cigar!”
We both refused the drink — it seemed to be Bols Parfait Amour, which is a sickly liqueur the color of methylated spirit, cut with gin and water — but I took a cigar and found it surprisingly mild for all its coal-black appearance.
“Brazilian, hey!” said Seixas with satisfaction, sucking hard on his own. “Well, whaddya think of Vados, Hakluyt? The burg, not the man!”
“Impressive,” I said, watching Angers out of the corner of my eye. It was plain that he found Seixas unbearable; it was equally plain that Seixas was thick-skinned enough not to realize the fact. I found this amusing.
“Yeah!” said Seixas with deep satisfaction. “This is one hell of a town! And you’re gonna bring it one step nearer heaven, hey?” He shook with laughter, squeezing up his eyes, and the ash from his cigar fell down the geometrical center of his brilliant tie.
“Well, with Angers there looking sour like a fresh lime, guess we’d better get on with the business.” He shoved his large body forward in his chair so that he could put his elbows on the desk, and swiveled his cigar up to an angle that he had probably copied from a bad Hollywood movie when he was in his teens: the tycoon angle.
“Well, ’s pretty straightforward. Back a few years — oh, eight years ago — there was a hell of a big dock fire at Puerto Joaquín. Tanker blew up. The docks didn’t do so bad, in the end, but the city fire department wasn’t worth a spit on the sidewalk. ’Bout four hundred people roasted to death; houses burnt like paper, y’know? Well, year or two an’ they got the town put back together, built lotsa new apartment blocks an’ like that — nowhere so good as Vados, though, all scrappy and bitty.
“Anyways, after that Vados gets the cabinet together an’ says we gotta be ready for it happening again, so he puts a levy on oil shipments — the big companies kick up a squawk, but hell, Vados is a good man in their books, straightened out their labor problems, done lotsa good work, so they give in. An’ offa this levy he gets a ’mergency fund, sorta like insurance. Y’see, they was building this burg then, already got started — hadn’t anything left over for Puerto Joaquín or any place else. There’s about eight million dolaros in the fund right now, an’ el Presidente himself says how it gets spent. If. You got four million of ’em if you need.”
He hauled a drawer of his desk open and rummaged inside for something. After taking out a gaudy-covered novel, a flat gin bottle — empty; he dropped it in the wastebasket — and a soiled shirt, he extracted a large file of papers and set it on the desktop with a grunt of satisfaction.
“Now le’s get this straight,” he muttered. “Ah — yeah!”
He selected a sheet of paper with a magnificent embossed letterhead and several wet rings adorning it, and held it up between beringed fingers. “This here’s the official authorization, y’see,” he said. “You get paid twenty thousand plus expenses; you can spend up to ten thousand on research, computing, and like that, but you have to get out a scheme for it. You cost your own scheme, that right?”