Who the hell was this Posador woman, anyway? I bypassed the crowded bar, which was slowly beginning to lose its customers as curtaintime at the opera house drew near, and was going through the foyer to collect my key at the registration desk when one of the bellhops trotted toward me.
“Señor Hakluyt!” he said. “Una señora preguntó por Vd.”
I reflected that I seemed to be pretty much in demand.
“Donde está?” I inquired, hoping to hear she had gone home. She hadn’t; she was waiting for me in the lounge — a slim middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and green-framed spectacles, idly stirring a long, cool-looking drink with a gold pencil. A young man with a shaven head and a broken nose lounged in the chair next to her, drawing shapeless patterns on a notepad.
“Señor Hakluyt,” the bellhop told the woman, and left me to it.
She hastily took the pencil out of her glass and gave me a beaming smile, extending her hand. “Señor Hakluyt!” she purred. “I’m so glad we caught you. Do sit down. This is my assistant, Señor Rioco. My name is Isabela Cortes, and I’m from the state broadcasting commission.”
I sat down; Rioco shut his notebook with a snap and put away his pencil. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long for me,” I said.
She waved a carefully manicured hand on which an emerald ring glistened gigantically. “We have been here no more than ten minutes, truly,” she declared. “In any case, that is of no importance whatever, since we have found you. It is a special request we have to make of you.” I looked expectant and cooperative.
“I am the director of — of what you might in English call current affairs broadcasts on both our radio and television networks,” Señora Cortes expounded. “Each day on the television we produce a program about life in Vados and the interesting people who come here, and we have also the news, of course. Señor Rioco has been preparing for tonight a program about the new developments that are planned for the city. We are desolated that we approach you on such short notice, but—”
She glanced expectantly at her companion, who jerked his jacket higher up around his body and leaned forward. When he spoke, he sounded as though he’d learned his English somewhere around Louisiana and then crossed it with Hollywood.
“Ought to have thought of it earlier,” he said in this half-lazy, half-tough accent. “It was Angers in the traffic department who put us on to you — we canned an interview with him this morning, and he said you were the only guy who knew what was in your mind, so we been trying to track you down. We reckoned we’d best try to catch you when you got in here an’ run you straight out to the studio.” He checked his watch. “Program goes out in — uh — hour an’ a quarter, at twenty-oh-five. Mind comin’ along to say a few words?”
“We do hope you’ll agree,” said Señora Cortes sweetly.
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “Just give me time to clean up and change clothes, and I’ll be right with you.”
“That’s great!” said Rioco, and sat back in his chair, composing himself visibly for the short wait.
As I ran my razor over my chin in the hotel bedroom, I reflected there were certain other things I didn’t see, as well as why not. Such as why I was considered important enough for the director of current affairs broadcasting and the producer of the program both to come calling; why, if Angers had suggested enlisting my cooperation for the program, he’d left it as late as today to bring the matter up — presumably it hadn’t just been sprung on him this morning without notice.
And more important than either of these: how Señora Cortes had known I was going to be here, now, when the previous evenings I’d stayed out till the small hours.
Was it a lucky guess? Or information received?
If it hadn’t been for the few minutes’ conversation I’d had with Señora Posador and Sam Francis before coming into the hotel, I’d have arrived coincidentally at almost the same moment as Señora Cortes and this shaven-headed assistant of hers. It looked altogether too much as though someone had worked out my estimated time of arrival; logically, this implied that someone was keeping an eye on me, probably had been since I started work — and further implied that someone didn’t trust me.
Or — another alternative occurred to me as I was going down to the lounge again — or else someone was protecting me. The idea stopped me in my tracks, and a cold shiver threaded beneath my jacket. With the high-running feeling against the project I was supposed to be undertaking, it struck me now for the first time that I could become a target.
VII
The slab-sided bulk of the television and radio center was set high up on the hillside across the city from the airport, so as to keep the towering antennae well clear of incoming planes. We whirled up toward it in a luxuriously comfortable car driven by a girl in a dark green uniform.
The evening lights of Ciudad de Vados spread out below us like a carpet of jewels. It was the finest view I had yet had of the city; I said so to Señora Cortes.
“Yes, we have a beautiful city,” she answered, smiling faintly. “It is good to know that you, señor, will help us to keep it so.”
Rioco, sitting in the front beside the driver, gave a short laugh, perhaps not at Señora Cortes’s remark.
Like everything else in Vados, the studio building was spacious and impressive. We pulled up in front of the brilliantly lit main foyer whose high glass doors stood open to the warm night. An attendant — a man, but uniformed in the same shade of green as the girl driving our car — whisked the door open for us to get out.
In the foyer people were coming and going with an air of quiet busyness; several of them greeted Señora Cortes as we entered. There were bored-looking actors, actresses, and commentators whose makeup gave them a slightly inhuman appearance; executives and technicians dashing from office to office: a man leading a trio of carefully clipped French poodles by blue ribbons around their necks; an unshaven man with narrow eyes, carrying a trumpet without a case, who looked lost; several tall, slim girls who from their movements could only be precision dancers — it was the sort of mixture one might see anywhere in the vicinity of a TV studio.
Altogether unexpected, though, was what happened when our elevator arrived.
We crossed the floor of the foyer directly to the elevator doors; Señora Cortes pressed the button and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the signal light over the door moved from 3 to 2 to 1. The moment the door started to slide open, she moved forward, only to fall back in astonishment and confusion.
There was a bishop in the car, in full episcopal regalia.
He nodded to us, eyes twinkling, and moved forward with the stateliness of a one-man procession, surrounded by lesser clerics, and a hush fell on the foyer as he approached the exit. I glanced back as we got into the elevator, and saw one of the dancers stop him and drop on one knee to kiss his ring.
Noting my amazement, Rioco chuckled. “That is our good Bishop Cruz,” he said. “He comes each week to record a — a — how do you say it? A lecture?”
“A sermon,” I said, and he nodded.
“A sermon, that would be it. But that’s the first time I ever saw him go out in all his fine clothes like that.” He chuckled again. “Me, I thought for a moment it was someone dressed up for a show!”
The elevator disgorged us on the top floor, and as we emerged into the corridor, a stout man going thin on top caught sight of my companions and addressed them sternly in Spanish.
“Where in the name of the good God have you been, Isabela? You know this evening’s program has to be good! What was the reason for running off and taking Enrique with you?” He flung out an arm in a grandiose gesture. “The chaos in the place is beyond conceiving!”