I was walking past the Courts of Justice toward the park where I had last left the car provided for me by the city council, deep in cogitation, when a familiar figure caught my eye on the steep, curved steps leading up to the entrance: fat, sweating in his white suit, sucking alternately at a ropy cigar and the straw stuck in a soft drink bottle. He yelled at me as I went by.
“Hey, Hakluyt! C’mere!”
I turned aside and went up the steps, starting to smile — I couldn’t help it. Brown looked a caricature of misery. I said, “Can I buy you that drink now?”
He scrambled to his feet and dusted off his broad behind. “Pal, I feel I could do with something stronger than that — horse urine. You want to know what kind of a country you’re in? Want to know what passes for law an’ order in Vados? Want to see murder?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“In there” — he jerked a pudgy thumb over his shoulder and sprayed cigar ash down his jacket — “there’s one of the damn finest lawyers in Vados bein’ ripped to shreds by a judge who don’t give a ounce of horse manure for legality, justice, or the rules of evidence. Miguel Dominguez — heard of him?”
“Is that the dangerous driving case — Guerrero’s? I shouldn’t have thought it was important enough to be tried here.”
Brown spat. “Nothin* but the best for Mr. Guerrero, no, sir! If they’d tried to put him on in a ordinary local justiciaria where it belongs, he’d have raised hell from here to Mexico City. It’d do you a heap of good to go inside an’ see what really goes on. C’mon!”
He took my arm and nearly dragged me into the building. As he went, he kept up a running fire of explanations. “This concerns you, y’know, Hakluyt. You been mentioned about six times so far that I heard. I just got so sick I had to go find some fresh air. I was hangin’ around waitin’ for the Sigueiras case to be called over the other side, in the civil court, but there’s a long one ahead of us an’ it looks like we won’t get heard till tomorrow or next day. So I thought I’d see how Mig was gettin’ on, and oh, Christ, it’s murder.”
“Where in hell do I get into the act?” I demanded.
“Old Romero — that’s the judge — he’s about a hundred, an’ he’s forgotten anything they ever managed to hammer into his thick skull about admissible evidence — he started by makin’ it quite plain he thought the case against Guerrero was nothin’ but an attempt to smear him. He gave a fifteen-minute political lecture on the iniquities of the National Party, accused Mig of being a paid perjurer, said it was a damn good thing someone was goin’ to clear out the bunch of peasants the National Party sponged on — that’s you, natch — ach, I’m too goddam’ revolted to repeat it!”
We came to the courtroom door; an usher rolled back a sliding panel for us, and we slipped into seats in the public block. There was a fair audience. In the front row sat Sam Francis, scowling like a fiend, and with him there were two or three other people whom I recalled seeing at meetings in the Plaza del Sur.
In the dock, in a comfortable armchair, sat Guerrero, a smug grin on his handsome face; below him in the lawyer’s seat was Andres Lucas, also smiling. On the other side of Lucas’s table was a man with a very white face, whose jaw was trembling visibly.
“That’s him,” whispered Brown. “That’s Mig.” The judge was a wizened man — not perhaps a hundred, as Brown had claimed, but certainly seventy or more. His gavel seemed almost too heavy for his clawlike, shriveled hand. His voice was reedy and penetrating, and he was using it now. I got the gist of his remarks; he was saying:
“—cannot, of course, entertain the evidence offered by the prosecution when it is so plainly colored by personal animosity and political considerations of the basest kind. I have heard cases in this court and others for upward of thirty years; never before have I been faced with such a farrago of rubbish. I shall, of course, report Lawyer Dominguez’s conduct to the appropriate professional body, and I look forward to the day — which cannot be far distant — when the persons responsible for this unprincipled attack on the good character of one of our leading citizens are swept away along with the repositories of filth and immorality where they were spawned. It only remains for me to pronounce the formal verdict — not guilty. Court adjourned.”
The gavel banged; as if it had been a trigger, Sam Francis leaped to his feet and, forgetting his languages in the heat of the moment, shouted at Romero in English.
“Why, you unprincipled old bastard! You’re just a—”
The gavel rapped again, but a storm of booing drowned it and the rest of what Sam Francis said. Beside me, Fats Brown scrambled to his feet, yelling execrations. The judge signaled to the clerk of the court, who ran to open the door behind the dais for him, and the ushers struggled to restore order.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Brown at length. “I couldn’t face Mig in the state he must be in. He’s just been legally slandered to death, so far as his career’s concerned. Like this country, Hakluyt? I think it’s a wonderful country. It’s just got some stinkin’ bastards in it.”
“But how can Romero get away with it?” I demanded.
“Who’s to stop him?” Brown snarled. “Romero’s the senior judge in the country, bar the chairman of the supreme court, an’ he’s a rubber stamp for Vados. Ugh! Fresh air — and quick!”
He led me through the corridors to the entrance so fast that he was panting when we halted at the head of the steps. He hauled out a large bandanna and mopped his face with it. “Well, like I was sayin’, you’ve seen what passes for law an’ order in Vados. Like it?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer, for at that moment Sam Francis came up to us and started to rail at Brown for what had happened. Brown took it calmly, realizing that Francis merely needed someone to listen to him and didn’t care who it was.
After minutes, the flow of Francis’s vituperation was cut short as a group of laughing people came from the interior of the building, I did not have to look around to tell that Guerrero and Lucas were in the middle of them; there was also Guerrero’s girl friend of the previous evening, and others I recognized as supporters of the Citizens of Vados party.
They halted at the top of the steps not far from us, and a man who had been half in the background — the driver of Guerrero’s big black sedan — slipped past us to collect the car. I nudged Brown. “What about him?” I said. “Wasn’t there a charge against the chauffeur, too?”
“Dismissed by Romero,” said Brown thickly. “Said it was only a cover for the real purpose of the case, which was to slander Guerrero.”
“Slander Guerrero!” echoed Sam Francis loudly, in a voice that was meant to carry. “How could you paint the bastard any blacker than he is?”
Guerrero stopped in midsentence and began to approach Francis with even steps. He stopped a pace or two distant, while his companions came up behind him. His eyes locked with Francis’s, and there was a long, cold silence.
“Coming from you,” said Guerrero at long last, “that is a ridiculous remark. You’re the black one here!”
Francis’s face contorted into a snarl, and he closed the gap separating them with a single stride. His thick fingers folded over into his palm with a clapping sound, and he drove his fist like a hammer into Guerrero’s mouth.
Literally, the violence of the blow lifted Guerrero from his feet — literally, because the act of falling carried him back over the lip of the steps beneath us. He seemed to be diving backwards like a ridiculous dummy, and time stopped.
I had a half-conscious memory of a crunching sound that had mingled with the thud of Guerrero’s body striking the foot of the steps. Then we were jostling and stumbling down toward where he lay.