That was a kind of argument I thought was dead with the two Joes — Stalin and McCarthy.
Brown’s disappearance was the next major story; there was a picture of the secretary of justice, Gonzales, declaring that he would be found, another of el Jefe O’Rourke scowling over the sheet-draped body of the girl, and a story saying that the police were working on various leads. I’d read the same thing practically word-for-word in too many different countries to go through it in detail; I glanced at the next story and found it was a report on some regional chess championship, so I picked up Tiempo, wondering how they were going to save any face at all in view of what had happened. They couldn’t very well defend Brown except vaguely, in general terms; perhaps they would try to distract attention by attacking a scapegoat -
I was right. It was just the identity of the scapegoat I wasn’t expecting.
In the middle of the front page was a crude cartoon; it depicted Ciudad de Vados as the Garden of Eden. Standing before it was an angel with a flaming sword, scowling down on ragged peasants — a man holding his hat in his hand, a woman with a baby at her side — who were saying, “Why is it a sin to be poor?”
And across the angel’s robe in big black letters was scrawled my name.
XVII
I was still staring incredulously at the drawing when a discreet knock came at my door and the chambermaid brought in my morning mail. Automatically, my mind not on what I was doing, I slit the two envelopes she gave me and glanced at the contents.
The first was a letter from a friend of mine in the States to whom I’d promised to write and then — as I usually do — had put it off. The second was the front page torn from a copy of this morning’s Tiempo, identical with the one I was reading except that the cartoon had been ringed with red and a single word added in English beside it: “Well?”
“Dalban,” I said aloud.
“Who else?”
“Well, Dalban or whoever was responsible, this was going to stop. Now. Tiempo seemed to get away with a hell of a lot of libel and near libel, but Maria Posador had told me that Seixas obtained an injunction to prevent them from accusing him of taking bribes. Someone was going to have to organize the same for me. Right now.
I put the torn page back in its envelope, stuffed the envelope in my pocket, and went to the traffic department to see Angers. I told him what had happened, showed him the red-ringed cartoon, and then slammed my fist down on his desk.
“Right!” I said. “There’s a law about this sort of thing. Get something done!”
Angers bit his lip. “So you think it’s Dalban behind this, eh? I suppose that’s logical, after the threat he made to you. Your best course, Hakluyt, would be to have a word with Lucas — suppose I call him and see if he’s free to join us for lunch?”
He picked up the envelope and glanced at the postmark. “Posted early this morning or last night, about half a mile from the Plaza del Sur — at least, I think that’s the postal zone in that area. Early today, more likely, unless whoever was responsible got hold of an advance copy of the paper.”
He picked up his interoffice phone and told his secretary to get Lucas for him. I waited, feeling my first hot-tempered reaction cool perceptibly.
Lucas was free; he was engaged in sewing up the case against Sam Francis, which was mainly a matter of collating the evidence of witnesses. I told him my story over lunch in the plaza that noon.
He nodded gravely when I’d finished. “Yes, Señor Hakluyt,” he said. “You have what is, I think, called a hard nut to crack in both these problems. The Mendoza brothers are very skilled at almost libeling persons they disapprove of, without being so rude as to bring the fury of the law about their heads. Since, however, you are not a citizen but, so to say, a guest of our government, I think it well worthwhile to investigate the possibility of a suit over this attack. At the very least, we can obtain an injunction to muzzle them for the time being.”
“That would help,” I said. “But it’s not enough. I want Dalban investigated. If he is responsible, then I want something done about him. I had no action out of the police when I was threatened by him, except the offer of a bodyguard — and I turned that down because of another experience I’d had with the police just after I got here.”
Lucas made a note in a small memorandum book. “I will make inquiries for you, señor,” he said. “It is, alas, no secret that a man with the right influence can — uh — discourage the enthusiasm of our Vadeano police force. Dalban certainly is one of them. But as it happens I am interested to know myself what has been going on with Dalban; I expected him to make a move before this.”
“What sort of move?” demanded Angers.
“You doubtless recall the fine that was imposed on Juan Tezol? So far it has gone unpaid, aside from a couple of hundred dolaros scraped together by fanatical supporters of the party. But the twenty days’ grace before the reckoning are up today, and many people have been wondering whether Tezol is indeed valuable enough to those behind the party for the money to be forthcoming.”
Angers nodded. “You have a point. If the fellow doesn’t get ransomed, it means his usefulness is at an end — because he and Francis were so closely linked, one assumes. Some of Francis’s dirt must have rubbed off on Tezol, then.”
“Of the two, Tezol is probably in fact the dirtier if not the darker,” said Lucas reflectively, and gave a faint smile. “Yes, it will be interesting to see if those thousand dolaros materialize.”
Angers was deep in thought for a moment. At length he said, “You seem very ready to accept that Dalban is at the bottom of this, by the way. Has he in fact any influence with Tiempo? I always understood that Maria Posador was behind it.”
Lucas shrugged. “To my way of thinking, Maria Posador is also a — a what is it called? A decoy, precisely. I think that her acceptance of Vados’s invitation to return to Aguazul greatly diminished her influence. Now it is always Dalban that I watch.”
He checked the time and started to get up. “You will excuse me; I have spent too long talking. Rest assured, Señor Hakluyt — this affair of yours will quickly be regulated.”
He acted remarkably promptly. On my breakfast tray at the hotel the following morning was an envelope containing two items: the first, a certified copy of an injunction issued by Judge Romero with, pinned to it, a slip of paper saying, “With compliments from Andres Lucas.” And the second, the morning’s issue of Tiempo.
Today the most conspicuous item on the front page was a yawning gap, bearing a facsimile of the official censor’s stamp and a note to the effect that this section of the paper had originally contained material which contravened such-and-such a subsection of the Public Order Act.
This was more like it. As I found later, police had descended on the Tiempo office early this morning, acting on Judge Romero’s instructions, and had removed another article about me from the actual stone on which it was set up.
Looking through the rest of the paper, I discovered that Romero had had a busy day yesterday. Tezol, his fine unpaid, had been arrested on Romero’s order last night and was now in jail, without Dalban or his associates — who were supposed to be backing the National Party — lifting a finger to help him.
The Nationals seemed capable of some really bloody things on occasion. I had no doubt that so long as this illiterate peasant orator had been useful to them, they were only too happy to have him trust them; when it came to a pinch, they’d dropped him without a word.
I turned to the inside pages and there found an example of the Mendoza brothers’ cleverness, of which Lucas had spoken yesterday. Felipe Mendoza was at it again, hammering his well-worn theme of bribery in the treasury department and vested interests in highway corporations. Owing, I presumed, to the injunction Seixas had previously obtained against the paper, he wasn’t mentioned by name; nonetheless, all the “for examples” given in the article would have fitted him like a glove, down to the jug of sickly cocktail he kept on the desk in his office. This gave me cause to frown. So having an injunction against the Mendozas wasn’t as watertight as I had hoped. I’d have to go on watching for trouble in this quarter.