He rattled the papers before him into a neat pile. “Well, I’d like to put this scheme before Diaz, anyway. Any objections?”

“Provided you make it clear it’s by no means final, I suppose you can if you like.” I took out cigarettes and gave him one. “What do you think of the situation in Vados today?”

“Terrible,” said Angers succinctly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Somebody actually threw a stone at my car on the way to work this morning. And there wasn’t a policeman in sight.”

“Police learn early not to be on hand when they’re really needed.” I thought of the scant help I’d had from them when Dalban started to threaten me. Well, Lucas had that in hand. I hoped.

“Speaking of police, though,” I said after a brief pause, “I’d appreciate having a few of the local force along with me today.”

Angers nodded. “I’ll tell O’Rourke,” he said, making a note on a scratch pad. “So you’ve changed your mind about that bodyguard you were offered, have you? Can’t say I blame you.”

“I don’t want a bodyguard. But if I’m going down into that hole of Sigueiras’, I suppose I’d be safer with an escort.”

He took a few moments to decide that he had heard me correctly. Then he drew a deep breath. “What makes you think of that all of a sudden?” he demanded.

“I’ve been saying — and believing — that this slum was a simple problem, not calling for elaborate answers, and that it’s been dragging on and dragging on.… I want to see what it’s like down there. I want to see the extent of the human problem involved.”

He fiddled with the ball-point pen from his desk stand. “Human problems don’t exactly fall in your province, do they?” he ventured. “I should have thought you could safely leave that to the city council.”

“You misunderstand me. I’m sticking to my own speciality all right.”

He didn’t press that line further. He countered, “But you must realize that to go into that place just now would be worse than walking into a den of lions! It’s Tezol’s home, for instance; now that he’s in jail and Francis has killed himself, it would be — would be foolhardy!”

“As it happens,” I said, “my middle name is Daniel. Boyd Daniel Hakluyt. I’ve already thought about the consequences — I still want to see for myself.”

“Couldn’t Caldwell give you an idea?” Angers insisted. “Or someone else from the health department? There are several people on the staff who’ve been down there—”

“I’m tired of ‘being given an idea,’ ” I said wearily. “I was given a wrong idea when I first came here, and there’ve been enough wrong ideas foisted on me since to make me suspicious as hell. I want to form some ideas of my own.”

“Very well,” said Angers stiffly. “I’ll arrange it for you. It’ll have to be this afternoon, I’m afraid, because I have an appointment with Diaz this morning that I can’t put off.”

My rather grudging respect for him rose a notch or two. I said, “You mean you’re coming with me?”

“Of course. Sigueiras’s main quarrel is with me; I wouldn’t want you to think you were collecting something aimed at my head if there is trouble. I’ll ask O’Rourke for a suitable escort — come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea for them to say they’re looking for Brown.”

“Would that hold up? Haven’t they searched the place already? I’d have thought it was an obvious hideout for him.”

Angers shrugged. “I don’t know whether they’ve searched the place or not, and I don’t care. It would be a good excuse.”

“I wonder what’s become of Fats,” I murmured, more to myself than to Angers, but he caught the words.

“Does it matter?” he countered. “The one certain thing is that he hasn’t dared to show his face in Vados again, and I’m sure that’s not a bad thing.”

I didn’t say anything. Whatever else anyone said, though, Fats Brown had left an impression on me: the impression that he was an honest man.

It was roughly what I had come to expect of the Vadeano police that for the afternoon’s sortie they laid on eight armed officers in two cars — after previously having established that Sigueiras himself was going to be out in the city somewhere. They seemed to be good at shows of this kind; less good at the practical side of police work.

It would have suited my purpose much better if I’d been allowed to go with a single policeman as escort, but I was made to understand that, while they couldn’t stop a foolhardy foreigner from committing suicide this way, the lives of their men were too valuable to risk so lightly. Somehow this went with the Spanish-speaking personality — in Spain itself, the guardias civiles are a species that hunts invariably in pairs; here in the press and hurry of the New World it seemed that nothing short of four times that number would do.

Moreover, they insisted that we each take a police automatic; Angers, possibly picturing himself as Beau Geste or someone of the kind, accepted enthusiastically, but I did my best to refuse the one given to me — after the way my reputation in Vados had been distorted, I thought carrying a gun was a final straw. When I had to give in, I made sure the holster was well out of sight inside my jacket, and hung the sling of my camera across it.

The cars skidded to a halt on the same graveled patch of ground where the traffic department’s car had halted on the occasion of my first visit. A group of children playing a singing game on the lip of the depression below the station caught sight of us and scattered, crying a warning. The officers piled out of the cars and hurried toward the entry; perhaps they didn’t realize what they were letting themselves in for, because one after the other they lost their footing on the slippery slope and raced in undignified manner toward the bottom.

Angers and I followed more slowly. One could sense the wave of silence spreading through the congested heart of the slum as news of the police’s presence was whispered ahead. It was as though the massed human beings were melting into a single hostile organism, like a carnivorous plant on the approach of a fly.

At the entrance a courageous little dark-skinned woman was trying to bar our way. When the police repeated the ostensible reason for the visit, she shook her head determinedly. Fats Brown was not there, had never been there, and never would be there. Everyone was saying he had fled the country.

“Then you won’t mind us looking through the place if you aren’t hiding him,” said the lieutenant in charge of the squad with heavy irony, and thrust her aside.

We threaded our way one by one into darkness and stink.

Two of the police had brought powerful flashlights; they turned them on now, and I saw how this slum had been created. Rough wooden or tin partitions, slatted floors, and rudimentary ladderlike stairs had been attached as best they could be to the original bare steel strutting and concrete buttresses of the monorail station. There was no provision for sanitation, of course, and ventilation was taken care of only by the gaps accidentally left between the ill-fitting sections of board.

Whole families somehow existed here in each of the drawer-like compartments. For furniture they had old boxes, for beds heaps of rags, for cooking stoves sheets of tin with a few glowing sticks heaped in the middle. The smoke mixed with all the other smells and was easier to bear than most.

There were garishly colored prints of the Virgin on most of the walls, along with last year’s pinup calendars from soft drink companies. Occasionally a family ran to a complete home shrine with a crucifix and a couple of wax tapers.

“Don’t they have a lot of trouble with fires here?” I asked Angers, and he snorted.

“Sigueiras is careful about that sort of thing. He knows perfectly well that if this place caught fire, the firemen would just make sure it didn’t spread to the station overhead, and otherwise let it burn itself out. Burning would be a good way of cleaning it out, come to that.”