Distantly we heard the howl of police sirens hurrying toward us.

I went up the slope to the station and caught a monorail to the Plaza del Sur. Nobody tried to hinder my going.

I wasn’t really thinking as I went. My mind seemed to have ceased its high-level functions, as though my skull had been poured full of cold water. Afterward quick snapshots of things I had seen on the way remained in memory — faces in the monorail car, the sight of traffic in the streets below, the reflection of sun on the windows of buildings, a headline in a paper from Puerto Joaquín that someone was reading as I left the car at Plaza del Sur station. But I wasn’t thinking. I had stuck, as though walking up a down escalator, in front of a billboardlike vision of Señora Posador, informing me that whether I liked it or not I had importance in the scheme of affairs.

Enough importance to kill a man.

If I had not conceived this irritable plan to enter the slum for myself, if I had not checked and turned as Señora Brown went by… Here you could point to decisions of mine; here you could say, “He did this, and therefore this followed.”

The afternoon lay hot and bright on the Plaza del Sur. It was almost empty of people. I went straight across it and entered the hotel.

Sitting alone in the lounge, the habitual unlit Russian cigarette between her fingers, was Maria Posador. Someone had been with her; two glasses rested on the chessboard-topped table beside her, two brands of cigarette were crushed in the ashtray. She was reading through a letter, with eyebrows drawn together.

I went over to her; she raised her face and gave me a cool nod.

“I thought you’d want to know,” I said harshly. My voice sounded unfamiliar in my ears, as though another man were speaking through my lips. “They found Fats Brown.”

She jerked upright in the chair. “Diablo! Where, in the name of God?”

“In Sigueiras’s slum — where else?”

“I had thought him safely out of the country! Señor, what have they done with him?”

“Angers put a bullet through his head,” I said, and the frozen golden face under the dark sleek hair with the violet eyes and the rich red lips was overlaid in my vision by the sight of the other face as it ceased to be a face at all.

Maria Posador had halted at my words like a movie when the projector motor fails; after a long second she flowed into motion again, but a mist had come up in her eyes, and I do not think she saw me clearly.

“Of course,” she muttered. “Of course, that was to be expected.”

I waited in silence. In a while she stood up, very erect, and gave me a little stiff half-bow. Then she walked away, crumbling the cigarette in her hand so that flakes of tobacco scattered behind her elegant, expensive shoes.

I turned toward the bar.

Later, they put television on, and I was too apathetic to move away. The program opened with news: Brown’s death. I saw the same graveled ground where I had stood earlier; there were military trucks deployed around it now, and people going to the monorail station crowded curiously in the background. Troops went into the slum, came out with Brown’s body; the watchers saw it, recognized it under its covering of sacks. Hats were lifted. People crossed themselves. Behind, many of the slum-dwellers were chased into sunlight, beaten with fists and batons, hurried along with the butts of carbines. Like impounded stray dogs, they were driven into the army trucks, sat with bowed heads, and waited to be taken away.

There was a hunt going on for Sigueiras. He was somewhere in the city. As soon as he was found, they would charge him with concealing a wanted man.

They interviewed Angers, looking heroically injured with a bandage on his head, on the current affairs program at five past eight. I was still in the bar; I hadn’t any stomach for food. I’d just been sitting there. They also put Bishop Cruz on, and he thundered episcopally about the wages of sin as he had done before, the day after Estrelita Jaliscos died.

And then they gave a sort of credit line to those who had helped in this brave hunting-down of a desperate killer — unquote. In among the rest they dragged my name.

I felt a sort of dull resentment harden within me. Hell, maybe Brown had laid this Jaliscos girl, in spite of all his denials; if he hadn’t, maybe he had pushed her out of a window; if he hadn’t done that, either, it was sure — I myself had seen — that he had it in mind to kill Angers. All granted, all granted. He wasn’t a desperate killer; he was an honest man on the wrong side. And I wasn’t going to have any part of posthumous attempts to convict him without trial.

Maybe it was a sort of habit, conditioned into me by my work; up to now, I’d been passive, reacting, absorbing, accepting, just as when I started a new job I had to spend a long time acquiring facts and feelings. Now I was past that stage. I was going to start saying what I thought and doing what I believed to be right. And I could start by raising a little hell at the TV studios.

I went out to my car and drove there as soon as the program ended.

Rioco, the producer of the program, was on the point of leaving the building. He seemed very tired; at first he failed to recognize me, and when he did, he hardly seemed to be taking in what I said.

As I was starting to repeat myself, however, he brushed his hand impatiently across his eyes. “Yes, yes,” he muttered. “I did hear what you said. But what can I do? This is a policy question — you must take your complaints to Dr. Mayor.”

“Why? What’s it got to do with him?”

He snapped at me. “You don’t think I decide what goes out on our programs, do you? The most important ones we broadcast? If you want your name kept out of our reports, you’ll have to tell Mayor, because he handed down an order to play up your part in the affair at seven-thirty this evening. If we’d had time, we’d have come down and got you to give an interview, like Angers.”

“You would not!” I said when I could draw breath again — the sheer presumption of the remark staggered me momentarily. “All right, if I have to see Mayor, I see Mayor. Where do I find him?”

“Maybe in his office — on the first floor.” Rioco gave a savage grin. “I wouldn’t tackle him now if I were you. He’s not in the best of moods—”

“What kind of a mood do you think I’m in after all the lying trash you’ve been putting out about me?” I could feel my nerves fraying as if Rioco’s voice were sawing them on the sharp corner of a block of sandstone; I stamped past him and went up the stairs two at a time to the next floor.

Mayor’s office was well guarded; there was a receptionist, male, muscular, as well as a receptionist, female, pretty. I walked past both of them while they were still putting on their “good evening we recognize you of course” smiles and threw open the door to Mayor’s sanctum.

For a moment everything was silent. I had expected Mayor to erupt, but he did nothing of the sort — he showed astonishment for a second and then mastered it. His visitor, who had been talking to him, broke off and swung around on his chair. I recognized, of all people, Dalban.

I was at a loss for a moment, and Mayor recovered his composure altogether. He sat back, settling his glasses on his nose with a fingertouch, and spoke with ponderous humor.

“Your business is obviously urgent, Señor Hakluyt. What is it?”

I ignored him and addressed Dalban. I could hear bitterness and rage struggling in my voice. “You’ll be delighted to know, señor, that what your threats and bribes couldn’t achieve is being successfully accomplished by this — this Mayor here. Minister of Misinformation and Accusations, so I understand.”

It was at this point that I first realized I was very drunk indeed.

I stood back inside my head and allowed myself to go on talking — I couldn’t do anything else. I said, “They say the bigger the lie the better the chance of people believing it. He’s been telling the whole of Aguazul this evening that I was right-hand man to hero-boy Angers in the rounding up of a dangerous killer called Fats Brown. That’s a hell of a big lie, and probably a hell of a lot of people believe it. Well, I don’t — and after all, I was only there. What I saw was murder. I’m telling you that straight. I’ve stood practically every kind of pushing around this pretty-in-theory, stinking-in-practice government of yours can dish out, Mayor, and I’m saying now that this last lie makes me want to vomit on your nice clean desk!”