Liberdad,naturally, was playing up Fats Brown’s death as the end of a desperate villain — the same tune that the television service had been whistling yesterday. There was a long article on an inside page by Luis Arrio, now chairman of the Citizens of Vados, that contained an attack on Dalban. The fire was, of course, not mentioned — this was on an inside page and would probably have been put to bed early the previous evening. It was concerned mainly with what he had done to me; he had villainously tried to put off the day when the good Señor Hakluyt would sweep away Sigueiras’s breeding ground for crime and criminals. Arrio warmly praised Andres Lucas for his handling of the Sigueiras case and went on to quote Professor Cortes extensively on the social problems of the slum.

Why the hell did they have to go on making me responsible for the continued existence of Sigueiras’s hell-hole? I’d done my best to make it clear that any solution of that one in terms of traffic would be artificial and that what was wanted was a good healthy governmental decree about it. In any case, now that Sigueiras was wanted for harboring a murderer, the whole thing would straighten itself out.

Tiempohad really let itself go — mainly on me, as though the force of Romero’s injunction had expired. Which it had not, of course. This morning I didn’t much care; I was as ready to hate the guts of the people of Ciudad de Vados as they seemed to be to hate mine.

And to add to the recklessness of today’s issue, Felipe Mendoza had gone back to his attacks on Seixas, and this time was imputing directly that Vados knew about Seixas taking bribes, but connived at it. They weren’t going to get away with that kind of thing for long.

But I didn’t spend time thinking about that. All I wanted now was out. I’d finish the job, if that was allowed me — and at present it seemed that it wasn’t allowed. Without being asked, I’d found myself caught up in Vadeano affairs that didn’t concern me, and now they were tangling me at every turn.

I wanted to get the job over. And for precisely the same reasons I wanted to quit — for a while at least — and give myself a chance to start thinking straight again.

Today, moreover, I did not want to see Angers. My first nausea was cooling, but I doubted that Angers’ selfsatisfaction and smugness with what he had done would have shrunk at the same rate. If they hadn’t, the sight of him was likely to make me explode. Oh, true, Brown would certainly have killed Angers, or manhandled him severely, if he hadn’t missed or slipped; true, he was a presumed murderer and had fled rather than attempt to prove his innocence as the law required… He nonetheless seemed to me an honest man, and honest men don’t grow on trees.

All too often, though, that’s where they end up. Hanging.

I went to the pay phone in the restaurant and called the traffic department to leave a message saying I wouldn’t be in today. Then I went out aimlessly and within a short time found myself in the Plaza del Norte. It was thinking of Brown, perhaps, that brought me to the Courts of Justice.

I was standing staring at the statues in the middle of the square (someone had cleaned the paint off Vados’s statue) when a squad of police cars howled into sight from the direction of police headquarters and went with sirens wailing down the Calle del Presidente Vados.

So many cars going out together meant something big, even making allowances for the well-known habit of the Vadeano police of going hunting in large numbers. I idled slowly along the sidewalk. After a minute or two the squad cars were followed by two large lumbering trucks.

I paused at a roadside stall and had some more coffee and tamales; before I had finished, the police cars came racing back. They halted before the Courts of Justice and their occupants got out. Three or four men in plain clothes were being forcibly led along by uniformed officers.

I almost poured my coffee down my shirt as I recognized two of the prisoners. They were Cristoforo Mendoza and his brother Felipe. Now what?

I waited until the trucks also returned — they took fifteen minutes longer over the round trip. When they pulled up, the men in charge — police again — started to unload bundles of newspapers baled for distribution, stacks of the etched plates from which newspapers are printed, files and filing cabinets, huge boxes full of paper.

I thought to myself, well, I’m god-damned. They’re closing down Tiempo.

And I felt something cold walk down my spine.

XXI

I thought of Maria Posador saying in that calm voice from which she seemed to try to eliminate all possible suspicion of emotionalism, “I believe it right and necessary for there to be some sort of counter-propaganda in Vados.”

And I suddenly felt that the remark contained a truth as stunning as a blow.

When a dictator silences the opposition’s means of influencing public opinion, then is the time to get the hell out of his domains. Up till now, presumably, Tiempo had not menaced Vados seriously, nor had any other source of information opposed to his regime. After all, one TV broadcast, reinforced with the “evidence of my own eyes” of the subliminal perception technique, was worth a dozen issues of any newspaper.

Was this new step due to his losing the weapon of broadcasting? Did he feel that his grip was in danger of slipping, that Tiempo now represented a major threat to his security? I speculated frantically for the hour it took me to establish the real facts behind it.

Today Judge Romero had a hangover.

So far as I was able to make out, that was the root of the decision. Physical discomfort has often in the past brought nations, let alone single cities like Ciudad de Vados, to the brink of disaster. It was not so long since one sick administration, composed of bodily unwell men, had nearly blown the whole world to pieces through their continued ill-temper.

In attacking me and Seixas in their issue of today, the editor and staff of Tiempo had, of course, infringed the injunctions against them which Romero had issued. And Romero, not taking time to consult me or Lucas, acting for me, as to whether I wished this to be regarded as an infringement of malice, had decided to haul the Mendozas in for contempt of court and to confiscate the unsold stocks of the day’s issue.

And he wasn’t playing. Police had closed the offices and were standing guard at the doors. There wasn’t going to be another issue of Tiempo for a long tune to come.

It took the news an hour or so to spread through the city. When it had spread, the reaction was immediate and thorough. The National Party, deprived of its only organ of propaganda, raised a howl that could probably be heard in Puerto Joaquín. Demonstrators were pouring into the Plaza del Sur long before the customary starting time for the daily speakers’ session, bearing improvised banners and placards attacking Romero specifically and the administration in general. The Citizens’ Party was not slow to follow suit; the pegs on which they hung their protests were, of course, the burning of the broadcasting center and the death of Mayor.

The police descended in force to try to clear the square, but it was hopeless. I stayed to watch until it wasn’t safe any longer, even from inside the entrance of the Hotel del Principe. The staff closed the doors and stood by under the direction of the anxious-looking manager, ready to barricade the ground floor if they had to. And it looked for a while as though they might have to — the rival mobs first swore at each other, then began to clash: a fist-fight here, knives drawn there, until there was a full-scale riot brewing.

The police did what they could — perhaps more than I had cynically expected — but they were limited to placing under arrest an individual here and there who didn’t have too many of his own side within easy reach. They were just nibbling the edges of the crowd.