I couldn’t feel sorry for him now.

Angers turned up at my hotel on Sunday; he had called me before he came, and I had been a bit brusque with him. But he came nonetheless, a little nervously, a little less self-possessed than usual — almost, I would have said, a little ashamed.

I let him find an opening when we had sat down in the hotel lounge. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t even try to look anything in particular.

He had brought a portfolio with him. He covered a minute’s awkward silence by searching in it for some documents, and at last, having found them, cleared his throat.

“I — uh — have bad news, I’m afraid,” he said. “Diaz has studied that plan for the market area you gave me. He says he can’t approve it. He wants a lot of changes. I tried to object, of course, but—”

I said wearily, “I warned you. It’s too expensive as it stands, for one thing. And Diaz is at perfect liberty to criticize individual points. So long as he hasn’t questioned the actual traffic flow, that’s fine. I thought I’d made that clear when I gave you the draft in the first place.”

Angers looked at me. He didn’t reply for a moment, and before he did he had to drop his eyes.

“You feel pretty ba’d about what happened to Brown, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes.”

He opened his hands, palms up, and looked at them, seeming not to know how to go on. Eventually: “So do I, damn it! I — I was scared, Hakluyt. You must understand that. When I felt him hit me on the back and I turned around to look into his face — it was like a maniac’s or a wild animal’s! What else was I to do, in Heaven’s name? If I’d hesitated, I’m certain he’d have tried to kill me with his bare hands.”

“You weren’t exactly treating his wife in the way an English gentleman is supposed to,” I said.

He flushed scarlet, all the way to the roots of his hair. “She — she — oh, hell, Hakluyt! Brown was a suspected murderer, whatever else anyone says, and he’d run away to hide instead of staying to face a trial the way an innocent man would have done—”

“Stop trying to convince yourself,” I said. “I saw the way you loved that gun the police gave you. Why the hell can’t you stick to your own job? You’re a highway manager, a traffic organizer, not a one-man crusade for the moral improvement of Ciudad de Vados! And I don’t think the conceited pleasure you got out of playing Sir Galahad was worth the life of a good lawyer and an honest man.”

His face was interesting over the next few moments; it began to go dignified, hesitated, flushed again, and ended up tattered, like a papier-mache mask that has been out in the rain.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to convince you you’re wrong,” he said. “Probably not.”

He took out a cigarette, but didn’t light it. With it waiting between his fingers, he gave a bitter smile. “You just don’t like us or our country, do you, Hakluyt?”

“I haven’t been given much reason to like it.”

“No… But I think you might try to understand people like me, the foreign-born citizens. We — we hitched our wagons to the star of Ciudad de Vados, as the saying goes. We put our hearts and souls into this city. We gave up all the other things our lives might have held for us — chances of possibly greater wealth, greater success, elsewhere — because we saw in Ciudad de Vados something we could shape to our own desires. There was a line of poetry” — he looked suddenly self-conscious — “that used to keep running through my head when I first made up my mind to come to Vados and settle here. It said something like ‘reshape it nearer to the heart’s desire.’ Well, that’s why. That’s why, when we see people like Brown and Sigueiras making an unholy mess of our — our dreams, if you like — we find it pretty hard to take lying down. Oh, maybe they have their reasons, maybe they’re doing right according to their lights, but we gave up everything for the sake of this city, and when people forget that, who never had to give up anything because they never had anything till we came along and gave it to them, it makes us furious.”

I didn’t comment. Angers waited a few seconds, half-hoping for a favorable answer, and at last got to his feet. “Will you be down at the department in the morning?” he asked.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

XXII

At about half past ten that same evening Jose Dalban committed suicide.

The astonishment that followed the news was almost solid: thick and cloying, hampering the mind’s attempts to make sense of it like heavy wet clay. Why? He was rich — perhaps only a few thousands short of being a millionaire. He appeared successful and influential; that success was founded, as Guzman had told me, on something not very respectable in the eyes of Vadeanos, but it was not illegal. He had a reputation as a clever speculator. And his private life seemed placid enough: he was married, had four children of whom two were at Mexico City University, and a congenial mistress in Cuatrovientos whom his wife knew about.

It was odd, I reflected, how sometimes one never managed to round out one’s mental picture of a person till that person was dead, as though a subconscious reflex held one back, insisting that until a man was dead no picture of him could be accurate or complete.

Certainly, in the twenty-four hours following Dalban’s death, I got to know very much more about him than I had during his lifetime.

By the end of those twenty-four hours truth was beginning to emerge. Jose Dalban’s enterprises were ripe for the undertaker. Like all speculators, he was operating on other people’s money a lot of the time; it so happened that at the moment he was extended far beyond the limits of his own resources. And in that strange, abstract, barely-more-than-half-real way that seems to turn bits of printed paper into deadly weapons, Luis Arrio had seized the chance to plot Dalban’s destruction.

That destruction was now following his death.

Piece by piece, Arrio had acquired control of every loan Dalban owed, a few mortgages, several advances against security — and had notified Dalban that he intended to foreclose on everything he could. The total amount involved was about two million dolaros; more than three-quarters of a million was due or overdue for repayment.

So, having drunk two glasses of fine brandy, which steadied his nerves and unsteadied his hands, compelling him to slash four times before he achieved success, he cut his throat.

I heard most of this from Isabela Cortes and her husband when they called in for a drink at the Hotel del Principe on Monday evening before going to the opera. I had asked Señora Cortes what she thought of the destruction of the broadcasting center, and she positively exploded with rage.

“When they find the saboteurs, let them be publicly burned alive!” she snapped. “An evil deed belonging to the past that Alejo labored so many years to bury — a past of irresponsible violence and internecine hatred! I feel half ashamed that I still live to walk in the city when Alejo has suffered that dreadful end!”

“On the other hand,” said her husband with unexpected mildness, “this is the first time in many years that we have been able to spend three consecutive evenings together, ’Belita.”

“Do not joke about death, Leon!” Señora Cortes went pale. “Ciudad de Vados, I swear, has never before been like this, with Jose Dalban dead, and before him Mario Guerrero, and — what can have come over our people? Tell me that!”

Her husband took the question literally, not rhetorically — which in view of his position was reasonable. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand as he considered.

“Frankly, ’Belita, you have asked an impossible question. One can assume that some — some crucial factor in the longstanding disputes to which we have become accustomed has now come to a head. But to isolate that factor — why, it would be the work of a lifetime.”