He looked at me for a comment; I murmured something about “I fully appreciate…”

“But I have one distinction. This city is — I have perhaps said this to you before, because I say it to everyone, and I say it to everyone because it is the truth — this city is my own child, the child of my mind. I am two official persons: I am president of Aguazul on the one hand, mayor of Ciudad de Vados on the other, and as regards the city, what I say shall be done is what matters.”

I nodded.

“Good! Then I say this. My duty is not alone to the people who belong to this country without having had the choice, who were born here, but also to those who shared my vision and my — my dreams, who gave up everything life could have offered them elsewhere to make Ciudad de Vados a reality. It is not just that I should betray my promises to them. “Señor, although Aguazul has grown more and more prosperous in the years I have ruled, ours is still not a very rich country. If I would give with one hand, I must take away with the other — and there is nothing I can take that is not already promised to others! I cannot allot funds for rehousing and subsidizing the squatters of the shantytowns and of the slum beneath the monorail station, not so long as there are slums in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquín, not so long as I require those funds to fulfill the promises I have made to the foreign-born citizens. Without them and their aid, there would be no city here — nothing but scrub and barrens.

“Understanding this, you will understand why I must direct you to prepare a scheme — some or any scheme — to wipe away the slums from this city. That will give us the breathing space we need to settle the disagreements in the cabinet, to prepare the long-term schemes we undoubtedly require. But — have you not reflected, Señor Hakluyt, that if we were today to make plans and place contracts for the building scheme envisaged in your memorandum it would be two years before we could clear out those slums? In two years, with such a focus of unrest as we have at present, there will have been revolution!”

“I think,” I said, “that you’ll get your revolution more quickly if you simply—”

He interrupted me, eyes blazing. “Señor, if I were a dictator and an autocrat, I could order troops into the shantytowns and drive their people into the country, have the shacks burned to the ground. I could have Sigueiras shot today and the squatters in a concentration camp tomorrow! But I am not that sort of man. I would rather that the citizens of my country threw flowers at my feet than bombs.”

He slammed the little crucifix down on top of the tab’e beside him; it gave a solid thud. “Please, señor, do not instruct me how to rule my country. Do I tell you how to solve your traffic problems?”

“Frankly,” I said, “yes.”

He stared at me and then began to chuckle. “Very true, alas, señor,” he admitted. “But I wish only that you see my difficulty. Do you?”

“You must also see mine, then,” I answered. “I have no choice except to do as you tell me, of course. But the result will be artificial. It’ll be a pretext. It will be neither improvement nor development — merely change for the sake of change. I’ll do the best I can. But you won’t have achieved any more than if you had, as you said, sent troops to clear the shanty-towns. You will only have pretended to achieve more, and you’ll have spent a lot of money on a sham.”

He was silent for a while. Then, sighing, he got to his feet. “Do not ever enter politics, Señor Hakluyt. You are too much of an idealist. More than twenty years of ruling has taught me that all too often men are ruled better by shams than by realities. Thank you, nonetheless; I look forward to seeing the results of your work soon.”

He extended his hand, realizing only at the last moment that he was still holding the crucifix. As he made to put it away, he saw my eyes on it and mutely displayed it to me on his open palm.

“You are a Catholic?” he inquired.

I shook my head.

He closed his hand around the crucifix. “In some ways I envy you. It is often hard to be both a good Christian and a good statesman.”

“I’d have said it was impossible,” I countered. “A state is concerned with people’s condition here and now; almost all religions are concerned with their state hereafter. And the two pretty often contradict each other.”

“Still, there is the ideal toward which we work.” He sighed heavily. “A Christian government for a Christian community — and almost all my people are believers… Señor, you must come and dine with me at Presidential House sometime soon. It has become rare for me to meet foreigners who have no personal interest in the way I run my country. I meet bankers negotiating loans, oilmen seeking favorable tariffs, importers and exporters desirous of exploiting our markets — and who else? Sometimes I even envy the man who might, had things been different, have ruled in my place… But I waste your time in empty talk, señor. Hasta la vista!”

He pocketed the crucifix, shook my hand, and returned to his study of the relief map of the city as I left the room.

XXV

I had a dim recollection that when I came to Vados five weeks ago I’d felt excited and proud of having been selected to do this job.

Well, the excitement and the pride were finished. Now I was reduced to doing a scrappy job, collecting my pay, and getting the hell out. The only part of that I wouldn’t regret would be getting the hell out.

It took me about four and a half hours to work out a scheme for the monorail central that was exactly what Vados wanted: two new passenger access ways, extra storage room, and a parking lot that might be half full on saints’ days and holidays. It looked all right superficially, of course; I’ve worked the basic rhythms so far into my system that I don’t think I could any longer design a bad-looking layout. But there wasn’t any need for any of this. There was no organic unity about it. It was like — well, creating a demand artificially by clever advertising and then complimenting oneself on having filled a long-felt want. Compared with the scheme I’d worked out for the market district — which was real development, worthy, I liked to think, of the painstaking original planning of the whole city — this was patchwork.

I turned it in for computing at the end of the afternoon. It would cost more than it was worth — but then, anything of this kind was essentially worth nothing. The hell with it. I went back to the hotel and had dinner.

Vados’s directive had amounted to an ultimatum. What else was I to do except get this thing over quickly?

Not long after I entered the dining room at the hotel, Maria Posador also came in. I hadn’t seen her for some days, and at the back of my mind I’d been wondering where she might have got to. Now she showed up with someone I failed to recognize at first, because I’d never before seen him in plain clothes. It was el Jefe O’Rourke, looking incredibly wrong as a foil to Señora Posador’s effortless elegance.

For someone who supposedly enjoyed a merely tolerated status in Ciudad de Vados, a bitter enemy of the president, who was alleged to be permitted to remain in the country only so that an eye could be kept on her subversive activities, Maria Posador had a respectably long list of influential friends. This particular mismatch just about capped all the others. I watched covertly while I was eating and saw that O’Rourke ate with gusto and was talking little, while Maria Posador ate rather little and seemed to be saying a lot. Occasionally O’Rourke rumbled into laughter, while his companion looked on with a tolerant smile. Their whole manner was that of old and close friends.

I was really getting curious when I finished my meal.