Bishop Cruz was one of the first to join the fray. Addressing a class of graduates from the theological faculty at the university, he denounced Sigueiras as close kin to a child of Satan, and his slum as a short cut to hell.

He probably wasn’t looking for the response he got.

Somewhat puzzled — so I gathered — but prepared to accept the evidence of a bishop as superior to that of their own senses, the simple-minded inhabitants of the slum grew terribly worried about the state of sin they must be living in. Accordingly, a fair proportion of them bundled up their belongings and walked out, together with their livestock, to set up a brand new shantytown on the Puerto Joaquín road.

It took forty-eight hours for the police and the National Guard to get them back where they came from, and by that time there were a lot of stories going around about police brutality. Some people accused O’Rourke directly of being involved, but he ignored the accusations and went on hammering at Caldwell. It was said, also, that General Molinas had flatly refused to send in regular army troops against the new squatters, and that the cabinet was fighting regular pitched battles at its meetings.

The second influential voice to take up Caldwel’s accusations was that of Dr. Ruiz, his chief in the health department. Ruiz had been silent for a long time on this matter — cowed, perhaps, by the risk of exposing himself to further charges about the death of the first Señora Vados, or possibly feeling that Sigueiras was now done for in any case.

He wasn’t, by any means, as it turned out. After Dominguez’s revelations regarding Lucas and Estrelita Jaliscos, no further talk had been heard from official quarters about his harboring a wanted murderer, and bit by bit the feeling excited by the Jaliscos girl’s death had died down. Apparently this wasn’t to Ruiz’s taste; now he jumped back in the argument with both feet, reiterating the kind of statement he had made on the witness stand when facing examination by Fats Brown.

This time he piled it on so thick it was a wonder everyone living in Sigueiras’s slum hadn’t long ago suffocated in the foul air alleged to be there. With the three of them — Caldwell, Ruiz, and the bishop — on the job, clearing out that slum was going to have massive support.

One person whose support was less than lukewarm was I.

I made this perfectly clear to a correspondent from Roads and Streets, who’d flown down specially from New York to do a story on the redevelopment project. I took him aside into a bar and stood him a succession of whiskeys while I explained the whole sad situation.

When I was through, he looked at me sympathetically and said in a voice brimming over with emotion and straight rye, “Boy, you’re in a spot, ain’t you?”

After which he flew back to New York, intending to cancel the proposed story.

I was half-expecting Sigueiras to retaliate when Ruiz began to go for him; after all, he must know the stories that were current about Ruiz’s “successful treatment” of Vados’s first wife. Someone presumably advised him against it — which was sensible, because with Dominguez on his side and General Molinas refusing his troops for the eviction he was assured of a respite at least. All he did, in fact, was to invite half a dozen local doctors to go down into his slum and see whether there was in fact a reservoir of disease there.

“If there are sick people,” he said spiritedly, “why don’t people outside catch their diseases from them?”

The doctors found exactly what I’d seen — rickets, vitamin deficiency diseases, and a lot of skin complaints caused by the squalid conditions. But it wasn’t their findings that took the heat off Sigueiras in the end; it was a stern directive from Vados himself. Apparently one of the current items of publicity about Citidad de Vados was that it had the lowest death rate of any city of its size in Latin America, and they were worried in case Ruiz’s assertions might affect the tourist trade. Not that the recent rioting had helped any, of course. Another directive came down about the same time. The university year had ended, and accordingly Professor Cortés was confirmed as acting Minister of Information and Communications. Having sampled his work while he was filling in, I wondered how Vados liked making do with Cortes instead of Alejandro Mayor; however, presumably he was the best available, and since there was no sign of Tiempo returning to life, after all, the government’s propaganda now had no competition.

Well, no effective competition. There were a series of inflammatory news sheets that had sprung up, which were constantly trespassing over the edge of the libel laws and being closed down in consequence — only to start up again the next day or the day after under another name. Most people were resigned to Tiempo’s fate and regarded the news sheets as the best stopgap they could expect.

But there were some others who were getting restive. They pointed out that even though Romero had been suspended from the judicial bench and looked likely to be declared incompetent, no action had been taken to reverse his committal of Cristoforo Mendoza for contempt or to release the impounded equipment belonging to his paper.

And that was not the only matter in which there had been a peculiar delay. As Manuel, the barman, had told me, at this crucial time of the chess championships television was sorely missed, and people were demanding that the arsonists be found forthwith.

It went without saying, of course, that the National Party view was expressed by every one of the succession of news sheets, and these two were the matters at which they hammered again and again: the banning of Tiempo, for obvious reasons, and the failure of O’Rourke to catch the arsonists, to stave off accusations that National Party supporters had been responsible.

It was something of a surprise to me to find out how these news sheets caught on. Surreptitiously printed and distributed, one day’s issue sometimes remained in circulation for nearly a week, being passed from hand to hand, and not only among people who had formerly read Tiempo, but also among people who merely wanted the television service back.

I had my own ideas as to who was responsible for keeping these news sheets going, of course. I’d seen no more of Maria Posador since the evening she dined with O’Rourke at the hotel, and nothing before that for some days. And she was the one who believed that an opposition press in Ciudad de Vados had to be maintained at all costs.

Maybe Vados had been premature to assume that Maria Posador was safer in Aguazul than out of it.

Manuel kept a supply of these miscellaneous news sheets under the bar for interested customers. I was going through one that I’d missed — I think it was calling itself Verdad in its current incarnation — when I found an interesting item which Cortes hadn’t seen fit to divulge on the radio or in Liberdad. I had no reason to doubt it, though. It was stated that el Jefe O’Rourke agreed with General Molinas on the question of clearing away the slums of Vados. It would be asking for worse trouble than they had already. And the much-vaunted plan of mine for redeveloping the ground below the monorail central was nothing more than a governmental pretext to kick out Sigueiras.

Well, that was perfectly true, of course. What shook me rigid was that O’Rourke had supposedly gone on, “And if they try to put this into effect, then we’ll throw Hakluyt out of the country and his plans after him.”