Flores.
The man who had shared my seat in the plane coming here.
It was Flores’s signature, too, that was appended to the most remarkable item of all. That was a typed sheet that ran:
“As directed, I have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the antecedents of the traffic expert Boyd Daniel HAKLUYT. Owing to the extreme distances involved, I have not been able to investigate his career outside the Americas. It appears that he is indisputably of great skill in his speciality. I have heard him spoken of most highly.
“As to his personal relationships and attitudes, it seems that he deliberately avoids forming close personal relationships while engaged on a particular project. This is in accord with the pattern of his life — viz., that he works for about seven or eight months of the year and takes extended vacations for the rest of the time. The nature of his work would appear to have made him essentially a mercenary, and I have no doubt that his loyalty will be to his employer exclusively.
“As to the information I was particularly asked to obtain, while his Australian origin suggests an inherent intolerance, the fact that he has worked in such countries as the UAR and India may have offset his original reactions. I am unable to state definitely one way or the other on the basis of available data. It is, however, a platitude that childhood conditioning remains throughout life. At least one may expect a disrespectful attitude toward ‘the natives.’ This seems to be in conformity with the desired attributes.”
Vados was watching me as I read the report, and when I looked up, I found his dark eyes on my face. “Yes, Señor Hakluyt,” he said levelly. “It would seem that our mistake lay there.”
“That little bastard Flores!” I said between my teeth. “If I’d known, I’d have kicked him off the plane.”
“Do not bear a grudge against him. He was acting exactly as he was ordered. And I ordered him.”
He dropped into a chair and reached toward a bell. “A drink, señor?” he suggested. “I am ready to answer all your questions.”
“No drink,” I said. “Explanations are all I want.”
“You think perhaps that I would poison you.” He smiled faintly. “The time for that is past. But as you wish. Be seated.”
I drew down another half-dozen of the folders at random and put them on a table as I sat down. I glanced at the names they bore, but they hardly meant anything to me. Too much of my mind was taken up in insisting to myself that I was not dreaming.
“You will perhaps not understand much of this that I am, about to tell you, Señor Hakluyt,” said Vados with a sigh. “You are, after all — forgive me, but it is true — a man without deep roots, without a real homeland. You have left your home behind and chosen to work all over the world as a mercenary. We misjudged how deeply that had affected you, how it had cut you off from the influences that must have shaped your personality as a young man. However, it is well that we made such a mistake.”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to betold platitudes about myself. I want to know what this means.” I tapped the pile of papers on the table. “As far as I can see, it says here you’ve been playing chess with human beings.”
I could hear the still strong disbelief in my voice as if it were coming from a neighboring chair.
Vados inclined his head. “This is exact,” he muttered. “Are you insane?”
“Perhaps. But not as you mean it. Señor, I have said to you more than once that Ciudad de Vados is to me like a son. If you had a son, would you wish to see him scarred, injured, perhaps crippled for life? That much I can make clear. I love my country! I have been its ruler for many years, and — oh, I have failed in many ways, but in others I have been fortunate enough to achieve great things where someone else would have patched and scraped and ended up with inferior botched work…
“And there was this disagreement, this mutual hate, growing out of something I had not foreseen and wished to set right — out of the peasant squatters who poison my beautiful city like germs in its bloodstream. Yes, they, too, are men of my country, but they are my soldiers, too, and I am fighting a war. A war against backwardness, señor!
“They tell me sometimes, ‘You were wrong to build Ciudad de Vados when there are slums in Astoria Negra, lairs of criminals in Puerto Joaquín.’ How was I wrong? Before there was a Ciudad de Vados, what did the world know of Aguazul? It was a blot on maps, no more! There was no trade to speak of, no foreign investment, nothing but peasants and their cattle plodding through mud and dust. Oh, there was the oil, but that was not ours — it was leased for a pittance to people who could afford the equipment to work it. Perhaps you did not know that, señor. That was the way twenty years ago. Today we own a quarter of the oil-drilling equipment in Aguazul; tomorrow we shall own all of it.
“I saw this coming! I trod down other men because I had a vision, and I had seen part of the vision come true. All of it might come true, I think — and then there is this problem dragging disaster in its wake. You will have been told that civil war — ah, but I am not here to make excuses, only to tell you the facts so you may judge.
“Diaz is a good man. He, too, loves his country — our country. But he hears all the little cries of the little people and wishes to run to every one of them and give them comfort. Good, good! But I know that some must suffer for the future happiness of all. Suppose I did not allot four millions of dolaros for the task we set you — what do I do with it? Say I give ten dolaros each to four hundred thousand hungry people in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquín. They spend it; it has gone. And perhaps a company that was considering setting its Latin American headquarters here, which would have brought us four millions not of our dolaros but of the better, stronger North American dollar in a very few years, decides to go instead to Brasilia because Ciudad de Vados has lowered its standard. Oh, no, señor! (Yet if Diaz were in here, he and I would be shouting argument at one another…)
“And in the end what happens? Diaz says that if I will not do as he asks, he will compel me to do it. Or he will oust me and do it himself.
“Am I to see my city bombed? See men and women bleeding in the gutters, at the corners of streets? I have seen that, in Cuatrovientos, before I was president. I have seen men thrown through windows; I have seen children shot down while they cried for mercy. Am I to do as others do, across the border — murder Diaz to be free of his opposition? He is a good man! We have worked long and well together, and only now do we begin to hate each other.
“So at the meetings of the cabinet we rage at one another until one day Alejo — Alejandro Mayor whom you knew, may his soul rest in peace — he comes to me and to Esteban Diaz and suggests to us—”
I saw Vados’s hands tighten, one over the other; the veins stood out knotted on their backs. He was not looking at me. He was reliving the moment he was describing.
“—that since we could not resolve our disagreement except by conflict, that conflict must be bound by rules. He said we both knew rules that were acceptable. He said that he could not — oh, remember, señor, this was perhaps the greatest master of government and political science who has ever lived! — he could not determine from day to day all the actions of all the members of our population, but it would be possible to control very subtly individuals about whom one had gathered sufficient knowledge.”
I could imagine Mayor as he made his proposition: his eyes bright behind his spectacles, his face perhaps shiny with excitement, his voice shaking for fear he might not get this chance to carry out the ultimate experiment in government.
“So perhaps it was a kind of madness,” said Vados, his voice dropping. “But we thought it was a better madness than some. I would not see my city torn apart by civil war; Diaz would not see his people die in a bath of blood. So we agreed, and we took our solemn oath upon it: we would fight out our battle on the squares of the city, serving us for a chessboard, with no man knowing such a game was being played.”