He looked now worn out, as though he had undergone a terrific physical strain. His voice had been getting steadily lower, so that now I had to lean forward in my chair to catch his final words.

“We kept faith with each other,” he muttered. “We moved always according to the rules.”

I felt altogether helpless. For no reason except chance, without my demanding it, I suddenly found myself in a position of power over this man who had power I could scarcely believe — and had used it.

Could this story be true? Or was it all some vast shared delusion, shared by Vados and Diaz,. shadow-played out to hide from themselves the fact that they were allowing their mutual disagreement to destroy what they wished to preserve? The more I studied the terrifying contents of the flies I had taken from the cabinet the less I was able to persuade myself that this had not in fact been done.

I thought of my cynical — well, speech — to Maria Posador about the impersonal forces that move human beings. I thought of the sensation I had sometimes had since coming to Vados — the sensation that I was being unwillingly involved in the clash of opposed interests. Maybe I had had a clue to what was happening.

I opened one of the folders — a very slim one, with only a few summary notes inside. The name on the cover was that of General Molinas, the commander in chief.

On top of the packet of papers inside was a handwritten slip, presumably by Vados himself. It said:

“Wondered at first why D. selected him for his side; felt him to be more sympathetic to white. As it turns out… N.B.: investigate reliability of.”

And that snatched me back at one jerk from fantasy to the world of hard facts.

I said, “At least this could not happen anywhere else.” Vados raised his head sharply. “It could have been done anywhere! Anyone could have done it — with Alejo’s skill to guide them and his audacity to persuade them to try it.”

“No!” I said violently. “And God be thanked that that’s not true! You said your first need was a well and firmly governed population. What you mean is a population too damned apathetic to care that it’s being pushed around on a chessboard. You have to begin with a dictatorship; you have to begin with ‘the most thoroughly governed country in the world.’

“For the sake of your vision, you’ve bled the spirit out of half your people; for fear that your pretty new town would suffer, you’ve insulted the personal dignity of everyone in it. With your camouflage — like these mock public-opinion polls — you’ve given the average man in the street a comforting sense that his views count; at the same time you’ve used every underhand trick to ensure that his views are molded into the same passive conformity as everyone else’s. The only reason you were able to employ the prejudices and fears of your victims to drive them around this chessboard of yours was because you created them! You didn’t create my prejudices, and so you failed to control me.

“I don’t have to claim some special credit for mucking up this bloody scheme of yours. You dug the trap and fell into it yourself, in just the same way as when you called in foreigners to build your city for you because you didn’t have any faith in your own people. Lord, even if your plans had worked out and Maria Posador’s bullet had gone through my head instead of through my arm” — Vados winced and made as though to clasp his head in his hands — “this attempt to reduce the realities of life to a game of chess would still have failed.

“Here you’re swearing that you stuck by the rules, and yet this file here shows that you’re planning to get rid of General Molinas because he doesn’t think the same way as the rest of his officers, doesn’t share your contempt for the ordinary people of Aguazul! He’s one of these chessmen, but do you honestly imagine the army as a whole would have observed the rules of chess if you’d beaten Diaz and got the chance to impose your wishes? Do you suppose that if Diaz had played so skillfully that he threatened to eliminate Bishop Cruz, who’s also supposed to be one of your pieces, the clergy would have sat quiet and watched him knocked down? The idea’s nonsensical!

“And Diaz himself! And you, for that matter! Staring defeat in the face, would you or he have still stuck to the rules? If Diaz cares so much about his own people that he accepted this crazy scheme in preference to starting a civil war, he must care for them enough to welsh on his agreement and try another method if he’s beaten. Maybe we’re all nothing but bits of complex machinery responding to stimuli on a totally determinate basis; it often seems to me in my job that we are. But that applies to all of us, and none of us can claim what you called the powers of God to dictate the thoughts and emotions of others.

“Well, you’ve brought yourself and your country and all your ambitions to the edge of disaster. What the hell are you going to do about it?”

XXXIII

I suppose that, although I had intellectually accepted the truth of what had been said, I didn’t yet feel that it was true. It was so patently unreal, so “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Otherwise, I could never have remained as calm as I did. I had forgotten, or was not reacting to, the fact that this man — Diaz, rather, since I was one of Vados’s own “pieces” — had come within inches of arranging my death this morning.

Of course, it is in any case very hard to accept the possibility of one’s own death; one is so accustomed to thinking of oneself as being indefinitely alive that in mental self-defense one tends to drive the idea out of one’s mind as soon as one can. Maybe that was why I scarcely felt angry anymore. I felt angry later — blindly angry — but in these last few minutes while I was speaking with Vados, I had kept a clear and detached viewpoint, like that of a man whose mind is still lucid although his body rages with fever.

Vados did not reply to my final question. I repeated it.

“What the hell are you going to do?”

“God knows,” he said wearily. “Whichever way I turn I see nothing but disaster. What can I do?”

“You’re asking me?” I said bitterly. “I’m only one of your chessmen, remember? You’ve turned loose forces that have got beyond your control. You must have been crazy to think that the death of someone like Guerrero and Mendoza could be called a move in a chess game. Had you just forgotten about everyone else in the city? Didn’t the feelings of Fats Brown’s wife matter to you, or Mendoza’s brother, or whoever else cared for the people you’ve killed?”

All the anger that had been repressed inside me suddenly undamned, and I roared at him. “Who the hell told you you had to fight over this bloody mess? You call that governing a country — getting yourself into such a damn stupid position you haven’t got any way out except killing people? You may have built Ciudad de Vados and brought prosperity and all the rest of it, but obviously you’ve done it to pander to your own selfish ego, because you must despise everyone else if you can treat them like bits of wood.”

He tried to break in, but my feelings were rising and I ignored him. “You were prepared to stamp down thousands of people just so long as your pretty new buildings didn’t get dirty, weren’t you? Why the hell didn’t you give up a few square yards of Presidential House and make room for some of those poor bastards living in Sigueiras’s slum? He didn’t want ’em there, living like animals — or maybe you think he did. God, but I’m glad I’m not in your shoes. Compared to you, a slave trader has clean hands.”

Vados sat limply, like a badly stuffed rag doll. “I cannot deny it,” he said. “It is all true.”

I made a disgusted noise and went over to the cabinet, to drag down the rest of the files from their shelf. I went through them methodically. Some of the names on them hardly meant anything to me personally: Guyiran — that was one of Diaz’s people from the Ministry of the Interior, and I hadn’t met him; Gonzales — that was the Secretary of Justice, and I hadn’t met him either. But some of them meant a lot to me: Angers, Brown, Posador…