But it seemed a pity, all the same.

I came back to the traffic department a few minutes ahead of time and was shown into Angers’ office. The Englishman was smoking at his desk, reading through a typed report; he gestured that I should take the same chair I had had this morning.

“Won’t keep you a moment,” he said. “Just got to finish this memo. Then we’ll go over to Seixas’ and get him to brief you on the financial side of it.”

I nodded and sat down. A few minutes passed in silence. At length Angers folded the report, rattled its sheets together, and scribbled a minute on the flyleaf before ringing for a secretary to collect it and pass it on its way.

“Fine,” he said with a glance at the clock. “We only have to go next door, and I’m afraid Seixas is like too many other people in Vados — doesn’t know what time is, I sometimes think. Still, that’s no reason why we should be late. Let’s go.”

We strolled through clean, bright passages out of the building and across the intervening lawns to the treasury offices. We were almost at the entrance when Angers said, as though struck by a sudden thought, “Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you — there’s a woman called Maria Posador who spends a lot of time around your hotel. Have you run into her?”

Surprised, I nodded.

Angers gave me his habitual wintry smile. “A word to the wise, and all that, then,” he said. “She’s not good company.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Well… just that maybe you oughtn’t to cultivate her acquaintance. Bear in mind what I said about remaining detached, won’t you?”

I don’t think I showed it, but I found the flat, dogmatic, English way in which Angers put his warning very unpleasant. I said shortly, “Why?”

“Uh—” He ushered me forward through the revolving door of the treasury building. “Well, she’s a well-known local personality and something of an opponent of the president — it’s a long story, and I won’t go into it. Take it from me, though: if you’re seen about with her, it would make people assume you weren’t a disinterested outside expert.”

“Well, here’s something for you to bear in mind,” I said. “The best way to ensure that I stay disinterested is to treat me as though I were and not to jump to the conclusion that because Señora Posador is prettier than you I’m going to take orders from her.”

“My dear chap!” said Angers, distressed. “I assure you—”

“Forget it,” I said.

A tense silence took us into Seixas’ office, which, although basically identical with Angers’, bore the stamp of an altogether different personality. Seixas, who rose from behind hisdesk to greet us with both hands outstretched, was a stout, sweating man with a round red face and black hair. A large black cigar like an exclamation mark jutted up from his wide-lipped mouth; it bore the widest band I had ever seen — gaudy with gold and red. He wore a sky-blue suit and a white shirt, down the front of which a tie with a design of pineapples poured like an illuminated cascade. As well as the office equipment on his desk, there was a large jug of something sickly-looking with ice cubes floating in it, and an enormous pinup calendar with a steatopygic nude hung from the tag of the rolled-up wall map.

“So you’re Hakluyt, hey?” he said. “Siddown, siddown! Have a drink! Have a cigar!”

We both refused the drink — it seemed to be Bols Parfait Amour, which is a sickly liqueur the color of methylated spirit, cut with gin and water — but I took a cigar and found it surprisingly mild for all its coal-black appearance.

“Brazilian, hey!” said Seixas with satisfaction, sucking hard on his own. “Well, whaddya think of Vados, Hakluyt? The burg, not the man!”

“Impressive,” I said, watching Angers out of the corner of my eye. It was plain that he found Seixas unbearable; it was equally plain that Seixas was thick-skinned enough not to realize the fact. I found this amusing.

“Yeah!” said Seixas with deep satisfaction. “This is one hell of a town! And you’re gonna bring it one step nearer heaven, hey?” He shook with laughter, squeezing up his eyes, and the ash from his cigar fell down the geometrical center of his brilliant tie.

“Well, with Angers there looking sour like a fresh lime, guess we’d better get on with the business.” He shoved his large body forward in his chair so that he could put his elbows on the desk, and swiveled his cigar up to an angle that he had probably copied from a bad Hollywood movie when he was in his teens: the tycoon angle.

“Well, ’s pretty straightforward. Back a few years — oh, eight years ago — there was a hell of a big dock fire at Puerto Joaquín. Tanker blew up. The docks didn’t do so bad, in the end, but the city fire department wasn’t worth a spit on the sidewalk. ’Bout four hundred people roasted to death; houses burnt like paper, y’know? Well, year or two an’ they got the town put back together, built lotsa new apartment blocks an’ like that — nowhere so good as Vados, though, all scrappy and bitty.

“Anyways, after that Vados gets the cabinet together an’ says we gotta be ready for it happening again, so he puts a levy on oil shipments — the big companies kick up a squawk, but hell, Vados is a good man in their books, straightened out their labor problems, done lotsa good work, so they give in. An’ offa this levy he gets a ’mergency fund, sorta like insurance. Y’see, they was building this burg then, already got started — hadn’t anything left over for Puerto Joaquín or any place else. There’s about eight million dolaros in the fund right now, an’ el Presidente himself says how it gets spent. If. You got four million of ’em if you need.”

He hauled a drawer of his desk open and rummaged inside for something. After taking out a gaudy-covered novel, a flat gin bottle — empty; he dropped it in the wastebasket — and a soiled shirt, he extracted a large file of papers and set it on the desktop with a grunt of satisfaction.

“Now le’s get this straight,” he muttered. “Ah — yeah!”

He selected a sheet of paper with a magnificent embossed letterhead and several wet rings adorning it, and held it up between beringed fingers. “This here’s the official authorization, y’see,” he said. “You get paid twenty thousand plus expenses; you can spend up to ten thousand on research, computing, and like that, but you have to get out a scheme for it. You cost your own scheme, that right?”

“That’s the arrangement.”

“Great — hate costing construction projects. Damn muddle of figures, all those loose ends like sickness losses an’ God knows what… Want I should put y’ on to the firms who’ll be doing the job?”

“That can wait. I’m not interested in who does it — it’s what has to be done that concerns me.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, regarding me thoughtfully. And then a second time, “Uh-huh.”

We spent about twenty minutes after that going into a few of the most significant figures — he sent for some recent records of work done under government contract so that I could get a rough picture of costs, and Angers sat impatiently at the side of the room while we got technical. I was rather surprised to find that under his casual exterior Seixas had a mind like a razor. Of course, I shouldn’t have been — Vados wasn’t the kind of man to tolerate easy riders in his beloved city’s administration.

Our interview over, Seixas got to his feet, beaming. “A helluva lot of luck, Hakluyt!” he said. “Me, I think it’s too damn much money to spend anyway — we could dig those sonsabitches out in half a day with bayonets. Then they’d come back, though, so maybe it ain’t a waste. See you!”

Evidently relieved, Angers got up eagerly, shook Seixas’ hand with a distant expression on his face, and hurried me out of the room.

“Quite a character, isn’t he?” I said when the door was closed behind me.

“By no means unique, I’m afraid,” said Angers glumly. “I mean — well, you saw for yourself. The empty bottles and the dirty clothes in his office desk — I ask you!” He sighed. “Still, one has to admit he’s clever enough. He’s a native, of course,” he added as an afterthought.