The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

  “What about the army?” he asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Is there such a thing as a black soldier?”

  “Sure there is.”

  “So they do mix with white men in the army?” Cindy shook her head.

  “The Negroes have their own regiments. Of course, their officers are white ...” “Of course,” Paco said dryly.

  “... but they don’t really come into contact with any of the ordinary white soldiers.”

  “Not even in combat?”

  “Negro soldiers don’t go into combat.”

  “They don’t?”

  “I think maybe they did in the Civil War – and just after it, when we were fighting the Indians – but they certainly don’t now.”

  “So if they don’t fight, what do they do?”

  “I ... er... I’m not an expert on this kind of thing. I really don’t know all the details.”

  “Can’t you even give me an example?”

  “I’m ... er... pretty sure that they use them to dig the latrine trenches.”

  In other words, Paco thought, their sole function in this case, too, was to clean up other people’s – white people’s – messes.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it must have been like to be Samuel Johnson.

  To live in a world where insults could be heaped on you without your daring to retaliate – because any show of defiance could result in a lynching.

  To be given the shitty tasks purely because of the color of your skin.

  To know that however good you were at anything, a white man would always be hired in preference to you, simply because he was white.

  Yes, that was the kind of background that Samuel Johnson must have grown up in. And yet somehow he had managed to rise above it – to find the strength and the courage to commit himself to fight to improve a world which, by and large, had always treated him like dirt.

  As a police officer, Paco had always had a certain sympathy for the underdog. As a man, he prized courage above most other virtues. He had never met Samuel Johnson – and would probably never be able to completely understand him – but he was beginning to feel the man’s loss, and he swore to himself that, whatever it took, he would find Johnson’s murderer and make sure that he was punished.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The town hall council chamber was an impressive room by almost any standards. The walls were paneled, and the ceiling carved with an intricate and complex geometric design. A dais stood at the front of the room, and the chairs which had been placed on it were elaborate enough to have been the thrones of minor royalty. Even the rows of wooden, high-backed benches which filled the rest of the chamber – though probably less comfortable than the seats on the dais – had a certain style about them.

  Looking down from the platform, Paco found himself asking what these foreign visitors – these yanquis who came from what, he imagined, was a thoroughly modern country quite unlike his own – made of it all. Their first thought was probably to wonder how a modest town like San Antonio de la Jara – a town in which not even all the roads were paved – could boast such a sumptuous chamber. But though it might baffle the yanquis, it was no mystery at all to him.

  The chamber, he was sure, would have been built at the expense of some conquistador who had returned from South America with his pockets weighted down with Inca gold, and had been determined to do something which would display his wealth to the whole world – or at least to the town in which he had grown up.

  Ah, Spain had been a power to be reckoned with in those long-gone days of glory.

  And now?

  Now it was little more than a practice ground on which the bigger, more influential countries tested their new weapons – a rehearsal hall for the larger conflict which was bound to follow this bloody, but parochial, war.

  Unless, Paco told himself ... unless men like those in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade really could make Madrid the tomb of fascism.

  The brigadistas began to file into the chamber. As Dolores McBride had explained earlier, they varied greatly in age, complexion and height. Even their uniforms were not, strictly speaking, uniform. Some of them wore the same type of jacket as the Spanish soldiers who Paco had fought side by side with in the Jarama Valley. Others were dressed in combat jackets which looked as if they were left over from the Great War – and probably were. A few even had on civilian clothes – worn tweed jackets and old camelhair overcoats.

  But it was neither their physical differences nor their uniforms which really caught Paco's attention – it was the elaborate, almost choreographed, way in which they took their seats.

  They had entered the room as a number of clearly distinct groups – the colored brigadistas had formed one, half a dozen men with Central European features had made up a second, and a third had consisted of broad men with weather-beaten faces and tattoos on their muscular arms. Yes, that was how they had entered. But then, instead of choosing to sit together, they had deliberately parted, so that one of the Central Europeans found himself with a Negro sitting to one side of him and a burly, tattooed man to the other.

  It was almost as if they were putting on a show for him, Paco thought. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that it was as if they’d been ordered to put on a show for him.

  “Are you ready to begin, Ruiz?” asked Cindy, from her seat next to his on the dais.

  “I won’t be talking to them.”

  “You won’t?”

  “No. Felipe’s going to address them.”

  “Me!” the fat constable said, giving his ample thigh a thoughtful pinch. “Well, I must say, I’m very honored to he asked. But you’re the jefe here. Shouldn’t it be left up to you?”

  “I can’t speak to them and study them at the same time – at least, not properly. Whereas if you put them through the standard procedure, I can be watching them closely to see how they react to it.”

  “A good point,” Felipe agreed. “One thing, jefe...?” “Yes?”

  “Since I’ll be in charge, would you mind if I granted myself a temporary promotion?”

  Paco grinned. “Why not?”

  Felipe cleared his throat.

  “Are you ready?” he asked Cindy.

  “I’m ready.”

  The fat constable clapped his chubby hands together.

  “Attention, all you men!” he said loudly, in a voice that a ham actor would have been proud to own. “My name is Felipe Fernandez – Captain Felipe Fernandez – and before the war I was a member of the Madrid police force.”

  While Cindy translated, Paco did his best to suppress a chuckle. It was typical of the fat man to have promoted himself to captain rather than being content to become merely a sergeant. Felipe's attitude to life in general mirrored his attitude to food – and he never did anything by halves.

  “I am here to investigate the death of one of your comrades,” Felipe continued. “Now we know where he was killed, when he was killed, and how he was killed. What we still have to find out is the ‘who’ and the ‘why’. And we will – make no mistake about that.”

  He looked expectantly around the room, as if he were waiting for the murderer to instantly jump to his feet and confess. But apart from a few men who shifted their backsides in an effort to try and find a more comfortable position on the hard seats, nobody moved.

  “It is most likely that Samuel Johnson was killed shortly after he left the Plaza Mayor,” Felipe said. “Raise your hand if you saw him on the fateful night.”

  Several hands went up into the air. Felipe nodded his head in a manner which suggested he had been anticipating just that response – and that he considered them very wise men not to try and hide from him things he already knew.

  “Now put your hands down again if you didn’t actually see him leaving the square,” he ordered the brigadistas.

  All the men instantly dropped their arms to their sides.

  “So nobody saw Johnson go,” Felipe mused. “Which means
that if the murderer was following him out of the square, nobody saw him, either.” He ran a finger and thumb over his wobbly chins. “Very well, then, let me ask you all another question. Is there any-body here who has a reasonable suspicion as to who the murderer might be?”

  No one raised a hand in response to Felipe’s question, but the fat constable did not seem the least discouraged.

  “I’ve investigated any number of murders in my time with the police,” he said, “and I’ve never yet questioned anyone – a man or a woman, old or young, who didn’t have some theory or other about the killer and his motive. So why don’t you tell me what’s on your minds?” He hooked his thick thumbs into the waistband of his pants. “Come on, boys! You’d be surprised how many theories – ones which have sounded crazy even to the men who were telling them to me – turned out to be a fairly accurate summary of what actually happened.”

  James Clay, the short, dark political commissar of the battalion, rose to his feet.

  “Yes?” Felipe said.

  Clay spoke for around two minutes, and though he couldn’t understand a word of what the yanqui was saying, Paco could tell from his tone and gestures that he was making some kind of a speech.

  “Mr. Clay says that everyone here knows why Samuel Johnson was killed,” Cindy translated when the commissar had resumed his seat again. “It was because the enemy saw him as a danger.”

  Clay was doing no more than trotting out the Party line, Paco thought. But not everyone seemed willing to accept it – several of the other men were actually shaking their heads, as if they disagreed with their commissar.

  “You!” Felipe said, pointing to a middle-aged man on the front row who had been one of the head shakers. “Tell us what you think? What’s your theory on the motive?”

  The man hesitated for a second after Cindy had translated, then said, “It could have been the French.”

  The French? Paco thought.

  The French!

  What the bloody hell had they got to do with it?

  Commissar Clay was back on his feet immediately. “The French brigadistas are our loyal and trusted allies in the great struggle which we are all waging against the forces of fascism and repression,” he said hotly. “They would never have killed Comrade Johnson.”

  But the same men who had been shaking their heads before were nodding them now.

  “Why should the French brigadistas have wanted Johnson dead?” Felipe asked.

  “Because he’d hurt their pride,” said the man who’d first raised the possibility of the killer being a Frenchman. “Because he made a fool of all of them – from Marty down – that day when we went into Albacete and ...”

  “That particular incident was nothing more than a small misunderstanding,” Commissar Clay interrupted hastily. “I have had a long and frank meeting with the French commander, and the whole matter has been cleared up to everyone’s satisfaction.”

  Maybe to Clay’s satisfaction, Paco thought. Maybe even to the satisfaction of the French commander. But as far as several of the men in the chamber were concerned, it was obviously still far from resolved.

  “I’d like to hear more about why you suspect the French,” said Felipe doggedly, ignoring the commissar’s interjection.

  So would I, Paco thought.

  But not right at that moment – not as long as Commissar James Clay was there, ready to smother any interesting spark of information with the thick blanket of Party dogma.

  “Well, spit it out, man!” Felipe said impatiently. “Why do you suspect the French are behind it?”

  Paco climbed quickly to his feet.

  “Would you mind if I asked a few questions now, Captain Fernandez?” he asked, knowing from past experience that the only way to shut the fat constable up, once he’d got his teeth into something, was by direct intervention.

  “I thought I was doing quite well on my own,” Felipe muttered, almost under his breath. But more loudly, he said, “Please be my guest, Inspector Ruiz.”

  Paco surveyed his audience – the young faces and the relatively old; the black, the white and the brown; those who looked interested in the proceedings, and those who seemed as if they'd much rather be somewhere else entirely.

  “You must appreciate from the beginning that Captain Fernandez and I know little or nothing about the country you come from,” he said. “So please understand that any question I may ask comes from my own ignorance, rather than through a desire to trick you.”

  He paused to let Cindy translate, then continued, “I believe that relations between the whites and the Negroes in the United States are not always harmonious, and I was wondering if perhaps there could have been a racial motive behind the murder of Samuel Johnson.”

  Commissar Clay started to rise to his feet again, but he was beaten to it this time by one of the large men with tattooed arms.

  The man started to speak in a powerful voice that would have carried well beyond the room, and punctuated his remarks with stabbing gestures from his big, thick fingers.

  He’d probably been a street corner agitator at one time, Paco decided – a rabble-rouser who understood how to work his audience. There had been any number of men like him in Madrid before the military had revolted – before free speech had been abandoned in favor of survival.

  The man had been talking for perhaps three minutes when one of the other brigadistas – a shorter man from the Central European faction – jumped to his feet as if he could bear to listen to no more.

  Like the burly speaker he was interrupting, this man used his hands as he talked, but instead of a stabbing motion he waved them wildly – almost imploringly – in the air.

  It was extremely frustrating not to understand what was going on, Paco thought – to get the tone of the words, but have no clue as to their meaning. A detective who did not understand the language of the people he was investigating had about as much hope of success as a blind man had of learning how to paint.

  The small man was still shouting at the big one, and now the big one was shouting back. Several other brigadistas were gesturing to them both to sit down, but to no effect. Even Commissar Clay seemed to have abandoned any hope of trying to restore order.

  A sandy-haired brigadista, who had been so quiet up to that point that Paco had not even noticed him, now rose to his feet. The effect of his action on the other two men was not instantaneous – but it was pretty damn close to it. Within seconds of the new man standing up, both let their arguments taper off, and turned expectantly to hear what he had to say.

  The sandy-haired man spoke quietly, but with great conviction. As he made his points, the shoulders of the other two men drooped, and an expression appeared on their faces which could only have been called growing shame.

  The sandy-haired brigadista had reached the end of what he’d wanted to say, and sat down again. The tattooed man and the Central European hovered uncertainly for a second, then followed suit.

  An uneasy tension had enveloped the room. It was almost as if all the brigadistas were embarrassed – as if they felt they had let themselves down in front of strangers.

  Paco turned around to Cindy, expecting her to be waiting eagerly to translate the exchange while it was still fresh in her mind. But she wasn’t ready at all! Instead, she was gazing at the sandy-haired man with a look of wonder – almost of hero-worship – on her face.

  Was it the man’s words which had had such a powerful effect on her? Paco wondered. Or was it something else entirely?

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Cindy kept her eyes glued firmly to the sandy-haired man.

  “I asked if you were all right,” Paco said, more sharply this time.

  The edge to his voice seemed to snap Cindy out of her trance.

  “I’m ... uh ... fine,” she said unconvincingly.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “In a way, I have.” Cindy shook her head, as if she were trying to clear her mind of thoughts which sho
uldn’t have been there at that moment. “You want me to tell you what that brouhaha was all about?”

  For perhaps half a minute he had been more concerned about Cindy than he had been about the job in hand, Paco realized. And in that short half minute, the focus of attention of the meeting had shifted. Before, the brigadistas had been watching each other and he had been watching them watching each other – which was just as it should have been. Now, however, the Lincolns’ gaze had shifted to the dais, as they tried to understand just what was going on between the blonde translator and the ex-policeman.

  In other words, Paco thought angrily, I’ve allowed myself to lose my grip on the meeting.

  “The brouhaha?” Cindy said. “Shall I ...?”

  “Forget that for the moment. Tell the brigadistas they can go now, but as they leave I want them all to pick up a piece of paper from the stack on the table by the door.”

  “And what are they to do with it?”

  “I want them to write their names at the top, and then give an account of where they were at just after midnight on Friday. They’re to say who they were with, and whether they noticed anything that was even a little unusual. Most important of all, stress that none of them should discuss his account with anyone else.”

  “And when they’ve completed their reports?”

  “They’re to hand them over to Chief of Police Fernandez.”

  It wasn’t much of a joke that he’d made at Fat Felipe’s expense, but he’d expected to see at least a glimmer of amusement flash in Cindy’s eyes. But there was nothing. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard – or had heard, but was incapable of accepting anything he said on any level other than a literal one.

  Cindy turned to face the hall again. She translated Paco’s request for information to the brigadistas in a flat, almost wooden, tone – and the whole time she was speaking, she kept her gaze firmly fixed on the sandy-haired man.

  The Lincolns rose to their feet. By the time they’d reached the door, they had managed to re-form into the groups they’d been part of when they entered, so that even though they had kept separate during the meeting, Central European now left with Central European and colored brigadista with colored brigadista.