The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

  Paco shook his head. After a night’s drinking, his brain knew that he should eat, but somehow it couldn’t talk his stomach into accepting the fact.

  “I was drinking in one of the local bars last night,” he said – and wondered why he had chosen to omit the fact that he had not been drinking alone.

  “You?” Felipe said, pulling a comical face. “Drinking in one of the local bars? I find that very hard to believe.”

  The fat constable was acting as if this were just a normal case and his boss were his normal self, Paco thought – so perhaps the uncertainties which were churning up his guts didn’t really show on the outside.

  “I talked to two of the customers,” he continued. “Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they talked to me.”

  Felipe reached for another strand of churro and dipped it in his chocolate.

  “Did they have anything especially informative to tell you?” he asked.

  “The way one of them spoke about the late Samuel Johnson, you’d have thought he was a saint.”

  “And the other?”

  “He only mentioned Johnson in passing – most of what he said was actually aimed at intimidating me – but I got the distinct impression that he’s more than happy to see the yanqui in his grave.”

  Felipe sucked the chocolate noisily off his churro.

  “No two men will ever have exactly the same opinion of a third,” he said, “but it’s when they hold widely differing views that things really start to become interesting. Do you have any idea why one of them should mourn his passing and the other seem to be glad he’s dead?”

  “None at all. But perhaps things will become clearer when I’ve talked to some of the locals – which is what I intend to do while the brigadistas are out on their training exercises.”

  “And what about me, jefe?” Felipe asked. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No.” Paco looked down at the sheaf of papers stacked next to Felipe's left hand. “Are those the accounts of the brigadistas movements on the night of the murder?”

  “Yes. Sergeant Cummings brought them round to me half an hour ago. He said there are two or three still missing, but he should get those to me by the end of the day. He seems a very efficient man, don’t you think?”

  “All the reports will need to be thoroughly checked and cross-referenced,” Paco said, ignoring his assistant’s last comment. “That should take you all morning at least.”

  Felipe looked instantly despondent.

  “But that’s paperwork,” he protested. “You know I’ve never been any good at paperwork. Anyway,” he added, bright-ening a little, “most of the statements are written in English. I won’t understand a word of them.”

  “Cindy will help you.”

  “Cindy? Won’t you be needing her yourself?”

  Paco shook his head.

  “As I said, I intend to spend the morning talking to the locals, so I won’t need a translator. In fact, having a foreigner with me might actually inhibit them from talking freely.”

  Besides, he thought, though he was not willing to admit it to Fat Felipe, it would be something of a relief to get away from Cindy for a while.

  Paco picked up the pile of statements, and flicked through them. He stopped when he came to one which had GREG CUMMINGS written at the top in bold letters. He read the first sentence, then handed it to his assistant.

  “Just as I suspected. The bastard couldn’t resist the temptation to show off by writing his statement in Spanish.”

  “Maybe he was just trying to make things easier for us,” Felipe suggested quietly.

  “I want you to check Cummings’ statement very carefully indeed,” Paco continued. “But be subtle about it – I don’t want Cindy to know we’re paying him special attention.”

  Felipe nodded, perhaps a little sadly.

  “And when we’ve finished going through all the statements?” he asked. “What do we do then?”

  “Follow up on any inconsistencies which might emerge. For instance, if X says that he was with Y, but Y doesn’t mention anything about being with X in his statement, then you must find out which one is telling the truth. And whatever you do, don’t give them the opportunity to talk to each other before you’ve interrogated them both, because the last thing we want is to give them time to iron out any kinks in their stories.”

  “Keeping a couple of suspects apart sounds like a job for two policemen, rather than one,” Felipe grumbled.

  “You’re nearly big enough to be two policemen all on your own, Felipe,” Paco joked.

  But the fat constable was not prepared to see the humor. Instead, he shook his head from side to side.

  “We’ve worked together for a long time, you and me, jefe,” he said.

  “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “And during the time we’ve been partners, I’ve had to put up with listening to a lot of complaints about you – both from the general public and from other police officers.”

  It was not the first time Felipe had said something like that, but there was usually a teasing element to his tone which was totally lacking now.

  “Go on,” Paco said.

  “I’ve heard you called rude, impulsive, and even reckless,” Felipe told him. “And a lot of the time, I’ve secretly agreed with the criticisms. But I’ve always stood by you. Do you know why?”

  “Because we’re friends?”

  Felipe shook his head so vehemently that all his chins wobbled at once.

  “No, not because of that. I’ve done it because I admire you.”

  “Enough of this hero worship,” Paco said offhandedly.

  But Felipe was not to be diverted.

  “I admire you because, whatever your faults – and there are enough of them to fill a very thick book – you’ve always been true to two guiding principles.”

  “And now, I suppose, you’re going to tell me what those two guiding principles are,” Paco said sarcastically.

  “Yes, I am,” Felipe replied, unruffled. “The first is that you’re determined to see justice done. And the second is that you’ll follow an investigation through to the end – whatever it costs you personally.”

  “Get to the point,” Paco snapped, feeling his anger start to rise.

  “You’ve abandoned both those principles in the last couple of minutes,” Felipe said. “I saw the first one go out of the window when you picked out Cummings’ file for special attention. You’d no reason to do that – except that it would suit you very well if we could find him guilty of something, even if he didn’t do it.”

  “Now listen ...” Paco began.

  “No, you listen,” Felipe interrupted, sounding fiercer than Paco had ever heard him before. “You dropped your second principle when you decided to leave the interrogations up to Cindy and me. You know it needs two cops to do it properly, but for that to happen, you’d have to spend more time with Cindy than you want to. Well, tough! If that’s what the case demands, then that’s what we need to give it. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. I wouldn’t have had to tell the jefe who I agreed to come down to Albacete with – but you’re not that jefe any more.”

  “Any time you find it’s starting to make you sick in the stomach to work with me, you’ve only to tell me, and I’ll see to it personally that you’re put on the next train back to Madrid!” Paco said hotly.

  “Jefe...” Felipe said mournfully – and it was obvious that after the tremendous effort it had taken him to say what he felt needed to be said, the fight was completely drained from him.

  “Don't you jefe me, you bitching bastard,” Paco told him, homing in mercilessly on his partner’s new sign of weakness. “In case you've forgotten, I am your superior officer, and I have given you a set of orders. In our present circumstances, I can’t force you to obey those orders, as I could have done in the old days back in Madrid – but if you choose not to, then I want nothing more to do with you. Have I made myself clear?”

&nb
sp; Fat Felipe bowed his head with the resignation of one who has tried his best, and now accepted the inevitable failure.

  “Sí, señor,” he said.

  “I shall expect your report by this evening,” Paco said. “And I shall expect it to be a fair report, not simply one designed to please the kind of man you seem to think I have become. Understood?”

  “Sí, señor."

  “Very good,” Paco said.

  His coffee and sol y sombra sat untouched before him, but he had no interest in drinking them now. He stood up so suddenly that he knocked his chair over, and without bothering to pick it up again, he marched towards the door.

  Once he was outside in the street – once the cold air of La Mancha had hit him in the face like a bucket of icy water – the regrets began to set in. Felipe had only spoken the way he had out of a sense of friendship – Paco knew that – and he’d had no right at all to attack the fat constable in return.

  And perhaps ... only perhaps ... there was a germ of truth in what Felipe had said. Maybe, because of what had happened between him and Cindy, he was not being quite as objective about this case as he had been about the other investigations he'd conducted.

  Now was not the time to think about that, he told himself angrily. He had a lot of investigative work to get through that morning. To conduct his inquiries properly he needed to keep his wits about him – and attacks of self-doubt would only serve to get in the way.

  He lit up a Celtas and strode resolutely towards his first port of call.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The house stood on the very edge of San Antonio, even beyond the remains of what had once been a section of the town wall and was now no more than a few large stones poking out of the ground like rotting teeth. It was at the end of a terrace of similar houses, and the owner had used the gable end as one wall of the rough barn he had constructed. The barn aside, there was nothing to distinguish this dwelling from its neighbors – nothing to suggest that the man who lived in it was particularly important. Yet it was this house that the gangly nervous man in the bar had advised Paco to visit if he wished to learn more about what was really happening in the town.

  Paco knocked on the front door. The woman who answered his knock was twenty-three or twenty-four. She was not pretty in the conventional sense. Her eyes were perhaps a little too narrow, her nose a mite too ungainly and her lips just a shade too thin. But there was something about her, Paco decided – perhaps an aura, perhaps the strength of character so evident in her features – which made her almost beautiful.

  “Yes?” the young woman said abruptly.

  She seemed like someone who could normally see the humor in both herself and the world in general, Paco thought, adding to his picture of her, but yet there was tightness about her which suggested that she had not found much to laugh about for quite some time.

  “My name is Francisco Ruiz,” he said. “I am – or at least, I was, an inspector of ...”

  “I know who you are, and why you are here, señor,” the woman interrupted him.

  Of course she did. San Antonio de la Jara might be a little bigger than the average Castilian village, but it still had the true village mentality, and everyone in it would know everything there was to know about a stranger within a few hours of his arrival.

  “I would like to talk to Don Juan Prieto,” Paco said. “Could you please tell me in which part of town he is working in today?”

  The woman laughed, though without much amusement.

  “He is not working anywhere. He only wishes he could.”

  “Is there something wrong with him?”

  “Why don’t you come inside and see for yourself?”

  The young woman gestured him to follow her. Paco found himself – as he’d expected to – in a large room which occupied the entire lower floor of the building. At the back of the room was a range on which the family meals were cooked, and next to it was the sink in which the pots would be washed after the meal had been eaten. Closer to the front door was a large scrubbed-wood table, and against one wall there was a horsehair sofa, on which lay a broad man with his right leg in plaster all the way from the ankle to the hip.

  The man smiled welcomingly.

  “I am Juan Prieto. Forgive me for not getting up to greet you,” he said.

  “What happened to you?” Paco asked. “Did you have an accident?”

  “An accident? Well, that is certainly what some people would like us to believe it was,” Juan Prieto said darkly. “Why have you come to see me, Inspector Ruiz? Did someone send you?”

  “I met a man in a bar last night,” Paco explained. “He suggested it might be useful to talk to you.”

  “And who was this man?”

  “He didn’t give me his name, but I’m sure you would know him. He was thin, and he had a nervous twitch in his left eye.”

  Prieto nodded.

  “I thought if anybody sent you it would be Angel. He has a big heart, but he also has the courage of a field mouse – and if anything needs to be said, he would much rather someone else said it.” He turned his head towards the woman. “Fetch a glass of wine for our guest, Concha.”

  The woman nodded, and walked over to a carved wooden cabinet set against the wall. With her back to the two men, she opened the cabinet and took out a bottle of wine.

  Concha! Paco thought. Concha Prieto! Why did that name sound familiar to him?

  And then he had it!

  “You were the one who found Samuel Johnson’s body, weren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I was the one who found him,” the woman agreed, still facing away from him.

  “What were you doing in a burnt-out church at that time of night?”

  The woman shrugged her shoulders, but did not turn.

  “I just went there. I can’t explain why.”

  “Do you often go there? Do you still worship?”

  “No one in this family has paid homage to the god of the landlords for the last twenty years,” Juan Prieto said.

  “Then why...” Paco began.

  “I’ve just told you, I can’t explain it,” the woman said, with an edge to her voice which could perhaps have been exasperation – or may have been something else entirely.

  Why doesn’t she face me? Paco wondered. She must have finished pouring the wine by now, so why won’t she look me in the eye?

  “Pull up a chair and sit down, Inspector,” Juan Prieto said.

  Paco walked over to the table, picked up one of the straight-backed chairs, and placed it close to the sofa. Behind him, he heard Concha Prieto finally move away from the cabinet, but even as she handed the glass of wine to him, she was staring at the ceiling.

  “Samuel Johnson was a good friend to this family,” Juan Prieto said. “But he was more than just a friend – he was an ally as well."

  “An ally in what?” Paco asked.

  “In our struggle for social justice.” Juan Prieto paused. “Before I talk about the part Samuel played in our lives, I should perhaps tell you a little of our recent history.”

  “Perhaps you should,” Paco agreed.

  “Until last July, there were only two large landowners in this area, but there were many small farmers, just struggling to get by,” Prieto said. “The landlords were also the local money lenders, and though we owned our land, many of us were heavily in debt to them. Do you understand?”

  Paco nodded. Prieto's story was – so far – a familiar enough one, and could have been told by most peasant farmers in most parts of Spain.

  “We knew that there was going to be trouble long before it actually happened. Who didn’t? The signs were there for all to see. When the bloody military rose in Morocco, we were ready to deal with our enemies closer to hand. We had guns hidden in our barns and buried in our fields, and we took to the streets to defend ourselves against the fascists. It was not a long struggle. The guardias civiles – who had decided to support the rebels – quickly saw they were outnumbered, and surrendered. In
some towns, they were killed whether they surrendered or not, but here I insisted that once they had handed in their weapons, they should be allowed to leave San Antonio unmolested.” Prieto paused again. “I am quite proud of that.”

  “You have a right to be,” said Paco, who had been sickened by all the unnecessary killing he had seen for himself in the early days of the war.

  “We let the priests and the landlords leave under the same conditions,” Prieto said. “And suddenly we were free. Free from debt. Free from the church. I can’t fully describe how wonderful that felt. We had been given a new life.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But once the excitement had died down, we had to ask ourselves what we would do with this new life we had been given. We held a meeting of all the farmers and artisans of the town. There were those of us – especially anarchists like me – who said we should collectivize everything. From now on, no one would own the land – and yet everyone would own it. Each family would put what they had into the collective, and would be paid a wage for its labor. We would all be equal at last.”

  “But there were objections,” Paco guessed, remembering the big peasant with the scar over his eye, who had threatened him the night before.

  “Yes, there were objections,” Juan Prieto agreed. “There were those who asked how the collective could work without leaders. We told them that there would be leaders – delegados – each responsible for one area of work. One for the cattle, another for the vegetable oil, a third for the agricultural machinery, and so on. But these delegados would not be leaders in the traditional sense because they’d be elected by the whole commune. The objectors said that it did not matter whether they were elected or not. Human nature being what it is, once they had some power they would use it to their own advantage. We argued that that would not happen. The delegados, in addition to their new duties, would work in the fields alongside everyone else – doing exactly the same work – but would receive nine pesetas a week less in wages than the rest of the collective. In other words, they would work harder but not earn as much. Surely no man would accept such a job unless he really believed in what the col-lective was trying to do.”