The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

  “So you’re prepared to accept the possibility that Samuel Johnson might have been killed by one of the brigadistas?”

  “I guess so.”

  Paco turned back to Felipe.

  “What about the brigadistas who don’t have alibis?”

  Felipe again consulted the notes which he’d written out in his large, childish handwriting.

  “There are only a few of them. James Clay, the political commissar, says he was working late in the office and ...”

  “You can’t possibly suspect Jimmy,” Dolores interrupted. “I don’t particularly like the guy myself, but it’s beyond question that he’s a ...” She caught the warning look in Paco’s eye, and shook her head in exasperation. “There I go again,” she said. “Sorry!”

  “The second is the very big man with the tattoos – Donaldson,” Felipe continued.

  “Ted used to be a shop steward for the New Jersey Longshoreman's Union. Most of them have got tattoos,” Dolores supplied, as if she imagined that, as far as the two detectives from Madrid were concerned, having tattoos automatically made him a suspect.

  “Donaldson? He’s the one who hates Jews, isn’t he?” Paco asked.

  “What makes you say an awful thing like that about him?” Dolores wondered.

  “You were at the meeting in the town hall ...” Paco began.

  But she hadn’t been. Cindy – Cindy again! – had seen to that.

  For Dolores’ benefit, he quickly sketched out the heated exchange which had passed between Donaldson and the small Jewish man in the council chamber.

  “OK, there’s always been an anti-Semitic vein running through the stevedores, and maybe Ted Donaldson’s still infected by it, just a tad,” Dolores admitted reluctantly. “But he’s been in the Party long enough now for it not to have an effect on his actions.”

  However much she professed her willingness to be objective about the case, she couldn’t help leaping to the defense of her comrades, Paco thought. Cindy would never have ...

  He’d been able to keep thoughts of Cindy out of his mind for nearly half an hour, but suddenly she was filling it again. The last words they had spoken to one another had been cold – almost acrimonious. Now she was in a coma, and she probably couldn’t even hear him if he were to tell her how much he loved her – how much she had become the cornerstone of his life.

  “Jefe?” Felipe said.

  And Paco realized from the anxiety in his partner’s voice that he must have been wrapped up in his own misery for quite some time.

  “If Donaldson doesn’t have an alibi, where does he say he was?” he asked, trying to sound business-like.

  “He claims to have gotten drunk much earlier than everybody else, and some of the other brigadistas’ statements confirm that. According to two or three of them, he was almost legless by nine o’clock.”

  “So he left the fiestas?”

  “That’s right. He claims he went for a walk to clear his head. The next thing he remembers, he was lying on the ground near the edge of town. He heard the church clock strike, and realized it was three o’clock in the morning. He didn’t know anything about Samuel Johnson’s murder until he got back to the barracks.”

  Did racism know any limits? Paco wondered. How easy was it for a man who hated the Jews to also hate the Negroes? And how would a white man who had gotten used to being a leader of men himself feel about a black man who seemed to have even greater power to attract followers?

  “Who’s next?” he asked Felipe.

  “The man that Donaldson had the argument with in the council chamber – Emmanuel Lowenstein – also can’t account for his movements.”

  Dolores opened her mouth as if she were about to say something, then bit hack the words.

  “You were about to tell us that Lowenstein couldn’t have killed Sam Johnson because he’s such a good communist?” Paco guessed.

  “Mannie Lowenstein ended up in hospital three times as a result of getting beaten up for union activities,” Dolores said carefully. “But I accept that that doesn’t rule him out as your murderer.”

  You might say it, Paco thought – but you don’t believe it.

  “Why wasn’t Lowenstein with the others?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t say in his statement. Just claims that he stayed in the brigadistas’ barracks.”

  “Is it just a co-incidence that two of the men without alibis were also the two men involved in the argument in the council chamber?” Paco wondered. “Or do you think there was an element of play-acting in it?”

  “What do you mean, jefe?” Felipe asked.

  “Say Donaldson did kill Johnson. He doesn’t have an alibi, so he goes for the next-best thing – which is to try and establish firmly in our minds that he’s unlikely to be the murderer because he’s on the side of the Negroes.”

  “And Lowenstein?”

  “If Lowenstein killed Johnson, then what he wants to do is to present us with another suspect. So by suggesting that Donaldson is a racist as far as the Jews go, he’s also opening up the possibility that Donaldson could hate blacks, too.”

  “That’s a bit deep for me,” Felipe confessed.

  “It’s also very far-fetched,” Dolores McBride said, unable to restrain herself any longer. “Killers simply don’t think like that.”

  “Don’t they?” Paco asked. “Well, obviously you’ve had more experience than I have, but ...”

  “There I go again,” Dolores interrupted. “Sorry.” “There is one more brigadista without an alibi,” Felipe said.

  “Who?”

  “Greg Cummings. He says that he stayed in the barracks during the fiestas, too. But he doesn’t mention seeing Lowenstein – and Lowenstein doesn’t mention seeming him.”

  Paco looked quizzically across at Dolores McBride. “Liberals!” she said contemptuously.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The one thing that the liberals share with us communists is the belief that they always know what’s best.”

  “But they’re wrong about that – and you’re right?” Paco asked, a small smile playing in the corners of his mouth.

  “Absolutely,” Dolores McBride agreed. “We do know what’s best, because we’re scientific, and we only deal with the broad sweep of history – with unstoppable trends and historical inevitability. They, on the other hand, think that they know what’s best for individuals – whether the individual in question happens to agree with them or not.”

  “Is all that just a long-winded way of saying that Cummings does, in fact, have a solid alibi, but he prefers not to produce it because he thinks it will harm someone else?”

  “Spot on, Señor Detective. At the time poor Sam got himself shot, Greg and I were at my house – making the beast with two backs. See, that’s another thing about liberals – they’re not very perceptive. Greg probably imagines he’s protecting my reputation – as if anybody who really knows me thinks I give a shit about that. Hell, I don’t mind a guy who’s slept with me talking to his buddies about how good I am in the sack. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just free advertising.”

  “How long was he with you?” Paco asked.

  “We started humping at about eleven o’clock, took a well-deserved break, had a second bout, and were still at it when we heard all the furor that followed the discovery of Sam’s body.”

  “You didn’t go to sleep between your ... er ... sessions,” Paco asked. “There wasn’t any possibility that Cummings could have slipped out and killed Johnson without you knowing about it?”

  “No,” Dolores said, stony-faced.

  “Are you sure?” Paco persisted. “Sometimes, after having sex, we fall asleep without even knowing it.”

  “I didn’t fall asleep!”

  “Given where this house, is and where the church is, he wouldn’t have had to be gone for long.”

  Dolores looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Jeez, this is becoming embarrassing,” she said.

&nb
sp; “What is?”

  “I know I didn’t fall asleep, because after we’d done it the first time, we got into this big argument about politics, and I can remember every word we said.” She smiled awkwardly. “Yeah, I know, screwing and politics aren’t natural bedfellows, but that’s what happened. And we ended up getting so furious that before we knew what was going on, we were off jumping on each other’s bones again.”

  Paco remembered arguments with Cindy ... oh God, Cindy ... which had ended up with a passionate reconciliation in the bedroom.

  But that was entirely different, wasn’t it? And what made it different? The fact that he loved Cindy, and Cindy loved him!

  Yet did he know for certain that Cummings hadn’t fallen in love with Dolores? Could he even say for sure that despite her hard outer shell, Dolores hadn’t even fallen a little bit in love with Cummings?

  “Anybody else on your list?” he asked Felipe.

  “No, that’s the lot,” Felipe said. “But as you pointed out earlier, jefe, not being on the list is no more of a guarantee of innocence than being on it is a guarantee of guilt.”

  “True,” Paco agreed. “But we have to start somewhere – and the men who are on the list are as good a place as any.”

  “Or you could start by seeing if there were any strangers in the town that night,” Dolores suggested hopefully.

  But the theory that Johnson had been killed by an outsider – always tenuous at best – simply didn’t really hold water any more, Paco told himself. Because not only did the killer have to have been in San Antonio on the night Samuel Johnson was killed, he’d also had to have been there no more than a couple of hours earlier.

  How else would he have perceived Cindy as a threat?

  How else could he have followed her up an alley and brutally smashed in her skull?

  “We start by questioning the brigadistas who don’t have alibis,” Paco said firmly, looking Dolores McBride right in the eye.

  The journalist shrugged.

  “Whatever you say,” she agreed. “After all, you are the jefe, aren’t you, Jefe?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There were four of them in the room in the town hall which the political commissar used as his office. James Clay himself was sitting behind his big desk. The other three – the two policemen from Madrid and the Moscow News’ Spanish correspondent – sat facing him.

  The political commissar had begun to speak even before they had settled into their chairs. His voice was as flat and dull as if he were reading from a telephone directory, his hands stayed determinedly still on the desk – as though afraid to betray him with gestures – and his hooded eyes gave away nothing. He spoke for perhaps a minute and a half, then stopped abruptly and signaled with a brief nod that Dolores should translate his words into Spanish.

  “The gist of all that speechifying is that he wants you to know he regrets what has happened to Cindy,” the journalist said.

  “He does, does he? Then why didn’t I even hear him use her name once,” Paco asked.

  “That’s because he didn’t use it. What he actually said, if I’m being strictly accurate, is that he regrets what happened to your translator.”

  My translator! Paco thought bitterly.

  They had been in San Antonio for less than two days, but surely most people had realized, even in that short time, that Cindy was much more than a translator to him. Certainly, the political commissar – a man who should have had his finger on the pulse of the place – ought to have known it. And he probably did, Paco admitted to himself. He probably did, but was just too rigid and formal to acknowledge the fact. God, the man was a cold fish.

  Clay spoke again.

  “He says that he hopes I will turn out to be an adequate substitute for her,” Dolores said.

  She should be more than an adequate substitute from Clay’s point of view, Paco thought – because she was one of his own, a disciplined, card-carrying communist.

  From the change in Clay’s voice, it was probable that he was no longer expressing his stilted condolences, but instead was asking a question. Dolores listened, hesitated for a second, then produced a slow, careful answer. Clay countered with a second question, and – without waiting for a response to it – added a third. He seemed to be growing angrier and angrier. Dolores McBride waited until she was sure he'd finished, and when she spoke again there was an uncharacteristically conciliatory edge to her words. Finally, when they both seemed to have said all they wanted to, Dolores turned to Paco.

  “He wonders why you’re here,” she explained. “He had assumed that once you’d taken the statements from his brigadistas, the investigation would be over as far as they were concerned.”

  “And you told him that it wasn’t?”

  “What I actually said was that it wasn’t quite as simple as that. He demanded to know why not. I told him that though the statements did, in fact, rule most of the men out of the investigation – sorry to stretch the truth a little there – there were still question marks hanging over a few of them. It was when I said that he was one of those men himself that he started to get really pissed off.”

  “So is he willing to answer my questions or not?”

  “Willing isn’t exactly the word I’d have chosen, but I pointed out that if he didn’t co-operate with you, you’d complain to brigade headquarters in Albacete about it, and he’d soon be snowed under with the paperwork that would generate. So let’s just say he’ll answer the questions, but I’d be surprised if he’s very gracious about it. What exactly do you want to know?”

  “Ask him about his background,” Paco said.

  “If you need those kinds of details, you only have to talk to me. They’re all in the notes for my book.”

  “I want to hear it from him.”

  “You won’t understand a word he’s saying.”

  “That’s true,” Paco agreed, “but at least I’ll be able to see the way he tells it. Don’t translate that last part, by the way.”

  Dolores grinned.

  “I won’t. I’m not an idiot.”

  Clay spoke in the same flat, lifeless tone as he had before.

  “He says his father was one of the bloated American capitalists ...” Dolores began.

  “Forget all that rhetorical crap and just stick to the basic facts,” Paco interrupted.

  “He had what you might call a privileged childhood – private schools, his own horse, an automobile as soon as he was old enough to drive. He went to Harvard Business School, and planned to join the family firm. Then the Wall Street Crash came along – and there was no family firm left to join. It was when he saw the lines outside the soup kitchens that he began to understand that capitalism wasn’t just wrong – it was inefficient. Any system which failed to use the talents of the masses wasn’t functioning properly. That’s when he joined the Party.”

  “Ask him what he would have been doing now if Wall Street hadn’t crashed,” Paco said.

  “That’s a little below the belt, isn’t it?” Dolores said, sounding a little concerned.

  “Ask him anyway,” Paco insisted.

  A slight smile came to Clay’s lips as he listened to Dolores’ words. It was the first indication Paco had seen that the political commissar had any sense of humor – and even then it was a humor based on irony rather than amusement.

  “He says the question is irrelevant,” Dolores told Paco. “Capitalism was a sick beast, full of inherent flaws – even without the Crash it could not have gone on as it was for very much longer.”

  “But what if it had survived for another few years?” Clay’s ironic smile widened.

  “He says that if that had been the case, then at this moment he would probably have been standing on the deck of his private yacht, sipping champagne and watching the sun set over the Hamptons. But that wouldn’t have been his fault. He simply wouldn’t have known any better. No man can really see things as they truly are until he’s been swept up into the relentless march of history.”<
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  “Ask him if there’s any way he can prove to us that he didn’t kill Samuel Johnson.”

  The question was relayed, and Clay shook his head.

  “He can’t prove he didn’t kill Sam, but why would he have?” Dolores translated.

  Why indeed? Paco wondered. Why should any man want to end the life of another? Yet they often did.

  “That's enough for the moment,” Paco said. “Please thank Señor Clay for his time.”

  Instead of merely nodding an acknowledgement, Clay launched into another short speech.

  “He says that you may have finished with him, but he certainly hasn’t finished with you,” Dolores McBride translated, when the political commissar had fallen silent again.

  “What more does he want to say?”

  “He understands that you have been questioning some of the local people about the murder.”

  “He understands correctly.”

  “He wants you to appreciate the fact that to accuse one of them of killing Sam would be just as bad for Spain, and for your cause, as if you had accused one of the brigadistas.”

  “And why might that be?”

  “To accuse a brigadista of the murder would be to split the brigade between the majority who wished to see him punished, and the few who sought to find excuses for him. Even if only one or two men took the killer’s side, it would seriously damage morale.”

  “And if the killer turned out to be a Spaniard?”

  “To accuse a Spaniard from this side of the front line would be to alienate the brigade from the very people it is here to protect.”

  “Does Mr. Clay actually want Samuel Johnson’s murderer found?” Paco demanded.

  “Yes – but only if he is an acceptable murderer – an enemy soldier or well-known fascist sympathizer. Otherwise, it would be better for the general good if the killer remained free.”

  “Does he realize that whoever killed Johnson probably also attacked Cindy – and that she may die?”