Operation Stranglehold

by Dan J. Marlowe

  We rejoined the others in the now-sweltering passenger car. The train proceeded more slowly, pulling off on a siding once to let a freight pass. Even when we joined a two-track system, our train dawdled behind another I could see occasionally on a curve ahead of us. I began to worry about making the connection for the train to Madrid.

  Passengers were collecting packages and bundles when the conductor came through the car with an announcement. I looked at Walter questioningly, and he nodded with a smile, making a circle of his thumb and forefinger. Hazel was smiling, too. I wondered what the good news was.

  The train came to a grinding, jolting halt at the Quebarro station. Half the passengers were already standing in the aisles. They were joined at once by the other half, and a shoving match like a rugby scrummage ensued. We joined the jam of humanity. I heard a muffled sound from Hazel, and then she sank a doubled up elbow into the gut of the traveling-salesman type. The man grunted painfully as he doubled over.

  “A pinch is a pinch, but that bastard damn near reached the bone!” she whispered to me indignantly as we hit the platform.

  “What did the conductor say?”

  “The Madrid train’s leaving right away.”

  We joined the rush of passengers squirting out onto the platform around us as though informed a bomb was aboard. I tried to keep the hurrying Walter and Lisa in sight. An occasional shiny-helmeted policeman standing to one side of the flow of foot traffic kept me uneasy.

  We sidestepped a baggage-laden porter and speeded up until we caught up with Walter and Lisa. Directly ahead of us were two-blue-uniformed men with brass-buttoned tunics. They beckoned to us as I instinctively slowed down.

  “Railroad men,” Walter muttered. “They want us to hurry.”

  We brushed past the train guards and trotted alongside a line of cars more American in appearance than the short, boxy cars on our first train. These were typically European, though, in that individual doors in the sides opened directly into compartments. There were few doors left open, and railroad employees were shouting, waving their arms, and blowing on shrill, piping whistles.

  Walter reached for an open door at the same time a train guard grabbed Lisa’s arm. “Por donde?” the man asked.

  Walter swung around in time to keep me from reacting. “Madthrid,” he answered, with a slight slurring sound I’d noticed he used only when speaking Spanish.

  “Este coche por Barcelona!” the trainman blared. He pointed toward the front of the train. “Siguiente coche!”

  This time we ran. Whistles were sounding everywhere. Couplers clanked as the train’s engine surged forward. Walter boosted Lisa through an open door; I wasn’t sure if it was the right car or not. He swung aboard himself. I steadied Hazel while she stepped as high as when she was mounting a horse. I scrambled aboard myself, banging a shoulder on the compartment door.

  We’d made it.

  The long seats facing each other in the narrow section could accommodate six people, eight with a little crowding, but for the moment we were alone. “What’ll you bet the fuzz will be aboard checking papers at the first stop?” I said. “It was blind luck the connection was so close they couldn’t check anyone out while boarding the train.”

  “There’s only one stop between here and Madrid,” Walter replied. “It’s at a junction point called Almador.”

  I was about to remark that it takes only one pinprick to burst a balloon, but I clammed up. Hazel nudged me. A man and woman were peering through the window of the door that opened onto a passageway that ran the length of the car. They saw the empty seats, and they came inside. The couple and Walter and Hazel exchanged courteous-sounding greetings while Lisa and I smiled and nodded. After that our group perforce remained silent.

  We rode for an hour before the train slowed suddenly. I looked out the window from under the brim of my hat. We were passing a military installation of some sort. Barracks, a motor pool, and squads of men casting long shadows in the late afternoon sunshine where they were formed up on a parade ground weren’t conducive to peace of mind. Police and military were so interchangeable in Spain as to be almost the same unit.

  We came into a station and stopped, and the same bustle took place that we’d seen at Quebarro. “Almador,” Walter said under his breath. I watched two young soldiers with carbines slung across their backs appear in the passageway outside our compartment and then move ahead into the baggage cars between us and the engine. If a similar pair had boarded the rear of the train and the pairs worked toward each other, checking papers, we were going to be squeezed like a lime into a ron Collins.

  The extra couple in the compartment had disembarked at Almador. The train had no sooner started up than our compartment was visited by the conductor and an assistant. Walter again handled the conversation and the exchange of money for tickets. The best thing he and I had going for us was the presence of Hazel and Lisa. The trainmen never looked at us as they ogled the girls, and the assistant conductor counted change three times with his eyes on Hazel before he handed it to Walter.

  “Let’s take a walk and see if there are more soldiers at the rear of the train,” I said to Hazel.

  Sure enough, we found another brace two cars from the end. They were older, and one had a sweeping mustache. Hazel spoke to both of them while I stared out a window, thankful for once for my permanent wooden-Indian expression. I didn’t like the look of this at all.

  Mustache chattered volubly to Hazel, grinning widely. His companion’s contribution to the conversation was more brief. “What’s the word?” I asked Hazel when she indicated we were to go back the way we’d come.

  “The one with the mustache had some complimentary things to say about my boobs,” she answered with a smile. “But the second had bad news. There’s a military inspector in the cars behind who’s working his way through the train. We could go past this pair, but we couldn’t get out again without being checked.”

  “Just what I was afraid of,” I said. “Damn good thing the inspector started from the rear of the train and not the front. Any indication if they’re looking for anything special?”

  “I think the word the soldier used means either fugitives or deserters. My vocabulary’s not that good.”

  We reentered our compartment and sat down. Walter looked at me inquiringly, and I shook my head negatively. “Any idea how long it will take us to reach Madrid?” I asked him.

  “About thirty-five minutes,” he answered.

  I’d been toying with the possibility that we might reach the Madrid central station before the inspector completed his rounds. Then I realized it would make no sense from the military’s point of view to let a quarter of the train depart unchecked. Upon arrival in Madrid unchecked passengers would almost surely be detained until they’d been screened. Our arrival at the central station unchecked would be no solution.

  Then I saw we weren’t going to make it anyway. The mustachioed soldier and his companion entered the car next to ours, followed by an officious-looking officer with silver epaulets on the shoulder-boards of his uniform. The group was moving faster than before. I was so intent on watching their progress through the next car that I jumped when Walter put his hand on my arm. He nodded out the window at a spread of railroad tracks widening out in all directions. “The Madrid marshaling yards,” he said.

  The train started to slow down, and I made up my mind.

  “Hazel, you and Lisa give me all the underwear you can peel off from under those horse-blanket skirts,” I said. “And give me the cigarette lighter from your bag.”

  For the next couple of minutes the girls resembled contortionists as they snapped shoulder straps and wriggled out of slips and panties. I kept one eye on the approaching inspector, now too damn close for comfort. I made a loose bundle of the underwear, added the handkerchiefs in my pockets, and watched Walter do the same.

  I unscrewed the lighter’s retaining screw with my thumbnail and dumped the fluid over the bundled material. I lighted the lighter
immediately while it still retained enough juice in the wick. When it flared, I touched it to a wet spot on the bundle.

  It burned, but too damn well. The fluid burned fast, with a pure clean flame. I was afraid the fluid would burn out before the material itself caught fire, but a slip started smoldering and then there was a puff of smoke. In seconds there was a pronounced acrid smell and gray smoke billowing about the compartment.

  “Que pasa?” someone shouted from the compartment behind ours.

  At the same time a woman began to scream! “Fuego! Fuego! FUEGO!” she yelled, each a good two octaves higher than its predecessor.

  The entire car boiled into motion as passengers fled their compartments and jammed the passageway. I swung open our compartment’s outer door. In the twilight outside I could make out track after track running parallel over a vast open area broken up only by clusters of freight and passenger cars standing on sidings. Our speed had slowed to eight or ten miles an hour.

  “Jump!” I shouted to Walter above the din of the car. “If you fall, keep rolling!”

  He went out the open space in a standing leap. Lisa followed him, although her face was white. Hazel jumped, and I went out behind her. Only Lisa fell, but Walter picked her up and aided her across intervening tracks to a long line of boxcars near the edge of the yard. Lisa was rubbing a knee.

  I took Hazel’s arm and we set out after them. I turned to look at the train. People were jumping from other compartments now. The train was slowing noticeably, then jerked to a stop as someone must have pulled the emergency cord. The clusters of passengers alongside the train became more numerous. It would take the authorities a while to straighten out that mess, I thought with satisfaction.

  “Watch it!” Walter warned.

  A freight was coming from the opposite direction. We moved closer to the standing freight cars to use the oncoming train as a screen. When it moved past us, gaining speed, we ducked behind the freight cars, crawling under a coupling bar to reach the farther side. There was no chance now of our being seen by the passengers or train crew of the Madrid train.

  We’d escaped from the train which had so nearly become a trap.

  We were in Madrid, and I hoped it wasn’t out of the frying pan into the fire.

  Walter was trying to work the sliding door of a boxcar open. Riding freights had been a way of life with me during my teens, and strangely enough I felt at home in this marshaling yard. There’s something international about the layout of a rail yard that no longer made me feel like a stranger.

  “Knock it off,” I told Walter. “An empty is one of the first places a yard dick will check.” I was only repeating the maxim taught me by an old cowboy-turned-hobo one cold and rainy morning in the East St. Louis yards. “Unless there’s a waybill pasted on the side and a seal clamped on the door, the car’s marked as an empty, and it attracts every bindlestiff on the road. Switchmen and yard inspectors will shake it down automatically.”

  “We’ve got to find someplace where we can get out of sight,” Walter insisted. “We can’t trade on the confusion caused by stopping the train forever.”

  “I’ve got the place,” I said. I’d seen it while we were crossing the numerous sets of tracks. “We’re going to hide you and Lisa there while Hazel and I run an errand.”

  He looked at first as if he were going to object, but he checked it. “Where is this place?” he wanted to know.

  “Follow me.”

  I shepherded the group to the far end of the yard, some twenty feet below the adjacent street level where a well-traveled thoroughfare carried automobile and bus traffic. The freight cars were thicker in this corner, and nestled close to the bottom of the embankment at our level was a small building not much larger than a Kansas six-holer. It had a flat, sloping roof, a single small window, and a solid-looking hinged door with a huge padlock through its hasp. I had spotted it as a tool shed the second I saw it.

  We bunched together in front of the shack, and I had to raise my voice to be heard above the street noises flowing down from the highway. “No one’s going to come near this place until a work gang shows up in the morning,” I told Walter. “You’ll be safe here.”

  I found a fist-sized stone and poised it near the padlock. When a mufflerless truck thundered by above us, I whacked the face of the padlock with the stone while exerting pressure against the U-shaped locking bar. It’s harder to say than to do; just don’t hit your hand. The single impact sprang the locking mechanism. A cheap lock will succumb to such rough treatment almost every time.

  I opened the door, and warm, oily-flavored air flowed out. Inside the shed were flare pots, crowbars, picks, shovels, and a motorized hand truck with flanged wheels. I looked at it thoughtfully. It represented off-the-beaten-path transportation, but without knowing rail schedules it also represented a quick form of suicide.

  My heels crunched on the pebbled, oil-stained floor inside. Despite the jumble of material, Walter and Lisa would fit nicely, although not in luxury. “I’m going to lock you in,” I told Walter. “Just keep quiet if anyone comes along. If they check the padlock, they’ll find it secure. We’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “With us locked in, you’d better be,” he said.

  “You’ve got enough tools in here to break out of the Lubianka,” I returned. “If we’re not here by daylight, you’re on your own.”

  “But we’ll be back,” Hazel said.

  I knew she’d said it for Lisa’s benefit. The girl was looking bedraggled from her fall, tired, and woebegone. Since Walter had picked her up from the cinders, she hadn’t moved two inches from his side.

  We left the shed, and I inserted the padlock through the hasp again and snapped it shut. Lights were on in the light towers in the yard, but it wasn’t illuminated the way an American yard would have been. I helped Hazel up the embankment. I had to prop a finger-fanned hand against her yielding butt a couple of times to get her up the steep grade. It reminded me I hadn’t had too much of the F-factor in life recently. I’m always getting thoughts like that at the damndest times.

  There was no fence at the top of the embankment. On the street it was almost completely dark. A couple of blocks to our right was a major cross street where a multi-spanned bridge carried traffic over the yards toward the center of the city. I knew we were on the northeast side, and from the wheels-and-flaps-down configuration of a commercial jet passing overhead I figured we were within a few miles of Barajas International Airport.

  “Get us to the Croswell Industries’ branch office,” I told Hazel. We weren’t in the correct clothes now for cab-riding, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Three or four cabs passed us up, perhaps for that reason, but finally one stopped. We went around the traffic circle near the bridge. I hoped we could contact Sam Morgan before he left for the day. European office hours kept many businesses open till eight. A Citroen sedan was parked in the company lot at a space marked RESERVADO—SENOR MORGAN.

  The front door was unlocked. There was no one at the receptionist’s desk. Morgan was locking up his own desk when we walked in. His eyes bugged out. He kept watching the door behind us as if expecting the police to follow us inside. “The—the Guardia C-Civil have been here twice t-today looking for Walter,” he stuttered. “If—if he’s with you, don’t tell me. I don’t w-want to know.”

  “How do you know about Walter?” I asked.

  “I had a call from the American Embassy which was followed by a visit from their representative, a Mr. Wessels. He’s supposed to be third secretary, but it’s rather common knowledge that he’s the top CIA man in Madrid. And I’ve had two transoceanic telephone calls from corporate headquarters telling me I was to do nothing outside channels. Really—” he was almost pouting “—you must have done something dreadful to stir up all this activity.”

  “What did you tell the police, Sam?”

  “That I knew nothing.”

  He said it promptly, but I wondered. Sam Morgan had all the aspects
of a soloist in the canary bird choir.

  “They questioned Consuelo too,” he added. “I wasn’t permitted to be present, but she told me she didn’t mention your previous—ah—visit.”

  That I could more readily believe. Despite the rubber-ball roundnesses south of the plump girl’s spine, I felt she had more starch in it. “We need help, Sam,” I said tentatively. I knew what the answer was going to be. I just wanted to make him say it.

  He shook his head with the frightened stubbornness of a timid man. “My orders—” he quavered. He didn’t complete it.

  “What can have happened?” Hazel said to me.

  “Someone’s been monitoring the situation from the sidelines,” I answered. “The cat is out of the bag on Walter’s situation, and his old man and Winters don’t want to be put in the position of throwing their weight around to hold the lid on. They’re telling us to hang by our balls while they decide what to do.”

  “But doesn’t it rip off the whole project, Earl?”

  “I don’t see why. Winters’ political opposition has to be able to prove its case before they say anything, or old man Croswell will sue them for their drawers. Sure, the home office is running scared right now. They probably think it’s another Erikson fiasco. Well, you’d better believe I’m not going to let a hundred thousand go down the drain just because the easy way dried up suddenly. They bought a package from me, and I’m gonna deliver it to them.”

  Hazel was looking at me oddly. “A hundred thousand? Dollars? Is that why you’re here, Earl?” I could see her starting to steam. “Why didn’t I hear about this before?”

  “It must have slipped my mind.” I sought for something to distract her. “Don’t forget we’ve got a newspaper to deliver too.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve heard you speak favorably on that subject,” the redhead said coldly.

  “I decided it’d be easier to separate Siamese twins than those kids,” I said glibly. I looked at the twitching Morgan again. “Call Consuelo and get her back to the office,” I told him.