Three Passports to Trouble

by Sean McLachlan

  “Hmmm,” was all she said. She had made it clear what she thought about my “other obligations”. She had been a card-carrying Party member all through the war, and an important fighter in the Resistance. She was out of it now, though. These days all she wanted to do was run her cafe and live in peace.

  She probably shouldn’t have been stepping out with me then.

  “The thing is, I’m worried this is all going to escalate,” I went on. “García and his buddies were screaming their heads off at the Cafe Central crowd.”

  “They always do that.”

  “It was worse this time. Escalated quicker. Chason saved the day, of all people. I’m worried some anarchist is going to act before he thinks. You know how they are.”

  “Try and talk with them,” she said, her tone hinting at how successful she thought I’d be.

  “I’d love to, but I don’t have a connection. You don’t happen to have one, do you?”

  She let out a merry laugh. My heart melted. It does that a lot around her.

  “I know just the man.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, he’s an American metals distributor.”

  “And he knows the anarchists?”

  “There’s a machine shop outside the city that’s a CNT collective. He supplies them with metal. He’s the biggest supplier in the International Zone. Quite wealthy.”

  “And how do you know him?” I asked. Rich guys were always trying to pick her up. Me, there were times when I didn’t have two dimes to rub together. Most of the time I made out all right, but I couldn’t give Melanie all the things she deserved.

  “Oh, he comes here to the cafe sometimes. You’ve seen him. Loud, like all you Americans, and he’s always cutting out articles from the International Herald Tribune.”

  “Not Cantaloupe Head?” The guy had some sort of skin condition that left his scalp bald and pockmarked. The rest of him didn’t look much better. My jealousy vanished quicker than a Spanish waiter when you want to make an order.

  “He’s really quite charming, and he loves my cafe.”

  “Is that all he loves?”

  Melanie put one graceful fingertip on the end of my nose.

  “Silly boy. I will call him. We can meet here. It is more private than the Petit Socco.”

  “All right. I gotta go, baby. I have a meeting with someone.”

  Melanie arched an eyebrow. “When you say ‘someone’, I know you are on Party business.”

  “Yep. Want to help, comrade?”

  “You know I am finished with that,” she said, and kissed me. “You should be finished with that too.”

  “No rest for the righteous,” I said, getting up.

  No safety, either.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  All I knew about the forger I needed to hire was that he was a German printer named Einhardt Ritter. Had a print shop in Tangerville. My contact said he was damn good at what he did and was the epitome of discretion. Through him, Einhardt and I had agreed to meet at the Cafe Mirador. Located on Boulevard Pasteur just past the Place de France, loungers on the patio looked past the traffic and out across a promenade featuring a row of old Colonial cannons. These stood atop a grassy slope that offered a broad view of the port and the Strait of Gibraltar. Freighters were passing through the Strait, and the hazy dark line beyond them was Spain.

  From Tangier you could always see Spain on a clear day, but no matter how many times I saw it, the sight gave me a funny feeling inside. For two years I’d lived some of the best and worst times of my life in that country. I had left the coal mines of Pennsylvania behind, giving up union organizing for more immediate action against capitalism. In Spain I had found true comrades, lost some, and lost a lot of innocence I didn’t know I had. Now the revolution had failed, Franco was in charge, and I would probably never set foot in Spain again.

  I forced myself to stop looking at the view and leaned against one of the old bronze cannons to light a cigarette. I studied the Cafe Mirador through the rush of traffic and pedestrians. The crowd was the usual mingling of foreigners and Moors of the wealthier type, attracted by the view and indifferent to the more expensive price tag on the tea.

  There he was—a short, healthy-looking German in his thirties with a bullet head, a blond crew cut, and a refined air. He sipped his tea and gazed dreamily across the Strait. Remembering Spain too? More than a few Krauts fought in the war, socialists who volunteered for the Republic and fascists getting some early field training before the Big One started.

  I waited for the traffic cop to blare his whistle and for the cars to come to a halt before joining the flow of people crossing to the other side of the street. I was in luck. A table right next to him was available.

  As I sat down, I noticed how short he was, maybe an inch or two taller than me but not more than that. A folded up copy of the Tangier Gazette lay on his table next to his beer.

  “Can I look at your paper?” I asked. “I like to keep up on the news.”

  That was my code phrase, and he responded with the correct one.

  “Not much in it, I’m afraid. The real news never makes the papers.”

  He said this profound truth in clipped, heavily accented English. I took the paper and skimmed the text. Einhardt Ritter sipped his beer and bided his time.

  “Excuse me, I think I recognize you,” I said. “Don’t you own that print shop not far from here? You made my business cards.”

  “That’s right,” he said with a nod.

  “Well, I need some more made up. Are you heading there now?”

  “Right after my drink.”

  So we chitchatted about nothing in particular until we both had finished our drinks, giving the eavesdroppers around us nothing worthwhile to learn.

  “I think it’s time to go,” he said at last, checking his watch.

  I froze. His watch had a little logo on the face, a palm tree with a swastika on the trunk.

  That was the watch they gave officers in the Afrika Korps.

  “It’s time I got back to work,” he said after I didn’t reply. “Shall we go?”

  I ground my teeth and nodded.

  We headed downtown. Neither of us said anything.

  His shop was a large storefront just off the Boulevard Pasteur. A couple of German men about his age were busy at a linotype machine. The heat and stink of the metal made the interior of the shop oppressive.

  “I apologize for the heat, but the hot lead makes it that way,” Einhardt said.

  “I know a little about hot lead.”

  He grinned and slapped me on the back. Actually slapped me on the back like I was an old chum. I felt like belting him one.

  Einhardt led me through the shop front, past rows of type and stacks of posters and leaflets, to a tidy office in the back, all but encased in bookshelves and file cabinets. He shut the door.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “No thanks.”

  He extended a hand. I forced myself to take it.

  “I’m honored to meet a fellow tanker,” he said.

  “So you looked me up, did you?”

  He bowed, and then sat behind the desk. I took a wicker chair in front of it.

  “Of course I need to know with whom I am working. A man of honor. Oh, you fought on the wrong side in two wars, but you had your principles and you stuck to them.”

  “Just like you stuck to yours,” I replied dryly.

  “I was a tanker in the Afrika Korps. A fine army, a credit to Germany.”

  When I didn’t reply he studied me. I realized I was lousing this up. I didn’t have any other connections for a forger this good, and here I was bringing up the past before we had even got started on negotiations.

  Actually it was him more than me. Was this some sort of test?

  He smiled again and said, “Well, that’s all the in the past.”

  No it ain’t, Mac, I thought. Out loud I said, “Our mutual friend says you’re good at what you do.”

  Einha
rdt gave a humble nod. “What exactly do you require?”

  “Two Spanish passports.”

  “That will be 1,500 francs for each of them, or their equivalent in pounds or dollars. I do not take pesetas, not with the current price fluctuations.”

  “Pretty steep. Can I see some samples?”

  He showed me a couple of Spanish passports. I couldn’t tell if they were the real thing or not. Looked good, though.

  But I couldn’t be sure, of the passports or of him. I’m not an expert on forged papers, and the usual Party member who handled that kind of thing got grabbed in Rome during a police sweep the month before. The operatives were already here on their last fake set and they couldn’t use the same ones to cross zones without advertising their movements. They needed new passports or the whole show was off.

  So it was Einhardt Ritter or nothing.

  I’d have preferred nothing. Not that I had anything against Krauts like a lot of people did in those days. I had known good Germans. Many were now buried on Spanish soil, but this guy had fought for Hitler. Hell, he still wore the watch. I wondered why he was living here.

  “Why are you living here?”

  Hey, the best way to find something out is to ask, right?

  The German sighed. “I am from Leipzig.”

  That was all he needed to say. Leipzig was in the Soviet zone. Anyone who could get out, got out.

  Oh, you’re surprised I don’t think the Soviet zone is some sort of workers’ paradise? Let me tell you, I don’t give a damn about Stalin or the whole Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That revolution failed even worse than the Spanish one. At least we went down because of external enemies (and some pretty poor organization). The Bolsheviks stabbed their own revolution in the back, becoming a worse dictatorship than what capitalism offered.

  But I wondered if that was the only reason he fled. A lot of war criminals were still at large. The Afrika Korps veterans always boasted how theirs was the only German army that had never been accused of war crimes, I guess because in North Africa they couldn’t find enough Jews, Slavs, socialists, and queers to make a decent-sized concentration camp. But I didn’t buy their line about being pure, noble warriors fighting for their country. If your country has someone like Hitler in charge, then it’s not your country anymore, at least not if you want to be counted among the decent people.

  I’d have to do some digging on this guy.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time. Not only was this murder staring me in the face, but my two operatives needed to get to the Spanish Zone pronto. They had some business down there. It wasn’t in my job description to know what that business was, but they needed to get there in the next few days or they would have failed in their mission.

  So I had to make a snap decision about whether or not to trust a man with a swastika on his wristwatch.

  We started going over the details of the deal—how much up front, when he could deliver, etc. It all seemed pretty shipshape, and my contact had insisted Einhardt was on the level. In fact, he had insisted my ear off. Must have anticipated my reaction when I learned about this Kraut’s war record.

  Still, it sat wrong. As we hammered out a deal, me still pretending I was on board with all this, my mind raced to figure out another way to get the operatives into Spanish Morocco. Sneak them through the countryside? Risky. The Moors did it all the time, but Moors don’t attract attention in Morocco. Foreigners do. Besides, I didn’t know a reliable people smuggler and I didn’t have time to sniff one out.

  Try another forger? There was that guy up near Cape Spartel. I’d heard good things about his work but I didn’t have an introduction to him. It’s not like I could just waltz into his farm (a cover for the printing equipment hidden in the barn) and ask for two fake Spanish passports. Not with my associations to Gerald. He’d think it was a sting. It was only me and Einhardt’s mutual acquaintance that got the Kraut to agree to help in the first place, and I can tell you, that introduction hadn’t come cheap.

  The real problem was that Einhardt knew enough about my past to know that I had fought for the Republic. Knowing that, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why I wanted two forged Spanish passports, neither for myself.

  “Why are you willing to help me?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Money, why else?”

  When he saw the doubtful look on my face he laughed. “Come now, let’s speak one soldier to another. I’ve heard you were a tanker, is that so?”

  “Yeah, I was a gunner in a T-26 in Spain and a Firefly in the Royal Tank Corps during the Big One.”

  He tilted his head. “A volunteer for another nation’s civil war, and then a volunteer for another nation’s army? You are a man of principle, Mr. MacAllister. I am a man of principle too. I was never a member of the Nazi Party. A bunch of sycophants, opportunists, and profiteers. I am sure your Republic had them too.”

  “We did.”

  He sat a little more erect. “I fought for Germany because I loved my country, and hated how it had been ground down by the Treaty of Versailles. And I will not lie, I fought because I wanted to defeat Bolshevism. I and many others saw the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to European civilization since the Ottomans besieged Vienna.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me.”

  “Ah yes, Stalin ruined your revolution, didn’t he? And Hitler ruined the great German reawakening. We were foolish young men who believed too easily in the glib words of politicians. But now we are older, and a bit more wise. We have become pragmatic. Let me blunt with you, Mr. MacAllister. You do not trust me, even though we are fellow tankers. Yes, I drove a Panzer IV all through North Africa. You do not trust me, I say, and I understand this. But my business, indeed my freedom, relies on me performing my work to the utmost satisfaction. If I do not give you two excellent Spanish passports, you have several effective means at your disposal to ruin my professional reputation. Is that not so?”

  “Yeah, I could make life pretty hard for you,” I conceded.

  If those two operatives got caught, life would be even harder for them, not to mention shorter.

  The German slapped his desk.

  “So there we have it. We are in a different time and place, my fellow tanker. We can talk as two men of business.”

  During all this my mind had been searching for an angle, a way I could get out of this, but the clock was ticking and if I didn’t get those passports, the mission was as good as over. I needed this guy, damn it.

  “When can you have the passports?”

  “When can you have the two gentlemen come in to have their photos taken?”

  “That’s already been done. I’ll give you the pictures and the information I want on the documents tonight. When could you have them done?”

  “Two day’s time. Do we have a deal?”

  He extended a hand. Reluctantly, I took it.

  “We have a deal,” I said, feeling the acid rise in my throat.

  “Excellent,” he said, opening a desk drawer. For a second my hand moved toward the .38 I kept in a shoulder holster beneath my jacket, but stopped when I saw him pull out a bottle of schnapps.

  “Shall we drink to our new business venture?”

  “Um…”

  He waggled the bottle. “I am very interested to hear of your experiences. You mentioned you rode in a T-26. In North Africa we never saw that model. The boys on the Eastern Front saw some. Effective enough against our lighter tanks but no match for a Panzer IV. The Ivans figured that out soon enough and brought out the T-34. I would have to say that besides the Tiger, that was the best tank of the war, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Better than the Tiger. Cheaper to produce and easier to maintain.”

  “Ah, you are correct on both points,” he said, pouring two glasses. “But I still maintain the Tiger was better, because it was a new stage in heavy tank. If you look at the latest generation of tanks being made in the West these days, you will see many inspirations taken from the
Tiger. It was a tank that made history.”

  Yeah, and you were on the wrong side of it.

  I glanced at the glasses. “Look, thanks for the offer, but I gotta go.”

  “Oh, just have one,” he said, pushing the glass over to my side of the desk. “I am curious about the T-26. It had quite a large turret for its size. How was the loading and aiming?”

  I stood. “Actually I got a pressing engagement. I’ll drop off that information and the down payment tonight in an envelope. Can your men be trusted?”

  He got businesslike again. I preferred him that way. “Completely. Are you sure you can’t stay for a drink?”

  “Gotta go. Bye.”

  His smile never faltered. “Some other time, then. There are more than a few veterans in Tangier, but I have not met any other tankers. It will be good to talk with someone who understands.”

  I walked out the door. If the situation demanded, I could do business with a veteran of Hitler’s army, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to drink with him.

  And what was that show of being all buddy buddy? Did that guy really expect me to shoot the breeze about tanks all afternoon?

  I had a really bad feeling about this.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cantaloupe Head appeared at the appointed time the next day. His real name was Edward Humboldt, but I’m going to call him Cantaloupe Head because he thinks he’s got a chance with Melanie. Does that make me petty? Yeah, probably, but you go out with a dish like Melanie and see how possessive you get.

  The cantaloupe in question strolled into the shaded courtyard at precisely 10:30 a.m., just as he said he would. He was a rotund man of average height, wearing an expensive summer suit and protecting his head from the harsh sun with a straw hat. A folded copy of the International Herald Tribune stuck out of his pocket. He touched the brim of his hat in the direction of a table of three gals sitting near the entrance, and made his way over to where Melanie and I were sitting.