“That’s great, Bill. Anything I can do?”
I don’t know how I got to be friends with a junky. Usually I avoid them like the plague, but Bill had a gentleness about him, and a level of culture you don’t usually see in the drug set. I don’t know what set him down this road, but it must have been something pretty bad.
Bill gave a weak smile and took another sip of water. Suddenly he stared at the glass like it had just appeared in a puff of smoke in front of him. He drained the rest of it in three big gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down on his thin neck.
“Gotta clean the pipes, son.” Bill was younger than me by a good ten years, but he called everyone ‘son’. “The new evolution of man is to become amphibious. Wallow in the shallows of jism lakes and dive deep into the septic tanks of suburbia. We’ll crawl out of these stinky, sticky cesspools, come right out of the toilets and consume the land-dwellers asses first. Take over their toppling cities and turn them into orgies of onanistic land-sea hybrids, the next generation rising spontaneously from the puddles of their emissions.”
“Yes, I have heard everything,” the nun said, shoes squeaking as she went out the door. “I will check on the other patients while you speak to your friend.”
“It would be great if you made it, Bill. I know you’ve been struggling a long time. Anything I can do to help?”
Burroughs shook his head. “Nothing. It’s a fight between me and junk. No one can help with that.” He glanced at the door and gave me a schoolboy grin. “You think I got her goat? I’ve been trying to get a rise out of that little battleaxe for the past three days.”
“I don’t think anything can get a rise out of her. So what happened, Bill? You look like you’ve been taking a lot for a long time. Much more than usual.”
Bill shook his head, his knobby cheekbones casting shadows on his hollow cheeks.
“I was all right when Allen was here. You met him. Poet and publisher. Wants to get my stuff out in America. You remember how I fell for him a couple of visits ago? It was wonderful for a time, and then he just went cold on me. Last visit it was all business. When I tried to break the ice this time around, he pushes me away and shouts, ‘I don’t want your wrinkled old cock!’” He looked sadly out the barred window and moaned, “Old. And still trying to get my thing together.”
“Sorry to hear about that, Bill.” I tried to remember Allen. Some Jewish last name. Plump, four-eyed graduate school kid from the good side of town. Not Bill’s type at all.
“When he was here there was a lot of things to do—book stuff, and an article I’m writing for him, plus the social round that I’ll tolerate with a queasy stomach for the chance to be with him. I cut down. Hit a light dose when everybody went to bed, woke up not much later than they did. Nothing during the day but a few bowls of kif. I was fine. But when he left, brother, that little pucker kiss in my vein just opened up and started calling.”
“Stay here and do it this time, Bill.” He’d been through cures before. All kinds. Cold turkey, gradual reduction, treatment with various injections, hypnotism, something called orgone therapy…none of it had worked.
“I gotta,” he said, his face wrenching to the side, teeth gritted. He managed a smile and switched into B-movie cowboy speak. Just as he was starting, another pang hit him. “Ugh! Well, sarsaparilla, looks like I’m in for a long, hard ride, pardner.”
I glanced over my shoulder. We were still alone.
“Look, Bill, I’m on a case. You know anything about Felipe next door?”
Burroughs shook his head. “Some rich old Spaniard with his sphincter so tight it hasn’t let pass so much as a fart since 1939? Hell no, I avoid squares like that like I avoid the law. Closet cases like him give queers a bad name.”
“You queens think everyone is queer,” I said with a laugh.
“Only the queer ones. I never made a play for you, did I?”
“Good for you that you didn’t. What makes you think this guy is zigzag?”
Zigzag was the Arabic term for it. Think of the position of the bodies. The term was used as a form of address in certain alleys. A kind of greeting, confession, and business proposal all in one.
Burroughs jerked a thumb in his neighbor’s direction. “Had a visitor here last night. That window in the guard’s door can open up and visitors can speak to inmates through it while the guard makes sure nothing gets passed between them, at least not without the right price being paid. This visitor sounded like a young guy, and you should have heard that old Francoist fairy speaking to him all sweet and dainty.”
“Did you see them?”
“I didn’t get up.”
“Do you remember anything they said?”
“I barely had the strength to wet my bed last night, Shorty. I think the young guy spoke with a German accent. Hard to tell since he was speaking Spanish, but that’s the impression I got. If you want any more, you’ll have to come back when my body isn’t torturing me to death.”
“All right, all right. I gotta go. I’ll come back and visit, OK?”
Bill nodded, his face eager. “Yeah, Shorty. Come and visit. It gets dull as dishwater in this damn place. Nice to have a visit. Keeps my mind off things.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, feeling the damp of his sweat through the hospital clothes. “I’ll come back soon.”
I returned to Felipe’s room. A chair stood by the door and I sat down, fanning myself with my hat. Even in this stone and tile hospital it felt warm.
“Friend of mine,” I told the Spanish fascist, nodding in the direction of the next room. “Hooked on junk. Pity, he could be someone.”
“This is a decadent society,” Felipe said. “It needs to be cleansed.”
“Maybe so. I don’t like junkies myself. Can’t trust them. But Bill is a friend. He’s different. He’s got real potential. I’d do anything for a friend, wouldn’t you? Especially some younger guy down on his luck who’s stuck in some trouble.”
A faint smile passed along Felipe’s lips. “Yes.”
“The younger people these days didn’t have to go through war like we did. They don’t know what it’s like. War gives you a certain discipline, you know? Things are pretty clear. There’s the enemy. Shoot him before he shoots you. But younger folks these days, nothing is clear to them. They need guidance.”
Felipe’s smile broadened, his eyes seeing something other than the room. “That they do. It’s easy to get lost in this new world. Especially here. So many corrupting forces. You have to keep them clear of the drugs and the loose morals and the—”
“So how old is he?”
“Oh, just—” Felipe cut off and glared at me, knowing he had almost fallen into my trap.
I met that gaze, and saw a mixture of rage, defiance, and shame. I wasn’t sure which of those three emotions was strongest, but any one of them ran strong enough to keep his secret to his grave.
I had gotten all I would out of him.
“Take care, Señor Vilaró.”
I got up, put on my hat, and strolled out of the room.
As a detective you got to keep your eyes and ears open. Sometimes a clue or a new angle comes from the least likely source.
Like a strung out junky trying to take the cure.
I asked the nun to see the visitor’s log book for the prison wing. After much waving of arms in the air and calling back and forth to various offices, they finally let me see it.
Felipe Vilaró had not had any visitors since being incarcerated.
“You put every visitor in here?” I asked the nun.
The nun suddenly took on an uncanny resemblance to a star poker player. “The rules dictate that every visitor to the prison wing must sign in and show identification.”
“Did Felipe Vilaró have a visitor last night?”
“Visitors must sign the guest book, and look, there is no signature.”
I looked at her. She looked back at me. The clock on the wall ticked. This game of evasion could go on all n
ight. She would not directly lie to me but she would dodge around my question until I got sick of it and went for a drink.
Would she confess her little white lie this Sunday to the padre? Or did this count as part of her higher calling to protect Blessed Mother Church?
I studied her for a moment longer. No, she wouldn’t confess this, because putting me on the wrong track wasn’t a sin. She was protecting the righteous. She didn’t look like she felt guilty at all.
I left, more confused than when I had arrived.
CHAPTER SIX
Cantaloupe Head was good to his word, and got us an appointment to meet some of the guys from the anarchist workers’ collective.
I say “us” because Melanie insisted on coming along.
“What do you want to hang out with a bunch of Spanish metalworkers for?” I asked.
“They will be less hostile with me there.”
“What makes you figure that?”
“They will start boasting about how successful they are with a fully independent workers collective, and then you will object that such collectives could never work on a national basis without the Party to guide them, at which point they will denounce you for your counterrevolutionary centralizing tendencies, and you will tell them they ruined the Spanish revolution because they wouldn’t adhere to discipline, and they will say that the Republic fell because it didn’t embrace a full workers’ revolution, and you will object that you hate Stalin as much as anyone, to which they will say—”
“All right, all right. But how are you going to keep a communist and a bunch of anarchists from arguing politics?”
“They will be too busy staring at me to remember.”
“I stare at you all the time and still remember the Revolution.”
“That’s because you are obsessed.”
“With you and the Revolution, baby. You think they won’t be?”
“Let’s see.”
We drove in Melanie’s car, a cute little sky-blue convertible. I didn’t mind her driving. It gave me a chance to admire how her blonde hair shimmered in the wind. The collective was inland, past the small European enclave of Tangerville and the sprawl of Moorish homes and shacks and out into the hills, the road going up and down and through cultivated fields and olive groves before straitening out on a flat, stony area unsuitable for farming.
In the center of this desolate space stood a long, low concrete building with a tile roof and several smokestacks. A couple of smaller buildings stood to one side. They looked like barracks. The whole thing was surrounded by a chain link fence with razor wire on top. Even from this distance with the motor running we could hear the faint clank and clatter of machinery. I was surprised that there wasn’t a red and black anarchist flag atop a flagpole somewhere. They probably didn’t want to push it. Live and let live has its limits even in Tangier, and the CNT is banned pretty much everywhere else.
The gate was closed when we got there, and a middle-aged Spaniard in the blue overalls of an industrial worker stood guard, an old rifle slung casually over his shoulder.
Melanie smiled at him and introduced us. The guard ogled her for a moment and opened the gate.
As we drove in, another worker came jogging out of the machine shop, smiling and waving. He had a wide, open face with an easy smile and bright eyes. He looked about forty, although it’s hard to tell with Spanish workers because the life ages them so quickly. Unlike so many, it did not look like it had defeated him.
“Are you Kent and Melanie?” he asked in Spanish, starting immediately on a first name basis to show himself as our equal. “I am Tomau, worker’s representative for this collective. Edward said you were coming.”
We stepped out, and he and Melanie did the standard Spanish kiss on both cheeks. Tomau got a little dreamy eyed.
“Come, let’s go into the office. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”
Tomau led us into a sunlit office with several desks and a large table covered with blueprints. A woman clattered away on a typewriter, briefly shaking Melanie’s hand and giving me a peck on each cheek before hunkering over her work again. Tomau poured us each a coffee from a large pot set on a hotplate and led us into a small private office, where he closed the door. The office was badly insulated and the clatter of the typewriter and the insistent clanging of the machinery made us all raise our voices.
“Thank you for having us here,” Melanie said.
“We’re very happy to have you,” Tomau said with a smile that showed he was as charmed by her as everyone else. Then he grew serious. “Edward mentioned you’re looking into the Juan Cardona case.”
“Yeah. I think they got the wrong man,” I said.
Tomau cocked his head. “Didn’t he confess?”
Like I said, news travels fast in Tangier.
“He did, but he’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. He couldn’t have stalked and chased down your comrade.”
“So you think he is protecting somebody?”
Tomau was quick on the uptake.
“I’d bet a month’s wages on it,” I told him.
“So who did it?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping you can help me. Could you tell me a bit more about Juan? Who he associated with, how he spent his time, that sort of thing.”
“He was always sort of on the edges. He worked driving a truck for the Republic. He had been a truck driver before the war, and helped distribute supplies for the CNT collectives and the militia.”
“He never fought?”
“He played an equal part in the workers’ revolution.”
“But he never picked up a gun and fired at anybody.”
“Not that I know of, no. Like so many people, he fled here when things got bad. Not many of us were accepted into France or other European countries, not if they found out we were anarchists. So, like many people from the Republic with no other option, we came here. They couldn’t refuse us a visa to Tangier since all Spaniards have free travel here, and because of the international government, Franco’s agents couldn’t harass us.”
“So you haven’t had any harassment?”
Tomau gave a bitter smile. “Well, there are shops where they are always out of stock of what we want to buy, and restaurants where they spit in our food. But murder? No, this is new. This will not go well for us, because the bosses own the press and will turn the incident against us. We’ve already had a collective meeting about Juan Cardona. We had to convince some of the more militant members to bide their time. I’m not sure how long they will remain convinced.”
“The communists are having the same trouble. So what did Juan do here?”
“We never hired him here. We have a perfectly efficient workshop without any of the wastage or parasitical relationships that plague capitalist centers of production. So there was no place for him here. He did get odd jobs in various places, the port and the cannery mostly.”
“Why didn’t he have a regular job? I thought you people stuck together and made sure everyone had work.”
He shrugged. “Not everyone wants work. He lived on very little and did not seem to mind. He only searched for work when he needed food, or when the rent on his little room was due. And then he’d only work two or three days to tide him over. Some people are like that. The system has broken them.”
“Did he ever go back to his old job of driving a truck?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do remember seeing him driving a truck just last week.”
“Where?”
“I was driving one of the collective’s cars into town for supplies and saw him coming the other way in a truck, heading for the Mountain.”
“That’s odd. What was he going there for?” The Mountain was where all the rich foreigners lived. No Spaniards except for a couple of rich fascists.
“How should I know? I waved to him but he didn’t wave back. I got the feeling he was pretending not to see me.”
“Interesting. Anybody with him?”
This was getting better. “Did he have trouble with anyone?”
“Not that I know of. He kept to himself, mostly. He talked sometimes at the collective meetings, mostly about keeping the CNT alive now that we’ve been banned. He didn’t do any party work, though. To be honest, he never did much of anything.”
“I don’t understand why someone would kill him then.”
“Neither do I. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more. I’ll ask around. Would you like a tour of the workshop?”
“Sure.” I never turned down a chance to stick my nose somewhere it had never been before.
He got up and led us back through the office and outside before passing through a large open doorway. Rows of machines filled the large interior. Men worked steadily on them, unhurried but efficient. A stamping machine was making some curved flat piece for some larger machine, while a lathe turned out steel rods. The rays of light shining down from the skylights caught clouds of whirling dust motes.
“So what do you make here?” Melanie shouted.
“All sorts of things. Door hinges, metal plating for car repairs, ironwork railings, just about anything that can be turned out by a small machine. We have plenty of work.”
“It’s all very impressive,” Melanie said. Tomau looked like he was going to swoon. I smiled. You can always reach a man’s heart through his machines. I wished I had someone like her during the war saying nice things about my tanks.
“And no bosses to get in the way!” Tomau exulted. “Everyone has their work and all decisions are made through group consensus. And we all share equally in the wealth we generate.”
I looked around, halfway to being impressed. “Yeah, it works pretty good on this scale, but you could never get these collectives to work nationwide without the Party to make sure everyone cooperated.”
Tomau frowned. “Those centralizing tendencies are counterrevolutionary!”
“Oh come on, you gotta have some central organization, especially in time of war. You ruined the Revolution through your lack of discipline.”
Three Passports to Trouble Page 5