Three Passports to Trouble

by Sean McLachlan

  “What gives?” I asked.

  “They’re everywhere.”

  “Who?”

  “Them.”

  All the lights were off. Because of the heat, the windows were open and the sun shone through the bushes, casting the room in a weird green light. I felt like I was in an aquarium. Books were stacked everywhere.

  Electric Eddie went to one of the windows, stood on a chair set in front of it, and peered through a gap in the greenery. Then he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, carried the chair to another window, stood on it, and peered a bit longer.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  He let out a sigh and turned to me. His face was a sheen of sweat and his shirt a patchwork of dark stains.

  “There’s trouble.”

  Oh great, just what I needed. More trouble.

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “The neighbors are up to something,” he said, wiping his nose again.

  “You’re paranoid, buddy. It’s all the cocaine and speed you do. You should cut down.”

  Here I was talking while nursing a two-day hangover.

  “No, I’m serious! One of my neighbors is having people come and go at all hours.”

  “Like you do.”

  Electric Eddie shook his head so hard I thought he was going to shake it off.

  “No! This is different. They’ve been having meetings there, big meetings. They try to mask their numbers by using as few cars as possible, but they pack them with people. Just pack ‘em! And when the door opens they all spill out like clowns from those little cars in the circus. HAHAHAHA!”

  Electric Eddie got like this sometimes. Well, most of the time. He was one of those obsessed, nervous people who didn’t feel right unless they were skating right on the edge. He didn’t need all those pills and powders, but he sure did like them.

  “So could you tell me exactly what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Sure. Um, I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Go on.”

  I sat on a stack of pamphlets titled Liberté pour Algerie and picked up one of the smut novels that were Electric Eddie’s best sellers. It was called The Bastille Cellar: Memoirs of Copenhagen’s Wildest Sex Club. I didn’t know the Danes were so racy.

  A loud snuffling came from the bathroom. I settled in for a long read.

  I was just getting to the part about the German tourists volunteering to be caged and whipped for their nation’s misdeeds when Electric Eddie came back into the room.

  Actually he tripped on a stack of books in the hall and fell into the room, followed by a cascade of hardback editions of The Well of Loneliness.

  He staggered to his feet, knocking over a lamp. He grabbed it before it fell to the floor and did a little waltz with it before setting it upright.

  “YOU LIKE THAT BASTILLE BOOK? PRETTY HOT STUFF.”

  “You stopped me at the best part.”

  “TAKE A COPY IF YOU WANT. IT’S PRETTY HARD ON THE GERMANS. MELANIE WILL LOVE IT. HAHAHAHAHA.”

  “That’s all right, Eddie.” I put the book away. “So what’s this about your neighbors?”

  “UP THERE.” He pointed through a wall, which wasn’t very helpful. “THERE’S AN OLD SPANIARD UP THERE THAT’S PLOTTING AGAINST ME.”

  Bingo.

  “A Spaniard, eh?”

  “SOME OLD RETIRED OFFICER. HE’S BEEN SPYING ON ME, I TELL YOU. HIS GARDENER USED TO WALK DOWN THE BACK PATH WHEN HE WENT HOME EVERY AFTERNOON, AND NOW HE WALKS RIGHT BY MY HOUSE. WANT MORE PROOF? HE’S BEEN HAVING SECRET MEETINGS ABOUT ME EVERY NIGHT AROUND TEN. HE’S ONTO ME. I SHIPPED FIVE THOUSAND COPIES OF A SPANISH TRANSLATION OF NAUGHTY NUNS OF NAVARRA TO SPAIN AND NOW HE’S ONTO ME.”

  “You didn’t happen to see a truck go up there last week, did you? During the daytime?”

  He nodded, sat down on a stack of Das Kapital, sprang up.

  “YEAH. THEY PARKED AROUND BACK SO I COULDN’T SEE BUT THEY TOOK SOME TIME WITH IT. MUST HAVE BEEN LOADING OR UNLOADING A HELL OF A LOT OF SOMETHING. DID A BUNCH OF TRIPS.”

  “Have you seen anything else happening around there? Anything else you know about that officer?”

  Electric Eddie shook his head and put his finger to his lips, like I was the one who had been shouting. He crept to the window, looked over his shoulder at me, and gestured for me to join him.

  We stood on the chair. From that height we could peek through the bushes and see over the wall. Several of the neighbors’ houses were visible. It kind of made me feel a bit perverted. Not as perverted as the folks who ran the Bastille Cellar, naturally.

  A long, trembling finger appeared beside me and pointed to a large, rambling home further up the slope. Like most houses on the Mountain, it was surrounded by a wall with iron spikes on top. The Mountain got pretty quiet and dark at night and break-ins were not uncommon. I couldn’t see much of the house because of that wall, and I suppose the owner wanted it that way.

  “In there?” I whispered.

  He nodded eagerly, banging his head against the window frame.

  He tiptoed back to the center of the room. I tiptoed after him.

  “BET YOU A MILLION BUCKS THEY’LL BE AT IT AGAIN TONIGHT. THEY’VE BEEN GOING FOUR DAYS RUNNING.”

  I didn’t bother asking why he was shouting again after trying to be quiet at the window. I didn’t bother asking Electric Eddie a lot of things.

  “It’s already late afternoon. Mind if I hang around and see what’s going on? It might be related to a case I’m working on.”

  “STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE. I GOT WORK TO DO.”

  He started organizing stacks of books, working at a frenzy to pack and address hundreds of shipments. It was a job for a moderately sized post office, but Electric Eddie did it all himself, and much faster too.

  If I had tried to help I would have only gotten in the way so I settled in to wait. At least I had some interesting reading material.

  I learned way more than I needed to know about the secret desires of Germans and Danes, and at around ten o’clock, my patience was rewarded.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Electric Eddie may have been a drug fiend, paranoid, and general weirdo, but he kept good tabs on his neighbors. At ten almost to the dot I saw a line of four cars drive up the Mountain, turn off at the dirt track that led to the Spanish officer’s house, and park.

  We watched from the window, standing on chairs to peek through the foliage and over the wall. My host had been kind enough to lend me a pair of binoculars. I figured they got a lot of use.

  The cars turned off their lights and all I could see through the lenses were dark shapes. The shadows seem to grow, widen, and then I realized what I was seeing was a group of people getting out of the cars and filing through the front gate.

  All this was done in silence. The house was only a few hundred yards away but I didn’t even hear a car door slam. They were being careful.

  “You’re right, Eddie, they are up to something. Always trust a smuggler to notice when the neighbors do something fishy.”

  “I’m not a smuggler, I’m a First Amendment evangelist.”

  “You’ve mentioned that before.”

  “Wanna go check them out?”

  The cocaine had worn off and he was talking at a normal level again.

  “I think I better do this on my own, Eddie.”

  “They’re my neighbors,” he whined like an adolescent.

  “And it’s my case. Stay put.”

  Electric Eddie was the last sidekick I needed on a job like this.

  I turned off all the lights in the house so the Spaniards wouldn’t see the door open. The night was silent except for the distant sound of surf, muffled a bit by an approaching engine. I paused in the darkness of Eddie’s garden and listened. The car turned off somewhere and receded.

  Easing open the gate, I made my way up the open field between me and the Spanish house. Another large house stood further uphill to my left. It was dark. A cluster o
f smaller cottages stood downhill to my right. Lights were on and I saw movement in one of the windows. It didn’t matter. That person was in a lit room. If they looked out, they would see nothing but darkness. It was the observers I didn’t see that had me worried.

  When I got to the road between Eddie’s house and the one I was aiming for, I walked up to it with a casual stride, like I was going further up the Mountain. That gave me a chance to study the Spanish house from a closer distance. The crescent moon didn’t cast much light. I didn’t see any way to get inside except climbing that wall, and that wall was way too high and topped with metal spikes.

  Wait. Now that I was passing the house and could see the wall facing uphill, I noticed a dark mound against the white of the wall. It reached about halfway up.

  Bingo.

  I continued up the road for a time, took a look around, and cut across a rocky field to the back of the house. I winced as my shoe slipped and sent a rock clattering against a bigger stone.

  Once I got to the wall, I stood a little away from it, out of the moonlight in the shade of a tree so I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the whitewash like that mound I had seen. Now that I was closer, I could see there was a trench in front of the mound. Probably some Moorish workmen laying a pipe or something. Plumbing is always chancy in Tangier and some of the homes up here didn’t have water at all. What really mattered was that there was a nice heap of earth and stones that might give me enough height to get to the top of that wall.

  I crept forward and tested the earth with my feet. The mound was a bit loose. I took an experimental step and caused only a small sound of shifting earth. I stepped again, getting partway up the mound.

  “Need any help?”

  I flailed, spun, grabbed for my gun.

  Then stopped. It was Electric Eddie. His skinny shadow stood right next to that tree I had been hiding by.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I whispered.

  “Helping you,” he whispered back. At least he wasn’t snorting anything. He’d wake up the whole neighborhood with his whisper.

  “No way. Beat it.”

  “C’mon. How you gonna get over that wall?”

  “Think I’m too short, eh? I’ll show you.”

  I crept back up the mound. The loose earth slipped a bit but compressed under my weight and held me. Once I got to the top, I reached over my head. My fingers barely touched the lip of the wall. I could try to jump, but I didn’t want to make any noise. The sounds of conversation came from within. I could almost pick out the words. The night air was still and carried any sound far.

  Strong hands grabbed me by the waist and lifted me up. I never took Electric Eddie for an athlete. Guess all those uppers and speed built up his muscle mass. I was up on the top of the wall in no time, both hands grasping iron spikes, one foot on the lip of the wall.

  The garden was dark, and much better tended than Electric Eddie’s. Carefully I stepped over the line of spikes, turned my body around, and lowered myself into the garden.

  As soon as I hit earth, a surge of panic gripped me. Electric Eddie got me so rattled I hadn’t looked for a way out! What a screw up. I could be trapped in here.

  My first move was to look for any trees or objects that would get me up and over the fence. No dice. Quietly I circled the house and checked the gate. It opened easily from the inside. The well-oiled hinge didn’t make much noise.

  That was a stroke of luck. Usually people locked their gates after dark. I guess the officer figured that with so many guests at his house, he’d be safe.

  I was happy to prove him wrong.

  Now I turned my attention to the house itself. It was a well-made stone structure, all a single story, that looked like it had been built up over time. The main building was a large rectangle with green shutters open to the night air. White curtains kept me from seeing inside the rooms that were lit. To one side was an extension that was entirely dark. In a smaller extension on the other side, a single light shone. Since this was closest, I crept over there first.

  This window, too, had white curtains blocking my view. From inside I could hear a radio playing some Spanish singer. A breeze shifted the curtains enough that I caught a glimpse of a bureau covered in perfume bottles and various jars of creams and ointments. The room for the lady of the house, and an older one at that, judging from the decor. She had been banished to her bedroom while the men talked politics. Back in the Republic women took an active part in political discussion. We even had some at the front.

  You would think that having the active support of the entire population instead of just half we would have won, but no.

  When I started moving toward the main house, I heard a scraping sound at the point of the wall when I had entered. Pulling out my gun, I hurried as quietly as I could to the spot.

  Electric Eddie was trying to climb the wall. He had gotten a grip on the metal spikes but couldn’t get his gangly limbs in order enough to lift himself up.

  “Quit screwing around,” I whispered. “They’ll hear.”

  “Ugh. This is harder than it looks. Hold on while I take a line.”

  “If you take a line you’ll start shouting. Stay put. Better yet, go home.”

  “You need my help.”

  “Yes I do. Stand guard. Stay in the shadows and don’t make a sound.”

  “All right.”

  I turned to go back to the house.

  “Shorty. Psst, hey Shorty!”

  I gritted my teeth and turned back to him. “Quiet. What?”

  “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Guards. Panzers. Invading fascist hordes. I don’t know. Just stay put and keep your eyes open.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  Shaking my head, I snuck back to the house. The sound of the voices led me to the large windows of a living room or dining room. The voices sounded hollow, like they were in a large, high room. They spoke in Spanish.

  I eased up below a window and listened. It took a moment to sort through all the voices. Spaniards like to talk all at the same time, and with what I estimated to be at least twenty people all talking at once, that made my job a lot harder.

  Much of the conversation was trivial, but after a couple of minutes, glancing with worry at the spot where I was trusting Electric Eddie to keep quiet, I began to pick up something interesting.

  “I heard Octavio is thinking of leaving the International Zone. He’s certainly persona non grata here,” an older man’s voice said.

  “The idiot deserves to be shot, bringing an anarchist into our midst.” This was from another older man, his voice sharper, shriller.

  “He didn’t know,” a young man said.

  “He should have checked,” Mr. Shrill Voice snapped.

  “Yes,” the young man agreed. “But it’s difficult. So many people hide their pasts here. Plus he didn’t know himself how important the delivery was.”

  “And he certainly made amends!” a fourth man said, belting out a laugh. He sounded drunk. Pretty early to be drunk. Especially for Spaniards, who tended to go lighter on the bottle than Yanks and Brits.

  “That he did,” the young man said.

  “And caused more trouble,” Mr. Shrill Voice added.

  That seemed to end that particular line of conversation. I kept listening to all the babble, feeling like a radio operator with a bad tuner trying to pick out individual stations on a busy frequency. Between the discussion of food, wine, and the best brothels (the Spanish are big into brothels) I caught a few things that may or may not have been useful.

  “They delivered forty, yes?”

  “Yes, forty.”

  “That should be more than enough.”

  Then,

  “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

  This sounded like the drunk again.

  “Because we need investment!” Mr. Shrill Voice said. He was unmistakable. “We can’t afford to cause troubles here.”

  Then,

 
“What sort of timetable do you think we have? I’ve heard so many estimates.”

  Someone laughed. “Everyone is guessing and no one really knows. Five years? Ten? The important thing is that we get ready, that we lay the groundwork, just like the Communists are.”

  The clinking of metal on glass made the conversation die down.

  “One heritage! One state! One leader!” a man barked with a military tone. The officer who owned this place? I’d been shouted at by a lot of officers in my time, in two different languages, and they all sounded the same.

  “One heritage! One state! One leader!” the crowd responded. It was the slogan of the Falange. I’d hit the gold mine all right.

  “Gentlemen, we have a great task ahead of us,” the officer said. “The future is uncertain, and our enemies are gathering their strength and preparing. We have grown too apathetic. Our victory in Spain and our survival of Europe’s great upheaval have given us a false sense of security. Our enemies, having lost, harbor no such illusions. They have been spreading their lies among the Moors, hoping to spread their contagion to a new continent. We—”

  “You there!” a voice shouted in Spanish to my right. I jerked around. A shadow loomed a few feet away from me. “Stop where you are. I’m armed.”

  I stood, raising my hands above my head.

  A scrabbling at the wall made us both turn. Electric Eddie peeked over, his face looking pale and frightened in the light from the dining room.

  The man spun and fired. Electric Eddie disappeared with a yelp.

  That was my signal to act. I closed the distance between us in two quick strides and landed my fist in an uppercut square on his jaw.

  The uppercut is my favorite punch, or I should say that it’s my most used punch since I’m usually punching up at people. Land a hard fist on the point of the jaw and your opponent’s head will snap back, they’ll go horizontal, and with any luck they’ll be down for the count. And that’s what happened this time.

  Well, almost.

  His head did snap back, and he did fall backwards, but he nearly put me down for the count.

  His gun fired as he fell, the roar jabbing my ears. I felt a tug on my left side.

  The curtains were torn aside. A middle-aged man with greased back hair and wearing a dinner jacket leaned out, eyes blinking as he adjusted them to the relative darkness. I grabbed him by the tie and hauled him out of the window. He landed head first on the ground and didn’t get up.