The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

  “Yes, what is it?” Paco asked.

  “They want you back at field headquarters, sir.”

  Sir! There had been no ranks in those first few days of the Civil War. Everyone had been called ‘comrade’. But it could not have gone on that way, Paco recognized. They had been facing a trained army, and if they were to succeed, they, too, needed to be trained. He was glad that things had changed, and yet there was a part of him which – obstinately and irrationally – missed the spirit which had existed during, the fierce battles in the Guadarrama Mountains.

  “So they want me back at headquarters, do they?” he asked. “And who are they, exactly?”

  The private shrugged. “They didn’t say. Only that you were to come immediately.”

  Paco nodded. “And who did they say they wanted to see? Captain Ruiz? Or Inspector Ruiz?”

  The private looked confused.

  “Are there two of you?”

  The army captain – who had once been a policeman – shook his head.

  “No, it’s me they want, all right.”

  He took a packet of Celtas from the pocket of his combat jacket, and offered it to the private.

  “Smoke, son?”

  The private took one – but hesitantly.

  “We’d ... we’d better go, sir,” he said, as his superior struck a match and held it out to him.

  “Yes,” Paco agreed, lighting his own Celtas and then dousing the match. “I suppose we better had.”

  The temporary field headquarters had been established in what had once been the home of one of the valley’s landowning cacique (as the pre-revolutionary political bosses had been known). There were three flags flying from the top of the building now – one to represent the Spanish Republic and its democratically elected government, another belonging to the Communist Party, and a third with the insignia of the Socialists.

  Armed guards, looking very bored, stood on duty outside the house, and several military vehicles were parked in front of it.

  Yet apart from that, the village looked much as it must have looked before the war broke out.

  Peasant women, dressed entirely in black, still passed by carrying bundles on their heads.

  Skinny donkeys, weighed down by their loads, still ambled reluctantly up the street.

  Mongrel dogs snarled menacingly at each other.

  And old men, wearing berets, and with cigarettes drooping from the corners of their mouths, sat in the village bar drinking glasses of wine.

  In some villages in this devastated country, it was almost possible to believe the war had never happened, Paco thought enviously.

  The nervous private handed him over to a sergeant who had obviously been waiting impatiently, and the sergeant led him down a corridor, stopping only when he reached a heavy oak door.

  “They’re in there,” he said.

  They again.

  “Who are they?” Paco asked.

  “They’ve come from Valencia,” the sergeant answered, as if that were all the explanation that was needed.

  And in a way, it was. Since early November, when the Prime Minister had come to the conclusion that Madrid was about to fall to the enemy any day, the government of Republican Spain had resided in Valencia.

  “You’d better knock, sir,” the sergeant said.

  “Aren’t you going to announce me?”

  The sergeant shook his head.

  “I’ve got other duties.”

  Then he turned on his heel, and was gone.

  Paco stood staring at the oak door – and thinking about the past. He had once been a policeman – a good one – but even before that he had been a soldier, fighting in Spanish Morocco – and now it was in the hands of the soldiers that the future of Spain lay. If the unnamed “they” had called him from the front line in order to resurrect his policeman self, he wanted nothing to do with it.

  He knocked on the door, and when a voice called out, “Come in!” he turned the handle and stepped inside.

  There were two of them, sitting behind the cacique’s long mahogany desk. One was a gray-haired man in his early sixties, the other a sharp-faced, much younger man with burning, ambitious eyes.

  And they were both wearing lounge suits!

  It was months since Paco had seen anyone in a suit. Before the Rebellion, he had worn suits himself – everyone who was not a manual worker had been expected to – but from August onwards, no one in Madrid had appeared in anything but overalls or a military uniform.

  “You are Francisco Ruiz?” asked the sharp-faced younger man.

  “I am,” Paco agreed, noting his questioner had used neither of his titles – and wondering whether that had been deliberate.

  “Take a seat, Señor Ruiz,” the young man said, indicating a low chair which had been set up in front of the desk.

  “I would prefer to stand,” Paco told him.

  For a second, it looked as if the sharp-faced man would insist.

  Then he nodded his head and said. “Very well, if that’s your choice. My name is Enrique Muñoz, and my colleague is Don Luis Ortega. We are here on official business, the direct representatives of President Azaña.”

  In other words, they were political time-servers, Paco thought.

  Which was just another way of saying that they would be well versed in playing the games of manipulation and advantage, which would ensure that whatever else happened, they’d manage to retain their comfortable berth.

  It was incredible that after all that had happened in the previous few months – after society had been turned upside down – he should still find himself talking to men of the same stock as the ones who had made his life so difficult in the old days.

  What had happened to the revolutionary spirit?

  Muñoz consulted the cardboard folder in front of him, though Paco suspected he already knew all the details it contained by heart.

  “It seems that before the outbreak of hostilities you were a homicide inspector in the Madrid police,” the official representative of the President said.

  The outbreak of hostilities! Paco repeated in his mind. What a neat, clinical – governmental – way to describe a situation in which thousands on both sides had been massacred.

  “Yes, I was a policeman,” he replied flatly.

  “A homicide policeman,” Muñoz repeated, in case the man standing before him had missed the point.

  “A homicide policeman,” Paco agreed.

  “There has been a murder,” Muñoz told him, “a particularly unpleasant one, as a matter of fact.”

  It would always be a case of ‘matter of fact’ with people like these. Paco did not even try to feign surprise.

  “There have always been murders – most of them particularly unpleasant,” he said. “There was no reason to suppose that they would stop just because of the outbreak of hostilities.”

  “This isn’t just any murder. It has very serious political and military implications.”

  Muñoz looked as if he expected the ex-policeman’s tongue to hang out – as if he were a dog, suddenly aware of the possibility of being fed a juicy bone. Paco took some pleasure in disappointing him.

  The sharp-faced young man and gray-haired older one exchanged questioning glances.

  Then the gray-haired man – Don Luis – said. “If we lose Madrid, Señor Ruiz, we have lost the war. That wasn’t always the case, but it is now. It was in Madrid that we first halted fascism and ...”

  “We?” Paco interrupted. “I don’t recall seeing you up in the mountains, when my comrades were dying like flies all around me.”

  Don Luis frowned, as if considering delivering a stinging rebuke. Then he shrugged, just as his partner had done earlier, and said, “We all do what we can – or what our age allows us to do. But to get back to the point – it is Madrid which stands as an all-important symbol for the continuation of our struggle. If it falls, the heart will be gone from the cause. The Republic will be like a balloon without any air in it. Flat. Useless.”<
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  Don Luis sounded as smooth and glib as every other politician he’d ever met, Paco thought. But for all that, he was right – lose Madrid and the cause was also lost.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Do you recall what that traitor General Mola said about a fifth column?” Ortega asked.

  “He said that there were four columns of his soldiers marching on Madrid, but that they had a fifth column to assist them – the men loyal to the rebel cause who were already in the city.”

  “Exactly,” the gray-haired man agreed. “And it is not only in the capital that there are fifth columnists at work.”

  The man was dangling the bait like an eager fisherman waiting to lure a hungry fish, Paco thought – but he was not ready to throw himself on the hook quite yet.

  “It’s only to be expected that there are people who support the rebels behind our lines,” he said. “Just as there must also be people loyal to our cause who have been trapped behind the fascist lines.”

  “Would you agree that Madrid would have already fallen to the enemy had it not been for the help of the International Brigade?” Ortega asked, suddenly changing tack.

  “Yes,” Paco said.

  How could he deny it? When the first battalions of the brigade – Germans, French, Belgians, Englishmen and Poles – had marched into the capital in November, they had given new hope to a populace which believed the city lost. More than that – the foreign soldiers had taught the eager but untrained Spanish volunteers how to fight. And they had been willing to lay down their own lives alongside those of their Spanish comrades in defense of a republic which was not even their own. The same had been true of the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who had fought side by side with his men in the Battle of Jarama. Republican Spain owed them all a debt it could never hope to repay.

  “Would you also agree that we need the continued support of the brigade if we are to win this war?” Ortega asked.

  “I’m an infantryman,” Paco said. “I know about hand-to-hand fighting on the ground. I know how to kill a man, and the best ways to avoid being killed myself. I have no knowledge of overall strategy.”

  The gray-haired man sighed.

  “Very well,” he agreed. “But would you believe me if I told you that is the case?”

  Paco looked into the other man’s eyes, and saw that beneath the veneer of the politician, there perhaps lay the soul of an honest man.

  “Yes, I’d believe you,” he said.

  “The enemy obviously believe it, too,” Muñoz interrupted. “More than believe it – they have done something to ensure that it doesn't happen.”

  “Even in a group of like-minded comrades, there will be differences,” Ortega continued. “They are bound together by their common ideology, but they are divided by their own personal experiences of life. And these personal experiences create animosities which, while they remain suppressed for most of the time, can surface in times of difficulty.”

  “Is all this generalization leading anywhere?” Paco asked impatiently.

  “Once these differences emerge, the cause of them must be dealt with as soon as possible, if splits and divisions are to be avoided,” Ortega said, carrying on as if he had never spoken.

  “One of the International Brigade has been murdered,” Paco said, finally seeing where he was leading.

  Ortega nodded. “A member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion was assassinated in San Antonio de la Jara, the night before last. His murder has caused a great deal of dissension.”

  “You mean that other members of the brigade suspect that the murderer is one of his own comrades?” Paco asked.

  “Yes,” Ortega said. “Which is, of course, exactly what the treacherous fifth columnist who is behind the crime wants them to think. That is why the real murderer must be arrested as soon as possible. Which, in turn, is why you must leave for Albacete imme-diately.”

  “I can’t do it,” Paco said firmly.

  “Why not?” Muñoz demanded sharply.

  “Because I have a responsibility to the men I command. They’ve fought bravely, and it’s my duty as their leader to see that as many of them as possible come out of this bloody mess in one piece. So, you see, you’ll simply have to send someone else.”

  “There is no one else,” Muñoz countered.

  “No one else!” Paco repeated incredulously. “No other ex-detective in the whole of Republican Spain?”

  “No one who is as a good as you were...”

  “I can give you half a dozen names off the top of my head ...”

  “... and who is still alive!”

  It was possible that Muñoz was speaking the truth, Paco thought. So many good men had died, and he would not be at all surprised if some of them had been his colleagues from the old days. But that didn’t do anything to alter the situation he found himself in now.

  “I’m still not interested,” he said. “And as things stand, I’d be no good to you, anyway.”

  The gray-haired man frowned.

  “No good to us? Why not?”

  “Because of the kind of detective I was.”

  “And what kind of detective was that?”

  Paco sighed. “When I investigated a case, I always started with a completely open mind.”

  “I imagine you did.”

  “It was the only way I knew how to work. But you’ve already told me the conclusion you’d want me to reach if you sent me down to Albacete.”

  “We’ve told you the conclusion that you’re bound to reach anyway,” Muñoz said.

  Paco shook his head. “There's no such thing as ‘bound to’ in detective work. I know nothing about this particular case, but I do know there are a hundred reasons why one man might kill another.” He began to count them out on his fingers. “Envy ... jealousy … greed...” He stopped counting and spread his hand in a gesture of hopelessness. “The list is endless. And if I discovered that your American was killed for one of those reasons – and not by the enemy at all, but by one of his comrades – it would achieve exactly the opposite result to the one that you’re hoping for.”

  Muñoz slammed his first hard on the desk.

  “You will investigate it,” he said hotly. “You will investigate it because it is what the President wishes. And you will reach the correct – and inevitable – conclusion.”

  “Even if I agreed to do what you want, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Paco protested. “How long have these brigadistas been in Spain? A month? Six weeks?”

  Ortega gave a thin smile – the smile of a hunter who senses a false hope growing in the bosom of his quarry.

  “Some of them have been here for even less time than that,” he said.

  “And do they speak Spanish?”

  “A few of them might have picked up a little of the language.”

  “Well, there you are. They don’t speak my language, and I don’t speak theirs. How do you expect me to interrogate them when we can’t even understand each other?”

  “It’s true that might present a difficulty in most circumstances,” Muñoz agreed, “but fortunately that is not so in this case. You might not speak any English yourself, but,” he glanced down at the cardboard folder, “you appear to have a friend who does.”

  Paco felt his stomach perform a somersault.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Muñoz looked down at the file again.

  “It is widely known that you are involved in an adulterous rela-tionship with an American woman who speaks excellent Spanish,” he said. “To be specific – a Señorita Cindy Walker? Isn’t that right?”

  “You leave her out of this,” Paco said menacingly.

  “There is a war going on,” the sharp-faced man replied. “It is impossible to leave anyone out of anything.” He gave the folder another cursory glance. “Señorita Walker is working as an unqualified nurse. At the moment, she is based in Madrid, which, with the enemy bombardment, is a dangerous enough place
to be. But it is always possible she could be moved much closer to the front line – and, as we all know, there is even more danger there.”

  “If she’s moved, and anything happens to her. I’ll hunt you down, wherever you are,” Paco growled.

  “Perhaps that’s true,” the sharp-faced man agreed. “But killing me wouldn’t bring Señorita Walker back to life, now would it?” He gave Paco another thin smile. “Look at it this way, Inspector Ruiz – if you were to agree to take the case, and she were to go with you to Albacete as your interpreter, you would both be a very long way from the front, and therefore quite safe. Whereas, as things stand, you could both easily be dead by tomorrow.”

  “You heard him,” Paco said to Ortega. “He’s threatening me.”

  The older man looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “He is ... er... only making plain the practical realities of war,” he said. “We would not decide ourselves that Señorita Walker should be sent closer to the front – that is not within our remit. But the decision could be made from Madrid. All we are offering you is the opportunity to prevent it from happening.”

  “Bullshit!” Paco told him. “Politician’s double-talk.”

  “Perhaps it is,” Muñoz agreed. “But the fact remains, you still have two options. Either you go back to the trenches and abandon Cindy Walker to her fate, or you both go to San Antonio de la Jara. Which is it to be?”

  “You know which it is, you bastard!” Paco told him.

  “Yes, I do,” the sharp-faced man agreed. “I knew long before you even entered the room. That is why I am the one giving the orders, and you are the one obeying them.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  If the train taking them to Albacete had been a racehorse, it would certainly have been put out to grass long ago.

  Its engine wheezed asthmatically. Smoke rose reluctantly from its funnel as if from the lungs of an addicted heavy smoker. Even its wheels – clanking protestingly against the rails – seemed to be suffering from a touch of rheumatism.

  From inside one of the rickety carriages, Paco Ruiz looked out at the vast, empty expanse of the La Mancha countryside which was slipping lethargically by. Once in a while, a small, sleepy village would appear through the window to break the monotony, but then it was gone again, and all that was left was rolling hills, scrub and clumps of sad-looking olive trees.