The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

  This was the heart of Spain, he thought – and it was a harsh, unyielding heart, which demanded much but gave precious little in return.

  His own father had worked his modest plot of land not so far from here. The old man had slaved from dawn to dusk – and sometimes beyond that.

  And for what?

  No one had starved in the Ruiz family – that was true – yet when the old man had died, he had gone out of the world with no more than he’d had when he'd come into it. And it was the same with millions of other Spaniards. Yet despite that, the people loved the land, and would have withered away without it. Even he, a city boy for over a decade and a half now, didn’t really feel at home until he was out in the campo of his childhood.

  “What are you thinking about now, Ruiz?” asked a voice from the seat opposite his.

  He turned his gaze from the window to the blonde woman, and experienced once again a feeling of wonder that this beautiful, intelligent, strong-willed yanqui should ever want to be a part of his life.

  “I asked you what you’re thinking about” Cindy repeated. “Is it the case?”

  He shook his head. He’d been a real detective when she’d first met him, and there’d been very few moments – except when caught up in the heat of passion in the bedroom – when his mind hadn’t been fixated on his investigation.

  But now all that seemed like another life, and when he was called on to be a policeman again – as he had been in the case of the General’s dog – it always took a while for him to stop merely acting like a detective and slip fully into his old role.

  Besides, he was still assailed by the doubts he’d expressed to the sharp-faced man in the field headquarters, doubts which warned him that this wasn’t a real investigation at all – that he wasn’t actual-ly expected to solve the murder, but merely come up with a solution which was politically expedient.

  Paco looked around the carriage. There were not many other people traveling to Albacete that day, and of the few there were, most wore some kind of military uniform. It would be a very different matter on the train's return journey to Madrid. Then, it would be carrying rice and meat from Valencia to feed the capital, and perhaps a few weapons to help carry on the struggle with an enemy who had reached the very western edges of the city. That was why the Battle of Jarama had been so vital – continued to be so vital. Because if the Republic lost that battle, it would lose the railway line, and without its link to friendly territory, Madrid was finished.

  In the old days, the train would have been crammed full of all sorts of people, Paco thought. There would have been weather-beaten peasants on their way to the market in Albacete, weighed down with fruit and live chickens. There would have been stiff clerks, dispatched by their masters in Madrid to check on how the provincial branches of their businesses were being run. And, of course, there would have been the priests and nuns.

  There had always been priests and nuns on the train before the war – traveling from one of the many religious houses to another, visiting their relatives in the village where they had grown up, or answering a summons from their bishop. But now they had all either been banished from the territory the government controlled, or killed at the behest of an angry mob. The Republic – or at least, the workers and peasants who made up most of it – no longer had time for those they saw as the blood-sucking leeches who had lived for so long off the sweat and strain of others.

  Paco lit up a cigarette. “Where's Felipe?” he asked.

  Cindy smiled. “Where do you think he is? He’s gone farther up the train – looking for something to eat.”

  Paco grinned. Constable Felipe Fernandez – who had been known to everyone in the Madrid police force before the war as Fat Felipe – had been involved in a perpetual search for food for as long as Paco had known him. And that had been quite some time. Felipe had been his partner for nearly a decade, and a few months earlier that association had almost cost the fat man his life. For a while, when he had been lying in hospital with half a dozen bullet holes in him, the fat constable had been losing weight, but ever since his discharge he had been working with the dedication of a zealot at returning his figure to its former podgy glory.

  Paco was glad that he had Felipe working with him on this case. The constable was driven by stolid, unimaginative common sense, which Paco recognized as a necessary counter-balance to his own impulsive reactions (which were often completely off-target) and his occasional flashes of insight (which were usually stunningly right). But their relationship went beyond their work. Though he would have died rather than admit it openly, there was no one in the world – Cindy excepted – of whom the ex-inspector was fonder.

  Felipe appeared, waddling between the rows of wooden benches, and plopped himself down heavily on the seat next to Cindy.

  “Not a single thing to eat on this whole bloody train,” he complained loudly. “The state things have been allowed to fall into, anybody would think there was a war going on.” He scratched his ample belly. “Still, Albacete’s quite close to the coast, so there should be plenty to eat there.” A look of mild concern flashed across his face. “We will be in the area long enough to get a few decent meals down us, won’t we, jefe?”

  “I don't know,” Paco admitted. “If the murderer takes one look at you and decides it’s pointless to try and keep the truth from a man of your substantial girth for long, we should be out of there in a few hours. On the other hand ...” He shrugged again.

  “A man of my girth,” Felipe muttered, pretending to sound offended. “That’s really hurtful.”

  “I hope it takes a long, long time,” Cindy said, then bit her lip as if she regretted having spoken.

  Paco knew what she meant. They were very much in love, yet his duty – first as a policeman, then as a soldier – had conspired to keep them apart for most of the time they had known each other. This investigation would at least give them an opportunity to be together.

  But wouldn’t that just make it harder when they had to separate again?

  The train, which could never have been said to be speeding, slowed down to almost a crawl.

  Fat Felipe checked his pocket watch.

  “We must be nearly there – and only three hours late,” he said. He stuck his head out of the open window. “Yes, that’s Albacete, all right.” He turned his attention to Cindy. “Do you know anything about the town?”

  “Very little,” the American woman admitted.

  “It’s not much of a place to look at,” Felipe told her, “but it’s the offensive weapons capital of the whole of Spain. If you’re ever robbed at knife-point, you can be almost sure that the blade which the robber is threatening you with was made in Albacete.”

  Cindy grinned.

  “Thanks,” she said. “If I am ever robbed, I’ll take real comfort from knowing that fact.”

  But it hadn’t been a knife from Albacete which had put an end to the life of a Yanqui who went by the name of Samuel Johnson, Paco thought. He had been shot twice – once through the chest and once through the head. Before the war, it would have been a pretty safe bet that such a crime had been premeditated, but now there were so many guns around that the mere fact that a man was carrying one was no indication that he had his thoughts on murder.

  Before finally being allowed to take a rest, the new recruits of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigade had spent an exhausting morning marching up and down the plain which surrounded San Antonio de la Jara. Now the men squatted on their haunches, eating their bocadillos and smoking their cigarettes as they had done during similar breaks on previous days. But today there was a difference. The easy camaraderie of their other marches had all-but disappeared. Instead of being the single unit that their commanders had been attempting to forge, the men had broken up into small clusters, drawn together either by the fact that they shared the same suspicions or because they belonged to that group on which those suspicions fell.

  “Sam Johnson was killed because of who
he was,” muttered a Jew from Brooklyn, talking to three other Jews who had been brought up in the same orphanage as he had. “There can be no other explanation for it. And we, too, could be killed for who we are.”

  “’Spect this sort o’ thing to happen in Alabama,” one of the black volunteers told his companions. “Hell, they still got the Klan down there. Just didn’t think it was gonna happen here.”

  “It was a cowardly killing,” an ex-longshoreman called Ted Donaldson told the three other ex-longshoremen who had traveled out to Spain with him. “An’ who should you be pointin’ the finger at when somethin’ cowardly happens? Why, the Yids!”

  The sandy-haired sergeant, standing some distance away from his men, shook his head sadly. He could not hear what any of them were saying, but he could make a pretty accurate guess. It wasn’t going to be easy to get these men to trust each other again, he thought. It wasn’t going to be easy at all.

  The train crawled into Albacete station, and came to a juddering, exhausted halt. The second it had stopped moving – even before the passengers had had the opportunity to disembark – the people who’d been standing on the platform were forming tight knots around the doors. They couldn’t wait to get to Madrid – to be in the thick of the action.

  Paco wondered how long their enthusiasm would last – how long they would have to be under constant bombardment before they decided that the tranquility of Albacete was not such a bad thing after all.

  Fat Felipe took his battered suitcase down from the rack.

  “We won’t have to walk far, will we?” he asked, sounding a little concerned.

  Paco grinned. “No. The commander of the Lincoln Battalion has been instructed to send someone to pick us up.”

  He had been expecting the ‘someone’ in question to be a man, but as they fought their way through the mob waiting to get on the train, he noticed a woman waving at them. She was around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, Paco estimated. She was wearing pants – which for practical reasons had become the fashion among women in the militias – and a combat jacket which did little to disguise her firm breasts. She had the long black hair and the dark eyes of a typical Spanish beauty, and most of the men on the platform who were not struggling to get on the train seemed incapable of tearing their gazes away from her.

  The woman started to walk towards them, cutting her path through the crowd as if she were the only person on the platform. An ex-aristocrat, from her attitude, Paco decided. The sort of woman who, before the war, would have spent her days riding around her father’s estate on a pure black stallion and her nights being waited on hand and foot by half a dozen servants. He wondered what had happened to make her decide to join the opposition.

  The woman spoke, but to Cindy, not Paco – and in English.

  “You the translator?” she asked.

  “That’s right. Cindy Walker.”

  “I’m Dolores McBride,” the other woman said. “You can call me Doll – most men do, whether I want them to or not.” She noticed Paco’s raised eyebrow when she’d said her first name, and turned her attention onto him. “My father’s Irish-American, but my mother’s Mexican,” she said, switching to Spanish. “I’m a journalist.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing as women journalists,” Paco replied.

  “Maybe there aren’t – here,” the woman said.

  “But in America …?”

  “Not on any of the big newspapers back in the States, either. For all the talk of equality, a woman with cojones scares the hell out of most men. But see, I don’t work for one of the big newspapers. I’m the Spanish correspondent of the Moscow News. That’s Moscow, Russia, not Moscow Idaho. Also, as it happens, I’m the schmuck who’s been given the job of driving the three of you out to the lovely town of San Antonio de la Jara – which is where the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is based, and where the murder took place.”

  Paco remembered how Cindy’s American directness had almost shocked him when he’d first met her. But this woman was something else. She made his lover seem like a mere shrinking violet.

  “So you’re working for the International Brigade, are you, Miss McBride?” he asked.

  Dolores McBride laughed.

  “God, no! But the boys back at the base camp are expecting to be sent up to the front real soon now, and I figured it would have been a waste of time for one of them to come and pick you up, when he’d be much better employed learning how not to get himself killed.”

  It was a good point, Paco agreed, but he found himself wondering if that was the only reason this woman – this journalist who was no doubt in pursuit of a story – had volunteered to drive to the station and collect them.

  Dolores McBride pulled a pack of American cigarettes out of her breast pocket, and offered them round.

  “OK,” she said, as she struck a match and held it under Paco’s cigarette, “let’s get this show on the road.”

  She led them to the barrier. Before the war, there would have been a railway official there to collect their tickets, but now that tickets – in common with so many other things – were distributed rather than bought, the only people standing there were two militiamen checking identification papers.

  The four of them stepped out of the station into the watery winter sunshine.

  “The car’s over there.” Dolores McBride said.

  Paco’s heart skipped a beat. The vehicle she was pointing to was a Fiat Balilla. He’d had one himself until the previous summer. It had been the only thing of any value he’d ever owned. And now it was gone – requisitioned by the Socialist Militia just as this one – as evidenced by the initials UGT crudely painted on its the side in white – had been requisitioned by the General Workers Union.

  Paco didn’t regret giving up his car – but he did miss it. He wondered where it was now. Probably blown to hell by a shell from a German tank on the front line.

  Dolores McBride stopped in front of the car. “You’re the Big Cheese, aren’t you?” she asked Paco.

  The queso grande?

  “I’m sorry?” Paco said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Are you the guy in charge of the investigation?” She glanced at Felipe. “Or should I be talking to your cuddly friend here?”

  “I’m in charge of the investigation,” Paco told her.

  “OK, so one of the perks of the job is that you get to ride up front with me,” Dolores McBride said, opening the door, pulling forward the passenger seat and indicating to Cindy and Felipe that they should clamber into the back.

  Paco turned questioningly to Cindy, whose expression replied that since he was the Big Cheese, she supposed he had the place in the front of the car by right. But he could tell that she was not entirely happy with the idea.

  Paco waited while Felipe eased his bulk into the back seat and Cindy had followed him, then slid in beside Dolores McBride.

  The railway station, as was the case in most Spanish towns, was situated well away from the center of Albacete, and soon the Balilla had left all buildings behind and was crossing the Castilian Plain. Once again, as they passed gnarled peasants leading donkeys and gangs of burly workmen repairing holes in the road, Paco got the eerie feeling that the war he had just left behind him was really nothing more than a bad dream.

  “Could you tell me what you know about the case?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Dolores agreed. “Sam Johnson was shot to death in a burnt-out church near the Plaza Mayor in San Antonio. So far, nobody’s come up with any satisfactory reason for him being there. Death occurred shortly after midnight on Friday.”

  “How can you pin it down so accurately?”

  “Easy. The town was en fiestas, and he was seen on the square just before the fireworks started. His body was discovered ten minutes later, by a local woman called Concha Prieto.”

  “What reason did she have for going to a burnt-out church at that time of night?”

  Dolores McBride shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe she’s one of the few Go
d-botherers still left in town. Any more questions?”

  “Yes. Could you please tell me all you can about Samuel Johnson’s comrades?”

  “That’s a pretty tall order, Mister. What particularly do you want to know about them?”

  “What are they like?”

  The journalist snorted.

  “That’s the same as asking me what dogs are like. There’s all sorts.”

  “Just try to give me some kind of overall impression, if you can,” Paco persisted.

  “OK,” Dolores McBride agreed. “There are two things that most of them have in common. The first is that they’re idealists. The second is that they were recruited by the Party in New York.”

  “The Party?”

  The journalist turned her head slightly towards him, the expression on her face suggesting that she couldn’t understand his obvious confusion, since there was only one party as far as she was concerned.

  “The Communist Party,” she said.

  “So all the members of the International Brigade are also members of the Communist Party, are they?”

  Dolores McBride sighed exasperatedly, as though she’d been through the same discussion so many times before – and with so many other people – that it was starting to bore her.

  “As far as the Party is concerned, this war isn’t about spreading communism but about stopping fascism,” she said.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Paco pointed out.

  “No, the Lincolns are not all communists. Many of them are, but that certainly wasn’t one of the requirements for recruitment. There are socialists in the brigade as well. And a fair number of other guys who don’t have any particular political leaning at all – but just want to do what’s right.”

  “So that’s how they’re the same,” Paco said thoughtfully. “How are they different?”

  “It’s hard to know just where to start,” Dolores McBride confessed. “One of the guys in the brigade is in line to inherit millions of dollars when his robber baron father finally kicks the bucket. Then again, there are others who haven’t got a pot to piss in. There are men with a college education, and men who can hardly even sign their own names. There are kids still wet behind the ears, and there are guys who it would be more than charitable to say are approaching middle age. A fair number of them have lied to their families about where they are – just like the Party asked them to – but there are others who don’t even have a family to lie to. We’ve got ex-union organizers and civil engineers, shop assistants and carpenters, poets and sharecroppers. Some of the guys haven’t had any kind of job since the Crash of ‘29. So like I said, all that binds them together is the fact that they want to do the right thing.”