“Who was aware of Samuel Johnson’s plans for the evening?”
“I’m not entirely sure of that, but I imagine it would have been pretty common knowledge. Members of the battalion spend most of their time together, and nobody has any secrets.”
Everybody has secrets, Paco thought. However open a man’s life appears, there is always something which, for one reason or another, he wishes to keep hidden from others.
“Have you accounted for the movements of the other members of the battalion at the time of the murder?” Paco asked.
“Why the hell should we want to do that?” James Clay demanded, when the question had been translated into English. “Are you suggesting, even for a moment, that it might have been one of his comrades who murdered him?”
“Well, he certainly didn’t kill himself,” Paco pointed out.
“We don’t have to be here in Spain,” Clay said, with obvious growing fury. “We weren’t drafted – we volunteered. Every man in the brigade is like a brother to every other man. We need each other. We trust each other. Losing a good man like Samuel Johnson is a loss to us all.”
“Like brothers,” Paco said, reflectively. “Possibly you are. But from what I remember from my religion classes, the first murder in the scriptures was when Cain killed his brother – and he wasn’t the last sibling to do it.”
“Do you really want me to translate that, Ruiz?” Cindy asked.
Paco grinned ruefully.
“Maybe it might be wiser not to,” he agreed. “Ask Señor Harris when his men will be back.”
But it was James Clay who responded to Cindy’s translation.
“He wants to know why you should need to have that information,” Cindy said.
“Because I have to question them,” Paco answered. “And before Señor Clay goes off on his high horse again, tell him that even if none of the brigadistas had anything to do with the murder, one or two still might know something which will lead us to the killer.”
In the exchange which followed, Paco could only guess at what was being said, though it seemed to him that Cindy was vigorously arguing his case, Clay was vehement on his opposition and Harris appeared to be attempting to steer some kind of compromise course between the two. Eventually Cindy asked a question, and Clay gave a reluctant nod.
“The Lincolns should be back in an hour or so,” Cindy told Paco. “They will be instructed to go to the council chamber, where you will be permitted to talk to them.”
“Talk to them? Or question them?”
“Mr. Clay agrees there can be no objection to you questioning them.”
“But questioning them how? Can I talk to individuals? Or does he just expect me to throw out questions at the whole group?”
Cindy gave him an awkward little smile.
“I wanted to get some kind of agreement out of him, so I thought it was best not to be too specific about that,” she said.
“You were probably right,” Paco agreed.
“So you’re happy with the arrangements?”
“Of course not. But at least it’s a start.”
“Is there anything else you’d like me to ask them about, while we’re here?” Cindy said.
Despite the unusual circumstances, this was a murder case like any other, Paco reminded himself, and his best course of action would be to follow the normal procedures as far as possible.
“Has the body been buried yet?” he asked.
“No. They’re planning to bury him with full military honors at dawn tomorrow.”
“So where’s the cadaver being kept until then?”
“In the house that used to belong to the priest.”
“Ask them if I can see it.”
Cindy conveyed the request. The commander nodded his head immediately, and even the political commissar did not seem to have any deep-rooted objections to the idea.
“When would you like to see it?” Cindy asked.
“Right now seems as good a time as any,” Paco replied.
The priest’s house was just one door down from the church, but had escaped the latter’s fate when the townsfolk had gone on the rampage in the first few, heady days of the revolution.
Matt Harris slipped a bony hand into one of his pockets, and pulled out a large key.
“We considered posting an honor guard on the door,” he said, almost apologetically. “Sam Johnson certainly deserved one. But then we thought about it, and decided that Sam would have preferred his comrades to use their time for their basic training.”
He inserted the key in the lock, and opened the door. The atmosphere inside the house – a mixture of incense, piety and brandy – reminded Paco of the few visits he had made to his priest’s house when he had been a child.
“He’s been laid to rest in what was the priest’s study for the moment,” Cindy told him.
Paco turned the phrase over in his mind.
Laid to rest.
He had long ago ceased to believe in God, and with that loss had gone any belief that the human soul could survive beyond death. Yet, as always when faced with a murder, he could not quite bring himself to accept that the victim would ever be completely at peace until his killer had been found and brought to justice.
The coffin had been placed across the top of the priest’s mahogany desk. A red flag, with a hammer and sickle clearly – and obviously deliberately – visible in one corner, had been draped over it.
“So, unlike some of the other Lincolns, Samuel Johnson was a member of the Party, was he?” Paco asked.
Clay nodded, and Harris said, “Si, un buen comunista,” his tongue curling awkwardly around the alien words.
“Could you open the coffin, please?” Paco asked.
Harris and Clay stepped forward, removed the flag, and reverently folded it up. The coffin, which the process revealed, was made of plain wood, in marked contrast to the expensive table on which it was lying.
Harris said something to Cindy.
“They want you to know in advance that he’s naked except for the bed sheet he’s draped in,” she said.
“And why is that?”
“They didn’t want to bury him in a uniform which was covered with blood. They’ve sent for a new uniform, but it hasn’t arrived from Albacete yet.”
Paco nodded.
“Good. That will make it easier for me to examine the nature of the wounds.”
The two Americans lifted the lid of the cheap coffin, and moved to the side. Paco stepped forward. The wound in the dead man’s chest was puckered, so it resembled an obscenely bloodied red mouth. The wound to the head was even messier. Though some attempt had been made to clean it up, nothing could disguise the fact that part of the skull had been blown away and some of his brain was missing.
It was obvious what had happened. The shot to the chest had been the first one, and had merely served to take Johnson down. It was the second shot – the one to the head – which had killed the poor bastard.
Yet even as he was examining the wounds and drawing his conclusions, only a small part of Paco’s mind was focusing on the cause of death. The rest of it was trying to accommodate the shock he had received the moment he saw the body.
He had been told that Samuel Johnson was a brave man with a big heart. He had been told that though not educated, Johnson had been intelligent. But no one – not the sharp-faced man at the field headquarters, not the commissar nor the commander – not even the female journalist from the Moscow News – had thought to mention the fact that Johnson was as black as well-aged teak.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Do you smell something interesting, jefe?” Fat Felipe asked, as the two ex-policemen and their blonde yanqui interpreter left the town hall and made their way across the Plaza Mayor.
Paco sniffed, and felt the chill air rush up his nostrils. “I can smell donkey dung,” he said. “And wood smoke. But in a place like this, I wouldn’t call either of them particularly interesting.”
Fat Felipe shook his h
ead slowly – almost pityingly.
“You might have a good nose for crime, but you’ve none at all when it comes to food,” he said. “Someone’s cooking riñones al jerez.”
“Are you sure?”
Felipe gave him a wide grin. “I’ve never been surer of anything in my entire life.” He reached up, and slowly scratched his bulbous left ear with all the care and precision of a surgeon. “Would it be all right if I went off on my own for a while? To investigate, you understand.”
“I understand,” Paco replied.
He understood very well. All men needed food to fuel them, but there were some, like Felipe, who needed more than most – usually in a very rich blend – and the constable’s brain would be a much more efficient machine after a bowl of kidneys in sherry.
Besides, it suited him to have Felipe disappear for a while. He had some serious questions he wanted to ask Cindy, and – given the way their last conversation had slipped so quickly into an argument – it might be wiser if he put them to her when they were alone.
He checked his watch.
“See you back here in about an hour, Felipe?” he suggested.
The fat constable licked his lips.
“An hour should be plenty of time to track those riñones down,” he agreed.
Paco watched Felipe waddle across the square in the general direction of the tempting odor which he alone could smell, then turned his attention to Cindy.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“What about?” Cindy demanded. “Your new friend Doll?”
“No. Not about her.”
“Then what?”
“Sam Johnson. The moment I saw him, I knew I was out of my depth and that was going to need your help.”
“My help!” Cindy repeated, unwilling to soften even a little. “That’s rich, isn’t it? You need my help! Well, I don’t see how I can help. You're the Great Detective – I’m just your interpreter. And I’m probably not even as good at that as someone who’s been brought up speaking Spanish and English from birth.”
“I know nothing about Negroes,” Paco pointed out softly.
“Say that again.”
“I know nothing about Negroes. I never expected Sam Johnson to be black. It came as a shock.”
“Why?” Cindy demanded. “Do you have some kind of prejudice against them? Have you decided that because the victim was only a black man, his murder isn’t worth investigating?”
She was angry, Paco thought – but how he did or did not regard Sam Johnson was only a part of what was causing her to lose her temper.
“I’m not prejudiced against Negroes,” he said, trying his best to stick to the subject.
Cindy put her hands on her hips.
“Well, it sure sounded like it from where I’m standing,” she retort-ed.
“How can I be prejudiced?” Paco argued. “I’ve never really thought about them enough to have formed an opinion.”
Cindy laughed disbelievingly.
“I find that very difficult to accept, Ruiz,” she said.
“That’s because you’re not trying to look at things from my point of view,” Paco said soothingly. “I have no feelings about the man in the moon either, because even if he exists, he’s never played a part in my life.”
“But you’ve never seen the man in the moon,” Cindy countered. “You must have seen Negroes before.”
“Not really,” Paco replied. “I suppose there were a few of them in Morocco when I was doing my military service – traders who’d crossed the Sahara from farther south – but it was the Arabs they did their business with, and I only ever saw them at a distance.”
“Samuel Johnson was a man like any other,” Cindy said. “Blood flowed through his veins just as it flows through yours, and when someone shot him, he felt it drain away as you would have done. He’s entitled to justice as much as anyone else would be.”
“Of course he is,” Paco agreed. “But that's not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“I always need to form a bond with the victim of a murder,” Paco explained. “Even if I know that I wouldn’t have liked him when he was alive, I at least need to understand how he would have thought – how he would have reacted in any number of different situations. I can do that easily with most kinds of Spaniards. I’ve even started to understand white yanquis, through you. But a black man? I have no idea where to begin.”
Cindy nodded thoughtfully, and he knew that – for the moment at least – her mind had turned away from the subject of Dolores McBride.
“Yeah, I can see how that might present some kind of problem for you,” she admitted.
“So maybe you can help me with it?” Paco suggested hopefully.
“A couple of minutes ago, I might have agreed with you,” Cindy told him, "but thinking about it, I’ve started to realize that I know as little about them as you do.”
“But you’re a yanqui,” Paco protested.
“A white yanqui, as you’ve just clearly pointed out,” Cindy said. “A white yanqui from way out in the boonies.”
What did the fact that she had been brought up in a village have to do with it? he wondered.
He was village-bred, too – but they had both traveled, and if anyone had asked him about the gitanos of the south of Spain or the Basques in the north, he could have given a considered opinion.
Cindy reached into her pocket, fumbled for a cigarette, and lit it distractedly.
“Jeez, I never knew how ignorant I really was until now,” she said.
“Ignorant?”
“Look, there were a few Negroes around in the area I grew up in, but they certainly didn't live anywhere near where the white people did. And if they came into town – which I suppose they had to do occasionally – they made pretty damn sure they kept well out of white folk's way.”
“You’re saying they didn't mix at all?” Paco asked incredulously.
“Shit, yes. Back home, the Negroes are expected to know their place. If they were being served in a store and a white person came in, they accepted it as natural that the guy behind the counter would abandon their order and deal with the new customer first. That’s just the way things were.”
“They didn't resent it?”
Cindy gave him a troubled frown.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “Thinking about it, I expect they probably did. But they knew better than to complain. They were brought up understanding that if they ever stepped out of line – if they looked at a white woman in the wrong way, for example – they’d soon find themselves in serious trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Cindy shrugged awkwardly. “You know.”
“No, I don’t,” Paco told her. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well, look, nothing like this has ever happened in my town, you understand, but from the stories you read in the papers, it seems as if a couple of dozen Negroes get ... get lynched every year.”
“Lynched!” Paco repeated, his incredulity growing. “You mean hanged. Until they’re dead?”
Cindy nodded. “Hung from a tree – and left hanging there as a warning to all the others.”
“And don’t the police do anything about it?”
Cindy sighed.
“I imagine they could if they wanted to,” she admitted. “But most of the lynchings seem to take place in small communities.”
“So?”
“The local sheriffs probably know who was involved, but ...” she shrugged again, “... even if they have no sympathy with the killers, they still have to live in the town when it’s all over, and I guess they think the best thing to do is to look the other way.”
Paco found himself thinking back to his childhood – to the village where the landowners rode around on their grand horses and the peasants were expected to show the proper deference. In a way, he supposed, the Negroes in the United States must live under similar conditions. But there was one big diff
erence – it didn’t take wealth or a fine house to make you one of the aristocracy over in America, you only had to be white!
And what power over life and death that skin color seemed to give you. Though the Spanish guardia civil, acting in the interests of the landlords, had habitually beaten up peasants who were seen as troublemakers, not even that notoriously heartless band of men would ever have considered stringing one of those peasants up from a tree.
“What about when you went to college?” he asked Cindy. “There must have been black men there, mustn’t there?”
“Not as students,” Cindy told him. “There are a few colleges which admit Negroes, but they’re only for Negroes. The only black men I saw were janitors and gardeners. And then, of course, there were the Georges.”
“The Georges?”
“On the trains in the States we have what are called Pullman coaches. They’re named after George Pullman, who was the guy who designed them. All the attendants on the Pullmans are black – I think it’s considered quite a good job for a Negro – and they’re all called George.”
“You mean, you can’t get the job in one of those coaches unless your first name is George?”
Cindy laughed.
“Of course not. But all the attendants are called after George Pullman, whatever their real names are.” The smile turned into another frown. “I accused you of being racially prejudiced a while back, didn't I?”
“Yes, but as I explained ...”
“You know what? It’s not you who’s really prejudiced. It’s me! Sure, I was horrified when I read about lynchings in the newspapers – but I’ve never questioned the idea that I should make the mess and some black guy should clean it up after me. So I’m not as bad as the son-of-a-bitch who puts the rope around some poor black sap’s neck – but I’m bad enough. And it took coming to Spain, and talking to you, to make me even realize it.”
Paco was realizing something, too. If his Cindy could have thought like that, how would other people – without her humanity – have looked on the Negroes?
The Fifth Column Page 5
