The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

But Paco couldn’t do it!

  He simply couldn’t bring himself to say that they should leave now, only to be told in return that he could go if he wished, and she would join him later, after spending some time catching up on things with her old and dear friend, Greg Cummings.

  As he rose to his feet, it felt as if his legs had turned to lead.

  “I think I’ll go and see what’s happened to Felipe,” he said. “He might have some useful thoughts about the case.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Cindy replied. “I’ll see you back at the widow’s house.”

  And he noticed that even as she was speaking to him, she could not resist glancing across the room at Cummings.

  Paco stepped out of the stuffy bar and into the cold night air. Why did this have to happen, he wondered? Why should the one thing which was right about his life suddenly start to disintegrate before his eyes?

  Though he had told Cindy that he needed to talk to Felipe, he now decided that was the last thing he wanted to do. The fat constable knew him so well that he would soon sense that something was wrong, and Paco didn’t feel strong enough to explain it all to him. So, instead, he would go back to his room in the widow’s house, and try to suppress his feeling of self-pity just long enough to be able to fall into some kind of sleep.

  He had walked perhaps twenty meters up the street when he heard the sound of footsteps behind him.

  And not just any footsteps – not ordinary, innocent footsteps.

  Whoever it was behind was matching his pace, slowing down when he did, putting on a burst of speed when that was necessary to maintain the same gap between them.

  Paco felt a chill run down his back which he knew had nothing to do with the air temperature.

  Could the unseen presence be the murderer?

  It would certainly not be the first time that a killer who was worried that he was getting far too close to a solution had stalked him.

  It had happened during the investigation into the headless corpse at Atocha railway station.

  He had happened in the mountains outside Madrid, when he’d been trying to solve the case of the general’s dog.

  He had survived on those occasions – but there was a good chance that, this time, he might not be quite so lucky!

  There was a cross street looming just a few meters ahead of him, and seeing it, one part of his brain began to formulate a plan, while another part regulated his speed and made sure his body gave no indication he was about to make his move.

  He approached the corner as if he had no interest in doing anything but going straight on, then suddenly veered to the right, disappearing up the side street. He had taken two steps when he came to a halt, pulled his pistol out of his overcoat, and flattened himself against the wall.

  The footsteps continued to click-click along the street he had just left, then slowed as they reached the corner. There could no longer be any doubt that he was being followed.

  A dark shape turned the corner. With one hand he reached forward and grabbed it, slamming it against the side of the house. He raised the other hand – the one which was holding his weapon – and jammed the pistol’s barrel against his shadow’s neck.

  “What do you want?” he demanded roughly. “Why are you following me?”

  “Christ, you play a rough game, don’t you, Inspector?” said an obviously female voice.

  Paco stepped back and lowered his gun.

  “Señorita McBride? Is that you?” he asked.

  “Damn straight, it is.”

  “You were following me, weren’t you?” “Obviously.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to buy you a drink.”

  “That’s the only reason, is it?”

  “Sure. I wanted to buy you a drink, and since your Miss Walker has singularly failed to take a shine to me – for some reason I don’t even begin to understand – I thought it might be diplomatic to wait until she wasn’t around before I issued the invitation. So what do you say? You want a drink or not?”

  “I want a drink,” Paco told her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In purely physical terms, the bar which Paco allowed Dolores McBride to lead him to was almost the twin of the one he’d left Cindy and Greg Cummings in possession of. The room was more or less the same shape and size, the zinc counter and barrels of wine almost identical, and even the tin of olives had probably come from the same canning factory in Andalusia. The customers, however, were weather-beaten peasants and mechanics who were still wearing their oily overalls – men who belonged, rather than men who had merely been uneasily transplanted there from their homes across the ocean.

  Several of the drinkers greeted Dolores by name, and as soon as she and Paco had sat down at a free table, the barman placed a bottle of Fundador brandy and two glasses in front of them.

  “You’re a regular, are you?” Paco asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve been here a few times before,” Dolores agreed.

  “Did Sam Johnson drink here?”

  “No, he didn’t approve of the place.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s an individualista bar. It belongs to a guy called Pepe – not to the collective.”

  “Then I’m a little surprised your principles allow you to drink here,” Paco said.

  Dolores grinned. “Comrade Stalin wouldn’t mind.” “He wouldn’t?”

  “Hell, no! This isn’t Russia, and Comrade Stalin doesn’t expect it to be a communist state.”

  “So what does he expect?”

  “Comrade Stalin’s aim is to stop fascism, and he’s decided that the best way to do that is by helping to establish a liberal democracy here. That’s what America and the other Western powers should be fighting for, too – and they would be, if they had leaders who were geniuses like the General Secretary.”

  Dolores uncapped the bottle, poured out two very generous shots of brandy, then knocked most of hers back in one gulp.

  “It ain’t as good as the bourbon we can get back home,” she continued, licking her lips, “but it’s sure as hell better than nothing.”

  “Have you always drunk so heavily?” Paco asked.

  Many women would have been offended by such a question, but Dolores merely shrugged.

  “Not always,” she said. “I’ve only gotten like this since I’ve been in Spain. This is a goddamn awful war, you know.”

  “But a necessary one?”

  “Yeah, it’s necessary – but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear.” Dolores topped up her glass again, but did not take a drink. “I’ve been here for two months – since the first batch of American brigadistas arrived,” she told Paco. “I got to know some of the early guys really well. Half of the ones I made friends with in the first month are dead now, and I wouldn’t give the rest of them much of a chance of survival. Why is it always the good men who have to die?”

  “Because they are the good men?” Paco suggested.

  Dolores threw back her head, and laughed heartily – though not without bitterness.

  “My God, a philosopher as well as a cop,” she said. “So how’s the investigation going? Have you come round to the idea that Sam was killed by somebody from outside San Antonio yet?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Paco replied. “I still don’t know enough about the case to make any kind of judgement.” He took a sip of his brandy. “I met a man called Greg Cummings at the town hall,” he continued, forcing himself to sound casual. “Do you know him?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “What’s your opinion of him?”

  “He’s a liberal.”

  It wasn’t what Paco had been expecting – or hoping for. He’d wanted some detailed information on the man he was coming to see as a rival, and instead Dolores had just slapped a label on him.

  “What’s wrong with liberals?” he asked.

  “Hell, you’re Spanish, so you should know the answer to that better than anybody,” Dolores replied. “Who was it who man
aged to keep General Mola’s troops out of Madrid? Was it the liberals? Or was it the communists and their comrades in the socialist party?”

  It was an easy question to answer, Paco thought. When the army had revolted, the liberal government had done little more than issue a few stern-sounding decrees, which, without any force whatsoever to back them up, had been nothing but hot air. Even when that same government had finally decided to arm the workers, it had given them rifles without bolts, and it had been workers themselves who had led a brave and bloody attack on the Montana barracks – which was then being held by the fascists – in order to capture the bolts they needed.

  “See, the liberals think that the system’s basically sound as it is, and all they need to do in order to make it run more fairly is to find the right way of tinkering with it,” Dolores said, warming to her theme. “I’ve never met a liberal yet who didn’t believe that due to his efforts, he’d leave the world in a whole lot better state than he found it in.”

  “And the communists?”

  “We know that the system is rotten to the core, and the only way to deal with it is to sweep it all away and start over again. But what makes us really different from the liberals is that we’re not necessarily expecting to see things change in our lifetimes. We know that we’re all nothing more than very small cogs in a very big machine. We’re totally expendable, and we’re willing cannon fodder. And the most we can ever hope for is that our personal sacrifice will help move the inevitable collapse of capitalism just one tiny step closer.”

  “So the individual doesn’t matter? Not at all?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Then why does the thought of your dead comrades make you want to hit the bottle?”

  Dolores McBride grinned ruefully.

  “You’ve got me there,” she admitted. “I guess that however much we tell ourselves we believe in scientific socialism, they’ll always be a bit of bourgeois sentimentality lurking in some dark corner of us – at least, until the Revolution comes.”

  “How well did you know Sam Johnson?” Paco asked.

  “We talked together quite a few times. He’s going to be one of the subjects of my book.”

  “What book?”

  “The one I'm writing about the brigadistas.”

  “Tell me about it,” Paco said.

  “I think these guys are real heroes,” Dolores said seriously.

  “So do I.”

  “But that isn’t the way the American government – or a lot of the American people for that matter – see them. They’re simply Reds as far as most folk back home are concerned. And to them, that’s almost as bad as being a child molester. So that’s why I have to write the book – to tell the truth, to get it all down on record while there’s still the chance. It’s going to be the brigadistas’ memorial – probably the only one they’re ever likely to get.”

  More bourgeois sentimentality emerging from her dark corners, Paco thought.

  And why the hell not?

  “What did Sam Johnson tell you about himself?” he asked.

  Dolores laughed again.

  “He told me a lot of things. Like, for example, how difficult it had been for him to get hold of a passport when he didn’t have a birth certificate.”

  “Had he lost his birth certificate?”

  Dolores shook her head.

  “Never had one to lose. In Mississippi, where he grew up, they didn’t issue Negroes with birth certificates. Or death certificates, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “The state didn’t register the birth and death of animals – why should it have treated blacks any other way?”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He told me about walking twelve miles each way to a shack of a school, to be taught by a teacher who hadn’t even graduated from high school himself. And how, even then, the law only allowed the school to stay open for five months of the year, because for the rest of the time, the niggers – even the young ones – were needed for picking and chopping cotton. Incredible, isn’t it? And don’t forget, I’m not describing a dark, distant past – this is our century I’m talking about.”

  What Cindy had told him about the lynching had been horrifying enough, Paco thought – but, in a way, this was worse. Because it was not the work of a few individuals who had gone off the rails, in much the same way as people had done in Madrid during the first few, mad weeks of the war. This was institutional repression!

  The Spanish State of his childhood had not – God knew – done much to help the children of the pueblos, but at least it hadn’t gone out of its way to keep them down in the dirt.

  “I’m surprised that growing up in a place like that, Sam Johnson ever managed to find his way to Spain,” he said.

  “He wouldn’t have, if he'd stayed back home in Mississippi. But he didn’t. He moved to New York City. Do you want to know what it was that made him move to New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “He had this cousin who’d lived in New York for years, and who’d gone down south to visit his family. He was in Mississippi for a few weeks, and all through his stay he did his best to try and persuade Sam to go back with him. Sure, life was tough on Negroes on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, he said. It was tough on Negroes everywhere. But New York was one hell of a lot better on them than Mississippi. Sam wouldn’t be persuaded, but he did agree to go to the railroad station with his cousin to see him off.

  All the way there, and right up the time they were standing on the platform, the cousin was urging him to just get on the train and at least give the big city a try. Still, Sam wouldn’t say yes. Anyway, it was a boiling hot day in July, and the train was delayed. Sam was getting thirstier and thirstier, but there was nothing he could do about it, because the blacks-only water fountain had broken down months earlier, and nobody had bothered to fix it.”

  “The blacks-only fountain!” Paco repeated, not quite sure whether or not he had heard correctly.

  “That’s right,” Dolores agreed. “There was one fountain for the blacks and another for the whites. So, they were standing there, and the cousin must have been getting thirsty too, because he said, ‘I sure could use a drink of water,’ and he started to walk towards the fountain which was reserved for the white people. Sam grabbed hold of his arm, and asked him if he was crazy. The cousin had been away from the south so long that at first he didn’t understand what Sam was saying. And Sam couldn’t understand why his cousin didn’t understand him. ‘What happens if you drink water from a whites-only fountain in New York?’ he asked. And his cousin told him that there were no whites-only fountains there. That’s what made Sam decide to go with him – because New York was a place you could always get a drink of water when you needed one.”

  “And was life better for him there?”

  “As his cousin had promised him, it wasn’t easy, but it was easier than what he’d been used to. Negroes had to take the jobs the whites wouldn’t touch – or else did the same job as the whites and got paid less – but at least Sam could stand next to a white woman on a street car without worrying about being lynched.”

  “What job did he have?”

  “He was a busboy on the railroad dining car at first, but eventually he worked his way up to being a waiter. It wasn’t a great job. The waiters got fed, but not the diners’ leftovers – that was considered too good for them. They weren’t allowed to leave the dining car at night, either – can’t have niggers running around on their own, now can you? – so after they’d been locked in, they put the tables together and slept as best they could. It wasn’t even a steady job – they were taken on for one trip, and after that, if they were unlucky, they might not work for weeks. But like I said, it was a hell of a lot better than Mississippi, and most Negroes would have given their right arms to have taken his place.”

  “Did he work there right up until the time he came to Spain?”

  “He could have, if he’d kept his head down and just got o
n with the job. But that wasn’t Sam’s way. Unions were legal by then – President Roosevelt had seen to that – but they weren’t exactly encouraged. Still, there was a union for white railroad employees, and Sam didn’t see why the blacks shouldn’t have one, too, so he set about organizing a local branch.”

  “It cost him his job?”

  “It almost cost him his life. He got beaten up real bad on the way home from a union meeting. The railroad company said it had nothing to do with the attack. And maybe it didn’t. There are plenty of other people in the States who hate unions. Anyway, when Sam came out of hospital, he had no job to go back to. That’s when the Party took him on. For the next three years he traveled all round the country helping to organize strikes and pickets. He was beaten up a couple of times more, but never as badly as the first time. Then Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, and Sam decided he would be more use there than he was back home. But the war in Africa was over before we even had time to do anything about it – so he came to Spain instead.”

  It all sounded so straightforward, Paco thought – a life sketched out in a few sentences. But it couldn’t have been as simple as that.

  Or as easy.

  Every step Samuel Johnson had taken must have required a tre-mendous amount of both effort and courage. And now he was dead – killed by some bastard who probably wasn’t worthy of licking his boots.

  “I want Sam’s murderer caught as much as you do,” Dolores said, “but like I told you before, he’ll be long gone by now.”

  “And what if he isn’t?” Paco asked. “What if he’s still somewhere in San Antonio?”

  “You check on the brigadistas movements at the time of the murder, and you’ll find they’ve all got alibis.”

  “How can you he so sure of that?”

  Dolores looked suddenly uncomfortable – as if he’d noticed a vulnerable spot which she hadn’t even known was visible.

  “The Party believes that unity is strength,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Apart from when they’re out on specific individual missions, it encourages its members to stay together at all times.”

  “So that it’s easier to keep tabs on them?”