The Fifth Column

by James Garcia Woods

  “When I was going to have Ted Donaldson shot.” Paco chuckled.

  “You might fool others, Commissar, but you don’t fool me,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon!” Clay replied, as always more than willing to take offence when he thought his dignity was being challenged.

  “You never thought Donaldson was guilty,” Paco said. “You only pretended to, in order to flush the real murderer out.”

  Clay smiled.

  “I might have known you’d spot that,” he said. He became serious again. “How long had Dolores McBride been working for Leon Trotsky, do you think?”

  “We’ll probably never know the answer to that,” Paco admitted. “She was very clever at hiding her true allegiance. If Trotsky hadn’t become desperate – if he hadn't seen for himself what a great success the International Brigade was going to be, she might have stayed hidden for years. But Trotsky did see it, and realized he had to do something soon. That’s why he took the risk of having Dolores exposed. He just couldn’t stand the thought of Comrade Stalin having yet another triumph.”

  “But why Johnson?” Clay asked. “If she really wanted to destroy the brigade, why not kill someone important?”

  “I think Johnson’s death was no more than a rehearsal,” Paco said confidentially. “I believe – though I can’t prove it – that her next target was the one intended to strike the really devastating blow. I’m almost certain that what Greg Cummings had found out was that she was planning to kill you!”

  “And that’s why she shot him?”

  “Yes. If only I’d arrived a few minutes earlier, I might have been able to save his life. As it was, all I could do was avenge his murder.”

  “It’s a pity you had to kill her,” Clay said. “If she’d lived, we could have put her on trial. That would have shown the world what a villain Trotsky really is.”

  “The world already knows it,” Paco said. “At least, the part of the world which has stopped believing the capitalists’ lies does. Still, I would have taken her alive if I could have. But you know what Trotsky’s fanatical followers are like. They’ve come to accept their own lies – and she chose to die rather than admit the truth.”

  The train, hissing steam, rumbled heavily onto the platform.

  “There’s one more thing I should say before we go, Commissar Clay,” Paco said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “I hope you’ll do all that’s within your power to keep away from the front line.”

  “Keep away from the front line!”

  “Yes. And I’ll tell you why. Any man can be a front line soldier, but it takes a real man – a man with balls – to force himself to stay back at headquarters and make sure that everything is running smoothly there.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Clay agreed. “I’ll certainly give the matter some thought.”

  The train pulled slowly out of the station. Cindy took one last look at the few lights still twinkling in Albacete, then turned to face Paco.

  “I’ve seen some snow jobs in my time,” she said, grinning, “but the one you did on Clay takes the prize. Weren’t you afraid that you were going a bit too far with all that guff about the wonderful Comrade Stalin and diabolic Trotsky?”

  If his shoulder had permitted it, Paco would have shrugged.

  “Men believe what they want to believe,” he said. “It suits Commissar Clay to see things in those terms, and if I talk back to him in the same meaningless jargon, that only proves to him that I'm at last starting to show a modicum of intelligence. And as to what I said about him staying away from the front line...”

  “Yes?”

  “If he chooses to believe he’ll serve the cause better in Albacete than he could on the battlefield, that can only be to the advantage of the combat troops who would otherwise have to follow his orders.”

  Cindy grinned again.

  “You just can’t help interfering in other people’s lives, can you?”

  “No,” Paco agreed. “That’s probably why I’m a detective.”

  “Do you want to tell me why Greg Cummings tried to kill me now?” Cindy asked.

  “Certainly,” Paco agreed, “but first we have to go into a little of the essential background.”

  Cindy gave a loud stage groan.

  “Oh, not that,” she pleaded. “I’m not sure I could stand another session of hearing just how clever you’ve been.”

  “And you won’t,” Paco promised. “The person who held the vital piece of information which cracked this case was you.”

  “OK, I’ll buy it,” Cindy said, resignedly. “Give me all the ‘essential background’ I’ll need.”

  “Dolores and Cummings had absolutely no idea what a hornets’ nest they’d be stirring up when they killed Samuel Johnson,” Paco explained. “They thought that in all the confusion of war, nobody would have the time to pay much attention to it. What they hadn’t foreseen was the effect it would have on the morale of the battalion itself, so it came as a complete surprise to them when the government sent me in to investigate.”

  “Us in to investigate,” Cindy said.

  “Us in to investigate,” Paco agreed. “And that caught them on the hop. Up until that point, they hadn’t seen the need to provide themselves with alibis, and suddenly they did need one.”

  “So they decided to give each other alibis?”

  “Exactly. But they needed a reason to explain why they were together.”

  “Do people need reasons?”

  “They did. They’d been working together, on behalf of their boss in Moscow, for some time. But in order to keep that fact hidden, they had been feigning complete indifference to each other. So it would have been highly suspicious if they’d suddenly become close friends – close enough to prefer each other’s company to the fiestas on the night that Samuel Johnson was killed. Unless...”

  “Unless they could explain it all away by pretending they’d been having a secret affair,” Cindy interrupted.

  “Yes. No man’s going to want to watch fireworks when he can have sex instead. Why should anybody even think to question that they were screwing when Johnson was killed? Not only that, but as a bonus they could use the same alibi to cover them for the attack on you.”

  “And this time, they’d have a witness to the dirty deed?”

  “That’s right. Dolores always intended me to catch them at it – she deliberately invited me to visit her at six o’clock because she thought that if I found them deep in an ‘act of passion’, it would never occur to me that they’d only been together for a few minutes. And she was quite correct – it didn’t. Of course, I should really have spotted the clues, and not been fooled for a moment.”

  “What clues?”

  “Dolores put on a show for me – parading around naked. Cummings, on the other hand, quickly covered himself up. Now why was that?”

  “The answer to the first part of that question could simply be that the vain bitch wanted you to see what a beautiful body she had,” Cindy said, only a little bitterly.

  “She did – but not because she was vain. She wanted me to be looking at her, rather than at Cummings, in case I noticed that, despite the fact that were supposed to have been rutting like goats, he didn’t have an erection.”

  “Well, of course he didn’t have an erection!” Cindy said. “Greg was a homosexual through and through. All his students knew that, and the only reason we kept quiet about it was that he was such a nice guy that we didn’t want to get him into trouble.”

  “And that was why you had to be eliminated – because you knew. The alibi only held together as long as I thought of Cummings as being heterosexual. Once you’d told me the truth, as you did just after you regained consciousness, I started looking in the right direction at last.”

  “So they tried to kill me to protect Greg’s little secret.”

  “That was the main reason – but it wasn’t the only one. I needed a translator, and if I couldn’t use you, I’d have
to use Dolores. That put them right inside our camp. They could find out exactly how the investigation was going and – if necessary – throw in a few red herrings to put me off the scent.”

  “How did Mannie Lowenstein manage to pick up the scent?” Cindy asked.

  “He didn’t – not completely. And if Dolores hadn’t overplayed her hand, he probably wouldn’t have got it even half-right. But she did overplay her hand.”

  “You mean when she put all those words about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Ted Donaldson’s mouth?”

  “I mean just that. Lowenstein knew there was a streak of anti-Semitism running through Donaldson. He’d pointed it out himself during the meeting in the council chamber. But he’d seen enough of the man to realize Donaldson wasn’t extreme enough to believe that there was an internationalist Zionist community bent on dominating the world. So if Donaldson hadn’t made those outrageous statements, then Dolores was lying. And if she was lying, it had to be because she had something to hide. That’s why he followed her – and that’s why we’re still alive.”

  “I could have worked all that out for myself, you know, given time,” Cindy said, yawning.

  “I’m sure you could,” Paco replied, covering his mouth with his hand to hide his smile.

  “I’m suddenly very tired,” Cindy told him. “I think I’ll try to grab a couple of hours sleep.”

  “After all you’ve been through, that’s probably a very good idea,” Paco agreed.

  Cindy closed her eyes and was soon asleep. Paco turned his head to look out of the window. He couldn’t see the rolling Castilian countryside in the darkness – but he knew it was there.

  They would be back in Madrid in the morning, he thought. And after that, there would be a few weeks of recuperation before he was sent out to the front again. He wondered if he would survive the war, and if – with the strong chance that the other side would win – he even really wanted to.

  If you enjoyed The Fifth Column, please share your thoughts by leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

  For more discounted reads and a free eBook when you join, sign up to our newsletter.

  And why not follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for more great book news.