Three Passports to Trouble
Interzone Mystery Book Two
By Sean McLachlan
To Almudena, my wife
And Julián, my son
Copyright 2018 Sean McLachlan, all rights reserved.
Cover design by Andrés Alonso-Herrero.
The characters in this work of fiction are fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER ONE
The body lay at the dead end of a narrow alley in the medina, right in front of an arched wooden door. The whitewashed frame was speckled with green dots to show that the resident had gone on the Hajj to Mecca. Darker spots, newer ones, were mixed in with the green. The victim lay twisted as if he had been running, came around the corner to find this sudden dead end, and turned to meet death in the form of the large knife stuck in his chest.
Both the body and the knife were European. The victim looked in his middle years, a tall, thin man with a face and clothes that said Spanish, although it was sometimes hard to tell in Tangier, where people came from all over and mixed freely. The knife was easier to place—standard Spanish army issue. The pockets were turned out but I didn’t think this was a robbery. First off, the guy’s clothes were old and patched, his workman’s shoes down at the heel, and he was thin as a rake. Not even your average medina thug would be desperate enough to go after this guy. More likely the murderer turned out the pockets and removed whatever little they contained in order to make it look like a robbery, or some street boy did it hoping for enough coins that he could eat that night without having to peddle his body. I hoped the second was true.
“One of yours?” Gerald asked.
Gerald was Gerald Richardson, Tangier’s chief of police. Official title: Commissaire, Chef de la Súreté, Police Générale. Despite the French title, the Treaty of Algeciras dictated that the post be taken by someone from the United Kingdom. All the important jobs in the International Zone were divvied up by country in this way. When you have nine different countries running the show, everyone wants their little piece of the pie but no one gets a satisfying bite.
Gerald was a decent guy—a rare trait for a cop—and he knew the city better than almost anyone.
Not better than me, of course.
“What do you mean, ‘one of mine’?” I asked.
“Old comrade in arms,” Gerald asked, emphasizing the word “comrade.”
“Could be. I don’t recognize him, though.”
“Come now, Shorty. I was hoping you’d be more help than that.”
That’s me—Kent “Shorty” MacAllister. A whisker shy of five-five, I’d had that nickname since I was a teenager. I’d gotten used to it.
“Well, he wasn’t in the tank corps,” I said.
“He’s six feet if he’s an inch,” Gerald agreed. “Quite tall for a Spaniard.”
Spain was a poor country where many of its people grew up without enough to eat. That was one of the reasons I had joined the tank corps, to fight Franco and change all that.
Gerald and I stood over the body. A Moorish policeman stood a little behind, keeping the curious from coming around the corner to stare. Not that it would make any difference. The news would be all over town by now, spread first by the fish vendor going door to door on his early morning rounds with his cart. If you lived in the medina, which thankfully I didn’t, that was your second wakeup call after the muezzin’s dawn call to prayer, these guys coming up from the port after the night’s boats had unloaded their catch, the rattle of the cart and the cry of “Hoat! Hoat!” (“Fish! Fish!”) announcing of the start of a new day.
The fish vendor had discovered the body and pounded on the nearest doors to raise the alarm. The neighbors summoned a cop. The cop dispersed the curious crowd, who had gone to their neighbors and local cafes to tell of what they had seen. From there, the news would have rippled out across the labyrinth of the medina, flowing like water through the alleys and little squares before cresting uphill to inform the Casbah, then running across the cliff-top sea views of Marshan and eventually to the Mountain where the rich foreigners lived. It would have spread the other direction as well, to Tangerville with its modern apartment buildings, swank shops, and French cafes set along the curve of Tangier Bay. Murders weren’t rare in Tangier, but a Spaniard killed by a Spanish army knife was something special, something to gossip about. The whole city would know by noon.
I had a feeling the killer wanted it that way.
“I suppose no one saw or heard anything,” I said.
“See no evil, hear no evil, suffer no evil. It’s the law of the medina,” Gerald said.
He crouched by the body and dusted the knife handle. He did not find any prints.
“Well that’s some bad luck,” the police chief said. “Our man had the sense to wear gloves. That doesn’t mean a professional, though. Any one with a good head on their shoulders would wear gloves if they intended on killing someone. That suggests premeditation, a grudge perhaps. But I doubt this was a crime of passion. See how there’s only one stab straight to the heart? If this had been driven by emotion there would have been several stab wounds.”
“You’re right, this was thought through and deliberate.”
“Didn’t think it through enough to do it somewhere a little less public. Crime of opportunity? Was our man walking around with knife and gloves in his pocket, awaiting a good chance?” Gerald put the fingerprint powder back in a little case that carried the tools of his trade.
“What time do you think this happened?” I asked.
“Rigor mortis has only partially set in. I tested the joints before you arrived and was able to move them, although it took some effort. I estimate he’s been dead about six hours. It couldn’t have been much more than that or there would have been no shortage of witnesses. This part of the medina doesn’t clear out until after midnight.”
“But why kill this guy at all? You might be right to ask after the political angle. You think this dagger was used as a statement?”
Gerald didn’t have answers to those questions any more than I did, so he stood there and lit a cigarette, studying the body.
Two more Moorish policemen appeared. Gerald ordered them to wrap the body in a sheet they had brought and carry him away. Gerald gave this order in French. All official business was done in French or English and if a Moor wanted a government job, he needed to learn one or both. Gerald didn’t speak much Arabic. For his position, he didn’t need to.
I spoke it pretty well. As a detective in this town, it helped with my work.
“Well, Shorty old chap, see what you can sniff out. We’ll give you your usual retainer. The Spanish are a closed group but you have an in, and I suspect you’d like to get to the bottom of this as much as I.”
Probably more, I thought, taking a last look at the dead man’s face before the police wrapped him up in the sheet, lifted him, and carried him down the alley like a carpet. Something was familiar about that face. I’d seen this guy around. Not sure where, but it would come to me.
And I knew the first place I should check.
CHAPTER TWO
Cafe Manara stood at the lower end of the Petit Socco, the heart of the Moorish quarter and less than a ten-minute walk (or a few minutes’ chase) from the murder scene.
The Petit Socco is an oblong plaza a little smaller than a football field hemmed in by whitewashed buildings three or four stories high. Several alleys pass out of it, leading downhill to the port, uphill along Silversmith’s Street through the Jewish Quarter and beyond to the Grand Socco, while other alleys lead into the medina, the maze of the Arab quarter. I’d been living in this town for years and sometimes I
still got lost in all those twisting little alleys.
People watching is the favorite past time here (besides drinking, smoking kif, and sleeping with prostitutes of both sexes), and the Petit Socco is the best place to do it. Everyone passed through it several times a day. At least everyone worth watching. The idle rich, which Tangier had in spades, hid up on the Mountain or in Tangerville and rarely set foot in the medina. Too many natives. It was fine by me if those social parasites stayed in their mansions. They weren’t very interesting anyway.
Because it was such a center, cafes ringed the entire plaza. My favorite was the Tingis, with a nice crowd of Moors and Europeans, grifters and chancers. Sitting out front at one of the chipped marble tables, you were at the top of the sloped plaza and could look out across the whole place and see everyone who came and went. I used it as an office more than I used my real one off Boulevard Pasteur in Tangerville.
More upmarket was the Cafe Central on the left-hand side of the Petit Socco as you looked downhill, where under a bright yellow awning sat a crowd of poseurs, the better-off French and Spanish (these things being relative), various tourists just off the boat, and a fat German procurer named Hans who would get those tourists any young body they desired for a vastly inflated price.
Across the way and further down slope, tucked into a ratty little corner of the plaza, was the Cafe Manara. It sat at the opening to Rue Mokhtar Ahardan, the entrance to the medina’s roughest area. If you walked down there at night and didn’t get accosted by a drug dealer or a prostitute in your first ten steps, then you must be wearing a policeman’s uniform. If you were wearing one, it would take twenty steps.
It was no accident that the Cafe Manara was stuck next to this grimy and dangerous lane. It was the poorest of the Petit Socco’s cafes, used almost exclusively by Spaniards who lived in Tangier, both those who had been born here and republicanos who fled after the fall of Madrid. No tourists went to Cafe Manara, certainly not the well-to-do Spaniards who came on holiday. They gathered in the Cafe Central and swapped war stories with former officers from Franco’s victorious army.
The bastards.
Despite the early hour, Cafe Manara was packed and the crowd looked grim and angry. All the tables on the patio were taken, so I passed through the large open double doors to find a table inside.
The cafe had a low interior, made lower by an interior balcony, the edge of which painted purple. That made a big purple band visible from outside, framed by the canary yellow of the building itself and a red awning. The colors of the old Spanish flag. It was the not-so-subtle sign that this was republicano territory.
Gerald was right. I did have an in here.
I spotted an empty table just inside the front door, with a view of the Petit Socco through a grubby window. All around me, Spanish men were discussing the murder.
Before I’d even settled in my chair, I’d caught the victim’s name.
Juan Cardona. Name didn’t ring a bell. Catalan, from the sound of it.
“Buenos dias, camarada. ¿Me puedo sentar?”
I looked up and saw García, head of the dockworkers in Tangier’s port and probably the most powerful Spaniard in town, unofficially at any rate. He was my height, broad shouldered with a deeply tanned face and little black moustache. He’d been a Communist agitator for years before Franco attacked the Republic, and had been one of the first to enlist in the UGT militia, the Unión General de Trabajadores. The Spanish officials who helped run the International Zone would have loved to slap him in jail, but the Interzone was neutral territory. That’s why so many republicano refugees had moved here even though it was partially run by Franco’s agents. The other countries who jointly ran Tangier as a free port made sure the Spanish officials behaved themselves.
What those officials didn’t know, or were paid not to know, was that García ran much of the smuggling that came through the port. He must have made a bundle, but like a good comrade he shared it out among the Spanish refugees who needed it.
“You’re always welcome at my table, comrade,” I said in Spanish.
That wasn’t strictly true. García was too obvious in his affiliations. I preferred the subtler approach. While a lot of people knew my background, they assumed I was no longer a Party activist. I liked it that way.
I’d worked with García before, but I always preferred to see him a little less publicly. At least this time I could make the excuse that I was investigating the murder.
García sat. “Did the police chief put you on this business?”
“Why do you ask that? Maybe I just wanted a change of atmosphere.”
García chuckled. “You picked the wrong atmosphere. Juan Cardona was no regular here.”
“No?” That was surprising.
“He was CNT.”
I raised an eyebrow. CNT stood for Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, an anarchist organization. They’d been big back in the Republic, bigger even than the Communists in the early days. Screwy ideas, though. So far to the left that they made me look like a Wall Street fat cat.
“The CNT don’t come here?” I asked.
García made an expansive gesture. “All republicanos are welcome here, my friend, even American detectives, but the CNT cause trouble. Always getting into arguments and pointing fingers. They claim the Communists sold out to Stalin and that’s why we lost.”
I didn’t reply. The Communists had sold out to Stalin, but that wasn’t why we lost. We lost because the Republic was made up of too many small parties that couldn’t get along. We spent too much energy arguing revolutionary politics and not enough supporting the front. Hell, half the time I was stuck in the rear areas because my T-26 didn’t have parts for repairs, or shells for the gun. Or a different militia had all the fuel and wouldn’t share. There were dividing lines everywhere you looked. One of the biggest had been between the Communists and the anarchists. They kept calling general strikes on each other or would hold up supplies earmarked for the other factions.
García went on.
“Even so, the people here are angry. I had to talk some hotheads out of causing trouble this morning. Everyone heard about the SS dagger stuck into his body.”
“It wasn’t an SS dagger, it was a Spanish army dagger.” In less than two hours the story had already gotten exaggerated. That was how the grapevine worked here.
García waved his hands in the air. “It’s all the same. It’s obvious the fascists killed him out of revenge for his work in Catalonia.”
“Come on, you know how easy it is to get a knife like that here. I could go up to the Grand Socco and buy one right now. Franco’s Moorish troops got issued that exact make, and when they came home a lot of them brought their kit with them. There must be hundreds in circulation.”
“It was left as a message,” García said.
“Yes it was, but that doesn’t mean it was a fascist sending the message.”
García clicked his tongue and looked away.
“What do you know about him?” I asked.
“Not much. He was a lazy man. No vices except that, so life was cheap for him. He only worked when he needed to. Sometimes he’d pick up a day or two at the port. Other times he’d work at the Polish cannery when they needed extra help. I saw him around. Didn’t much talk to him. He was always spouting off their rubbish. You know how they are.”
“He was a good man,” croaked a voice by my side.
This was from the waiter, Gaspar, a broken down old wreck of a Spaniard. Gaunt, with a weary look on his face and just a white fringe of hair around his head, Gaspar looked perpetually tired and put upon. Life had obviously disappointed him once too often. He was a fixture here, tottering between tables, always looking ready to give up the ghost, and yet working twelve-hour days six days a week. He took Saturdays off, not Sundays, because he didn’t want anyone thinking he had fallen for religion, the “opiate of the people”, as Marx called it.
“You knew him?” I asked.
“He came in eve
ry now and then. We used to talk about art.”
“Art?”
“He had been an art student, long ago,” Gaspar croaked, his eyes not focusing on me but on something else. “Just like I was. I used to sketch in the Prado every day.”
“Is that so? I didn’t know you were an artist.”
A pained look came over his face. “Oh, I’m not an artist anymore. That was long ago. So, so long ago.” Suddenly a look of defiant anger blazed in his eyes. “Capitalism tries to crush any art that is not bourgeois art. In a revolutionary society, artists would be held up as heroes. They would not have to work at any job except creation. The state would take care of all their needs. Why should artists work? Their creation is their work, their revolutionary act!”
Uh-oh. I needed to get him back on track. “So what was Juan Cardona like? Did he always come in with the same people?”
Gaspar shook his head. “He didn’t come in much, because he had little money. But when he did come in he would always give me a cigarette or his newspaper if he was done with it. No, he didn’t come in very often. Sometimes with some of the other CNT people, but usually alone.”
“When was the last time you saw him here?”
Gaspar gave a tired shrug. “Who’s to know? There are so many people to serve. So much to do. Last week, I think. Yes, last week. He wasn’t as talkative as he usually was. I had just read an article in ABC Cultural about Goya. A shitty newspaper, monarchist and reactionary, but it has good articles on art history. The rest of the paper I use in the lavatory.”
García and I laughed. A favorite practice among the republicanos was to cut out pictures of Franco and his generals from the paper and use them as toilet tissue. I have to admit I’ve done that more than once myself.
“So I tried to speak with him about it,” Gaspar said. “I know he loved Goya. Goya was a real painter of the people, despite his bourgeois associations. But Juan seemed distracted, uninclined to talk. That wasn’t like him.”
Three Passports to Trouble Page 1
