Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  Santos was the first to call for quiet, followed by a chorus of older and disciplined members. He then tapped the microphone, and its tubercular, electronic cough proved more effective than the ‘ssh!’ of human voices.

  ‘The agenda is in the folder in front of you.’

  Sixty per cent of those present thought it necessary to check. Julian Mir ushered in a four-man crew from Televisión Española, who bathed the platform and the first four rows of tables in a flood of light. Like an animal incapable of modulation, their camera devoured reality with a single steady sound.

  ‘You can stay if you like,’ Garrido proposed as the TV men were saying goodbye.

  ‘That would be very interesting, but we’ve got to film the opening of the PSOE executive meeting.’

  ‘Go, then. But you’d find out more here.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘Meetings of communists are always more exciting.’

  Santos supported Garrido’s jokes with his smile. Martialay continued to wrestle with the written sheets of his intervention. After the TV men left, the doors were closed and silence settled in the room.

  ‘Let’s get it over quickly, because you know I can’t keep going without a smoke.’

  Laughter.

  The lights went out, as if the laughter had been badly received by the gods of electrical energy. A thick, unmistakable pall of darkness hung over the room.

  ‘Those Workers’ Commission people are always on strike,’ Garrido remarked. But the microphones did not pick up his joke.

  He wanted to say it louder, but he could not manage it. An icy pain crossed his English-wool vest and drained him of life.

  When the lights came back on, Santos was the first to realise that the scene had changed. It was not normal for Fernando Garrido to be slumped over the files, his mouth open and his eyes glassier than the thick-lensed spectacles fallen across his face. Santos rose as if something had painfully rubbed against his legs. The other communists stood in turn, stupefied, wondering what had happened. Then they rushed forward, overturning chairs as they went, to discover the reality of death.

  The will to awake was enough to wake him up. He switched on the radio, which was already fully tuned to Spain at Eight. ‘Profound national and international repercussions of the assassination of Fernando Garrido, general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain.’ Grief and sympathy at home and abroad. And the profound repercussions? The Spanish government has denied that troops are confined to barracks or that the Brunete armoured division has carried out special manoeuvres. The head of government has met with the secretary-general of PSOE and José Santos Pacheco from the executive committee of the Communist Party of Spain. Superintendent Fonseca has been appointed by the government to head the investigation into Fernando Garrido’s murder.

  ‘That bloody Fonseca strikes again,’ Carvalho said to himself as he switched off the radio. Fonseca’s gleaming eyes, lidless and watery. The smooth, blood-thirsty little rabbit. Superimposed on him, the image of Fernando Garrido twenty-five years ago—walking the gravel-path of a house beside the Marne, surrounded by young students who had come from ‘the interior’ for the 1956 summer school.

  ‘If the Spanish bourgeoisie is not prepared to assist our plan for national reconciliation, we shall not hesitate to pick up our guns again and set off for the mountains.’

  ‘Which mountains?’

  Garrido looked at him with a smile on his lips, but his eyes were cold and hard behind the glasses.

  ‘What are you studying? Haven’t you learnt yet that Spain is one of the most mountainous countries in Europe?’

  The others laughed and dispelled the tension. Now and again, however, Carvalho saw Garrido staring at him in a kind of silent warning from afar. Look out, kid. Don’t try to be smart. This is a serious business. During the rest period, when he wanted to be alone in the refreshing shade of the ash trees, Carvalho was accompanied by an old leader bearing all the scars of life and History. Such an exemplary life, it was implied, mocked the student’s petty irony which, a few minutes earlier, had deflated something as dramatic as the to-be-or-not-to-be of the Spanish revolution.

  ‘You think it funny that Garrido should be talking about the mountains. But just seven or eight years ago, we were still being hunted there like animals. Even today, a communist in Spain is tortured and sentenced to a hundred years in jail.’

  Carvalho was too young to excuse himself, but too full of admiration to let it rankle. He heard the old comrade out and followed all the other meetings without a word of sarcasm. The regime would fall that October, and a woman comrade reported that the Party was now so strong in Barcelona that it could place the city in a state of siege. The influence of Camus, the young Carvalho thought. But he said nothing and examined the woman with the interest one has for a species on the verge of extinction.

  ‘I could see it myself, and the Barcelona comrades will bear me out.’

  This they did, rather unenthusiastically, as if they could not do otherwise, creating a bond between objective and subjective conditions through the dose of subjectivity required to believe what they were saying. Then came the embraces, the farewells, the songs:

  I must go down to the harbour

  And up to Tibidabo go.

  There to shout with my people.

  Yankees out! Death to Franco!

  The blood of Spaniards

  Is not the blood of slaves!

  The songs were not well sung, because only the course organisers knew the words. Whenever they sang, the veteran communists therefore had to summon up the notorious voluntarism of youth.

  Young Guard, Young Guard

  Give them no peace or quarter!

  Carvalho had shown that you could not go to such a course in the spirit of Machado’s watchword: ‘Doubt, my son, even your own doubt.’

  Spring has at last appeared

  On the wings of a dove.

  The people’s voices rise up

  Over the Spanish land.

  Long live the Barcelona strikes!

  I must go down to the harbour

  And up to Tibidabo go.

  That was precisely what he did nowadays. He went down to the harbour in the hope of relaxing between a tiresome wait and a tiresome, sub-criminal investigation. Up to Tibidabo he went, in search of the Vallvidrera hiding-place from which he could contemplate an older, wiser, more cynical city, with nothing to offer the youth of today or tomorrow. That was the only time he had seen Garrido during his Party days. Twenty-five years later, he had gone to see him at a rally and merely discovered that the years had left their mark. He’s right at the top of middle-distance bull-fighting, a dark-skinned young dude sardonically remarked in the disguise of someone at his first communion. ‘Where the hell were you in that summer of fifty-six?’ Carvalho asked with his eyes, although he did not have the slightest hope of a reply. The thousands upon thousands of people who had come to the rally might have been the fruit of years of spiritual exercises in France and catacomb activitiy inside the country. But Garrido’s speech was the same as ever: he was still suggesting that the bourgeoisie should reach a pact of progress if it did not wish to see a return to fascism or to face the danger of pre-revolutionary chaos. Enough communists were present to place the city in a state of siege. But what should be done once a city was already in a state of siege? Seated next to Garrido was the comrade who, twenty-four years earlier, had laid siege to cities with her imagination and her desires. Her name then had been Irena, but now she was called Helena Subirats, complete with an MP’s certificate and soothing declarations.

  ‘No dictatorship, not even of the proletariat.’

  He switched programmes to see if any expanded on the Radio Nacional report. A local radio station was trying to interview José Santos Pacheco, who had unexpectedly arrived in Barcelona on the first plane from Madrid. Santos did his best to dodge the questions, but he merely succeeded in dodging the answers.

  ‘Is it the crime of a
fanatic or the beginning of a vast plan to destabilise democracy?’

  ‘Look, no one knows anything yet. Ask the government. It’s an act against democracy.’

  ‘Why have you come to Barcelona?’

  ‘I’ve been coming here often for some time.’

  ‘What do you make of the appointment of Superintendent Fonseca to head the official investigation?’

  ‘It’s a bad joke. Fonseca is still remembered by communists as one of Franco’s choice hangmen.’

  Fonseca used to offer cigarettes half-way out of the packet, his arm half stretched out, his voice half raised. Those eyes were as if wounded by reality, full of water and threats. Carvalho remembered him walking along the corridor, whimsically looking at the latest police haul and asking his Barcelona lieutenants for a running commentary.

  ‘That one?’

  ‘José Carvalho. A dangerous red.’

  Fonseca managed to close his eyes in disgust as the lieutenant landed a punch in Carvalho’s unsuspecting stomach.

  ‘You and I are going to have a long hard talk,’ he said as he continued his inspection of the day’s bag. ‘We’ve got the whole night ahead of us.’

  ‘This is war, boss.’

  Biscuter had switched on the transistor and was listening to a live report from the Communist Party’s mortuary chapel in Madrid. Thousands of madrileños had already passed in front of Fernando Garrido’s mortal remains, while the impressive police presence had been backed up by a deployment of troops in the outer suburbs.

  ‘Excuse me, an opinion-poll for Radio Nacional. What do you put the murder down to?’

  ‘To international fascism—what else?’

  ‘But how do you explain that he was killed in a closed place, where the only people present were communists, members of the central committee?’

  ‘In the only way a good communist can explain it. It was international fascism.’

  ‘Are you a Party member?’

  ‘Yes, I have been for a long time.’

  ‘Did you know Fernando Garrido personally?’

  ‘I had the honour of shaking his hand on more than one occasion. I was a branch delegate to the 1978 congress.’

  ‘That was when there was a fight between Leninists and non-Leninists. Could that have anything to do with the murder?’

  ‘You can’t know us very well. We don’t go around killing each other. You watch too much television or you’ve seen too many American films. Which radio did you say you’re from?’

  ‘Radio Nacional.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t surprise me then.’

  ‘Well said, you old chump!’ Biscuter shouted.

  ‘What’s it to you, Biscuter?’

  ‘It’s a dirty business, boss. You’ve got to admit Garrido was a nice old fellow.’

  Biscuter had not even had time to rub his eyes or to put the office table in order.

  ‘Are you having breakfast here, boss? I’ve got some fantastic butifarras and a few fesols left over from yesterday.’

  ‘I can’t think and eat breakfast.’

  ‘Does the radio stop you thinking?’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Carvalho picked up the phone and dialled a number, all the time wrinkling his nose as if the number smelled bad.

  ‘Señor Detras? I’ll hang on.’

  ‘I’m not a communist,’ someone else was saying on the radio, ‘but I have come to say farewell to Garrido because I am a democrat and what they have done is too unspeakable for words. It’s an assault on democracy. Who did it? The CIA? The Russians? You’ll soon find out, what with all the crap, if you’ll pardon the expression, that there is in politics.’

  ‘Señor Detras? I’m Carvalho, the detective. Your girl is in a stage-actors’ commune performing The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Riudellots de la Selva. She’s fine. They only do one performance a day. Out of the question. I won’t go looking for her: that’s your business. I’ll send you the bill. The play? It’s decent. Rather subversive, but no nudity. Don’t worry yourself. Right. It could be a lot worse. In my last case like yours, the girl was in Goa with one hell of a diarrhoea. She had to be repatriated on a Caritas plane. At your service.’

  ‘Listen to what this guy’s saying, boss! Listen!’

  ‘There’s got to be an end to this political nightmare. I’m not against politicians as people, but I’m against them as politicians. Since Franco’s death, politics has descended on us like the plague.’

  ‘I’d like some breakfast, Biscuter, but not that dreary stuff you were offering. Bread and tomato, some well-truffled Catalan sausage, a few split olives, a jug of cold red wine. Mild things. I’m full of toxins.’

  Biscuter installed himself in the kitchenette lying off the corridor to the toilet. He whistled contentedly or repeated the order to the tune of Three Coins in a Fountain. Carvalho switched off the radio and began arranging the papers on his forties-style desk, whose layers of varnish had failed to highlight its wooden colour and instead formed a kind of brilliantine for furniture half-way between neo-classicism and inter-war functionalism. He picked up a sheet of paper on which Biscuter had written: ‘Important visit at eleven.’

  ‘Why is it an important visit?’

  ‘Because they told me so.’

  ‘They told you they were important?’

  ‘They said it was a very important and confidential matter. They even asked if you would be completely alone.’

  Noises came up from the Ramblas. Carvahlo looked out of the window. Two or three hundred people, their arms linked, were marching in rows down the street. ‘The real terrorists are you, the fascists!’ and ‘Brother Garrido! We shall not forget you!’

  ‘Here, Biscuter.’

  ‘Twenty thousand pesetas! What’s this for?’

  ‘Buy food for two weeks. Just in case.’

  ‘Things are going to blow up. That’s what I was already thinking.’

  ‘Maybe nothing will happen, but look at the queues starting to form in the food-shops.’

  A little queue of women with baskets jutted out of the corner shop.

  ‘Use the same plan as when Franco died. Fabada the only ready-made meal. It’s the only one that keeps well in tins.’

  Biscuter passed his fingers through the few red hairs left on his skull, rubbed his hands, bent his legs and geared up his body for the energetic activity required by the situation. His weak chest was drawn in so as to accentuate the resolution of a pair of childlike, gangliate shoulders. Before going out, he put Carvalho’s breakfast on the table and left the bottle of ice-cold orujo by the wine-jug.

  ‘Looks like you’ll need this, boss.’

  Biscuter produced a wink by means of a rash muscular movement that nearly paralysed half his face. He threw himself into the urban jungle, equipped with his mental parachute and that desire for adventure which anyone had to have in order to work with Carvalho. The detective ate his breakfast without thinking about the food. He had chosen a meal that required no reflection and almost no conscious attention. A breakfast that could discreetly accompany some transcendental meditation. Not even ham would have been the right choice, for it demands a critical, judicious sense of taste. Catalan sausage, however, adjusts to mechanical tasting and artless chewing. It did at least have to be truffled if its flavour was to surprise Carvalho from time to time, as the patches of truffle suddenly burst its smell in his mouth cavity and set up sharp sensations at the tip of his nose. Whatever the meal, it was always necessary to leave some time for dialectics, based on either the flavour or the texture of the food. With much less time for reflection, Brillat-Savarin wrote his Physiology of Taste. He was a man both famous and stupid—qualities which, Baudelaire noted, ‘go very well together’. As for the sickly little drug-taker Baudelaire, he only drank wine or smoked drugs to worry his mother and punish her for marrying another man.

  ‘Write a doctoral thesis on something so arbitrary that it rules out any thesis or antithesis, and then change jobs,’ Ca
rvalho said to himself as he held a little piece of truffle in his mouth, soaking up all its aroma and transforming it into a mere obstacle that the tongue would drop into the doubtless horrible depths of the stomach. He poured wine down his throat until he felt his stomach machinery to be well lubricated. Then he filled a glass with the orujo that lay attractive and threatening like a bare-toothed animal.

  ‘You won’t do me any good, you swine.’

  And yet he drank it down in one go and felt a cold fire rise from stomach to nostrils—the same contradiction, after all, as that expressed in any vanilla ice soufflé.

  ‘If you like we’ll come back later.’

  One of the men nodded towards the food still on the table.

  ‘I’d already finished.’

  ‘It’s the best time for breakfast.’

  He had never heard him say anything so cheap. Carvalho remembered him twenty-two years earlier, standing before the military court on a charge of rebellion. Then Salvatella had declared that he recognised only the courts of the Republic, not the one trying him. Evidently disturbed by his lack of respect, the military judges increased the sentence demanded by the prosecutor. But as he left the courtroom, Salvatella still tried to make a salute with his handcuffed hands, while Carvalho and a number of others were pushed out by local policemen. Salvatella turned to his companion and introduced him to Carvalho:

  ‘José Santos Pacheco, member of the executive commitee of the Communist Party of Spain. My name is Floreal Salvatella. I belong to the PSUC executive and the PCE central committee.’

  ‘Mine is on the name-plate downstairs.’

  ‘We didn’t need to look at that. We were sent by Marcos Núñez, a comrade who knows you well.’

  ‘Yes, we met now and again when we were trying to solve the mysterious killing of a manager.’

  ‘A tough case, was it?’

  ‘So tough that they all wanted to kill him but he died by himself.’

  Santos Pacheco looked as if he had stepped out of a press cutting or a TV news flash. In the background behind Garrido, and now in the background behind Salvatella. Tall, sunburnt, hewed by life into the form of an old, grey-haired mariner, he bent a little to hear the two Spaniards condemned to the average height of 165 centimetres. Salvatella, however, was only a memory of that nearly young prisoner whom Carvalho had seen sentenced to a hundred and twelve years. You’ve put on weight, Floreal; not from prison, it would seem, but as a result of time and legality. They only sat down when Carvalho suggested it, and even then they did so with the prudent reserve used by every communist to show that he is nothing like the prefabricated image of an uncultured, soulless brute. Salvatella kept his eyes on Santos, who took up the offer and played soloist with the tone that he might have used to open a Party meeting. It was a firm, level voice, as if he were trying to make it exactly like the voice of anyone else present.