Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘José Carvalho?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For your own good, we advise you not to act foolishly.’

  ‘You mean the book-burning? Who are you: Bernatán or García? Or maybe Engels?’

  ‘Don’t play the clown. Leave the dead in peace, particularly the ones you know. He got what was coming to him. You won’t be warned again.’

  It was a policeman’s voice from a Bardem film—assuming, of course, that Bardem had been allowed to use real policemen. Carvalho poured himself a glass of cold orujo and went to open the door for Enric Fuster.

  ‘Here are some Villores truffles perserved in cognac.’

  ‘What’s so special about the truffles from the village of yours?’

  ‘The aroma.’

  Fuster rubbed his hands at the glowing fire, and then tapped his temple when he saw the charred frame of the fire-eaten book.

  ‘Have you seen a psychiatrist yet?’

  The agent held out a bill for the processing and payment of income tax.

  ‘Haven’t you got the wrong client? You mean that isn’t Pujol’s bill?’

  ‘Vertumnis, quotquot sunt natus iniquis, said the great Horace.’

  ‘A word of warning. If you want your bill to be paid, you will have to act as witness to my meeting with a CP big-wig. Whatever happens, you must play the role of witness and then keep as quiet as the grave about what you hear. That’s not just a manner of speaking. They’ve just threatened me over the phone.’

  ‘What have you got yourself into?’

  ‘Garrido’s murder. I’m investigating it for the Party.’

  ‘You’re coming along, Pepe. You’ll end up an extra in one of Le Carré’s novels.’

  ‘What do you think of the whole thing.’

  ‘There may be five or six hundred motives for the murder, and a couple of million candidates.’

  ‘A locked room, with all the entrances guarded by stewards. A hundred and forty central committee members, of whom a hundred and thirty-nine could be the murderer. That’s all there is to go on. Unless someone slipped in, killed Garrido and left again. The likeliest solution is that the murderer was in the room and used accomplices to fix the lighting.’

  ‘What does the Party say?’

  ‘They refuse to accept that it was an inside murder.’

  ‘Sounds like an English mystery.’

  ‘A typical case of murder in a room locked from inside with no other exit. But in an English mystery, the murdered person is the only one who appears in the room. In our case, he has a hundred and thirty-nine companions. Sounds more like a Chinese or Galician joke than an English detective story.’

  Salvatella pressed the bell as politely as he offered Carvalho what, in his view, was a modest yet interesting present: a facsimile of the first issues of Horizons, a cultural review published clandestinely under the Franco regime. Carvalho mentally promised to burn it sometime around 1984, along with George Orwell’s novel. As they were crossing the gravel yard, he told Salvatella of Fuster’s presence.

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s my partner. I have no secrets from him—professional secrets, that is.’

  He stressed the word‘partner’ as he was introducing the two guests, and Fuster’s faint eyebrows pointed at a Mephistophelean angle behind the loosely balanced spectacles that kept him looking like a Sorbonne student unfairly afflicted with monastic baldness. He had no idea what Fuster and Salvatella discussed as he reheated the rice in the sautéd onion, adding the clam juices and enough fish stock to cover the risotto by a finger’s depth. He let the mixture boil for ten minutes, then lowered the heat while continuing to spread the clams over the rice, and finally added a garland of chopped garlic and parsley. In the meantime, Fuster served Salvatella with chilled sherry and almond-stuffed olives. Their conversation covered in great detail the boundary between Castille and Aragon, a privileged slice of the world where Fuster had been born and which he had left to study in Barcelona, Paris and London, in a journey he would have liked to be without beginning or end. For his part, Salvatella asked with great interest about the anti-Catalan features of Valencian nationalism. One would have said he was taking notes, except that his hands were busy holding the glass that Fuster filled with the zeal of a self-important waiter and hunting down the evanescent almond-toothed olives. A little later, he praised the choice of Viña Esmeralda and showed his erudition by mentioning the wine-book written by its producer. He sat truly ecstatic after eating his third forkful of rice in its rich sauce of clams, garlic and parsley.

  ‘It’s the antithesis of Valencia-style rice. Simplicity as opposed to baroque,’ Salvatella concluded. And Fuster’s nodding gave his conclusions a definite stamp.

  ‘Are you communists always communists? Now, for example, while you are digesting a supper I trust you found agreeable?’

  ‘Probably, although not the way you think. I’m here because I am a communist. That is what brought me here. I’m happy to be with you both. We are joined by a pleasant common experience. The possibility of conversing. But if you start asking me questions about the Party, I’ll react as the Party man I am.’

  ‘And you will say what you think is in the Party’s interests.’

  ‘The Party is interested in finding Garrido’s murderer. It was an act against the Party, the working class and democracy. So there is no conflict between what you want to know and what I ought to tell you, although I warn you that I can’t be as useful as my PCE comrades. It’s a sister-party of ours, but still another party. It corresponds to different realities.’

  ‘Suppose it was a crime of passion: a personal vendetta, for example. Or suppose it was a political crime. Why? What for?’

  ‘To blacken the Party; to leave it without its historical leader of the last forty years or so. Does that seem petty to you?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem enough unless it was, as you say, the first move in a process of destabilisation to change the political system. That’s assuming it was the work of the right. If that was not the aim, then it seems an act out of all proportion. Senseless. You’re not a threat to the right for the moment. You’re a potential or latent threat, but they don’t need to wipe you out. You’re not even an alternative government.’

  ‘You underestimate us,’ Salvatella said. ‘We may not be so important in numbers, but we are in qualitative terms. When a dictatorship comes to an end, the only really organised forces are those which have systematically fought against the dictatorship. In the case of Spain, that means the communists. We’re indispensable, then, in any left-wing strategy or any process of democratic consolidation. Quite naturally, the socialists are growing on votes that correspond to “invertebrate” social tendencies. Our votes correspond to “vertebrate” social tendencies. It’s harder and, in the short term, less profitable to vote for us: it requires a higher level of political consciousness and greater capacity for political action. Besides, you shouldn’t forget that we support and influence the main trade-union force in the country.’

  ‘For the moment.’

  Salvatella cheerfully accepted Fuster’s qualification.

  ‘Okay, for the moment. Union elections have been announced, and there will undoubtedly be a fierce struggle between the workers’ commissions and the UGT.’

  ‘They could have tried to kill Garrido in the street or to discredit him by whipping up a campaign or causing problems in the Party. It wouldn’t be the first time. Why go for an assassination, which puts the whole country on the brink of the abyss? Why a scenario that puts the blame on the Party as a whole?’

  ‘Have you read today’s papers?’

  ‘I’ve glanced at them.’

  ‘You should look at the Madrid press, which is directly linked to political and economic pressure-groups. They already take it as proven that the communists are to blame. “Communist Patricide”—that’s the exact title in Ya, as you’d expect from the paper of the Church and the right-wing Christian-Democrats. ABC, holding a candle for banking capit
al and the royal household says “Settling of Accounts in the Central Committee”. And what about political trend-setters around the palace? Well, Cambio 16 headlines with “The Struggle for Power”. El País has a well-known ex-communist on its editorial staff and did attempt a rational account of the events. But it could not refrain from morbid insinuations between the lines: “Growing Opposition to Garrido in the Party”.’

  ‘Was it growing?’

  ‘Garrido was subject to argument but also beyond it.’

  ‘Like the Pope in Rome.’

  ‘Or like the general secretary of PSOE, or the chairman of the UCD, the SPD or the leader of the British Conservative Party. Leaders are not arbitrary creatures of fashion or destiny. They stem from a process of natural selection corresponding to each party’s needs.’

  ‘Were you at the central committee meeting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was everything normal until the murder took place?’

  ‘Quite normal.’

  ‘And then? What did you think when you saw Garrido’s body on the table?’

  ‘Everything, except that he’d been murdered. Then I formed part of a cordon to prevent people from entering or leaving the room. We checked that everyone there was a central committee member.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then it began to be your problem.’

  ‘In the late fifties, you were sentenced to more than a hundred years’ imprisonment in Barcelona. Released at the end of the sixties. What then?’

  I went underground until the Party was legalised in 1977. It’s a pretty commonplace story in our party. More than five centuries of imprisonment are brought together at every meeting of the central comittee.’

  ‘Have you always been a professional?’

  ‘Not always. I have been since 1941, when I began to organise partisan activity in Roussillon. I’m a professional in Lenin’s sense of the word. My job is to make the revolution. First in the mountains, next in prison, and then on street-corners with the collar of my raincoat turned up. Now I sit behind a table drafting a full-scale amendment to an electoral reform bill.’

  ‘Have you built up any grievances against the Party?’

  ‘Against myself?’

  ‘You’re not the only one in command.’

  ‘Above me is the central committee, which decides as a collective body. Neither the executive nor the general secretary does more than interpret the decisions of the central committee.’

  ‘Sounds like a fairy-story.’

  ‘You know there are sometimes witches in a fairy-story.’

  Salvatella laughed uncontrollably, as if he were freeing himself from a collective language and recovering his own capacity for speech.

  ‘The communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the redemption of the flesh, everlasting life,’ Fuster recited.

  ‘Amen,’ Salvatella concluded. It was obvious that he considered the meeting at an end, for he held out his hand, expressed thanks for the meal, and told Carvalho that the ‘comrades’ would wait for him at the airport at whatever hour he came.

  ‘How will I recognise them? Will Santos be there?’

  ‘The less you’re seen with Santos the better. They’ll be watching the services from Barcelona to Madrid.’

  Carvalho kept his most dramatic news until last.

  ‘They’ve threatened me over the phone that I’ll be killed if I don’t drop the case. As far as I am aware, Santos Pacheco, you and I are the only ones who know about our link-up.’

  Salvatella took some time to reply.

  ‘They may have followed us.’

  ‘You were more efficient underground.’

  ‘Sometimes. Not always.’

  He had read a good deal on the subject; rather like a sick man who devours books on his illness or a death-cell prisoner who eventually knows more than his lawyer about the penal code. No one is more like an ex-communist than an ex-priest. To sin against History or against God—what is the difference? The literature had methodically classified the various possibilities. Koestler or the renegade. Orwell or the apostate. Bukharin or the self-immolator. Carvalho’s case would never be the object of study, perhaps because it was typical of periods when History is lived without great dramatisation and people break with their world or steer their life along different axes. Left the Party to become assistant in Spanish at a mediocre Midwestern university. Recruited as a translator for a State Department bureau. Given the offer one day of working on special intelligence missions. Soon saw himself in the mirror as a CIA agent who would travel half-way round the world, accumulate five-year postings and perhaps eventually return home as a pensioner. During interrogations at the Brigada Social headquarters, he never felt himself to be the hero of his own history, but always a part of the machine that had to resist and fulfil its mission so that the machine should not break down. When they hit him, or when Fonseca called across the room ‘You deserve to be dropped’ as they held him out of the window, he felt secure in his own lack of importance. The cries that came from nearby rooms, if someone opened the door, filled him with a sense of fatality about a situation that left him no possibility of choice. Later, as the police-van was driving him to prison, he took a cigarette from Cerdán and suddenly realised from his handcuffs that he was handcuffed too. A guillotine-like anguish sliced through his wrists. Cerdán was a leader. A promising leader who had assimilated the Party language and allowed the Party to recognise itself in him.

  ‘At least I won’t be tried for breaking discipline,’ said Carvalho as he slumped on the straw bed in the cell he shared with Cerdán and a Maquinista[2]* worker whose collar-bone had been broken under interrogation.

  ‘Forget all that. It was a misunderstanding.’

  ‘What would you have sentenced me to?’

  ‘These are hard times, Pepe. If you’re hard on other people’s lack of understanding, you must also be hard on your own.’

  The son of a bitch had an answer for everything. Six weeks before the condemnation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress, he had refuted every single point of Carvalho’s critique of Stalinism. Then he forgot his Stalinist past with the speed at which children forget their little sins. Let a hundred flowers bloom! For realism without bound! While Carvalho contemplated the cell ceiling as a continuation of the wall-framed sky and the wall-framed sky as a continuation of the cell ceiling, Cerdán organised a short course of lectures dealing with Ricardo’s influence upon Marx. He also explained to the workers how the ‘peaceful, nation-wide twenty-four-hour strike’ fitted into the fall of fascism or rather the ‘assault on the first-level contradiction’, as it was fashionable to say at the time. Cerdán spoke through the nose to other priests of the spirit; but when he addressed the working class, he seemed like a primary school teacher explaining that a table has four legs or that balls are round objects.

  ‘When I get out, I’ll ask to be “released” and perhaps go to work in a factory. Marx said that you cannot understand people’s problems if you don’t eat their bread and drink their wine. What will you do? A university career seems to me a sign of individualist egoism, of evasive self-centredness. What will you do?’

  Carvalho turned his eyes down from the ceiling or sky to watch Cerdán doing his regular morning gymnastics in the tiny space between the heap of litter and the Maquinista worker’s wretched bed. As well as doing gymnastics, he ordered books on modern algebra and mathematical logic and started to learn German. He ate nothing that did not contain the necessary protein and vitamins for him to be fit for the ‘peaceful, nation-wide twenty-four-hour strike’.

  ‘Imagine it lasts twelve hours. Or thirty-six.’

  The Maquinista worker laughed, clutching his stomach with one hand and his collar-bone with the other. But Cerdán merely clenched his teeth in a friendly sort of way—a gesture worthy of recognition and much more agreeable than the unfriendly clenching of the teeth through which he rose to the requisite level of consciousness and launched into a long speech on
the identity of the individual, class and historical morality.

  ‘It’s not good to spread defeatism among the workers—particularly not here,’ Cerdán said in an aside, perhaps in the showers, when the leader turned to the icy jet with the parsimony of a watchmaker.

  Afterwards he would dry his short, white, muscular body, topped by a sad, bird-like head cropped in the German style, hunting down every drop of water that could upset his internal thermostat and damage his machine for thought and revolutionary action. He must have had some mysterious influence over his own body, for when he used the bowl shared by the three cell-mates, his shit smelt the least of all and only bothered them with a final whiff of liquorice that Carvalho put down to the cod-liver oil sent by his family to sustain him as a young animal sick with mental plenitude.

  ‘Prison is not a desirable place to be. It doesn’t prove your fighting qualities. But it’s a necessary experience in the life of a revolutionary, and it has been of great advantage to you.’

  ‘In what way?’