Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘There are huge blasts in every paper. The Socialists have brought out a special issue of El Socialista. Not an inch is wasted: there’s a poisonous eulogy of Garrido which argues that he unsuccessfully tried to democratise the Party and that he could not prevent the trade-union movement from growing more radical and escaping its control. He was therefore a victim of the contradiction between desire and reality. They’re after us. They’re all after us.’

  It has been said that the worst thing that can happen to someone with persecution mania is to be persecuted in reality. Carvalho tried to work out how many years Carmela had been a Party activist. It couldn’t have been very many, and yet the whole catacomb culture had rubbed off on her, perhaps to the musical accompaniment of rock culture, itself at home in cellars and darkness.

  ‘Where do you want to eat? I’ve heard you have posh tastes.’

  ‘Take me to some bars.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Serious.’

  ‘Okay. We can either do Argüelles or stay around here. Calle Echegaray and all that.’

  ‘Let’s get out of this area. I’ve seen a lot of it already.’

  Carmela parked on a zebra crossing at the Plaza del Conde del Valle de Suchil. She pushed her glasses back and struck out along Calle Rodriguez de San Pedro.

  ‘What would you say to stuffed onion?’

  ‘Stuffed with what?’

  ‘Meat. They’re doing some at La Zamorana. You can also have very good mincemeat there. Then we can try some kidneys at Ananias.’

  ‘To whet our appetite. But we’ll have to eat seriously after that.’

  ‘My stomach’s about the size of a stuffed onion.’

  ‘That’s your problem.’

  Carvalho paid superficial attention during their quick prowl around the bar-cum-restaurants of Argüelles. In order to select a restaurant for the ceremony of eating, Carmela referred to some notes she kept in her bag. Casa Ricardo? Know almost nothing about it. In fact, I consider I have already eaten and drunk. Carvalho was relentless until he sat before a plate of blood-sausage followed by tripe in the shade of a carafe of Noblejas wine.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can fit all that in. After what you’ve eaten already. Three sausages are enough to fill a whole gullet. Where do you put them?’

  ‘I do it in order to forget.’

  ‘You’ll say that to anything.’

  Can a man be wrong if he acts according to his conscience? Despite the sweet taste of the tripe, Carvalho concluded that the question deserved some thought. His eyes returned to the equestrian form of an aggressive businessman, who was browbeating three shocked provincial representatives with the weight of the evidence.

  ‘You say to me, if I reduce the staff, you’ll be on the street with unemployment benefit that will sooner or later come to an end. And what will you do then? You’ve told me what you think, and now I have to consider it in the light of my knowledge.’

  ‘It’s just that. . .’

  ‘Let me finish. I weigh it in my mind. Brrmm, brrmm, brrmm. My conscience starts to turn the thing round and round. I know all about it or, okay, maybe I don’t but I can imagine it. And my conscience tells me: cut down on the staff, because if you don’t, Macario, it’ll all be over and you’ll be forced to close down. I ask you: which is worse? Bad for a few and good for many, or vice versa?’

  ‘Seen like that, of course. . .’

  ‘Bad for a few. And my conscience tells me a lot more. There’s a process of natural selection: the strong survive, the weak go under. How many bread manufacturers have shut down? None. How many textile manufacturers? A hell of a lot. Bread is needed every day. Textiles are only needed now and then, and it’s sometimes cheaper to import them.’

  ‘With respect, Señor Macario, the point is that Catalonia is collapsing.’

  ‘Of course!’ Macario agreed, as if all the effort of his reasoning had been leading to this conclusion.

  ‘The old guy’s a bit ridiculous, eh?’ Carmela whispered.

  Carvalho was still turned towards the group, and Macario realised that he had aroused the interest of an attentive diner.

  ‘We’ve reached the hour of truth,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘If it’s necessary to join the Common Market, then so be it. But we’re not all going to join, of course not.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Of course not. Only those who reach the gates in good competitive condition will be able to join. What do you manufacture? Watches. We don’t need any: we buy them from the Swiss and Japanese. Naturally. If the Swiss and Japanese make the best watches, why should we make our own?’

  He beamed a complicit smile at Carvalho, and the detective was so overwhelmed by the objective facts that he smiled in return.

  ‘Or lounge suites,’ Carvalho said aloud.

  Macario weighed the pros and cons of this outside intervention and decided to take it in.

  ‘Or lounge suites. What would we do with our own?’

  ‘Maybe they could. . .’ the Valencian representative still resisted.

  ‘No suites.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Carvalho confirmed from his table.

  ‘Take another example, however: blood-sausages. Why should blood-sausages not be well made and sent to conquer Europe? I’ve said it before. You have to get off the beaten track.’

  Carvalho decided to break off his familiarities with Macario and turned back to face Carmela. She was bewildered.

  ‘Why, you’re a right old yob! You can just sit chatting with that guy, as cool as a cucumber!’

  ‘I quite like after-dinner philosophers. In every human being there’s something of the ABC Sunday columnist, and after-dinner chat helps to bring out the repressed creativity. Shall I ask him whether our fritters have a future in the Common Market?’

  ‘If you do, I’ll walk out. This will end in hospital.’

  ‘You’ve got to help people with their digestion.’

  Rather bemused by the stranger’s sudden loss of interest, Macario was now talking politics in a lower voice.

  ‘We can’t go on like this—we must recover a sense of authority. All politicans are the same.’

  Carmela stood up first and walked ahead of Carvalho. The detective leant towards Macario’s table and wished him a good meal. Macario could not quite bring himself to stand up or offer him a drink, for Carvalho was no longer paying him the slightest attention.

  He had seen the murder-room on television, but in reality it seemed much more spacious, full of corners and alternative paths from a to b. The presidium table, measuring no more than sixty centimetres, stood on a small platform. The murderer must have moved and struck with a precision that seemed impossible in pitch darkness.

  ‘With the skill and precision of an expert. It’s the work of a commando, someone specially trained to use a knife in just that way.’

  Santos and Mir had called together the central committee members living in Madrid, as well as the stewarding force present on the day of the murder. Carvalho asked them to sit or stand in the places that they had occupied the previous Saturday.

  ‘Do the older members always sit in front?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a question of hearing. They don’t trust microphones—what can you do? But it’s also a question of communist education. You can’t read the papers in the front rows, as some of them do at the back.’

  Mir had got his answer in first. But that did not deter Santos Pacheco.

  ‘That was just a joke about the papers. They also sit in front as a mark of their trust, of their historical proximity to the leadership. You can understand them. Things aren’t so simple.’

  ‘If you say so. But some take a nap at the back and even start snoring.’

  ‘Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.’

  ‘Ask them if they’d like to add anything to their police statements.’

  Santos turned to the central committee members, who were spre
ad about like sad-eyed schoolchildren.

  ‘This gentleman is an expert in such matters—I mean in criminal investigation.’ He hesitated, as if the criminal did not sound strong enough. ‘Well, he’s here to help us, and anything you can remember that doesn’t appear in your police statement would be very useful to him and to us.’

  No one said anything. They all looked at one another across the distances imposed by the missing members scattered throughout Spain.

  ‘Let him ask us questions,’ said the voice of a typical jumping-jack from the rear of the room. ‘Surely he knows what he wants to know; we don’t. I, for one, feel empty after making the statement.’

  The others nodded. Carvalho took two steps forward and swallowed the irony flickering in his smile as he thought how, in very different circumstances, he had once dreamt of addressing the central committee.

  ‘The loss of electricity lasted three minutes—precisely the length of time required for the hotel staff to put in a new fuse. Even if he’d had five minutes, the murderer would have had to move at record speed: leave wherever he was, reach the platform, guess the position of the heart, plunge the knife in and return to his starting point. Did anyone hear a noise? Or even notice a movement of air as someone passed? Either the murderer managed to slip into the room somehow, or he got up from the tables. And since he had so little time, he must have run very hurriedly in the space between the tables.’

  ‘There was a lot of larking around when the lights went out,’ said one of the old men in the front row. ‘Garrido himself was cracking jokes, and there was a lot of bustle apart from the usual laughter and chattering. I doubt whether anyone could have spotted any movement in the room.’

  ‘But if the murderer was sitting at one of these tables, his immediate neighbour or others around him must have noticed when he got up or moved.’

  The jumping-jack intervened again.

  ‘Sense perception is predetermined. That is, if the goal of perception had been to capture such a movement, it would have done so. But we all had our minds, first on the darkness, and then on what Garrido was saying.’

  ‘Comrade, you take for granted that the murderer was one of us.’ This was the half-question, half-complaint of a little man more furrowed than the land he must have spent much of his life cultivating.

  ‘I’m nobody’s comrade. Let’s get that straight to begin with.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Santos came in. ‘I thought it was already clear. The gentleman is a professional hired by the Party. That doesn’t mean we should not fully co-operate with him.’

  ‘My dear gentleman hired by the Party. . .’ The others laughed as the little man stopped, sarcasm oozing through every wrinkle in his skin. ‘I’ll repeat what I said. You take it for granted that the murderer was here among us, that he was one of us.’

  ‘Prepare yourselves for the worst, my friend.’

  Carvalho went to the door and opened it. Two stewards were standing just outside.

  ‘Were you here?’

  ‘A little further away—here.’ They moved back a few steps.

  ‘But as soon as the lights went, we moved instinctively to the door to see whether they had also gone off inside.’

  ‘Did you open the door?’

  ‘Yes. We saw it was dark and closed the door again. Then my mate asked the people at the bottom of the stairs to find out what was happening.’

  ‘You’re sure you closed it again?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘It would be more normal to leave the door of a dark room open. . .’

  ‘Mir had ordered us to keep the door closed. So that it would be hard for anyone to go in or out. He always said the same thing.’

  ‘Why make it hard for people to go out?’

  ‘Because someone would always take the chance to go for a smoke. It wasn’t allowed in the room.’

  Carvalho closed the door and faced the central committee again.

  ‘Unless the stewards are lying, no one came from outside. If they are lying, then they are assuming direct responsibility for the crime—after all, they could just have said they didn’t remember whether the door was closed or not. Now, it has to be established whether you were the only ones there. Was everyone present a member of the central committee?’

  ‘Yes, I can vouch for that,’ Santos said. ‘We take a list; that is, I personally take a list of those who attend, and of those who only come for part of the time, leaving later for justifiable reasons usually connected with political work. Once the TV men had left, everyone there was a central committee member.’

  ‘Could someone have come in with the TV men and stayed behind?’ asked a woman in her fifties who looked as if she was the mother of twelve children.

  ‘Impossible,’ Mir asserted. ‘Four came in and four went out. And after they left, I shut the door and went to my place.’

  ‘The mystery of the closed room,’ said the jumping-jack, as if announcing a film.

  ‘You said it. No doubt you realise that the mystery of the closed room only exists if we believe that people can pass through walls. And I’m sure you’re the least inclined to believe in such things.’

  ‘We’ve got everything. There are plenty of Christians who are for the socialism you can find around here.’

  They contained their laughter, feeling that they were violating the period of mourning.

  ‘We cannot accept that the murderer was one of us. That’s what they want. They want to demoralise us. They want to sow mistrust in our ranks. Has the place been properly checked? Is there no other possible exit?’

  ‘There’s an emergency exit that can be easily opened from inside, but in fact it is locked from outside. The most it adds is that the murderer could have escaped; but it was apparently not in his interest to escape, because he would have identified himself in some way.’

  ‘It can’t be accepted,’ said the man of furrowed brow.

  ‘Aranda,’ said the jumping-jack, quick as a flash, ‘don’t be irrational. I’m tempted to think the same as you. But facts are facts. And facts are more stubborn than ideas.’

  ‘It can’t be accepted. And I blame you for calling in a professional to solve the case. It’s a political case, and it must have a political solution; amongst ourselves, for the whole Party.’

  ‘We can get an investigator who’ll say you’re right and prove that the murderer is the devil or the Holy Ghost. He’d save the Party, but dialectical materialism would have gone out of the window.’

  ‘Words, just words! There are a lot of great talkers around here,’ replied the man of furrowed brow.

  ‘These folders,’ Santos said, ‘contain transcripts of all the tape-recordings, plus a reconstruction of Garrido’s movements from the time he left home to the time he arrived at the hotel and went upstairs. Everything. If necessary, we’ll reconvene the whole central committee, but there’s a plenum already scheduled for next weekend to elect a provisional general secretary until the Party congress. Can you wait a few days?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Maybe you brought away a negative impression from the meeting. We have a special kind of shyness. We don’t like our business being aired—it’s as if we were still protecting it from repression, as if we still had an underground complex. Besides, we’re under obvious social and political attack. It’s no longer a question of that crude Francoite anti-communism which even liberal democrats reacted against. There’s now a gut anti-communism in our society, animated by people looking for accomplices with their repressive past or afraid of the Party’s progressive proposals.’

  ‘Don’t keep on. I don’t vote.’

  ‘I just wanted. . .’

  ‘This file is enough for me, but I do need to move freely around the city. That girl, Carmela, is very nice, but I already know how to walk on my own.’

  ‘She’s at your disposal, not the other way round. Go however you like, but take care. There have been troop movements through Villaverde and San Cristobal de los Angel
es. They are tactical manoeuvres designed to make people think twice. No one will say anything about them, but they always happen in times of crisis. The extremists are off the leash. They are hitting out at random and have already attacked two Party centres, in Aluche and Malasaña.’

  ‘What did the police get out of Cerdán’s interrogation?’

  ‘The police are looking for an Oswald. Cerdán still has some influence in the Party, particularly among intellectuals and leaders of the trade-union movement. But one would have to be appallingly ignorant of the Party to think that he could lead an internal conspiracy against Garrido.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to Cerdán.’

  ‘That’s up to you. His number is in the book.’

  ‘You don’t get on well with him?’

  ‘He was a valuable comrade, but he knew too much.’

  ‘When did you realise that he knew too much: before or after he left the Party?’

  ‘A long time before, although perhaps you won’t believe me.’

  ‘Who does he hang around with now?’

  ‘Ecologists, radicals, feminists. . .’ Santos opened his arms to indicate anything potentially too broad or alien to himself.

  ‘Cerdán? Are we talking about the same person?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  ‘One personal question. You organised paramilitary squads in the partisan days. I assume you had special training.’

  ‘War was our only special training—the civil war and the Second World War. Only a very small number of Party cadres received higher military education, in theoretical questions, and that was in exceptional cases before the war. Lister, for instance, when he had to leave Spain and take refuge in the USSR.’

  ‘That stab was the work of an expert. The knife should really be stuck in and pulled upwards. But the table and the height of the platform were between the killer and Garrido. What about the weapon?’

  ‘It was shown in all the papers. A Czechoslovak dagger made for special operations. It’s used by Czech parachutists, for example.’