Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Have you got any wine?’

  ‘There must be some bottle or other at home.’

  ‘With no surname or christian name?’

  ‘You must have noticed that we don’t belong to the gastronomic faction, although there are more and more who cook in order to forget.’

  ‘Forget what?’

  ‘That there’s been a reform but no political break, for example; or that they were made monarchists overnight and sent out waving the little flag. Some people are very sensitive.’

  ‘I’m terrified just at the thought that you might have a litre bottle of wine. Is it a litre?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, stop at the first bar you can. That’s the only place we can buy wine at this hour.’

  Carvalho tried unsuccessfully to buy something other than Rioja or Valdepeñas, but at the fourth bar he managed to get chatting with a man from Simancas who was quite partial to Cigales. “Have you people in Barcelona heard of Cigales wine? The only ones around here who ask for it are from Segovia or further north. It’s no better that Rioja, but it’s quite different. You said it, mister, you said it. Did you hear? It’s no better than Rioja, but it’s different. Look, there are some very good wines in León. No, damn it, not in León; in El Bierzo. This bloke is an El Bierzo separatist. I’m from where I am, like you and like this gentleman from Barcelona. But they’re a special kind of people in Barcelona. Very special.’

  ‘You had to tear yourself away?’

  ‘We moved from wine to the autonomy statutes. Funny, but that often happens. One day Spain will be a federation of certified-origin wines.’

  A small lift in keeping with the low-rent building had enough room for Carmela, Carvalho with his paper-bags, and a fifty-year-old woman whose powerful, crown-like head sported a silver hair-do. Afraid that the narrow lift would endanger the metallic architecture of her perm, she raised her eyebrows heavenward as if to keep a constant check on the precise arrangement of her hair. Her farewell ‘good-night’ was charged with sarcasm and a sense of triumph that the invaders had not even managed to graze the architraves of her capillary cathedral. She passed Carmela with a moralising look as if she were repeating the family code to herself.

  ‘I could be your assistant.’

  Carvalho went into the kitchen and filled his lungs with air that smelt of omelette. Surveying the kitchen implements, he overcame a natural dejection at the memory of the times in prison when he used to cook with ladle-measures and a metal plate.

  ‘I see you have a healthy diet. Eggs, grilled meat, tins of asparagus. They’re highly diuretic.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel like cooking and I cook. We nearly always eat out, and in the evening the kid is over the moon with steak and chips. What’s the menu, then?’

  ‘Tripe and capipota with peas and artichokes, and larded tuna.’

  ‘It will take us till midnight.’

  ‘Three-quarters of an hour.’

  ‘That’s what you tell every woman.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to offend you sensitivities as an emancipated woman, but since you obviously don’t have a larding device, I wonder if you could give me a darning needle.’

  Carmela put on a wounded look, left the kitchen and returned with three different sets of needles.

  ‘Don’t get the wrong idea. They’re my mother’s. She sometimes comes to be with the kid and then starts darning my jumpers like mad.’

  Carvalho bored a number of tunnels in the chunk of fish and filled them with anchovies. Having sprinkled on salt and pepper and rolled the creature in flour, he browned it in oil with a few cloves of garlic and left it over a low gas. He then stripped off the artichoke leaves until their white hearts became visible. The next step was to cut the ends, divide each artichoke into four, fry the sixteen pieces and set them aside. In the same oil, he slowly heated the tripe and capipota and then added some sautéd tomato and onion. When everything was well mixed together, he put in some peas and some stock made from Carmela’s assortment of cubes. By then the tuna was already done on the other ring. Setting it aside, he worked the left-over juices into a Spanish sauce enriched with little pieces of fennel. He then took the sauce off the flame and turned back to the tripe, adding the fried artichokes and a pinch of hazel nuts, some almonds, pine kernels, garlic and toast softened in a little stock. Finally, he waited for the tuna to cool before cutting it into slices and covering it with the hot sauce on a serving-dish.

  ‘But those are two main courses.’

  ‘I’ve gone too many days without cooking. Anything left over will be very good tomorrow, particularly the tripe.’

  Carmela repeated the word tripe and contented herself with a slice of larded tuna.

  ‘Do you cook like this every day?’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes played the violin. I cook.’

  ‘And what were you thinking about while you were cooking?’

  ‘Culture. You Marxists think you get enough by setting the material conditions to music, but you’re as much slaves to culture as anybody else. Even the election percentages are converted into culture. In France there’s a culture of twenty per cent, in Italy of thirty. Here you have a culture of nine or ten per cent.’

  ‘Did that occur to you while you were cooking the tripe or the tuna?’

  ‘Garrido’s murderer is another cultural theme. He’s either a traitor or a messiah. In the whole history of the communist movement, there’s only one top-level murder that was done as an emergency cleansing operation. The killing of Beria. That’s what I was thinking as I worried in case the frozen peas weren’t sufficiently cooked to enhance the artichokes. You’re not drinking any wine?’

  ‘It goes straight to my head.’

  ‘Some time ago, when your language was still fresh in my mind, I may have been able to explain better. Whether you have ten or thirty per cent of the vote, you have a clear sense of being the driving force of history. You’ve even got your enemies to believe it, and they’re as afraid of ten per cent as they are of thirty. You may not represent a quantitative danger, but you’ll always be a qualitative one. They killed Garrido to transform you into a band of cold, calculating cultural assassins who need the central committee protocol to stage a sacrifice. The murderer is one of you, and at such moments he knows that he is condemned to death. Not by you, who are up to your neck in a liberal culture-graft, but by the very people who incited him to commit the crime.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he do a bunk?’

  ‘I’ll be able to answer you tomorrow. But I could almost tell you in advance. The reason is that he is trapped, completely trapped, and he has to act out his role till the end.’

  ‘It’s a pity. We’ll drop one percentage point at the next elections.’

  ‘Maybe not. You now have the chance to elect a general secretary who will fit the market. But you won’t do it. Your culture stands in the way. You will be forced to choose between a historical figure who will keep the myths alive, and a true son of the apparatus, smart enough to have got this far without any serious mishap. The hour of truth will come in fifteen or twenty years, when no heroes are left from the struggle against Franco and the rank and file have become thoroughly anti-liturgical. I may not live to see it and perhaps it doesn’t interest me a great deal. But it will be very interesting when no European Communist Party has any martyrs, not even a student expelled in 1974.’

  ‘I can’t see that coming. Just a fortnight ago one of our comrades was stabbed at Malasaña.’

  Carmela was keen on the after-dinner chat and dialectical tension. She put a Joan Baez disc on the record-player and offered Carvalho an array of unfinished bottles: chinchon, cognac, cointreau. He poured himself some chinchon in a glass that had once been a nutella container and sank into a hissing plastic sofa. She listened to the music on the edge of another chair in the three-piece suite, holding her knees in her arms and only straying from her swarm of thoughts to observe Caravlho’s self-communion.

  ‘It’s very late.
Do any taxis pass by?’

  ‘Stay and sleep here.’

  ‘What about your husband and son?’

  ‘I took the boy to my parents-in-law, and who knows where the old man is. I don’t think he’ll come to sleep here.’

  It was a neutral conversation between the landlady of a boarding-house and an uncertain customer. Carvalho tried to peer from a distance into the low-necked jumper of his potential landlady, driver or travelling companion.

  It was at the same session on the Marne in August 1956 that Garrido had talked about the comrade’s arse: not in the abstract, but the flesh-and-blood woman comrade discovered in the bed of Biel Ciurena, a medical student who had turned up with a pharmacy Pasionaria. Although the rules of secret Party meetings were not written down in physiological detail, a division still existed between male and female sections in the sleeping rooms. This was an unforeseen obstacle for Roser Bertran, better known as the pharmacy Pasionaria, who was eager to show the necessary link between Marx’s goal of changing History and Rimbaud’s goal of changing Life. So when night came, Roser and Biel lay ostentatiously on one of the metal beds of the French Communist Party’s summer-school residence. Surprised in their third tangle by a veteran who had just scraped onto the last or next-to-last boat from Alicante in 1939, Roser looked up from the theoretical, near-practical position of a woman being screwed by a Majorcan trainee psychiatrist (later a follower of Lacan). ‘Could you turn the light out, comrade.’ The veteran turned it out, but an hour later the couple had to present themselves before Garrido himself.

  The general secretary took the drama out of the situation by offering them a cigarette, with no distinctions as to sex and with apologies for the enforced puritanism of harsh clandestine life.

  ‘In order to get you here, we had to key up not only most of the Party organisation in Spain and France, but a major support network of the French Communist Party. You are here to clarify the situation and tasks in our country. Three, four days, a week. It would not be proper, Biel, if you responded to this organisational effort by losing yourself in contemplation of the comrade’s arse.’

  The arse in question leapt from the chair and supported a Pioneer-type feminist harangue, all the worthier in that, according to the not unexpected figures mentioned by Helena Subirats on the first day, women made up a precarious fifteen per cent of those attending the course. Which would be worse? That Biel should lose himself in contemplation of the woman comrade’s arse, or that she, Roser Bertran, should do the same thinking about the male comrade’s arse?

  Although ten years would pass before the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and photos of cunts in Schuck, Garrido had read Kollontai at the height of adolescence and was aware of his macho indiscretion. ‘It’s just that women have greater powers of concentration’—such an upright excuse that even the pharmacy Pasionaria was satisfied. Not only did she leave the meeting in better cheer, but she was actually persuaded that she should not have too much trust in her greater powers of concentration, and that it would be a mark of civility to practise abstinence for the rest of the course. Those veterans of an assault on the main contradiction must not believe that the younger generation lacks self-control.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘The arses of women comrades.’

  ‘Mine, for example?’

  ‘Not a concrete arse, but one that can be generalised.’

  ‘Wonderful. It must be a very ugly arse, battered by hours and hours of meetings.’

  ‘Either you go to few meetings, or your arse is made of excellent raw material.’

  ‘Is that a hint?’

  The comrade’s arse. Look at the comrade’s arse and investigate the murder of Garrido. Carvalho made an effort to swallow the political taboo sticking in his gullet.

  ‘You communist women inhibit me. I suspect you’ve only got an epic sense or an ethical sense of fucking.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Maybe it was like that during the siege of Stalingrad. You rather tend to live in the past.’

  ‘Doubtless a hangover from adolescence.’

  ‘Wasn’t there free love in your time?’

  ‘No. And now?’

  ‘Just as little.’

  Carmela sighed with an air of disenchantment.

  ‘But there’s no ethics or epics, you can rest assured.’

  Carvalho managed to free himself from the noisy plastic and perched on the edge of the sofa facing Carmela. Should I put on a smile of complicity or just get on with it? The street door made a noise as it opened.

  ‘Now’s the moment when the husband enters and stabs the unfaithful wife’s lover. It will be an unjust death.’

  Carmela looked at the door with perplexity and indignation.

  ‘If it’s him he’ll certainly get an earful.’

  It wasn’t him. The door was almost too small for the fat, smiling man whose pistol-waving hand forced Carvalho to stay still. He invaded the room, followed by a pale-faced man directly descended from a hitherto unknown illegitimate son of Carlos II the Possessed.

  ‘Cool it. Don’t be scared, madam. Your friend will tell you I’m a peaceful man.’

  ‘Who is this bloke?’

  ‘I am Pepe’s uncle. Isn’t that right, Pepe?’

  ‘My uncle from America? Or from the Soviet Union?’

  ‘Are you still at it? Never mind. What does it matter to you? Did you hear, Pérez? I haven’t introduced you to my friend Pérez. His surname is a real find.’

  The fat man laughed, putting away his gun but keeping an eye on Carvalho.

  ‘Are you just passing or do you plan to stay long?’

  ‘Just visiting, señora. First of all, Señor Carvalho, let me congratulate you for the VIP number. You’re a bit suicidal, though, because that kid you held up to ridicule won’t forget you in a hurry. I also heard that you broke the arm of a real professional. Not a good idea, even though he’s an opponent of mine. I admit you’re a man of resources, and so I prefer to visit you on neutral ground, rather than in the street or at your hotel. Here, in the home of this charming lady. You have a very typical Madrid-style charm.’

  ‘Thank you very kindly.’

  ‘Some say that Andalusians are the nicest Spaniards. But I go more for madrileños.’

  ‘I thank you in the name of the people of Madrid.’

  The pale-face man was sniffing more than examining the room. The fat man moved his nose like a rabbit in mock imitation and sat at the far end of the sofa where Carvalho was still perched.

  ‘We haven’t been introduced,’ Carmela said, crossing her legs and surrendering to the anatomy of the sofa.

  ‘I’m a very ordinary man who’s devoted to learning new things. Pérez is my assistant.’

  ‘I’m well aware of what this lady is involved in,’ the fat man said, ‘but it doesn’t bother me if she’s present during our conversation.’

  ‘That’s assuming we have a conversation. For my part, I have nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Don’t be so rash. Of course you have a lot to say to me. In a few hours—however many it takes—you’ll be surprised at how much you’ve told me. Since we last met, you’ve had a number of interesting meetings. Fonseca, Santos Pacheco, Leveder, Sepúlveda Civit. I think you’re beginning to get close.’

  ‘You tell me. Both you and the guys on the pavement outside already know the ending.’

  ‘I give you my word of honour that I don’t. Listen hard to what I say. I do not know. They told me: Ask Señor Carvalho to give a report. I’m just following orders. Don’t move, señora.’

  The sharply emphatic voice had seemed unthinkable in that plump body almost overflowing the sofa yet alert to every possible movement.

  ‘I want to have a piss.’

  ‘Pérez, take this lady to the toilet. Examine it first and then let her go in quite freely.’

  Pérez followed Carmela out of the room.

  ‘Alone at last. But don’t think tha
t the relation of forces has improved. I’m much faster than you imagine, and you don’t want Pérez to get nervous, do you? He’s a real tough guy who doesn’t distinguish between the sexes. A real brute. Let’s get down to business and finish it as soon as possible. Which will be the winning horse? Make a prediction.’

  ‘You overestimate me. I’m only just beginning.’

  ‘Santos Pacheco was looking very nervous. Particularly when you met outside the university. It’s understandable that he’s afraid. Whatever the verdict, he’ll be the loser. I put myself in his shoes. For an old communist like Santos Pacheco, it must be very, very hard to take. Don’t be too smart. Don’t think the whole thing will rebound on us.’

  ‘What would you advise me to do? As one professional to another. Should I give you the information first, or the others?’

  ‘Not a shred of doubt. Give it to me. If I could say everything, I’d easily convince you that I’m the more profitable choice.’

  ‘We haven’t discussed money.’

  ‘There are many ways of paying someone.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Life, peace and quiet. Does that seem too little? But let’s stick to the point. You’re beginning to get close. Tell me the name of your prime suspects.’

  Carmela returned with Pérez behind her.

  ‘When I’m nervous it makes me want to piss.’

  They heard again the sound of the street door and then a whistled greeting.

  ‘No!’ Carmela cried out.

  The fat man stood up with difficulty, and a Beretta appeared in Pérez’s hand. When the steps were just outside the door, Carvalho knocked the fat man upside down on the sofa. Pérez’s gun wavered between Carvalho, Carmela and the man shouting from the door.

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  Carmela started to flee, but Pérez held her back with one arm. The newcomer advanced on him without hesitation.

  ‘Leave my wife alone!’

  Carvalho hurled himself on Pérez and pinned him to the wall like Christ on the cross.