Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Was Garrido calm on the day of the murder?’

  ‘As calm as we are now. I was with him on the day he left the Cortes and a group of Fuerza Nueva women called him a murderer and told him to go back to Moscow. He went up to them and said: “I’d rather be a prisoner in Spain than a free man in Moscow.” The women just stood there gaping—a verse translation of the Bible would have fitted in their wide-open mouths. Calm. Courageous. We exchanged a few words on the day of the crime. I asked him about the trade-union question, complaining that the socialists were beginning to turn nasty. Quite normal, he replied; they follow their policy and we ours, but we’ll meet up at the end of the day. On the day of the Last Judgement, I added, because I like a joke and I always spoke to him with complete confidence. Not that late, Julvito, not that late. Sometimes it’s hard to be patient, because, just between you and me, the socialist comrades are really quite amazing. As someone put it, we’ve come out of prison and look what’s coming out of the woodwork. Very good. I’ll tell you another good one: PSOE, a hundred years of history . . . and forty years on holiday. We shouldn’t be sectarian, but they sometimes make it very difficult. They don’t trust us—or, rather, it’s in their interest to seem as if they don’t, so as to disqualify us in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. True, we played some dirty tricks in the past, but so did they, and we stood shoulder to shoulder during the civil war.

  ‘In the end, I keep this up to be faithful to myself, but it’s really time for me to take a rest. I’ve worked flat out for years and years and I’d like to drop it now, but Santos talked me round. Just a few more years to set an example, Julvito, so that the younger ones can be with you and discover the moral legacy of the communists. That’s why I’m still on the central committee, but it’s not the thing for me. I would go on working at the base, helping as best I could, but the central committee is for people with all of history in front of them, not behind them as is the case with me. I went abroad once to work with my two hands in Germany. But it was the same story: there was still the Party organisation abroad. “What shall we decide, then?” Santos used to ask, whenever he came on a visit. “You leave Spain to see the back of us, but then you make contact again.” Maybe it’s stronger then me—I took it in with my mother’s milk. More than ever at times like these, when we have to show that the assassins won’t destroy us. If the Franco regime couldn’t do it, then this mafia certainly can’t.’

  ‘Was Garrido killed by the mafia?’

  ‘No, I’m talking about the Trilateral Commission. Who else, eh? Garrido and eurocommunism weren’t up their street. The image of a civilised communism, the kind there has to be, was disarming a lot of anti-communists. And that drove them wild in the Trilateral.’

  ‘The Trilateral can kill someone without taking his life. It can start off a crushing campaign of character assassination.’

  ‘It was them. No doubt about it. They wanted to smash an image, to rule the eurocommunist programme out of court. Just think what a setback, what a scandal. How will we stand in world opinion? That does matter, because, as Garrido used to say, we cannot live in isolation. We must take a global view of everything and everybody that goes to make up our party, and of the position it occupies in Spanish society as a whole.’

  ‘You know it by heart.’

  ‘When you have Garrido, he’s worth taking advantage of. They tried to annihilate forty years of Spanish communism.’

  He insisted that Carvalho should try a Galician kiwi and an Australasian kiwi.

  ‘What do they resemble? Nowadays, you can grow tobacco at the North Pole, so long as you create the right atmospheric conditions. I started out as a partner in a firm that grew endives—you know, those white Belgian salad vegetables. It was a disaster at the time, but now they’ve carved out a place in the market. Everything has its time, and what forges ahead in one period often simply collapses in the next. You can see how things are. History has no heart, and no brain either.’

  ‘Democratic Municipal Administration’: a course from the fifteenth to the thirtieth of October, sponsored by the Cultural Office of the City of Madrid. ‘Municipal Politics and the Means of Communication’: organised by Ana Segura and Ferrán Cortes; a trip to Chinchón; a visit to the printing works of the Official State Bulletin; a round table on ‘Urban Semiology’; two hundred and ten mayors, councillors responsible for cultural matters, two-tone faces, bare heads, gnarled hands, long-winded lawyers, ex-priest councillors. Escapá Azancot? I don’t know if he’s here. The one with the flageolet? Escapá Azancot! You are wanted at the press-office! He walked alongside with the sun in his face, a peasant economy of gestures, hard of hearing in the left ear, a head leaning in compensation like the tower of Pisa. Excuse me, but I forgot what I was going to say when I took the notes.

  ‘Here you’re known as the man with the flageolet.’

  ‘Yes, I play it.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘A wind instrument, like the hornpipe, only a bit shorter. It’s been played in La Mancha since time immemorial, although they say it’s of French origin. My grandfather used to play it, and my father and an uncle actually make them. All that was virtually abandoned until the coming of democracy. But since everyone is pulling signs of identity from under every stone, we now have our flageolet. What do you think of it?’

  ‘Does the Party support demands related to the flageolet?’

  ‘Well, it hasn’t said no. And when someone from the leadership passes through my village, they sit right through a one-hour concert.’

  ‘Do you take a flageolet to central committee meetings?’

  ‘Escapá, are the ones speaking today also from your party?’ someone asked.

  ‘They couldn’t possibly be from yours; you haven’t got anyone who knows the first thing about anything. That guy’s a socialist. They’re furious because so far all the committee chairmen are communists and the mayor of Madrid is a socialist. Is what they say any use or isn’t it? That’s what should be asked, not whether they’re hounds or greyhounds.’

  ‘I think they paid homage to Garrido on the day of his murder.’

  ‘A flageolet concert was scheduled for the Casa de Campo, but Fernando couldn’t come. So we took our instruments and went off to the Hotel Continental. No big deal. One number and it was over, because he was late and the central committee comrades were waiting. We forced him to accept the flageolet of honour and that was that. He said he had a very bad ear and that if he played, it would sound even worse than it did.’

  ‘What is the flageolet of honour?’

  ‘Something to put in the buttonhole. A tiny model flageolet. We made it red so that he wouldn’t protest.’

  ‘Did Garrido put it on?’

  ‘I put it on him myself, and then he said a few words.’

  ‘Have you given out many such emblems?’

  ‘None like that one. They’re usually gold or silver. But we decided that Garrido’s should be red.’

  ‘You personally ordered a special model for Garrido?’

  ‘No, not me. In fact we weren’t the ones who thought of it. One day a comrade came from the central committee to report on what had been discussed. Although I’m also on the central committee, I’d sooner another comrade came to our village branch to explain how it went. So a comrade came and, as usual, the discussion went on to our flageolets. Garrido ought to hear about this. Well, we did everything demanded of us. And it would be nice if you made him an honorary associate, so that people could see the Party encouraging popular culture. So, an honorary associate. No sooner said than done. The discussion got quite lively, and the comrade went back to Madrid with a specimen he could use to order Garrido’s special emblem.’

  Carvalho’s stomach was filled with an icy void. On the brink of solving the mystery, he tried to complicate the peasant mayor’s intentions, as if he couldn’t believe that the truth was so simple and easy to reach. When he asked the question that capped hours and hours of flying like a blowfly or dragon
fly, a vulture or a barnyard bird, his own voice seemed quite strange to him.

  ‘Which comrade suggested the idea and took responsibility for arranging the special emblem?’

  ‘Esparza.’

  ‘Esparza Julve.’

  ‘Yes, Julvito. It was touch and go because the emblem only arrived at the moment we were to pin it on in the hall of the Hotel Continental. I’d forgotten that detail because of the business that blew up afterwards. “I’ll wear it whenever I go to La Mancha,” Garrido said. “That’s not doing it justice,” someone urged. “You ought to wear the flageolet in the capital.” And that’s how it rested. He walked towards the meeting-room, my colleagues from La Mancha stood discussing the ceremony, and Esparza and I followed Garrido so as not to be late for the meeting. Who would have thought that Garrido would die wearing the flageolet? I’ll write an article for Mundo Obrero. They won’t believe it back home.’

  ‘The emblem wasn’t in the list of objects found on Garrido’s body.’

  ‘It’s so little. It must have gone unnoticed.’

  ‘The man who compiled the list even wrote down the flakes of light tobacco found at the bottom of his jacket pockets.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand. Unless it fell off when we moved the body. There were a few minutes of confusion until the two doctors on the central committee said nothing could be done. What’s the flageolet got to do with all this?’

  ‘Every detail must be considered.’

  ‘It’s just that the talk is due to begin and I don’t want to miss it. The course costs small fortune and I wasn’t born a mayor. Do you understand? What you don’t know, you have to learn.’

  Carvalho left behind the hum of the course students and stopped at a crossroads only he could see. Fonseca? Santos Pacheco? Back to see Esparza? Play around with the thugs who must be waiting outside the city hall?

  ‘To the Puerta del Sol.’

  ‘But it’s just round the corner.’

  ‘I got up tired.’

  ‘Well, it will cost you two hundred pesetas just for the pleasure of it.’

  ‘There are dearer pleasures.’

  ‘And then you’ll say there’s a crisis.’

  ‘Drop me right outside the State Security Office.’

  ‘Mission Impossible coming up!’

  The taxi-driver did not take his eyes off him in the rear-view mirror. He bowed solemnly when he saw that the tip was in the region of thirty pesetas. Carvalho got out and took the shortest route between the pavement and the armed policeman standing on guard.

  ‘Señor Pérez Hinestrilla de la Montesa.’

  ‘You mean Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla.’

  ‘He wears a waistcoat.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

  Duck or turkey? It would be necessary to decide which was the defining feature: the long neck kneaded by a prominent Adam’s apple; or the small head, with thick lips and scant chin, crowned by short hair displaying the diametrically opposed aspects of Prussian and punk capillary culture. Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla tried to compromise.

  ‘You will appreciate that I cannot reveal secret information unless I know the purpose for which it is required. You are asking for highly confidential reports about the members of the PCE central committee. Fine. I’ll give them to you as a mark of trust, but you’ll have to give me some other token in return so that I can justify myself to my superiors.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you the prime suspect?’

  ‘That seems fair.’

  ‘Do you promise he won’t die a quarter of an hour after I give you his name?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Is it so hard to understand?’

  ‘You are talking to a public servant of a democratic government who has himself been a democrat for many years. I was a shareholder in the journal Cuadernos para el Diálogo.’[1]*

  ‘You seem a nice enough kid, but are you able to guarantee what I am asking? Will you take responsibility for disclosing the name of a man I may then find drilled full of holes?’

  It was either anger or a violent struggle within himself. He sighed and struck a punishing blow against the back of his tall, carved-wood chair.

  ‘Why are you putting me on the spot like this?’

  It’s true. Why am I facing him with a moral dilemma that could wreck his brilliant career? Who knows, he could soon be a chief executive, a government representative on some autonomous regional body, a minister at forty or forty-five. But precisely because he had the air of a weak prince, the cynical detective used a form of moral blackmail he would not have used with anyone else. Why me?

  ‘You were a member of the Communist Party.’

  ‘That was an adolescent prank. At most a couple of months. I didn’t know what the Communist Party was. I thought it was an attempt to resurrect the FUE student union. Which university student of my age hasn’t held Marxist ideas at some time in his life? For all of us, or nearly all, the experience was an effective enough vaccine. I don’t owe anything to the Party.’

  ‘It’s no longer a question of parties or more or less powerful intermediaries. There are gangsters loose: real professionals of political crime who want to finish the job.’

  ‘What’s that to me? In the end he’s a murderer, and we are arguing over the life of a murderer.’

  Caravlho shrugged and seemed to settle with pleasure into the soft Oxford armchair. He closed his eyelids, as if trying to sleep or to imagine something. The waistcoated public servant talked in a loud voice, with himself, with Carvalho, with the past, with the future, with Humanity.

  ‘You’ll be the first to tell the Party.’

  ‘I give you my word that the Party will know nothing of your role in all this.’

  ‘I haven’t played any role and I don’t intend to. I must consult my superiors, or at least Superintendent Fonseca.’

  Carvalho smiled with all the sorrow his face could concentrate.

  ‘At least I must tell the minister.’

  Carvalho shook his head, as if another pound of sorrow had been added to the crushing weight of incomprehension and estrangement.

  ‘The head of government, then. Or don’t you trust him either?’

  ‘Do you think the head of government will keep a secret between him, you and me?’

  ‘Leave me some way out. I can’t take all the responsibility.’

  ‘I’d like the head of government to promise that it will go no further than us three.’

  ‘That’s a crazy suggestion, but I’ll try.’

  He took a diary from his pocket and dialled three numbers on a telephone that stood majestically apart from the one connected to the switchboard.

  ‘Extension ten. . .’

  His Adam’s apple was wildly agitated, determined to break all records for moving up and down a human neck.

  ‘Hi there, president. Yes, it’s me again.’

  He closed his eyes with pleasure, sensing Carvalho’s respect for unaffectedness in high places.

  ‘Look. It may be possible to speed things up, and I need your permission to show some confidential reports. Everything will have to remain between you, me and him. No; that, no. Nor that. I know it’s a problem, but there’s no other way. Thanks for your trust.’

  He opened a drawer and took a handful of tissues to mop up some imaginary perspiration. Then he made a sign for Carvalho to follow him into a side room where there was barely enough space to stand between the cupboards packed against every wall. He took a key ring from his pocket and went to work on a deep-set lock. Zinc drawers tinged with rust and old age opened up before Carvalho’s eyes. The assistant chief executive selected a box, placed it under a thin arm lost in the sleeve of his jacket, and relocked the drawer and cupboard. Back in the main office, he put the box on the edge of a table facing Carvalho. The detective took it with him to the sofa and crossed his legs into an improvised desk that hid the box from view.

  He opened it and looked for the
file. ‘Son of Emerenciano and Leonor. Father: a miner and member of the Communist Party of Spain since 1932. Mother: a back-up activist in the coalfield until her arrest in October 1934. Amnestied by the Popular Front in February 1936. Married on the Ebro front in February 1938. Exiled 1939. Birth of Félix Esparza Julve in Toulon, January 1940. Father active in the French Resistance. Mother deported with her child to the Massif Central. Domestic service for a high-ranking German officer saved her from a concentration camp. At the end of the war, the father entered Spain with the maquis. Arrested on the outskirts of Villafranca del Bierzo in 1947. Died of TB in El Dueso prison in 1951. The son studied at the PCF-funded Marcel Cachin College in Paris. Summer camps in Romania and the USSR. Member of the Spanish delegation to the Moscow Youth Festival in 1958. Agronomic studies at Humboldt University in East Germany. Rapid rise in the Party. First mission to Spain: subversive activity, the 1962 strikes in the Asturias. Arrested under a false name in Madrid, 1965. Eight months in Carabanchel. Sentence quashed. Rearrested in the break-up of the Party apparatus in Ciudad Real in 1965. Sentenced to four years in Cáceres prison. Applied for parole in 1967. Apparently left the Party apparatus and set up an agricultural company for selected produce. Married a partner’s daughter in 1968. Business trips especially to Belgium and Holland. Irregularities of management in 1969. First matrimonial separation. Left for Germany after fraudulent bankruptcy. Contact in Frankfurt. Fraudulent bankruptcy overturned. Returned to Spain. See code-name Mainz. New business marketing tropical produce. Irregularities of management. Final matrimonial separation. See codename Felt. Fresh links with the Party under the protection of Santos Pacheco. Code-name Doubloon. Training ST 68, Exit Sunflower services. Umbrellas.’

  In other words, Carvalho concluded, high-level training, very special service, unlimited protection. He caught Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla looking furtively at the ceiling in one particular corner of the room. Carvalho hurriedly buried the file among the others and made as if to stand up.

  ‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t always work. You know what things are like in Spain. Sometimes they watch, sometimes they don’t.’