Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Outer Mongolia. That’s all I wanted to hear!’ Plasencia grumbled peevishly as he looked up at the little lift descending with asthmatic slowness.

  ‘Do you know where Outer Mongolia is?’

  ‘Between the Soviet Union and China.’

  Plasencia gazed with admiration and opened the lift door for him.

  ‘Very few people would have been able to say that.’

  Plasencia watched him sideways, with a huge eye trained and deformed by suspicion. Carvalho was obviously not a Mongol or a Chinese. Maybe Soviet? As far as Plasencia was concerned, Outer Mongolia had for years been a prohibited entry in Spanish passports, a country forbidden by His Excellency, who must have had good reasons. It seemed to him that people had no right to know anything about a forbidden country, and someone who even knew where it was could not be quite honest. They came out into a wide, yellow-tiled corridor with green paper on the walls and almost no doors. There they were met by a sluggish-looking man with pointed ears and a sack of potatoes under each eye. Plasencia slightly bent his head towards Carvalho, and the other man eyed the merchandise as if obliged not to believe what he saw.

  ‘Carvalho?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your identity card.’

  ‘I’ve already seen it.’

  ‘Four eyes are better than two.’

  Feeling upset with his colleagues, the man with the rings under his eyes pored over all the details at the speed of an East Berlin Vopo or a barely literate child.

  ‘Your mother’s name?’

  ‘Ofelia.’

  ‘Was she foreign?’

  ‘No. Galician.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound Galician to me.’

  After Plasencia grunted and left them, the other man finally relaxed.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, turning his back on Carvalho and continuing along the corridor up to a window that looked onto a peeling wall of an inner yard or alleyway. Just as he seemed on the point of throwing himself out of the window, the functionary half turned through a door that led straight to a short flight of stairs. They arrived in a square-shaped room where the lift was the only door. They stood inside and the man pressed the lowest button of all. Carvalho calculated that they would be going down to the last of the underground storeys. The lift opened on a reception room furnished and carpeted in the style of an inter-war wagon-lit. Everything smelt of dampness, and the passage of time was discolouring the joints of every object as if it was there that the general decomposition first signalled itself. An usher took Carvalho’s particulars, while his companion with ringed eyes pointed to a young man with a look of a television announcer, waistcoated, lacquered in both hair and smile. When someone opened the tall, leather-padded door, Carvalho saw that he had reached his destination. Santos stood up at almost the same time as the minister of the interior, and another waistcoated young man was introduced as the assistant of some obscure deputy chief executive of the government presidium. The minister fired the opening shot: he was the first to be concerned about the speediest possible clarification of what had happened. Señor Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla had been personally appointed by the head of government to form a tripartite body that would assure closer collaboration among the government, the Communist Party and the minister of the interior. Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla gave a cordial smile, as if he were trying to sell a Ford Granada or a country house in Torremolinos. Santos gave a resumé of the situation in the most impeccable end-of-congress style. The three looked at Carvàlho, waiting to hear what he would say.

  ‘It might be useful for us to make a list of those who did not kill him.’

  The waistcoated young man burst out laughing, while the minister of the interior took a long time to understand and Santos bowed his head in dejection. Such a stab of humour had not been expected. A prominent Adam’s apple began to speak above a tweed waistcoat:

  ‘The government has naturally been considering all kinds of possibilities. Although it is prepared to accept the results of any other investigation such as yours, it intends to push the process of its own right through to the last minor detail, however disturbing this may be. For what is at stake is no longer just the government’s credibility, but the credibility of the democratic process and of the state based on autonomous regions.’

  Carvalho had read a newspaper article which suggested, not without truth, that Madrid writers were keen on reviving the baroque. It was a mental problem reflected even in government executives.

  ‘Which possibility is the government considering more than others?’

  Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla drew in air, sharpening his nose and whole face to a point. He then plunged into two sheets of woolly talk and finally concluded that the government was considering no more than the traffic on Castellana Avenue. The minister of the interior fully corroborated the facts:

  ‘No more, no less.’

  Santos tried to apply historical materialism to the concrete situation and dialectical materialism to the situation in the abstract. Carvalho grasped this when he saw the old communist squinting in silent exasperation. Carvalho was told that he could depend on Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla and Superintendent Fonseca at any time, really at any time.

  ‘Why did you pick Fonseca?’ asked Santos.

  ‘He’s our best officer, and the best officers are needed for the most difficult cases.’

  The minister of the interior thrust forward his face and shoulders with a dissuasive power apparent in his shiny, smouldering eyes.

  ‘I won’t allow my officers’ competence to be challenged, nor my own competence in selecting them.’

  ‘The challenge won’t come from me. But Fonseca. . .’

  The minister struck the table with sufficient self-control that no one could say he banged it.

  ‘Santos. We’ve talked about this a thousand and one times. Just as many of us have forgotten about it, so you ought to do the same. Fonseca is our best officer.’

  Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla acompanied them to a corner of the reception room and was eager to exchange impressions away from the minister’s presence. Speaking in a low voice, the young civil servant tried to excuse the minister’s rigidity:

  ‘He’s a very nice guy, but a little rusty. If only we had a thousand like him. He was in the Blue Division[6]* and, take my word for it, he’s more anti-communist than God himself. But he’s a democrat. His feelings are those of a democrat, and he’ll play the democratic game right to the end. As I told you yesterday, Pepe, you can trust us. Things are in good hands.’

  Pepe went up to Santos, who was deep in an ocean of perplexities. Then Santos, Carvalho and the man with rings under his eyes went into the lift.

  ‘Who’s the guy with the waistcoat?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

  They passed through other hands and along other corridors until they were left alone outside an office marked ‘State Security Brigade.’

  ‘I’ll leave you here. It’s too much for me to meet Fonseca. I’ll be in the Continental after lunch so that we can go over everything.’

  ‘Who’s the guy with the waistcoat?’

  ‘One of fifty thousand democrats the UCD wheeled out overnight to fill state positions. He’s the son of I-can’t-remember-who and was in touch for a bit with our Party at university. In this city, guys like him come by the thousand.’

  ‘Madrid is a city of a million waistcoats.’

  Fonseca stood up behind his powerful table and came to meet Carvalho with one small hand outstretched. Carvalho barely brushed it, weighing perhaps the work of time on that discoloured, straight-edged countenance with its lidless eyes and darting pupils.

  ‘How are things, Señor Carvalho?’ Whenever he stopped speaking, he pursed his lips as if to ask pardon, or perhaps just compassion, for something or other. ‘Sánchez Ariño, my main assistant. The great Dillinger, as he’s known here. I’m sure you already know all about him. And this sprightly Andalusian is Pilar.’

>   Sánchez Ariño waved a playful greeting across the room with his fingers, while the sprightly Andalusian woman managed to form a smile through a crust of make-up and rouge, at the risk that her mascara-covered eyelashes would become stuck forever.

  ‘Your reputation has travelled ahead of you.’ Fonseca was now looking at him with his arms folded over a small pot-belly that looked like a tumulus on his otherwise thin body. ‘The famous Pepe Carvalho.’

  He continued to look at him as if begging his autograaph.

  ‘You are much more famous than me.’

  ‘Mine is ill-fame. Just because I do my duty. My vocation has always been to be a policeman. I’m one of those who believe in a vocation, and I completely agree with what Marañón said on the subject. I had the good fortune to be a disciple of Marañón and Ortega. Don’t be surprised. I’m older than I look. The civil war found me in the Complutense. Would you like a drink? A smoke?’

  He had the same way of tightly gripping the pocket, in case he changed his mind at the last minute and decided it was more useful to leave the prisoner frustrated. This time, however, he was serious. And when Carvalho said that he only smoked cigars, Fonseca offered the packet to Sánchez Ariñó instead. Without taking his bulging eyes off Carvalho, the elderly adolescent waved no with a hand bearing a shiny golden ring in the shape of a Comanche’s head. Fonseca checked his initial impulse to sit across the table and beckoned Carvalho into one of the leather armchairs next to a window facing the Puerta del Sol. Sánchez Ariñó kept to Carvalho’s right, seated or reclining on a corner of the table that supported the sprightly Andalusian’s typewriter.

  ‘Pilar,’ Fonseca said gently without looking at her. Pilar rose and walked out of the room, leaving behind the scent of magnolia essence that saturated her abundant flesh beneath a lilac dress and a cover of loose flowing hair dyed jet-black.

  ‘You must be in a hurry, and so are we. I must confess that I was against the idea of a parallel investigation from the very beginning. The minister tried to persuade me by referring to the circumstances. What circumstances? you will doubtless ask. Or perhaps you won’t.’

  ‘Which do you prefer? That I ask or don’t ask?’

  ‘Don’t let’s get sidetracked. That folder, the third one from the right, is concerned just with you. And you know who I am. If I agreed to your investigation, it was so that no one could ever say Fonseca was guided by clichés or a priori judgements. I’m a professional. I used to persecute reds, and now I do the same with yellows. Tomorrow, it’ll be the crimsons.’

  ‘Or back to the reds.’

  Fonseca and Sánchez Ariñó exchanged glances. The superintendent leant towards Carvalho and spat out in a crumpled voice:

  ‘That’s a good one! They’ve already got the country by the balls, and they won’t let go this time.’ He nervously pointed to his flies. ‘Times are changing.’

  Fonseca smiled serenely. His features softened, as if they bore no relation to the contorted face of a few seconds before. He was the same as ever: a great play-actor who could hit someone in the face and then immediately kneel down and ask forgiveness, begging that he should no longer be forced to act in that way.

  ‘I’d like to know how far the investigation has got.’

  ‘We’re making a systematic comparison of the various statements made by central committee members. District police officers recorded them that very morning at the scene of the crime, although top people from the State Security Office were also present.’

  ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Me? No. I was called in later. I followed the course of the investigation from this office. I don’t meddle where I’m not asked. I’ve been that way all my life.’

  In 1940 the young Ramón Fonseca Merlasca had entered into contact with the underground organisation of the Communist Party of Spain. No one had tried to attract him, but he was well received because he had been an active FUE member when at university in 1934. He showed great courage on his first Party assignments, in conditions where the slightest delay could mean a firing-squad. In 1941 he gradually moved up to a high position in the Madrid network: he was given responsibility for contacts with abroad and even proposed for the district committee. The growing underground activity made the government nervous at German demands for an immediate clean-up and allied embassy pressure for information about repressive measures. Fonseca could have thrived in the Party and reached the central leadership, but he obeyed his new instructions to demolish as much as possible of the Madrid apparatus. His face would never be forgotten by the men and women who paid with decades of imprisonment for the success of this operation. Those who had paid with their lives had, of course, no memories left. When, many years later, the Party spread throughout Spain and had to face regular police crack-downs, many recognised Superintendent Fonseca as that infiltrator who quoted from Lenin’s What is to be Done or State and Revolution with the fluidity of an expert and the conviction of a fanatic. Now it was an ageing, tired fanatic who kept his eyes on Carvalho, trying to make out his code of behaviour and to guess what he was thinking about Fonseca himself. A smile of mockery mixed with self-pity was dancing on his lips:

  ‘They did it themselves. There’s not the slightest doubt. It’s a struggle for power.’

  ‘A struggle for power in a party broken by the murder? That makes no sense.’

  ‘They’ll soak it all up. In fact, they no longer knew what to do with Garrido. He was a symbol for people over fifty or sixty, but he was meeting more and more opposition among younger ones. If that wasn’t the motive, then it was a family-type settling of accounts in the KGB. Because it is plain for all to see that Garrido was a KGB agent.’

  ‘What about his anti-Soviet attitudes?’

  ‘Look, Señor Carvalho, I’ll let this little kid explain all about that. Come here, Sánchez, and get going on what we’ve talked about so many times.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What do you mean? You’ll understand once you start talking. We have to convince our friend here. Everything has to be explained to him. Now, dialogue! Action! Aren’t we in a full democracy?’

  ‘Come on, this is pointless,’ he motioned to the file on Carvalho.

  ‘He’s referring to your past. Sánchez has this theory that once a red, always a red. Give the gentleman a chance. He has an interesting life-history.’

  Sánchez Ariñó sighed in resignation, straightened himself and began to pace up and down.

  ‘The KGB has a special department of anti-Soviet propagandists who are quite capable of speaking in public if such a demonstration serves the interests of the USSR. In Italy and Spain, for example, and all the countries of eurocommunism or some such euro shit. The communists who make public declarations against the USSR do so because it is not in the USSR’s interests to give the impression that pro-Moscow communism is being established in Europe or any advanced capitalist country. It counts on capitalism being so thick as to believe the divergences and to accept the euro-alternative. It will then be able to reap the fruits—for instance, a nonaligned European foreign policy. All that’s ABC. I don’t see why you made me go on, don Ramón.’

  ‘Let’s suppose your TV scenario is right. Why bump off Garrido when he’s playing so well?’

  ‘Something must have gone wrong. Maybe he started to believe it, and the murder was a way of destroying both the dog and the rabies. The whole party is affected, deprived of authority, and the Soviet Union can either manipulate what’s left or use a more docile political platform.’

  ‘Is that your initial assumption or the result of an investigation you have not even begun?’

  ‘It’s theory,’ Fonseca smiled, striking his knees with both hands. ‘The investigation will be practice.’

  ‘What about other motives? A personal score, a provocation by the right wing or by some secret service, not necessarily Soviet.’

  ‘It’s possible. You see? You, too, start from presupposition. It’s your theory. And your theory frees the Party an
d communism from any blame. You’re beginning the investigation with a clear political bias. Your investigation will be a mere practical ratification of your theories. In fact, you can do it more easily than I can. You’ll show your little masters to be in the right, while I have to produce conclusions that satisfy the government, the opposition and God knows who else. For democracy has to be saved, and you can’t screw democracy. Obviously not.’

  Sánchez Ariñó let out a high-pitched laugh, which seemed to escape through a chink in his dignified bearing.

  ‘What are you laughing at, eh?’

  But Fonseca succumbed to a similar attack, wrapping his mouth with a hand that contained all the fire of suppressed laughter.

  ‘Look, you’re making me laugh. What will this man think? That it’s all fun and games?’

  ‘Well, chief, you say some strange things. . .’

  They split their sides until tears came into their eyes. Carvalho stood up and went towards the door.

  ‘There’s one other thing.’

  Fonseca had conquered his mirth in the middle of the last joke. As he turned round, Carvalho saw him gravely, and in a mockingly superior way, hold out a sheet of paper full of notes and telephone numbers.

  ‘I want you to be able to reach me at any time of the day. So that no one can say afterwards. . .’

  ‘Is it true that shots have been fired outside the Cortes?’

  ‘Move on, madam, I know nothing about it.’

  Carvalho overheard the exchange as he was leaving the State Security Office. When he asked Carmela the same question in her car, she merely said ‘yes’ with her eyes.

  ‘Not in the Cortes itself, no. But there were shots in the Plaza de Canalejas. From a car and in the air. Trying to create atmosphere. It happened yesterday in four or five parts of Madrid. And this morning, some toughs were knocking people about in Malasaña and the literature faculty. Have you seen this?’

  She handed him a copy of El Heraldo Español. The leader of Fuerza Nueva stated: ‘He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. . .The crimes of a criminal ideology are turning against those who hold that ideology.’