Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  [5]* (Calle) Castelló: then the location of the PCE headquarters in Madrid.

  [6]* Blue Division: a special division sent by the Franco regime to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern front during the Second World War.

  [7]* Planeta Prize: a major literary prize awarded to Montalbán in 1979 for his novel Los Mares del Sur.

  [8]* Spain’s Second Republic lasted from 1931 until Franco’s victory in 1939.

  He walked with a thirst for the last beauties of a landscape that would keep growing darker until night heaped black cotton fibres on the mountains in the distance. Something more than cotton. A fine air returned to give the air a definitely autumnal quality, adding touches of urgency to the beckoning lights of the Plaza de la Moncloa. A waterproofed jogger passed alongside, with the useless stride of a horse fleeing the knacker’s yard. He was unsure whether he should surrender to the fear of water or to the necessity of walking under such benevolent rain. He decided to set off in search of the Puerta de Hierro and San Antonio de la Florida. As people raced along the streets, he enjoyed feeling the secret complicity of rain. A half-buried memory called out to him—a cider-filled hallway glowing with the reflected sunlight of youth. Just as he was becoming a saturated sponge, he reached the hallway (recovered, who knows, from another life) of the cider-bar Casa Mingo, a refuge for people fleeing the rain and for Asturians of every kind. Nothing had changed of his life or dream, and anyway he had not lived or dreamed enough reliably to compare reality and desire. He delivered himself up to the penetratingly cool cider, which was stingily dashed out in glasses little used to such a controlled stream. Wet inside and out, he soaked up the apple-froth with chorizos cooked in cider and pasties too full of onions to conceal the paucity of meat. Had he been here before? No doubt.

  A fragment of conspiratorial activity stuck in his brain like a cigarette-end sticks to the lips. It was a Sunday, twenty-five years ago, and the enormous hall was teeming with omelette-filled masses unaware that, in a corner, he was seeking to overthrow the dictatorship verse by verse, sentence by brilliant sentence. Ortega must be recuperated—he vaguely remembered the words of his companion, now some kind of vice-president in some upper or lower chamber. He had doubtless been referring to Ortega y Gasset. Ortega has failed to make the leap from subject to object, said that little moustache, the moustache of an Ortegan socialist specialised in stopping punches from the shock groups of the university Falange. What a stupid prick! Here is a product of Iberia se non è vero è ben trovato. The civil guard, the prick, San Fermin, balls, cunt, pimp, son of a whore. But Ortega y Gasset had stopped half-way between subject and object, at the y separating Ortega and Gasset. Ortega or Gasset, which shall we end up as?

  ‘More chorizo.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘There’s nothing like chorizo.’

  ‘And it’s Asturian too.’

  ‘Do you swear it’s Asturian?’

  ‘The chorizo and me are both Asturian.’

  Spain and me are like that, señora. He took paper napkins and drew diagrams of the central committee meeting-room. But instead of communists, he sketched footballers in theoretical forward positions facing terrified defenders and hopelessly defeated goalkeepers.

  ‘Can I make a long-distance call?’

  ‘No. But there’s a kiosk a few metres from here.’

  It was raining. Too heavily, as if to balance his wish to speak with Charo and Biscuter. He’d left his town for two days and he already felt half a world and half a life away, as if Madrid thrust a past and a geography upon him. No. They didn’t have hake in cider. A woman in cider. He needed a woman in cider. A Celtic woman, with fair complexion slightly sullied by a lack of Aryanness and blue eyes more concrete and distrustful than Viking blue. Gladys was not the type, but she was the only possibility around. Unless he spent the evening trying his luck beneath tables with the long-wedded calves of faded Celtic women, accompanied by sauce-lipped men who wiped their plates with a huge slice of bread. He decided to run the shortest possible distance between the two psychological points of attraction. He swapped the cider for brandy until he felt at ease between the four cardinal points of his body. With his depression drowned in cider, a brandy-induced euphoria fixed his mind on two or three faceless décolletages. Driven away by combative male eyes, as shiny as their lips were greasy, Carvalho spared them their life and their female and returned to the rain that had been waiting with deceptive gentleness. He could not find a taxi until he was nearly at North Station. He asked to be driven to his hotel, so that he could take a hot bath and phone Biscuter.

  ‘Boss, I was beginning to get worried.’

  ‘That’s bad. You shouldn’t get worried so quickly. Any news?’

  ‘I’ve rung Charo two or three times. She was very angry, boss, because she doesn’t even know which hotel you’re at.’

  ‘I’m at the Hotel Opera.’

  ‘How about that, boss. They’ve got an Opera there?’

  ‘It looks like a cheap chocolate-box.’

  ‘Will you call her?’

  ‘It’s a bad time. I’d get her just when she was hardest at work.’

  I’d get her just when she was faking an orgasm with one of her regular customers. ‘Tell her I’ll ring if this business lasts much longer. Tell her tomorrow, at meal-time.’

  ‘We’ve eaten together, boss. I made a finger-licking moussaka and invited her round. Did I do wrong? She was very sad and spent the whole meal talking about you.’

  ‘Did she eat or not?’

  ‘Like a horse.’

  ‘What’s it like in the Ramblas?’

  ‘Wet. It’s been raining all day. Is there going to be war, boss?’

  ‘What war?’

  ‘That’s what people are saying here. Another eighteenth of July. The Garrido thing was a signal. What are people doing there?’

  ‘Eating chorizo in cider.’

  ‘Isn’t that just great!’

  He hung up and filled the bath with hot water. As he was getting in, he discovered that the rain had driven the cold into his body. But now the hot water drove it out again and he began to feel comfortable. Closing his eyes, he could see a dark room in which a single bright point, right at the end, shone so faintly that it did not show up Garrido’s face. The intensity of its glow varied with the man’s breathing. And so, since the light of a cigarette is essentially intermittent, it should have been much more apparent to the others, creating an area of relative visibility around the smoker’s face. A fixed glow. But how? Garrido himself giving signals to his assassin? Here I am. Here is my heart waiting for your knife. Someone is sitting next to him. Helena Subirats? Santos Pacheco? What is clear is that Garrido must have given out a signal, creating the beacon that guided his killer’s steps. A ring. Maybe a ring. But no metal or precious stone could project its gleam without the intervention of light.

  ‘Fonseca. I’m sorry to call you at this hour.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m your faithful servant.’

  ‘I’ve read and reread the list of personal effects found on Garrido’s body. It carries the seal of your department. Did nothing go unnoticed?’

  ‘The list mentions everything that was on the body when it was handed over to us.’

  ‘Some witnesses insist that Garrido was smoking, and that could have been the killer’s guiding light. But Santos swears and swears again that Garrido was not smoking at that moment.’

  ‘If he says so. . .’

  ‘How do you explain the precision of the killer’s path?’

  ‘Training. A lot of training.’

  ‘Where? Did someone from the central committee hire the Hotel Continental meeting-room for rehearsals?’

  ‘That wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s enough to reproduce a similar set-up. Garrido always sat in the same place. The distances could have been calculated to perfection.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem a good enough explanation.’

  ‘It’s a question of tas
te or inclination.’

  Oliver’s belonged to the neo-classical style. It didn’t matter which one—perhaps a spin-off from the decorative modernism that sprang up in the second half of the sixties through the hardening of camp sensibilities. Just as the Renaissance tried to imitate Greek and Roman art more than a thousand years after its effective extinction, so the neo-modernists retrieved the last imaginative fling of pre-monopoly capitalism forty or fifty years after its decay. A soothing effect resulted from the use of colours, forms and volumes determined by high ceilings for an uneroded space. The inevitably sadistic contribution of the decorator had been to condemn bodies to something like the theoretical crouching position of people opening their bowels. Seats for pre-Arabs or post-Japanese, or feather weight abdomens conditioned to hard-boiled egg sandwiches.

  When Carvalho sat down, he felt that he was about to be interrogated by someone much better placed than himself, and this expectation shaped the way in which all those present looked at one another. They were inescapably forced to keep a look-out for the one who would play the role of grand inquisitor. This unpleasant sensation of being badly seated for the game of life sometimes disguised itself as curiosity for the faces, names and epithets that were seeking room in the inquisitor’s harem, or in the basement where much of Madrid’s cultured and distinguished homosexual world is known to collect. In the heterosexual room were ex-actresses of the ex-theatre, ex-actors in the post-May ’68 intellectual ex-life, whose verbal radicalism was continually renewed and suitably dented by an improper sideways fall into an intervocalic position.

  Inheritors of Segovian sausage-factories, converted to the negation of the negation of the negation of a radical, abrasive, dodecaphonic, paradigmatic Bakuninism seven miles from anywhere and seven leagues from before and after the discovery that fathers do not bring new-born babies from Paris and cannot save them from the degree zero of development or from death, were explaining their latest nouvelle cuisine discoveries, the discovery of a seventies conspiracy, it being false that 1970 was a good year for Rioja, no need to go further than 1971 Muga, crucial for survival despite the communist betrayal and the fact that a close friend of mine at the Sorbonne, a Cambodian himself who translated Saint-John Perse into Cambodian, became a head-shrinker in Cambodia, where the fuck could he be now?

  Princes of the baroque ended every night at Oliver’s, beginning their elegant oration the same morning over coffee and rolls, their lungs full without oxygen or anything, still reading Gongora with a fat woman sitting on their lungs. Starlets without distinction of sex or status talked about semi-theatrical, semi-physiological performances, all the eyes in their body sketched with a small tube; then they would drop the conversation to finish it a few hours later at Boccaccio’s, with depressed male and female nipples because there is massive unemployment and people don’t give a fuck, which comes to the same thing. Fugitive editors or ex-editors of Mundo Obrero, former concrete poets, five thousand Andalusian novelists and a theosophist from Alcoy, a sensitive forty-year-old with bad nerves and a nurse with a cunt at half-mast, expelled CP members and those who expelled them, the general secretaries of all the left-wing pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostella, Umbral’s last discovery and Cejador’s next-to-last one, black-market salesmen of El País articles, a girl from Seville who goes to bed late and alone, the empty chair of someone who hasn’t shown up, survivors of the 1963 purge and triplet great-grandchildren of Sitting Bull, people who come to see if they are noticed, others who know the secret of the Planeta Prize-winner or Kennedy’s assassination, an ETA terrorist disguised as a kid from the North, the nun who converted Borges to Kropotkinism and now displays blue-blooded stigmata on the palms of her hands.

  ‘This is unbearable. We should have stayed at Malasaña’s. There’s more atmosphere there. This is like an old crock’s garage.’

  Gladys interpreted what she heard to Carvalho. For his part, he was fascinated by her pearly teeth that seemed miraculously artificial.

  ‘The census is over. I’ve had my fill of prodigies.’

  ‘I haven’t yet described those in the north corner.’

  She is wearing a mohair sweater, whose V-neck separates the hemispheres of her breasts. Carvalho has a premonition of equatorial heat in the dark humidity of her flesh. Like a moist finger, his eyes travel from the birth of the spheres down to the south of a vegetative body.

  ‘I’m sure there’s more atmosphere at Malasaña’s, but the people are less erotic—they’re basically as healthy as bonny little babies. At least no one here is running away from crow’s feet or the spread of carbon 14.’

  ‘Are you improvising, or reciting your secret verse?’

  ‘Am I boring you?’

  ‘No. But I’ve had enough. Can’t we talk in private?’

  ‘Just talk? You’ll be sorry after. I’m not what I seem. I’m a cold, calculating woman who’ll lead you to ruin.’

  ‘Lead on.’

  ‘You asked for it.’

  As she rose, she passed her forearm over her buttocks and thighs—a gesture Carvalho had not seen since an Eleanor Parker film of the fifties.

  ‘What are you staring at?’

  The coolness of the street was soothing to his skin.

  ‘Who leads, you or me?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m just passing through town.’

  ‘I haven’t any fixed abode either. I live outside town, in a flat some friends lent me.’

  ‘Let’s get a taxi.’

  ‘No so fast, stranger. I’ve got a car. It’s also borrowed. Like everything I have.’

  ‘I was quietly standing against the bar, resting from a dialectical punch-up, when you came looking for me.’

  ‘Don’t act the simpleton. Why were you looking at me?’

  ‘There was nothing better to look at.’

  ‘That girl wasn’t bad.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The brunette who was with you.’

  ‘She wasn’t with me. I think she knocks around with the other guy, the one who was translating Lenin into slang.’

  ‘Well, you must have met in another life, because you were looking at each other like first cousins.’

  Later, Carvalho kissed her near-red hair as she was driving, while she flashed back a series of smiles occasionally lit up by the headlights of an oncoming car. Now and again, Gladys caught Carvalho’s hand with her lips and left a string of little kisses. The car’s route was unknown to Carvalho, although he guessed they were going along the Coruña road to a residential suburb. Then they passed through motionless streets forming the darkened web of an elegant district. The car stopped and they kissed, Carvalho’s tongue on the edge of the abyss, hers lightly perched on the railings. Gladys’s tongue limbered up on the way of crossed kisses that marked their advance onto a crackling gravel path, just before the old glass door which she rather clumsily unlocked.

  ‘No. Not there. They may come back any minute. Come to my room.’

  Carvalho saw a cracked porcelain wash-basin, a shiny coat-hanger and a firmly locked window. He could not take in much else, because Gladys switched off the main light and put on a tiny bedside lamp. The bed promised to be a soft homeland, and the two bodies immediately fell upon it.

  She did not let herself be undressed. As she pulled the mohair sweater over her head, two breasts leapt out with two raspberries on the end. Gladys put her hands under her breasts, as if to feel their weight or to prevent them falling. Her hands served as a plate for Carvalho’s sucking lips and then moved to stop his hands on their journey down her spine to the anal abyss.

  ‘Gently.’

  It struck Carvalho she had spoken with the voice of a whore, or a mother of six children weighed down by shopping, cooking and varicose veins. But her soft smile had nothing in common with the tone of her voice, nor did the small lips that pecked at Carvalho’s lips, chin and chest-hair, leaving two bite-marks on his nipples that showed an unsettling presence of the canine teeth. Carvalho’s hands had clutch
ed her buttocks, separating them to spread the secret and the aroma of the enclosed grooves.

  ‘Gently,’ Gladys repeated, with a restless voice but cold eyes staring at those of Carvalho. Using the tips of his fingers, the man raised the moist down that marked the trail from her anus to a small vulva stretched to acquire greater proportions.

  ‘Gently.’

  There was already greater harmony between look and voice. Carvalho let himself roll back with Gladys on top and lifted her to see her hair, breasts and soft look of surprise. Without giving her time to recover, he placed her on his penis and penetrated her. They looked at each other without moving or speaking, but Gladys’s eyes searched for explanations that Carvalho was not disposed to give. Gladys shut her eyes, lifted her head, rested her palms on Carvalho’s belly and began to move up and down in a perfect gymnastic rhythm assisted by regular panting. Carvalho toured the geography of the dark-brown, painted-timber ceiling and the geography of Gladys’s face, sublime, ecstatic when she leant her head back, and conquered, exhausted when she dropped it towards the man’s skewering body. The arrival of orgasm was announced by a few sighs, a controlled moan, and the weakness of bent arms deserted by the brain. Finally, Gladys’s body closed on his like a lid, and an oily dampness lubricated their sexual parts.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Carvalho had taken her strongly by the arms, forcing her onto all fours on the bed. ‘What are you doing, stupid. Don’t think you’re going to have me in the arse.’

  Carvalho helped his favourite son to find the entrance to the limp vagina, and then he grasped the woman’s hips and buttocks and forced them to gyrate. Gladys’s face had disappeared beneath the dome of her head, shaken by the to-and-fro movement of a body stretched to meet the tenacious rod. But her brain was still working like that of a computer programmer, and from time to time it sent order to her hands to strike freedom blows against the inordinate pressure of Carvalho’s talons on her hips and buttocks. Crushed against the sheets, Gladys’s face emitted a howl to the west: she slid forward, leaving Carvalho’s purple member in the lurch, mocked by the squelching separation of flesh. He fell by her side, not in search of company but in order to protect the withdrawal of his penis to its original position. Carvlho’s eyes were an inch or two from Gladys’s open eye, full of smiling neutrality.