Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘An interesting quesion. Which agency? That must have been where the contact was made. You’re a fine professional. It’s obvious that you’ve had some education. I won’t offer you a job here because even I don’t know how long I’ll last. What times these are, when the greatest loyalty is rewarded with disloyalty!’

  ‘I’d like access to the confidential files on every member of the PCE central committee.’

  ‘If you’ve got a week to kill, I don’t see any obstacle. But they won’t tell you anything you don’t already know. They merely chart their criminal career until the Party was made legal. I’d have to consult my superiors.’

  ‘I’d like to see reports not about criminal activity, as you call it, but about their private life. What they say on the phone, for example.’

  ‘There’s a lot of myth about this phone-tapping business. Ours is a poor country, and we have neither the technology not the staff to keep listening in on every red in the country. If you can be more specific and tell me which five or six you’re interested in, it might be easier to put together. But not dozens. Don’t ask for the impossible. You can’t tell me that you haven’t got a list of candidates.’

  ‘I’ll swap it for yours.’

  ‘We’ll study the offer.’

  For the moment, Fonseca’s eyes were content to study Carvalho.

  ‘I have got a suspect—or rather, two. But one above all.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll be frank and then leave it to you to name your favourites. My suspects are Martialay and Marcos Ordóñez. Martialay and Garrido were on very bad terms. Garrido, as you know, was very euro and liberal on the outside, but he couldn’t stand losing control of any power centre such as was happening with the trade-union movement. As for Marcos Ordóñez, the story’s as long as your arm. You know who I’m talking about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cut the jokes.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘Marcos Ordóñez is one of the historic figures from before the war. He was thick as thieves with Garrido until the struggle for the succession back in the late forties. Against Garrido, Ordóñez supported a guy who’s now dead, called Galdón. When Garrido won, Ordóñez was marginalised to such an extent that he had to go to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia. Has no one really ever told you the stories of people like that? You’ve only heard a part: how heriocally they resisted the torturers of that butcher Franco, and so on. Yes, I know all that. But there was a lot of shit flying around in exile, particularly among the leadership. A lot of jealousy, both big and small. A lot of battles between influential Party families. Let’s go back to Marcos Ordóñez. After the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, Garrido needed all possible support to force through destalinisation in the Party, and so he started drawing people back to confront the Stalinist conspiracy. Ordóñez was one of those reintegrated, but only on terms of complete political prostration. Just think. He was one of the first and he only reached the executive committee in 1973 or thereabouts, more or less at the end of his life. He’s a very sick man, deeply marked by the moral suffering to which he was subjected. Try to understand. Put yourself in his shoes.’

  ‘I can see you have a high opinion of Marcos Ordóñez.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘His fate obviously makes you sad.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have a heart of stone. It’s true, I’ve studied these people so much that I’m not indifferent to them. It’s only because of my Catholic principles that I’ve been able to resist their enormous seductive power and avoid becoming a communist.’

  Miss Pilar let out the first series of short guffaws. But after a little stern hesitation, Fonseca followed with roars of laughter that brought him to the verge of suffocation.

  ‘The Urbana Matritense,’ Dillinger said from the door.

  ‘The Urbana Matritense,’ Fonseca repeated softly, casting ocular rays of expectation towards the listless Dillinger. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The company that does house-cleaning. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a family firm with more than fifty years of tradition.’

  ‘You can stuff your tradition. Investigate, investigate, investigate!’

  Fonseca rigidly tapped Dillinger on the lapel. Carvalho passed alongside them, muttering something in the way of goodbye.

  ‘You’re off already? I promise to keep you right up to date with what I find out.’

  Carvalho indicated his agreement.

  ‘But next time I won’t let you off so lightly. I did all the talking.’

  ‘We swapped roles for once.’

  Santos was waiting alone at the corner of a long committee table. He showed Carvalho the obsessive blue files piled up behind him. He stood up to walk around the table while Carvalho was sounding the innards of the twenty files.

  ‘You can go if you like. I’ve got a couple of hours’ work.’

  ‘I’ll stay if you don’t mind.’

  Carvalho put his hand in his pocket and drew out a note-pad and a plan of the Hotel Continental conference-room. Imagining the pad as the platform table, he placed each file in such a way as to represent the position of the central committee member whose photograph and political history were contained inside it.

  ‘Good work.’

  ‘I did it alone. I didn’t want anyone to stick their nose into it.’

  As if he were waiting for the result of an examination, Santos continued to walk up and down, with an occasional glance at Carvalho’s activity. The detective read each biography, took notes, put the file to one side, and left the photograph at the relevant point around the note-pad. He considered each picture in turn, scrutinising the eyes in the blow-ups of banal passport photos. Finally, he separated out six photos and six dossiers and put them at the other end of the table.

  ‘Are those the suspects?’ Santos stopped with a sceptical smile on his lips.

  ‘The main ones, yes.’

  ‘Juan Sepúlveda Civit, Marcos Ordóñez Laguardia, Juan Antonio Lecumberri Aranaz, Félix Esparza Julve, Jorge Leveder Sánchez-Espeso, Roberto Escapá Azancot. A fine selection. I congratulate you.’

  ‘I’ve borne in mind their position in the room. And I’ve eliminated women and old men since they wouldn’t have been able to deliver such a knife wound. These six names do not exhaust every possibility. If I get nowhere with them, I’ll continue until we’ve covered all twenty.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve read the life-history of these people. I also notice that you’ve selected one veteran, Marcos Ordóñez. Was he physically capable of doing it?’

  ‘Theoretically, no. But he may have had the psychological capacity. According to my information, he’d piled up a number of grievances against Garrido.’

  ‘Have they been telling you about the purge in the fifties? But Ordóñez was rehabilitated and promoted to high Party posts.’

  ‘Still, Ordóñez’s exile in Czechoslovakia seems to have lost him even his family. His own wife wrote a letter to the Party leadership disowning her husband and accusing him of Titoism. Was it a very serious thing to be a Titoist?’

  ‘Very serious until 1954.’

  ‘What happened in ’54?’

  ‘The new leadership team in the USSR revised its position on Yugoslavia. It was the beginning of destalinisation.’

  ‘Did the Ordóñez couple get together again?’

  ‘No. She went to Spain for underground work and was arrested in ’58. She was only released about 1965—quite a long spell.’

  ‘What does she do now?’

  ‘She died in Bucharest two years ago. She was a sheer physical wreck, and so we sent her to a Romanian sanatorium.’

  ‘Were there any children?’

  ‘They stayed with the mother and vanished after she was picked up. They have nothing to do with the Party nowadays. One’s a tailor in Barcelona, I think, and the other has a restaurant in Melbourne.’

  ‘Do they keep in touch with the father?’

  ‘Only just.’<
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  ‘A fine political history, to the greater honour and glory of militant discipline.’

  ‘We were fighting a military dictatorship and were not too concerned about nuances. We were tough, not only with others but also with ourselves. I never saw my children grow up: they’re strangers to me. Our children grew up thanks to the tenacity of our wives, who lived like widows from one trial to another, one prison to the next. Some fared a lot worse than Ordóñez. At least things could be put right in his case.’

  ‘Juan Sepúlveda Civit. Industrial engineer. Forty-two years old. Member of the People’s Liberation Front who joined the Communist Party in 1965. Responsible for the liberal professions for nearly ten years until regionalisation. What does regionalisation mean?’

  ‘When the Party began to grow, it switched from occupational to regional organisation. One of the aims was to check the corporatist deviations that were beginning to appear.’

  ‘Sepúlveda Civit. Court-martialled with El Felipe in 1962. Public Order Court in 1967. Sacked from Perkins, Pegaso. Married with two children. I see his dues are four thousand pesetas a month. That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘It’s one per cent of his income.’

  ‘Four hundred thousand a month. Not bad.’

  ‘He’s very highly thought of as an engineer. The Party turns to him when it has financial problems: elections, special expenditure.’

  ‘According to my information, he may be one of Garrido’s legatees. It says here that he clashed with Garrido about the decisions of the last congress. He identified with “Leninist” against “euro-communist” positions.’

  ‘That may be a little exaggerated. That tendency could be seen in him, and it would anyway be logical in his case. Sepúlveda is a great militant. But he cannot shake off a social and cultural conditioning which sometimes drives him into maximalist positions. Intellectuals are usually more radical than workers; it’s a way of affirming themselves. We have to be as wary of arrogant intellectual know-alls as we are of humble intellectuals with an inferiority complex in relation to the working class.’

  ‘You’ve studied the problem a lot.’

  ‘It’s my job. I’m a bureaucrat, don’t forget.’

  ‘Married with two children. His wife is not a member, but she helps on occasions and gave him active assistance during the election campaign. Her name is Lamadrid Raistegnac. Sounds very familiar.’

  ‘Her father belongs to twenty administrative councils. He’s a papal count or something.’

  ‘You have very good connections. Let’s continue. Juan Antonio Lecumberri Arranaz. Comes from ETA (military wing). Well, I’m damned! Now we’re getting somewhere. A recent recruit: 1973. A violent past—tried as an ETA man in 1967, wounded in a clash with the guardia civil. Economist. Currently a member of the Party finance committee. Exempt. I suppose that means he’s a full-timer.’

  ‘He helps to collect Party finances and is also one of those responsible for organisation. He’s rather a difficult lad. He’s recently seemed weighed down by political work and on the point of requesting a leave of absence. He got married three years ago, and his wife doesn’t understand the vow of poverty he forces on her. He could earn a very good living indeed. It’s understandable. But that doesn’t strike me as reason enough to kill Garrido.’

  ‘Félix Esparza Julve. Forty years old. Already a member of the Communist Youth in Burgos in 1953. The son of exiles. A commission agent. Married. Three children. A Party full-timer in the early sixties in Paris and Asturias.’

  ‘We sent him into Asturias to reorganise the Party after the round-ups of ’62 and ’63. I was a friend of his father, one of the bravest comrades who went into exile in 1939. We smuggled him into Spain in 1944 to make contact with the Valencia guerrillas. He was arrested and reduced to a pitiful state, dying of TB in San Miguel de los Reyes prison. I’ve been a kind of godparent to Félix. I call him Julvito. For reasons connected with Party work, I’ve spent more time living with him than with my own children. I’d put my head on the chopping-block for him.’

  ‘But not for the others? What should we deduce from that?’

  ‘The others deserve all my trust, and right now I really would prefer a supernatural explanation that would free everyone from blame. I feel ashamed to have helped you compile these dossiers, and to be haggling with you over the honour of my comrades.’

  ‘There’s one assassin in a party of two hundred thousand members. That’s not a bad average.’

  ‘No, that’s the wrong way to look at it. There’s an assassin in a central committee of little over a hundred members, in which the herioc history of the Party is distilled. That’s the problem, the insoluble problem.’

  ‘Paco Leveder Sánchez-Espeso. I see that you’ve given a very frivolous account of him. Why do you call him “a professional oppositionist”?’

  ‘He’s mad about aesthetics and always adopts the most beautiful posture. But he’s been a very hard-fighting militant, both at university and on the intellectual front. He spent three or four years in prison and always stood up for the Party when he had to. He’s on the central committee because he’s all the rage among intellectuals.’

  ‘You say here: voted against Garrido.’

  ‘The present central committee was elected at the last congress. In turn, it elected the general secretary and the executive committee. Garrido was elected almost unanimously. The almost was Leveder. He raised his solitary arm when asked if anyone was against.’

  ‘You didn’t send him to Siberia?’

  ‘It must be accepted that the days of unanimity are over in this party.’

  ‘Did he justify voting against Garrido?’

  ‘Yes. He asked to speak and gave his motivation. He said he was voting against as a matter of basic Party education, to teach the charismatic leaders that they are not gods. I think his explanation disturbed Garrido more than the actual negative vote. He erupted, in the way he used to erupt with a charge of repressed inner violence that clung to his words. They weren’t on good terms with each other after that. They joked a lot in order to cover it up, but there was a basic antipathy between them.’

  ‘So Leveder is your prime suspect?’

  ‘Absolutely not. He’s a frivolous type and an aesthete. Do people kill out of frivolity or aestheticism? Maybe in books or films, but not in real life.’

  ‘Leveder is separated and has a daughter. Separated from a member of the PCE-Internacional. He’s a sociology lecturer at the Faculty of Information Sciences. I see that you describe him as anarchistic.’

  ‘He calls himself a liberal-Marxist, but I think he’s a democratist: an anarchist involved as a communist for reasons of historical efficacy.’

  ‘Roberto Escapá Azancot, a farmer from La Mancha. Elected mayor of his village at the last municipal elections. Thiry-five years of age. Married. Four children. Member of the Party since 1970. Very little information.’

  ‘He’s a reliable, hard-working comrade, but without much of a history. One of the great Party workers who can keep a whole region going on his own. Worth his weight in gold. I may have forgotten to mention that he plays the flageolet and has helped to revive it throughout La Mancha.’

  ‘Did Garrido like the flageolet?’

  ‘He never gave an opinion one way or the other.’

  Marcos Ordóñez: the face of an old frog, wise and weary. Lecumberri, that of a Basque in whom the seeds of rebellion have been sown. Esparza Julve, the smiling look of a salesman in the backroom of a shop. Irony as a method of knowledge in Leveder’s smile. The agricultural solidity of La Mancha cheese in Escapá Azancot’s expression. And raised above them all, Sepúlveda’s ministerial head of press conferences and programmatic speeches, an important head.

  ‘If you don’t need me.’

  ‘No, I don’t need you.’

  ‘Have you given these names to Fonseca?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?
’

  ‘I don’t want to rush things or put anyone in danger. I don’t want to manufacture an Oswald.’

  ‘Thanks for the trust you’ve shown in me.’

  When Santos Pacheco left, Carvalho put his feet on the table and leant back on the hind legs of the chair. He suppressed the temptation to lift the nearby telephone and call the six under investigation. He gathered together the files and photographs. Then he looked out of the balcony windows at the tree-lined street with the name of a river. Julio and his companion were propped against the car they used to follow him. A white van could be seen a few metres further down the road. Carvalho looked at it absentmindedly until his mind settled on the inscription: Urbana Matritense. Carvalho could feel the pistol in his shoulder-holster. He picked up the files, left the room, grunted nonchalantly in response to Mir, and went straight up to a girl who was tapping away at her machine.

  ‘Give me a large bag that can hold all these files.’

  He sealed the bag with sellotape and stressed that it should be given to Santos. He went into the street. Julio and his friend were still there, but not the van.

  ‘A van has just gone off.’

  ‘Yes. Just now.’

  ‘I’ll get in with you.’

  ‘We’re not supposed to. But okay, let’s go.’

  Carvalho folded and refolded the notes he had taken on the six men and put them in his top jacket pocket.

  ‘Make as if you’re going to Party headquarters.’

  ‘Okay, man, to Castelló. It’s so little known.’

  The van followed in an obvious way, even drawing alongside at one point.

  ‘Keep next to the van.’

  He lowered his window and smiled to the Latin American, who was sitting beside the driver. Carvalho took out his pistol and aimed it at the face of the man obsessed with castration. His twitching face suddenly pulled back, and the van darted off to the left.

  ‘Step on it.’

  Through the rear window he could see the van trying to move back into a position of pursuit.

  ‘Our friend’s a playful sort. As if there weren’t enough trouble already.’