Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  Carvalho looked for the hidden eye of the closed-circuit television. He thought he could make it out under the wing of a Murillo angel flying to the top of the trompe l’oeil.

  ‘Even I don’t know when it’s on.’

  ‘But you know it’s sometimes on?’

  ‘Almost never, I promise you. I swear it.’

  A formal knock on the tall, huge doors followed by a rapid entry. Fonseca stretched out his hand to Carvalho, while Sánchez Ariñó, his head bent but smiling, kept his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I heard you were here, Señor Carvalho, so I thought I’d drop in and say hello. If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must go to Mohammed.’

  Fonseca put on a most critical look of surprise when he saw the metal box on Carvalho’s knees. As his eyes rose questioningly towards Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla, the assistant chief executive’s face grew smaller than ever, as though searching for the metaphysical consistency of authority. He beat off the doubt and interrogation clinging to Fonseca’s eyes. Carvalho watched them act out their roles of suspicious overseer and hardy administrator, without taking his eyes off Sánchez Ariñó, who seemed lost in the mystery of the new world suggested by the grooved surface of his powerful fingernails. If he sometimes turned his gaze from such a magical preoccupation, it was to fling his boredom and indifference at the other protagonists.

  ‘It occurs to me that. . .’

  ‘What occurs to you is your business,’ the assistant chief executive cut him short.

  But Fonseca had decided to stop only at the top and he pointed to the box resting on Carvalho’s knees. The executive raised his voice on artificial heels and emphatically declared:

  ‘That’s enough!’

  Fonseca shrugged and gave a wink to Carvalho.

  ‘Well, ours is not to reason why. As far as I’m concerned, you can churn out photocopies and give them to all your pals.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any point. Written reports were never your strong point. You’ve always preferred oral communication.’

  ‘Very clever. Very intelligent. I’d like to have had you here five years ago. Then we’d have seen where your cleverness and intelligence got you. I know very well where they’d have gone: up your arse.’

  But he wore a smile, evidently trying to put a brave face on it.

  ‘If you know something and don’t inform the legitimate representatives of the government, then you know what can happen to you.’

  ‘I told him that myself,’ echoed Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla.

  ‘This isn’t a spy film. There are a lot of ugly customers around, as you’ve already found out.’

  ‘It’s also for your own safety,’ added the waistcoated executive to ingratiate himself with the other two.

  ‘Of course. That’s what matters above all.’

  Fonseca was enthusiastic at the discovery of a new argument.

  ‘Your own safety is the supreme consideration.’

  ‘The main one,’ Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla said by way of correction.

  ‘Yes, the main one.’

  Carvalho stood up and felt a highly charged threat on passing Fonseca, as if the suppressed violence were attempting to electrocute him. He left the zinc box on the table in front of the waistcoated executive.

  ‘You’ve convinced me. I don’t want to find anything out. Here’s the box.’

  ‘He’s playing games. He’s already found what he wanted, and now he’s just trying to pull the wool over our eyes.’

  ‘Señor Carvalho, I’d like to warn you for the last time that you are assuming a grave responsibility towards the country, the government and your own conscience.’

  The short speech was emphatically supported by the nodding of Fonseca’s head. Carvalho was most impressed. He shrugged his shoulders without any sign of defiance, understanding that everything said was for his own good, but he remained the victim of a personal and professional drive which, he well knew, might one day lead to disaster. Perhaps the shrug was not sufficiently eloquent, for Sánchez Ariñó barred the exit by forcefully placing the palm of his hand on Carvalho’s chest.

  ‘Is this door yours?’

  Sánchez Ariñó pursed his cheek by way of a smile.

  ‘Am I under arrest? Is this the moment when I should ask to see my lawyer?’

  ‘Let him go. But I’m telling you very seriously, Señor Carvalho; you’ve asumed a great responsibility to the country, the government and your own conscience.’

  ‘There’s no need to repeat yourself. I’m sure it’s already been taped and filmed.’

  Carvalho pointed to the hole in the ceiling. The palm of ‘Dillinger’s’ hand dropped from his chest, and he left the actors to take a breather behind the fallen curtain. This is not moving but being moved, he repeated to himself as he passed through doors, rooms and corridors towards the way out. Once in the street, he was not sure whether to cover his tracks or make them easier to see. He should speak with Santos and others as well, eventually placing the right epithet on the assassination. Yet another taxi-driver disilllusioned with politics, the mayor, the city, the taxi and life. Calle Professor Waksman? Do you know who he was? A fortune-hunter? What do you think? He invented streptomycin, the thing that came after penicillin. And what came then? A lot of concoctions, but nothing really. This time the porter strictly looked the part and was not scratching his balls beneath his uniform. He accompanied Carvalho to the lift, with the submission of an assistant lecturer from the fifties. The detective went up to the flat of James Wonderful, alias Jaime Siurell, walked past it, climbed a few steps to the next floor, and waited. The porter must have told them over the house-phone. They’ll wait four or five minutes, then they’ll get nervous and the door will open. The door opened. The Central European from the night at Gladys’s stuck his head out to make sure no one was on the landing.

  ‘He’s not there,’ he called back from the door.

  ‘Have you looked properly?’

  It was Wonderful’s voice. The fair-haired man slowly turned to look again, without taking his hand from his jacket pocket. He ventured as far as the stairs to the landing and then on to the main staircase, where the soles of Carvalho’s shoes crashed into his eyes and broke the world into stardust, burning his nostrils with the smell of his own blood. As Carvalho hit him about the ear and neck, he let his body topple gently in an apparent effort to soften the fall and avoid a sharp encounter with the parquet floor. Carvalho jumped over the prostrate body, gripped the door-frame with one hand and pushed his pistol into the flat with the other. The door was open between the entrance-hall and the living room, so that right at the end he could see Wonderful standing attentively and blinking to sharpen the image that approached him.

  ‘Shuster, what’s going on?’

  Wonderful’s hands dropped on the wheelchair as on a parapet, obviously dejected at the presence of Carvalho.

  ‘What do you want here? You’re an idiot, a complete idiot. You haven’t learnt anything.’

  He spoke with greater ease than at their previous meeting, and his eyes even seemed to have returned to their orbits. But as he took his hands from the wheelchair and dropped his arms by his side, tears hung from the ragged lashes of sickly, weather-beaten eyes. Carvalho drew nearer and Wonderful ducked down, concentrating all the strength in his arms to launch the wheelchair like a missile at the detective. Having chosen to contemplete that raging face full of veins, red patches, grimy moisture and mauve wrinkles, Carvalho took the force of the chair on his knees and belly. He fell on his knees, breathed deeply, and let Wonderful regain sufficient agility to move towards a cocktail bar. Just as the old man was about to put his trembling hands on the hidden revolver, Carvalho’s neutral voice froze him to a halt.

  ‘You’ll never reach the gun. But I’ve got one, too. Be sensible.’

  ‘Imbecile. You’re a real imbecile. What did you come here for?’

  ‘I need a few more pieces of information.’
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  ‘And who’s going to give you them? Me?’

  A flash of hope smoothed the wrinkles on the old man’s face. Carvalho swung round and fired before the broken-armed Latin American could do the same. The man fell on his sling arm and uncovered a shadow seeking refuge on the staircase. Carvalho threw himself on Wonderful, seized him by his dressing-gown and forced him to walk in front. With his good arm, the Latin American was trying to hold back the blood that streamed from his chest. Carvalho did not have to say a word, since Wonderful himself cleared a path.

  ‘Careful what you do! I’m coming first.’

  Two angry-looking men watched as Wonderful and Carvalho, stuck to each other, took the lift to the ground floor. One of them was the impassive, fair-haired man. He seemed to be smiling.

  When they were passing the porter, Wonderful began to exaggerate the difficulty he had in moving. But it was not enough to stop the ill-tempered doorman’s eyes from popping at the miracle of the walking invalid. So radical was his surprise that he did not appreciate how firmly Carvalho’s arms were placed on Wonderful’s shoulders. It did not strike him as odd that Carvalho suddenly left the old man tottering on the pavement, for no other reason than to pounce on a taxi—pounce on rather than hail—in an area where they were certainly not in short supply. But this basic incongruity was as nothing beside the sudden raising of the old man. For a moment Wonderful followed the trail of Carvalho’s taxi, but then he let himself be taken in and questioned by the porter.

  ‘I’ve been able to walk just a little for a few days now. My nephew got very excited that I should see him to the door. Sometimes things like that can boost you more than the best medicine. I hadn’t seen him for so many years. He’s the son of my little pet sister.’

  Similarly, Carvalho looked back to watch the old man allowing himself to be led submissively into the house. Imbecile. You’re a real imbecile. You haven’t understood anything. And you go around shooting people and breaking their arms. The more powerful your enemies, the more foolhardy you become. You won’t reach old age, and nor will you become a young man again. It was true. Imbecile. You haven’t understood anything. What do epithets matter to you? Leave them for the politicians. The murderer is so-and-so, and that’s that. He grabbed a telephone box, placing his body between it and an agitated woman who had undoubtedly seen it first. While he tried to locate Santos, he listened to the indignant monologue addressed to him through the glass by the woman, who looked like an angry orangutan.

  ‘Excuse me, but it was an emergency. I had to get a doctor.’

  ‘Well, if you’d told me. I’m only human.’

  But Carvalho paid no attention to the moral sermon and got back into the taxi.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Take me on a guided tour.’

  ‘A tour? Round Madrid? Aren’t you from here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s obvious. A tour of Madrid by taxi!’

  But he took him on the tour, from one traffic jam to the next.

  ‘They say it eases up at meal-times. You see?’

  Meal-times. For the first time in many years, the appointment with food did not seem important.

  ‘Drop me outside the Ritz.’

  The taxi-driver sang softly:

  ‘Ah what pleasure

  Dancing a fox-trot

  With a young squire

  Who talks of love!

  If I live to be a hundred years old

  I’ll never forget the evenings at the Ritz.’

  Julio was reading a sports paper propped against the corner of the hotel façade.

  ‘Keep going for two blocks. Carmela is waiting for you. She’s not in her usual car. It’s a blue Talbot.’

  As he walked along, Carvalho worked out what he would say. He looked round twice to see if he was being followed. Carmela opened the door from inside.

  ‘Is your husband safe and sound?’

  ‘The poor guy. They left him crippled for me. He doesn’t look too happy. You men don’t know how to be ill. If you’d been through childbirth . . . and everything that follows. What headaches! A stomach turned upside down. You’re not looking well. Did you meet that riff-raff again?’

  ‘A similar bunch.’

  ‘Santos is waiting for you.’

  She stopped on the Gran Via at the corner of the Plaza de España. She pointed to the dull rise of the Madrid Tower towards a dying afternoon sky. Seventeenth floor.

  ‘It’s a safe flat. Ask for Pino Betancourt—the flat’s in his name.’

  He crossed the square behind the dull-witted Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. No one asked him where he was going until he came upon a dark, big-eyed woman with a printed dress that half-covered a pair of high black boots. Santos looked uncomfortable on the low collapsible sofa of a living-room filled with symbols of emancipated woman. The dark woman picked up her bag, nodded to them and went out of the room. Carvalho dropped beside Santos and told him of the flageolet, the special emblem with red paint treated to shine in the dark, the death signal, the Galician and New Zealand kiwi fruits, Esparza Julve, or rather Julvito, the interview with the waistcoated Pérez-Montesa de la Hinestrilla—waistcoated? yes, waistcoated—and Fonseca. Santos rose to his feet as if he were carrying the weight of four bodies. He went onto the balcony to look at the old-town panorama on the verge of nightfall: beyond the autumnal agony of the Plaza de España, between the decor of the Royal Palace and the illuminations of the Gran Via. Seventeen floors between reality and desire, Carvalho thought, without knowing why and without moving from the sofa. Santos Pacheco’s white head shone in the sunlight. The animated shadows of doubts were no longer passing through that head—only memories, one, two, three, a thousand episodes from the life of Esparza Julve, Julvito. As Carvalho had spoken, he had seen a prayer steadily taking shape in Santos’s eyes. Not that, please; anything, but not that. Santos returned from the balcony.

  ‘For money? Out of hate?’

  ‘Only he knows. But the evidence very strongly points to money. Irregularities of management. Fraudulent bankruptcy. Did you know anything about it?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘What kind of irregularities?’

  ‘It was after he got married and moved away from the Party. He’d lived the tough life of a Party orphan and communist fighter and he soon became a free man with money in his pocket. No one could help him. I heard of what was happening, but I couldn’t give him any financial assistance. I never dreamt that it was so dramatic, that it would lead him where it did.’

  ‘Everything fits. The times. The trip to Germany. No doubt we would discover that he didn’t work in a factory, but received special training.’

  ‘So much deceit. I just can’t understand it.’

  ‘You can hate what you love, especially if you’ve been conditioned by a life full of extraordinary events.’

  ‘That must be it. We all surrounded him with the cult of his father. We all wanted him to be like us. We always want new cadres to be like us, talk like us, think like us. Would you mind leaving?’

  He went back on the balcony. The sun had moved enough to take the shine off his head. It was now pallid, opaque, abandoned between his shoulders, crestfallen over the void.

  ‘I’ve finished my work,’ Carvalho said without daring to follow.

  ‘Please. Leave me alone for a few hours. I’ll track him down before the evening is out. Tomorrow we will settle up and you can be on your way.’

  The words came from that motionless head. There could be no doubt.

  ‘I can’t be sure that the people from the State Security Office haven’t found out.’

  ‘Until tomorrow.’

  He was going to say: I’m in torture, Carmela. Do you know where I can get some nice tripe at this hour? But then he realised from her paralysed face that they were not alone in the car. The man he had insulted in the bookshop for being too free with his hands now sat up in the rear seat and expertly searched Carvalho with one hand, while keeping the
other out of sight.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut. And you, you already know what to do.’

  She did. Having found a way round the España building, she followed the Avenida Princesa down to the Puerta del Hierro and emerged onto the Coruña highway.

  ‘Madrid is like a pocket handkerchief. We’ve just been near the VIP bookshop, and now you’re taking me to another familiar scene.’

  ‘Taking us,’ Carmela pointed out.

  The man did not reply. He had leant back at a distance half-way between Carmela and Carvalho.

  ‘Slow down when you see an advertisement for the Mesón del Cojo. I haven’t eaten anything. I’m travelling on an empty stomach.’

  ‘You on an empty stomach? You won’t survive. But I don’t think this gentleman will let you have a sandwich.’

  ‘Where are we going? Is there a meal prepared?’

  The other man closed his eyes and screwed up his nose. They were boring him.

  ‘I’ll take bad memories away from Madrid. I’ve hardly had any sleep. It’s a town without doors or private life. They just take you where they like. I wasn’t able to go to any fashionable restaurants.’

  ‘I did what I could. Submit a complaint in writing.’

  Carmela had the voice of a student who is about to sit an exam.

  ‘The Mesón del Cojo,’ he said.

  Carmela slowed down.

  ‘The next on the right.’

  They turned into a street lined with cars and fences.

  ‘Left.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Right. Gently does it.’

  The man leant towards them, pointing a gun at Carmela’s head.

  ‘Shit! Don’t scare me like that!’ she shouted hysterically.

  ‘Easy, Carmela. It will work out okay,’ Carvalho said reassuringly.

  ‘Stop in front of the green lattice-gate.’

  Green lattice-gate. What a rich vocabulary, Carvalho thought. The car stopped, and the man leant forward to take the ignition key and put it in his pocket. He gently pushed Carmela so that she should get out of the car. Then he himself stepped onto the pavement and motioned for Carvalho to get out. The three crossed a garden under the acacia trees and came to a door with Andalusian-style iron gratings. Behind it they could see the radiance of a brightly lit house.