Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s go there.’

  ‘No. I need authorisation.’

  Carvalho walked round the car and sat next to Carmela. He held out the latter and showed her two or three fragments. She started up the car and began to sob when they reached the third set of traffic lights.

  ‘Yes, I won’t deny he’s in.’

  The concierge still had the look of suspicion with which she had met the strange, hurried couple who asked whether Santos was in his flat. She eventually let them go up only when Carmela showed her Party card.

  ‘There are so many fascists around.’

  Carvalho and Carmela pushed so hard on the bell that they almost broke it. No answer. They went back to the resistant concierge, who became suspicious at the incongruity of it all.

  ‘He’s definitely in.’

  ‘Well, if he is and doesn’t answer, then something must have happened. Do you have a key?’

  The woman looked hard at Carmela and Carvalho, apparently convinced by her but not by him.

  ‘Are you also from the Party?’

  ‘This is a very important gentleman who has come a long way to see Santos.’

  She arched her eyebrows, sighed resignedly, went into the office and returned with a bunch of keys. As they were climbing the wooden stairs, the woman searched for the key to Santos’s flat and said almost to herself.

  ‘I’ve known him for thirty years and nothing like this has ever happened before. Come rain or shine, Ventura—that’s what I still call him—always has the same character. Something like this is very difficult, particularly in a man. Because where there’s a man, there’s a lunatic. I’m not exaggerating.’

  The concierge strode across the landing, sized up all the aspects of the door, and pressed the bell with all the simplicity, assuredness and familiarity of an expert who belongs to the same tribe. She looked at Carvalho and Carmela as if to say: He’ll answer for me all right. But he didn’t answer for her. With a sudden nervous apprehension, she faced the door and cut into the lock with a well-aimed key. Before the three-man expedition lay a reception room with nothing to receive them and a corridor more obscured than brightened by a naked light-bulb.

  ‘Señor Ventura, are you there? (He’s been Ventura for twenty-five years and Ventura he’ll remain.) Señor Ventura, are you there?’

  He was there, half asleep on a wicker chair against a background of unpolished pine bookcases.

  ‘He’s fallen asleep.’

  Carvalho pushed the concierge aside in his hurry to reach Santos. He felt his pulse and opened one of his eyelids.

  ‘Coffee. As much as you can make, Carmela. Or rather, would you make it, señora? You ring a Party doctor to come at once; if not, call an ambulance.’

  The concierge repeated Carvalho’s gestures. She took his pulse. Raised an eyelid. Stared open-mouthed at the man and woman.

  ‘A clot?’

  ‘Coffee. Make some coffee or he’ll die.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  She assumed the position of the black American holder of the hundred metres record and immediately showed the rubber soles of her velvety slippers. Carvalho pulled Santos’s head back, opened his mouth and put two fingers down his throat, producing such a nervous reaction that the sleeping man seemed to be coughing from his stomach. Carvalho persisted, his hands full of saliva. Finally, the retching took material shape in a thick white mucus that spread over Santos’s unshaven white-and-black chin. The body bent forwards. One bout of retching followed another, as if an internal piston were driving to his lips the hidden illness of the sleep of death.

  ‘Coffee.’

  It was too hot. Carvalho cooled it with water, tore the cloth cover from a book on Mayakovski’s theatre, and used it as a funnel into Santos’s gasping mouth.

  ‘Hold the funnel.’

  The concierge held it with one hand and stroked the sleeping man’s white hair with the other. Carvalho let some coffee trickle into the funnel, and Santos’s head began to shake in refusal of the potion. When Carvalho insisted, Santos tipped forward spitting out the coffee. A white milk emerged from his mouth, punctuating the fits of choking that sounded like the reports of a blocked organpipe.

  ‘Poor man. It’s like Chinese torture.’

  The concierge looked accusingly at Carvalho as he again inserted the funnel into the mouth of a convulsively sobbing, babbling and slobbering Santos. The action of vomiting once more became an uncontrollable implosion of his whole body. A little later, Carvalho’s tired eyes watched a young doctor attend to Santos while he carefully took in Carmela’s attempts to think rationally about the situation. Tell the Party. What for? Tell his family. What for?

  ‘What do you mean, what for?’

  ‘This man tried to commit suicide without seeking permission from the Party or his family. Don’t turn it into an item for the agenda of the next central committee or a reproach on the part of his would-be widow. Besides, all the papers would find out.’

  The newspapers were the convincing argument. Carmela agreed and returned to the doctor’s side.

  ‘I won’t be responsible if he isn’t taken to hospital. He has good reactions, but there may be complications.’

  ‘We can’t take the political scandal upon ourselves,’ Carmela argued as Carvalho kept his eyes on Santos.

  What does a political scandal matter to you now? It wouldn’t be fair if you appeared in your underpants on the pages of History. Much better if you’re there in your prison costume, in one of your conspiratorial disguises, in your marble suit of armour. Santos’s eyes were two tear-filled outlines. His body lay on a metal bed scattered with pieces of plaster: a chair beside the headrest, books on a floor covered with sheets of newspaper, a window looking onto a back-yard. The closest thing to a cell. Nothing else but a corridor leading north to a kitchen with ragged white tiles and an iron stove. One of those ‘economic kitchens’: coal, heavy white coal bins with blackened calves. To the south, a clean bathroom delivered to the conspiracy of rust on the mirror, the bath-taps, the shower, the low-wattage electric heater. A dining-room with a pine table in the middle, three or four rush-bottomed pine chairs, bookcases, Lenin, Lukács, Stalin, Storia del Partito Communista Italiano by Paolo Spriano, Togliatti’s Political Writings, Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, Rosa Luxemburg’s Scritti Politici, Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin, the Anti-Dühring, Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, Mehring’s Karl Marx, Cole’s History of Socialist Thought, the Manual of Political Economy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Berlinguer’s La Alternativa Communista, Lafargue’s Right to Idleness, Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements, Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels, Lichtheim’s Marxism, four or five Lefebvres, three or four Garaudys, London’s On Trial, Mao’s Selected Works, Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Arrabal’s Letter to the Spanish Communists, Semprún’s Autobiography of Frederico Sánchez, Mayakovski’s Complete Works, Ostrovski’s How the Steel was Tempered, Labriola’s Essays on Historical Materialism, Fernando Buey’s Getting to Know Lenin, Abendroth’s History of the European Workers Movement, the volume Socialist Humanism by Fromm and others, Ramsay MacDonald’s Socialism, Gramsci’s Selected Works, Carr’s The Bolshevik Revolution, Balzac’s Complete Works, Della Volpe’s Critique of Taste, López Salinas’s The Mine, López Pacheco’s Electric Power-Station, José María Castellet’s Twenty Years of Spanish Poetry, Manuel Sacristán’s Writing on Heine, Della Volpe’s Rousseau and Marx, Jean Jaurès’s Socialist Studies, Jean Kanapa’s Socialisme et Culture, Claudín’s The Communist Movement, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation, the History of the CPSU, Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, The Secret Correspondence between Stalin and Churchill, Broué’s The Moscow Trials, Norberto Bobbio’s Which Socialism?, Bahro’s The Alternative, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

  The last of the Sioux war chiefs now became a reservation Indian, disarmed, dismounted, with no authority
over his people, a prisoner of the Army, which had never defeated him in battle. Yet he was still a hero to the young men, and their adulation caused jealousies to arise among the older agency chiefs. Crazy Horse remained aloof; he and his followers living only for the day when Three Stars would make good his promise of a reservation for them in the Powder River country.

  Late in the summer, Crazy Horse heard that Three Stars wanted him to go to Washington for a council with the Great Father. Crazy Horse refused to go. He could see no point in talking about the promised reservation. He had seen what happened to chiefs who went to the Great Father’s House in Washington; they came back fat from the white man’s way of living and with all the hardness gone out of them. He could see the changes in Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, and they knew he saw and they did not like him for it.

  In August news came that the Nez Percés, who lived beyond the Shining Mountains, were at war with the Bluecoats. At the agencies, soldier chiefs began enlisting warriors to do their scouting for them against the Nez Percés. Crazy Horse told the young men not to go against those other Indians, far away, but some would not listen, and allowed themselves to be bought by the soldiers. On August 31, the day these former Sioux warriors put on their Bluecoat uniforms to march away, Crazy Horse was so sick with disgust that he said he was going to take his people and go back north to the Powder River country.

  When Three Stars heard of this from his spies, he ordered eight companies of pony soldiers to march to Crazy Horse’s camp outside Fort Robinson and arrest him. Before the soldiers arrived, however, Crazy Horse’s friends warned him they were coming. Not knowing what the soldiers’ purpose was, Crazy Horse told his people to scatter, and then he set out alone to Spotted Tail agency to seek refuge with his old friend Touch-the-Clouds.

  The soldiers found him there, placed him under arrest, and informed him they were taking him back to Fort Robinson to see Three Stars. Upon arrival at the fort, Crazy Horse was told that it was too late to talk with Three Stars that day. He was turned over to Captain James Kennington and one of the the agency policemen. Crazy Horse stared hard at the agency policeman. He was Little Big Man, who not so long ago had defied the commissioners who came to steal Paha Sapa, the same Little Big Man who had threatened to kill the first chief who spoke for selling the Black Hills, the brave Little Big Man who had last fought beside Crazy Horse on the icy slopes of the Wolf Mountains against Bear Coat Miles. Now the white men had bought Little Big Man and made him into an agency policeman.

  As Crazy Horse walked between them, letting the soldier chief and Little Big Man lead him to wherever they were taking him, he must have tried to dream himself into the real world, to escape the darkness of the shadow world in which all was madness. They walked past a soldier with a bayoneted rifle on his shoulder, and then they were standing in the doorway of a building. The windows were barred with iron, and he could see men behind the bars with chains on their legs. It was a trap for an animal, and Crazy Horse lunged away like a trapped animal, with Little Big Man holding on to his arm. The scuffling went on for only a few seconds. Someone shouted a command, and then the soldier guard, Private William Gentles, thrust his bayonet deep into Crazy Horse’s abdomen.

  Crazy Horse died that night, September 5, 1877, at the age of thirty-five. At dawn the next day the soldiers presented the dead chief to his father and mother. They put the body of Crazy Horse into a wooden box, fastened it to a pony-drawn travois, and carried it to Spotted Tail agency, where they mounted it on a scaffold. All through the Drying Grass Moon, mourners watched beside the burial place. And then in the Moon of Falling Leaves came the heartbreaking news: the reservation Sioux must leave Nebraska and go to a new reservation on the Missouri River.

  Through the crisp dry autumn of 1877, long lines of exiled Indians driven by soldiers marched northeastward toward the barren land. Along the way, several bands slipped away from the column and turned northwestward, determined to escape to Canada and join Sitting Bull. With them went the father and mother of Crazy Horse, carrying the heart and bones of their son. At a place known only to them they buried Crazy Horse somewhere near Chankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek called Wounded Knee.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  Carvalho closed the book and handed it to Carmela.

  ‘One about Indians. Well, this is the moment. He’s awake.’

  Santos moved his head on the pillow to follow Carvalho’s approach.

  ‘The others can go.’

  Carvalho sat on the edge of the bed, while the others obeyed the old man’s orders.

  ‘I’m very tired.’

  ‘Me too. I’ve spent three days on the run. Since I arrived in this town, I haven’t known sleep or been able to tell north from south. But now it’s over for me.’

  ‘And me. I thank you for what you have done. I can’t say that I’m glad.’

  ‘The central committee will be meeting in a few hours.’

  ‘I’ll send a message that I’m sick. They’ll have to start operating without me.’

  ‘They want to acclaim you as their general secretary.’

  ‘I won’t let them.’

  ‘I don’t make or break the king. It’s your business. There’s just the little matter of what should be done with the murderer.’

  ‘I’ve already sent suitable instructions.’

  ‘I don’t want to miss the ending. If possible, I’d like to be there before the start of the central committee.’

  ‘Talk to Mir. He’ll sort out any problems you may have. He’ll also pay you.’

  Carvalho stood up and stretched out his hand. It was held more than shaken by the two rapidly shrunken white hands of a man who had descended into old age within the space of a few hours.

  ‘The letter I sent you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Destroy it.’

  ‘I already have. I don’t keep correspondence, and sometimes I don’t even read the letters that people send me.’

  Santos closed his eyes with a smile.

  ‘You still don’t seem sure what is the rule and what is the exception.’

  ‘It’s well known. If you abandon Marxism, you end up believing in astrology and unable to tell good from evil.’

  ‘Someone who abandons Marxism has lost his sense of good.’

  ‘Kyrie eleison.’

  ‘I suppose they’ll all come today.’

  The secretary winked sceptically. Mir made a guess at the number of files left by the corner of the display-table, which was full of fresh folders in which the members of the central committee of the Communist Party of Spain would find the agenda, an outline of the political report collectively drafted by the executive committee, and a proposal to convene an emergency conference between the second and sixth of January 1981.

  ‘The sixth of January? What about the epiphany?’

  Leveder sought an explanation from all the executive committee members present among the various groups of comrades.

  ‘How will we normalise our relations with society if we can’t share with our sons the joy of receiving toys from Their Majesties the Three Magi?’

  ‘Come on, don’t be silly.’

  ‘Well, more than one of us will have our ears boxed by the missus. It really is the limit to be doing politics on the feast of the Three Magi.’

  ‘My wife will ask whether I’m married to her or the Party.’

  Leveder was provoking miniature dialectical storms.

  ‘Mir, I’ve got an idea how we can solve the problem of the Magi.’

  ‘It’s not a problem for me.’

  ‘What about the kids? They’ll be excitedly looking forward to their presents.’

  ‘Mine are grown up. Anyway, they’re republicans from birth.’

  Leveder went away laughing and Mir winked at the secretary.

  ‘He thinks I was born yesterday.’

  ‘He’s always in a mood for joking.’

  ‘He’s a great guy, but I saw him coming this time.’

&n
bsp; Mir smiled left and right, happy to have won the cut-and-thrust at Leveder’s expense.

  ‘I heard that Santos is ill. Nothing serious, I hope. Who will take the chair?’

  ‘The Party organiser,’ Mir replied to Sepúlveda Civit.

  A ring of people were noisily laughing at one of Leveder’s remarks.

  ‘Mir, come over here. You’re being talked about.’

  ‘What did that euroanarchist say about me?’

  ‘He suggested that, on the epiphany, our children should come to the congress and receive their presents from you dressed as one of the Magi.’

  ‘Good idea. Dressed as a black. I’ve been doing it all my life. As a black. We’ll propose it at the end. What’s he doing here?’

  Mir’s voice rose in surprise as he saw Carvalho enter alongside a steward. The detective went up to him and read in his eyes a certain irritation at his presence.

  ‘Santos gave me permission and said you would sort out my problems.’

  ‘That’s my job. What problems?’

  ‘I’d like to collect what’s owing to me and look around until the meeting begins.’

  ‘You can collect through there. Go out to your right and ask for Cespedes. He’s in charge of finances and has been told all about it. There’s no problem with the other because you’re already here.’

  ‘Has Esparza Julve arrived?’

  Mir stared into his eyes.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’

  ‘Was he informed in the usual way?’

  ‘Like everyone else.’

  Neither man dropped his eyes.

  ‘I’ll go and collect, just in case.’

  Royo from finances was a bald, wary, light-skinned Aragonese. Carvalho attributed his opening remark to the proverbial rectitude of the Aragonese peasantry.

  ‘That’s a nice packet you’re taking away.’

  ‘Do you resent it?’

  ‘Me? Why shoud I? Pay is pay. What I do resent is the Party’s unserious attitude to finances. Whenever I give a report, they just nod off or go to have a piss. Royo has to plug all the holes, and sometimes there aren’t enough hands for the job. Some of them seem to think a revolution can be made for nothing. Shall I cross it?’