Murder in the Central Committee Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  MANUEL VÁZQUEZ MONTALBÁN’S

  PEPE CARVALHO SERIES

  “Montalbán does for Barcelona what Chandler did for

  Los Angeles—he exposes the criminal power relationships

  beneath the façade of democracy.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  “Montalbán writes with authority and

  compassion—a le Carré-like sorrow.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “A writer who is caustic about the

  powerful and tender towards the oppressed.”

  —TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  “Carvalho travels down the mean calles

  with humor, perception, and compassion.”

  —THE TIMES (LONDON)

  “Does for modern Barcelona what

  Dickens did for 19th century London.”

  —TOTAL

  “Carvalho is funny . . . scathingly witty about the powerful.

  He is an original eccentric, burning books and cooking all

  night. Like Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, he is a man of honor

  walking the mean streets of a sick society.”

  —INDEPENDENT (LONDON)

  “I cannot wait for other Pepe Carvalho titles

  to be published here. Meanwhile, make the most

  of Murder in the Central Committee.”

  —NEW STATESMAN (LONDON)

  “A sharp wit and a knowing eye.”

  —SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON)

  “Splendid flavor of life in Barcelona and Madrid, a

  memorable hero in Pepe, and one of the most startling

  love scenes you’ll ever come across.”

  —SCOTSMAN

  “An excuse for a gastronomic, political,

  and social tour of Barcelona.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  “An inventive and sexy writer. . . Warmly recommended.”

  —THE IRISH INDEPENDENT

  “Pepe Carvalho’s greatest concern is with his

  stomach, but when not pursuing delicacies, he can

  unravel the most tangled of mysteries.”

  —THE SUNDAY TIMES

  Born in Barcelona in 1939, MANUEL VÁZQUEZ MONTALBÁN (1939–2003) was a member of Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), and was jailed by the Franco government for four years for supporting a miners’ strike. A columnist for Madrid’s El País, as well as a prolific poet, playwright, and essayist, Vázquez Montalbán was also a well-known gourmand who wrote often about food. The nineteen novels in his Pepe Carvalho series have won international acclaim, including the Planeta prize (1979) and the International Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (1981), both for Southern Seas. He died in 2003 in Hong Kong, on his way home to Barcelona.

  PATRICK CAMILLER has translated Che Guevara’s African diaries and, from the Romanian, Norman Manea’s The Black Envelope.

  MURDER IN THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

  First published as Asesinato en el Comité Central by

  Editorial Planeta, S.A., Barcelona

  © 1981 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  Translation © 1984 Patrick Camiller

  This edition published by arrangement with Serpent’s Tail

  First Melville House printing: January 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-036-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942039

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and the Pepe Carvalho series

  About the author and translator

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s note

  Glossary of dishes and parties

  Murder in the Central Committee section 1

  Murder in the Central Committee section 2

  To Josefina Sallés just because

  and Javier Alfaya as agreed

  We have freed ourselves of a blind faith in science, but now we feel stronger than ever that faith to which Marx was referring when he said that communists are capable of ‘storming the heavens’. When that faith grows cold and doubt creeps in, one begins to cease being a communist. That is the truth.

  —Irene Falcón, quoted by Jorge Semprún in The Autobiography of Federico Sánchez

  But death suddenly shows that the real society is lying.

  —Georges Bataille, The Theory of Religion

  Author’s note

  Since he can foresee a perverse tendency to identify the characters in this novel with real persons, the author would like to state that he has confined himself to the use of archetypes, although he does recognise that we real people sometimes behave as archetypes.

  Archetype: Sovereign and eternal type which serves as an example and model for the human will and understanding.

  —Dictionary of the Royal Academy

  Dishes and parties

  Arroz de Arzac a rice dish named after a famous restaurant in San Sebastian

  Bacalao a stew of salted codfish

  Butifarra a distinctive Catalan sausage

  Capipota a dish made from head and leg of pork

  Chinchon an aniseed-based alcoholic drink

  Chorizo a hard pork sausage

  Cocido a popular stewed dish made with various ingredients

  Fabada a rich Asturian stew made from beans and pork

  Fesols Catalan word for beans

  Horchata a popular drink based on ice-cream

  Kokochas cheeks of hake

  Orujo a grape eau-de-vie akin to the Italian grappa

  FUE Communist-Socialist student organisation in the 1930s

  Movimiento Obrero literally workers’ movement, the section of the trade-union movement in which the Communist Party has traditionally played a dominant role

  PCE Partido Comunista de España, Communist Party of Spain

  PSOE Partido Socialista Obrero de España, the Socialist Party of Spain

  PSUC Partido Socialista Unificado Catalan, the semi-autonomous Communist Party in Catalonia

  UCD Union Centro-democratico, the main centre-right coalition which headed the transition from the Franco regime. Now virtually defunct

  UGT Union General del Trabajo, the trade-union federation in which the Socialist Party has traditionally played a dominant role

  Santos absent-mindedly shuffled the folders. By pretending to do something, he avoided the obligation to greet everyone as they arrived.

  ‘These were left untouched by human hand at the last meeting.’

  The secretary pointed to a forlorn heap of folders piled at one end of the display-table. It was covered with dossiers and brand-new folders in which members of the central committee of the Spanish Communist Party would find the agenda, an outline of the general secretary’s political report, and the full text of an intervention to be made by the leader of Movimiento Obrero.

  ‘In my time people gave their life to be on the central committee. Now they haggle over every weekend.’

  Santos smiled at Julian Mir, the chief steward.

  ‘I wouldn’t go back to those times.’

  ‘No, Santos, nor would I. But I get sore when I see how inconsiderate certain comrades can be. Some travel seven hundred kilometres by train to come to the meeting, while others stay put in Argüelles, half an hour away by taxi.’

  ‘So, what shall I do with the folders left from the last meeting?’

  ‘Put them with today’s.
’

  The girl did as Santos said, and Julian Mir returned to his duties as chief steward, casting expert eyes over the movements of his red-armbanded subordinates.

  ‘We’ll have an unpleasant surprise one of these days. I don’t like this place.’

  Santos met Mir’s critical ill-humour with a nod that could have indicated either agreement or disapproval. He had been using the same gesture with Mir ever since the days of the Fifth Regiment. Then, Julian had never liked the evening shadows, which had seemed pregnant with Franco’s soldiers, nor the morning light that opened the way to advance parties of Regulares. Later, he had not been fond of the Tarn fruit groves, which seemed to have borne the shape of German patrols ever since the Pleistocene. Later still, he had not liked his missions inside the country, although he carried them out with the haughty assurance of a Western film hero.

  ‘Many problems?’

  ‘Four fascists died of fear,’ Mir had invariably replied on his return from a trip to Franco’s Spain.

  He had always been like that. Probably born that way, thought Santos, and he was suddenly surprised that Julian Mir had once been born: so long ago; too long. The time was now stored in his stiff white hair and his old athlete’s musculature that made him look like a chicken spoiling for a fight.

  ‘I don’t like this place.’

  ‘Here we go again. Where would you like to hold the central committee?’ asked Santos.

  ‘There are too many little offices dotted everywhere. That’s what I am complaining about. There should be a fine central headquarters like every proper Communist Party has got. Does it seem right to you? Just yesterday, the Anabaptists from Torrejón de Ardoz held a convention here. Look at what’s written on that poster.’

  ‘I’d have to put my glasses on.’

  ‘Oh yes! You’ve been losing your faculties ever since you became a pen-pusher,’ Mir said. ‘I can read it all right: “The way of the spirit in the path of the body”, by Yogi Sundra Bashuarti. That was here yesterday. I can’t tell anymore whether this is a central committee meeting or a gathering of fakirs. Communists in a hotel—as if we were tourists or underwear salesmen.’

  ‘You’re in a right old mood.’

  ‘And one day they’ll sneak in a commando disguised as a tropical orchestra. Sometimes you can even hear the music from the dance-hall.’

  ‘It’s quite atmospheric.’

  Santos left Mir to his ill-humour and immediately received a feverish hug from the comrade-mayor of Liñán de la Frontera. He had not lost his faculties. His memory was still fresh clay on which all the Party’s faces were engraved; and his arms still responded with Herculean strength to the Soviet hugs which more distant comrades used to test his already aged frame.

  ‘Why do we hug like this?’ he once asked Fernando Garrido.

  ‘Probably since the civil war,’ Garrido had shrugged. ‘Any parting or meeting was very emotional.’

  ‘I think it’s Soviet influence. They always greet each other like that. At least we didn’t pick up their way of kissing.’

  ‘Don’t mention that, man. When they gave me a kiss on the mouth, I never knew what to do: kick them in the balls or let myself be had.’

  Garrido was clearly late. The comrades were standing in circles outside the meeting-room and would remain there until the charged opening of the door announced Garrido’s entry. The circles would then open like eyes to contemplate once more the ever miraculous incarnation of the working-class vanguard in the person of the general secretary. Santos decided to inspect the meeting-room one last time before Garrido entered beneath the invisible mantle of History. Standing in the door, he could hear behind him the rising, digestive-like rumble of conversation as he looked at the lonely conference room of the Hotel Continental. Its prophylactic, symmetrical concentration of tables and chairs, lacking the warmth of leather or fabric, surrounded the table of power at which Garrido would sit, flanked by two executive committee members on either side.

  ‘Is the sound all right? Have you tested the recorder?’

  The heads of those responsible nodded to Santos.

  ‘Who’s sitting next to Fernando today?’ Leveder asked.

  ‘Martialay, Bouza, Helena Subirats and I.’

  ‘The unity of the men and lands of Spain.’

  ‘Martialay won’t be there as a Basque, but as the Movimiento Obrero leader.’

  ‘I know, I know, it was a joke.’

  ‘A bit worn, though.’

  As Santos replied to the ironic young man, he mentally went over his background: Paco Leveder, lecturer in civil law, part of the Democratic Union batch. ‘He’ll make a good parliamentarian,’ Garrido had remarked when he heard him speak at the Ivry college, made available by the French Communist Party for a secret meeting with university staff from Spain. Now he was just a parliamentarian.

  ‘He’s not the only one. Some forty per cent of the central committee are missing. A sense of punctuality is the first thing to go when you become legal. Anyway, weren’t you absent without apologies from the last meeting?’

  ‘I phoned Paloma to say I had to attend a public function.’

  ‘You know that central committee meetings are more important than even a Party function,’ Santos said.

  ‘You’ll be telling me next that the central committee is the Party’s highest leadership body.’

  ‘I don’t think I need to.’

  ‘Does “the land to those who till it” mean anything to you? Or “all power to the soviets”?’

  ‘They did before you were born.’

  ‘You certainly preserve yourself well, Santos.’

  He left Leveder with a smile. Answering all the greetings and witticisms directed to him by various groups, he moved ever more softly towards the door from which Julian Mir was indicating Garrido’s arrival. As if everything had been calculated by an all-powerful chronometer, he replaced Julian at the door just as it was framing the body of the general secretary. Fernando Garrido smiled and moved forward, moved forward and smiled. He waved and spoke briefly with one group after another, as if reciting a speech timed to last the exact distance between the doors of the entrance-hall and the meeting-room. The circles opened and even broke apart as some comrades insisted on a handshake with Garrido, hoping for a confidential word or offering one of their own to the general secretary, who, devoid of secrets himself, indulgently inclined his head to listen. Yet he did not linger as he walked between Santos and Julian, drawing in his wake two stewards who barely left room for Martialay in the narrow human passageway. Garrido made a special stop to receive the crushing embrace of Harguindey, twenty-one years and a day served in prison with the superhuman obstinacy of the time. Garrido survived Harguindey’s slap on the shoulder. He told a joke to Helena Subirats that produced a roar of laughter more like an ovation.

  We still can’t believe that we are able to meet, Santos thought; that Fernando is here, that a van-load of policemen are protecting the side-entrance to the hotel.

  He respected the halts in the procession and yet tried his best to hurry it along. At one point he stopped so that Martialay could keep up with them.

  ‘We weren’t able to circulate your speech before today.’

  ‘As always.’

  ‘Nearly always.’

  Garrido had had his hair cut, and he left behind the scent of after-shave lotion mixed with traces of a recent shower. Who could have imagined him like that? For a moment, Santos thought he was following the young leader who, during the meetings to prepare for October 1934,[1]* had said to him: ‘Leave everything and follow me!’ Santos had followed, through forty years of war, exile, imprisonment, false identities, and even Crimean holidays and strategic poker-games with the Soviets.

  ‘Santos.’

  ‘Yes, Fernando.’

  ‘I’d like to have a word with you and Martialay before the meeting begins.’

  The three went into the room, and Julian Mir closed the door behind them.

 
‘I still don’t quite understand,’ said Garrido, ‘why we put off seeing the socialists.’

  ‘It’s only a fortnight to the union elections,’ Martialay argued, ‘and we have to keep our distance. The going will get rough; the PSOE will have its fingers in the UGT campaign.’

  ‘Anyway, if there’s a question of intervention at the meeting, it should be answered rather ambiguously. Clear-cut positions are often a cover for obscurity and vacillation.’

  ‘I thought everything was clear.’

  ‘That’s why it may be unclear. What’s your view, Santos?’

  ‘There’s no need to draw back from the meeting with the socialists. It will seem just as logical for us to go ahead as to call it off.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Strikes me as a byzantine problem.’

  ‘You’re always saying that you don’t want to be a Party transmission-belt. Well, nor can the Party be a transmission-belt of yours.’

  Martialay shrugged and went to find his place at the table. He immediately plunged into the typewritten waters of his coming speech.

  ‘He’s nervous.’

  ‘He has reason to be.’

  Garrido took a cigarette from his jacket pocket as if it were one huge packet of cigarettes. ‘He seems to take them out ready-lighted,’ an interviewer had once written.

  ‘You won’t be allowed to smoke,’ Santos reminded him.

  ‘And then they say I’m a dictator.’

  He put the cigarette back into his pocket:

  ‘Right, let’s get started.’

  Santos opened the door and went to sit on Garrido’s right. From there he could see the central committee members as they made their noisy, chattering entrance.

  ‘Nearly a plenum. They’re obviously expecting something. Did you see the thing in El País?’

  ‘Those people are still polite when they screw us. But Cambio 16 has gone back to its headline: “Trade-Union Blackmail”.’

  Garrido stood up to greet Helena Subirats.

  ‘Your La Calle interview was very good.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked it. I’m still smouldering at the way the interviewers reduced everything to simple schemas.’