Adrián Gallardo is murdered when Guillermo García Medina kills the real man whose identity Manuel Arroyo Benítez has assumed. The killing, carried out in a Madrid office on 29 December 1949, prevents Gallardo from exposing Manuel’s deception, but makes Guillermo—a doctor committed to saving lives—cross into deliberate, planned violence. The scene’s careful choreography and its later return in nightmares make the murder both an act of protection and a wound that cannot be contained by its immediate purpose.

Causes and Stakes

For more than four years, Gallardo had been missing and was presumed dead. In that absence, Manuel used Gallardo’s identity to leave the country and infiltrate a network helping Nazi fugitives escape to Argentina. The deception held only while the real Gallardo remained absent. If his survival became known in Buenos Aires, Manuel would be in mortal danger; the threat also extended to the Burnstein committee and others connected to the operation. Guillermo understood the danger not as an abstract risk but as a direct threat to his friend and to the lives and hopes bound up in their cause.

By the time Gallardo appeared in Madrid, Guillermo had already concluded that he had to die. He later recalled that Gallardo had ceased to seem like a person to him and had become, in his mind, a threat that only he could remove. Yet Guillermo did not describe himself as a vengeance-seeker or a justiciar. He framed the decision as the act of an ordinary man protecting everything he loved, while recognizing that this was also the moment he became capable of thinking and acting like a soldier.

The Meeting and the Offer

Guillermo prepared the murder as if planning an operation. At the office of the Sociedad Europea de Comercio Exterior, he arranged the room so Gallardo would sit with his back to the desk, where the weapon was hidden. He had withdrawn 150,000 pesetas from each of three bank accounts and placed the money in a briefcase. The offer was designed to buy Gallardo’s silence: 150,000 pesetas immediately and the same amount a year later if he kept the agreement. Guillermo added another option during the conversation—300,000 pesetas at once if Gallardo left Spain for any country other than Argentina.

He presented the payment as a generous settlement, explaining that the organization had acted in good faith because it believed Gallardo dead. Gallardo accepted the underlying facts but knew the danger: Guillermo’s friends were powerful, and any attempt to reclaim his identity through legal channels could get him killed. The offer, however, was not a genuine path to safety. Guillermo recognized that allowing Gallardo to leave would not prevent him from going to Buenos Aires later or returning to Spain to renew his threats. The negotiation was a device to distract him and reduce the chance that a former professional boxer could resist.

The Killing

As Gallardo counted the banknotes, Guillermo used the office telephone to perform a call to a nonexistent number, then waited until Gallardo had released the money from its briefcase. He removed his jacket, took the Luger from its hiding place, and put on rubber gloves. The gloves recalled the preparations for surgery: Guillermo later says their touch made him wish he could wash his hands before entering an operating room. He approached Gallardo without being noticed, drew the pistol, placed its muzzle against the man’s neck at the left carotid artery, and fired before Gallardo could turn.

The gunshot was louder than Guillermo expected. Gallardo remained seated, his head against Guillermo’s stomach, while blood soaked Guillermo’s shirt. He held the body still and waited for any sound of someone coming down the corridor. No one investigated. Then he moved the money aside, lowered Gallardo’s head onto the glass tabletop, and went to the tiny washroom. He washed his bare torso, arms, and face with cold water and soap, changed into the clean shirt he had brought, and returned to the office. His hands shook so badly that lighting a cigarette was difficult; it took nearly fifteen minutes before he could rely on them again.

Concealment and Immediate Aftermath

Once his hands steadied, Guillermo moved quickly to erase the traces of the killing. He disassembled the Luger and returned it to its chest, gathered the money back into his briefcase, and wrung out the shirt that had been soaked with blood. Though it was white again, a pink stain remained on its front; he spread it over the edge of the bathtub to drip dry. He put the chairs back around the table, leaving Gallardo seated as though asleep, then used the office telephone to call Munich and tell Rolf that it was done. The ordinary tidiness of the room—chairs restored, weapon put away, money collected—stood beside the body and the bloodied shirt, the practical aftermath of a decision Guillermo had tried to make feel like a surgical procedure.

The Killing

As Adrián counted the banknotes, Guillermo used the office telephone to simulate a call to a nonexistent number, then waited until Adrián had released the money from his briefcase. He removed his jacket, retrieved the Luger from its hiding place, and put on rubber gloves. Their feel recalled the preparations for surgery: he wished he could wash his hands before entering an operating room. He approached Adrián without being noticed, placed the pistol against his neck at the left carotid artery, and fired before he could turn.

The shot was louder than Guillermo expected. Adrián remained seated, his head against Guillermo’s stomach, while blood soaked Guillermo’s shirt. Guillermo held the body still and waited for footsteps in the corridor; no one came to investigate. He moved the money aside, lowered Adrián’s head onto the glass tabletop, and went to the small washroom. There he washed his bare torso, arms, and face with cold water and soap, changed into the clean shirt he had brought, and returned to the office. His hands shook so badly that he struggled to light a cigarette. Nearly fifteen minutes passed before they steadied enough for him to act.

Disposal and the Dictatorship’s Paperwork

The killing’s aftermath extends beyond Guillermo’s office into a system where a body can be made administratively invisible. A police inspector arranges for the dead man to be buried without the usual delay of an autopsy, and the body is recorded as another unidentified death attributed to cardiac arrest. At La Almudena Cemetery, the corpse is assigned to a common grave for undocumented people; its gunshot wound is visible, but the false cause of death passes into the routine. The gravediggers even consider taking the dead man’s good coat, treating the body as both evidence to be concealed and a source of usable property. The sequence makes the murder’s cover-up part of a broader machinery of impunity: official procedures do not expose violence but help erase it.

A Crime That Returns

Guillermo’s act does not end with the body. In recurring nightmares, he relives the shooting almost weekly: he sees Gallardo’s blood soak his shirt, then finds that the dead man is Manuel, whose horrified eyes accuse him. The dream turns the original act of protecting Manuel into its most feared reversal, making the friend Guillermo saved appear as the victim of his own hand. He wakes in disgust, still feeling the blood on his nightclothes, and cannot bring himself to tell Rita what he has done. His silence is partly defended as protection—Rita is active in an illegal party and could be endangered by knowing too much—but it also keeps his own complicity sealed away.

The episode’s later resonance is sharpened by Guillermo’s recollection of Estonia: he had seen photographs of heaps of bodies prepared for burning and of people reduced to charred remains. He insists he did not kill Gallardo as a avenger or a judge; he acted because he believed there was no other way to defend his friend, their cause, and the future he hoped to share with Rita. That distinction explains his decision without making it clean. The doctor who had been forbidden to enlist in anything but hospital surgery has become a killer, and the carefully planned act he once treated as a necessary operation returns as an intimate, repeating wound.