Luger .22-caliber pistol and silencer

The Luger .22-caliber pistol and silencer are the concealed instruments around which the narrator organizes his plan to kill Adrián Gallardo. Hidden in an inlaid wooden chest in the office of Sociedad Europea de Comercio Exterior, the loaded weapon initially appears to belong to the room’s furnishings. When the narrator retrieves it, fits the silencer, and finds a place beneath his desk where it can be kept within instant reach, it becomes the material center of a decision he must face as both a doctor committed to saving lives and a man prepared to kill to defend what he loves.

Concealed in the Office

The gun’s route into the office begins with Rolf Steinbauer. Nearly a year before the planned killing, Rolf gave the narrator a card at a bar after the two had been drinking together following a visit to Clínica Ruber. On the evening Gallardo appeared unexpectedly at the narrator’s office, the narrator stayed late, waited until the receptionist had left, and took the card from his wallet. He had spent fewer than three hours considering what to do, but the central problem was already practical: he believed he could kill Gallardo, yet did not know how to get him somewhere suitable or dispose of his body afterward.

The office itself offered a hiding place that did not announce its purpose. Its dark wooden furniture was almost new and gave the room a respectable appearance. When the narrator first showed it to Ingrid, she thought it needed office supplies for the desk and books for the shelves. There were also empty cardboard files and inexpensive vases filled with artificial flowers. Against that ordinary arrangement, the wooden chest on the windowsill seemed to be another decorative object, and the narrator had assumed Frau Weiss had chosen it for that reason. In fact, Rolf had placed it there as a personal provision and checked on his visits to Madrid that the gun remained loaded and in position.

The Weapon and Its Concealment

On December 29, 1949, the narrator arrived at the office at seven in the evening, having spent a couple of hours there the day before assessing the space. He had measured the distances between walls and furniture and tried to anticipate the movements two men could make in the room. The means for carrying out his plan were hidden in Goethe’s Complete Works, translated into Spanish: on the fourth shelf, between the endpapers of the fourth volume, he found a small, flat key. It opened the inlaid chest on the sill, where he found the loaded .22-caliber Luger, ample ammunition, and a silencer, just as Rolf had promised.

Following Rolf’s instructions, the narrator fitted the silencer to the barrel and saw it double the gun’s length. He then examined the desk in front of him. It stood on two banks of drawers, but above the top drawer on either side was an unseen hollow shelf, invisible from the other side and large enough to hold the weapon with the silencer attached. He put the Luger there and confirmed that he could reach it at once and without noise. A hidden key, a concealed chest, and a space built into the desk turn the office’s respectable order into an apparatus for a killing.

From Stored Contingency to Intended Use

The narrator’s preparations extend beyond retrieving the gun. He has already rejected the possibility of involving Communist friends: they are watched by the police, and suspicion or arrest could endanger them and compromise the wider operation. Meg Williams is another possible source of help, but asking her would require telling her what he and Manolo had withheld, including their connection to Scarface and their business with Lazar. The weapon is therefore part of a larger calculation about who can be trusted, who would be exposed, and what must be done to keep Gallardo from speaking.

The Luger’s concealment gives the narrator a way to control the mechanics of the planned encounter, but discovering the shelf also yields a second, less manageable recognition. The narrator understands that he is behaving like an assassin. He has not merely accepted a proposal made to Rolf; he has gone to the office and planned a procedure intended to end a human life. His profession, which the prohibition of Dr. Quintanilla had directed toward the hospital’s surgical service, does not erase his capacity to act otherwise. He considers that capacity as something already present in him, brought from possibility into action by circumstances.

The Moral Weight of the Gun

The narrator does not claim that the pistol will serve as an instrument of revenge or justice. He knows that a court would not accept his action as self-defense, though he believes a court would be wrong to deny that right. He has seen photographs of bodies in an Estonian forest, piled for burning or fused into charred remains, and knows that Gallardo participated in mass killing. But he insists that the immediate reason to act is protection: the real Adrián Gallardo’s existence threatens Manolo, who would not survive twenty-four hours if his assumed identity were exposed in Buenos Aires; it also endangers the Burnstein committee, anyone who answers the love letters Gallardo writes to Miss Murray, the narrator’s cause, and his future as a man in love.

On December 27, when Gallardo left the narrator’s office, the narrator had already ceased to regard him as a person and had begun to think of him as an animal that had to disappear. Yet the gun’s presence does not settle the question its concealment raises. While preparing to kill, the narrator’s conscience begins telling a different story from the one he would give Rolf: Gallardo was also a failed boxer, a man who had gone to Russia to die fighting and returned to Spain at the worst possible moment with a poor plan for exploiting his return. The narrator sees weakness in him, even a weakness entangled with the massacres in which he took part, and still concludes that Gallardo must die. The silenced, instantly reachable Luger makes that conclusion actionable; it cannot make the narrator’s knowledge of the person he intends to kill disappear.