Luger pistol

The Luger pistol is the concealed weapon with which the narrator kills the real Adrián Gallardo Ortega on 29 December 1949. Its role is decisive because Gallardo’s survival threatens to expose Manuel Arroyo Benítez, who has taken Gallardo’s identity to infiltrate a Nazi escape network; in the narrator’s account, the pistol becomes the instrument of a choice that places protection and political purpose above the life of the man he kills.

Preparation and concealment

On the evening of the killing, the narrator enters the office of the Sociedad Europea de Comercio Exterior with a clean shirt, rubber gloves, and a leather folder. The pistol has been disassembled and returned to its place in a safe. To reverse the preparation, he retrieves the safe’s key from the fourth volume of Goethe’s complete works, opens the coffer, and hides the Luger, silencer attached, in a recess above the right-hand desk drawer. He leaves the gloves there too. The sequence is careful and reversible: the weapon is made ready without being carried openly, while each detail of its concealment has a planned counterpart in the cleanup.

The narrator arranges the room around the expected meeting with Gallardo. He moves the chairs and table so Gallardo will sit with his back to the desk, facing a briefcase containing money. He has also withdrawn 50,000 pesetas from each of three bank accounts and placed the notes in their original bank wrappers inside the briefcase. The meeting is staged as a transaction; the pistol waits behind the routine of office furniture, cash, and conversation.

The killing

When Gallardo begins counting the money, the narrator lifts the telephone receiver and pretends to make a call. As Gallardo keeps his attention on the banknotes, the narrator takes off his jacket, retrieves the Luger, and tucks it into his waistband. He puts on the gloves. Their touch recalls the threshold of an operating theatre, a medical association that follows the weapon into a scene of deliberate killing.

The narrator approaches Gallardo from behind. After a brief exchange about the money, he draws the pistol, places its muzzle against the left side of Gallardo’s neck at the carotid artery, and fires before Gallardo can turn. The shot is louder than he expected. Gallardo remains seated, his head against the narrator’s stomach; blood soaks the narrator’s shirt. The description makes the act at once controlled and bodily: the target is selected with anatomical knowledge, but the resulting blood cannot be kept at a professional distance.

Aftermath and meaning

The narrator waits for anyone in the building to respond to the noise, then moves the money aside and lays Gallardo’s head on the glass tabletop. He washes his torso, arms, and face with cold water and soap, changes into the clean shirt, and returns to the desk. His hands tremble; nearly fifteen minutes pass before he can rely on them again. He then dismantles the Luger, returns it to the safe, and restores the office and its chairs, leaving Gallardo’s body seated as though asleep. The pistol is not merely the means of death: its disassembly and concealment are part of the work of making the killing disappear into an ordinary office.

The narrator later frames the murder as a break in his identity as a doctor. He recalls that Doctor Quintanilla had forbidden him to enlist in any service other than his hospital’s surgical department, and measures his new role against his vocation to save lives. He does not describe himself as a avenger or a justiciar; he presents the killing as necessary to protect Arroyo, the Burnstein committee, and the future he hopes to share with Rita Velázquez Martín. This explanation does not make the act innocent: he acknowledges that a judge would probably reject his claim of self-defence, even as he believes such a judgment would be wrong.

After restoring the pistol, the narrator calls Rolf in Munich and reports that the deed is done. The Luger thus closes the immediate operation while opening a lasting moral divide: the doctor’s medical skill helps him carry out a precise killing, and the same man who has survived through imposture now lives with responsibility for choosing who will not survive.