During a meeting in Madrid of the Central Committee of Spain’s Communist Party, there is a brief power outage. The lights are back on a few seconds later, but in that short span of time the Secretary General, Fernando Garrido, is killed, stabbed in the chest. The government asks Fonseca, a rabid anti-communist, to find out who committed this crime. Santos, the interim new leader of the Communist Party, calls in a private investigator, Pepe Carvalho. A witty and cynical hard-boiled detective, Carvalho arrives from Barcelona to take on the case. Carmela, a militant communist, is assigned to work as his driver and assistant. Carvalho and Fonseca meet to exchange ideas about the case on which both are working. They utterly dislike each other since in the past, Fonseca persecuted leftists like Carvalho. Their parallel investigations take different routes. Carvalho interviews a former CIA chief who is severely handicapped after losing his arms and legs in Vietnam, but the wheelchair-using old man refuses to co-operate.