Barcelona Shadows (2 page)

“Call me Sherlock one more time, Malsano, and I’ll rearrange your face.”

“Hey, hey, hey…” Juan Malsano lifts one hand, peacefully, and with the other he pulls back his jacket to reveal his revolver. “Don’t get all worked up, ’cause we’re six against one here.”

I move closer to One Eye without him realizing, poised to collect his soul. He doesn’t know I’m about to ensnare him. I watch as he hides on Mendizábal Street, waiting for the performance to end. She likes the opera and money. People pretending to be somebody else, the opulent costumes, great passions, tragedies and miseries. A fake world of appearances, convention and protocol, far from reality. A world of masks. At least he isn’t ashamed of who he is, doesn’t need to pretend to be something he’s not. Because he’s no worse than the riff-raff that now paw at their imitation jewels at the end of the show, he says to himself. The pretentious music, which can be heard three blocks away, is over. In a little while, when all the lies have been said, when the mistresses have set dates with the respectable businessmen in some little apartment in the Eixample for a couple of hours from now, the procession will begin. That’s why One Eye hid a few blocks up, because there are too many beggars on the Rambla. The municipal police will be busy beating them back to allow Mr Sostres’s car through, no one will pay any attention to One Eye in this foul-smelling alley behind the Liceu Opera House. Sostres is the city’s next mayor (even though the Lerrouxists and the regionalists tied in the 12th November elections, and he won’t be chosen until 29th December). No one notices One Eye except me, but he can’t see me or hear me now because I’m just a shadow waiting for
his soul. One Eye doesn’t get what it is the filthy rich see in that German chap, some guy named Bagner. How many times have the same clowns looked on as some singer bellows out fucking opera, in German, which not even Christ himself understands. Good music is hearing whores scream in a warm bed, he thinks. And he laughs, revealing his missing teeth. Today he won’t rob anyone, even though it’d be like taking sweets from a baby. Today he has come to see her, which is why I’ve come to find him. He has something she might be interested in, because opera and money are not her only passions.

He hears the clip-clop of the horses and knows they are on their way. He can almost see them, dripping with jewels, with their fur coats and their husbands by the arm. How he’d love to have his way with some of them, to show them what a bravura performance is. One Eye shields himself from unwanted glances, in the darkness of the lampless street, until he sees her pass by. She is different from the rest. She walks alone, her head held high, with short, quick steps. Her lips pressed tightly together, her face impassive, like a wax figure. She has her hands crossed over her breasts, which are wrapped in a spectacular
deep-red
dress, a fancy number that goes all the way down to her ankles. Her hair, pulled back in a bun, reveals a long neck that resembles a column of smoke. One Eye licks his lips in desire. Approaching her is like leaning out of the highest window in a building: the sensation of being about to fall is as powerful as it is irresistible.

One Eye goes out onto Unió Street and follows her for a bit, while there are still people around. It is dark, but not yet dark enough to be the witching hour. The people of ill repute are getting ready to start the night. The worst of them all has just left
the Liceu. When she turns onto Oleguer, he quickens his step. He pants, he’s too old for this, goddamnittohell, and shouts, “Ma’am!”

She turns and glances at him, but doesn’t speak. One Eye runs towards her, unaware that it is the last thing he will do before he dies.

When Moisès Corvo and Juan Malsano show up there, two hours later, the narrow street is jammed with people.

“Sherlock Holmes is a pedant. A piece of shit who never leaves his office, thinking he can solve every case like it was some maths problem, just because he’s educated.”

“But he does solve them, right?” Malsano plays along, fanning the flames. He knows how to provoke him.

“He botches it from the very beginning: for him everything is logic, logic and more logic. Even the most irrational.”

“And that’s not how it is…”

“No! You already know that! The world doesn’t work that way: there are errors, misunderstandings, improvisation. Holmes underestimates the surprise factor.”

“But he solves the cases,” declares Malsano.

“Literature. It’s impossible to arrive at the solution to any case by following a chain of deductions, there will always be someone to break it. Criminals play by their own rules.”

“And Holmes doesn’t.” Beneath Malsano’s moustache lies a mocking little smile.

“Not Holmes, and even less Dupin.”

“Who?”

Moisès Corvo pushes aside a man on tiptoe who is trying to catch a glimpse of the dead body. One of the few men, in fact, since most of those present are women. They wear revolted expressions but don’t want to give up their front-row view of One
Eye. The outraged man attempts to challenge him, but when he realizes that stocky Moisès would probably just lay him out as company for the deceased, he decides to pipe down and hope that none of the coarse women start laughing at him.

“Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, is even worse than Holmes. Holmes, at least, is seen through Watson and Watson’s got a constant crafty streak, even though Holmes is a bully and treats him like shit. Ma’am, out of the way, goddamnit, do you know how late it is?” he scolds. “Dupin is a some sort of
crime-solving
machine who’s never set foot on the street. I’d like to see him out in the real world, off the page, where all the murderers aren’t stupid monkeys.”

“There must be one that you like…”

“Lestrade. I like Lestrade. A Scotland Yard detective who does his job even though Holmes insists on humiliating him.”

“Moisès, you read too much.”

“And you talk too much, Juan… for God’s sake!”

They reach the cordon made up of two policemen. They can make out the body, or at least its shape, beneath a blood-soaked sheet. The female spectators just cry and grumble disjointed sentences, as if they really cared about the poor wretch laid out there. A cutpurse slips into the unguarded pockets of the few men present who are consoling the women, hugging them close, feeling their breasts heaving against them. Moisès smacks his hand and the pickpocket scurries off like a mouse. One of the municipal policemen, when he sees them arriving, asks the crowd to move aside, but they don’t pay him much mind. He gets tough, furrowing his brow, and finally manages to clear a small path with a couple of threats.

“Asensi, fuck, what happened?” asks Moisès.

“You’re asking me? What do you think? One Eye, who must’ve been waiting for folk to come out of the opera and didn’t know that today he’d be the star of his own show.”

“How’d it happen?” Moisès moves closer, and Juan lifts up the sheet, which sticks to the victim’s body for a few seconds.

“We don’t know. No one saw anything until they found him like this, all sloppy.”

“So no one’s been arrested.”

“You don’t miss a beat.”

Moisès shoots him a look and Officer Asensi understands that he’s used up today’s quota of familiarity. The body is in a puddle of blood, twisted, its hands stiff as claws, with one eye staring at the sky and the other, the empty socket, stuck in hell. He looks like a white cockroach.

Moisès approaches and squats beside Juan, but he’s distracted. All he can hear are the comments of the ring of people, who seem even more excited by his arrival. You fear me, but I’m your favourite spectacle: when I show up, you can’t look away.

They always come when the evil’s been done, he hears a slender woman say.

“Isn’t it too early for this stiffness?” asks Juan.

Moisès touches One Eye’s cold fingers, which now have as much life in them as a banister. His face is out of joint and pale as a candle, his mouth a grotesque grimace. He bled to death, thinks Moisès, but he doesn’t see any wound. His neck is stained with blood, and in the darkness it looks like tar.

“It’s the panic. His death was so sudden that the panic paralysed him.” He rolls up his sleeves, revealing his forearms. “He has no defensive injuries, but from the position of the body it seems the killer was standing right in front of him.”

“He wasn’t expecting it. But how did he bleed to death?”

A monster, hears Moisès. The rumour grows around him.

“Asensi, get all this riff-raff out of here, fuck, they don’t belong at the scene.”

Asensi does as he’s told, but the people basically ignore him. Fascinated, they retreat a few feet and come right back when Asensi’s gaze returns to the dead body. Moisès grabs a handkerchief and cleans the blood off its neck until he finds what he was looking for. A ripped-off piece of flesh, with the skin flapping over it. Moisès sticks his right-hand index finger into the wound, confirming for Malsano, once again, that sometimes Corvo is crazy.

“Right at the jugular. However it was done, this attack was direct and brutal.”

The buzz on the street grows. He’s white! They drained all his blood!

“But this isn’t a knife wound, and it wasn’t made by a firearm either, Moisès,” Juan says, stating his fears out loud. He senses what made that wound, but he doesn’t want to believe it.

“The cut is semicircular, but not precise. As if it had been made with a small saw. But a saw would have been more destructive, and there would be signs of struggle. The body has no other visible blows. In any case, we’ll have to wait for the autopsy…”

“Do you think it’s possible?”

Moisès turns the cadaver upside down, as if he were hauling a sack. And, in fact, that was what it was for him. Just a sack, nothing more than work. He takes off the corpse’s jacket and, with a small knife, strips the shirt off its back. A screech from the crowd gets Asensi worked up again and he is about to pull out his truncheon. But he’s curious too. Moisès carefully looks
over the arms. He asks for a lantern, which the other municipal brings him. On his upper right arm there are four small bruises in the shape of a crescent moon. On the left arm, there are three.

“They got him from the front. The aggressor grabbed him from the front… and bit him.”

A woman faints. Moisès turns when he hears the uproar.

“It’s a mouthful,” continues Juan looking at One Eye. “They pulled out that piece of flesh with a bite.”

A reporter arrives, equipped with a notebook and pencil.

“Inspector Corvo!” he shouts.

“Not now, Quim.”

“Come on, man, it’s still warm!”

Juan stands up and addresses the journalist.

“Do you want to feel how warm my fists can get?”

He shakes his head.

“Then shut up.”

From the Ronda de Sant Pau to Ciutadella Park, the rumour spreads that the monster is hungry.

While Judge Fernando de Prat is arriving, a couple of babies cry for their mothers’ attention. As if it were a factory whistle, the spectators begin to file out. Some of them want to make sure their children are at home, sleeping beneath the blankets, even if they’re full of lice. Others would rather not meet up with the magistrate face to face, in case he reminds them that they’re due in court one of these days, that they owe a fine or have a sentence to serve. There are those who suspect that it’s now questioning time, that the police will start interrogating anyone who has a mouth and eyes and, in this neighbourhood, it’s best to be mute and blind. Surely better than being one-eyed like the poor stiff, which is starting to stink, if it didn’t stink to begin with.

When he sees Don Fernando de Prat step out of his Hispano Suiza car into the commotion on Sant Pau Street, with an inhospitable expression, smoking jacket over his pyjamas and a pipe at his lips, Blackmouth turns tail and heads down Om Street towards Drassanes, where One Eye’s carriage sits, still carrying the body they dug up in Montjuïc. He takes it to the port, where the topmasts sway to the slow, deliberate rhythm of the sea breeze and, making sure there are no prying eyes around, gets rid of the body by dumping it into the water, with a crashing noise like a rock falling from a mountain. Blackmouth runs off, leaving One Eye’s carriage. He won’t need it now, he says to himself, and he heads home, to the pigeon loft on Lluna Street, wary of the dark, which is where vampires hide.

Don Fernando de Prat looks obliquely at the body, without much interest, and starts up the usual shop talk with Moisès and Malsano. He acts as if he wants to know what happened, but he’s only thinking about going back to bed once this damn
on-call
shift is over.

“If we at least had cameras,” laments Corvo when de Prat asks him to prepare a report on what happened for the next day.

“Draw, like you’ve done your whole life.”

“Sometimes life ends, Your Honour, and we move on to a better one. I would recommend you ask our guest for tonight, but I think his reply would be too cold.”

The magistrate ignores Corvo’s sarcasm because the doctor has just arrived.

“Tell me he’s dead, I want to go home and sleep.”

Doctor Ortiz, moustache held high and satchel in his hand, is a man of few words. He crouches over the body and puts a little mirror in front of its mouth.

“Maybe you’ll have more luck with the neck wound, doctor,” says Corvo, who gets no response.

He checks the pulse, looks into the eyes and stands up.

“Take him to the Clínic for me.”

And having said that, he shakes the judge’s hand and heads off from whence he came. He can dispense with formalities. Don Fernando de Prat, Moisès and Malsano know him well enough. Just as they know each other. They’ve all met up many a night around a corpse. And so the judge decides that that’s enough for today and that tomorrow’s another day, God willing. The two detectives wait alone on the street for them to cart off the body, with no more company than a limping dog that groans and stops to lick the puddle of blood off the paving stones.

At number twenty-nine Ponent Street, not far from where One Eye was found, Salvador Vaquer has only been in bed for a short while. He was in the study waiting for Enriqueta to come home. His eyelids were heavy. Then he got up and went to the room of little Angelina, who was sleeping. He locked it with a key and opened the door to a large closet, where Dorita’s daughter sat on a straw mattress. She was crying.