Authors: Marc Pastor
The watchman receives them with his blunderbuss in his hand, a weapon that’s not very practical but quite a deterrent, and the policemen open their jackets just enough to reveal their revolvers.
“We want to talk to Mr Camil,” states Corvo.
“Not at this hour,” responds the gypsy, big and fleshy, with a calm voice and a bearing that seems to say just you try it, and see what a thrashing you’ll get.
“Tell him we’re here and let him decide.”
“No need for that,” a hoarse voice says from the largest shack. “Chacote, let the inspectors in.”
Before they enter, three of Mr Camil’s sons come out to meet them and watch them dismount and tie up their reins with the mules. They greet them with a nod and remain outside in case their father should need them. Mr Camil shakes his wife, make them some drinks, and smoothes his clothes. Grey hair, receding hairline and bushy eyebrows, he uses his fingers to slick down his moustache in the shape of an inverted U, and he receives the surprise visitors with a courtesy not typical of that time of day.
Malsano realizes that his partner is very trusting, but he keeps checking behind him. It’s not only that they’re among gypsies (he can’t stand them), but they are in the patriarch’s house, alone, nobody knows they’re there, it’s the middle of the night and they are disobeying a direct order from their superior officer. The next day they could as easily end up in the clink as chopped up and mixed in with the hash these riff-raff on the outskirts of civilization feed their pigs, damn them.
“Cognac?” asks Mr Camil, who is already filling his glass. He drinks it, savouring the taste. “A good midnight snack is important.”
And he looks at the empty glass with a glimmer in his eyes, amid the sleep, promising loyalty.
“No, coffee,” requests Corvo, and Malsano leans back in silence.
“Fina!” he bellows, even though she’s right beside him. “You heard the inspectors.”
The woman, more sleepy than resigned, lights a little burner that serves as their stove to boil a pot of water. She grabs a sock from the table and fills it with ground coffee beans.
“I’ve haven’t been by here in a while.”
“Good sign: my boys are behaving as they should.”
“Yes… or they are learning to be independent.”
Mr Camil smiles, revealing a gold incisor and his best cynicism.
“You know you are always welcome. Fina, where’s that coffee?” he mutters under his breath. “She’s a good woman, a saint, but sometimes… what can I do for you?”
“I need names.”
“Gypsies or gadje?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mmm…” He adopts a serious stance, pure front. “What is it about this time?”
“Have you heard talk about the disappeared children? About a…”—he hesitates about using the word—“monster?”
“Who hasn’t?” He yawns.
“I want to know his name, face and address.”
Mr Camil gets up from his armchair and, with his gaze, urges Fina to hurry up.
“Not a simple task. I can’t give you what you want.”
“You’re out of coffee? What’s your wife cooking up?”
“Fina, bollocks! You heard the man!”
“It’s coming, it’s coming.” She carries the smoking cups, burning her fingers.
“I don’t know who it is, but I’ve heard things.”
“What things?”
“Ugly things. Buying and selling.”
“Buying and selling?” Corvo knows what he’s insinuating, but he wants to have as much information as possible.
“It’s hard to reach conclusions, Mr Inspector. Now there’s a child, now there isn’t. And it’s happening more and more often— with one constant that repeats.”
“They are the children of prostitutes.”
“Yes, but no. My boys spoke to a woman on Mata Street, a beggar who lives off the alms of the crowds on Marqués del Duero. About a year ago they stole her son, a few months old. She had left him in the care of another panhandler while she went to look for food at the poorhouse on Barberà Street.”
“You didn’t tell me about this.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“What was the man like?”
“Lame. That’s the only thing she remembers.”
“And why didn’t she report it?” asks Malsano.
“Are you joking?”
“You heard the chief today,” says Corvo. “If they aren’t visible, they don’t exist. In a way, their children can’t disappear because it’s as if they’d never been real.”
“Exactly.” Mr Camil sits down again, places his glass on a chest of drawers and crosses his arms.
“So, the guy responsible is lame, and not a gypsy,” reflects Malsano out loud. “We have to look at the anthropometric files, because that would reduce the range of suspects by—”
“Nothing,” concludes Corvo.
“Don’t bet on it,” the patriarch warns them. “My boys—shit, I can’t drink this coffee like this”—a few drops of cognac—“my boys, I mean, they’ve heard a lot of things.”
“They have good ears.”
“As big as pockets, Mr Inspector. But we leave the work to professionals such as yourself.” Another swig, rolled eyes, barks from dogs outside that Chacote solves with a stick. “There isn’t just one.”
Moisès Corvo is stunned.
“That’s not possible.” Malsano puts down his glass where he can, between porcelain figurines and rosaries of Majorcan pearls. “When there is more than one person involved in things like this, somebody ends up talking. Always. And where there’s somebody talking, there’s somebody else listening. And the news spreads very quickly.”
Mr Camil leans forward in his armchair, like a hustler about to reveal a good hand created with cards hidden in his sleeve that appear at just the right moment.
“My boys, I’ll say it again, they hear everything. But if the… news, as you would say, Mr Inspector, doesn’t flow, it’s because someone can silence it.”
“What are you insinuating?” asks Corvo.
“That you aren’t just looking for a monster. And not a handful of incompetent sons of bitches who rape children. That you are going after people with enough power to anaesthetize an entire city. People who will do whatever it takes to indulge in their disgusting vices, who have money, who have status and who have power. That is all I know.”
Moisès Corvo walks in circles, brooding, knowing that the
words of his informant could have more truth to them than he was expecting. A dangerous truth.
“Can I do anything for you?” offers the policeman.
“Look for the money and you’ll find your monster. It won’t be long before they blame us for all that. It is the first thing they do when the fear strikes. And that is bad for business.”
“If you have any problems, you know what to do.”
“We’ll keep that in mind. If my boys find out anything important, we’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck. My wife—” He turns and finds her sleeping, with her head fallen onto her chest and snoring freely, in a chair. “My wife will pray for you, we’ll see if it turns out better than the coffee.”
I
DON’T WANT EVER TO
see that wicked whore again, says Maria Pujaló. She has no heart, no soul, no feelings. I haven’t spoken to my brother in a long time, and the only thing I know is that he can’t free himself from her. He tried to leave her when they came back from Majorca. He realized he was married to a shrew, that it didn’t matter if they were in Barcelona or on the Islands, that hate was eating her up and that was why she was like that, niggardly, a bag of bones, without an ounce of fat on her, with those frighteningly sunken cheeks. You never know if she is looking at you or spying on you, and she’s always plotting something sinful. But Juanitu still adores her, I can’t explain it. That whore turned him against me.
Maria Pujaló lives in Vilassar de Dalt and works as a maid in the home of the parish priest. She finally has enough stability, being that she’s a widow. She opened the door to me reluctantly, and eventually ended up opening her heart to me. She has a lot to say, and few people to talk to. I’m the perfect confessor.
When I lived with her and my brother in the little flat on Jocs Florals Street I left Pepitu, my little angel, in her care. I had to go to Cervera for a few days because my father was very ill and needed me to care for him. After two weeks the doctor told us that it was best we bring him to the city, keep him close, because
he would need extreme unction any day now and we would have to be by his side.
As soon as we returned to Jocs Florals we found that neither Enriqueta, Juanitu nor Pepitu was there. Some other family was living there! Ay, you should have seen it! How upsetting! You can’t imagine what it is to find that your house is no longer your house. I cried wretchedly all day, with my father, who could barely even speak any more, beside me like a wilted little bird. Ay!
I looked for a hospice for consumptives where they could take him in, because on the street, with me, he would wither like a little flower, but we didn’t have the coin and without money you die on the street.
Maria Pujaló whimpers, pulls a handkerchief out of her cleavage and rubs her reddened eyes. She asks for my forgiveness and I brush it off with a hand gesture, because I understand. She has suffered, and I know it, but her suffering won’t go on much longer. Enriqueta won’t hurt her again. Naturally, I keep that to myself.
And one day I ran into her on the street, that wicked woman. She was dressed all in black, as if in mourning, and she had Pepitu by the hand, practically dragging him. I shouted: “Enriqueta! Enriqueta!” She looked at me as if she’d just seen me the afternoon before, and everything had been said.
“What do you want, Maria?”
I ran to cover Pepitu with kisses, he was filthy, snot everywhere, but she wouldn’t let him go.
“My boy!”
“We are in a hurry.”
She is cold. She’s very cold. She is a very evil person, and she doesn’t care.
“Where were you? When I came from Cervera with father I couldn’t find you. I’ve been on the street for four days, sleeping in doorways!”
“Juanitu found a better flat than that hole we were living in, and we moved.”
“But you didn’t tell me anything!”
“We told the neighbours. They were supposed to let you know.”
It was a lie: she hadn’t even spoken to the neighbours.
That same afternoon we—father and I—moved in with them. I didn’t want to take the matter any further because the important thing was that I was reunited with Pepitu, who is my life. The boy told me that she had been filling his head with strange ideas. She told him that now she was his new mother, that I wasn’t coming back from Cervera because I didn’t love him any more, that she would take care of him but that he had to call her Mama. I don’t know why I believed her… I don’t know why I ever believed her.
Shortly, a week after moving into the flat on Tallers Street, father died. Choked by a cough, alone, suffering, poor thing. We didn’t even have the money to bury him, even though Juanitu beat on his chest and said that he would build him a pantheon in the new Cemetery of the East, that nothing was too good for his father. And we had to bury him in a mass grave, God keep him in His Glory.
They say ignorance is bliss but you see that it’s not always true, because Maria Pujaló doesn’t know much and she couldn’t be more unhappy. She doesn’t know, for example, that Enriqueta got sick of having her father-in-law in the house, always in the bed, coughing and doddering, he’s going to give it to me, she thought, and she decided to get rid of him, the sooner the better.
Seeing that the man didn’t pass away—there are many who seem about to die who never do—she waited until she was alone
in the house with him. Her husband must have been getting drunk in some tavern and Maria had taken Pepitu out to run errands; she’d been keeping him close ever since the change of flat in her absence.
She had to screw up her courage and find a way to get rid of the sick old man. She wasn’t doing anything bad, she thought, he’d have to meet his maker sooner or later. But the problem was how to do it without raising any suspicion. Stealing jewellery and money is one thing, killing someone quite another; and when you don’t know how it’s done, you have to roll up your sleeves and figure it out so you don’t look like an amateur, Enriqueta.
The woman approached the bedroom where Mr Pujaló lay sleeping, his breathing jagged and so filled with whistles that it seemed she was entering the França railway station. She knelt down and opened his mouth with her long, skinny fingers, introducing them gradually. No. That would wake him up and he was still capable of screaming. She grabbed the pillow, disgusted to find it drenched in sweat. She folded it over the man’s face and pressed hard, but she was in a bad position and when he tensed all the muscles in his body he made her fall to the floor on her ass. The victim sat up, his hair mussed, poorly shaven, his eyes bulging, as if he were now regaining the strength that had been slipping away from him in recent months. Seeing Enriqueta on the floor, he understood her intentions and got up as best he could with a crick crack creck of his joints to run (if that crippled, pathetic gait could be called running) towards the door. But when he tried to open it, the knob failed him. Enriqueta had locked it with two turns of the key she carried in her dress pocket. The man turned tail and headed down the hallway towards the dining room, where there was a large window overlooking the street and he could call for help.
Enriqueta appeared in the kitchen brandishing a bread knife.
“Dear father-in-law, all this exertion isn’t good for you.”
The man wanted to scream, he wanted to call her a cynical bitch, but he could only get out a weak, unintelligible voice choked by anguish and exhaustion. He still had the pluck to challenge her and try to wrest the knife from her, but that just made Enriqueta laugh as she switched it to the other hand and sank it into his butt cheek.
Too much blood. Mr Pujaló shrieked and hastened his step towards the dining room, taking advantage of the fact that Enriqueta was hypnotized by the reddish reflection of the knife blade. Too much blood. She would have liked to lick it, but that was infected blood. She had to finish him off, but without making the place look like a slaughterhouse. She went towards the man, whose wound was gushing down his leg like uncontrollable diarrhoea, and strangled him with her hands from behind. He coughed, but kept breathing because she didn’t have a good, strong hold on his neck. The smell of leather, coming through the window from the hide workshop on the lower level, excited her. The man extended his arms as if someone could see him and help him, and he thought he’d survive when she let him go. But a second later he felt a sharp, delicate pressure on his throat. Enriqueta had pulled off one of the curtain cords and tied it around his neck. He spat and turned blue as she pulled it taut. He tried to hit her in the face, the shoulders, the breasts, desperately, but Enriqueta wouldn’t let her captive go until he was well dead, enjoying the moment, savouring the feeling of power, discovering a new pleasure, playful and more intense than any she’d known up until then.
She left the inert body near the window, face down, just as she had killed him, and she cleaned his legs with a damp sponge. Then
she scrubbed the floor, calmly, as if she’d dropped the remains of lunch off plates, and she went back to check on the body. The wound had stopped gushing. She covered it with a clean rag and put some pyjama bottoms on him which the dead man never wore but would cover up the cut. Then she remained by his side for a few minutes, looking at him, revelling in what she had just done.
Finally, she got up and went to take a walk until around ten, when Maria received her in tears.
“Father is dead and I wasn’t here. He tried to lean out of the window to ask for help and he died.” Maria hadn’t seen the wounds, and no one would. Who looks for signs of violence on a consumptive old man?
Enriqueta consoled her with a big hug.
The chauffeur who had driven her to the mansion and is now keeping a close eye on her is a man named Marcial but, from what Enriqueta has seen, he only responds to the voice of his master. He is sturdy and serious, with a bowler hat and his hands crossed over his belly. She notices a bump under his armpit that confirms he has other duties beyond the steering wheel. And for the moment, one of them is staying close to the healer that Mr Llardó has called for.
Enriqueta already knows the mansion in the Bonanova where they’ve brought her: she has been there a few times before. But that doesn’t stop her from feeling envious of the luxury surrounding her. As she enters through the wall covered in vines, the well-kept garden of topiary animals, a fountain with two cherubs spitting water over a small lake filled with colourful fish, the porch with columns at the entrance, she is convinced that it was all built
for her, that she is the one who deserves to live there. She has to wait in the vestibule, despite the fantasies that invade her, sitting on a chaise longue and escorted by the chauffeur, contemplating the velvet curtains, the pale sculptures of satyrs chasing nymphs, the carpet that looks to be several inches thick and the distant murmur of bustling in the kitchen.
A nearby bell tower rings some quarter-hour after twelve.
Mr Llardó comes through the door with a boy of seven, tall and chubbier than his father. They both enter laughing, but the little one loses his smile when he sees Enriqueta, who has stood to greet them. Mr Llardó smacks the boy’s nape affectionately.
“Go to your room.”
His son obeys and leaves running, phlegmatically, without losing sight of the woman who is also watching him out of the corner of her eye. With a hand gesture Mr Llardó dismisses the chauffeur, who disappears without a word.
“Sir.” Enriqueta is so fawning when it comes to the wealthy that those who deal with her normally wouldn’t recognize her. Even though she attempts to sound sweet, she fails.
Mr Josep Vincenç Llardó Romagosa made his fortune in the Indies before Spain lost Cuba and can afford peacefully to while away the rest of his days in Barcelona, where he is an alderman. That allows him to keep a hand in small business deals that maintain his good position, both economically and socially. He seems shorter than he is because he always walks hunched over, due to the dampness of the boat where he worked for fifteen years, he says, and he has a hollow-cheeked face from which an enormous hooked nose emerges. Bald on the crown of his head, he hides it by combing over a cow-lick like a spiral
ensaïmada
, a technique that works as long as the wind isn’t blowing.
“I need more salve,” he says as he accompanies her to the parlour.
“I told you it wouldn’t be enough. That it has to be one for each full moon, Mr Llardó.”
“I know, I know.” The alderman seems baffled and even somewhat ashamed. “But I didn’t want my wife to find it and start asking questions that… well, you know what I mean.”
Mr Llardó’s wife had gone to spend the days before Christmas in Caldes, to soak in some thermal springs on her doctor’s advice, since lately she’d been feeling very weak of spirit and very feeble. Maybe it was completely unrelated, or maybe not, but Mr Llardó had caught a raging case of syphilis over the summer and, through a friend, was put in touch with Enriqueta, who is providing him with the balms that are meant to cure him. Mr Llardó is afraid to go to the doctor, and Enriqueta takes advantage of that.
“Right now I don’t have any more salve.”
“It’s very urgent.” He seems like a little boy about to pee himself.
“Let me see the affected area.”
The man hesitates, but the need is pressing. He lowers his trousers and unfastens his underwear. Like a scarecrow, making sure his son doesn’t appear on the stairs, that the servant girl doesn’t appear through the kitchen door and that—rattled by his nerves, in short, with his arms extended. Enriqueta examines his genitals without touching them. The chancre on his penis has disappeared, but he is starting to show symptoms of
mucous-membrane
irritation.
“How does it look?”
“Not good.”
“When can you have the salve?”
“I’ll have to prepare it, but reckon on seven days.”
“That’s… next Wednesday?”
“Yes, right before the full moon. You’re in luck. For the moment, make an infusion of rosemary and two heads of garlic and soak a pillow and some rags in it. Use the pillow, when it’s dried, for sleeping. The rags will be for scrubbing down where you are having discomfort. And tomorrow morning drip candle wax on a drop of Agua del Carmen, mix well and add it to your bath water.”
The alderman lifts up his trousers and smoothes his moustache as if nothing is going on, sweat drenching his forehead.
“What do I owe you?”
“Today’s visit is 300 pesetas. The salve will be 1,000.”
“A thousand?”
“The ingredients are difficult to come by, and the urgency makes them costlier. But think that if you heed my words, you will not only be cured but also protected from infecting those who come into contact with you. And I know that you have many lady friends that you don’t want to let get away while the lady of the house isn’t here.”