Barcelona Shadows (3 page)

“What’s wrong, pretty girl?” Salvador approached her and caressed her short, clumsily cut hair.

“I’m scared,” she whimpered. “Why? You don’t have to be scared of anything.” Salvador

slid his fingers down the little girl’s neck and then her chest. She’s four years old, at most.

“I want my mummy…”

“I’m here, sweetheart, I’m here.”

Salvador now smells his fingers, which hold the girl’s scent. From the bed he hears keys at the door and the woman entering.
A twinge makes him feel guilty, and despite the cold he starts to sweat. He pricks up his ear, like a hunting hound, and he imagines her going first through the dining room, then the kitchen and finally the large closet, where she stops. Silence.

Enriqueta opens the door to the bedroom and Salvador pretends to be sleeping. She undresses in the dark and gets into bed. She embraces him from behind. Salvador bites his lips when she lays her cold fingers on his ribs. She breathes deeply and lets out a whistle from between her teeth that makes him think of a snake. The woman bites his ear and then runs her tongue along the nape of his neck, while her hand slithers down his pubic bone until it catches its prey. He turns and kisses her: her mouth is hot and salty.

Like blood.

G
REASE SLIDES ALONG THE TILES.
The sink is stopped up. The brazier’s embers trace shadows that sway to and fro in a spectral shivering. These are the few signs of life, as misleading as they may be, of the morgue at the Hospital Clínic. On one of the tables lies the sewn-up body of One Eye, white and rigid, with contusions on its back, arms and legs. Less dead than the decapitated body that rests on the table beside it, judging by its smell. They found the corpse very early, floating in the port, beneath a mountain of seagulls. In fact, they wouldn’t have even noticed it if it weren’t for the din of the big birds screeching and fighting for a piece of rotten meat in front of the statue of Columbus with its outstretched finger. Doctor Ortiz believes that the discoverer of the Americas was pointing out the dead chunk, as if asking them to get it out of there. Now the doctor taps the floor with his feet, first the right, then the left, to drive out the cockroaches that smell a banquet.

“Have you started the party without us?” bellows Moisès after coming down the spiral staircase that leads to the autopsy room. “I hope I won’t have to dance with the ugliest girl…”

And he looks at the headless body. Doctor Ortiz furrows his brows and shakes his hand. He does the same with Juan, who comes down behind him.

“Good evening.”

Everyone knows it’s a figure of speech. Doctor Ortiz doesn’t think this is a good evening. He doesn’t even think it’s a good anything. He called them in because he wants to show them something on the corpse with the bite mark.

“Let’s get down to it, doctor,” pressures Juan. “We’ve hardly slept today and I’d like to take a nap before the shift is over.”

“I think there are still some free beds, if you want, and even some company, the kind that doesn’t complain much,” replies Moisès.

“Is the comedy show over, gentlemen, or am I going to have to start charging admission?”

“And what about this one? Do we know what it’s doing here?”

“He just came in a little while ago.” The doctor pats the chest of the body, since it has no head, and a stream of insects splashes onto Juan’s feet.

“Goddamnittohell!”

Moisès leans over the corpse, covering his nostrils and mouth with a handkerchief that has his initials embroidered on it. It is the only thing of his wife’s that he carries with him.

“Here we have the best proof that, indeed, there is life after death. A lot of life.”

The stench is almost unbearable, and with the brazier it is asphyxiating. Doctor Ortiz knows how to make sure visitors don’t overstay their welcome.

“As I said, he had already been a
client
of mine. A poor wretch who threw himself onto the railway track and ended up like this… well, not quite like this.”

“And what was this Marie Antoinette doing in the port? Now even the deceased are in on this stupid swimming craze?”

“Mr Corvo, I’ll pretend I don’t hear your insightful comments and I’ll refer you to your colleague, Inspector Sánchez, who is handling the case.”

Buenaventura Sánchez. The perfect policeman. If Juli Vallmitjana wrote about the coppers instead of about the plebs, Buenaventura would be the main character. Tall, handsome, with spiky hair and light eyes, a hypocritical smile and pat on the back, a guy who knows everything about crime and how to fight it. A policeman so perfect that he’s the apple of his boss’s eye. The district chief of Barcelona, José Millán Astray, can’t stop listing his virtues while Buenaventura brings him warm milk and tucks him into bed. With everyone else he acts like a know-all, like someone who knows he’ll go far, or at least thinks he will. Juan Malsano can’t stand looking at him, and Moisès Corvo has already broken his face once.

“Has Inspector Sánchez been here? I think I can smell his perfume…”

“He came this afternoon, Inspector, with Doctor Saforcada, who did the autopsy on the subject I called you here about.”

“And what did Doctor Saforcada find?” asks Juan.

“Your monster. It’s human. Or at least, a human with
nec-rophagous
tendencies.”

“So we can rule out the Wolfman or Count Dracula?”

“Inspector Corvo, come here.” He stands beside the table and grabs One Eye by the arms. “Four ecchymoses on one arm and three on the other. What does that tell you?”

“That they held him down before he died, from in front. Someone with some strength…”

“Don’t tell me something we all know already. Think. Why are there three on one arm and four on the other?”

“Because the killer has missing fingers?”

“Ectrodactylism. That’s a possibility. And it would definitely limit the search field.”

“Our fingerprint archives are still small,” says Juan, running his fingers over his moustache. He has been breathing in that same air for so many years now that he barely smells the odour of putrefaction except when he takes off his clothes in the morning, before getting into bed.

“Yes,” continues Moisès, “Professor Oloriz is just now supervising the archives’ creation. And to top it all, there’s all sorts of people coming back from the war against the Moors missing a hand, with their trousers knotted up at the knee, or in a pine box.”

“I said it’s a possibility. What’s the other?” Silence. “That one of his hands was busy with something else.”

He moves One Eye’s body like a dried-out baguette and pushes it closer to the lamp, revealing a fourth bruise, smaller and longer than the rest.

“He was carrying a knife?”

“A knife would have left a cut. It must have been a pointed tool, like a bodkin.”

“But there’s no bodkin wound either.”

“Not at first glance, but we didn’t bring him here to sing us a zarzuela, did we?”

“If you want your part of the ticket money for the show, doctor, all you have to do is say so,” grumbles Moisès.

The doctor positions himself to touch One Eye’s head, shaved and sewn up clumsily, and opens the neck wound. You spend half your life seeking me out and the other half running from me. You rough up the corpses, jab at the flesh, looking for explanations inside the bodies that bear my mark. Who? How? Why?
The answers are within these men’s reach, these men that shuffle around dead bodies like someone looking for the answer to an arithmetic problem.

“This is a human bite. We can tell from the diameter, from the way the skin is broken and the teeth marks, which fit with a human odontogram. But the killer’s first attack wasn’t the bite. He would have to have been a real big brute to just grab somebody, even a very weak victim, and bite off a piece of their neck.”

Moisès looks inside the opening, but doesn’t make out anything.

“Here,” continues the doctor. “This cut on the inner part isn’t consistent with the bite, but with a lacerated-contused wound stemming from a weapon, such as a bodkin.”

“Such as a bodkin.”

“Or a hairpin.”

“What murderer wears a hairpin?”

“What murderer drinks their victim’s blood?”

Moisès Corvo closes his eyes and the memory of Rif comes flooding into his head, as vivid as the warmth of the room he is in. Soldiers who eat human flesh in order to survive. Were they monsters then? He himself had cut off the enemy’s fingers and ears as some kind of stupid souvenir of his tour of Africa; was he a monster?

“Who could do something like this?” asks Juan.

“You two are the policemen, gentlemen. I’m just a doctor. There you have the clothes, which haven’t been inspected.”

Moisès picks them up off the table and separates them. He starts with the wrinkled jacket, then moves on to the shirt. It feels like parchment where the blood has already dried, and slippery where it’s still damp. There doesn’t seem to be anything useful, until Juan pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of the trousers.
It’s a map, written in pencil. On the back, they couldn’t have had a better stroke of luck: it’s a doctor’s business card.

“Doctor Isaac von Baumgarten,” reads Juan. “Do you know him?”

“No.”

“But you’re both doctors…” he replies, annoyed.

Doctor Ortiz bites his tongue. They’ll be leaving soon and he’ll be left with the only company he gets along with, the dead, who are considerate enough not to spend the night saying stupid things and expecting a nice response.

Barcelona is an old lady with a battered soul, who has been left by a thousand lovers but refuses to admit it. Every time she grows, she looks in the mirror, sees herself changed and renews all her blood until it’s almost at boiling point. Like a butterfly’s cocoon, she finally bursts. Distrust becomes the first phase of gestation: no one is sure that he whom they’ve lived with for years, whom they’ve considered a neighbour, isn’t now an enemy. All of a sudden they put up walls, making obvious the differences among Barcelonians, and each one takes refuge in his own universe, prepared to defend or attack. And this is how violence, the second phase in the metamorphosis from bug to butterfly, becomes an irreversible phenomenon. Over some petty thing, some groundless motive, some made-up excuse, the old lady is once again covered with scars and burns; she screams madly and pays homage to me. These are days when I stroll openly through the streets of a city devoted to me, and I enter a thousand bodies anxious to please me. I collect souls in abundance, without paying attention to names or faces. Slain Jews and monasteries in flames. Blood and fire create the soot that will be the make-up Barcelona smears on to become old again. Renewal as the final step, the pretence that nothing 
happened although now everything is different, will make the city both a wiser woman and, at the same time, a more aggrieved one.

And thus, along these scarifications that are the narrow streets of the old quarter, Moisès Corvo and Juan Malsano search for the origin of the evil that is now more than just a rumour, that is breeding fear. And only three years have passed since the last wave of violence. They head down Raurich Street—a dark, damp ravine that’s misty around its amber street lamps and cloaked in sepulchral silence—and stop at number twenty, the address of Doctor Isaac von Baumgarten.

Just as the half-asleep doctor opens the door slightly, a whore crosses Tres Llits with a customer. Malsano thinks he recognizes him as a famous politician, and so he turns his gaze, trying to summon up his name, just in case some day it comes in handy. Later he’ll jot it down in a notebook, beside all the notes on strange Doctor von Baumgarten.

Isaac von Baumgarten is short and thickset, not really fat. His blond hair is always well combed, but not now, not at this hour. Gentlemen, what is it that you want, his eyes are puffy with sleep and he wears a robe over his pyjamas. It’s cold; he shivers and shakes when they identify themselves as policeman because, holy shit, they’ve caught me.

“Doctor?” says Malsano with his foot prepared to keep him from slamming the door shut.

“Yes?” He is afraid.

“Do you know One Eye?” Corvo isn’t up for playing games. It’s night, it’s late and he’s a cop; he’s not going to beat around the bush.

“No,” he lies, but his small ice-blue eyes, puffy with sleep, give him away.

“Then how do you explain this?” He shows him the business card, the full name clear as day, wrinkled but intelligible.

“Where did it come from?”

“Can we come in?” Malsano’s legs are cold. Besides, it’s awkward talking to half a face. Doctor von Baumgarten still hasn’t replied when Moisès Corvo pushes the door and enters.

It isn’t quite a doctor’s office, but it’s not a private residence either. The entrance is austere. Its sagging walls are clean, with greenish wallpaper, and illuminated by an electric lamp besieged by an insomniac moth. There are no personal photographs, not even the slightest trace of any family life, notices Moisès.

“How do you know him?”

“He helps me.” He doesn’t know where to hide his hands, Moisès also detects.

“Helps you what?”

“He just helps me, that’s all.”

“He works for you?”

“It’s not exactly that, but he does some errands for me. Would you like some coffee?” An unidentified accent makes its way through his “s”s.

“If I said yes, you’d have some too, and then I’d have to nail you to the wall to keep from getting seasick with all your shaking.”

“I, uh…”

“Work alone?”

“Me?”

“One Eye.”

“Yes… I mean, no… I haven’t seen him in two days, since I sent him to pick up a corpse from Montjuïc. The card is his, that’s for sure, on the back is the sketch he drew. Sometimes
he comes with a lad. A youngster who barely speaks. He’s never crossed the threshold. He stays outside, like a little dog, waiting.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I’m foreign. I don’t know anyone, and those I do know, I’d rather not.”

“Well, now you know us, doctor, and it would behove you to start remembering.” Malsano inspects the entrance and stops in front of a closed door. Doctor von Baumgarten carries the key in his pocket and he caresses it with his soft fingers.

“How long have you lived here?” Corvo continues his questioning.

“Can you tell me what happened?” The doctor approaches the exit.

“Did you not understand me?” responds Corvo.

“Two years, not quite. I’m Austrian.”

“And what brought you here?” Malsano is getting tired. He opens a drawer. No bodkins, no fangs. It doesn’t look like the doctor dresses up as a vampire for his evening walks.

“Friends?” ridicules Corvo.

“I am a doctor. You’ve already seen that on the card.”

“An Austrian doctor. You wouldn’t be one of those psychoanalysts who are everywhere these days, would you?”

“No, no. Those are a gang of illusionists who think they’re practising science when they chalk everything up to fucking. I am a phrenologist, of the positivist school.”

“Aha, Lombroso,” says Moisès. “I know some of his theories on anarchy.” He doesn’t add that he read them at the printing press where his brother works, flipping through
Criminal Man
to kill time and because the title amused him.

“Will you tell me what happened? Is he dead?” Doctor von Baumgarten takes the lead.

“Why do you ask that?”