Barcelona Shadows (10 page)

“Are you accusing me, Inspector?”

“Is that what it looks like? Because if it looks to you like I’m accusing you of something, you might force me to do just that.”

“I don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything. I love children. Whoever this beast is doesn’t love them.”

“Love? Is that what you call what you did to your daughter?”

“You’re a rapscallion!”

Moisès Corvo smacks him in the face.

“First of all, speak to me with respect, you disgusting rat. Second, tell me where we should look or we’ll arrest you.”

Bernat has a hand to his cheek and is very angry. When he arrested him the last time, Moisès Corvo beat him badly. That was the beginning of a chain of beatings and humiliations that continued in the Model Prison and led to his being sodomized by a group of inmates who wanted to make clear the only two certainties behind those walls: everyone has a mother and children are innocents. Hours, days, weeks and months of frustrations brewed inside Bernat’s mind and body, but he is too old now
to release them and he is too afraid to challenge the policemen.

“Look, Bernat, you’d better talk or I can’t be responsible for what he’ll do.” Malsano knew that he couldn’t control his partner. If there were children involved, he became more rash, and he didn’t even have any of his own.

“He eats them. He kills them, drinks their blood and eats their organs.”

“Now we’re on the right track.” Corvo puts his arms in prayer position, and makes an innocent face. “Continue.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, that it keeps him alive.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know.” He protects his face against a possible blow. “But I’ve heard he’s been doing it for years, but that lately he’s got more greedy, as if he needed more and more.”

“Why would he need to drink blood?” Malsano is repulsed by the idea.

“Because children are life and they keep you forever young.”

“Superstitions,” declares Moisès.

“Really? I would be dead, if not for them. At my age, after my daughter died and my wife left me, all those years in prison, all the—”

“Don’t come crying to us.”

“If it wasn’t for my contact with children, I’d already be on the other side. If not for sleeping in Elisa’s bed, with her sheet that still gives off her perfume when I take a deep breath, I’d be pushing up daisies. They give you life, and that’s what the vampire is doing: taking life from them. I’m incapable of hurting them, but this monster kills them.”

“I don’t feel the least bit sorry for you, Bernat.” Moisès spits on the floor, as if to stress his words. “You deserve what you got.”

“Elisa never understood me, neither did Mercedes. But I need to be close to children, give them love, make them love me. I’m not guilty of anything.”

“Give us a name,” demands Malsano.

“It could be anyone. It could be you.”

“If I find out you have anything to do with this, even the slightest coincidence, I’ll be back, Bernat,” threatens Moisès, already on his way out. “And I’ll strangle you with the same sheet she killed herself with.”

I met Moisès Corvo six years ago. Conxita was seven months pregnant when I came for the baby inside her. I had to do it. I’m not proud of what I did, but I don’t regret it either. Its time had come while it was just winding its watch. That was very hard on the couple, who were hoping to have a child when they were still young enough to raise it. A year later they tried again, and Conxita got pregnant once more. In her fourth month I came into their home and caressed the woman’s feverish face. Moisès Corvo was sleeping by her side, after long, wakeful hours attending to her every need. She awoke haemorrhaging heavily, and the doctors said that the baby had destroyed her from inside and she’d never be able to have another. Moisès Corvo was grieving and in pain (he blamed himself for not being able to make good babies, for not being a whole man) and he distanced himself from Conxita. She needed him by her side, but she never found him there, and she too closed herself off into her own world. They shared a roof and little more, each sleeping in separate rooms. It wasn’t so much that they had stopped loving each other (the love that accrues over time together) as that they’d buried their affection
along with the foetus. The couple channelled any parental feelings towards Moisès’s brother Antoni’s son. Little Andreu Corvo is the boy they could never have, the over-indulged one of the family, the last link that binds them. And Moisès Corvo can’t stand to see Andreu suffer or have anything bad happen to him, and he will stand up even to me if he has to.

He’s got real balls on him, that copper.

In the next few days nothing happens worth mentioning. The city, in that parenthesis of stillness, fills with comments of this can’t bode well, it’s the calm before the storm, now comes some big trouble. Even the weather turns grey, the sky covered in clouds heavy with a rain that never falls. Moisès Corvo haunts school doors, knowing it’s a waste of time. He goes to the Children’s Hospital on Consell de Cent Street and talks to Sister Euclídia. Scarlet fever and tuberculosis are the main dangers, she says, maintaining she hasn’t heard anything about anyone kidnapping children. There are always orphans and the penniless here, and the last time anyone tried to take one of them it was a stranger, must have been eleven years ago now, who said he had just as much right to be a father as anyone else. They stopped him before he got to Sicília Street, but I don’t know any more. Nobody, not even the police, came about it and around here it was business as usual. Corvo wants to check the files from 1900, but the fire a few months earlier at the Palace of Justice makes it impossible to find anything there. He visits the Model and no one remembers any man who snatches youngsters.

Blackmouth hasn’t seen the woman for days. It’s as if, after the incident with the level-crossing keeper, she’d got scared and didn’t want to show her face in public. Moisès Corvo had tried, in vain, to contact Manuela Bayona. The woman had taken her
daughter, still wrapped in bandages from the burns, to Murcia, with some cousins. Blackmouth fears the moment when Enriqueta again demands he be by her side, but at the same time he is hugely curious.

The bullfight before Christmas at the Arenes ring would have been one of the most soporific of 1911 if it hadn’t been for one of the bulls up against Vicente Pastor escaping out onto the street and sowing panic. It charges an omnibus and a few men try to cut it off and play the hero, meanwhile the municipals do their best to hide at a safe distance and a woman faints to get her suitor finally to take her in his arms. Some contraband officers take it down, making the front page of every newspaper the next morning. It is the only topic of conversation in Barcelona. People make circles in front of the cathedral, and the social gatherings in cafés mock the matador’s talent that led to the animal’s escape in the first place. Someone suddenly says out loud, without malice: the animals are restless because the beast is still here. The next day, the word on the street is that two children have disappeared. A day later they are three. On the seventeenth the victims of the creature from hell are up to nine.

It is unclear whether Moisès Corvo’s wife can’t stand her husband dyeing his grey because it leaves his hair looking like it’s covered in shoe polish or because it mucks up the bathroom sink and there’s no way to get it clean. It is he who can’t stand the sight of her, and he takes advantage of the moments of calm, when she goes down to buy some beans and chat with the girl at the grocer’s, to shave his moustache until it looks as if his lips have grown eyelashes, darken the mat of hair on his head and splash cologne in his crotch; he is on duty that night and plans to visit the new ladies in Portaferrissa. They say there are some
exotic ones who do things the local girls can’t even imagine. You’re such a romantic, Lord Byron, Malsano will say when he sees him. He sucks on a menthol and cocaine lozenge he bought at the pharmacy to cover his breath, which smells of tobacco and poor digestion, and he smiles at himself in the mirror.

When he arrives at the police station to say hello I’m here, see you tomorrow, he bumps into the guard at the door, who greets him with a resigned expression, tired of greeting everyone who’s been parading in and out all day long.

“Boss is here, Inspector.”

“Still?”

“He’s been here all afternoon.”

He swears under his breath, looks like today he’s going to have to lie low. He finds Malsano on the staircase. He receives him with a sour face.

“They told me that—”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s waiting for you.” And he sighs heavily with his hand on his stomach, folded over.

“You’re pale. Someone drain your blood?”

“No, this goddamn ulcer, it sees the holidays coming and starts setting up a manger scene.”

“What the hell is Millán doing here, at this time of the day?”

They go up the stairs and a press photographer lets them through, hidden among the tripod, the camera, the plates, the suitcase and the sweat from having to carry it all around.

“This morning he met with the city’s safety alderman and a group of dignitaries.”

“Dignitaries? What are you, a barrister now?”

“Shut up and listen. They want to put the kibosh on these rumours about the disappearances. And this afternoon they had
the newspapers come.”

“Oh, yeah, makes perfect sense to call in the journalists when you want to put an end to the rumours,” says Moisès Corvo sarcastically.

“Yes, I see you’re having a bad day.” He sucks his teeth. “Thing is they’ve been ordered to hush up any unsubstantiated news on the subject.”

“Are they going to do it?”

“They’d better.”

They reach the door to the office Barcelona’s chief of police keeps in that station, and they knock on the glass. Come in, and José Millán Astray is waiting for them, standing stock still behind his desk. Sit down. There is no please, not in the orders given by that man.

“Has Inspector Malsano brought you up to date?”

“Yes, sir. He says they’ve recovered the Mona Lisa that was stolen in Paris last summer.”

Millán Astray ignores the comment. If there were a firing squad in the office he would have given the order to shoot. He grits his teeth and continues:

“I want you to know that I have analysed the situation with City Hall and we have come to the conclusion that the stories about children being abducted in Barcelona, for the time being, are absolutely unfounded. There is no reason why the newspapers should report on them, nor why this police force should be investigating anything. We have much more important cases than the gossip of a few prostitutes. Our streets are filled with anarchists, for one thing.”

“Sir, pardon me, but it’s not just a—”

“There is nothing more to say, Inspector Corvo. Have there
been any reported kidnappings in recent months?”

“No, reported, no, because they are afraid of—”

“They? If there is no report, Inspector, there is no investigation. It’s a basic principle that I don’t think you should have trouble understanding. And if there is no investigation, there’s no case.”

“I know the case of one disappearance in particular, sir.”

“Children aren’t civilized like adults are. They play in the street, they get into things they shouldn’t, they’re always getting themselves hurt. There are youngsters who fall into wells and are never found again.”

“I understand what you mean, but…” Moisès Corvo can’t finish his sentence. The police chief wants to leave and is in no mood to listen to his reasoning.

“You shouldn’t understand anything: just obey. There is no bogeyman, so I suggest that from this moment on you forget all about it.”

“Yes, sir.” That’s what you have to say, according to Corvo, when you don’t agree but there’s nothing more to be done. Later, Corvo and Malsano discuss it while they make their rounds on horseback in the area around some of the city’s aldermen’s homes, as he’d sent them to do that night.

“That’s why people trust the municipals more,” reasons Corvo. “Maybe they don’t do any more than us, but at least they don’t have to play at being stupid bodyguards for politicians.”

“He who pays the piper calls the tunes. Stay out of it.”

“It annoys me to be a puppet.”

Malsano brings his left hand to his ears, eyes and mouth, and with the other tightens the reins to stop the horse. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

A cold, placid dawn breaks, the mist orangish around the
streetlights and rosy on the cobblestones. All that is heard is the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves and some distant muffled crying behind the panes of closed windows. Here and there, the light of a bakery, the policemen who stop in there and chat with the bakers. It’s still three hours until the workers get up and head to the factories, which—like giant beings—also sleep, stuffed with metal and hierarchy.

“I’m going to Montjuïc,” decides Moisès Corvo.

“What?”

“Come. Let’s go and see Mr Camil.”

“Are you crazy? Do you know what time it is?”

“Yes, a time no one will notice we’ve gone.”

He turns tail and gets his horse trotting. Malsano follows him, half-heartedly, sick of his partner acting on whim.

On the seaside slope of the mountain of Montjuïc, before reaching Morrot, there is a camp of gypsies under the protection of Mr Camil, the patriarch. It is made up of at least a dozen shacks located on different levels, united by paths chopped through the weeds with a scythe, around an esplanade where there are carriages and a permanent watchman sheltered by a few shoddily nailed-together walls and a bonfire that can be seen from the sea. There are even those who say that more than one sailor has confused Mr Camil’s gypsies’ fire with the entrance to the port and run aground. There are those who go further and claim Mr Camil’s gypsies can often be found selling the contents of the ship’s hold the next day.

Corvo and Malsano arrive there amid the silence, crickets and stars, and stop at the entrance. The former learnt to ride in Africa during the war and the latter in the uprisings at the turn of the century, sabre in hand. He’s always saying he’s one
of the policemen in the famous painting by Ramon Casas, but it’s always a lie.