Barcelona Shadows (19 page)

An inseparable pair who work robbery cases in almost every district of Barcelona, Golem and Babyface have been a team for many years. Golem’s nickname is because he is big and imposing, like the mud homunculus of Jewish tradition Gustav Meyrink
captured in his novel. With small eyes and a considerable nose, Golem doesn’t talk much but always says enough. Babyface barely needs describing. Malsano gave him that name the first day he laid eyes on him. Unlike his partner, he is much more expansive, chatty, and he likes to brag about all the robbers he’s sent to the clink. And he’s got reason to brag.

Moisès Corvo made sure that no one knows about this clandestine meeting at the police station. If Millán Astray, or Buenaventura, or some bigmouth found out, he’d be done for. Rest is a euphemism for don’t show your face around here for a while.

“Do you have anything useful or have you just been playing around the whole time?”

Golem pulls out the file, one of the most complete of the corps, and which few people know even exists. The records of the most common offenders and the most dangerous are well organized into five boxes, according to criminal methods and alphabetically. They are used by Golem and Babyface, and they usually end up being much more useful than the official archives, which are disorganized and filled with dampness and lost files. Doctor Oloriz, from Madrid, tried to introduce dactyloscopy into the police force, with prints from those arrested carefully classified, but it seems that Millán Astray isn’t up to the task.

“Juan gave us a quick overview of what you’re looking for, and we have a few candidates.” Babyface’s tone of voice is shrill and nasal.

“But don’t think we do this for just anybody,” laughs Golem sarcastically.

“Only when you’re sexually attracted to the person who asks you.” Corvo swats away a fly passing by his nose.

“Exactly.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“Ten men who walk with a limp, with priors for receiving stolen goods, robbery with use of force and fraud. All ten of them are jabberers, the kind who can’t stand not bragging about what they’ve done.”

“Not bad.”

“Wait, wait,” says Malsano, who’s got his eye on another fly, stopped beneath a lamp. “Crap bugs… Buenaventura had to bring in the goddamn clothes with rotten, decomposed flesh on them.”

“Also known as rancid mortis.”

“Listen: of these, there are three that have also been arrested for corruption of minors. Your typical model citizen, basically.”

Golem hands over the files, which have no photographs and are typed up on card stock, with handwritten annotations and additions regarding later arrests, aliases, consorts and all kinds of details.

Moisès Corvo reads out loud.

“Gerard Serrano, Albert Gené and Salvador Vaquer.”

One of my little friends lands on the back. Corvo smacks it hard, leaving the record stained with blood, the fly like an exploded sultana. I love these coincidences, but I take no part in them, believe me.

“We are looking for a vampire,” states Isaac von Baumgarten.

Malsano walks between the empty bunks of the doctor’s parlour, and he makes horns with his fingers to touch his head and ward off the evil eye. Corvo hides his hands with gloves, because he doesn’t want to give the Austrian doctor any more explanations than strictly necessary. He fears that, since he’s helping them,
soon he’ll start asking for things, like everybody does. Quid pro quo, as they say.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t bring any stakes, doctor.”

“I’ve been thinking it over, these days. We are looking for a vampire who doesn’t know he is one.”

“I don’t understand,” admits Corvo.

“Vampirism has existed for years. Stoker didn’t invent it, he’s more of an apostle. Perhaps that’s an unfortunate choice of words, but I say it that way so you’ll understand where I’m going with this. For centuries vampires have been persecuted and hunted around the world, but few have ever been studied, and when they have the conclusions have been strikingly similar.”

“Which are?…”

“One of the most famous cases on record is what’s called the vampire fever, on the border between Serbia and Romania, in the late eighteenth century. A good bunch of peasants and ranchers suffered all kinds of disorders, accompanied by nausea and fevers. At night, they went to the cemeteries and dug up the most recent cadavers to drink their blood. It was said that they had been bitten and infected by vampires, and fear spread through the region. It was so spectacular that a Hungarian doctor, Georg Tallar, showed up to study the phenomenon.”

“More or less like you here in Barcelona.”

Von Baumgarten blushes, and continues. “He examined them over months, long enough to reach some quite interesting deductions. The winter in that area is hard on the shepherds. They live in isolation on the mountainside and most of them only have contact with the rest of the community when they attend Mass. The Orthodox Church is quite strict, and imposes very severe fasts on the faithful. This lack of nourishment, along with the
conditions of cold and loneliness in the mountains, made them sick and gave them hallucinations, which would explain both the digging-up of cadavers and the consumption of blood.”

“There were no vampires.”

“Yes there were. They were, but they didn’t know it. Like in a vicious circle.”

“Then the man we are searching for is ill,” Malsano thinks out loud. “But here we don’t have extreme conditions like on the border between… where did you say it was?”

“Serbia and Romania.”

“Yes, that. We live in the West, and in a city full of people.”

“You’re forgetting that typhus, tuberculosis, syphilis and other illnesses still manage just fine in this city. I’m not saying that our man is ill. At least not in the sense of Doctor Tallar’s vampirism. I am saying that he is a predator who chooses his victims not only for their defencelessness, but also for the qualities of their blood.”

“The qualities?” asks Malsano as he fiddles with what looks like an operating saw.

“The blood of children is fresher and more vital than the tired blood of an older person. The older one gets, the more contaminated and diseased the blood. The younger and more innocent, the more healing properties it has, the more pure.”

“What attraction could this man have to drinking it? What led him to behave this way?”

“Blut is ein ganz besonderer Saft,”
recites von Baumgarten in German, and then he translates. “Blood is a very special juice. Mephistopheles says it to Faust, in Goethe’s play. For years, blood has been considered an almost magical element, the bearer of Good and Evil, as coveted as gold, or perhaps more. In the Middle Ages it was believed to cure nervous diseases and illnesses of the joints,
but it also contained the evils and that was why it was extracted in bleedings, which most times ended up weakening the patient to the point of killing him. Let’s return to Stoker and his Dracula. There is a passage in which Lucy is half dead from a vampire bite. But when she drinks her lover’s blood, she revives, she seems to recover.”

“Our man is a real hard drinker,” jokes Corvo, but he is actually very absorbed in the doctor’s explanation.

“Yes, but he also knows the mysteries of haematology. He is an expert in transforming the liquid into remedies. He takes life and gives it at the same time.”

“The vampire we’re looking for is a druggist?” asks Malsano.

“The vampire we are looking for is methodical, cold and manipulating. He can surround himself with people who do certain tasks for him so he remains unexposed. He has two faces: the inner one and the one he offers the world; the dirty one and the elegant one. And he not only lives off sucking blood, but he also sells it. The vampire we are looking for has to be a doctor, a quacksalver or a healer, although I’m leaning more towards this last option, because our vampire has contact with popular culture, surely. He isn’t a scientist, he comes at it from oral tradition.”

Little did Blackmouth imagine that, when he knocked on Doctor von Baumgarten’s door, he would find there the two policemen he’d duped with the story of the Negroes and One Eye. Since the lady hadn’t shown any signs of life recently, and he’s hungry, he went to visit the doctor who gave work to his consort, to see if he’d toss him a bone.

“Blackmouth.” Moisès Corvo acts as if he’s pleased, and the boy almost loses control of his sphincter. “You knew someone who made unguents and pomades and things like that, didn’t you?”

The next evening, Blackmouth leads them to the house of León Domènech, the blind guitar teacher who makes remedies for all sorts of ailments. When he’d run into the police, he hadn’t had any other way out. He won’t rat on the lady, and León is guilty enough to be charged with fraud and innocent enough not to be linked to Enriqueta’s activities. Von Baumgarten had asked to come along, but the inspectors had refused. The doctor isn’t a man of action. He breaks down, he gets nervous and he doesn’t know how to react in situations that are beyond him. But the vampire hunt, the fact of having him so close, almost in reach, is more powerful than any of his fears. He wants to move from study to praxis, from fruitless dissection to empirical application. He yearns to be face to face with one of these monsters he’s been pursuing for years.

The building number twenty-two on Lluna Street is tall and narrow like a ravine, with stairs too small for the policemen’s feet. Blackmouth takes the steps several at a time. Stop here, boy, we’re in no rush, reprimands Corvo. They are in the dark and the only light slips from beneath the doors to the flats. The stench of urine surrounds them.

León Domènech opens the door completely nude. Lad, is it you? And Blackmouth invites Corvo and Malsano in.

“I bring company, León.”

“The policemen.”

“Cover yourself up,” advises Corvo, curtly.

“Why? I like to air myself out.”

The flat is dark as a dungeon, and when León turns and goes back inside, they see that he knows it very well. Not a sound, not one bump into a chair. Blackmouth lights a couple of candles, which tinge the air with melancholy. The blind man sits in an
armchair, with his eyes closed as if he were sleeping, his legs spread and his arms at either side. If he isn’t the monster they’re looking for, he’s surely one the Brothers Grimm would have liked to meet, thinks Corvo.

“Mr Domènech. This is Inspector Corvo and I am Inspector Malsano.”

“The lad already told me you’d be coming. How can I help you?”

“You are a quacksalver, is that right?”

“Man, quacksalver is a very ugly word.”

“But that’s what you do.”

“It’s not my main activity. I don’t have any real profession. Usually I teach guitar classes.”

“Pardon me?”

León laughs in silence.

“The lad told you I’m blind.”

“Yes.” In unison.

“And you wonder how I can teach guitar.”

“Please,” Malsano invites him to explain.

“I haven’t always been this way, you know? As a young man I lived some years in Paris. I lived the good life there, those were some days. I was a real artiste. I was good with my hands”—he lifts them up, now soft with fallen skin—“I played the guitar, I sculpted, I painted, I fondled the loveliest women…”

“And you went blind from touching yourself so much,” says Moisès Corvo, and Malsano shoots him an admonishing look.

“I went blind from an accident. If it were an illness, believe me I would have cured it. It was in my workshop, I made wax figures for a living. A bucketful of hot wax fell into my face. It didn’t only leave me without eyes, but it also left me with this face like a mask.”

León Domènech has a white beard, thick in patches. Now he opens his eyes, colourless like two moons.

“And you became a quacksalver.”

“I don’t like that word. Natural remedies is much better. And no, it wasn’t immediate. Remember, I’m talking about a long time ago. Obviously, I gave up the arts. Not only were they good for nothing, but they were trying to kill me.”

Moisès Corvo looks at the naked man, a pathetic sight, and wonders if he is the vampire. It doesn’t seem like it, but you never know.

“Have you tried to cure yourself?” he questions.

“I already told you that it was an accident. There is no possible cure.”

“None at all.”

“None at all.”

“As strange as it might be.”

León Domènech is blind but not dumb.

“Are you insinuating that I’ve committed some crime, Inspector?”

“No, I’m not insinuating. I’m asking.”

“Well you can rest easy, because the answer is no. My fondness for natural remedies comes from a woman I met in Montauban, in the south of France. Have you been there?”

“No.”

“Well you should go. It has a square with arcades that’s magnificent. Obviously I felt it, I didn’t see it, but I know how to recognize beauty.”

“You said a woman taught you.”

“Who else? We men are simple apprentices of witchcraft. The ones who hold the mystery, who really keep nature’s secrets, are women. Confidentially, don’t ever trust a male healer if there’s
the option of a woman.” He laughs again, more for himself than his audience. “I’m shooting myself in the foot!”

“How do you make your remedies?”

“Oh, that I can’t tell you. It’s the secret house recipe.”

“We are policemen, Mr Domènech, not the competition,” Corvo reminds him.

“Yes. In fact, there are no big secrets. I remember the recipes of tallows, herbs and liquors that woman taught me.”

“And do you have many customers?” “A few. The ones I’ve always had. Neighbours who ask for home-made cures for flu and rheumatism.”

“No one else?”

“Sporadically, some traveller they send over from a couple of pensions where they know me.”

“And where do you get the raw material for your mixtures?”

“There is a rag shop in Hostafrancs that also manufactures tallows.”

“On what street?” Malsano would jot it down in his notebook if he could see anything.

Blackmouth remains standing through the entire conversation, in the shadows, nervous. If he were bold, he would kill the policemen right there.