Barcelona Shadows (20 page)

“Jocs Florals, I don’t remember the house number. The owner is named Ferran Agudín.”

January ends gradually, without news. It’s as if the previous year didn’t let the monster through, thinks Malsano. Every investigation leads them to a dead end. Two weeks ago they were watching over the homes of the three men that Golem and Babyface
gave them. Two of them lead apparently normal lives, married, with stable jobs where they spend most of their time. The third, Salvador Vaquer, they haven’t even seen. He hasn’t come near his flat on Muntaner Street. They give up their vigilance there, day in day out, on the corner—he might even be dead and they just don’t know it. Maybe he moved to another city. They don’t know that Salvador lives at number twenty-nine Ponent Street, but he doesn’t want to give up his old flat because he fears Enriqueta could kick him out of the house at any point.

On Jocs Florals Street, Ferran Agudín is beating a rug when he sees them arrive. Calling that rubbish depository a workshop is generous.

“Good day,” he greets them, and at first glance it’s clear he is a man without secrets.

“Mr Agudín?”

“That’s me.” He stops thrashing the rug and wrinkles his nose beneath thick glasses, curious. He wears a handkerchief tied on his head, covered in sweat, and a short-sleeved shirt open to the navel.

The policemen are all buttoned up, a freezing wind is blowing, despite a splendid day with a crackling sun.

“Mr León Domènech told us that you provide him with the raw materials for his unguents and pomades.”

Ferran Agudín puts down the beater on a small table completely covered with tools and scrap iron, and it falls to the floor. He doesn’t bother to pick it up.

“That’s not exactly true.”

“No?” Malsano acts surprised.

“No. I make the mixtures for him. He practically has them all finished when he brings them to me.”

“The mixtures,” repeats Corvo.

“Yes. Surely he’s explained the story of the Frenchwoman to you, right? He goes on about that, the poor wretch. If I went blind, I’d cling to my memories too, obviously. But I’ve known him for some time now and that woman must be dead and buried, eh, but he keeps polishing that damn memory of his.”

“You say that you make the mixtures for him,” insists Moisès Corvo.

“Yes, the ones he asks me for. A few things here and again, cod-liver-oil capsules, or shark, unguents of pork fat with fungi— home-made remedies for small ailments.”

“Where do you get the material to make them?”

“Here and there. I’m a rag-and-bone man. Today you were lucky to find me here, because I’m often going about the city, stopping at the markets, looking in the rubbish, I have contacts—” The man stops short. “Are you police?” Corvo and Malsano nod. “I have no problem with the police. I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t steal, everything I have I’m given or pay a good price for.”

“Don’t worry,” Malsano assures him. This search is turning out to be entirely frustrating. The investigation path suggested by von Baumgarten seems as if it has to die out at any moment.

“We’re particularly interested in where you get the tallows,” interjects Moisès Corvo.

“Ah, the tallows. They used to give them to me in the Boqueria market, but the municipals cracked down and said there were no hygiene measures and… well, you can imagine. They wanted me to pay for them so City Hall would pocket their part in taxes, and they were just leaving them for me on the street.”

“And do you pay for them now?”

“Yes. But I get a very good price, honestly. A married couple
who do slaughtering in town bring them for me every once in a while. He is a very lively chap, very sharp, a nice bloke. But if you talk to her, you’ll see she’s harder to swallow than old bread without cheese.”

“Do you know their names?”

Ferran Agudín thinks hard.

“Not hers. She’s never told me. He’s named Joan, but I don’t know his last name.”

“And where are they from?”

The rag man searches in drawers, pulls out papers, makes a mess of the mess.

“Wait, I have it written down here, with the address and everything. Joan, you see, yes, he’s named Joan, Joan Pujaló, forty-nine Ponent Street.”

A
LL STORIES COME TO AN END,
and the end of this one is approaching. It’s never a full stop, but rather the abrupt break chosen by the narrator. The surrounding world keeps on spinning, more or less influenced by the events told, always moved forward by reality’s momentum. But in our story the time has come, even though it doesn’t seem like it because it’s been some days since the city turned its back on the rumours of disappeared children and focused on something it knows how to do better: sterile political gatherings, eagerly following the incipient King’s Cup that Barcelona Football Club is taking seriously, or robbing the drunk foreign sailors on the streets of the Marina district. Barcelona is as quick to love as it is to forget, as quick to hate as it is to fall asleep, and what’s today an insurmountable fear will tomorrow crumble like a lump of damp sugar amid the newspaper pages.

Reality isn’t very given to narrative climaxes. Fiction does that much better, as it’s usually more structured and prepared for easy digestion. I could be accused of manipulating events at whim, I won’t deny it, but I wanted to be precise with the strange dissolution of the events surrounding the end of Enriqueta Martí.

Moisès Corvo—cross, with his left hand useless and no work to keep him occupied—stops pestering the enclaves where he
believes the monster sells the children to focus on the line opened by Doctor von Baumgarten. There are different worlds in the city, classes so separate they don’t touch, borders impossible to cross without suffering the consequences. He dreams that he is shot again, and he wakes up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat. If he can, he stays confined to his flat, all alone. He had his wife go stay with his brother and nephew, because he doesn’t want them to get hurt or be used against him. He looks out of the window onto the street before leaving the house, and he never takes the same route twice. He makes sure no one is following him every two paces. He is reminded of those nights in Morocco, when he waited for an attack that never came. The silence of the desert, comparable now with the silence of the city’s leaders. The clear sky, filled with reeling stars, that died abruptly over the white sand, almost sparkling beneath the moonlight. Nights of watch around embers, warming the scorpions that climbed into their rucksacks, conversations interrupted by the whistling wind, by a strange noise, the Moors always on the horizon like a ghost, like a monster, like the threat that muddies the policeman’s mind now, in silent Barcelona.

The neighbours of Joan Pujaló say they see him often, but almost never at home. He is a carefree man, very extravagant and reserved at the same time, and they never know what to make of him. Corvo and Malsano haven’t found him in his flat or in his studio, and when asking for him all they got in return was pulled faces and closed doors. It’s not Joan I’m afraid of, it’s her. Her? They say she was his wife, but they’re never been seen holding hands. What’s her name? We don’t know, and we don’t want to know.

Saturday, late January, they kill a pig and break out the wine, preparing a big party around the slaughter. In the city there are buildings with interior courtyards where they bleed the pig and slit it open, and shortly after there’ll be nice cuts of meat and sausages. The police are at the door of Joan Pujaló’s flat, but they don’t know that he is twenty numbers further down, alone with Angelina.

“Thank goodness I don’t have children,” says Moisès Corvo.

“How’s your wife handling it?” Malsano tries the doorknob: it’s weak and will give in with the first blow.

“She’s anxious. Poor thing cries all day.”

“You gave me a good scare, Cervantes. When they told us you’d been taken to hospital, that they’d shot you, goddamn.”

“It’s starting to be a tradition. I thought I was done for.”

“Was there an angel taking you to the other side?”

“No. No angel or lights or heavenly court. Just an implacable darkness, and the absence of pain. It’s strange that it didn’t hurt, since my arm was torn to shreds.”

“Then dying’s not worth it, Corvo. Don’t get in the habit of it.”

“Tell that to her,” and he pats his revolver.

“I thought they’d taken it away from you.”

“And they did. But this one is mine. And now I have a special affection for it.”

“What is it?”

“A hammerless.” He struggles to pronounce it elegantly, like the owner of the gunsmith’s had.

“It looks pretty new.”

“I hope it stays that way.”

“Was it dear?”

“A hundred and twenty-five pesetas… I came into some money after the shooting…”

Malsano smiles, and smoothes his moustache. They both pull out their revolvers.

“OK, shall we go inside?”

Moisès Corvo kicks in the door and enters the darkness of the flat. It is narrow and dark and not a soul is heard, but you can’t trust that. They go through the vestibule and check that the kitchen and the two rooms are empty, until they reach the dining room, which opens onto an interior courtyard where there is a shack with the toilet. Moisès Corvo approaches and opens the door. It’s also empty.

“This is too clean,” he says out loud, so his partner can hear him.

“And too tidy, except for a couple of dirty dishes in the sink.”

The neighbours lean out of their windows to see them, curious. Moisès Corvo feels their eyes like needles on his nape, but he is pretty used to it.

“A married couple doesn’t live here.”

“Did the rag man lie to us?”

“No, I don’t think so. But only a single man lives here, and only every so often. Look at it all, this isn’t somewhere somebody lives day in day out.”

“You think it’s a hidey-hole?”

“I don’t know. But it gives me a bad feeling.”

The sound of footsteps on the stairs alerts the policemen. The door is ajar. They lift their revolvers and aim at whoever is pushing it open, slowly.

“If you’re looking for Joan,” says the thin voice of an old woman when she comes in, and suddenly sees the weapons, “—ay, don’t point those things at me.”

They lower their guard.

“Who are you?” asks Corvo.

“The owner of the building, Emília Bernaus, at your service. I was saying that if you’re looking for Joan, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“He doesn’t live here?”

“He doesn’t come here much, only when he wants to sell some of his paintings, or make a racket and get drunk, and the municipals have to come and give him a warning.”

“And where does he normally live?”

“I don’t think he lives far, because I see him on the street very often. Who I don’t see as much is his little girl, poor thing, they’ve always got her locked away.”

The woman doesn’t know that Pujaló is often a few metres down, in the flat that Enriqueta has on the same street. But nor does she know that he could just as well be there as sleeping in a tavern, or whiling away the hours in a brothel. Joan Pujaló is a slouch who spends his time wherever he’s likely to find fewer headaches. But Malsano is focused on her comment about the little girl.

“They’ve got her?”

“The woman he’s separated from and he have a little girl. Maybe I’ve seen her twice in a handful of years. She must be with her.”

“And she lives close by?”

“I already told you I don’t know where they are.”

“Do you live in the building?” asks Malsano.

“Yes.”

“Look, do us a favour. Can you let me know, at the Conde del Asalto police station, the day that Mr Pujaló shows up at the flat?”

Emília thinks it over, running her fingers through her grey moustache.

“But I don’t walk fast. By the time I let you know he might already be gone.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m Inspector Malsano. Ask for me.”

“Inspector Malsano. And your partner?”

“I’ll come along with him, don’t worry,” stresses Corvo.

“Inspector Malsano,” and she tries to inscribe the name inside a dried-up brain where not much fits any more.

Doctor von Baumgarten is as nervous as a little lad. He badly wants to find his specimen, which he has been searching for for so long and which is now so close at hand, but he fears the policemen won’t allow him to study him as he would like. He fears that they will arrest him, take him to the clink, and that his specimen will rot there before he can get a chance to examine him. He would like to get ahead of the inspectors, but he doesn’t have enough information to find him, nor enough courage to face up to him. Now he contemplates the leather case opened on the table, with tools unbefitting for a doctor, and he wonders if he’ll also be able to study the monster once he’s dead. He imagines killing him and dissecting him, finding the secret mechanism that leads a human being to behave like a beast. He yearns for scientific recognition after years of making do with clandestine autopsies, stolen cadavers and erroneous conclusions. Blackmouth has offered to bring him more bodies, but he refused. He is too focused on the vampire of Barcelona to keep wasting his time. In front of him, carefully organized on the case, are saws, dissection knives and scalpels, but also a crucifix and a stake. Isaac von Baumgarten believes that he is more than a doctor: he believes himself to be an envoy, a chosen one, a vampire hunter. And the flash of the silver beneath the oil lamp muddles his brain, he buys into his own fantasies and laughs like a madman, like the
man they locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Linz for twenty years. When he got out he had to go into exile and create his own delusional world to survive and he ended up in Barcelona. Isaac von Baumgarten, the phrenologist who isn’t one, the fake doctor who was a patient; the man who will kill the monster because he hates himself.

Joan Pujaló jumps when he hears the door slam. He is in Enriqueta’s flat, on twenty-nine Ponent Street.

“Who is it?”

“What are you doing here?” It’s Enriqueta’s voice, very hoarse, from the darkness.

“I’m taking care of the girl.”

The painter has spent some days in his ex-wife’s house, basically because she has enough food in the pantry so he doesn’t have to buy any out of his own pocket. He’s spent the idle time playing cards with Salvador Vaquer. Even though they can’t stand the sight of each other, they’re too lazy to express it. Vaquer doesn’t leave the house much, although he did just go down to the winery to buy alcohol, because he’s still scared and hurting from the beating Shadow gave him.

“Get out of here,” she orders, and Pujaló grabs his jacket and his tobacco and he leaves, without even asking how are you, what have you been doing, or anything. He sees she’s not in the mood.

Enriqueta heads to Angelina’s room and turns on the light. The girl is curled up in a corner, her hair shoddily cut, skinny and pale, her lips dry. Mama, she whines, Mama.

“Ay, girl.” She is acting, poorly, without any emotion in her voice. “Are these men not treating you well?…”

Mama.

Angelina feels Enriqueta’s frozen embrace like a mauling. The woman sniffs her hair and runs the tip of her tongue over her soft, tender neck and then kisses her on the cheeks.

“You haven’t eaten anything.”

The girl shakes her head. She eats what she can find when she’s hungry, but only when Salvador isn’t around. She doesn’t like Salvador, among other reasons because when she eats he sits her on his lap and kisses her all over, and the girl can’t stand it. Joan just gives her sweets. Angelina has been locked in her room for most of the day and night.

“Mama will bring you food.”

Enriqueta Martí is tired of fighting with her father, and she left Sant Feliu. She thinks enough time has already passed since Shadow threatened her, and she’s been needing to recoup her strength for a few days now. She has to feed again, she is growing weaker with each passing day and at this rate she’ll waste away in the blink of an eye. She believes her blood is thickening in her veins and not flowing. She has to replace it with some that’s fresher, younger.

And she has to do it right away.

When Joan Pujaló walks the fifty metres of Ponent Street separating his flat from hers, he passes by Emília Bernaus and says good evening, and she wastes no time in heading to the police station, where she asks for Inspector Malsano.

The policeman runs out, no need to let Moisès know because Pujaló might have disappeared before he even gets there. In less than twenty minutes he is knocking on the painter’s door.

“Who is it?”

“Police, open up.”

There is a silence of waiting, and Juan Malsano has the feeling that all of this is looking awfully bad. Finally the door opens and Pujaló receives him, clearly disconcerted.

“Is there a problem?”

“No, I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes, yes, of course. For the police, whatever you need.”

“May I come in?”

Whatever you need, he says, but now he hesitates about allowing him in or not. Pujaló covers it up very badly.

“Come on in…”

They both sit in the dining room, the oil lamps creating quivering shadows on the walls. Malsano listens carefully but doesn’t hear any noises in the flat. They are alone.

“Are you Joan Pujaló?”

“Yes.”

“Married?”

“Separated.”

“What is your wife’s name?” Malsano opens his notebook and pulls out a pencil.

“Enriqueta Martí Ripollès.” His voice trembles; he trusts the policeman didn’t notice. He stands up.

“Where are you going?”

“To light the brazier. I just came in and the flat is very cold.”

“Where were you?”

“Around.”

“In Barcelona or away?”

“Has something happened?”

“No, we have some information we want to confirm.”

“I’ll confirm whatever you like, Officer…”

“Inspector.”

“Inspector. But you’re worrying me.”

“I already told you that there’s nothing to worry about. Sit, sit, please, don’t stand up.”

“I’ve been in Cervera, these days after Christmas, I have family there.”

“Your parents?”

“No, they’re dead. Cousins.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Ah!”—this is a good subject for bragging—“I’m a painter. I have my studio here below, if you’d like I can show you some of my work. I’m quite good, and I’m successful, I can’t complain. Now I’m finishing up a portrait of Mr Lerroux that—”