Barcelona Shadows (6 page)

“Calm down, Dorita.” Corvo knows it’s useless to ask her to calm down, but he does it out of inertia. “When was this?”

“The 27th of November, what a dreadful day!”

“In the morning.”

“Near twelve, before lunch.”

“No one saw her leaving? The vegetable-sellers?”

“Ay, no, I tell you he’s a devil. He moves among the shadows and nobody can see him. He hides and waits and looks for children and, ay, ay, ay, I’m going to faint… when nobody’s looking he wraps his wings around them and takes them to his den. Ay, ay, ay…”

Dorita isn’t the harlot who lets you kiss her butt cheeks whom Corvo’s familiar with. Now she is a mature woman, with watery eyes, begging for the only person she loves in this world. And she truly believes that the girl is in hell. I know that that’s not the case, but close.

“I’ve never seen Clàudia.”

Dorita is silent, the reply seems obvious. You didn’t have any business with her.

“Do you have a portrait of her?”

Dorita leaps up, as if an inner spring were set off, and she runs towards the dining room. Corvo follows her along the hallway, a cluster of closed but attentive doors, of colleagues who don’t want to see the police out of fear, but don’t want to miss a single detail of the story. On a trunk there is a framed photograph of three girls dressed in their Sunday best. One of them, with a bow in her hair, stares at Corvo. Help me. The policeman has to look away.

“Can I hold on to it?”

Dorita is about to burst into tears. She grabs the frame and kisses the glass, leaving something more than damp lips there.

“She is still alive; I’m her mother and I know. But the devil wants to drag her into the darkness. At night I hear her scream, she says, Mama, Mama, come find me.”

Dorita hands the photograph to Corvo. He can’t believe it, but she still has enough energy to muster up a smile.

Outside, on the street the only devil is tuberculosis. Moisès Corvo walks to the Rambla along the labyrinth of streets that seem to be clearing their throats, unable to sleep. Outlines in the doorways betray indigents I will soon come looking for, spitting out spots of blood on the cobblestones. They’ve been dead for a while now, when they were forgotten by the last person who knew them. The model city doesn’t hide its detritus because, after all, it’s as if no one could see them. The policeman crosses the cemetery of the living and reaches the Plaça Reial, lit up by the outside tables of cafés where bohemians converse as if they were in Pigalle. Some stop their chatting when they see the detective pass with a pale
face and an undertaker’s expression, his back slightly curved, and they murmur, shit, isn’t that the king? When he is about to leave the square on Lleona Street, he changes his mind and enters the Aigua d’Or, a tavern run by Miquel Samsó. He orders a mug of the particularly bubbly house beer, which clambers up his palate to his nose. He wipes the foam from his moustache with his sleeve and asks Miquel if he knows Isaac von Baumgarten.

“If I know him, it’s by a different name, Inspector.” The owner is always behind the bar, night and day, wiping a glass with a rag that hangs over his back. It doesn’t matter if the place is empty: he is always washing a glass.

“More or less blond, almost a head shorter than me, with glasses and a foreign accent.”

“The doctor?”

Moisès Corvo smiles and takes another slug of beer.

“What do you know about him?”

“Not much.”

“Not even his name.”

“No, he’s a… strange bloke. I don’t see him much, but when I do, he’s usually alone, he has a couple of beers and he leaves.”

“He doesn’t talk?”

“He says: a beer, please.”

“And then he orders another one.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever think about becoming a policeman?”

Miquel touches his belly, which is like a football stuck to his body, about to burst through his apron.

“Man, it’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

“Maybe the lad will have a chance, if he inherits his father’s prowess.” Corvo points to his protruding gut.

Miquel furrows his brow.

The policeman is debating between just shutting up and directing his questions to the wine barrel that’s his table. Miquel Samsó suffered very bad migraines when his fifth child was born, with fevers and delirium. A quack trepanned his skull and amputated a part of his brain. He hasn’t had migraines since, but he hasn’t stopped wiping glasses. One after the other. I’ve taken his four children (Cuba and Morocco) and his wife (syphilis), and he hasn’t batted an eyelash, as if he were only around to make sure the glasses were as crystal-clear as his gaze.

“Have you ever seen him with anybody else?”

“No, he’s always alone.”

Moisès looks at the clientele. A drunk at each corner, like sentries. He won’t get anything more out of the Aigua d’Or.

“Where’s Margarida?”

The one daughter he has left. Corvo knows that, no matter what he says, it’s not going to register with Miquel.

“At home.”

“Tell her to wash the towels, this morning I almost scraped my balls off.”

“But…”

He stops polishing the glass, and Moisès leaves through the door, in time to hear an “I’ll let her know”.

He gets to Raurich and the doctor’s light is still on. When he opens the door, Corvo doesn’t find the nervous individual he spoke with a few days earlier. Doctor von Baumgarten has had time to work up an alibi, gather strength and wait for the policeman’s return.

“Good evening,” he greets him, as if it were perfectly normal to receive visitors at two in the morning. He has him come in and sit down, again in the vestibule. The doors are closed. “I read in
El Diluvio
that you’ve arrested the murderers of that poor wretch. That’s real diligence! I hope I was helpful in some small…”

“Shut up, please, you’re going to give me a headache.”

“What can I help you with?” he asks, annoyed.

Moisès Corvo stands up. He doesn’t like to threaten sitting down.

“I’ll let you lie to me, but no more than necessary.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have four questions for you. You can answer two of them with lies, but for the others you have to tell me the truth. If I catch you trying to trick me more than twice, I’ll arrest you and you’ll spend the next twenty years in the clink, as an accessory to murder. Those Negroes must be wanting some company, surely.”

Doctor von Baumgarten is dumbstruck, even though he doesn’t suspect that Corvo’s terrible at sniffing out lies.

“I have no reason to lie, Inspector.”

“Don’t start by wasting what advantage you have, please.”

The doctor is a card-carrying snake-oil salesman. With a tiny bit of preparation, he knows what to say to make his questioner happy. A full-blooded coward, he doesn’t usually look for confrontation, but he will end up sticking a knife in your back. He’s always got nice words, always with a yes on his lips, sharpening his blade as he speaks. But he needs time, and Corvo wants answers now.

“I’ll be honest.”

“What do you want the bodies for?”

“What bodies?”

Moisès Corvo raises his index finger. One.

“What is an Austrian doctor doing in Barcelona?”

“Oh, it’s a long story, Inspector,”—the doctor doesn’t know how to keep his eyes still.

“Invite me in and we’ll have a chat.”

“It’s very messy in my house.” He places himself in front of the small door.

“I’m a very understanding person.” Actually, Moisès is quick to lose his temper.

“I have Catalan blood. A little bit. My great-grandparents supported the Austrians in the war, and they went to Vienna with the emperor, where they started a new life. Now I’ve come back.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“But it’s not a lie, either.”

“If I had come here to play, Doctor von Baumgarten, I would have brought cards.”

“Great, I love blackjack.”

Doctor von Baumgarten doesn’t see the blow that closes his left eye coming.

“I think that you’re not very conscious of who you’re talking to.”

“No, I’m not very conscious, now.”

“Third question: do you have any family here?” He takes off his jacket and leaves it on a wicker chair.

“What do you mean?”

“I was trying to insinuate if anyone would miss you.”

“Uh, no…” OK, von Baumgarten doesn’t know where the next one is coming from, and that makes him nervous again.

“I’ll ask you the fourth question inside.”

Corvo gives the door a kick that makes the hinges jump. The wooden plank, weakened by dampness, bounces back and reveals a small, poorly lit parlour, with four bunks with dirty sheets, like the hostel on Cid Street, but without any indigents sleeping there.
Towards the back, a half-open curtain allows him to glimpse a single bed surrounded by books, and what look like plates with the day’s dinner. A mouse comes running out towards him and scrabbles into a hole in the wall. Moisès Corvo looks at von Baumgarten, is that a friend of yours?, and the doctor’s facial pigmentation reacts. His skin turns reddish, with the little blue veins quite prominent, and the blow to his eye turns a dismal shade of purple.

“You can’t do that! This is a private home.”

“Answer the fourth question!”

“I’m telling you everything you’re asking for!”

Moisès moves among the empty beds. The scent of boiled sweat pricks his nostrils. The smell of putrefaction, of spilt blood.

“What do you do with the bodies?”

“You already asked me that.”

The policeman pulls out handcuffs and opens them. He doesn’t make a big display of it, but he knows the effect they have on the Austrian.

“OK, OK, OK. I’ll tell you everything.”

Not far away, Blackmouth wanders. He isn’t used to thinking, he’s only used to lying, in a less sophisticated way than Doctor von Baumgarten but more convincing. He’s looking for a child for the woman. She asked him to bring her one, between ten and thirteen years old, older than usual, but it’s too late and there are no longer children on the street. With a lot of freckles, she had added, and big eyes. Blackmouth knows he won’t find any but he keeps looking, because the strumpet is watching him and can read his thoughts, and will do the same thing to him that she did
to One Eye. She is very convincing, and if she says she needs a child it has to be now, not in a day or two. What she wants it for, he doesn’t know, but the taste of blood comes back to his palate after each intake of freezing air, like a reminder, like a bow that ties him to her and which only she can undo. Blackmouth falls asleep on Corders Street, right beside the gallows I’ve visited so many times.

There are coincidences that are revealed to be the product of a hidden hand, of an evil stagehand, who’s always drunk and has a very unique sense of humour, who tugs on the pulleys like a madman until the play mixes together characters who otherwise would never have met. I have nothing to do with it, even though most times these coincidences end up affecting me. Don’t blame me, I’m usually just an observer, calm and patient, despite my reputation as an opportunist. There are no more universal secrets than the ones you already know. No one is so important that the universe conspires against them, nor will the gods intervene in their favour. Basically because there are no gods or anything at all, and things happen because they have to happen and that’s all. There’s no need to worry about it so much. Don’t do what Moisès does, thinking that the stagehand has placed strange Doctor von Baumgarten, a two-bit charlatan, before him to resolve the case he’s working on. He doesn’t even know what’s going on, and he already thinks he’s tying things together. The last thing he needed was for von Baumgarten to confess that he studies and hunts the most… extreme—that was the word he used—humans.

Isaac von Baumgarten explained that he has been studying the causes behind human behaviour for years. He’s not satisfied
with the Lombrosian theory of atavism. He wants to know where the true root of evil lies, and so he must do an exhaustive study of all types of bodies. He has to dissect them, he can’t do any experimenting while they are alive. He won’t fall into the same trap as the Italian master, who only studied Italian inmates without realizing that most of them came from the southern part of the country and therefore had a similar physiognomy. Doctor von Baumgarten wanted to study every race and in Europe there are few cities where they mix together. Barcelona has a port, and everyone here is passing through. And the dead don’t point fingers at anyone. I’ll go to Africa, he announces, convinced, because it seems that violence runs free there, and there are none of the social constraints of the West, all this religion and all this shit, as Corvo says. Von Baumgarten crosses himself and explains that along the way he has come across some real monsters.

“Monsters?”

“What surprises you about that?”

“You’re a doctor, a scientist. You shouldn’t believe in monsters.”

“I don’t believe in them, Inspector. I search for them and I study them. I try to find the difference between a regular human being and a beast.”

“The difference is some dig up bodies, open them up and rummage around in them.”

“That was a low blow. I need these bodies, and nobody’s going to miss them. What’s the harm in it?”

“Have you thought about the families they’ve left behind, who have to see the tomb of their father or their sister profaned?”

“Wouldn’t you want to go out on the street and know that the shoemaker you just said good morning to will one day kill five prostitutes? Surely if there was a way to know that and arrest him
before he could do anything, the families won’t care too much about profaned tombs. These are people who have enough problems eking out an existence every day without worrying about those they’ve left behind.”

“Do you know who Doctor Knox is?”

“Pardon?”

Moisès Corvo mentally jots down that he has to look around his house for the story
The Body Snatcher
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

“Do you like to read?”

“I don’t have much time, but I guess you could say I do.” The doctor is modest: he has read a lot, to an unhealthy degree. But not the Stevenson story about grave robbers.