Barcelona Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Sometimeshe 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