Barcelona Shadows Read Online Free PDF

his soft fingers.
    “How long have you lived here?” Corvo continues his questioning.
    “Can you tell me what happened?” The doctor approaches the exit.
    “Did you not understand me?” responds Corvo.
    “Two years, not quite. I’m Austrian.”
    “And what brought you here?” Malsano is getting tired. He opens a drawer. No bodkins, no fangs. It doesn’t look like the doctor dresses up as a vampire for his evening walks.
    “Friends?” ridicules Corvo.
    “I am a doctor. You’ve already seen that on the card.”
    “An Austrian doctor. You wouldn’t be one of those psychoanalysts who are everywhere these days, would you?”
    “No, no. Those are a gang of illusionists who think they’re practising science when they chalk everything up to fucking. I am a phrenologist, of the positivist school.”
    “Aha, Lombroso,” says Moisès. “I know some of his theories on anarchy.” He doesn’t add that he read them at the printing press where his brother works, flipping through
Criminal Man
to kill time and because the title amused him.
    “Will you tell me what happened? Is he dead?” Doctor von Baumgarten takes the lead.
    “Why do you ask that?”
    “Because if he weren’t, I don’t suppose the police would be waking me up at this hour of the night.”
    “We came to bring you a glass of warm milk, so you can have sweet dreams,” growls Corvo. “But you must not be very thirsty. What’s the name of the boy who comes with One Eye?”
    “I only know his nickname. He always called him Blackmouth.”
    “You see, how it’s all coming back to you?… Where can I find him?”
    “It was always One Eye who came to see me.”
    “We would have liked to invite him, but he had a small problem of… how would you say it… death.”
    Now I would be smiling. I liked Moisès Corvo, with his sense of humour that was so dark, so dear to me.
    “Gentlemen, it is late and I can’t be of any more help to you. Please forgive me, but I am going back to bed.”
    Moisès Corvo slaps on his hat and buttons his coat. That was enough for the first round, but this bloke knows more than he’s saying, we’ll meet again.
    “Farewell, Inspectors…”
    “Corvo and Malsano,” answers Juan on their way out of the door.
    They walk towards Ferran Street, where there is more foot traffic. It’s the weekend, and sailors hungry for nightlife have left their boats docked in the port.
    Let’s go to the Napoleón, says Moisès Corvo out loud. The cinema on the Rambla Santa Mònica, closed hours ago, is the roof under which Sebastián, the projectionist, sleeps as well asworks. When the screenings are over and the audience has gone home or to bed (which aren’t always the same place), he opens the doors of the booth to the policeman and lets him in. They chat while he puts on one of those Italian movies that are all the rage now, he brings him up to date on the latest gossip which, in the long run, is often significant, and they smoke like chimneys until the projection moves from the screen to the wall of smoke they’ve created in the seating area. Sebastián has known the inspector since the war, they were in the same levy, and a few years back he found peace at the Napoleón. It was Corvo who arrested him at the start of the century when he stole, from a train in the North Station, a shipment of paintings that had been forged in Belgium, and it was also Corvo who found him the job at the cinema when he got out of prison. No grudges held, you do your job and when you nabbed me it was nothing personal. Now Sebastián, with his blue eyes, hooked nose and two daughters he hardly ever sees, has mellowed but he still lusts mightily after women. And that makes Moisès, womanizer that he is, feel comfortable.
    Today both the inspectors will go and wake him up, put on a film and sit to chat for a while. It is starting to be time for the wall of secrets closing in on them to be hammered down.
    They can’t even begin to imagine the horror