Barcelona Shadows Read Online Free

dead, I want to go home and sleep.”
    Doctor Ortiz, moustache held high and satchel in his hand, is a man of few words. He crouches over the body and puts a little mirror in front of its mouth.
    “Maybe you’ll have more luck with the neck wound, doctor,” says Corvo, who gets no response.
    He checks the pulse, looks into the eyes and stands up.
    “Take him to the Clínic for me.”
    And having said that, he shakes the judge’s hand and heads off from whence he came. He can dispense with formalities. Don Fernando de Prat, Moisès and Malsano know him well enough. Just as they know each other. They’ve all met up many a night around a corpse. And so the judge decides that that’s enough for today and that tomorrow’s another day, God willing. The two detectives wait alone on the street for them to cart off the body, with no more company than a limping dog that groans and stops to lick the puddle of blood off the paving stones.
    At number twenty-nine Ponent Street, not far from where One Eye was found, Salvador Vaquer has only been in bed for a short while. He was in the study waiting for Enriqueta to come home. His eyelids were heavy. Then he got up and went to the room of little Angelina, who was sleeping. He locked it with a key and opened the door to a large closet, where Dorita’s daughter sat on a straw mattress. She was crying.
    “What’s wrong, pretty girl?” Salvador approached her and caressed her short, clumsily cut hair.
    “I’m scared,” she whimpered. “Why? You don’t have to be scared of anything.” Salvador
    slid his fingers down the little girl’s neck and then her chest. She’s four years old, at most.
    “I want my mummy…”
    “I’m here, sweetheart, I’m here.”
    Salvador now smells his fingers, which hold the girl’s scent. From the bed he hears keys at the door and the woman entering.A twinge makes him feel guilty, and despite the cold he starts to sweat. He pricks up his ear, like a hunting hound, and he imagines her going first through the dining room, then the kitchen and finally the large closet, where she stops. Silence.
    Enriqueta opens the door to the bedroom and Salvador pretends to be sleeping. She undresses in the dark and gets into bed. She embraces him from behind. Salvador bites his lips when she lays her cold fingers on his ribs. She breathes deeply and lets out a whistle from between her teeth that makes him think of a snake. The woman bites his ear and then runs her tongue along the nape of his neck, while her hand slithers down his pubic bone until it catches its prey. He turns and kisses her: her mouth is hot and salty.
    Like blood.

2
    G REASE SLIDES ALONG THE TILES. The sink is stopped up. The brazier’s embers trace shadows that sway to and fro in a spectral shivering. These are the few signs of life, as misleading as they may be, of the morgue at the Hospital Clínic. On one of the tables lies the sewn-up body of One Eye, white and rigid, with contusions on its back, arms and legs. Less dead than the decapitated body that rests on the table beside it, judging by its smell. They found the corpse very early, floating in the port, beneath a mountain of seagulls. In fact, they wouldn’t have even noticed it if it weren’t for the din of the big birds screeching and fighting for a piece of rotten meat in front of the statue of Columbus with its outstretched finger. Doctor Ortiz believes that the discoverer of the Americas was pointing out the dead chunk, as if asking them to get it out of there. Now the doctor taps the floor with his feet, first the right, then the left, to drive out the cockroaches that smell a banquet.
    “Have you started the party without us?” bellows Moisès after coming down the spiral staircase that leads to the autopsy room. “I hope I won’t have to dance with the ugliest girl…”
    And he looks at the headless body. Doctor Ortiz furrows his brows and shakes his hand. He does the same with Juan, who comes down behind