Barcelona Shadows Read Free Page A

least, is seen through Watson and Watson’s got a constant crafty streak, even though Holmes is a bully and treats him like shit. Ma’am, out of the way, goddamnit, do you know how late it is?” he scolds. “Dupin is a some sort of crime-solving machine who’s never set foot on the street. I’d like to see him out in the real world, off the page, where all the murderers aren’t stupid monkeys.”
    “There must be one that you like…”
    “Lestrade. I like Lestrade. A Scotland Yard detective who does his job even though Holmes insists on humiliating him.”
    “Moisès, you read too much.”
    “And you talk too much, Juan… for God’s sake!”
    They reach the cordon made up of two policemen. They can make out the body, or at least its shape, beneath a blood-soaked sheet. The female spectators just cry and grumble disjointed sentences, as if they really cared about the poor wretch laid out there. A cutpurse slips into the unguarded pockets of the few men present who are consoling the women, hugging them close, feeling their breasts heaving against them. Moisès smacks his hand and the pickpocket scurries off like a mouse. One of the municipal policemen, when he sees them arriving, asks the crowd to move aside, but they don’t pay him much mind. He gets tough, furrowing his brow, and finally manages to clear a small path with a couple of threats.
    “Asensi, fuck, what happened?” asks Moisès.
    “You’re asking me? What do you think? One Eye, who must’ve been waiting for folk to come out of the opera and didn’t know that today he’d be the star of his own show.”
    “How’d it happen?” Moisès moves closer, and Juan lifts up the sheet, which sticks to the victim’s body for a few seconds.
    “We don’t know. No one saw anything until they found him like this, all sloppy.”
    “So no one’s been arrested.”
    “You don’t miss a beat.”
    Moisès shoots him a look and Officer Asensi understands that he’s used up today’s quota of familiarity. The body is in a puddle of blood, twisted, its hands stiff as claws, with one eye staring at the sky and the other, the empty socket, stuck in hell. He looks like a white cockroach.
    Moisès approaches and squats beside Juan, but he’s distracted. All he can hear are the comments of the ring of people, who seem even more excited by his arrival. You fear me, but I’m your favourite spectacle: when I show up, you can’t look away.
    They always come when the evil’s been done, he hears a slender woman say.
    “Isn’t it too early for this stiffness?” asks Juan.
    Moisès touches One Eye’s cold fingers, which now have as much life in them as a banister. His face is out of joint and pale as a candle, his mouth a grotesque grimace. He bled to death, thinks Moisès, but he doesn’t see any wound. His neck is stained with blood, and in the darkness it looks like tar.
    “It’s the panic. His death was so sudden that the panic paralysed him.” He rolls up his sleeves, revealing his forearms. “He has no defensive injuries, but from the position of the body it seems the killer was standing right in front of him.”
    “He wasn’t expecting it. But how did he bleed to death?”
    A monster, hears Moisès. The rumour grows around him.
    “Asensi, get all this riff-raff out of here, fuck, they don’t belong at the scene.”
    Asensi does as he’s told, but the people basically ignore him. Fascinated, they retreat a few feet and come right back when Asensi’s gaze returns to the dead body. Moisès grabs a handkerchief and cleans the blood off its neck until he finds what he was looking for. A ripped-off piece of flesh, with the skin flapping over it. Moisès sticks his right-hand index finger into the wound, confirming for Malsano, once again, that sometimes Corvo is crazy.
    “Right at the jugular. However it was done, this attack was direct and brutal.”
    The buzz on the street grows. He’s white! They drained all his blood!
    “But this isn’t a knife