you can shake a stick at. Let’s see.” He opens up the notebook and brings his index finger to his lips. “…Where’d I leave the pencil? Oh, yeah. A stabbing between neighbours on Flassaders Street, but that’s all tied up; a hanging on Comtal Street, a crazy woman who tried to scald the baby of a level-crossing keeper by the Model, a—”
“Wait, stop. What was that about a baby?”
“Nothing. From what they told me, some old lady went barmy, argued with a friend of hers and threw the girl into the soup pot.”
“Did they arrest her?”
“No, she ran off, and the mother isn’t up for much explaining. They pumped her full of Agua del Carmen to control her hysterics.”
“And the aggressor… do they know her identity?”
“It’s not your kidnapping monster, Moisès. It’s some crackpot who went too far.”
“We should go and check it out.”
“No way. It’s not our district, and we have commitments, whether you like them or not.”
“If we don’t have the freedom to investigate, then tell me what we’re doing here at all.”
“Hierarchy. Every ship’s got a captain. And if there are no reports of children disappearing it’s because they’re not just vanishing into thin air.”
“Where there’s smoke…”
Juan Malsano has the statement from the gunmen in his hands, and he shows it as if it were the ten tablets of the law.
“A bird in the hand…”
Moisès Corvo furrows his brow, fed up with the proverb contest, frustrated because time and again the higher-ups are clipping his wings: office bureaucrats, the closest they’ve got to working the streets is stooping to wipe horseshit off the soles of their loafers.
“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” asks Malsano in the following days, when Moisès Corvo goes to schools and stands around in front of their doors, waiting for a hairy ogre to show up and head back to his cave with one of the more trusting students in his mouth, for his next meal.
But the children always come out shouting, running, playing and beating on each other, happy to be free after an exhausting day of numbers and letters and endless lists of dead people, of dates that seem so far away and that smell of mothballs that’s in every hall of every school. Their mothers take them by the hand, look both ways before crossing, Tomaset, and there are a few who look at the policeman suspiciously and talk to the caretaker and say who is that bloke, and the caretaker warns the municipal policeman who’s having a coffee with brandy in a café near theschool and shows up with his truncheon at the ready to mess up the strange guy ogling children on their way home. The detective pulls out his ID, half hidden under his jacket, so the circle of spying mothers about fifteen metres away doesn’t see it. He asks a few questions, all very vague, so as not to cause alarm, because then the municipal will chat with the women and we’ll have a kerfuffle on our hands. Every answer is either no or I don’t think so.
“Forget about it. So two girls got lost. That’s always happened, but you know how whores are: they spend their days crying and drinking, when they’re not taking drugs.” Malsano is the practical type, never going beyond the call of duty, working just the necessary, no more, no less. He doesn’t understand how Corvo, his partner, can waste his time off duty trying to resolve this stupid matter that has no reliable basis. “They must have been sold to some perverted kid-fucker.”
And thus Malsano achieves the opposite effect he was hoping for with his advice, and Corvo suggests that they go and look for Bernat the next day.
In a two-storey building on Tapioles Street, an old haberdashery that could fall down at any moment, hidden behind scaffolding abandoned God knows how long ago, lives Bernat Argensó, sixty years old, bearded and bald, scrawny, with very long, filthy fingernails and sulphur breath.
Moisès and Malsano come in at midnight, after
“Wait, stop. What was that about a baby?”
“Nothing. From what they told me, some old lady went barmy, argued with a friend of hers and threw the girl into the soup pot.”
“Did they arrest her?”
“No, she ran off, and the mother isn’t up for much explaining. They pumped her full of Agua del Carmen to control her hysterics.”
“And the aggressor… do they know her identity?”
“It’s not your kidnapping monster, Moisès. It’s some crackpot who went too far.”
“We should go and check it out.”
“No way. It’s not our district, and we have commitments, whether you like them or not.”
“If we don’t have the freedom to investigate, then tell me what we’re doing here at all.”
“Hierarchy. Every ship’s got a captain. And if there are no reports of children disappearing it’s because they’re not just vanishing into thin air.”
“Where there’s smoke…”
Juan Malsano has the statement from the gunmen in his hands, and he shows it as if it were the ten tablets of the law.
“A bird in the hand…”
Moisès Corvo furrows his brow, fed up with the proverb contest, frustrated because time and again the higher-ups are clipping his wings: office bureaucrats, the closest they’ve got to working the streets is stooping to wipe horseshit off the soles of their loafers.
“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” asks Malsano in the following days, when Moisès Corvo goes to schools and stands around in front of their doors, waiting for a hairy ogre to show up and head back to his cave with one of the more trusting students in his mouth, for his next meal.
But the children always come out shouting, running, playing and beating on each other, happy to be free after an exhausting day of numbers and letters and endless lists of dead people, of dates that seem so far away and that smell of mothballs that’s in every hall of every school. Their mothers take them by the hand, look both ways before crossing, Tomaset, and there are a few who look at the policeman suspiciously and talk to the caretaker and say who is that bloke, and the caretaker warns the municipal policeman who’s having a coffee with brandy in a café near theschool and shows up with his truncheon at the ready to mess up the strange guy ogling children on their way home. The detective pulls out his ID, half hidden under his jacket, so the circle of spying mothers about fifteen metres away doesn’t see it. He asks a few questions, all very vague, so as not to cause alarm, because then the municipal will chat with the women and we’ll have a kerfuffle on our hands. Every answer is either no or I don’t think so.
“Forget about it. So two girls got lost. That’s always happened, but you know how whores are: they spend their days crying and drinking, when they’re not taking drugs.” Malsano is the practical type, never going beyond the call of duty, working just the necessary, no more, no less. He doesn’t understand how Corvo, his partner, can waste his time off duty trying to resolve this stupid matter that has no reliable basis. “They must have been sold to some perverted kid-fucker.”
And thus Malsano achieves the opposite effect he was hoping for with his advice, and Corvo suggests that they go and look for Bernat the next day.
In a two-storey building on Tapioles Street, an old haberdashery that could fall down at any moment, hidden behind scaffolding abandoned God knows how long ago, lives Bernat Argensó, sixty years old, bearded and bald, scrawny, with very long, filthy fingernails and sulphur breath.
Moisès and Malsano come in at midnight, after
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