Black Sun Rising

by Mathew Carr

  Had it not been his father-in-law, Mata might have replied that a country with Spain’s record would do better not to fight another war that it could not win, and that a few Rif tribesmen were not the most challenging test of national mettle. Fortunately there was no need to say anything, as Sylvia and his mother-in-law came back onto the terrace with the maid, who was carrying a tray of coffee. With the arrival of the women the conversation turned from politics to Puigcerdà, where Sylvia, the children, and his in-laws were due to depart at the end of July. Mata managed to get through the rest of the afternoon without any further provocations from his father-in-law, and afterward he and Sylvia walked down the road to catch the funicular railway at Vallvidrera Superior.

  Sylvia had arranged for the children to stay with their grandparents for two days, and as they sat down on the train, she moved closer to him and let her hand brush playfully across his thigh. Mata felt aroused and also anxious as the train crawled slowly down the hill. Because even though he loved his wife and took pride in the fact that a woman ten years younger had wanted to marry him, there were times when Sylvia was more passionate than he felt able to be, and he worried that she might look elsewhere.

  These thoughts soon faded as she playfully sat on his lap and kissed him while they rode the taxi home from the Peu del Funicular, the way they used to during their courtship. As soon as they got home she took his hand and led him to the bedroom, and he untied her hair and unbuttoned her dress before slipping into bed in the dark so that she could not see his paunch. They made love slowly and luxuriantly in the cool dark room, and afterward she laid her head on his chest and he ran his fingers through her lustrous hair and told himself that he was luckier than any man had a right to be.

  “You know that policeman you went to see last week,” she said suddenly. “The one in Montjuïc?”

  “Ugarte?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s moving to a new apartment in the Calle Bailén.”

  “You’re well-informed.”

  “Mother mentioned it. She knows his wife through the Catholic Women’s Association. They’re moving next week. One hundred square metres.”

  Mata got up to make himself some coffee, while his wife turned over to sleep. As he waited for the water to boil he went out into the gallery and stood in the shadows, looking over the interior courtyard, watching his neighbors come and go. Once again he thought of Esperanza Claramunt’s accusatory expression. He knew the real reason why it bothered him: there were simply too many details about the murder of Pau Tosets and the Luna Bar terrorist that made no sense. How had Tosets’s kidnappers known when and where to find him? How could a lowly police officer afford a one-hundred-square-meter apartment in the Calle Bailén? Why had the Social Brigade taken over the investigation of the body at the swimming club?

  These were questions that Bravo Portillo should have been asking, and if he was not going to ask them, Mata realized gloomily that he might have to ask them himself.

  * * *

  “Hello Ignasi.”

  Ignasi looked up at the stranger standing over him in a white suit and fedora hat who seemed to know his name. He was sitting in his usual spot near the Hotel Oriente, with his wooden toy ship on wheels and the cardboard sign begging alms for the love of God. At first he was not sure whether the stranger was talking to him, as he stared up at the black moustache, the silver-handled cane, but then he saw the bag of sugarcoated jellies in his hand, and he took one and gobbled it down.

  “Would you like an ice cream?” the stranger asked.

  “Cram,” Ignasi repeated.

  “Ice cream, that’s right.” The stranger smiled indulgently. “Come with me. I’ll buy you one.”

  Ignasi scrunched his face up now, because even though he really did want to eat ice cream, he knew that he was not supposed to leave his spot until his mother or one of his brothers and sisters came to fetch him.

  “Don’t worry,” the stranger said soothingly. “You can bring your money with you. We’ll give it to your mother when we come back.”

  Ignasi had not eaten since breakfast and he looked up at the stranger in the dazzling white suit and hat who knew his mother. He obediently gathered up his tin of coins, his cardboard sign and his ship, and hobbled down toward the port alongside his new friend. A few minutes later the two of them were walking alongside the port, and he was holding a cone with a scoop of chocolate ice cream, while the stranger held his ship for him.

  “Shall we walk?” the stranger suggested.

  Ignasi nuzzled the ice cream as they walked toward the customs house, past the sails, cranes, and ropes and the giant ship beyond the entrance to the harbor, with its guns and funnels. Soon the ice cream began to drip onto his trousers and wooden clogs.

  “You need new clothes,” the stranger said. “Do you know I have another suit, just like this one?”

  Ignasi looked at the stranger’s suit. It was as white as the Virgin of Mercy’s skirts or the snow-topped mountains in the postcards and magazines along the Ramblas. He tried to imagine himself wearing a suit just like it, and smiled at the thought of his mother’s face when she came to pick him up.

  “Suit,” he said.

  “That’s right,” the stranger said. “You can have it. Come and try it on. It’s in my palace. Have you ever been to a palace?”

  Ignasi shook his head. He did not know what a palace was and he had never been away from the Ramblas without his mother or a member of his family. Somewhere in the distance he thought he heard a voice telling him to go back there, but it was so faint that he could hardly hear it or recognize whose voice it was. His new friend was still smiling at him expectantly, and now Ignasi was smiling too as he walked away to continue what was already turning out to be the very best day he had ever known in his life.

  8

  On leaving the medical school Lawton walked to the post office and sent a telegram to Mrs. Foulkes announcing that he had confirmed the identity of her husband. Afterward he ate lunch in a café on the Ramblas and withdrew to his hotel to look through the suitcase and the sealed bag the vice-consul had given him. Foulkes’s case contained nothing that he would not expect to find among the possessions of a gentleman summering abroad. There was a three-piece evening suit, a starched high-collared shirt and black bow-tie, brown polished brogues, and a pair of opera glasses. Lawton also found socks, underwear, and pyjamas, a washbag, American Express traveler’s checks, a large wallet filled with pesetas and francs, and a well-thumbed copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The sealed bag contained the remnants of the clothes Foulkes had been wearing on the day of his death, in addition to a smaller partly burned wallet and the charred Baedeker.

  In his two years peering through the bedrooms of adulterers and bigamists, Lawton had learned to look for evidence of marital transgressions in everyday objects, and he carefully inspected each article of clothing and each object with a magnifying glass. There were no hairs, stains, lipstick traces, or aromas that might have indicated female company. In the early evening he went out to eat. He did not want to go far or stay out for long, and he found a table in the terrace at the Café Suizo, just on the corner of the Plaza Reial. Despite the grim tasks he had performed that day, he could not help feeling pleased with what he had achieved, as he watched the people walking up and down the Ramblas and ate another meal at Mrs. Foulkes’s expense without having to worry how much he was spending.

  Now that he felt like a detective again, he realized how much he had missed being one. He knew that the search for Foulkes’s female companion was likely to be more complicated in a foreign country than it would have been in London, but even in Barcelona there were standard procedures that every detective was obliged to follow, and he looked forward to working his way through them the next morning. That night the square was quieter than it had been the previous day, but the image of Foulkes’s blackened corpse continued to flit through his mind for some time before he finally fell asleep. At some point in the
night he dreamed that a great bird had flown into the square. In his dream he heard the flutter of wings outside the half-open shutters, and then he looked up and saw a dark shadow in the window.

  It was not until the figure came closer that he saw the dark-haired woman standing by the bed, looking down at him with a smile. She was completely naked and her gleaming wet hair smelled of seaweed and covered much of her face as she straddled him and pressed her hands against his chest. He made no attempt to resist her or question her presence, as her hair tickled his face and he felt the soft weight of her breasts against his chest. For a moment he thought she was going to kiss him, then he felt the sharp points of her teeth in his neck and her legs turned to coils that slithered underneath and around him.

  It was only then, as his ribs began to crack and he felt his blood draining out of him, that he knew he had fallen into the fatal embrace of the peuchen. He tried to get out from under her, but he had no strength and no voice and he knew that his lifeblood was draining out of him. The dream was still fresh in his mind when he woke up the next morning. As he got dressed, he wondered why the strange and ridiculous superstitions that had once frightened him as a child should still find their way into his adult dreams.

  Now, with the window open and daylight streaming into the room, the absurdity of these fantasies seemed obvious. Yet all he had to do was fall asleep and the old monsters from his childhood invaded his dreams. Perhaps it was the stories that adults told that kept them there. The peuchen was not that different from the vampire-women in Dracula, after all. And yet it seemed to him that some part of his mind had never changed at all, and that all the creatures that had once tormented him were still waiting somewhere beneath the surface. Perhaps someone cleverer than he understood why the mind behaved like that, but he had no explanation for these unwanted intrusions, any more than he understood why his memory continued to retain so many other things that it was more sensible to forget.

  * * *

  He put these thoughts behind him and went down to the square to eat breakfast. Afterward he asked Señor Martínez where he could find the Bank of Sabadell, and the receptionist directed him to an office on the Ramblas. Lawton walked around the corner and asked to speak to the branch manager. Shortly afterward a dour, neat little man came out from behind the counter and introduced himself as Señor Tressols. He ushered Lawton into his office, where Lawton explained that he was carrying out an investigation into a payment for £500 that had been withdrawn on the 18th of June. The manager listened politely as Lawton showed him a photograph of Foulkes and handed him the letter from Mrs. Foulkes asking for his cooperation.

  “What kind of cooperation?” Tressols asked.

  “Mrs. Foulkes would like to know the identity and the address of her husband’s payee—a Marie Babineaux.”

  “May I ask why Mrs. Foulkes is making this request?”

  “Mrs. Foulkes is not familiar with the payee,” Lawton explained. “She’s concerned that this payment may have been the result of deception.”

  “And why doesn’t Dr. Foulkes make the inquiry himself?”

  “Dr. Foulkes was killed in a terrorist bomb last month, right here in your city.”

  “At the Bar la Luna?” Señor Tressols looked genuinely pained. “Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr. Lawton. But we don’t reveal details about our clients. If Mrs. Foulkes has these concerns, she should refer them to the police—not to a private investigator.”

  “My employer doesn’t want the police involved at this stage,” Lawton persisted. “She hopes that the matter can be resolved by some discreet inquiries. If I could speak to your client, it would be easy to clear up the matter. I assume she must have an account here—to transfer such a large sum.”

  “As I’ve said, we aren’t at liberty to reveal the details of our clients. Not without a formal request from the police.”

  “Mrs. Foulkes is willing to pay whatever fee may be required,” Lawton said.

  Tressols’s sympathetic expression abruptly disappeared, and he looked embarrassed and faintly indignant now. “I’m not sure what you’ve heard about our Spanish bank practices, Señor Lawton, but here in Catalonia I can tell you there is no fee to pay, and you cannot have those details.”

  “Well could I at least see the check—to make sure the signature is genuine?”

  “The check has gone to central office. But I can assure you it is genuine.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  The ghost of a smile flitted briefly across the bank manager’s dour countenance. “Because Dr. Foulkes was with our client when she handed it in.”

  “Well may I ask what this client looked like?”

  “No you may not.”

  Lesseps stood up to indicate that the conversation was over. The day had not begun well, Lawton thought. He had intended to go straight to Foulkes’s hotel. On reaching the top of the Ramblas however, he was surprised to find that the Bar la Luna had reopened, and he took a seat at one of the outside tables. A chubby little waiter in a bow tie and white apron came over toward him, and he ordered a coffee.

  “I’m surprised to find you open,” he said. “After what happened last month.”

  The waiter shook his head sadly. “A terrible incident, Señor. Had I not gone inside to take an order I would not be here today. There are those who say we shouldn’t have reopened so quickly. But a man must eat. And Barcelona does not surrender to terrorism.”

  “Good for you,” Lawton said. “I understand a foreign gentleman was killed that day. Do you know where was he sitting?”

  “Right over there!” The waiter pointed at an empty table just behind him. “And the spawn of the devil who killed him was sitting in the table next to him!”

  “Was the señor sitting by himself?” Lawton asked.

  The little waiter shook his head. “There was a woman with him. A very lucky woman—she left just before the bomb went off. I thought she must be his daughter—or something else. But she acted more like his mother.”

  “In what way?”

  “He didn’t speak. She did. When I asked the gentleman what he wanted, she was the one who replied. And she paid the bill, too.”

  “Maybe he didn’t speak Spanish?”

  “But he didn’t speak at all. He just sat there reading his book. I thought if I was in his position I would be looking at the woman not the book. The señorita spoke Spanish. Not as good as yours. Her accent was stronger.”

  “Did you recognize it?”

  The waiter looked blank. “No idea.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Very pretty. Blond hair. She was wearing a green dress and matching hat with flowers in it. And one of those little lace veils that French women like—the ones that come down just over their eyes. You’re not from the international press, are you?”

  “I’m a friend of the deceased.”

  “My condolences, Señor. And I hope that when you return to your country you will let people know there is more to Barcelona than bombs and madmen.”

  “Madmen?” Lawton stared back at the waiter and remembered his peculiar dream.

  “The Raval Monster.” The waiter crossed himself. “A murderer who drinks the blood of his victims. You haven’t heard of him?”

  Lawton shook his head, and he listened with some surprise as the waiter told him that a young man had been found murdered in the Raval and drained of every drop of blood. “What is the Raval?” he asked.

  “Down there.” The waiter nodded gloomily toward the port. “The lower part of the Ramblas. I would stay away from there if I were you, Señor. These are the bajos fondos—the lower depths. Not a place for tourists even in the best of times. But now…”

  Lawton lit a cigarette as the waiter went to fetch his order. It was certainly a coincidence that the waiter should tell him about this vampire-murderer only the morning after he had dreamed about the peuchen, but it was not something worth dwelling on. He was more interested in why Randolph Fo
ulkes had allowed a woman to pay for him when he had his wallet in his pocket. Even at a time when women were becoming more confident and forceful by the day, that was not how a gentleman was supposed to behave, or indeed any man. At first sight, the question of what Foulkes might have been doing with a woman less than half his age was not difficult to answer. But if Foulkes had come to Barcelona for an assignation then he did not appear to have been in a romantic or chivalrous mood that morning. Perhaps they had had an argument, or perhaps he was bored.

  It was also possible that their relationship was an entirely business transaction. But men who paid for prostitutes did not usually parade them in public, even in foreign cities where they were not likely to be recognized. Was this companion the same woman who had cashed Foulkes’s check? And why had she left him alone just before he was killed? Was she merely lucky, as the waiter suggested, or was something more than luck involved? Lawton smoked a cigarette and pondered these questions before setting off across the Plaza Catalunya toward Foulkes’s hotel. From the grand façade it was obvious that the Hotel de Inglaterra catered to a better class of visitor than Señor Martínez’s establishment, and the décor and the well-heeled clientele drifting through the lobby confirmed this impression. Lawton had already decided to take a different approach to the one he had used at the bank, and he told the receptionist he had been sent by Scotland Yard in London to investigate the disappearance of one of the hotel’s guests.