Black Sun Rising

by Mathew Carr

  He gripped the wooden banister with one hand and held up his lighter as a flashlight with the other, before backing his way down the stairs. Even as he descended, the cold air seemed to move up his legs, and he tried to dispel the thoughts of skulls, madmen, and things that slithered in the dark. As soon as he reached the dirt floor he saw the hooded white robes hanging on hooks from the wall by the stairs. There were five of them altogether, all emblazoned with the same wide-pointed red cross.

  Lawton thought of all the photographs he had seen of Foulkes, and tried to imagine why the stern Victorian scholar with the white sideburns would want to keep such garments in his basement. He was even more surprised to see the same black sun that he had seen at the Edén Concert theater painted on the far wall. As he came closer he saw a row of candles and sticks of incense on a table just beneath it, and a little silver chalice that appeared to be stained with wine or dried blood. The incense sticks explained the sweet smell, but nothing else made any sense at all, and he was conscious of a chill in the air that was only partly due to the basement itself.

  All this was unsettling and disturbing, and he hurriedly climbed the stairs and shut the door behind him with a little sigh of relief. In the same moment he thought he heard a movement outside the house. He paused in the doorway of the living room, but there was no other sound except for the birds outside and the flies buzzing in the kitchen. Even as he stepped back into the living room, he saw the raised arm in the open window and the fizzing black ball came rolling across the floor toward him. He jumped back into the hallway and slammed the door behind him as the bomb hit the tiles and skittered across the floor.

  The explosion blew the door to pieces, and chunks of plaster dropped from the wall and ceiling onto his head as he lay stretched out in the hallway. As he picked himself up the dust and smoke were pouring into the hallway and his ears were humming as though an engine had become stuck inside his head. Even through the shock he knew he could not stay where he was. He gripped the banister and pulled himself to his feet. Everything in the living room was broken or burning, and the room was so full of smoke and flames that he could barely make out the window. He could smell paraffin and burning paper, and the smoke made him cough as he stumbled toward the window.

  He was about halfway across the floor when he tripped over one of Foulkes’s skulls and fell flat on his face. He writhed away from it in disgust and lurched to his feet once again. The smoke was so thick now that it was difficult to breathe as he pressed himself against the wall and looked out into the yard. During the war he had been bombed and shot at many times, but he had never been attacked in an enclosed space without a weapon and he had never felt so exposed and helpless. He was wondering if his attacker was out there waiting, when he heard a shot from the direction of the road. His lungs were burning now, as he skirted round the rising flames and hurled himself through the open window. He fell out into the yard and scrambled to his feet, crouching and zigzagging to avoid any waiting shooter.

  He continued running, crouching and zigzagging to avoid any waiting shooter, and continued running back down toward the road. He was about halfway down the track when he heard the baaing up ahead and he saw a flock of sheep swirling around in front of him. As he drew nearer the animals scattered into the forest, to reveal the body of a man lying on his back, with his cap by his head and a shepherd’s staff lying by his outstretched hand. Lawton looked down at the bloody stain on his chest, and then he heard the engine splutter into life. By the time he reached the road the motorcar had vanished, but even as he continued to follow the fading motor back down into Vernet-les-Bains, he knew that it was on its way back to Barcelona.

  16

  Gentlemen, it cannot be denied that there are forces intent on reducing our city to chaos and ruin.” Civil Governor Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo looked at the assembled journalists, who were sitting in front of him with their pens and notebooks poised. “They are using these disturbances to further their aims, but you can rest assured that they will not succeed. Those who break the law will feel the full weight of the law.”

  Ossorio was a big man in his late thirties, whose balding head and dark sober suit made him look older. His size and his girth had made him an object of mockery among both anarchists and republicans, but Mata knew him as an intelligent and thoughtful conservative, who had struggled during his two years in office to reform the Barcelona police and bring the rule of law to a city that was too often indifferent to it. Mata had met him on a number of occasions, both socially and professionally, and it was partly because of these personal contacts that the Veu was the only Catalan newspaper invited to a select gathering of the usual conservative journalists who could be relied upon to disseminate the government’s views. Despite his attempts to project confidence, Mata thought the civil governor looked under pressure, and he asked him whether he would declare martial law in the event of a general strike.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Ossorio replied firmly, “because there will be no strike.”

  Mata pointed out that the socialists in Madrid had called for a national strike, and the workers’ organizations in Barcelona seemed likely to follow suit.

  “Madrid is not my concern,” Ossorio said. “But there will be no strike in this city. Law, order, and common sense will prevail. That is all gentlemen.”

  Ossorio ignored the barrage of questions that followed, and his secretary ushered the journalists from his office. Despite the civil governor’s serenity, Mata did not feel reassured. In the last few days he had seen the Fat Man openly mocked in the street when he went out with his officials. On two occasions he had observed the police firing warning shots at crowds protesting against the war. It was only a matter of time before someone was wounded or killed. Even though Ossorio had banned public meetings in an attempt to defuse the situation, Radicals, anarchists, and socialists continued to address smaller gatherings on street corners and public squares, where they denounced the war and talked of strikes, revolution, and setting fire to convents and churches.

  All this was alarming enough, and the mood in the workers’ districts had become more belligerent and more openly seditious as a result of the stream of rumors and bad news coming from Morocco. It was said that the soldiers lacked food and ammunition; that the reservists had been attacked by Rif tribesmen almost as soon as they had landed at Melilla; that Maura was about to announce a full mobilization of the army and issue a declaration of war. In this febrile atmosphere Hermenegildo Cortéz’s woman Angela Romeu—the same woman he had spoken to little more than a week ago—had been found floating in the harbor, next to one of the troop ships.

  Once again the newspapers were inflaming the population with wild and fantastic rumors that had no basis in fact. One newspaper claimed that the Raval Monster had been seen prowling the docks dressed as a priest in search of prostitutes; another described him climbing buildings in the Raval like a giant ape. Such pernicious drivel might sell newspapers, but Mata had no doubt that Romeu had been killed because she had spoken to him, and that knowledge felt far more alarming than any of the fantasies circulating in the press. He left Ossorio’s offices and walked down the Ramblas, past the police, Civil Guards, and Somaten, who had been deployed up and down the thoroughfare in even larger numbers than usual. Mata knew they were intended to reinforce Ossorio’s message of order and control, but he could not help finding the presence of so many armed men intimidating and depressing, as he walked on to keep his appointment with Quintana. Cities that worked well did not need to be protected in this way, and the murder of Angela Romeu was further proof that his city was not working well at all.

  It was less than twenty-four hours since he had watched the longshoremen fish the prostitute’s naked body out of the harbor, and he was not looking forward to seeing her again as he turned into the Calle Hospital and continued into the medical school. He had arranged with Quintana to take photographs of the murdered woman, and he went directly to the autopsy room, where one of the orde
rlies went to fetch Quintana. A moment later he emerged wearing his bloody surgical clothes and holding a knife in his hand, like an Aztec priest returning from a sacrifice.

  “Bernat,” he said. “I’m glad you came. I’ve got something interesting to show you.”

  Mata followed him gloomily to one of the slabs, where Quintana drew back the sheet covering the body of Angela Romeu.

  Mata took the usual photographs of her head and shoulders, and then Quintana pulled the sheet down further. Mata lowered the camera and stared with pity and disgust at the cavity that reached down from her neck to her ribs where Quintana or one of his colleagues had opened her up, and the bites and wounds that he had already seen.

  “Have a look at this.” Quintana held up the dead woman’s left arm with one hand. Mata leaned forward, as the pathologist prised apart a small cut in the vein just below her elbow.

  “I don’t understand,” Mata said.

  “It’s not a bite or a wound!” Quintana looked as excited as Mata had ever seen him. “It’s an incision. Made with a surgical instrument. Exactly where you would expect to find a tube for a phlebotomy.”

  “A what?”

  “A blood transfusion. This is where the blood would go in. Or out.”

  “You mean her blood was drained through a tube?”

  “That’s what it looks like. And she’s not the only one.” Quintana walked along the row of corpses and drew back another sheet to reveal Ignasi the cretin. Once again Mata photographed his face, before Quintana drew back the sheet and showed him the same incision on his left arm.

  “You see?” he said. “The same thing. And that made me think about these blue marks and the rash. That suggests a haemolytic reaction. When you mix two incompatible blood types.”

  “You mean he had someone else’s blood put into him?” Mata stared at him in confusion.

  “Exactly. But it was the wrong kind. We found traces of blood type A and AB—according to Landsteiner’s classification. That would have caused agglutination. It may even be that that’s what killed him.”

  “Before these wounds were made, you mean?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And the other victims?” Mata asked. “Hermenigildo and Tosets? Did they have these incisions?”

  Quintana shrugged. “I didn’t see them. The bodies were too badly mauled. Anyway they’re both buried now.”

  “You’ve told Bravo Portillo about this?”

  “I did,” Quintana said. “He didn’t seem to think it was significant. He still thinks a madman did this. And maybe he’s right. Only it’s not the kind of madman we thought it was.”

  “But what about these other wounds? You said yourself they were bites or claw marks.”

  “They are.” Quintana frowned. “And I don’t understand it. It’s as if these victims were attacked by two different people—assuming that whatever made these marks is human.”

  “What else could it be?”

  Quintana shrugged. “It’s clearly some kind of animal. But a phlebotomy requires science. I don’t know why anyone would perform such procedures, but I can tell you this: Bravo Portillo is completely out of his depth here. And who can blame him? These aren’t the kind of murders we’re used to. This is something for your Irishman.”

  “I don’t know where he is. I went to his hotel. The receptionist says he’s out of the city.”

  “He’s not gone back to London?”

  “I don’t see why he would. But I hope he comes back soon.”

  Mata left his friend still poring over the murdered woman’s body and went back out onto the street and returned to his office to write up Ossorio’s conference. It was nearly dark by the time he set off home, and as he walked back to his house he had the feeling that the city of his childhood and youth was changing into something darker and more sinister than he had imagined possible. He thought fondly of the Barcelona of his youth and childhood: the city of the World Exposition, of Verdaguer’s ode, of dragons, devils, and human towers; the city of painters, poets, and builders of dream palaces; the Paris of the Mediterranean and the capital of the future independent republic of Catalonia.

  Now he imagined Barcelona as Sodom and Gomorrah or Pompei; as a patient on its deathbed, slowly rotting away from a disease that had not yet been named, that could be seen only in its external symptoms. He arrived back at his flat and shut the great wooden door behind him with a feeling of gratitude and relief. The children were being put to bed, and Sylvia asked him to read Carles a story. Mata sat by his son’s bed and told him from memory the tale of the wolf who tried to eat the seven children. His father had once read him the same story, and Carles listened with the same fearful satisfaction that he had once felt as he described how the wolf was cut open and filled with stones.

  “Do they have wolves in Barcelona, papa?” he asked.

  “Definitely not.” Mata leaned forward and kissed his son on the forehead, as an image flitted through his mind of Angela Romeu lying on the autopsy table. In the same moment he thought of Lieutenant Ugarte sitting down for supper with his wife and children in his new flat, and wondered once again why Ugarte had not followed up on the information the murdered woman had given him.

  “Is everything alright?” His wife’s voice broke into his thoughts and he looked up to see her smiling at him sympathetically.

  “Yes, fine,” he said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  He gave her a wan smile, and tried to concentrate as his wife talked about the preparations for their forthcoming exodus to Puigcerdà. Like his son, there were things that it was better for her not to know about, and the way things were going the sooner they were out of the city the better. But for the time being he had other things on his mind. After supper he withdrew into his study. He had thought he might write a poem to lift his mind to a better place, but even as he stared at the blank paper with his favorite fountain pen, the fine verses refused to come. Instead he found himself thinking of the hairy anarchist beast depicted by the cartoonist from El Universo, leaping across the rooftops of the Raval with an unconscious woman under his arm. The woman had a sash around her with the word ORDER written on it, and the ape-like creature had a copy of Solidaridad Obrera protruding from a trouser pocket. Such caricatures were only to be expected from a Catholic newspaper, but the Radical Party papers had their own variants. El Progreso’s latest showed a young woman strapped to a bed frame surrounded by vampiric nuns, while a Jesuit with bloodstained hands stood watching approvingly.

  The newspapers seemed only too willing to pander to the prejudices of their readers, and present them with monsters of their own invention. Meanwhile poor women died like dogs and their murderers sat down to eat supper with their families on a government salary and no one even cared enough about the victims to uncover the truth. The more he stared at the blank paper, the more intolerable it seemed that such a situation could be allowed to continue. Because poetry was all very well, but poetry without justice was like burning incense in a sewer. For much of his adult life the verses of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Verdaguer, and Maragall had moved and inspired him, but none of them could help him now. It was less than a year since Joan Rull had been garrotted, taking his secrets with him, and once again his city was being manipulated by puppeteers pulling invisible strings.

  Mata did not know who or what the Raval Monster was, but he was certain it was not what the papers or the police said it was. Someone was lying, and their lies needed to be exposed. What Barcelona needed right now was not poetry, but a voice like Zola’s—an angry, passionate voice that denounced lies and corruption and upheld the cause of truth, just as Zola had once denounced the false charges against Dreyfus and the men who had manufactured the evidence against him. Unlike Zola, he could not name names, because he did not have enough evidence against Ugarte or anyone else. But he could point out the flaws and inconsistencies in the official investigation, and try to generate enough of a scanda
l to force the public and the authorities to do something about it. The more he contemplated this possibility, the more he felt his desolation recede.

  In the end, no matter how bad or how hopeless things seemed, writers could do nothing else but write, even if they told people things they did not want to hear. That was what the Frenchman had done, and even though he might not be Zola, he had his own accusations to make. By the time he sat down at his desk and picked up his pen, the sentences were already beginning to form in his mind, and the more his hand moved across the white page, the more he felt hopeful that his prose might shake his city out of its delirium, just as it was sometimes necessary to shake or even slap someone who had become hysterical.

  * * *

  On Friday morning, Esperanza Claramunt was walking past the School of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on her way to work, when she found the caretaker trying to erase the word monsters from the school’s main entrance, while some of the nuns stood watching gloomily. She had seen similar slogans scrawled on convents and churches in Gràcia and other parts of the city throughout the week. She had heard the stories circulating in the newspapers and on the street that priests and nuns were kidnapping children and young women and torturing them in underground torture chambers, and she had heard some of her own pupils repeat these stories.

  Even if she had never known Pau or witnessed his kidnapping, she would not have taken such stories seriously. Now their stupidity and absurdity made her angry, and she could not help feeling that these rumors were being deliberately manufactured for purposes that were not yet clear, as she continued on toward her own school for what she knew might be her last day of work before the general strike. The following day delegates from all over Catalonia were coming to the city to attend the meeting of the workingmen’s federation, where they would vote on whether to call a strike in response to Maura’s war.