by Mathew Carr
“Are your parents alive now?”
“My father disappeared years ago. Went off to sea and never came back. My mother—” Lawton hesitated. “Well, she’s no longer with us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Ah, it’s a long time ago. The rest of us live all over. Manchester. America. I don’t see ’em.”
“You don’t have a wife?”
Lawton thought of the widow Friedman, and spread the jam on the bare bread. “No,” he said.
“You don’t want one? Or you just haven’t found the right woman?”
“I’m not for marrying.”
Lawton was beginning to wish that they could change the subject when he noticed a framed photograph on the wall that he had not seen the previous evening. The picture had been taken in a street packed with people, and at the center of it a group of men wearing headscarves were standing on each other’s shoulders in a pyramid-like formation. All of them were wearing the same identical sashes and white shirts, and the point of the tower was occupied by a little boy, who was standing almost level with the third floor of the buildings on either side of him, and raising his arm toward the sky.
“What is that?” he asked.
“That, my friend, is a castell—a human tower. And that boy on top—that’s me.”
Lawton stood up to examine the picture more closely while Mata described the tradition that he had first seen as a child during visits to his grandfather’s house in the town of Vilanova. He explained how the castellers—the castle makers—were chosen according to their build, strength, and size, with the strongest on the ground, all the way up to the child known as the enxaneta, who climbed to the highest level and waved his arm in the air to show that he had reached it. All this was done with the help of the crowd, who provided additional support to the men in the tower to the sound of drums and horns.
“But why would you do such a thing?” Lawton asked.
“Why? To see how high we can reach! That picture was taken in the summer of 1865, and my grandfather arranged for me to be the enxaneta. I was so terrified I thought I’d wet myself. Then I realized that if I fell the people would catch me and I climbed up the tower like a monkey. That is something you never forget. Standing at the top of the castle, with my arm raised up to the sky, and all those hundreds of people looking up as if I was a little prince.” Mata patted his belly with his two large hands. “Look at me now. I would most definitely be in the pinya—the base—except I don’t have the strength. But next year I intend to take Carles to Vilanova so that he can be an enxaneta, too. Every boy should have memories like that, don’t you think?”
Lawton nodded. In that moment he remembered the first time he had knocked a man out, at the age of sixteen, how the referee had held up his arm while the spectators had cheered. It was the first time in his life he had found he could do something well, and he still liked to think about it whenever he needed to cheer himself up.
“Harry I have a question for you,” Mata said suddenly.
“What’s that?”
“Why did you leave the police force? You’d make a better inspector than Bravo Portillo.”
Lawton was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I have epilepsy.”
As soon as he pronounced the despised word he immediately regretted it. He never called his illness by its name to anyone except Dr. Morris, and now he felt as if he had stepped out from a hiding place with his hands up.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mata said.
Sympathy always made Lawton feel uncomfortable, and he tried to deflect it with a shrug. “I’m not too pleased about it either. My doctor says it might have been the boxing—though I didn’t have any symptoms back then. Or it might have been the war. I was nearly killed by a Boer shell once. Blew everyone in my trench to pieces. I was the only one left standing. Three months in the hospital. Still got a piece of metal in my head somewhere. Doctors said it was too dangerous to take it out. Another quarter inch it would have killed me. Lucky me—I thought. Of course you can’t be a copper in that condition.”
If Mata had noticed the anger he showed no sign of it. “But you are lucky. You’re still here aren’t you?” he said. “And if you hadn’t told me, I never would have suspected.”
“Well I hope you won’t go telling the world about it.”
“Of course not.”
Lawton could not think of the last time he had ever revealed anything of significance about himself to anyone, and he was surprised to find that it did not make him feel that bad. “The woman who was killed yesterday,” he said. “Where will they have taken her?”
“To the medical school, I presume. Why?”
“I’d like to speak to the pathologist who was with me when I identified Foulkes,” Lawton said. “He won’t be on strike, will he?”
“Quintana? Definitely not. We can go there after breakfast, if you like.”
“You have time?”
“There’s no newspaper today and I doubt there’ll be one tomorrow. I only have to go to the offices in the afternoon.”
“Good. Because I also want to see this Montero—the informer, if that’s what he is. Maybe Miss Claramunt can arrange it.”
“They’ll be harder to find today. They may not want to be found.”
“Also.” Lawton looked embarrassed now. “I was wondering if I could borrow some money. I need to pay my hotel and I’m assuming the banks will be closed.”
“Hombre, of course. But why don’t you stay here till the strike is over? The Ramblas is a battleground right now.”
In ordinary circumstances Lawton would have rejected this invitation, but Mata was so amiable and hospitable that it seemed churlish to refuse.
“I accept,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, Harry. I’d like to see London one day. Maybe you can take me to Baker Street. To see the house of Mr. Holmes.”
“It’ll be a pleasure,” Lawton said. “But Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist.”
“I know that,” Mata replied, with a grin. “But I’d still like to see where he lives.”
* * *
Half an hour later they left the building. Mata was wearing his fedora hat, light gray cloak and carrying a cane. Lawton wore the hat Mata had given him, with the revolver tucked into his trousers beneath his waistcoat. They passed a few women carrying baskets filled with loaves of bread, and the city seemed calm enough. No sooner had they turned the corner however, than he thought he could smell burning. There was no sign of a fire, and even though he felt no other symptoms he began to feel anxious as they walked along the Calle de las Cortes toward the Ramblas. On reaching the Plaza Catalunya he was almost relieved to see the column of black smoke rising up from the direction of the port. Further back to the west, another black trail rose up in the distance beyond the cathedral spire.
“What is that?” Lawton asked.
“Whatever it is, it can’t be good,” said Mata. “Something must have happened during the night.”
It soon became obvious that Mata was right. The Plaza Catalunya had become an army camp, and hundreds of soldiers and police were sitting or lying round the square, with their rifles beside them. At the top of the Ramblas, they passed a dozen Civil Guards in gray uniforms who looked equally exhausted and disheveled. Unlike the previous afternoon, the security forces made no attempt to turn them back, and a trickle of bicycles and carriages were moving up and down the roads on either side of the thoroughfare. The shops and kiosks were still closed, and Lawton saw crowds of people milling about, some of whom were clearly drunk and holding bottles in their hands. Others exuded a more purposeful defiance and Lawton was amazed to see men and even women openly carrying shotguns, rifles, and revolvers. There were no soldiers on the Ramblas now, and the few police and Civil Guards who remained looked nervous and unconfident. Whoever was in control of downtown Barcelona, it was not the government, and as Lawton looked beyond the crowds and the lines of plane trees toward the smoke-stained sky, he w
ondered if anyone was in control at all.
Mata kept shaking his head and sighing like a teacher observing unruly behavior in the playground as they made their way into the backstreets. A few minutes later they arrived at the Athenaeum where the strike committee had established its headquarters. Outside the main entrance groups of workers were engaged in agitated conversation and the atmosphere inside the building was equally febrile. As they pushed their way into the crowded reading room, Mata pointed out the socialist leader Fabras Riva and the other two members of the strike committee, who were sitting at one of the tables, looking at a map of the city. All around them men and women in white armbands were listening expectantly or shouting instructions to each other.
They had barely entered the room when an older man with a lined malarial face and a cloth cap came toward them, accompanied by two younger men, with pistols in their belts.
“Aren’t you Mata from La Veu?” the older man asked.
“I am,” Mata replied. “I’m looking for Ruben Montero.”
“He’s not here,” the old man said coldly.
“Are you from the Invincibles?” Mata asked.
“The bourgeois journalist comes looking for his story,” the anarchist said mockingly. “Would you like a quote, Mata? ‘The city belongs to us now. And we will never accept Maura’s war.’ How’s that?”
“Excellent,” Mata replied. “But I’m not here to write a story. I’m looking for Esperanza Claramunt.”
“Never heard of her,” the old man replied. “And you should leave. And take the copper with you.”
Mata looked as though he were about to say something, and then he let out a sigh of irritation and walked away shaking his head. “You see what these lunatics are like?” he said. “Now they think they’re in control? Can you imagine what the country would be like in their hands?”
“It doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s hands right now,” Lawton said.
* * *
By the time they returned to the Ramblas the smoke had begun to form a swirling black cloud above the trees, and Lawton thought another fire was in progress further east beyond the Edén Concert. One stout middle-aged lady was standing in the middle of the Ramblas looking toward the port with a Browning pistol in her hand and a red Radical Party bow on her dress. Mata stopped to ask her what was happening.
“The youth are burning the churches and convents!” she replied. “To drive the rats away!”
Mata gave Lawton a long-suffering look and shook his head wearily as they walked down to the Calle Hospital. Lawton found it difficult not to cough as the light ash swirled and billowed through the street and settled on his jacket. Once again they walked through the vaulted corridors of the medical school to the mortuary, where Mata asked for Quintana. He came out to meet them in a bloody white coat, looking even more tired and cadaverous than the last time Lawton had seen him.
“Good morning Bernat,” he said. “Mr. Lawton. You’ve heard what’s been going on?”
“You mean the fires?” Mata asked.
“That—and the gun battles that took place during the night. And the railways and telegraph lines that were blown up or cut. Now there are no more soldiers and no more orders from Madrid. As of this morning Barcelona is entirely isolated from the rest of the country and the world. We had dozens of people here yesterday, mostly with bullet and saber wounds. I haven’t been home or slept. You’re not planning to write about this, are you Bernat?” Quintana looked at him warily. “Santiago has prohibited any mention of casualties.”
“We aren’t publishing,” Mata said. “But Mr. Lawton has some questions about our Monster.”
Quintana stifled a yawn. “We had a woman brought in yesterday afternoon. It looks like his handiwork. I’ve only just had a chance to examine her. Come.” They followed him into the autopsy room, where two orderlies were laying the corpse of a young girl on the last empty table.
“They say she was shot by the Civil Guard yesterday,” Quintana said. “On the Ramblas. I took a Remington bullet from her chest this morning.”
Lawton was more interested in the woman lying on the table next to the little girl. She looked much the same as she had when he had first seen her less than twenty-four hours before, except for the cavity running down through the center of her chest.
“Here she is,” Quintana said. “I don’t know who she was and no one has asked for her.”
“Bernat told me that you found traces of different blood in one of the victims,” Lawton said.
“In the cretin, yes. There were signs of red blood cell agglutination. It may even be what killed him. But not in this case.”
Lawton did not have a very good ear for scientific or medical detail, and he was soon struggling to concentrate as Quintana explained the classification system developed by Dr. Karl Landsteiner of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy in Vienna, that Quintana had mentioned to him when they had first met. In 1900 Landsteiner identified three distinct human blood types, A, B, and O, and his colleagues subsequently discovered a fourth, which they called AB. Not many scientists were aware of Landsteiner’s findings, Quintana said, but he had studied hematology at medical school and he had had his paper translated from German into Spanish. The Barcelona police had no interest in such matters, but he had begun to take blood samples from some of the corpses that were brought to him, to see whether the different types matched Landsteiner’s conclusions.
“So you’ve tested this one?”
“I have.” Quintana held up a small rectangular glass slide, with a little funnel of red running through the middle. “She’s blood type AB. No mixing. But she was completely drained.”
“And how long would it take to do that?”
Quintana clicked his tongue. “Difficult to say. The average human body contains five liters of blood—five pints as you say in England. An ordinary blood transfusion from a living person, taking one pint say, can take anywhere from two to four hours. But that’s because you need to take care of the donor and the recipient. There are questions of hygiene to take into account, the speed with which different recipients can absorb the fresh blood, and the effect that giving it has on the donor. Some people may give blood with no ill effects. Others may suffer complications. In which case—”
“I’m not talking about a transfusion to save a life or make sick people healthy,” Lawton broke in. “I want to know how long it would take to remove all the blood from a human body.”
Quintana blinked. “That depends on how it was extracted. Most transfusions are carried out by anastomosis—suturing or fixing the vein of the donor to the recipient. You cut the donor’s vein and clip it shut, and when the suture is complete you release the clip to allow the blood to flow. You see these wounds?” Quintana pointed to the gash in the dead woman’s throat. “You would expect a wound like this to bleed a lot. But the police said there was hardly any blood. And this is the reason.” Quintana held up the murdered woman’s left forearm and pointed out a small hole with a bruise above the elbow. “This has been made by a needle. That’s how the blood was removed from her. But it wouldn’t have been just by filling and emptying each needle. I’m assuming it was attached to some kind of catheter, connected to a container. And that’s not something I’ve ever seen before. I didn’t even know it was possible.”
“What kind of container?” Lawton asked.
Quintana shrugged. “Bottles or tubes, I imagine. There’s no other way to have removed it.”
Lawton stared at the bruise and grimaced with disgust at the thought of Weygrand, Klarsfeld, and Zorka standing over him while these procedures were performed. “So she was dead before these wounds were made?” he asked.
“Most certainly.”
Lawton gave a little sigh of relief now, because it was now clear that whatever Weygrand had done to him, he was not responsible for the woman’s death. “What can you do with a dead person’s blood?” he asked.
“Do with it?” Quintana looked confused. “There’s n
ot much you can do with blood from a corpse except put it into someone else’s—a sick or wounded person who needed blood, say. But the recipient has to be present in order to do that. You can’t take blood from one place to another.”
“Why not?”
“Because blood clots very quickly. And if you put clotted blood into someone else’s veins the recipient is likely to get ill or die. That’s not even taking into consideration the effects of mixing blood types. So there’s not much you can do with a dead person’s blood except study it.”
“What would you want to study?”
“So many things! How to perform transfusions effectively and save millions of lives. How to use healthy blood to restore the sick and wounded or help us to resist disease and infection. One day we will be able to store blood the way we now keep money in banks. Police will be able to use blood types to connect murderers to their victims. There are those who believe that blood may carry the secret of human origins and heredity—the cells that Mr. Darwin called gemmules. Some believe that culture, intelligence, racial characteristics, even religious beliefs, are passed on through the blood. Here in Spain we had the concept of limpieza de sangre—purity of blood. We—they—used to believe that Christians could be corrupted if they had Jews or Moors in their ancestry.”
Mata gave a snort. “Spanish superstition, Harry.”
“Not just Spain, Bernat,” Quintana corrected him. “Look at Santo Domingo. Or the American South. Look at your British Empire. Don’t you have octoroons and mulattoes and all the other categories? All defined by their percentage of white and black blood—and we don’t even know for sure if such things even exist! So you see Mr. Lawton, blood is a very interesting subject, and not only for doctors. Do you have any more questions? If not I have work to do. Because I fear there will be a lot more blood flowing in our streets in the next few days.”
Lawton thanked him, and he walked back with Mata out into the cloister.
“Well?” Mata asked. “You seem pleased.”
