Barcelona Shadows by Marc Pastor Read Free Book Online

types of people: the ones that are like him and the ones who aren’t. And he devotes all his efforts to taking the second group out of circulation, without questioning whether, in that crusade destined for defeat, he himself has switched sides. His whole life he’s swum through the filth, and you know that if you stir shit up, something’s going to get stuck under your nails. The difference between him and the others is that he is convinced there is a difference.
    Corvo is an old dog, grim-faced and filled with vices, but he isn’t ready to give the streets over to anyone. And much less to these newcomers that Blackmouth wants him to believe killed One Eye and who are abducting children for rituals they’ve imported from their savage country. As if we didn’t have enough with the riff-raff that are from here, now they come from abroad, exclaims Corvoevery time the conversation goes down those paths. The detective is of the opinion that the city’s not big enough for everyone, that these guys come to do wrong, that any day now the city’s going to blow up in their faces, but this time the target won’t be churches and convents, which is practically a tradition in Barcelona. The mark will be shopkeepers, workers who get up early each day, the midwives and the tramcar drivers. The police… we coppers are already used to the blows, we’ve got tough hides and lean flesh. Even still, Corvo’s thoughts are pure bar ramblings, cheap Lerrouxism that dissolves the second he remembers Ismael, the little son of a bitch who drives the druggists crazy, or Vicente, a real bastard who steals pieces of industrial machinery to resell them by the kilo; when he remembers how those two mark their victims’ faces with rusty knives, or beat people up just for fun, then he curses all the criminals born in this country, in a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, blah blah blah taken from the last book he read or some newspaper headline that caught his eye.
    Blackmouth gets another blow to the back of the neck from Moisès Corvo, which makes Juan Malsano burst into laughter.
    “What was that for?”
    “Just in case.”
    They are on a roof near the Santa Madrona gate, pitch black, sea salt in the icy air that freezes the jangle of the watchman’s keys. Corvo can’t get the Apaches out of his head.
    It was barely over a year ago that Moisès Corvo took part in an operation to round up a group of Frenchmen who crossed the border to rob jewellery stores in Barcelona. They were the Apaches, a clan that had formed as a criminal gang on the outskirts of Paris and just kept growing. The reason for their name wasquite simple: they acted as a group and they were very violent and merciless, like the American Indians were rumoured to be. The description they had to work with was as flimsy as “they’ve got moustaches and speak French”, so both Moisès and his colleagues spent weeks waiting outside jewellery shops and in coach houses for the Apaches to show up. After hanging out on a corner for four hours, keeping watch over the entrance to Dalmau Jewellery on Casp Street, Moisès no longer knew where to hide. He had already drunk six anises to combat the cold and, with his head foggy, he came to the conclusion that the operation was as foolish as any of the houses those new two-bit architects were building everywhere. You tell me if a municipal cop couldn’t handle this, he said to himself, as Mr Dalmau, who knew nothing of the surveillance, came out again and again to make sure that that tall, moustachioed loner who was a bit tipsy didn’t speak French.
    He was so fixed on Moisès, and Moisès was so fed up with standing around there without any good spot to stretch out for a nap, that neither of them reacted when a small, stocky individual, dressed entirely in black and with a bowler hat bouncing around on his head, went into the jewellery store and punched Mr Dalmau in the eye, just like that, as motivation. His wife