Crazy Tales of Blood and Guts
Page 7
He had very little time. Now he thought her body wasn’t at all deformed or monstrous, but a prodigy of beauty and perfection. He picked up needle and thread and lovingly began to sew up Eugènia’s empty body. He wanted to see to that personally. Then he put the ring back on her finger and the ribbon in her hair. Blue brings brides good luck. Finally, he put his lips next to the girl’s cold lips and kissed her.
When they eventually found him unconscious on the ground, he said he had simply fainted.
In the months to come, everyone noticed something was wrong with him. He hardly slept or ate, and the purple circles under his eyes made his pale face even more alarming. He’d got thinner and his hair had turned grey from one day to the next. Now it was almost white. He drank coffee all the time, and his left eye twitched nervously and forced him to blink compulsively. His pulse trembled and stuttered. His head of department grew worried and repeatedly begged him to take sick leave or go on holiday, but he refused laconically, insisting that he was fine. Despite his gradual deterioration and his sickly appearance, he continued to arrive at work punctually and nobody had any complaints. In fact, he worked more hours than ever, as if he could never have enough to do, and he engineered it so he was always on call. For the last few months he’d been a silent presence at every autopsy, and always volunteered to lend a helping hand to the less experienced forensics. Everyone avoided his company but no one dared say a word to him.
One night he was left alone. The other doctor on duty was forced to go home suffering from a bad bout of summer flu. The rest of the staff had finished their shifts. The security guard was dozing as he did every night, sitting in his cubbyhole with his radio blaring and now and then glancing at the monitors that kept a watch on the entrance and sides of the building. Despite his apprehension when he’d first been assigned to the old site of the Institute for Forensic Anatomy, experience had taught him that problems always came from outside. He didn’t like the dead, but at least they never gave him any headaches.
Recently there’d been a constant stream of bodies. Suicides, accidents, drug overdoses, bodies stabbed to pieces, anonymous faces no one could identify… The coolers in the basement were crammed with corpses patiently waiting their turn before they could be sent to the cemetery or medical schools, and the staff were complaining. If it carried on at this rate, they’d have to do overtime. They didn’t know what to do with the bodies, and couldn’t cope with the workload.
There’d been no incidents that night. No calls, no emergencies. The next morning, shortly before eight, the head of area arrived. He liked to be the first in, and used that quiet time to organize the day’s schedule and shifts before the phone started ringing. He wasn’t surprised when he didn’t see his colleague. If it was a quiet night the forensics on night duty got bored and often joined the nurses for coffee. He was probably upstairs in the library having a nap, or had gone to the cafeteria for breakfast. While he was rummaging for his keys, he thought he heard a noise in the basement. It was a kind of feeble, barely audible moan, like a continuous sobbing. No doubt somebody had left the radio on. He sighed, dropped off his coat and briefcase and went down the stairs to the morgue. The door was just pulled to. As he opened it, he instinctively felt frightened.
He tried to shout, but was unable to articulate a single sound. For a thousandth of a second he thought it might be a hallucination caused by the shadows in the morgue, a sly trick played on his brain by stress, but then he understood immediately that what he could see was for real.
Decomposing bodies piled up on tables, on the floor, open down the middle, with viscera scattered all over the room. It was impossible to take a step without treading on livers, encephalic matter, kidneys or dissected hearts. There were intestines tossed in every corner, like macabre streamers for some lugubrious party where the guests were dismembered and headless. The stench was unbearable, as if hell itself had thrown its gates open. The only spotlight in the room barely lit the central table where they performed necros, but the phantasmagoric skin of mutilated corpses absorbed the light and projected a sad, sinister set of shadows. The moans were faint but could still be heard. They came from a man crying face down on one of those disembowelled corpses, his gown dripping blood. No doubt about it. It was one of his doctors. He seemed to be holding something. And there was lots of blood. Lots. But the dead don’t bleed.
He suddenly recognized her. She was one of their paediatric nurses, a particularly pretty girl with strikingly blonde hair. It was difficult not to notice that svelte, well-proportioned girl and her bright, cheerful eyes. Only two weeks ago she’d come to tell him how worried she was by the health of the man who was now sobbing over her bloody, opened body. She was naked and completely still, somehow tied to the table with plasters and bandages. The ball of cotton stuffed in her mouth must have stifled her screams but not asphyxiated her. She had undoubtedly resisted. Her blue eyes were wide open, but no longer smiling. She’d been cut open from top to bottom, her ribs pulled apart and various organs wrenched out. As he closed in, he thought the man was holding something that pulsated rhythmically. Suddenly he retched. It was the girl’s heart. Still beating.
The doctor didn’t even notice he was there. Beneath the tears, his gaze wandered aimlessly. The startling beauty he’d discovered inside Eugènia’s body had made him lose his reason. From that day on he’d searched every corpse that passed through his hands with the fury of a man possessed. He’d examined hearts, livers, brains, uteruses, kidneys, each of the organs capable of hoarding that secret, dazzling beauty that had emerged unexpectedly from Eugènia’s imperfect body, and which he’d never ever found again. In his despair, he had decided to look for it in the prettiest woman he knew, only to meet failure once again. He now knew that he would never again contemplate that golden mean of harmonious proportion, that unusual, extraordinary beauty that Eugènia had generously given him when she’d offered him her lifeless body. And that certainty made the immense solitude overwhelming him at that moment irremediable. He had embarked on a journey into the deepest darkness with no return, a prisoner of an ancient and tragic wisdom that would never again be within his reach.
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND KILLING
Teresa Solana
“The Sound of One Hand Killing is Barcelona-based
Teresa Solana’s third satirical crime novel to feature her twin
brother detectives Borja and Eduard and once again people will
be calling her ‘the Queen of Catalan Noir’. If they are not, they
should.” Getting Away with Murder
Two detectives, brothers Borja and Eduard, are hired by bestselling author Teresa Solana to research the world of “alternative” therapies. They enrol for a course at an exclusive meditation centre in the ritziest part of Barcelona, only to discover the director murdered, whacked on the head with a statuette of the Buddha. The violent death of a neighbour – who happens to be a CIA agent – simultaneously drags them into an international conspiracy complicated by Borja’s attempt to smuggle a priceless Assyrian figurine, the “Lioness of Baghdad”.
Catalan novelist Teresa Solana mercilessly punctures the pretensions of New Age quacks who promote pseudoscience and pseudo-spirituality. Solana draws compassionate portraits of characters trying to live “ordinary” lives in circumstances that have ceased to be normal, while coping with such everyday issues as adultery, the menopause and simply surviving to the end of the month.
PRAISE FOR TERESA SOLANA’S
BORJA AND EDUARD BARCELONA SERIES
“A glorious picture of an urbane and lubricious
Hispanic lifestyle as the brothers gumshoe their way through Barcelona.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Solana’s sparkling debut pokes sharp fun at Catalan politics, society and pretensions” Publishers Weekly
£8.99/$14.95
Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978-1908524-065
eBook
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A SHORTCUT TO PARADISE
Teresa Solana
The shady, accident-prone private detective twins
Eduard Martínez and Borja “Pep” Masdéu are back.
Another murder beckons, and this time the victim
is one of Barcelona’s literary glitterati.
Marina Dolç, media figure and writer of bestsellers, is murdered in the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona on the night she wins an important literary prize. The killer has battered her to death with the trophy she has just won, an end identical to that of the heroine in her prize-winning novel.
The same night the Catalan police arrest their chief suspect, Amadeu Cabestany, runner-up for the prize. Borja and Eduard are hired to prove his innocence. The unlikely duo is plunged into the murky waters of the Barcelona publishing scene and need all their wit and skills of improvisation to solve this case of truncated literary lives.
PRAISE FOR A SHORTCUT TO PARADISE
“Solana’s second novel made me laugh so much the tears soon rolled. She shoots from the hip at the guardians of culture...” El Pais
“Solana’s Barcelona is exciting, sexy and louche, the city’s literary scene and the people who inhabit it portrayed with satirical gusto. Charming and great fun.” The Times
“A delightfully droll double-barreled denouement provides a perfect ending to this romp, which should earn its author consideration for the kind of award she so cleverly lampoons.” Publishers Weekly
£8.99/$14.95
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A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME
Teresa Solana
Murder and mayhem in Barcelona
Another day in Barcelona, another politician’s wife is suspected of infidelity. A portrait of his wife in an exhibition leads Lluís Font to conclude he is being cuckolded by the artist. Concerned only about the potential political fallout, he hires twins Eduard and Borja, private detectives with a knack for helping the wealthy with their “dirty laundry”. Their office is adorned with false doors leading to non-existent private rooms and a mysterious secretary who is always away. The case turns ugly when Font’s wife is found poisoned by a marron glacé from a box of sweets delivered anonymously.
PRAISE FOR A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME
“The Catalan novelist Teresa Solana has come up with a
delightful mystery set in Barcelona…
Clever, funny and utterly unpretentious.” Sunday Times
“Solana’s stylish and witty debut makes entertaining
reading, and her two characters, the suave, quick-thinking
Borja and anxious, law-abiding Eduard, make a good
contrast as they weave their way through an increasingly
murky mystery.” The Telegraph
This deftly plotted, bitingly funny mystery novel and satire of Catalan politics won the 2007 Brigada 21 Prize.
£8.99/$14.95
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ISBN 978-1904738-343
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BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
The stories were first published in Catalan as Set casos de sang i fetge
i una història de amor, Edicions 62, Barcelona, 2010.
‘Still Life No. 41’ was first published in English in 2012 in Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine, ‘A Stitch in Time’ at
www.worldwithoutborders.org, 2011, ‘The Thought that Counts’,
in Barcelona Ink, 2013, ‘The First (Pre) Historic Serial Killer’ in
Mediterraneans, Paris, 2011, and ‘The Offering’, in Barcelona Noir,
Akashic Books, New York, 2011.
© Teresa Solana 2013
English translation © Peter Bush 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form or by any means without written
permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of Teresa Solana and Peter Bush
have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978-1-908-52429-4
Typeset by Tetragon, London