by Mathew Carr
“Are you sure it can’t escape?” he asked.
“Of course it can’t escape,” Alba rolled her eyes. “It’s in a cage.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Carles retorted. “And what if it breaks the bars?”
“Then it will eat you!”
Mata smiled patiently. “Alba, please remember that you are eight and your brother is five. I promise you son, that this monster cannot escape.”
“He knows we’re talking about him,” Carles said.
Mata stared back at the ferocious yellow eyes and jutting teeth, and thought that his son was probably right. Since its arrival from the Belgian Congo that spring, a lot of people had been talking about Snowy the gorilla. This was partly due to its size and its color, and also to the sign on the animal’s cage that claimed, “there is less difference in size and structure between the well-developed brain of a gorilla and that of the lowest living savages than there is between the brain of such a savage and the brain of a high European type.”
This seemingly uncontroversial observation had offended the Catholic papers, which accused the zoo authorities of exposing young children to Darwinism. Snowy had even become the subject of one of Archbishop Laguarda’s sermons at the cathedral, in which His Eminence reminded his congregation that man had been brought into the Garden of Eden fully formed, that Eve had been born of Adam’s rib, and that any arguments to the contrary were fallacious and blasphemous. Mata wondered whether this was the first time in history in which a gorilla had been mentioned in a sermon. The ape reminded him of the soldiers who had attacked the offices of ¡Cu-Cut! magazine four years ago, because of Joan Junceda’s cartoon mocking the armed forces. Those soldiers had shown the same brutish ferocity that day, and it was easy to imagine the gorilla raging through the offices, knocking over desks and smashing typewriters in the street.
The soldiers had accused Junceda and the magazine of insulting the honor of the armed forces, but as far as Mata was concerned, men who behaved like hooligans in response to words and pictures they did not like had no honor to defend. That was bad enough, but instead of punishing them, the government had given in to their thuggery and passed the Law of Jurisdictions, which now obliged every newspaper and magazine in Catalonia to submit to the military censors. And all this had been done with the approval of the bishops and archbishops who lectured the city on the evils of evolution.
“We should go home now,” he said.
“But we’ve only just arrived!” Carles complained.
“Yes. To see Snowy. And now we’ve seen him. We’ll come on a longer visit another time. Right now you need to eat and I have to work.”
Mata took his son’s hand while Alba skipped along beside him, past the mad puma pacing up and down the same few steps that it would follow till the ends of its days, past the anteater and the armadillos and the Pyrenean brown bear. Outside in the park couples and families were seated on the grass, rowing on the lake, or strolling back and forth between the rows of trees while parrots shrieked and squawked in the trees above their heads. They had just left the zoo when he heard what sounded like an explosion coming from the direction of the Ramblas. It was not as loud as the Bar la Luna bombing two weeks ago, and no one in the park seemed particularly concerned by it.
Mata was not sure whether such sangfroid was a sign of civic strength or weakness. Since Joan Rull’s execution last August, the bombings in the city had quieted down. His execution had brought to an end a three-year period in which bombs had gone off all over the Raval. At times there had been an explosion around the Ramblas almost every week and sometimes every day, as large and small bombs went off in alleyways, marketplaces, urinals, and doorways. Even then the population got on with its daily business as if all this mayhem were of no more consequence than a streetcar accident.
According to the prosecutors at his trial, Rull was responsible for most of these bombs, and the lull that followed his conviction seemed to prove them right. Yet Rull had protested his innocence right up until they tightened the garotte around his neck in the Modelo prison. Mata had no idea whether he was telling the truth. Many times during the trial he had glanced over at his mane of combed-back hair and his dark hooded eyes and tried to gauge his reaction to the witnesses and statements, but his expression never changed.
Mata had spoken to the English detective Arrow about the bombings, and Arrow had dropped hints that he did not believe Rull was uniquely responsible for them. Many people had the same doubts, but no one could ever prove them. The state claimed that justice had been done and the minister of the interior boasted that peace had been restored to Barcelona. But now the Luna Bar suggested that such claims were premature. He had witnessed the bloody aftermath of the explosion there and he still felt revolted by what he had seen. Of course no one had claimed responsibility for it, and that was not unusual. It had been the same during the Rull years, and Mata wondered whether the bombing signaled the beginning of a new campaign, as they came into the dirt square that surrounded the Monumental Fountain. He looked at the man in a battered top hat standing by the fountain, playing with a dancing monkey while a child solemnly cranked out a waltz on a barrel organ. That was how the city worked: the monkeys placed bombs while someone else cranked the organ, and only the monkeys ever got caught.
Mata gazed at the waterfall, past the statues of a chariot and horses, Neptune and the Griffin toward the half-naked Leda. Whoever had known that model was a lucky man, he thought, as he noticed a young woman coming toward him from the entrance to the Arc de Triomf. Even from a distance she looked vaguely familiar. As he came closer he looked at the long neck and heart-shaped face, the wide brown eyes and chestnut hair tied up beneath her hat.
“Good afternoon Senyor Mata,” she said in Catalan. “Your wife said you would be here. I’m Esperanza Claramunt. Rafael Claramunt’s daughter. I believe you knew my father.”
Now Mata remembered the little girl he had seen holding her mother’s hand at Rafael Claramunt’s funeral in 1896. She would have been not much older than Alba, he thought, as he looked at her with an expression of concern and surprise.
“I did,” he said. “And your mother, too.”
“She suggested I talk to you.” Esperanza’s eyes flickered toward the children. “On an urgent matter.”
“Of course.” Mata sent his children to look at the monkey and he and Esperanza walked over to a nearby bench under the shade of a tree. He slumped down like a heavy bear with his hands resting on his cane and looked at the young woman expectantly.
“A comrade—a friend of mine has been kidnapped,” she said. “By the police.”
Mata raised his eyebrows. He had known Rafael Claramunt mostly through his writings and speeches, and as one of the many tragedies of 1896. He remembered him as a decent man, a moderate republican who had fallen victim to the inquisitorial frenzy that followed the Corpus Christi bombing. It soon became obvious that Esperanza Claramunt had gone on a very different political journey, as she described the kidnapping of the anarchist Pau Tosets.
“I’m sorry to hear this,” he said. “But if your friend was arrested, there isn’t much a journalist can do about it.”
Esperanza’s cheeks turned suddenly pink. “The comrades said this would be a waste of time. But my mother said that you wrote about my father. She said you were one of the few bourgeois journalists to question the charges against Ferrer.”
Mata sensed that this was intended to be a compliment, but it did not sound like one. “I was,” he said. “Because the charges were without foundation.”
“Pau’s done nothing wrong!” Esperanza insisted. “He’s just a printer and a journalist—like you.”
“An anarchist journalist. Who works for Solidaridad Obrera.”
“Is that a crime now? And it’s not the police I’m worried about. It’s the Brigada. You know what they’re capable of.”
Mata knew very well. The Social Brigade had led the investigations into the Corpus Christi bombing, and its o
fficers were responsible for many of the outrages that followed. Nowadays the Brigada was supposed to be under strict orders to moderate its behavior, but when it came to anarchists and political crimes the collar was easily slipped, and the savage bombing at the Bar la Luna would not have inclined them to remain on the leash.
“How do you know the Brigada is involved? You say you didn’t even see who kidnapped your friend.”
“I don’t know. But if they have arrested Pau and someone asks about him—someone with influence—it might save him.”
Mata could not help feeling pleased that she thought of him as a person of influence, and her earnest puppy-dog eyes seemed suddenly difficult to refuse. “I’ll go to the castle and ask,” he said. “They don’t have to tell me anything. But if he is there, I might at least shake the tree and get them to admit it publicly.”
“Thank you.” Esperanza looked so relieved and grateful that Mata could not help feeling sorry for her.
“I won’t be able to go until tomorrow,” he said. “Come by my house in the evening.”
* * *
Mata called his children back, and the four of them walked out of the park along the wide promenade toward the Arc de Triomf. Esperanza chattered to Carles and Alba with the ease of someone who was used to being in the company of children, and Mata was not surprised to hear that she was a teacher at one of the Ferrer schools. On reaching the arch she turned away toward the Plaza Catalunya, and Mata and his children walked on home. Sylvia had lunch ready and the children chattered about the gorilla and the nice lady they had met in the park. Mata did not tell his wife what he had agreed to do. After lunch he took the siesta as usual and then set off to his offices in the Calle Escudellers.
He was tempted to take the tram, but he needed to lose weight and Sylvia was worried about his heart. A walk would also give him time to mull over the column he had already agreed with Rovira on Marinetti and the Futurist movement, whose manifesto he had just translated into Catalan. Half an hour later he arrived out of breath at the offices of La Veu de Catalunya to find his colleagues sitting at their desks like galley slaves, while Rovira strode menacingly up and down the aisle between them in his waistcoat and short sleeves. Rovira looked at him in disapproval. Mata knew that Rovira wanted his journalists to look more like businessmen in order to impress the newspaper’s funders, and disapproved of his floppy hats, his long frock coat, and his cane pipe, but he also knew that there was nothing Rovira could do about it.
“There you are Mata,” he said. “We’ve just had a messenger from Bravo Portillo. You can save that Futurist stuff for another day.”
“Is it about the bomb?” Mata asked. “I heard it earlier.”
Rovira clucked his tongue. “That was nothing. Just a coffee-grinder bomb in the Calle Ferran. Blew out a shop window. But now there’s been a murder. At the swimming club. Ten more minutes and I would have given it to someone else, but of course the inspector asked for you.”
Despite the sarcasm, Mata knew Rovira was pleased with his mutually beneficial arrangement with the chief of the Atarazanas district station, and La Veu had often benefitted from Inspector Manuel Bravo Portillo’s interest in getting his name in the papers. Such publicity enabled him to uphold the reputation of the Barcelona police force and also to advance his own career prospects, and as long as he saw Mata as his best vehicle for achieving these ends, then Rovira would not send anyone else to report on important stories like this.
Mata had never heard of a murder at the swimming club before, and he wondered what could have happened as he walked onto the Ramblas and caught a cab. Ten minutes later he was sitting in the back of a one-horse carriage moving at a trot around the customs house. As they followed the curve around the port toward Barceloneta he saw the three funnels of the German battleship Helgoland looming up out of the ocean just beyond the entrance to the harbor. The arrival of the lead ship from the Kaiser’s new class of dreadnoughts in Barcelona had thrilled and flattered some of Mata’s compatriots. Some of them saw it as another confirmation of Barcelona’s transformation into a European city, but he sensed that its presence had more to do with the Kaiser’s attempts to flatter Spain than anything to do with Catalonia. Soon the carriage came alongside the swimming club, and he saw the crowd gathered on the beach just before the upturned boats and nets. Bravo Portillo was standing at the center of the crowd with two uniformed Mossos d’Escuadra, and the mortuary wagon was already drawn up just behind the onlookers.
“There you are Mata,” Bravo Portillo said. “Just in time.”
Mata threaded his way through the fishermen, sailors, and local women, past a few members of the swimming club who were still wearing their striped one-piece bathing suits and vests with towels around their shoulders. One of Bravo Portillo’s officers pulled back the tarpaulin to reveal the corpse of a man in his early thirties. Though he stopped just above the waist for the sake of decency, it was obvious that the victim was naked. Mata stared at the flecks of seaweed in his jet-black hair, and the swirling tattoos that he had seen on certain criminals in the Modelo prison, from the dagger on one forearm and the pistol on the other, to the large gallows that covered most of his bony chest with the words CARPE DIEM tattooed beneath it. The corpse also contained a number of wounds that looked like bites, and there was a large gash in his throat, where a mesh of torn pink veins protruded from a rim of whitened flesh.
“What’s this?” asked Mata. “Did he get bitten by a shark?”
“I don’t think so.” Bravo Portillo rolled the body onto its side to reveal a piece of frayed rope tied around his wrists. “One of the swimmers found him floating in the water. Poor little Hermenigildo. I don’t think he expected to leave the world like this.”
“You knew him?”
Bravo Portillo nodded and folded back the tarpaulin over the corpse’s face. “There wasn’t much to know. His name was Hermenigildo Cortéz. Typical rubbish from the Raval. Petty thief and pickpocket. He used to run with Rull’s group. A nobody—though he didn’t always realize it. Well, he seems to have upset someone.”
Mata looked out toward the gleaming ocean that had brought this corpse ashore. In his youth he had been a member of the swimming club and he still occasionally came here with his children. Now he thought that he would not be bringing them here for a while. And he could not help thinking that whoever had inflicted such strange wounds on the nobody from the Raval had more in common with the Barcelona zoo’s latest acquisition than with anything human.
* * *
Lawton sat smoking and listening to Caruso singing an aria from Tosca on the phonograph. From where he was sitting he could see the sunset spreading across the sky in the direction of the Thames like a forest fire, as the great tenor filled the room. Lawton had not bought any new records since leaving the force, but even after two years it still seemed miraculous that science had made it possible for Caruso to sing to him in his own room. He was also grateful, because he had stopped going to concerts or the music hall since his illness. In the half-light, the Italian’s voice seemed to weep from the little speaker horn, and even though Lawton did not understand the words, he felt soothed, uplifted, and moved by by the emotion behind them.
The music continued to resonate even after he got up to lift the needle. Beyond the rows of chimneys and clotheslines the sky reminded him of the Great Unexplained Event the previous June. That night the sun had refused to set, and the sky was lit up with a lurid orange glow that lasted till past midnight, so that it had been possible to read the newspaper without even turning the light on. At first he had thought it was another hallucination, but then he heard the excited voices of his neighbors and he realized that everyone else was seeing the same thing.
Some said that war had broken out and that the German invasion was underway. Others claimed that another great fire was spreading through London, but the next day the newspapers reported that the same ghostly light had been seen all over Europe. No one knew what had caused it. There were rep
orts that a volcano had erupted in the South Seas; that a meteorite had crashed in Siberia and caused a forest fire; that the Kaiser had been experimenting with a new super-weapon. Some God-fearing Christians had even gone out into the West End with sandwich boards declaring that the end of the world was coming and calling for all theaters and music halls to be closed.
Now Lawton wondered how Randolph William Foulkes would have accounted for it, because there was no doubt that Dr. Foulkes was a very learned man who knew a lot about many things. His bookshelves were a testament to the breadth of his knowledge and interests. Many of the books in his collection were written in foreign languages, and Mrs. Foulkes said her husband was fluent in German, Latin, and French, and he could also read Sanskrit. At least fifteen of them were written by Foulkes himself, Mrs. Foulkes said, and some of them had been translated. Foulkes had a degree in medicine from Oxford and a doctorate in anthropology from the Royal Holloway. He was a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Society for Racial Hygiene, and the Society for Psychical Research. According to Mrs. Foulkes, his friends and correspondents included Sir Francis Galton, Gladstone, Conan Doyle, Cesare Lombroso, Ernst Haeckel, and Alphonse Bertillon, some of whom had dined at their house.
Foulkes’s study was filled with souvenirs and mementoes of his travels and encounters with famous men. There was a framed letter of appreciation from Signore Lombroso for a lecture Foulkes had delivered in Milan; an African witchdoctor’s mask, two crossed spears, and a leopard-skin shield, in addition to various fossils, bones, and glass cabinets containing insects and butterflies. The study also contained a number of photographs of Foulkes himself, including an early daguerreotype showing him receiving his degree in medicine at Oxford.
Even as a young man in his gown and mortarboard, Foulkes looked older than he was, with his high-domed forehead and high cheekbones, his long sideburns and the serious and faintly distant expression on his face as he stared back at the camera, as though he were looking at some point just beyond it. Foulkes had the same frown in a more recent photograph that showed him in a parka, standing outside a wooden hut against a background of ice and snow, with a group of men who were similarly dressed. Behind them was a pile of boxes and bags loaded on sledges, and Lawton noticed that some of the boxes were marked with what looked like a flash of lightning and the single word, EXCELSIOR.