Black Sun Rising

by Mathew Carr

  Lawton remembered what Señor Camacho had told him on the train. “But Spain isn’t Russia, is it? They have a parliament, don’t they?”

  Smither looked scornful. “They do. And political parties. They even have a Liberal and a Conservative party—just like ours. But they aren’t like ours. Here the elections are bought by the caciques—local chiefs acting on behalf of themselves or their parties. They don’t earn votes, they buy them. Both the main parties do it. The Liberals and the Conservatives think they own the country. They take turns in government while pretending to oppose each other. So the Conservative Party is in government now, led by Antonio Maura. But when the next election comes it will be the Liberals’ turn to govern, and the political machine will make that happen. The whole system is rotten and no one seems able or willing to change it. Even rich Catalans have had enough of it now and they’re turning to separatism. They think Spain’s sucking them dry. Barcelona makes the money and Madrid takes the taxes. That’s how they see it, and they’re not entirely wrong. They want out, and when you see the way this country is run, you can’t blame them. But Spain won’t let them go.”

  “A bit like Ireland then,” Lawton said with a grin.

  “Some people might say that.” Smither’s disapproving expression made it clear that he was not one of them.

  They turned left into a street called the Calle Hospital, and Lawton grimaced at the smell of raw sewage. The people around him were noticeably poorer now. Some of them had the same shrunken look as the inhabitants of East End rookeries, and there were numerous children wandering about like bony little ghosts, some of whom had no shoes and were bow-legged with rickets. Lawton noticed two women leaning against the wall with lipstick and rouged cheeks. One of them was smoking a cigarette, and she blew a stream of smoke at a passing priest, who walked on with an expression of haughty disgust that the two women clearly found hilarious.

  Just beyond them, Smither turned into an enormous, ancient-looking building that dominated the narrow street like a fortress wall. Lawton was pleasantly surprised to find a large sunlit patio filled with rows of trees and benches, where sick-looking patients were being tended by nuns. This, Smither informed him, was the medieval Hospital of the Holy Cross, and the home of the Catalan School of Medicine, where the Nobel Prize winner Ramón y Cajal had once worked.

  Lawton had never heard the name, and he followed Smither through a maze of corridors with high vaulted arches filled with doctors, nurses, and patients, until they reached the entrance to the mortuary. Smither asked for Dr. Quintana, and a few minutes later a mournful, cadaverous-looking man with a well-trimmed beard came out to see them, wearing a white coat splashed with blood.

  “Good morning vice-consul,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Smither introduced Lawton and explained that he had come to identify the body from the Bar la Luna.

  “Very good. You have the permiso?”

  Smither handed him Mrs. Foulkes’s letter, and Quintana looked it over briefly and returned it to him. “There are tables in the autopsy room that you can use,” he said. “But it’s not very private. There’s a more secluded table in the medical school. I can have the corpse brought there.”

  “Fine with me,” Lawton said.

  “I’ll leave you in Dr. Quintana’s hands then,” said Smither hastily. “I’ll be at the consulate.”

  Lawton followed Quintana through the corridors till they reached two large doors with frosted windows. Quintana ushered him into a small auditorium with a marble autopsy table in the center, surrounded by circular rows of overlooking desks and benches.

  “You’ll need a smock,” he said.

  “I’d also like some methylated spirits,” said Lawton. “And a sponge and towel.”

  Quintana nodded. “I’ll have them brought to you. I’d like to watch, if you don’t mind. I studied briefly under Lacassagne in France, and I’d be very interested to see an English detective at work. If it doesn’t disturb you? I’m a great admirer of Scotland Yard.”

  Like most detectives, Lawton was familiar with Alexandre Lacassagne’s work on bloodstain patterns and bullet identification, and even though he had not examined a body in more than three years, a part of him liked the idea of showing off his skills to a student of the French criminologist.

  “Fine with me,” he said. “But I’m an Irishman not an Englishman. And I hope you’re not expecting Sherlock Holmes.”

  Quintana did not smile, and Lawton sensed that he was not someone who smiled very often. “I’ll fetch the body then,” he said.

  Lawton took off his hat and jacket and rolled up his sleeves as Quintana walked away. Ten minutes later the pathologist returned with two orderlies who were pushing a metal gurney that contained a body covered in a white sheet. The orderlies lifted the stretcher onto the marble slab, and Quintana tapped the corpse on the chest with his fist. It gave off a hard, hollow sound, like a heavy cardboard box.

  “Completely frozen!” He handed Lawton a white smock, sponge and bottle. “Ammonia works wonders. I assume you’ll need these?” Quintana held out a syringe in one hand and a rectangular glass tray in the other.

  “What’s that for?” Lawton asked.

  “Hombre, his blood type, of course.”

  “His type?”

  Quintana looked at him in surprise. “Don’t you use Dr. Landsteiner’s categorizations in England?”

  Lawton had no idea what Quintana was referring to. During his detective training he had learned that it was possible to determine whether blood traces were animal or human, and he had once had this test successfully carried out in a murder case some years ago. He had also found Lacassagne’s work on blood splashes useful in determining the relative positions of a murder victim and the murderer in at least one investigation, but he had no idea who Dr. Landsteiner was, or what blood types Quintana was referring to. Whatever they were, they did not seem relevant to what he was about to do.

  “We don’t,” he said. “We have… other methods.”

  The pathologist shrugged and sat down at one of the benches. He leaned forward and watched with interest, while the orderlies stood impassively beside him, and Lawton could not help feeling slightly self-conscious as he pulled back the sheet and looked down on the earthly remains of the man he had come so far to identify.

  * * *

  As a soldier and a policeman Lawton had seen many corpses, and the charred body lying on the autopsy table looked far more like a wartime casualty than any corpse he had ever encountered in peacetime. The face and the nose were almost completely black, much of the outer layer of flesh was missing, and the lips were no longer distinguishable from the horrid hole of a mouth through which a torn shred of tongue protruded from between its few remaining teeth. There was only one blue eye remaining in its right socket, the top of the skull had been shorn off, and tumescent traces of brain were visible through the tufts of stiff blackened hair that still remained like burned wheat stubble.

  The rest of the body was similarly blackened and scorched. The explosion had sheared its left arm off at the shoulder. Its right leg was unattached to the thigh, from which a small stick of bone jutted out, and its groin and most of its backside were missing. Its right hand appeared to be intact, though blackened, and the left was missing three fingers, which now lay in a row where they should have been. The left foot had been blown off, though some of its pieces were lying neatly in an approximation of their correct position, as though the hospital staff had been trying to reassemble a jigsaw.

  Lawton had seen men literally blown to pieces beside him in South Africa, and he was relieved to see that the first two toes of the corpse’s right foot were missing, exactly as Mrs. Foulkes had said they would be. He was conscious that Quintana was following every movement as he opened the satchel and laid the tools he had brought with him next to the methylated spirits and sponge: first the magnifying glass and printers ink, the little roller and metal tray; then the writing pad, the tape measure and
fingerprint copies, and finally the photographs of Foulkes that Pickering had given him. He was pleased to find that he had not forgotten the standard procedures, as he matched the descriptions and close-up pictures from Foulkes’s Bertillonage “speaking portrait” to the body in front of him. He measured the skull first, both width and height; the length of the remaining arm from the fingertips to the neck; height, trunk width, and foot size.

  Apart from some minor shrinkage, the measurements coincided exactly with the figures next to Foulkes’s photographs, and he ticked them off one by one. The right hand was too burned to take prints, but the left was in better condition, particularly the three detached fingers. He cleaned them one by one and left them to dry while he poured a drop of ink into the tray and rolled it out. He held up the corpse’s left hand and rolled the thumb into the tray before pressing it against the paper pad. He repeated the procedure with the forefinger and the remaining three fingers, and then leaned over the prints with the magnifying glass.

  Quintana stood up now to get a closer look as he counted the numbers of arches, whorls, and loops and compared them to the prints Pickering had given him. In each case, Lawton explained to the pathologist, they were identical, from the number of whorls to the twinned loop on the little finger to the small scar on the thumb, and even though it was impossible to do the full count that the Henry System demanded, he had no doubt that the prints he had brought with him were the same as the ones on the corpse. He handed Quintana the magnifying glass and pointed out some of the similarities.

  “Interesting,” Quintana said. “Our police have only just begun to adopt Bertillonage, and in Madrid they are beginning to use fingerprinting, but the courts still don’t accept them as evidence.”

  “Ours do,” Lawton said.

  For the first time in two years, he realized that he had spoken as if he were still a detective, but he was so pleased to discover that his knowledge and skills remained intact that it did not feel like a pretense.

  “I can tell you,” he said, “without any doubt. This is the body of Randolph William Foulkes.”

  “Bravo!” To his amazement Quintana clapped, and the two orderlies clapped too.

  Lawton resisted the temptation to bow. In spite of himself he could not help feeling a certain pride, and now that he had successfully confirmed Foulkes’s identity, he was ready to go and look for Mrs. Foulkes’s trollop.

  * * *

  From the terrace of his in-laws’ house, Bernat Mata watched his children chase the cat across the garden down below, and looked at the familiar view. Beyond the lawn and the flowerbeds, the pink roofs and white mansions protruded up through the trees all the way down through Sant Gervasi and Gràcia, and in the far distance he could see the point where the harbor merged with the dark blue sea. He had eaten well, as he always did at his mother-in-law’s house, and now the trickle of running water and the humming of bees from the nearby roses lulled him into a postprandial torpor. He had just closed his eyes when he thought of Pau Tosets, lying in a heap of rubbish in an alleyway just behind the Nou de la Rambla.

  It was three days since Bravo Portillo had summoned him to the Raval, and still the image of the bloodless naked body, lying in a heap of rubbish with flies buzzing around its bites and wounds, continued to sit in his mind like a trapped bone that he could not swallow. It was not only because the evidence of such violence was so shocking, disturbing, and inexplicable. Had Esperanza Claramunt not told him about Tosets’s disappearance, he would have accepted Bravo Portillo’s explanation that the murder was the work of a madman, because only a lunatic could have inflicted such cruelty on another human being.

  Had he not already seen similar wounds on the body at the swimming club, he might have believed the Social Brigade when it said that Hermenigildo Cortéz was the perpetrator of the Bar la Luna bombing. But now that he had seen these things, he could not forget them, and he could not accept the fairy stories that were being told about them. Because if the Claramunt girl was correct, and the anarchist Tosets had indeed been snatched from the street by members of the Brigada, then it was even less likely that he had been murdered by a madman. The two murders had already attracted a great deal of morbid attention in the Barcelona newspapers and also in the national press. Much of this was fanned by the usual lurid artist’s impressions of the supposed “Raval Monster” who looked variously like a vampire, an ape, or a wolflike man with claws and hair. The Catholic papers were blaming the murders on the anarchists, but the republican newspaper El Diluvio had published a cartoon showing a blood-drinking monster wearing a priest’s robe and collar, abetted by a coven of nuns who looked like witches.

  To its credit, La Veu had resisted such nonsense, but Rovira had refused to publish Esperanza Claramunt’s declarations without further verification for fear of offending the military censors. Mata had persuaded Claramunt to accompany him to the Atarazanas district station, where she had told Bravo Portillo what she had seen. Bravo Portillo was unimpressed. It was possible, he conceded, that she had witnessed the kidnapping of Tosets by the man—or men—who had killed him, since even madmen did not always work alone, but he dismissed any suggestion that agents of the state were responsible for these events.

  It was bad enough, he said, that the Radical Republican Party should now be accusing priests and nuns of these atrocious murders without any foundation, but anarchists were clearly no more to be trusted, especially when it came to the political police. It was obvious from the strange and barbarous nature of these murders, Bravo Portillo went on, that the two anarchists had been killed by a madman who hated anarchists. It was even possible that they were carried out by an anarchist, he said. Mata knew that Bravo Portillo hated anarchists, as most policemen did, but none of these explanations made any sense. He told himself that it was no longer any of his business, and yet even now he winced at the thought of Esperanza Claramunt’s accusing, I-told-you-so expression when they left the station and he told her that he was not going to take it any further. He knew that he had confirmed his bourgeois inauthenticity and lack of integrity that she already suspected, and he felt offended by her condemnation. It was all very well for these young anarchists to pass judgment on everybody else—he had once done much the same when he was younger. But he was a married man now with children and responsibilities, and he had learned that not everything was black-and-white. Still he could not shake off a vague feeling of discomfort and unease as he stared down at his native city. He was still trying to suppress it when his father-in-law came out onto the terrace.

  “You’ve heard the rumors?” the old man asked.

  Mata suppressed a sigh and inwardly braced himself. Over the years he had learned to put up with Vicente del Bosch’s bitter anti-Catalanism, his nostalgic reminiscences of the Cuban war and his tirades against the politicians who had betrayed the army and thrown away the empire. Such diplomacy was not just a concession to his wife; it was also necessary for his own good. It was Bosch’s money that paid for his apartment in the Eixample, for the holidays in Puigcerdà, for the publication of his literary and artistic journal and his occasional books of poetry, and various other pleasures that were beyond the reach of an ordinary journalist. His father-in-law rarely let these fortnightly visits pass without taking the opportunity to remind him of his dependency, or provoke him politically.

  “What rumors are those?” Mata asked warily.

  “That we might be going to war.”

  Mata was not unaware of this possibility. It was little more than a year since the papers had hailed General Marina’s less-than-heroic advance beyond Melilla into the Rif mountains as the beginning of a new African empire. The government claimed that Spain was only protecting the iron and lead mines that it had bought from the Rif tribesmen who were fighting the Moroccan sultan. But you did not need to be an anarchist to know that the escalation in military operations had more to do with the army’s desire to do something great to make up for Cuba and the Philippines. Now the mining concessions at
Monte Uixar and Monte Afra were being raided almost daily by Berber tribesmen, and the Spanish army was already bogged down in trying to protect its possessions.

  All this was only to be expected, but these less-than-sterling achievements had done nothing to diminish the appetite for war in certain circles. On the contrary even Rovira—a staunch Catalanista and a fellow member of the Lliga—argued that Spain needed to acquire new colonies to compensate for the ones it had lost only a decade before. Even Belgium owned half of Africa now, Rovira said—the ultimate insult. The reactionary Spanish papers went even further. If Spain could not establish a permanent presence in Morocco, they argued, then France and Germany would swallow the country whole, and perfidious Albion was also lurking in the background as usual to see what it could bite off.

  “The Ministry of War is considering levying new troops,” Bosch went on. “And it may have to call on the Catalan reserves. Let’s hope the Catalan press supports the army this time, eh?”

  Mata knew he was referring to the ¡Cu-Cut! episode. His father-in-law had naturally taken the side of the army mob and regarded the offending cartoon as an insult to the honor of the armed forces. This was only to be expected from a retired general who looked as though he were on horseback even when sitting in a chair in baggy white trousers, espadrilles, and white shirt.

  “It might be difficult to persuade anyone to support an adventure in Africa,” he replied. “Not only the Catalans.”

  “Well you’re the writer. Write a poem.”

  Mata was not sure whether this was intended as a taunt or an exhortation, but he had no intention of doing any such thing. Unlike his father-in-law, he worked in downtown Barcelona and he knew that its population was in no mood to fight another war. The anarchist papers were threatening to strike, and now the Radicals were attempting to compete with them, and warning that any attempts to call up the reserves would meet with resistance on the streets. There was no chance to explain any of this, and Mata knew that there was no point, as the old man launched into a familiar tirade about the regenerative qualities of war. Mata listened patiently to the tedious arguments that he had heard so often from his father-in-law and from the conservative papers: that a nation without colonies could never rejoin the great powers; that the country of Isabella and Ferdinand must show that it could honor its treaty obligations agreed with Britain and France and maintain order in Morocco; that a nation that was unable or unwilling to wage war was a nation that had lost its manhood and virility.