BURIED IN A dark corner of Calle Hospital’s nether regions stood a sombre building that looked as if it had never been touched by sunlight. An iron door forbade entry, and there was no notice or sign to hint what was inside. The police car stopped in front of it. Vargas and Linares got out.
“Will that poor devil still be here?” asked Vargas.
“I don’t suppose job offers are raining down on him,” said Linares as he rang the bell.
After about a minute the door opened inwards, and they were greeted by the reptilian glare of an unfortunately built little man, who admitted them with a somewhat unfriendly expression.
“I thought you were dead,” he said to Vargas once he recognized him.
“I’ve missed you too, Braulio.”
The old hands knew about Braulio, a humanoid creature with a skin weathered by formaldehyde and the unsure step of an old beetle. Braulio, man of yet untapped talents, acted primarily as errand boy and assistant to the pathologist. According to malicious gossip, he lived in the basement of the morgue, turning filth into an art form and drifting into old age in the safe haven provided by a decrepit, bug-ridden bed. He possessed a single change of clothes, which he was already wearing when, at the age of sixteen, he was admitted to the institution under unfortunate circumstances.
“The doctor is waiting for you,” he said.
Vargas and Linares followed him through a litany of damp corridors tinged with a greenish half-light that led to the heart of the morgue. Legend had it that Braulio had arrived there thirty years earlier, after being run over by a tram opposite the San Antonio market while fleeing from the scene of a petty theft – a scrawny chicken or a handful of petticoats, depending on the version. The driver of the ambulance that picked him up, seeing the tangle of impossibly knotted limbs, pronounced him dead at the scene and, after loading him into the van as if he were a sack of rubble, stopped to have a few rounds of beer with a few pals of his in a bar on Calle Comercio before handing in the battered jumble of bloody bones at the police morgue in the Raval quarter, which was more on his way than the Hospital Clínico. Just as the trainee pathologist was about to dig his scalpel into him, the dying man opened his eyes, big as saucers, and jumped back to life. The event was declared a miracle of the national health system and enjoyed wide coverage in the local press, because this happened in the middle of the summer when newspapers liked to come out with curious news items and trivia to liven up the blistering heat. “Poor Wretch Revives Magically One Step Away from the Grave,” the front page of El Noticiero Universal blared.
Braulio’s fame and glory were short-lived, however, and in tune with the frivolity of the times. For it turned out that the person in question was exceedingly unsightly, and after his large intestine had become braided like a horse’s mane, he suffered from chronic flatulence. The readers were put in the awkward position of having to forget all about him in great haste and concentrate again on the lives of music-hall singers and football stars. Poor Braulio, having drunk from the capricious fountain of celebrity, couldn’t handle his return to the most ignominious of anonymities. He considered taking his own life by eating an enormous amount of rancid Lent fritters, but in a moment of mysticism that came upon him while sitting on the toilet – owing to the resulting severe colitis – he saw the light and understood that the Lord, in his manifold ways, had wanted him to exist in the shadows, at the service of rigor mortis and its accompanying mysteries.
As the years went by and boredom grew, the police force’s fertile wit devised a most elaborate mythology around the figure, misadventures and miracles of Braulio. According to this narrative, during his interrupted passage between this world and the next, Braulio had been adopted by a malevolent spirit who refused to go down to hell, feeling more comfortable in that Barcelona of the 1930s, which was – so experts maintained – its earthly equivalent.
*
“You still haven’t got yourself a girlfriend, Braulio?” asked Linares. “With this perfume of stale black sausage you let out, they probably throw themselves at you, begging for your favours.”
“I have plenty of girlfriends,” Braulio replied, winking with a droopy, purplish eyelid that looked more like a patch. “And they’re nice and quiet.”
“Stop uttering such filth and bring the body, Braulio,” ordered a voice from the dark. At the sound of his master’s voice, Braulio hurried off.
Dr. Andrés Manero, pathologist and Vargas’s old comrade in arms, stepped forward and held out his hand. “There are people you only see at funerals, but you and I don’t even manage that: we only meet for autopsies.”
“A sign that we’re still kicking.”
“You can say that, Vargas – you look as fit as a bull. How long since the last time?”
“At least five or six years.”
Manero nodded with a smile. Even in the faint light floating around the room, Vargas noticed that his friend had aged more than normal. Soon they heard Braulio’s uneven footsteps pushing the stretcher. The body was covered with a cloth that clung to it, becoming transparent where it touched the moisture.
Manero approached the stretcher and lifted the part of the shroud covering the face. His expression remained unchanged, but he turned to look at Vargas. “Leave us, Braulio.”
The assistant raised his eyebrows in annoyance. “You don’t need me, Doctor?”
“No.”
“But I thought I was going to assist with—”
“You were wrong. Go out for a while and have a smoke.”
Braulio threw Vargas a hostile look, being in no doubt that he was to blame for his not being allowed to take part in the forthcoming feast. Vargas winked back at him and pointed to the door.
“Clear off, Braulio,” Linares ordered. “You heard the doctor. Go and have a really cold shower.”
Visibly annoyed, Braulio set off, limping and cursing under his breath. Once they were rid of him, Manero removed the entire shroud and lit the strip of adjustable lamps hanging from the ceiling. A pale light of icy vapour carved out the outline of the body. Linares took a step forward, and after a quick glance at the corpse, let out a sigh. “God almighty . . .” Linares looked away and went over to Vargas. “Is it who it looks like?”
Vargas kept his eyes fixed on Linares’s, but didn’t reply.
“I’m not going to be able to cover this up,” said Linares.
“I understand.”
Linares looked down, shaking his head. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“You could get rid of the leech.”
“I’m not following you.”
Linares fixed his gaze on Vargas, his smile leaving him. “I have no one following you.”
“It must have been someone from the top, then.”
Linares shook his head. “If there was anyone doing that, I’d know. Mine or not mine.”
“It’s a young guy, quite bad. Smallish. A novice. His name’s Rovira.”
“The only Rovira in headquarters is in the archives. He’s sixty and has enough shrapnel in his legs to open a hardware store. The poor man couldn’t follow his own shadow if you paid him.”
Vargas frowned.
Linares’s face oozed disappointment. “I may be a lot of things, Vargas, but not someone who stabs his friends in the back.”
Vargas was about to reply, but Linares raised a hand to silence him. The harm was done.
“You have until mid-morning,” Linares said. “After that, I must file a report. This will have its consequences, as you know.” He moved towards the exit. “Goodnight, Doctor.”
*
Anchored in the shadows of the narrow street bordering the morgue, Braulio watched the figure of Linares disappear into the night. “I’ll get you, you bastard,” he said to himself. Sooner or later, every one of these cocky pricks who loved nothing more than disrespecting him would end up like all the rest, a piece of swollen meat laid out on a marble slab at the mercy of a well-sharpened blade and whoever knew how to handle it. And he was there to give them the farewell they deserved. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. Those who thought death was the final indignity life gave you were wrong. An extensive catalogue of mockery and humiliations awaited backstage once the curtain had fallen, and good old Braulio was always there to collect a memento or two for his trophy case and make sure that they all stepped into eternity with their fair reward. He’d had his eye on Linares for some time. And he hadn’t forgotten his buddy Vargas, either. Nothing keeps memory more alive than resentment.
“I’m going to bone you like a piece of ham and make myself a key ring with your nuts, you jerk,” he murmured. “Before you know it.”
Accustomed to listening to himself but never bored of it, Braulio smiled with satisfaction. He decided to celebrate the good fortune of his clever thoughts with a cigarette, to help fight off the cold permeating the streets at that late hour. He felt the outside pockets of his coat, which he’d inherited from a deceased with subversive leanings who had come to pay his dues a few weeks earlier, in conditions that proved there were still real experts with balls on the police payroll. The packet of Celtas was empty. Braulio buried his hands in his pockets and watched his breath forming spirals in the air. With what Hendaya would pay him when he told him what he’d just seen, he’d be able to buy a few cartons of Celtas and even a tub of fine Vaseline, the perfumed sort they sold at the rubber shop of Genaro the Chinaman. Some customers had to be treated with class.
*
The echo of footsteps in the dark roused him from his dreams. He looked carefully and noticed a silhouette forming among the folds of the mist. It was advancing towards him. Braulio took a step back and bumped into the entrance door. The visitor didn’t seem much taller than he was, but he transmitted a strange calm and determination that made the few hairs remaining beneath Braulio’s blondish hairpiece stand on end.
The individual stopped in front of Braulio and offered him an open packet of cigarettes. “You must be Señor Don Braulio.”
Nobody had ever called Braulio Señor or Don in his entire life, and he discovered that he didn’t like the sound of that address coming from the stranger’s lips. “And who are you? Has Hendaya sent you?”
The visitor simply smiled and raised the packet of cigarettes up to Braulio, who accepted one. He then pulled out a gas lighter and held out the flame.
“Thanks,” Braulio murmured.
“You’re welcome. Tell me, Don Braulio, who’s in there?”
“A pile of stiffs – what do you expect?”
“I’m referring to the living.”
Braulio hesitated. “So Hendaya sent you, right?”
The stranger just fixed his eyes on him without losing his smile.
Braulio gulped. “The pathologist, and a policeman from Madrid.”
“Vargas?”
Braulio nodded.
“How is it?”
“Excuse me?”
“The cigarette. How is it?”
“Very good. Imported?”
“Like all good things. You have keys, don’t you, Don Braulio?”
“Keys?”
“To the morgue. I’m afraid I might need them.”
“Hendaya didn’t say anything about giving any keys to anyone.”
The stranger shrugged. “Change of plan,” he said, as he calmly slipped on a pair of gloves.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
The flash of the steel only lasted a second. Braulio noticed the blade of the knife, the sharpest cold he’d ever known in his miserable existence, sinking into his guts. At first he felt no pain, only that awareness of extreme clarity and weakness as the blade sliced his guts. Then, when the stranger sank the knife again into the lower abdomen, this time right up to the handle, and pulled it strongly upwards, Braulio felt that cold turning to fire. A claw of red-hot iron made its way towards his heart. His throat flooded with blood and drowned his screams, as the stranger dragged him into the alley and pulled out the bunch of keys fastened to his belt.