Gentlemen, it cannot be denied that there are forces intent on reducing our city to chaos and ruin.” Civil Governor Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo looked at the assembled journalists, who were sitting in front of him with their pens and notebooks poised. “They are using these disturbances to further their aims, but you can rest assured that they will not succeed. Those who break the law will feel the full weight of the law.”
Ossorio was a big man in his late thirties, whose balding head and dark sober suit made him look older. His size and his girth had made him an object of mockery among both anarchists and republicans, but Mata knew him as an intelligent and thoughtful conservative, who had struggled during his two years in office to reform the Barcelona police and bring the rule of law to a city that was too often indifferent to it. Mata had met him on a number of occasions, both socially and professionally, and it was partly because of these personal contacts that the Veu was the only Catalan newspaper invited to a select gathering of the usual conservative journalists who could be relied upon to disseminate the government’s views. Despite his attempts to project confidence, Mata thought the civil governor looked under pressure, and he asked him whether he would declare martial law in the event of a general strike.
“That won’t be necessary,” Ossorio replied firmly, “because there will be no strike.”
Mata pointed out that the socialists in Madrid had called for a national strike, and the workers’ organizations in Barcelona seemed likely to follow suit.
“Madrid is not my concern,” Ossorio said. “But there will be no strike in this city. Law, order, and common sense will prevail. That is all gentlemen.”
Ossorio ignored the barrage of questions that followed, and his secretary ushered the journalists from his office. Despite the civil governor’s serenity, Mata did not feel reassured. In the last few days he had seen the Fat Man openly mocked in the street when he went out with his officials. On two occasions he had observed the police firing warning shots at crowds protesting against the war. It was only a matter of time before someone was wounded or killed. Even though Ossorio had banned public meetings in an attempt to defuse the situation, Radicals, anarchists, and socialists continued to address smaller gatherings on street corners and public squares, where they denounced the war and talked of strikes, revolution, and setting fire to convents and churches.
All this was alarming enough, and the mood in the workers’ districts had become more belligerent and more openly seditious as a result of the stream of rumors and bad news coming from Morocco. It was said that the soldiers lacked food and ammunition; that the reservists had been attacked by Rif tribesmen almost as soon as they had landed at Melilla; that Maura was about to announce a full mobilization of the army and issue a declaration of war. In this febrile atmosphere Hermenegildo Cortéz’s woman Angela Romeu—the same woman he had spoken to little more than a week ago—had been found floating in the harbor, next to one of the troop ships.
Once again the newspapers were inflaming the population with wild and fantastic rumors that had no basis in fact. One newspaper claimed that the Raval Monster had been seen prowling the docks dressed as a priest in search of prostitutes; another described him climbing buildings in the Raval like a giant ape. Such pernicious drivel might sell newspapers, but Mata had no doubt that Romeu had been killed because she had spoken to him, and that knowledge felt far more alarming than any of the fantasies circulating in the press. He left Ossorio’s offices and walked down the Ramblas, past the police, Civil Guards, and Somaten, who had been deployed up and down the thoroughfare in even larger numbers than usual. Mata knew they were intended to reinforce Ossorio’s message of order and control, but he could not help finding the presence of so many armed men intimidating and depressing, as he walked on to keep his appointment with Quintana. Cities that worked well did not need to be protected in this way, and the murder of Angela Romeu was further proof that his city was not working well at all.
It was less than twenty-four hours since he had watched the longshoremen fish the prostitute’s naked body out of the harbor, and he was not looking forward to seeing her again as he turned into the Calle Hospital and continued into the medical school. He had arranged with Quintana to take photographs of the murdered woman, and he went directly to the autopsy room, where one of the orderlies went to fetch Quintana. A moment later he emerged wearing his bloody surgical clothes and holding a knife in his hand, like an Aztec priest returning from a sacrifice.
“Bernat,” he said. “I’m glad you came. I’ve got something interesting to show you.”
Mata followed him gloomily to one of the slabs, where Quintana drew back the sheet covering the body of Angela Romeu.
Mata took the usual photographs of her head and shoulders, and then Quintana pulled the sheet down further. Mata lowered the camera and stared with pity and disgust at the cavity that reached down from her neck to her ribs where Quintana or one of his colleagues had opened her up, and the bites and wounds that he had already seen.
“Have a look at this.” Quintana held up the dead woman’s left arm with one hand. Mata leaned forward, as the pathologist prised apart a small cut in the vein just below her elbow.
“I don’t understand,” Mata said.
“It’s not a bite or a wound!” Quintana looked as excited as Mata had ever seen him. “It’s an incision. Made with a surgical instrument. Exactly where you would expect to find a tube for a phlebotomy.”
“A what?”
“A blood transfusion. This is where the blood would go in. Or out.”
“You mean her blood was drained through a tube?”
“That’s what it looks like. And she’s not the only one.” Quintana walked along the row of corpses and drew back another sheet to reveal Ignasi the cretin. Once again Mata photographed his face, before Quintana drew back the sheet and showed him the same incision on his left arm.
“You see?” he said. “The same thing. And that made me think about these blue marks and the rash. That suggests a haemolytic reaction. When you mix two incompatible blood types.”
“You mean he had someone else’s blood put into him?” Mata stared at him in confusion.
“Exactly. But it was the wrong kind. We found traces of blood type A and AB—according to Landsteiner’s classification. That would have caused agglutination. It may even be that that’s what killed him.”
“Before these wounds were made, you mean?”
“Possibly.”
“And the other victims?” Mata asked. “Hermenigildo and Tosets? Did they have these incisions?”
Quintana shrugged. “I didn’t see them. The bodies were too badly mauled. Anyway they’re both buried now.”
“You’ve told Bravo Portillo about this?”
“I did,” Quintana said. “He didn’t seem to think it was significant. He still thinks a madman did this. And maybe he’s right. Only it’s not the kind of madman we thought it was.”
“But what about these other wounds? You said yourself they were bites or claw marks.”
“They are.” Quintana frowned. “And I don’t understand it. It’s as if these victims were attacked by two different people—assuming that whatever made these marks is human.”
“What else could it be?”
Quintana shrugged. “It’s clearly some kind of animal. But a phlebotomy requires science. I don’t know why anyone would perform such procedures, but I can tell you this: Bravo Portillo is completely out of his depth here. And who can blame him? These aren’t the kind of murders we’re used to. This is something for your Irishman.”
“I don’t know where he is. I went to his hotel. The receptionist says he’s out of the city.”
“He’s not gone back to London?”
“I don’t see why he would. But I hope he comes back soon.”
Mata left his friend still poring over the murdered woman’s body and went back out onto the street and returned to his office to write up Ossorio’s conference. It was nearly dark by the time he set off home, and as he walked back to his house he had the feeling that the city of his childhood and youth was changing into something darker and more sinister than he had imagined possible. He thought fondly of the Barcelona of his youth and childhood: the city of the World Exposition, of Verdaguer’s ode, of dragons, devils, and human towers; the city of painters, poets, and builders of dream palaces; the Paris of the Mediterranean and the capital of the future independent republic of Catalonia.
Now he imagined Barcelona as Sodom and Gomorrah or Pompei; as a patient on its deathbed, slowly rotting away from a disease that had not yet been named, that could be seen only in its external symptoms. He arrived back at his flat and shut the great wooden door behind him with a feeling of gratitude and relief. The children were being put to bed, and Sylvia asked him to read Carles a story. Mata sat by his son’s bed and told him from memory the tale of the wolf who tried to eat the seven children. His father had once read him the same story, and Carles listened with the same fearful satisfaction that he had once felt as he described how the wolf was cut open and filled with stones.
“Do they have wolves in Barcelona, papa?” he asked.
“Definitely not.” Mata leaned forward and kissed his son on the forehead, as an image flitted through his mind of Angela Romeu lying on the autopsy table. In the same moment he thought of Lieutenant Ugarte sitting down for supper with his wife and children in his new flat, and wondered once again why Ugarte had not followed up on the information the murdered woman had given him.
“Is everything alright?” His wife’s voice broke into his thoughts and he looked up to see her smiling at him sympathetically.
“Yes, fine,” he said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m tired, that’s all.”
He gave her a wan smile, and tried to concentrate as his wife talked about the preparations for their forthcoming exodus to Puigcerdà. Like his son, there were things that it was better for her not to know about, and the way things were going the sooner they were out of the city the better. But for the time being he had other things on his mind. After supper he withdrew into his study. He had thought he might write a poem to lift his mind to a better place, but even as he stared at the blank paper with his favorite fountain pen, the fine verses refused to come. Instead he found himself thinking of the hairy anarchist beast depicted by the cartoonist from El Universo, leaping across the rooftops of the Raval with an unconscious woman under his arm. The woman had a sash around her with the word ORDER written on it, and the ape-like creature had a copy of Solidaridad Obrera protruding from a trouser pocket. Such caricatures were only to be expected from a Catholic newspaper, but the Radical Party papers had their own variants. El Progreso’s latest showed a young woman strapped to a bed frame surrounded by vampiric nuns, while a Jesuit with bloodstained hands stood watching approvingly.
The newspapers seemed only too willing to pander to the prejudices of their readers, and present them with monsters of their own invention. Meanwhile poor women died like dogs and their murderers sat down to eat supper with their families on a government salary and no one even cared enough about the victims to uncover the truth. The more he stared at the blank paper, the more intolerable it seemed that such a situation could be allowed to continue. Because poetry was all very well, but poetry without justice was like burning incense in a sewer. For much of his adult life the verses of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Verdaguer, and Maragall had moved and inspired him, but none of them could help him now. It was less than a year since Joan Rull had been garrotted, taking his secrets with him, and once again his city was being manipulated by puppeteers pulling invisible strings.
Mata did not know who or what the Raval Monster was, but he was certain it was not what the papers or the police said it was. Someone was lying, and their lies needed to be exposed. What Barcelona needed right now was not poetry, but a voice like Zola’s—an angry, passionate voice that denounced lies and corruption and upheld the cause of truth, just as Zola had once denounced the false charges against Dreyfus and the men who had manufactured the evidence against him. Unlike Zola, he could not name names, because he did not have enough evidence against Ugarte or anyone else. But he could point out the flaws and inconsistencies in the official investigation, and try to generate enough of a scandal to force the public and the authorities to do something about it. The more he contemplated this possibility, the more he felt his desolation recede.
In the end, no matter how bad or how hopeless things seemed, writers could do nothing else but write, even if they told people things they did not want to hear. That was what the Frenchman had done, and even though he might not be Zola, he had his own accusations to make. By the time he sat down at his desk and picked up his pen, the sentences were already beginning to form in his mind, and the more his hand moved across the white page, the more he felt hopeful that his prose might shake his city out of its delirium, just as it was sometimes necessary to shake or even slap someone who had become hysterical.
On Friday morning, Esperanza Claramunt was walking past the School of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on her way to work, when she found the caretaker trying to erase the word monsters from the school’s main entrance, while some of the nuns stood watching gloomily. She had seen similar slogans scrawled on convents and churches in Gràcia and other parts of the city throughout the week. She had heard the stories circulating in the newspapers and on the street that priests and nuns were kidnapping children and young women and torturing them in underground torture chambers, and she had heard some of her own pupils repeat these stories.
Even if she had never known Pau or witnessed his kidnapping, she would not have taken such stories seriously. Now their stupidity and absurdity made her angry, and she could not help feeling that these rumors were being deliberately manufactured for purposes that were not yet clear, as she continued on toward her own school for what she knew might be her last day of work before the general strike. The following day delegates from all over Catalonia were coming to the city to attend the meeting of the workingmen’s federation, where they would vote on whether to call a strike in response to Maura’s war.
Esperanza had done everything possible to make sure they made the right decision. In the evenings she went out with the Gràcia comrades in her own neighborhood, distributing leaflets and making speeches calling for a general protest strike. On other days she and the Invincibles visited the workers districts in Clot, Pobleneu, and Sant Andreu. In the last week she had visited factories and workplaces, libraries, public squares, anarchist meeting places, and cafés to hand out leaflets or listen to speeches by Ruben, Arnau, or Pau’s mother. As she went about these preparations she often wondered how Director Vargas would react if he found out what she was doing, and she had taken pains to avoid the subject of the strike while she was at school.
That morning, however, Vargas informed the staff and children that the school would remain open in the event of a strike. Vargas also referred for the first time to certain rumors that had been circulating through the neighborhood. Although the Elisée Reclus school was not a church school, he told the children, they should not believe that nuns and priests were murderers. Such stories were nonsensical and they were also lies, and just because some adults were foolish enough to believe such things, there was no reason for them to do the same.
Vargas did not need to describe these rumors, and even though Esperanza agreed that they were nonsensical, it also annoyed her that he should declare so emphatically against a strike. Her mother often asked her what would happen to her and Eduardo if she lost her job, and Esperanza had hoped that Vargas would resolve this dilemma by closing the school. Now she would have to choose whether to work or strike after all, which might also mean that she would have to decide whether to come in to work or disobey Vargas’s instructions. The director’s appeal failed to have its desired effect on the children. No sooner had she entered the classroom than she was showered with questions. What was a strike? What was the difference between a strike and a revolution? Was it true that the churches were going to be burned? Did she know that the Monster was a priest who moved through the Raval in secret tunnels?
Esperanza knew her answers might reach the director’s ears, and she chose her answers carefully. A strike, she said, was what happened when workers stopped working. The last time this had happened in Barcelona was in 1902, before most of the children were born. People went on strike, she said, to protest against things that were wrong or unfair. Sometimes they did this in order to change their working conditions and sometimes they united with other workers for political reasons that went beyond the workplace. The war in Morocco was one of those reasons. Many people across the country did not agree with the war, she said, and did not want to fight it. But that was not the same thing as a revolution. A revolution was what happened when the people overthrew their king or government, as the people of France had done in 1789.
Could the strike become a revolution? one of the children asked. Once again Esperanza chose her words with caution. It was possible, she said, but as far as she knew nothing of that sort was being planned in Barcelona. She did not think that any churches would be burned, and she agreed with Director Vargas that the so-called Monster was not a priest. These answers only produced more questions. If the Monster was not a priest or a vampire then what was it? Why was the war in Morocco wrong? Two of her children raised their hands and said that their fathers had been sent to Morocco, and another girl said her brother had also been called up. Would they be all right? Was it true that the Moorish women beat prisoners to death with clubs?
Esperanza answered these questions as best she could. For the rest of the morning she struggled to get her pupils’ attention. Some of the children were still discussing the Monster at lunchtime, and Vargas announced that the next child to bring up the subject would be given detention. They were about halfway through the meal when the caretaker came in and said that Miss Claramunt had a visitor. Esperanza was surprised by this. She had already arranged to go out into the Raval with Ruben and the Invincibles after choir practice and she was not expecting a visitor now. She was even more surprised to find Bernat Mata waiting for her by the entrance. They walked away from the school to a nearby plane tree, where Mata leaned on his stick and began fanning himself with his hat.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “But I wanted to warn you about a piece I’m writing in the paper—about the murders. It should appear tomorrow.”
“Why do you need to warn me?”
“Because I will be saying some hard things. And some people— powerful people—may not like them. I wanted to alert you in case there are any… negative repercussions.”
“Such as?”
“You’ve heard about the woman who was killed two days ago? The one in the harbor?”
“The prostitute? I read about her. Poor thing.”
“That was the woman I spoke to. Hermenigildo Cortéz’s woman.”
Esperanza had not known this, and Mata’s concerned expression made her feel suddenly anxious. “Do you know who killed her?” she asked.
“No. But I’m certain she was killed because she spoke to me. I thought you should know that.”
“You’re not suggesting I’m at risk?”
“No, not at all.” Mata gave a reassuring smile. “Just keep your eyes open, that’s all. Probably better not to go out alone. Oh, and I have a question, you don’t happen to know an old terrorist named Salvador Santamaría?”
Esperanza raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure why you think I consort with terrorists.” she said.
“I just thought you might have heard of him,” Mata said impatiently.
“Well, I haven’t. Sorry.”
“Maybe you could ask your ‘comrades’?” suggested Mata.
Esperanza ignored the condescension. “We’re rather busy right now.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Mata. “Chaos takes a lot of organization.”
“A protest against an unjust war is not chaos, Señor Mata.”
“We’ll see. In any case the police are too busy dealing with you and your friends to investigate these murders. Let’s hope there aren’t any more of them, eh?”
For the rest of the school day, Esperanza tried not to think too deeply about the warning Mata had given her. That day school ended two hours early for the weekend. Despite her mother’s pleading, she had arranged to go out with Ruben and the Invincibles into the Raval in the early evening to prepare the population for the strike. There were rumors that the Civil Governor intended to stop the federation from meeting the next day, and all the comrades agreed that crowds were needed in the streets to make sure it did.
Most of the Invincibles were still at work, and there was no point in going to the Athenaeum so early. Instead she walked over to the conservatory for choir practice, which she had missed for the last two weeks. As a child she had loved the sound of church choirs, and there had been a time when she had imagined that these were the sounds she would hear in Heaven. Long after she had stopped believing in God she had continued to sing in her local choir, not for the words but for the melodies and beauty of it and the pleasure of harmonizing her voice with others. Her mother wanted her to sing in the Orfeó, the most prestigious of Catalonia’s choral societies, but Esperanza preferred the New Catalan Choral Society, because the Nova Catalunya was more of a workers choir than the Orfeó, and she enjoyed the pieces that Enric Morera selected for them.
That afternoon she was pleased to find that Morera had chosen the Hebrew slaves chorus from Nabucco. Morera’s frown as she came into the hall made it clear that he was not pleased by her absence. He told her that her voice was sounding hoarse, and she saw no need to mention that she had been shouting and giving speeches all week. By the time she left the conservatory her voice was even more strained, but she felt stirred by Verdi’s music as she hummed the melody to herself.
The Invincibles were already waiting for her outside the Athenaeum, and Arnau said that they would go out into the Atarazanas district near the harbor. Esperanza walked next to him down the Ramblas, with Ruben on the other side of her.
“I hear things are going well in Gràcia,” Arnau said.
“They are,” she replied. “The people are absolutely behind the strike. Even if the vote goes badly tomorrow.”
Arnau looked pleased. “It won’t go badly. If the masses come out to support it, the delegates will have to listen. And when it passes we should come up and give you a hand.”
“It’s all organization now,” Esperanza said. “Maura’s done most of the work for us. Even my neighbors are talking about a republic. And some of them even talk of bringing Maura down.”
“Good for them,” Ruben said. “But revolutions need leadership.”
Arnau agreed. The more comrades there were in Gràcia, he said, the more chance they had of shutting the Radicals out. The Radicals were not true revolutionists, he said, and a republic with soldiers, police, and priests was no different from a monarchy with soldiers, police, and priests. Esperanza knew he was right. But the Radical Party was very strong in Gràcia, and she doubted whether the Invincibles could do much about it. Soon they reached the bottom of the Ramblas and turned right into the lower part of the Raval. Esperanza knew the neighborhood behind the old Atarazanas shipyards was one of the poorest in the city, and even though some of her pupils came from there, she had never been to this part of the Raval herself. Now she looked indignantly at the moldering tenements and wooden shacks, and she felt the same outrage and astonishment that human beings could live in such places. Once again she heard the choir singing “Oh mia Patria sì bella e perduta! O membranza sì cara e fatal!” But there was no slave chorus to redeem these stinking, unpaved streets, only the men and women standing outside their shacks and hovels like prisoners of war, while their spindly barefoot children played in pools of dirty water.
As in Gràcia, almost everyone they spoke to was in favor of a general strike. Even the prostitutes denounced the war and said that they would be joining the protest. Esperanza was disappointed once again to find that much of their anger was directed at the Church rather than the government or the army. Many buildings were already daubed with Radical Party slogans blaming the war on the monks, Jesuits, and convents, and many of the people they spoke to were Lerroux’s supporters. Their loathing of priests and nuns was visceral and profound, and Esperanza sensed that it was not simply due to the war or even to the Radical Party’s propaganda. Arnau and Ruben both agreed that such hatred could be useful, and they made no attempt to challenge the Radicals as they continued to work their way through the streets and rows of shacks.
After two hours the sky began to darken and the smell of fried meat and fish began wafting through the neighborhood. Esperanza was beginning to feel hungry herself, when she heard the sound of gunshots coming from the direction of the port. The shots were immediately followed by a louder and more coordinated volley. Esperanza heard angry shouts and another ragged burst of pistol shots. A few moments later a group of young men came running up the street toward her from the direction of the Ramblas. They looked as if they were running from bulls, but some of them were armed with pistols, and they ducked into doorways as other members of the crowd ran past shouting “Long live the Republic!” and “Long live Lerroux!”
Within minutes the narrow street was swarming with running men and women, and she could see helmeted police running toward them. Some of the youths at the rear of the crowd began to fire at the police, and the police took shelter and fired back. Esperanza had never seen anything like this, and she felt the same hysterical claustrophobia that she had once felt as a child when she witnessed the Mercè procession for the first time, as the crowd stampeded past her. She remembered how she had screamed for her father when the dragons came charging toward her with fireworks exploding and flaring from their nostrils, and he had reached down and plucked her to safety.
She was still looking around in panic and confusion when Ruben came up behind her and pulled her toward a nearby doorway. He stood with his back to the crowd and his arms outstretched to protect her. Esperanza was glad Ruben could not see the terror on her face, as she stared down at the street and tried not to scream. She was still standing there when she saw something fall from his jacket pocket. He bent down to scoop it up, and she was surprised to see a thick roll of peseta bills in his hand. She had no time to see how much it was, but she could not help thinking that it was a lot of money for a humble factory worker from Poblenou. Soon the pressure of the crowd began to ease, and Ruben stepped away and looked at her with concern.
“You alright? Lerroux’s young barbarians eh? Always too early or too late.”
Esperanza smiled tensely. As far as she could see no one had been killed, but Arnau said they should get out of the neighborhood in case the police came back. Esperanza had no objections. It was only now, as the group made its way back onto the Ramblas, that it occurred to her that she had just been in her first gunfight and she realized that her hands were trembling. Ruben offered to walk her to the tram, but she politely refused. She had intended to ask if he had heard of Salvador Santamaría, but now she had no desire to speak to him about anything at all. As she walked back up the gloomy thoroughfare, she thought of Mata’s warning not to be out by herself, but she felt more angry than frightened now. Because the more she thought about the money that had fallen from Ruben Montero’s jacket pocket, the more it seemed to her that this was something that Mata would want to know about.
Once again Lawton saw the factory towers up ahead and he knew that they were nearly in Barcelona. To his left he could see patches of ocean, beyond a field splashed with red poppies that gave onto a citrus orchard. Three days ago these same views had pleased him, now he was anxious to get back to the city. Even with the upper window open, the heat was suffocating, to the point when he almost envied the passengers sitting on the roof. He had not felt inclined to join them. His right knee still felt stiff and painful from where he had fallen at Foulkes’s house, and there was a faint whining in his left ear, as though an insect was trapped inside his head.
As he willed the train to move once again, he remembered Dr. Morris’s advice. He was not doing very well at avoiding difficult or stressful situations, but it was not his fault that militia thugs had beaten him with rifle butts, or that someone had tried to kill him for the first time since the war. He had no doubt Weygrand had sent the would-be assassin, and he had been ready to return to Barcelona even as he walked back to Vernet from Foulkes’s house the previous day. It was clear to him then that he could not talk about his investigation to any officials who might ask him about it. Instead he brushed himself down and washed his face and hands in the stream as best he could and then limped back to the hotel, where he told the receptionist at the Hotel du Portugal that there had been an explosion at Dr. Foulkes’ house, and that he had found a dead man in the forest.
He did not mention that he had broken into the house himself, but the horrified receptionist immediately called the police in Villefranche and sent a messenger to summon the fire wagon and a doctor. By the time the fire wagon went racing up the road, Lawton had already begun to make his own discreet inquiries about the motor car. He soon established that a red Delaunay-Belleville with a passenger and driver had passed through Vernet and returned by the Villefranche road. He knew they had come from Barcelona, and he hurried to Monsieur Béchard’s studio to pick up his photographs. On returning to the hotel, he found two French policemen waiting in the lobby, who ordered him to accompany them to the gendarmerie at Villefranche.
There he was interrogated by a police officer who proved to be more zealous than most provincial policeman he had known. The officer took his statement, but seemed reluctant to accept that he had nothing to do with the explosion or the murder of the shepherd. Eventually Lawton managed to convince him, but not before the officer had telegraphed Paris, for reasons he did not explain. As a result he had missed the last train to Perpignan and spent the previous night in an inn just inside the medieval walls of Villefranche. Now he had wasted much of the day waiting for trains that stopped for no reason or moved at the same glacial pace.
Finally the train resumed its snail-like progress through the Barcelona suburbs, and an hour later it pulled into the Estación de Francia once again. Despite his pains and bruises, Lawton rushed out of the station to catch a taxi. Once again he rounded the harbor, and he was pleased to see that the Helgoland had disappeared. Even before the cab pulled up alongside the Hotel Colón he had his coins ready, and he dropped them into the driver’s hand and rushed toward the entrance. Some of the guests looked askance at his sweaty, disheveled appearance and his breathless urgency as he strode across the marble floor and asked the receptionist for Dr. Weygrand. The receptionist replied that the doctor and his companion had checked out of the hotel that morning, without saying where they had gone.