Сантьяго Ронкальоло - Barcelona Noir

“Do you know how old she is? Fourteen! That fucking asshole, or his buddies, brought her over from Guinea with fake papers and put her out on the streets!”

“So why did he tell me it happened at the plaza with three chimneys?”

“Why do I give a fuck what he said? Why don’t you go back and ask him why he’s lying? Fucker! They raped her, they choked her, and they left her for dead... and you’re asking why that piece of shit is lying? Mother of God!”

“But—”

“She’s just a girl! Do you get that? A little girl!”

I wanted to argue with her but Paty raised her hand, opened the door of a taxi, and left me gazing at it as it disappeared up the street. I have no idea how she does it; I never have any luck with taxis.

Later that week, there was an anonymous call. A body had been found in the trash at a building in Poble Nou. It was a girl.

She was Chinese, very young. They’d tortured her before strangling her. Her torn vagina and anus indicated a vicious sex crime but the police actually thought it might be worse, and they’d shut down the block. They didn’t even want to think about the possibility that it was gangland revenge.

The ghosts of Eastern European immigration nourished the fears. Russians, Chechens, Serbians, and Bosnians all arrived marked by war, and their methods were especially brutal. They weren’t afraid of anything and only the Chinese competed with them, except when it came to exploiting the homeless, which was dominated by the Romanians. It’s possible that in Europe no one would have taken a Chinese beggar seriously.

But I’d already added two plus two and I’d come up with El Delgado’s massive figure.

The dead girl had been found not too far from where the black pimp had told me the suspect was. That the girl was Asian also reminded me of the night at Clavié when, with that crazy expression, he’d muttered the cryptic phrase about the slender charm of Chinese women.

There was something to what that black guy had told me. It would turn into an article I could sell for a good price, or information with which I could barter.

As the morning wore on, I neared the plaza with the three chimneys, which is situated in a neighborhood that extends from the edge of Montjuic and blurs into Parallel, with its porno theaters and its ancient memories of sin.

Not even fascist bombers who used to aim at the three chimneys during the civil war could have recognized this place now. Each day, it got more and more crowded with skateboarders from all over Europe. If one were to go missing, nobody would even notice.

As if to compensate for all the skating noise and hot speed, the plaza was also packed with Pakistanis with their cricket sticks.

But the ones I was interested in were the homeless, the guys who slept up against the electric company building.

There were only two still around. A toothless drunken woman who laughed a lot and a tiny man, almost a dwarf, as dirty as she was, who was trying to win her favor with beer.

There wasn’t a trace of the so-called German. He could have been the nighttime tenant of any one of the folded cardboard sructures between buildings that served as precarious beds. Those two were the only ones around to question.

As I approached, the man puffed out a tubercular chest, just in case I wanted to challenge him for Julieta’s fleas. They lowered their guard a bit when I gave them some money. She grabbed the bills with a fierce look directed at her suitor and shoved them in her bra.

I couldn’t get much out of them while they tried lie after lie to see which one could loosen more euros. The description of the so-called German coincided quite a bit with Delgado, but they hadn’t seen him in a while.

I didn’t have to be anywhere and the spectacle of the Pakistanis playing so British a game was a good enough excuse to sit in the shade for a bit.

I’d been there for some time, getting bored watching the formerly colonized swinging their bats, when a thin Moor with several bottles of beer in a sweaty bag approached me. I bought one and he immediately offered me hashish and coke.

I said no, because I never buy on the street, but he didn’t leave, he stuck around, smiling with just his lips.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might have it.”

I was about to tell him to go to hell when it occurred to me this skinny guy might have seen me talking to the couple and might have a certain take on the neighborhood.

“El Delgado. What do you know about El Delgado?”

“A beer?”

I understood and passed him a few bucks, enough for five beers.

He made a vague head movement. “They say he went up,” he said, then turned his back and left, happily searching out other customers.

At that moment, I was certain he was pulling my leg. He was telling me Delgado was up in heaven with the angels. It took me awhile to realize I was wrong.

For a couple of weeks I did some media outreach for an ethnic music festival and I forgot about Delgado. I didn’t even think of him when the news hit about the Russian girl.

She wasn’t young but very small, with a body like a little girl, and they’d found her on the beach at Barceloneta. Her corpse had been left out in the open. Like a message for somebody. Raped and strangled. It was impossible to identify her, but her features suggested she was from the former Soviet Union, where they’re as much Slav as Mongolian: blond hair, high cheekbones, gray eyes that seemed vaguely Asian.

I didn’t think about Delgado again until early one morning when inertia took me to Clavié.

There were a couple of people at the piano, straining themselves singing “... estranyer indenai!” and Paty, who I hadn’t expected to find there, was tearfully killing her fourth gin and tonic.

“You men are all sons of bitches,” she said, warmly gesturing for me to sit with her.

She was in a stormy mood. That afternoon she’d interviewed the father and brothers of a girl who’d recently disappeared. Muslim Algerians with strict traditions, they struggled without news of the girl and became angrier and angrier with every passing hour.

“You must have seen the photos, the fliers. They’re on the lampposts,” she said.

“Maybe she ran off with somebody.”

“Or at this very moment, she’s being raped by twenty shitass machos,” she replied, pronouncing each syllable so as to pound it into my head. “Do you know what will happen if they find out who did it?”

“They’re going to cut him into little pieces?”

“Sweetheart...” she said, her eyes blurry from liquor, tears, and disdain, “he’s gonna hate his mother for ever having given birth to him.”

I was ordering a rum and Coke, which helps recharge the batteries at that hour, when I felt a hug and heard Cavalcanti’s voice.

“You’re exactly who I want to see,” he said. “I’ll buy you whatever you want; let’s talk business.”

“C’mon, man, I’m with my girlfriend. Why don’t we leave it for another day?”

The tango singer wrinkled his nose and, with a smile from golden times, bowed toward Paty.

“My dear lady, darling of Cupid and all gods with good taste, may I steal your intended for just a few minutes?”

Paty grinned from ear to ear because, curiously enough, she and Cavalcanti always got along quite well.

“Oh, noble gentleman,” she answered, “if you take him and lose him in some battle, this lady will be forever grateful.”

Since I had no choice, I followed him to a corner and drank his whiskey while acting like I wasn’t really listening.

“What a woman, pibe, what a woman! You know what I’m saying? You don’t deserve her.”

“Cavalcanti, don’t mess with me. What do you want now?”