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increasingly difficult.
    “You think I’m an idiot. Remember that idiots have bad memories and sometimes they forget they’re holding somebody up over a four-storey drop.”
    “No, no. I’m not lying,” he lies. “One Eye wanted the corpse for black magic, for witchcraft.”
    “One Eye couldn’t tell the difference between electric light and a pile of horseshit. You want me to believe he was a necromancer?”
    “A what?”
    Corvo is about to let him go. But he is the only means he has for resolving a crap murder with a crap victim. Who cares who killed One Eye? They should build whoever it was a monument. Normally he would have made a toast to the son of a bitch who’d taken him out of circulation, one less lowlife on the streets. A wretch and wastrel, a grave defiler and a war amputee. Definitely a lowlife. But it could be that something different is hiding behind that death, one of so many that happen every day in this city of masks and lies. It could be an open door that leads to the monster, or that man that passes as one.
    “One Eye dealt with strange people. Healers, charlatans, people like that.”
    “Have you ever seen an execution by hanging, Blackmouth?”
    Corvo pulls him away from the drop and throws him against the terrace tiles. Some pigeons wake up and coo, but the city keeps pretending nothing’s going on.
    “No.” Blackmouth is no longer afraid. It seems the danger has passed.
    “Of course not. Because it’s been a while since the executioner has been working his trade around here. And you know why? Because when I ask questions, people tend to talk. And if they don’t talk, then I make sure they never do again. I’m the jealous type.”
    “I’m talking, I’m talking. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
    “You should know more.” Blackmouth hastens to invent a good story. The two policemen look at him, expectant.
    “Some Negroes…” he says, but he knows he has to be more specific. “I don’t know their names, but they’re two big Negroes, from Africa, who came to Barcelona a few months ago. They knew what One Eye did for a living and they asked him for bodies.”
    Corvo pulls out his revolver and opens the cylinder. He has six bullets, perfect. He closes it and points it at Blackmouth.
    “With this shit you won’t even make it to the gallows.”
    “It’s true. They are two huge Negroes, from the area around the Santa Madrona gate. Ask whoever you want, you’ll see I’m not lying. They have the Cubans and the Filipinos scared out of their wits. They threaten to keep their souls and things like that. One Eye got mixed up with them, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, that kind of stuff gives me the jitters.”
    Blackmouth is lying, but not entirely. The two Negroes he is talking about are two Guineans from the colonies who extort their fellow countrymen and other unfortunates who believe that if they don’t pay like a good Christian should, excuse my irony, they will turn them into zombies, into walking dead who owe their masters obedience. Blackmouth got into it with them once when they caught him stealing their money, and his ribs still hurt.
    “And they killed him?” asks Malsano.
    “I don’t know, I haven’t seen One Eye for a while.”
    “But you were seeing him to go to the doctor’s house. What kind of neighbours do you have, who are only interested in rotting bodies?”
    “I can take you to them. I can help you catch them.”
    “Now you want to work for us?”

4
    M OISÈS CORVO IS A DOG: nobody pisses in his territory. And if that means stinking up the whole neighbourhood with the cloying stench of urine, he has no problem with that. Moisès Corvo quit walking the beat some time ago, quit being cannon fodder, with a blindfold over his eyes and a yes sir on his lips, to become the gun dog he is now.
    He’s no longer the defender of the good folk, because he no longer believes in good folk. In Corvo’s specific world there are only two