Barcelona Crime Investigation Team

The Barcelona Crime Squad is the police force headed by Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero, whose authority reaches from the bookshop counter to wartime detention and the morgue. Though the evidence gives little account of the organization’s formal structure, its agents’ conduct shows how police power serves both as an official institution and as a means of personal persecution: it threatens witnesses, punishes inquiry, and can make a false identity the basis of an official death record.

Identity and Leadership

The organization is identified as the Barcelona Crime Squad, with Fumero publicly known as its chief inspector. Father Fernando describes his reputation as notorious and widely recognized, even among people who rarely leave their religious establishment. The force therefore enters the story not as an abstract institution but through the reach and reputation of its leader.

Fumero’s position also lends authority to the threats he makes. At the Sempere bookshop, he displays his police identification and warns Daniel and his father that they could face trouble over allegedly selling communist material. The encounter makes clear that the badge can turn a personal accusation into an intimidating claim backed by the state.

Surveillance and Intimidation

The Squad’s agents accompany Fumero when he intercepts Fermín and Daniel near the Hospice of Santa Lucia. Two men seize and restrain them while Fumero questions Fermín about their visit and warns that he could take them to headquarters. One agent tells Daniel not to get involved, threatening to break his arm. The officers’ presence makes the interrogation effective before any formal arrest: restraint and the threat of further force are enough to control the scene.

The encounter also reveals the Squad’s interest in the past. Fumero accuses Fermín of investigating matters that are none of his business, assaults him, and warns Daniel that he will be next. He declares that the past must be left alone. His demand is not merely a private grievance; it is enforced with the assistance of police agents, turning historical inquiry into a source of immediate danger.

Torture and Political Repression

Fermín’s account connects Fumero and the Squad’s methods to the change of power in Barcelona during the war. After the city falls, Fermín says, he becomes a persecuted criminal, while Fumero is placed in charge of the cleanup operation. Fermín is arrested at the port as he tries to secure passage to France for his superiors and is taken to Montjuic Castle. There he is held in a dark cell and tortured by Fumero and a German-speaking man in an effort to extract information about the people in hiding.

The consequences continue after Fermín’s release. He is abandoned in an alley in Pueblo Seco, badly injured, and taken in by a woman who cares for him for two months. Later, when Dr Baro examines him, he identifies the marks as injuries caused by torture. The episode shows how the Squad’s power reaches beyond interrogation: its violence leaves a person displaced, dependent on private help, and unable to return safely to an ordinary life.

Records, Identity, and Impunity

The Squad’s influence also appears in the handling of bodies and official records. When a man identified by a passport as Julian Fortuny Carax is brought to the morgue in September 1936, the police claim he was found in the Raval shortly before dawn. The passport indicates that Carax entered the country a month earlier, and the stated cause of death is a gunshot wound. The morgue employee, however, believes the body had been dead for more than a day, contradicting the police account.

At the morgue, Fumero is the third policeman present while Carax’s father is brought in to identify the body. After the father leaves, the policeman approaches the corpse, spits on its face, keeps the passport, and orders that it be sent to Montjuic for burial in a common grave. When the morgue employee objects that the identity has not been established and the procedure is irregular, the officer threatens him. The official paperwork is signed, and the body is assigned the identity the policeman dictates. The employee later recognizes the same signature on numerous death certificates for unidentified bodies, suggesting that this abuse of procedure is repeated rather than isolated.

The pattern recurs when Miquel Moliner is killed during the war and his body is left in the Raval. Because his own papers are not with him, the morgue finds a damaged passport bearing Julian Carax’s name and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. Fumero recognizes Miquel, but signs the report identifying him as Carax and orders the body’s removal to a common grave at Montjuic. By certifying the false identity, he helps ensure that the official record declares Carax dead and obscures the connection between the killing and the police. The Squad’s power thus lies not only in pursuing and punishing people, but also in determining whose identity the state will recognize and what version of a death will remain on record.

Narrative Significance

The Barcelona Crime Squad links everyday intimidation to wartime political violence. Its presence at the bookshop, its agents’ restraint of Daniel and Fermín, Fermín’s account of torture, and the falsification of morgue records form a chain in which coercion and official procedure reinforce one another. The organization’s authority is most consequential where it controls the boundary between private memory and public fact: it can threaten those who investigate the past and make an imposed identity appear legally settled.