Authors: Javier Cercas
‘That’s what I did. I ran through the empty park like a flash, passed the football pitch, the rifle range and the model-plane runway and ended up taking shelter in a grove of poplars stuck in between the Ter and the Güell, between the sports pavilion and the municipal dump. Dazed, I stayed in that hiding place for a while, trying to get over my fear, the pain of my wounded arm and the buzzing in my head. Although the buzzing soon stopped, the wound wouldn’t stop bleeding and the fear rushed back when the police helicopter flew low over the grove a couple of times, but I managed to think with sufficient clarity to understand that I should get out of there immediately and that I only had one safe place to go.
‘Making sure no one saw me, I left the poplar grove, got to Caterina Albert and went home.
‘When I got there everything happened very fast. When I went in, my whole family was eating. My mother and my sister cried out to high heaven when they saw my T-shirt soaked in blood; my father reacted differently; without a word he took me to the bathroom and, while I explained to all of them that I’d fallen off a motorcycle, he examined my wound. Once he’d examined it, my father asked my mother and sister to leave the bathroom. This is not from a fall, he said coldly when they left, pointing at my arm. Go on, tell me what happened. I tried to insist on my lie, but my father interrupted me. Look, Ignacio, he said. I don’t know what mess you’ve got into, but if you want me to help you, you have to tell me the truth. Without affection, he added: If you don’t want me to help you, you can leave. I understood he meant it, that he was right and that, no matter how badly he reacted to the truth, it would be a thousand times worse if the police arrested me; besides, by then I was coming down hard off the adrenaline and was so scared it was as if I’d injected myself in one single shot with complete awareness of the danger I’d exposed myself to in my forays of the past months.
‘I agreed. As best I could I told my father the truth. His reaction calmed me down a little, almost disconcerted me: he didn’t yell at me, didn’t get furious, he didn’t even seem surprised; he just asked me a few very specific questions. When I thought he’d finished I asked: What are we going to do? He didn’t even take a second or two to think. Go to the police station, he answered. A chill made my legs go weak. You’re going to give me up?, I asked. Yes, he answered. You said you’d help me, I said. That’s the best thing I can do to help you, he said. Dad, please, I begged. My father pointed at my wound and said: Wash that off and let’s get going. Then he left the bathroom and, while my mother came back in and washed the wound with the help of my sister, I heard him speaking on the phone. He spoke for quite a while, but I didn’t know what about or with whom, because the telephone was in the front hall and my mother and my sister were harassing me with questions; they were also trying to comfort me, because I’d started to cry.
‘Back in the bathroom, my father asked my mother to pack a suitcase for him and for me. I looked at him with my eyes full of tears; my father looked at me as if he’d just recognized me or as if he was about to burst into tears as well, and at that moment I knew he’d changed his mind, and that he wasn’t going to turn me in. Where are you going?, my mother asked. Pack the suitcase, my father repeated. I’ll explain later. In silence and without looking at my face again, my father finished cleaning out the wound, disinfected and bandaged it. When he finished he left the bathroom and for a couple of minutes I heard him speaking to my mother. He came back to the bathroom and said: Let’s go.
‘I followed him without questions. First we went to Francesc Ciurana Street and parked outside the door of a building where a close family friend lived, a lawyer from my parents’ hometown called Higinio Redondo. My father got out of the car and asked me to wait and, while I waited, I deduced that it had been Redondo he’d spoken to on the phone, after I told him what happened. After a while my father returned to the car alone and we crossed the city and left it by the highway to France. On the way he told me we were going to a summer home that Redondo had just bought in Colera, a remote coastal village; he assured me that, if the police went looking for me at home on Caterina Albert (something which was highly probable), my mother would not hide our whereabouts; he explained in detail what I had to tell the police in the event, also highly probable, that they came to Colera to interrogate me (what I had to say was, in short, that we’d spent a week there, just the two of us, stretching out the last days of the summer holidays). An hour later we arrived in Colera. The village streets were deserted; Redondo’s house was very close to the sea. As soon as we got in, my father started unpacking our things and arranging them in the wardrobes, or rather disarranging them and messing up the dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom and bedrooms, so it would look like a house where we’d been living for several days. Then he went shopping and I stayed in one of the rooms, lying on the bed and watching a tiny portable television. I hadn’t recovered from the fear or the exhaustion. I fell asleep. When my father woke me up I didn’t know where I was. Someone had turned off the TV and the light in the room was on. My arm didn’t hurt; I vaguely sensed that it was night-time. There’s someone out there who wants to talk to you, my father whispered. He’d crouched down beside me; running his hand down my other arm he added: It’s a policeman. He didn’t say anything else. He stood up, left the room and Inspector Cuenca came in.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Of course. And he knew me. We’d often seen each other in the district and he’d interrogated me at least a couple of times. That night he interrogated me too. Standing beside the bed, without asking me to get up – I had sat up just a bit: I was sitting on the mattress with my legs flexed and my back leaning against the wall – he asked the predictable questions and I gave him the answers my father had told me to say. While I was speaking I read in the inspector’s eyes that he wasn’t believing me; he didn’t believe me: when the interrogation was over he told me to get dressed, to pack some clothes in a bag, that I had to go with him. I’ll wait outside, he said, and walked out of the room.
‘I realized that all was lost. I don’t know exactly what happened during the minutes that followed. I know that fear suffocated me and I didn’t obey the inspector and didn’t get up off the bed; I know that I battled the imminence of the catastrophe by imploring in silence that all that had happened over the past three months hadn’t happened or had been a dream, and that I implored as if I were crying or as if I were praying, begging for a miracle. No miracle occurred, although what did happen is the closest thing to a miracle that has happened in my life. And do you know what it was?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. At some point the door to my room opened and Inspector Cuenca appeared. Naturally, I thought it was the end. But it wasn’t; in fact, it was the beginning. Because what happened was that Inspector Cuenca just stood there, silent, standing still, looking at me for a couple of endless seconds. And then he left.
‘Nothing else happened that night. Inspector Cuenca slammed the door on his way out, and after a moment my father came back into the room and sat down beside me on the bed. His face was as rigid as wax. As for me, at that moment I realized I was sitting on top of sheets that were drenched in sweat. I asked my father what had happened and he said nothing. I asked him what was going to happen. Nothing, he repeated. Although I had just woken up, I had the feeling of not having slept for months; I must have looked it, because my father added: Go to sleep. Obedient, as if I’d just suffered a sudden regression to childhood, I slid down and stretched out, not caring about the dampness of the sheets, and the last thing I noticed before sinking into sleep was my father getting up off the bed.’
‘Up until the beginning of July I wasn’t really pursuing Zarco’s gang. Why did it take me so long? Well because, as I said, up till then I hadn’t managed to find a clue – the clue I dragged out of Vedette – and I didn’t have the slightest suspicion that the gang I was after was Zarco’s gang.
‘Why should I lie to you: from the start I was too optimistic, thought it was going to be an easy job. After all my idea was that I was confronting a group of kids, and I didn’t think it would be complicated to catch them; the reality is that it took me more than two months to break up the gang. This delay can, of course, be put down to the fact that Zarco was razor sharp and knew every trick in the book; but it’s especially down to the fact that, at least during the month of July, my bosses’ interest in catching Zarco and his gang was more theoretical than actual, and I could never count on the support and men that I needed. The summer, moreover, was a bad time to do a job like that: you can imagine that between people off on holiday and Operation Summer – a surveillance measure that came into effect for the season every year on the Costa Brava – the station was often down to a skeleton staff. The first result of those two things was that, although I tried to make Deputy Superintendent Martínez and Inspector Vives understand that Mejía, Hidalgo and I couldn’t cope and that without more help we would take a lot longer to accomplish the mission we’d been assigned, they always had good arguments to refuse my requests for reinforcements; and the second result was that, since neither Hidalgo nor Mejía gave up their vacation time, and since both of them were sometimes detailed to Operation Summer (especially as bodyguards for politicians on holiday), I often found myself working on my own, wandering the alleys and strip clubs of the red-light district looking for a clue that would guarantee that the criminal gang I was after was Zarco’s gang and give me the chance to catch them.
‘At the beginning of August I thought the chance had arrived. That was when we arrested several members of the gang after they tried to rob a farmhouse in Pontós, near Figueras, and they crashed their car on the Bàscara bridge while trying to outrun a police car; one of them died in the accident and another ended up a quadriplegic, but I was able to interview the other two in the station. During the interrogations I confirmed without any room for doubt that the gang I was looking for was Zarco’s gang. That was the good news; the bad news was that I realized that Zarco wasn’t a typical
quinqui
like the others and catching him was going to be more difficult than I’d thought. The two gang members I interrogated were called Chino and Drácula. I knew them from the district, just like the rest, and I knew they were Zarco’s subordinates and not tough guys, so, when I started interrogating them, what I was after was not to charge them with the frustrated robbery of the farmhouse in Pontós and a few other jobs – I was already taking that for granted – what I wanted, as well, was for them to give up Zarco and the rest of the gang, but especially Zarco, because I was sure that bringing down Zarco would bring down the whole gang. Although to be honest, that’s also what I would have been after if Chino and Drácula had been tough guys and hadn’t just been mere subordinates.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What I mean is that back then everything was possible in the station, not like now, for us that was still a time of – how shall I put it? – impunity; there’s no other word: although Franco had been dead for three years, at the station we did whatever we liked, which is what we’d always done. That’s the reality; later, as I say, things changed, but that’s what it was like then. And, frankly, in those circumstances, it was unlikely that a sixteen-year-old kid, no matter how tough, would endure, without caving in and singing everything singable, the seventy-two hours we could hold him in a station house before bringing him before a judge, seventy-two hours without the right to a lawyer that the kid would spend between a darkened cell and interrogations lasting hours and hours during which the odd fist might slip, and that would be a best-case scenario for him. Frankly difficult, like I say. So imagine my surprise when Chino and Drácula held out. How do you like that? The thing is that’s the way it went: they took all they had no choice but to take, but they didn’t give up Zarco.’
‘Do you have an explanation for that display of bravery?’
‘Sure: that it was no display of bravery; in other words: Chino and Drácula were more scared of Zarco than they were of me. That’s why I said that was when I realized that Zarco was a real tough guy and catching him was going to be harder than I’d thought.’
‘I’m surprised you say Zarco was a real tough guy; for some reason I’d got the idea that you thought he was just unfortunate.’
‘And he was. But real tough guys are almost always unfortunate men.’
‘It also surprises me to hear you say his friends were scared of him.’
‘You mean the kids in his gang? Why does that surprise you? The soft ones fear the tough guys. And, maybe with the odd exception, the kids in Zarco’s gang were softies; so they were scared of him. Starting with Chino and Drácula.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I told you already: because, if they hadn’t been very afraid of Zarco, they wouldn’t have spent seventy-two hours in the station house without giving him up. Believe me. I was with them during those three days and I know what I’m talking about. And as far as whether or not Zarco was really a tough guy, just look at what he did after Guille’s death and the arrest of the others.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Getting hold of guns and starting to hold up banks.’
‘I’ve heard that back then it was less dangerous to rob a bank than a gas station or a grocery store.’
‘That’s what Zarco said.’
‘And isn’t it true?’
‘I don’t know. It’s true that the person behind the counter of a gas station or a grocery store was sometimes the proprietor and might feel tempted to resist the robbery, while the employees of banks would almost never entertain such crazy thoughts for the simple reason that they wouldn’t lose anything in the robbery of the bank, which anyway had the deposits in all their branches insured and gave their employees orders that in the case of a heist not to run needless risks and hand over the money without a second thought; and it’s also true that back then we hadn’t imposed the security measures on banks that two or three years later were obligatory and finally ended the craze for bank robberies: armed guards, double entrance doors for branches, security cameras, bullet-proof enclosures for the tellers, hidden retractable drawers, correlatively numbered bank notes, push buttons that activated alarms that sounded in the headquarters or even at the police stations . . . Anyway: all that’s true. But, man, it’s also true that it takes balls to walk into a bank armed with a rifle, threaten the employees and customers and make off with the money that’s there; especially if you’re sixteen years old, don’t you think?’