Javier Cercas - Outlaws

‘The day I’m talking about must have been a Monday or a Tuesday because there weren’t many people in the bar and Mondays and Tuesdays were slow days in the district. When we went in Hidalgo and I always carried on straight to the back, where we could get a good view of the whole place, and we stayed there while Vedette or her husband pressed the button that turned the red light on in the rooms and the girls moved away looking at us from the other end of the bar with the usual mixture of suspicion and indifference. We talked for a while with Vedette, and then I left her with Hidalgo and went to talk to three girls who were alone at the bar. The first two didn’t tell me anything out of the ordinary, but, after a few minutes of conversation, the third told me or led me to understand — or maybe it slipped out — that Zarco and his gang had spent a fortune in the place the previous Saturday night. I spoke to the first two girls again, who confirmed the story a bit reluctantly, and one of them added, probably to make up for her previous silence, that one of the kids had mentioned that he or someone from the gang or the whole gang had been in Lloret that afternoon. I went back to the bar and told the owner what her girls had told me; a little grimace gave her away: because it was in her interest, Vedette had always behaved very well towards us, but she was an astute woman and knew that information was power and liked to be the one who handled it and doled it out; in any case she immediately realized that she neither could nor should refute what her charges had said, so she had no choice but to confirm it, although she tried to play down Saturday’s orgy, assuring us that Zarco and the rest had spent much less money than the girls had claimed and denied having heard anything to do with Lloret.

‘The first thing I did when I got to the station the next morning was to ask whether there’d been any robberies in the city or province that we hadn’t heard about. Nobody knew anything, but Hidalgo, Mejía and I started making inquiries and soon found out that the Civil Guard in Lloret had received a complaint the previous day of a break-in at a bungalow in a housing development called La Montgoda. That’s how we connected one thing to the other. And that’s how I got my first suspicion that the gang we were looking for was Zarco’s gang. How do you like that?’

‘It was at the beginning of August, not long after I slept with Tere on the Montgó beach, outside the Marocco, and it was like cresting a hill not least because from that moment on the gang was reduced almost by half. I’m talking about Guille’s death and the arrests of Chino, Tío and Drácula.

‘It happened at the same time as my parents went away on holiday. Until then I’d always gone with them, but I spent the month of July announcing to my mother that I was going to stay in Gerona with my sister and she and my father finally accepted it. My parents’ departure simplified things, because it allowed me to stop leading a double life — that of a quinqui with Zarco’s gang, that of a conventional teenager with my family — and to enjoy much more liberty than I’d ever enjoyed before. I don’t think my parents left without me calmly, but I don’t think they had much choice either, because at sixteen it was impossible to force me to go with them and on top of that they must have been more than fed up with the arguments, complaints, rude remarks and hostile silences, and maybe they thought it would do me good to spend a month apart from them. What my parents did try to do was keep me under control through my sister, although she wasn’t much help to them: as soon as I understood that they’d put her in charge of keeping an eye on me and keeping them informed, I threatened her, told her I knew a lot about her and that, if she told our parents anything I was up to, I’d do the same; of course, I was bluffing, I had no idea what kind of life my sister was leading and had not the slightest interest in finding out, but she didn’t know that and she did know I was serious, that I’d changed in that brief month and a half of summer and was no longer the fragile adolescent or faint-hearted little brother I used to be, and on account of that she had begun to fear my reactions, if not respect me. So she had no choice but to shut up and accept the blackmail.

‘I’m sure I don’t need to clarify that my parents’ departure affected me, not the gang; what affected the gang was, as I was saying, Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest. The episode was pretty confusing, and I wasn’t involved, so what I’m going to tell you is not what happened but what I reconstructed after it happened. That afternoon Guille’s group didn’t even come into La Font; I knew they were up to something but I didn’t know exactly what, which was quite normal anyway, because normally only Zarco and Guille knew what we were all up to and the rest of us knew nothing or only knew about stuff once it had already happened. This ignorance wasn’t premeditated, a security measure or anything like that; it was just a symptom of our absolute subordination to Zarco and Guille, proof that, in the hierarchy of the group, those of us who weren’t Zarco and Guille were no more than extras. The thing is that Guille and his group had planned a robbery in a village near Figueras that afternoon and the robbery went wrong because, as we began to learn that night and as was related in the newspapers the next day, while Guille and Drácula were inside the house the owner and two of his sons showed up firing hunting rifles and scared them away. Everything would have ended at that if some neighbours, alerted by the gunshots, hadn’t called the police and if not for the coincidence that there was a milk cart, which is what we called the white Seat 131s of the police fleet, nearby; these two things meant that, when our guys pulled out onto the main road fleeing the failed robbery, they practically crashed into the cop car and a full-speed chase ensued that ended a few kilometres further on, when Tío took the curve of the Bàscara bridge too fast and lost control of the Seat 124 they were in, and the car flipped over several times before going over the railings and falling into the river. Guille got stabbed in the sternum with the gear stick and died instantly; Tío, Chino and Drácula survived, although Tío broke his spinal column in several places and was left a quadriplegic.

‘The days following the accident were very strange. None of us went to Guille’s funeral or visited the injured guys in hospital or showed any concern for them or their families (only some time later Tere did); actually, everything went on as if that catastrophe hadn’t happened, except for the fact that for three days we were sort of dormant, we even stopped stealing cars, and people in the district and at Rufus bombarded us with questions and the secret police interrogated us several times. But between ourselves, as far as I remember, we barely mentioned the accident, or we only mentioned it in a neutral and dispassionate way as if it had nothing to do with us. I don’t have any explanation for that either. Perhaps it was all a pose, or we were like punch-drunk boxers, or in reality the accident and its consequences overwhelmed us, and that’s why we talked so little about it. You could say that, but I’m not sure it’s true.

‘What is true is that the incident changed everything. I remember very well how the change began. One afternoon, after about four or five days of total paralysis, Zarco, Gordo and Colilla went into a villa at La Fosca beach, between Calella and Palamós, while I stood guard by the door, and they came out of there with an armour-plated safe they could barely carry between the three of them; and we put it in the trunk and tried to open it in an empty field, but we quickly realized we wouldn’t be able to without help and took it to the General’s house. The expression on the General’s face changed when we told him what we had in the car and he told us to leave the safe in the yard and then asked us to wait there. We waited there, accompanied or guarded by the General’s wife, who came in and out of the yard in silence, with her grey hair and grey housecoat and vague eyes. The General came straight back. With him came two men carrying two toolboxes. After examining the safe, the men took out some safety goggles, gloves and a pair of blowtorches and got to work. An hour later they’d destroyed the lock and opened the safe.