Javier Cercas - Outlaws

‘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?’