Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘Haven’t you asked Inspector Cuenca?’

  ‘No. I’ve never talked to the inspector about those days: I never wanted to talk to him and he never tried to talk to me about it. What for? Besides, I don’t think he could tell me anything I don’t know. The thing is there was a tip-off and, thanks to that, the police were able to set a trap for us.

  ‘At first we didn’t notice that they were waiting for us, and everything seemed to go according to plan. We arrived in Bordils at about one or one-thirty, Gordo parked very close to the door of the bank, in a sidestreet that led to the highway and, a few minutes later, Zarco, Jou and I got out of the car and walked into the branch pulling the nylon stockings over our heads. That was the first unusual thing I noticed: only two of us should have gone into the branch, not three; the role Zarco had assigned to Jou was to stay outside guarding the door: that’s why he had the pistol. I soon noticed other unusual things. At the same time as Jou and I aimed our weapons left and right and Zarco pronounced the words he’d prepared in his habitual tone (“Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t be nervous. Nothing’s going to happen. Please don’t be heroes. Keep still and nobody’ll hurt you. We just want the bank’s money”), I saw that there was an alarming number of customers in the branch, among them two women with children; I also saw that there were two doors instead of just one: the main door we’d just come through and a back door that seemed to go into an alley; and I noticed that the employees were isolated from the rest of the branch in a reinforced booth or a booth that looked reinforced, and that booth was not open. Zarco must have noticed these things too, or at least the first and the last, because while he asked the women and children to lie down on the floor and some of the children began to cry, he ordered the employees to open the door of the booth. There were three employees, but for the moment none of the three moved; there’s no way of knowing if one of them was weighing up the insane idea of resisting the robbery or if they were simply paralyzed by panic and, to clear up the doubts, Zarco grabbed a customer by the collar of his shirt, dragged him to the door of the booth, put the barrel of his sawn-off shotgun under his chin and said: Open up right now or I’ll shoot this guy.

  ‘They immediately opened the door. The man who did looked like a hunting dog with a face as white as plaster. While the children’s crying filled the branch and began drilling into my head, the man stepped away from the door stammering that he couldn’t open the safe. Zarco let his hostage go, approached the man and asked: Are you the manager? I can’t open the safe, answered the man. Zarco slapped him. I asked if you were the manager, he repeated. Yes, said the man. But I can’t open the safe. Open it, said Zarco. Open it and nothing will happen to anybody. I can’t, the manager whined. It has a delayed opening mechanism. How long does it take to open? Fifteen minutes, answered the manager. Then Zarco hesitated, or I sensed him hesitate; the hesitation was logical: if he didn’t force him to deactivate the delay mechanism, the result of the robbery would be a failure: another one; but, if he forced him to deactivate it, the fifteen-minute wait for the safe to open would be the longest and most anguished fifteen minutes of our lives, and nobody could guarantee that we could keep the situation under control during that time. I mustn’t have been the only one guessing at Zarco’s doubts, because at that moment a man who was on the floor by the back door took the opportunity to open it and escape (or maybe he hadn’t been on the floor by the back door, but had crawled or dragged himself to it without us seeing him). Everything happened in a second, the same second in which Zarco hesitated or in which I sensed Zarco hesitating: the next second Jou shattered the glass of the door the man had escaped through with a shot; the next an insane uproar erupted in the bank and the next Zarco tried to quiet it down by firing his shotgun at the ceiling and shouting that everyone should stay on the floor until we’d left. Then Zarco ordered the manager to forget the safe and give us all the money that wasn’t in it. The manager obeyed, we grabbed the money and rushed out of the branch.

  ‘On the street the police were waiting for us. As we ran as fast as we could towards the car we heard a shout to halt; instinctively we kept running, instead of surrendering, and, before we could get into the almost moving car, the shots began. All at once I heard them and felt a burning in my arm. All at once we got in the car and Gordo headed for the highway to Gerona while the shooting behind us intensified and my arm smarted and started to bleed. Although I must have been swearing out loud, nobody noticed that I was wounded, among other reasons because at the Bordils ramp there was an undercover cop car parked across the road. Gordo braked or took his foot off the accelerator, until Zarco screamed at him to step on it; he slammed the pedal to the floor, and with a single charge rammed the cop car almost onto the hard shoulder. The blow opened up a spectacular gash on Gordo’s brow, which had hit the steering wheel and began to bleed copiously. In spite of that he floored it again and we kept going, at first pursued by two undercover cars that we started to pull away from as we crossed Celrà and Campdorà running red lights and stop signs, overtaking and dodging everything in our way, so by the time we got to Pont Major we had the impression that we’d left our pursuers behind. At that moment a helicopter began flying overhead. It was obviously after us, and Jou seemed to realize that at the same time as he noticed the blood flowing from my arm and Gordo’s brow, and he lost his nerve and started shouting that they were going to catch us, and then Zarco told him to shut up and Gordo turned right and crossed the bridge over the Ter in the direction of Sarrià while the undercover cars reappeared in the distance behind us, coming down the road from Campdorà. They must have been a kilometre or a kilometre and a half away, and Gordo took advantage of that to try to lose them once and for all in the narrow streets of Sarrià. For a while he seemed to have managed it, but in all that time the helicopter stayed hovering in the sky, without losing sight of us for an instant, and after a few minutes the undercover cars appeared again in the distance. Gordo floored it again and got us out of Sarrià and back onto the main highway, only this time not on the coastal road but the one that goes to France but instead of taking us to the border and away from the city it was taking us back to it. Gordo was following new instructions from Zarco and I suppose he was acting sensibly, because it seems like it would be easier to escape a helicopter in a city than in open country, but the truth is that, as soon as I saw where we were going, I felt we were getting ourselves into a rat trap and were not going to get out of it.

  ‘I was right. At the beginning of La Barca Bridge just at the entrance to the city and already with La Devesa in sight, a big truck loaded with gas cylinders was heading straight for us; Gordo tried to miss it by yanking the steering wheel, lost control of the car and we flipped over and started rolling across the tarmac. What happened after that is difficult to tell. Although I’ve tried to reconstruct the sequence of events many times, I’m not entirely sure I’ve been able to; I have been able to reconstruct some links of the sequences: enough, I think, to have an approximate idea of what happened.

  ‘They’re six links that are six images or six groups of images. The first link is formed by the image of myself lying facedown on the crushed roof of the car, dazed and feeling around for my glasses and finding them intact, hearing meanwhile a sharp buzzing in my head and hearing Jou groaning and cursing and hearing Zarco shout that Gordo was unconscious and that we had to get the fuck out of the car. The second link is formed by the image of myself trying to crawl out of the twisted metal of the car through one of the back windows as I see how thirty or forty metres away a car brakes and two plain clothes cops get out and run towards us. The third link is not formed of one image but two: the image of Zarco yanking me out through the window and the image of both of us running across La Barca Bridge behind Jou, who’s a few metres ahead of us and who, out of instinct or because Zarco shouted it, at the end of the bridge turns off up Pedret and heads for the district. The fourth link is not formed of two images but rather a sort of chain of images: first Zarc
o and I get to the end of the bridge and run towards La Devesa in the hope of giving the police the slip there, then Zarco trips on the uneven slope that goes down to the park and hits the ground, then I stop short and run back and grab Zarco’s arm and he grabs me and for a few seconds we try to keep going like that, stumbling, Zarco running on his hurt leg and me dragging him; finally Zarco falls down again or throws himself on the ground while shoving me away and saying in a low, hoarse, panting voice: Run, Gafitas! And there’s the fifth link, the penultimate image of the sequence: lit by the midday sun that shines through the crowns of the plane trees of La Devesa, Zarco is still kneeling on the ground and I am still standing at his side while the two cops are about to reach the slope into the park and catch us. The final image is predictable; it’s also a double image: on the one hand it’s a diaphanous image, the image of myself running through La Devesa leaving Zarco behind; on the other hand it is a blurry image, half-seen as I turn around to see if they’re following me: the image of Zarco tangled up in a jumble of arms and legs, struggling with the two cops.

  ‘That’s where the six links end, and that’s all I remember.’

  ‘So you abandoned Zarco.’

  ‘What was I going to do? What would you have done? He couldn’t save himself; I couldn’t save him: sacrificing myself would have been stupid, it would have done no good. So I decided to save myself. It’s what Zarco would have done; that’s why he told me to run, to go. And maybe that’s why he fought with the police (or that’s why I’ve always thought he fought with them): to give me time to get away, so I could save myself.

  ‘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, beggin
g 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.’

  Chapter 8

  ‘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.