Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘He means Tere. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘No: I think it’s interesting. What other explanations has Cañas given you?’

  ‘He’s told me that Zarco went looking for him. Or that he didn’t just join Zarco, rather Zarco also recruited him: according to Cañas, Zarco needed someone like him, someone who spoke Catalan and looked like a nice boy and could act as a decoy for their jobs.’

  ‘That sounds a bit unlikely to me. I mean, I’m not saying that a good decoy couldn’t have come in handy for Zarco, but I don’t think it would have mattered to him enough to go out and look for one, among other reasons because he used to do things bare-faced, without any screen.’

  ‘Not that he was looking: he just found one.’

  ‘Well, then maybe so. In any case it’s true that Gafitas wasn’t like the rest of the gang; that was clear as day: although he soon started dressing like them, and combing his hair and walking and talking like them, he never looked like one of them; he always looked like what he was.’

  ‘And what was he? A middle-class teenager taking a walk on the wild side?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Do you mean that he never took what he was doing with Zarco seriously?’

  ‘No: of course he took it seriously; if not he never would have gone as far as he went. What I mean is that he always thought, as serious as it was, that it was just temporary, that he’d stop and return to the fold and then it would be as if nothing had ever happened. That’s my impression. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. In any case, ask Cañas. Or don’t waste your time: I’m sure Cañas will say I’m wrong. Up to you.’

  ‘From what you say, you guys didn’t see Gafitas the same way you saw the rest of them.’

  ‘We saw him for what he was, as I said, just that he wasn’t like the rest. And if you mean did we treat him differently from the rest, the answer is no . . . Although maybe I should qualify this. The truth is at first, when he showed up in the district with Zarco and the rest, we thought it would just be a fleeting thing, one of those strange things the district sometimes turned up; the surprise was that he lasted and after a short time he was just one more of them. As for the end, well, judging by what happened in the end maybe you’re right: maybe we did always see him in a different light. But we’ll talk about the end later, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s go back to the beginning. The other day you told me that the gang settled into shape when Gafitas arrived on the scene.’

  ‘That’s what I believe. Of course before Gafitas showed up there was already a gang more or less in existence: they stole cars and broke into holiday villas, snatched purses and stuff; but when Gafitas showed up things changed. Not because Gafitas wanted them to, of course, just because; these things happen all the time: something is added by chance to a mechanism and it unintentionally changes the way it works. That’s what might have happened when Gafitas joined Zarco’s gang. Or when Zarco recruited him, as Cañas says.’

  ‘Was it at that moment when you guys detected that there was a gang of delinquents operating in the city?’

  ‘No, it was earlier. I remember very well because for me the case began then. One morning Deputy Superintendent Martínez called all sixteen inspectors of the Squad into his office. That wasn’t too out of the ordinary; what was out of the ordinary is that the provincial superintendent was present at the meeting: that meant it was a serious matter. During the meeting the superintendent said very little, but Martínez explained that for some time they’d been receiving recurrent reports of robberies in the city and the towns and housing developments of the province; at that time the systems of suspect detection were very rudimentary, we didn’t have a computerized registry of fingerprints like they do nowadays and everything had to be done by hand, imagine what that was like. In any case the repetition of the robbery methods, Martínez told us, led them to believe that we were dealing with a more or less organized gang: the handbags were always snatched the same way, the cars always hot-wired the same way and the houses always broken into through doors or windows when they were empty; furthermore, witnesses spoke of kids doing the robberies. Here things got complicated because, as I think I told you already, there was no such thing as a teenage gang back then, or they didn’t exist the way they later did, or at least we didn’t know about them, so Martínez’s conjectures did not indicate a gang of teenagers but an adult gang who used kids to help them. This meant it wasn’t going to occur to anybody at first that Zarco’s gang had anything to do with those robberies, first because we didn’t even think of them as a criminal gang exactly, and second because, as far as we knew, they weren’t associated with any adults. Be that as it may, Martínez asked the whole brigade to be alert and assigned Vives to take charge of the case; our group had several things on our hands already, and Vives decided to divide us in two and asked me to devote myself exclusively to this case with the help of Hidalgo and Mejía.

  ‘That’s how I began to pursue Zarco without yet knowing I was pursuing him. Apart from bureaucratic tasks, my job up till then consisted mostly of interrogating victims and suspects, gathering evidence and spending the afternoons and evenings doing the rounds of the bars of the district, identifying, frisking and questioning anyone and everyone, keeping my eyes and ears wide open; from that moment on my job would still be the same, except that now my main objective was to arrest the gang we’d just been alerted to. Just at that time Gafitas showed up in the district, but I’d been trying to complete my mission for a relatively short time and hadn’t yet associated the gang I was looking for with Zarco’s gang.’

  ‘When did you associate them?’

  ‘Some time later. Actually, during the first weeks I was so disoriented that I only managed to establish that the robberies were the work of one gang and not a bunch of different gangs or isolated individuals, which is what I thought more than once at the beginning; I also came to think that the gang had no connection to the city or to the red-light district, that it had its centre of operations outside – in Barcelona, perhaps, or maybe in some housing development or town on the coast – and that they only came into the city on jobs and then left. It was a preposterous idea, but ignorance produces preposterous ideas, don’t you think? I had a few at least, until one day I began to suspect that Zarco and his guys could be connected to the robberies.’

  ‘How did you reach that conclusion?’

  ‘Thanks to Vedette.’

  ‘You mean the madam?’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘I’ve heard about her.’

  ‘Of course, lots of people have heard about her, she was a legend in the district. The truth is she was a remarkable woman, and one who stood out in that scene. When I met her she was already getting on, but she still had her faux-grande-dame bearing, she still behaved with the arrogance of a woman who was once very beautiful and still ran her business with an iron fist. She was the proprietor of two clubs, La Vedette and the Eden; the best known was La Vedette, which also had a reputation for being the best hooker bar in the district, as in times gone by the Salón Rosa or the Racó used to have. It was a small L-shaped place, without a single table but with lots of stools lined up against the walls, opposite a bar that began just to the left of the entrance then turned left again and continued to the back, where two doors opened, one to the kitchen and the other to a stairway leading to the rooms upstairs; the walls were wood-lined and had no windows, several columns came out of the bar and reached up to the ceiling mouldings, a reddish light made objects and faces look unreal, the music of Los Chunguitos, Los Chichos and people like that was playing at all hours. Back then it was often full, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, just when we tended not to go to the district so we wouldn’t ruin the bar owners’ businesses by scaring away their abundant weekend clientele.

  ‘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 wen
t 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?’

  Chapter 7

  ‘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.

  ‘The General saw the two men out. As he did so we looked through the safe: inside were stacks of files full of documents and a gold ring with a precious stone set in it. When he came back out of the house, the General found his wife examining the gemstone against the light. When she saw him, the woman rubbed the stone against her housecoat, as if she’d sullied it and wan
ted to shine it up again, and then she handed it to Gordo, who in turn handed it to Zarco, who in turn handed it to the General. How much do you want for this? the General asked Zarco, after studying the ring and gem carefully. Nothing, said Zarco. The General looked at him with distrust. I don’t want cash, Zarco clarified. I want hardware. The General’s expression went from distrust to incredulity; I looked at Gordo and Colilla and realized they were as perplexed as the General or, for that matter, as I was: Zarco hadn’t said a word to them about weapons either. The General looked sceptical, scratched his sideburns and said: What happened to Guille has upset you, son. Zarco smiled and shrugged, although he didn’t say anything; his silence was his way of insisting, or that’s how the General took it, and he added: I don’t have weapons: you should know that. Yeah, I know, said Zarco. But you can get some if you want. The General asked: What do you want them for? What’s it to you?, Zarco replied softly; and just as softly asked: Do you want it or not? If yes, fine; if not, fine too: I’ll find someone who does. Before the General could reply something nobody expected happened: his wife intervened in the discussion. Get them for him, she said. We all looked at her; standing between us and the General, the woman had her hands hanging down at her sides and, with her blind-woman’s eyes, she seemed not to be looking at anyone or to be looking at us all at once. It was the first time I’d heard her speak and her voice sounded cold and piercing, like the tyrannical voice of a spoiled child. After a moment of silence she repeated: Get them for him. Have you gone crazy too?, the General asked then. What if they turn us in? Can’t you see they’re just little kids and that . . . ? They’re not kids, his wife cut him off. They’re men. As much as you are. Or more. They won’t turn us in. Give them guns. Indecisive or furious, the General put the gem in his shirt pocket, walked over to his wife, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the back of the yard; there they stayed for a while, whispering (the General was gesturing, as well), and then both of them went inside the house and a short time later the General came out alone. What do you need?, he asked briskly. Not much, replied Zarco. A pistol and a couple of sawn-off shotguns. That’s a lot, said the General. That’s a lot less than the stone’s worth, Zarco replied. The General only thought for a second. All right, he said. Come by tomorrow afternoon and they’ll be here. Before we could consider the deal done he looked at each of the four of us one by one and said: One last thing. It’s a message from my wife. She’s asked me to tell you just once and I’m only going to say it once: anyone who lets it out is dead.