Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘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?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s what Zarco started to do in the middle of that summer. And by doing that he began to run greater risks every time. And, the greater the risks he ran, the closer we came to the moment of catching him.

  ‘It seemed to be coming, but it didn’t arrive. During the month of August, while the pressure from my bosses grew to crush this gang as soon as possible, we were on the brink of catching them a couple of times (one afternoon at the beginning of August, near Sils, after they hit a gas station that we knew they’d been lurking around the previous day because the owner had filed a complaint, Hidalgo and Mejía chased them by car until flipping over on an embankment while they got away; in Figueras, a couple of weeks later, a Civil Guard thought he recognized them outside a bank and followed them for several kilometres, but also ended up losing them). The fact is that by the beginning of September I was desperate: I’d been working on the case for two months and things had only got worse; Deputy Superintendent Martínez and Inspector Vives knew it, so when they came back from their holidays they put me between a rock and a hard place: either I solved the problem or they’d have to assign someone else to solve it. Relieving me of the case would have been a tremendous failure, so I got my act together and in the second week of September found out that Zarco’s gang was going to hold up a bank in Bordils.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I found out.’
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  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. There are things a policeman cannot say.’

  ‘Even when thirty years have gone by since they happened?’

  ‘Even if sixty had gone by. Look, I once read a novel where one character said to another: Can you keep a secret? And the other replied: If you can’t keep it yourself, why should I keep it for you? We cops are like priests: if we’re no good at keeping secrets, we’re no good as cops. And I’m good at being a cop. Even if the secret is a trivial one.’

  ‘Is this one?’

  ‘Do you know any that aren’t?’

  ‘Cañas thinks he was responsible. Apparently, two days before the Bordils hold-up he was drinking beer with Córdoba, an old district character he’d befriended.’

  ‘I remember that guy.’

  ‘Cañas thinks he might have got carried away and told Córdoba about the planned heist and Córdoba took the tale to you.’

  ‘It’s not true. But if it was true I’d still tell you it wasn’t true. So don’t insist.’

  ‘I won’t insist. Go on about the Bordils hold-up.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell you? I suppose, when I add it all up, it’s one of the most complicated operations I set up in my whole career. I can’t say I didn’t have the time and resources to prepare it, but the truth is I was so reckless that Zarco and company were on the brink of getting away. My only justification is that back then I was an ambitious greenhorn and I’d expended so much effort to nab Zarco that I didn’t want to put him in jail just to have him released a few months later. That’s why the operation I set up was designed to catch Zarco once he’d committed the heist and not before, so the crime he’d be charged with wouldn’t be a minor offence or an attempted offence and that the judge could lock him away for a good long time. Of course, letting Zarco act in this way, not arresting him before he went into the branch office and held up the bank, meant running an enormous risk, a risk I shouldn’t have run and only a couple of years later wouldn’t have run. Keep in mind that we couldn’t give the manager or employees of the branch prior warning, so they wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag and not to alarm them over nothing, because we couldn’t be sure our tip-off was good, or even, supposing it was true, that Zarco wouldn’t back out at the last minute. In any case, the truth is that Martínez and Vives came through, they trusted me and gave me command of the operation and half the squad: eight police inspectors in four undercover radio cars. Those were the forces at my disposal. First thing in the morning I put a car on the way into town and, as time went on, the rest of us set about positioning ourselves discreetly (one on the way out of town, another in the parking lot to the left of the branch and mine twenty metres in front of it), in such a way that, when we finally saw Zarco and two of his guys go into the branch after midday, the trap was set to close around them.

  ‘But, in spite of all that preparation, everything seemed to go wrong straight away. Three or four minutes had passed when a shot was fired inside the branch; almost immediately there was another. When we heard them, the first thing I did was alert the other cars and tell those on the way in and out of town to cut off access to the highway; then I called the station and told them I’d changed plans and was going in. I didn’t finish talking: at that moment Zarco and the other two kids who’d gone in with him came out of the branch taking the stockings off their heads. I shouted at them to halt, but they didn’t stop and, since I was afraid they were going to escape, I fired a shot; beside me, Mejía fired too. It was no use, and before we knew it the three of them had jumped in the car and were fleeing towards Gerona. We went after them, saw them charge into the car blocking the ramp onto the highway and carry on, and then I had a good idea. I knew that, in a car chase, they’d have the upper hand, not because the car they were driving was better than ours, but because they drove as if they knew no fear, so I called the station and talked to Deputy Superintendent Martínez and told him that, if he didn’t send us one of the helicopters they were using for Operation Summer, the armed robbers would get away again. Again Martínez came through for me and the helicopter soon appeared and thanks to it we didn’t lose their trail (or we lost it but we found it again). Finally their car overturned as they took the curve onto La Barca Bridge, on the way into the city, and that was the end of Zarco.

  ‘It happened more or less like this. We arrived at the bridge just after they’d flipped over, just when they were crawling out of the car, which had stopped upside down on the asphalt. There were four of us, two cars, we stopped twenty or thirty metres from the accident and, when we saw the robbers take off running across the bridge, we ran after them. Although there had been four in the car, there were three running, and we instantly recognized Zarco, but not the other two, or not with certainty. One of my officers stayed to examine the overturned car and, when we got to the other side of the bridge, I shouted to the other to run after one of them, who’d fled on his own in the direction of Pedret. Mejía and I followed Zarco and the other kid. We were lucky: on the way into La Devesa Park Zarco tripped and fell and broke his ankle, and that’s how we caught him.’

  ‘And the other one?’

  ‘The one who was with Zarco? If you’ve been talking about this with Cañas, you already know what happened: he got away.’

  ‘You didn’t follow him? You let him get away?’

  ‘Neither. What happened is that Zarco kept us busy long enough that Gafitas was able to get away.’

  ‘Do you think he did it on purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you sure the guy who’d got away was Gafitas?’

  ‘No, but that was my impression, and Mejía’s too. What I was sure of (I think I told you this already) is that, as soon as we brought Zarco down, the gang was finished.

  ‘And it was. That very evening I began to interrogate Zarco and the other two members of his gang we’d nabbed that afternoon, who turned out to be two kids called Jou and Gordo (Gordo, who lost consciousness in the accident on La Barca, I interrogated a few hours after he’d been admitted to hospital; Zarco didn’t even get there: a doctor put a cast on his leg in the station house). The interrogation lasted the regulation three days but there was no surprise; it wasn’t even a surprise that from the start all three detainees piled as much shit as they could at the doors of Guille and Tío, who could take all the shit in the world because one was dead and the other quadraplegic. I don’t know if it was a strategy they’d prepared beforehand, in case they got caught, or if it occurred to each one on their own, but it was the most sensible thing they could do. Of course it didn’t surprise me that Zarco was astute enough not to cop to any more than strictly necessary either, and much less that he didn’t give anyone up for anything; I knew this was what was going to happen: not only because Zarco was the toughest in the gang and the one with most experience, but also because he was their leader, and a leader loses all his authority if he turns into an informer. However, I did get Gordo and Jou to give up Zarco for a couple of things (I tricked them: I told them he’d already copped to it himself, and they swallowed it), but I didn’t get them to give up Gafitas, or the girls or any of the others who’d participated at some point in the gang’s misdemeanours without actually being part of it. This didn’t matter to me too much – why should I lie to you – because, like I said, I thought that once I’d thrown the book at Zarco the gang would be out of action, and sooner rather than later the fringes would end up coming undone and falling of their own accord. So I rushed through the interrogations, took the greatest of care writing up the affidavit and put Zarco and the rest before a judge. And that was it: the judge sent them to the Modelo prison to await trial and I never saw Zarco again. In person, I mean; like everyone else, I later saw him often on TV, in magazines, newspapers and such. But that’s another story, and you know it better than I do. Are we done?’

  ‘More or less. Can I ask you one last question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘
What happened with Gafitas? Did he end up falling of his own accord?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I’ve got Cañas’ version already.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s right.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. But I’d like to hear yours as well. Why don’t you want to tell me?’

  ‘Because I’ve never told anybody.’

  ‘That makes it even more interesting.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with your book.’

  ‘Maybe not, but that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Will you give me your word that you’re not going to use what I tell you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. You’ll see. At dusk on the day I arrested Zarco I showed up alone at Gafitas’ house. I didn’t want to waste time: I’d just interrogated Zarco and his two accomplices in the Bordils bank robbery for the first time at the station and, while I left the three of them stewing in their cells before waking them up in the early hours to begin the interrogation again, I decided to go after him, who was the one I suspected of being the fourth. As soon as his mother opened the door I knew I’d guessed right. It wasn’t the poor woman’s terror that betrayed her but the huge efforts she was making to hide her terror. She was so distraught that she didn’t even ask me why I was looking for her son, all she managed to say was that for the last week he had been with his father at a friend’s place, in Colera, taking advantage of the last days of the holidays; then, before I had time to ask for it, she gave me the address. An hour later I got to Colera, an isolated little seaside village, near the border at Portbou. I asked where the house was and found it not far from the beach; it was dark and looked uninhabited, but there was a car by the door. I parked beside it. I let a few seconds pass. I went and rang the bell.

  ‘It was his father who opened the door, a man in his forties, thin, dark-haired with no grey, who at first glance looked very little like his son. I introduced myself, told him I wanted to talk to Gafitas; he answered that he was sleeping at that moment and asked me what I wanted to talk to him for. I explained. There must be a mistake, he replied. I was with my son all morning out at sea. Are there any witnesses to that? I asked. Me, he answered. No one else? I asked. No one else, he answered. That’s a shame, I said, and added: In any case I still need to talk to your son. With a gesture that combined resignation and surprise, the man invited me in and, as we walked through the dining room, told me that he and his son had been in Colera for a week and had been going out fishing every day, although that morning they’d come back earlier than usual because of an accident. My son got a scratch from a lure when he was casting, he told me. On his arm. It was a bit gory but nothing serious; we didn’t even have to go to the doctor: I saw to it myself. When we got to the door of a room he asked me to wait there while he woke him up. I waited, seconds later he showed me into the room and I asked him to leave me alone with his son.