Outlaws (16 page)

‘That’s more or less what he said to me. I didn’t answer, in part because I had nothing to answer and in part, as I told you before, the conversation about Tere had made me uneasy, but especially because at that moment Tere showed up at the lighthouse with the news that the abandoned building was a Civil Guard post and the suggestion that we should check it out. It was almost dark by then. Zarco pointed the long, dirty fingernail of his index finger at me and said as if he hadn’t heard Tere’s suggestion: Think about it, Gafitas. I stood up. Tere looked at me; then she looked at Zarco. What does Gafitas have to think about?, she asked. Zarco patted her on the ass and answered: Nothing. We went back to the Mehari and drove away.’

‘And that was the last time you and Zarco talked about Tere that summer.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you consider leaving the gang after Zarco advised you to?’

‘Yes, I think so. Not because I wanted to leave, but because I had the suspicion that Zarco had advised me to leave the gang and return to my previous life to get me away from Tere, and that there was a threat hidden behind that advice. In any case he didn’t mention the matter again, and the truth is there was barely any time for me to consider it seriously: shortly after the conversation at Cap de Creus it was all finished.’

‘You mean the gang.’

‘Of course.’

‘When did it finish?’

‘In the middle of September, a couple of weeks after my parents got back from their holiday. That was the worst moment of the summer for me. On the one hand I felt increasingly ill at ease in the gang or in what was left of the gang, because that conversation with Zarco had injected me with the poison of distrust. On the other hand my relationship with my parents didn’t improve on their return; quite the contrary: after a few days of truce even the rows and shouting matches multiplied and worsened, especially with my father, who must have seen me as an unrecognizable and furious monster, full of contempt. I don’t know: now I think I probably felt trapped, and felt that everything could explode in those days at home or in the gang; finally everything exploded in the robbery of the Banco Popular branch in Bordils.

‘It was our last job and it was a disaster. The reason for the disaster is obvious. For a start it has to be said that we planned it all in no time and so clumsily that we didn’t even check out the branch and barely had a look around outside it. Add to this that the people who participated in the heist were not the best suited: we couldn’t count on Tere, who was in Barcelona because one of her sisters had just had a baby, and, after Zarco sounded out the district, Latas and some other guys, the one who ended up filling in for her was Jou, who’d never robbed a bank and had no experience with guns. And to top it off we were unlucky . . . All this is true, but it doesn’t explain the disaster; the explanation is simpler: there was a tip-off. We never found out who it was, or at least I never found out. It really could have been anybody: any of the guys Zarco sounded out to participate in the heist, any of the guys those guys talked to, any of the guys we’d talked to. Keep in mind as well that all the bars of the red-light district were full of police informers, starting with La Font; there were also snitches at Rufus. We knew it and, although Zarco was always demanding discretion, the truth is we talked to too many people and too cheerfully. And the first to do so was me.’

‘Do you mean that it might have been you who let it slip?’

‘I’ve often thought so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because two days before the heist, when we were all set to go and just needed to find someone to take Tere’s place, I spent a couple of hours drinking beer with Córdoba while waiting for my friends in La Font. I’ve told you about Córdoba, right? I don’t remember what we talked about that day, but Córdoba and I were friends and I trusted him, although I’ve often thought since that he wasn’t trustworthy. I don’t know. It might have been him. Which is to say: it might have been me.’

‘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 Zarco 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.