‘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, begging 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.
‘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.