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Debts to the Past

Piel de policía
Andreu Martín & Carles Quílez

Roca • 2006

Javier Sánchez Zapatero
Translation: Jean Burrell

 

The duo formed by Carles Quílez and Andreu Martín – who has also published two-handed novels with Jaume Ribera, such as those in the successful teen mystery series with Flanagan as main character – once again displays, in Piel de policía, the chief characteristics that adorned their debut as a literary partnership en Asalto a la virreina. Once more the careful documenting of historical reality becomes the starting point and raw material for a book that works to illuminate even fiction, though it never loses sight of its genuine origins, an obscure episode of police corruption set in the early 1980s. At that time the state Security Corps had not yet passed through the transition that would herald certain changes in the direction of openness and a clear-out of anti-democratic elements, since within it there existed, with difficulty and frequent friction, fascist elements persuaded of their ability to act, through violence and instilling fear in the citizens, alongside new idealistic activists who placed their hopes in the new regime and were appealing for neighbourhood policing that respected people and provided a public service to society. One of these young dreamers, Lacruz, after discovering some irregularities in an investigation, starts to dig into the bad professional habits of some of his comrades and stumbles on a network of corruption and organized crime linked to the Spanish extreme right and certain departments of state. His discovery is the start of a traumatic, wild experience that leads him to leave his body, abandon his ideals and go away to work in a filthy dive.

One day, after several years of getting over it all, devoting himself to serving and drinking whisky, having turned into a pathetic character more and more alienated from what he once was, Lacruz gets an unexpected visit that lands him face to face with a past he thought was forgotten. The novel is structured as a flashback which makes the main character recollect the reasons for his destitution and makes the reader understand his situation. This journey into the past implicitly involves a desire for revenge against whoever Lacruz thinks was responsible for everything that happened, which makes the book resemble one of Martín's, and the whole of the Spanish crime novel's, classic titles, Prótesis. As in that book, this novel's whole plot, in which there is room for an initiation ritual, social condemnation, the police intrigue and even a love interest, is reduced essentially to a relationship of ferocious hatred between two characters who symbolize two very different ways of being and understanding life. In this duality there shines brightly the antagonist Castán, who is based on a real person and so becomes one of the most tremendous fictional characters among those created by recent crime fiction.

Heartrending and brutal, Piel de policía, as well as being a terrible yet illuminating document about the Spanish police of 25 years ago, is above all novel that celebrates the capacity for regeneration in an encounter with the past and with it the need to make sure the account is settled with that eternal time which never lets go.