Free Escape by Dominique Manotti

would be fine, they’d be waiting for us – those were his words. And he didn’t elaborate any further. The day dragged by very slowly.
    The third of March. At last. The day that was to decide our fates. Things started speeding up. We split up. Pepe went to hire two vans and parked them near the bank. My job was to check the condition of the two motorbikes in the garage. I lavished attention on them and drove them to the two positions identified the previous day, so that we could make our getaway in two different directions after the robbery. And then there was more hanging around. I wasn’t able to eat the sandwich I’d bought.
    We met up in a café a few hundred metres from the bank. Carlo had brought the guns in a sports holdall, we took one each. At 14.30, we got into our vans, Carlo alone in one, Pepe and me in the other. At 14.50, Pepe started up the van and parked it over a driveway to the left of the bank, obstructing the entire pavement. The bike was there, shielded by the van, and I was relieved to see it. At 14.57, the security van drew up in front of the bank and two guards got out, one of them was carrying two bags, the other kept his hand on his hip, on his open holster, and they went into the bank. Just then, Carlo’s van pulled up on the driveway to the right of the bank, facing ours. I was very focused, but not frantic, not even anxious; we simply needed to stick to the plan. Carlo opened his door, I opened mine. I didn’t take my eyes off him, he was our chief, we took our cue from him. He had his gun in his hand, I picked up mine, but then everything went wrong, and I don’t understand how or why. Isaw Carlo collapse in slow motion, like in a film. It was impossible, unthinkable, and I lost all sense of reality. I was in another dimension. I’d gone deaf, I couldn’t hear a sound, I didn’t hear the shots. I turned towards the entrance to the bank, still in slow motion, and I saw a
carabiniere
aiming his gun at me, and one of the security guards taking his gun out extremely slowly. I didn’t have the sense that I was in danger, I shot without making the decision to do so, without grasping what was happening. I saw two cops stagger and fall in a muffled silence. I existed only through the gun I was holding with both hands, through my fingers squeezing the trigger. Pepe grabbed me by the arm, brutally, and dragged me from the scene. He shoved me behind the van and started up the bike. I clambered on behind him, clung on to his shoulders, and within a few seconds we were out of sight. I could feel the bike throbbing, I could hear the sound of the engine, I put my gun in my pocket and I could feel the barrel burning my thigh. Gradually I came back down to earth. I replayed the whole scene in my mind, much more clearly than I had experienced it. Three things were certain: Carlo was dead. Dead. I would never hear him talking about his former battles again, inventing his future and mine. Dead without a goodbye, a last outburst, a last caress. Another certainty: I had killed, I’d become a killer, without yet comprehending the full import of those words, the consequences of those actions. And finally: yes, Carlo was right, they’d been waiting for us.
    Filippo adds these sheets to those in the orange binder sitting on the desk in front of him. He is concentrating, his elbows on the desk, his face cupped in his hands. The two key sections of his story, the opening and the closing scenes, are written, they exist. His task now is to fill in the bits in between, bring alive the entire story by fleshing it out. How to go about it?
    He draws a box in the top left-hand corner of a blank sheet of paper, and writes ‘Escape’ in it. In the bottom right-hand corner, a box with ‘Bank raid’. Three weeks to get from one to the other. Three characters, Carlo, Marco, Luciana, and a fourth, Filippo,the chronicler, slightly in the background, an observer until the final shootout. He scribbles and he thinks. When