Press pack for Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 'Falcó' (2016)

"For Falcó, words like motherland, love, or future had no meaning. He was a man of the moment, and trained to be one. A wolf in the shadows. Greedy and dangerous."

Europe, 1936. The action takes place in a world between the wars, one that is about to collapse. As fascism, communism, and worker revolts sweep across the continent, mercenaries and spies move around freely to profit from the carnage of others. The whole century promises demolition. And while elegant gentlemen and beautiful women board ocean liners and are seen in luxury resorts and hotels, others make a living in more sordid corners.

On both sides of that line moves Jerez native Lorenzo Falcó, the protagonist of this story of adventure and espionage. Elegant, womanizer, scoundrel, and adventurer, this former arms smuggler will be hired as a spy to carry out a mission that could completely change the history of his country. Caught between two opposing factions, Falcó will have to fulfill his contract. In the pages of this story, fascists, Nazis, Marxists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks intervene in favor of their own interests while others, those who defend an ideology, exchange shots from both sides of the trench. Everyone fights his own battle. So does Lorenzo Falcó, who walks tall, charmingly and lethal, efficient and amoral. Because if there's one thing clear in this novel, it's that Lorenzo Falcó works for himself, even when he works for others.

The action takes place in Spain in 1936, specifically during the four months following the July 18th uprising perpetrated by the so-called Nationalist faction—led by General Francisco Franco—against the Spanish Republic; the bloodiest days of that war. Hired by Franco's intelligence service, Lorenzo Falcó must carry out a mission in enemy territory: to free the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a prisoner of the Republic in Alicante prison. Three characters will accompany him in this task: the Falangist brothers Ginés and Caridad Montero, and the enigmatic Eva Rengel. More than just a piece in this story, she will throw her weight decisiveley to tip the scales.

This story begins at night, in a first-class carriage. The woman who is about to die talks about her time in Biarritz, and also about the latest film starring Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. The man hired to identify her listens to her with a cigarette between his fingers and one leg crossed over the other, careful not to pinch the crease in his flannel pants too much. She is just another mission to be accomplished. He is Lorenzo Falcó, the protagonist of a book that needs only a paragraph to hook anyone who reads up to the last line of its fifteen chapters.

This is 'Falcó', the new novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a memorable story of adventure and espionage in Europe in the 1930s. It all takes place in a world still reeling from the shocks of the First World War and preparing to shatter again during a second war of even greater magnitude. It is there that Lorenzo Falcó, adventurer and spy, makes his way with the determination of hunters stalking their prey. This is Falcó: a man of action, someone dangerous who has no remorse and always places the best bet, the one that will benefit him. He is the perfect man for the mission entrusted to him.

After passing through Istanbul, Africa, Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, and Lebanon, Lorenzo Falcó moves through this Spain at war with the calm and composure of someone who doesn't care what will happen next. Falcó has seen it all, done it all: from seducing beautiful and elegant ladies in silver-plated restaurants and leather-furnished bars, to closing, in those same places or perhaps worse, a few—almost always shady—business deals in which he manages to emerge victorious. Falcó hasn't come back to Spain to take sides, even though everyone demands it of him. This is not his war.

Spread across both sides, Falcó has already seen the naive and the scoundrels, those who thrive and smuggle, those who redeem themselves in a trench and those who protect themselves safely away from the front lines. He already knows all of them. Therefore, something different runs through the pages of this story, a novel in which Arturo Pérez-Reverte revisits some of his main themes—combat, bravery, courage, meanness, redemption—in an even more refined version. 'Falcó' is a masterfully planned and executed novel, in which an omniscient narrator operates freely, barely revealing himself, and who offers the reader thrilling dialogue, and powerful scenes that manage to make readers feel part of this story.

Perhaps spurred on by the allure of the 20th century, which he already explored in 'El tango de la Guardia Vieja' (translated into English as 'What We Become'), Arturo Pérez-Reverte goes a step further in 'Falcó'. He creates a fascinating setting, believable in its contradictions (the luxury of some and the hunger of others, courage next to abjection), full of enough nuances to faithfully recreate those times and those who inhabited them. This is a world in which portraits of Douglas Fairbanks, Paul Muni, and Loretta Young hang on the walls of bars, and the protagonist sets aside his remorse to examine the events through the glass of a martini glass filled with vodka and a few drops of orange. It is a place where fascists, Nazis, Bolsheviks, spies, and counterspies freely interfere in the politics of a Europe on the brink of disaster. Reading these pages, the reader will wonder: Did Franco want to let Primo de Rivera die so no one could steal his spotlight? Was the Spanish Caudillo forced to fake a rescue operation under pressure from Mussolini? How many arms dealers, former acquaintances of Falcó, did business with the factions that slaughtered each other without mercy? Were all Nazis as loyal to Hitler as we thought? Can someone seduce the wife of a high-ranking officer and emerge unscathed? And can Falcó be dazzled by a woman as tough and tenacious as he is, or even more so?

The lives of certain men have a family resemblance to previous novels from the same author. Whether it's Diego Alatriste of the Flanders Tercios in the 17th century, Jaime Astarloa from 'The Fencing Master,' or Coy, the shipless sailor of 'The Nautical Chart' in the early 21st century, they are all connected by a certain way of seeing life: they are the ones who don't run away and defend their right to die properly in the world they have been given. Lorenzo Falcó, the protagonist who gives his name to Arturo Pérez-Reverte's most recent novel, belongs to that lineage. With his own nuances, it's true. Although his world is different, he possesses the defining traits of Pérez-Reverte's characters, those that make the reader empathize with them despite their sullenness, their ferocity, or their implacable character.

The Characters

Lorenzo Falcó

A former arms smuggler and mercenary turned spy in the service of the National Movement, he has been hired by Franco's intelligence services to complete a mission in enemy territory: to free the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who remains a prisoner of the Republic in Alicante prison. A man of action and amoral conduct, Falcó, 37, grew up in a wealthy family in Jerez, linked to wineries and wine exports. He is elegant, polite, charming, and very precise in every detail of everything that identifies him: from his silver cigarette case, the pillbox with aspirin, and the cufflinks he chooses, to the care he devotes to his Browning handgun, or the point he makes of carrying a small razor blade hidden in his belt to use as a weapon if necessary. With him, nothing is left to chance. Lorenzo Falcó is a true scoundrel with a very particular set of personal ethics. Expelled from the Navy because of a sex affair, he is driven by adventure, women, danger, and adrenaline. He knows and has under control the most luxurious environments (spas, hotels, and restaurants in Europe) but also the most sordid places in Istanbul, the Balkans, Africa, and interwar Europe, where he has claimed the lives of several men and women without even blinking. "Lorenzo Falcó's war was different, and the sides were clear: he was on one side, and everyone else was on the other," writes Arturo Pérez-Reverte about him. Only one thing can touch Lorenzo Falcó's heart: the courage and determination of those who, like him, don't hesitate to kill.

Ginés Montero

A young Falangist who, along with his sister Cari Montero and Eva Rengel, take part in the mission in enemy territory entrusted to Falcó. Provenly loyal, his courage lies hidden under his idealism, inexperience, and naiveté. With an unwavering faith in the advancement of the Nationalist faction, Ginés Montero wholeheartedly believes in the ideas that drive him. "Do you really think killing someone unites those who kill them?" Falcó snaps at him. "Don't fuck with me. Be a good boy. Go on, wage your war, save José Antonio, and save Spain from the Marxist horde, if you can. But don't fuck with me."

Caridad Montero

She, like her brother Ginés, fights with courage and candor. Cari is a strong-willed woman, although lacking the courage and toughness of her fellow fighter, Eva Rengel. Like the rest of the Falangist command, she distrusts Lorenzo Falcó. She doesn't consider him a comrade, she doesn't consider him one of her own: he's not a party member, he doesn't put all his cards into play... However, hope and faith in the outcome of the mission she is about to undertake outweigh any suspicions.

Eva Rengel

A member of the Women's Section of the Falange movement and a close friend of the Montero brothers, Caridad says of her, "she's the bravest girl I've ever met. And Ginés says so too." Like Lorenzo Falcó, she is a woman of few words and possesses an overwhelming character. However, her cause—although legitimate—may not be entirely clear. The daughter of an English engineer married to a Spanish woman, Eva Rengel exudes confidence, courage, and composure. She is beautiful and intelligent. She will be the only woman capable of penetrating Lorenzo Falcó's outer armor, precisely because she is made of the same material as him. The relationship between the two is halfway between love and a pact between those who recognize themselves as brothers in action. In this novel, Eva Rengel will prove to be much more important and dangerous than the reader can imagine.

The Admiral

Head of Franco's intelligence service. He has a direct line to the Caudillo and his brother, Nicolás Franco. Clever, tough, bad-tempered, and fearsome, he maintains a relationship with Lorenzo Falcó closer to that of a father than that of a boss. The two met when the Admiral was still head of the Spanish intelligence service in the Eastern Mediterranean. Falcó was then trafficking arms on his own. At that time, the Admiral only had two options: terminate him or recruit him. He opted for the latter. Falcó is the man at his service, his pawn on this board.

Colonel Lisardo Queralt

Head of police and security for Falange. He is known as the Butcher of Oviedo due to his proven effectiveness and cruelty as a torturer, as well as his lack of scruples. Queralt rivals Falcó's mentor, the Admiral, and won't hesitate for a minute when the opportunity arises to take on both of them.

Chesca Prieto

A woman who leaves neither Lorenzo Falcó nor the reader indifferent. Married to an infantry captain on the Nationalist side, she possesses a powerful beauty and a sharp intelligence.

Excerpts from the novel

About Lorenzo Falcó: his world, his certainties, and his fissures

He wasn't a military man, quite the opposite. In 1918, he had been dishonorably discharged from the Naval Academy in Marín after a scandalous affair with a professor's wife and a fistfight with her husband in the classroom, right in the middle of a lesson on torpedoes and underwater weapons. However, when the war broke out, the Admiral had obtained for him a provisional rank of lieutenant in the Navy, in order to facilitate his work.

For a moment, Lorenzo Falcó remained motionless, studying his own reflection, satisfied with his appearance: clean-shaven, sideburns trimmed precisely so, gray eyes that contemplated themselves, like the rest of the world, with calm and ironic melancholy.

Falcó came from a good Andalusian family linked to wine and its export to England. The manners and education acquired in childhood had served him well later, when a less-than-exemplary youth, a truncated military career, and a vagrant and adventurous life tested other elements of his character. Now he was 37 years old, with a dense biography under his belt: America, Europe, Spain. The war. Night trains, borders crossed in snow or rain, international hotels, dark and unsettling streets, clandestine embraces...

For Falcó, words like motherland, love, or future had no meaning. He was a man of the moment, trained to be one. A wolf in the shadows. Greedy and dangerous.

A woman had once asked him that. It was always women who asked that kind of thing. "Why do you do this," she said. "Why do you live like this, playing things on a knife's edge. And don't tell me it's for money" […]. After the question, Falcó looked at the woman with deliberate calm, enjoying the perfect landscape she unfolded before him; and after a silence, shrugging his shoulders, he summed it all up in a few words. "I only have one life," he said. "A brief moment between two nights. And the world is a formidable adventure that I'm not willing to miss."

Besides his expensive clothes, his English cigarettes, his silver and leather objects, his painkillers for headaches, for his uncertain life, and for his beautiful women, Lorenzo Falcó liked things peppered with detail. With a certain vintage character.

Falcó and Women

Ladies tended to like his elegant manners combined with his handsome profile and the charming, daring smile, calculated to the millimeter, tested a thousand times, which he used as a calling card. From a very young age, he had learned, at the cost of some quick disappointments of his own, a crucial lesson: women were attracted to gentlemen, but they preferred to go to bed with scoundrels. That was a fact.

Now Chesca looked at him differently. As if looking for chinks in his armor. She crossed her legs, and Falcó thought that a real woman knew how to cross her legs, smoke, and have lovers with the appropriate elegance. Without giving it any importance. And this one, without a doubt, knew how to do it.

"Is it essential that they be beautiful?" she finally asked, point-blank.

"Pardon?"

"I'm referring to the women in your life."

Falcó continued to hold her gaze. If he looked away, he knew full well, the fish would break the line and dive away with a flick of its tail […].

"Are you always so brutally honest?"

"Only when the woman is not only beautiful but also intelligent."

He saw her slowly place her hand on the table. The one with the rings.

"Mr. Falcó…"

"Lorenzo, please. I already told you, Lorenzo."

"You're not going to sleep with me."

"You mean now?"

"Never."

Greta Lenz was quite dirty, Falcó realized as soon as the first assault began. Very German, that is. Very efficient for this kind of business, as the Admiral, who seemed to know the drill, had hinted. She handled her tongue with surprising ease, truly enjoying the task, and he found himself hard-pressed to prevent things from ending right there, with a premature outburst of affection. He thought urgently of General Franco, of the mission that awaited him, of the three Falangists from a moment before, and that cooled his spirits somewhat, giving him back control of the circumstances. Aside from an eager mouth, she had a tremendous body, he could confirm.

There was something solid and dark throbbing inside Eva Rengel that he could easily recognize because he was made of the same stuff. He was aware that just hours earlier he had been holding  a mystery in his arms, and he knew she realized he was noticing it. Even while making love she hadn't allowed to completely lose herself in it, except for a few moments at a time, and then immediately regaining control of herself. As the Admiral would have said, Falcó concluded with a sarcastic sneer, she was one of them, one of their kind, without a doubt. That cold rootlessness. One of us.

"Eva... Your past begins long before this war, doesn't it?

The young woman held his gaze, without even blinking. In silence. Then she looked away, and he had to make a great effort not to kiss her bare neck.

Falcó thought of the demure ladies of the new, Catholic Spain, who prayed novenas, Mass, and rosaries. He thought of the war widows and the women whose boyfriend or husband was at the front; or of those who were simply hungry, had children or relatives to feed, and were fortunate enough to have something to offer between their legs: that ancient resource of all women in all times of misery and war, for as long as the world could remember.

On Killing and Living

Killing isn't difficult, thought Lorenzo Falcó. The difficult thing was choosing the moment and the way to do it. Killing a human being was like playing the seven-and-a-half card game, because one card too many or too few could ruin everything. Killing on the spur of the moment or on impulse was within the reach of any fool. He was also tempted to believe he could go unpunished, a very common occurrence in times like those. However, killing properly, impeccably, professionally, was something else entirely. A big deal. Here, a high degree of purpose, a sense of timing, sound judgment, and a certain dose of training were required. Patience was also necessary. A lot of it. To kill, or not to kill.

It was a life, his, that perhaps one day would end up taking its toll on him relentlessly. Knock, knock, knock, "Mr. Falcó, it's your turn to pay the bill." This is as far as we go. End of the party. In anticipation of this end to the party being, if necessary, as quick and painless as possible, Falcó had hidden in the glass tube of aspirin a small ampoule of potassium cyanide that would allow him to take a shortcut if the things went south. All he had to do was place it between his teeth and squeeze. A little clack, and little angels go to heaven, or wherever they went. Dying slowly and broken in pieces while being interrogated was not one of his goals in life.

Falcó had seen them in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, facing off in the streets: Falangists, Socialists, Communists, anarchists, killing each other with admirable tenacity. Brave and determined young men, some of whom knew each other or had even been classmates at universities or factories, had shared dancing balls, movies, coffee breaks, friends, and even girlfriends. He had seen them deliberately murder each other, reprisal after reprisal. Sometimes with hatred, and other times with cold respect for an adversary known and valued despite fighting from a different trench. It was either him or me. It was either them or us. So pity all that, he concluded. A bonfire was burning away the best of both sides […]. It wasn't his business, he told himself. Whoever killed or died, and their reasons for doing so, was up to them. Their idiocy, wickedness, or noble motives. Lorenzo Falcó's war was different, and in it the sides were quite clear: on the one side him, and on the other everyone else.

That world of the 1930s

With calm resignation, routine at this point in his life, he remembered other trains and other more comfortable times, where men seemed to be—or actually were—more elegant and women were—or seemed to be—more beautiful when he passed them by in the aisles of Pullmans and wagon-lits. On that subject, Falcó possessed a good mental repertoire of images and moments, captured like a photo album: breakfasts in luxurious restaurant cars on the way to Lisbon or Berlin; drinks on the leather stools of the Train Bleu, even more refined than the one at the Ritz in Paris; dinners on silverware on the Orient Express, on the way to a room with a good view of the sunrise at the Pera Palace in Istanbul…

On Combat, Bravery, and Scruples

The entire Francoist headquarters in Salamanca was a hive of national and foreign agents and services: parallel to the German Abwehr, the Italian Servizio Informazioni Militare operated, in addition to the multiple spy and counterspy Spanish organizations that competed with and often hindered one another.

In the areas occupied by the military rebels against the Republic, all the riffraff and all the opportunists rushed to wear the blue shirt and join the National Movement. With a little influence and a bit of luck, being part of the Falange militias in the rearguard was an ideal way to stay out of the fighting. Ambushed, as they said. These patriots of opportunity could settle scores with their neighbors with impunity, inform on suspects, rob their homes, and even shoot them by the car headlights, on the side of any dark road.

The bombings by the national air force, Montero summarized, were incredibly infuriating. Especially when there were civilian casualties. And every time there were reprisals like the other day's. The militiamen would take people out to kill them in a cemetery or in the countryside. The communists maintained a certain amount of order and discipline; but the anarchists—every person in rags joined the FAI trade union and refused to obey any hierarchy—were a danger to the Republic. Many of the common criminals released when the prisons were opened walked around with weapons but wouldn't even dream of going to the front.

"The decent ones are on the front line, fighting," he concluded. "Those who never showed their faces have stayed here, seizing the factories and workshops, and here are also the Navy's sailors, who, after murdering their commanders and officers, never go out to sea, not even to fish for tuna."

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: "Falcó is a consequence of my previous novels."

Writer and academic Arturo Pérez-Reverte returns with a new novel, a spy adventure set in Europe in the 1930s. What is he looking for? Who is Falcó, and what does he represent? He answers these questions in this interview.

Exactly 30 years have passed since Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Cartagena, Spain, 1951) published his first novel—'El húsar' (The Hussar) in 1986—and 22 since, in 1994, he retired from his work as a war correspondent, a task to which he dedicated more than two decades of his life and which took him to the front lines of nineteen separate conflicts, including the Falklands, the Balkans, and the Iraq War. There he saw men killing each other and people dying because someone else ordered it. He has seen it all, or almost everything. That's why his books are what they are and taste the way they taste: sometimes they leave you with blood in your mouth; they also call to mind lucidity, death, shit, and meanness; courage and daring; nobility and abjection; destruction and redemption. Ultimately: contradiction. In those hidden places wounds sting, because their depth confers, at the same time, understanding and pain.

Precisely for this reason, because Arturo Pérez-Reverte knows the strange corridors that connect worlds, this novel surprises and confirms—at the same time—its coherence with the rest of his work. This is 'Falcó' (published by Alfaguara), a story about a man without a country or morals, a former arms smuggler and mercenary, a womanizer and adventurer driven only by adrenaline, danger, money, and women. A man without principles, without morals, without a country. That's Lorenzo Falcó. It all takes place in Europe in the 1930s, a place filled with luxury and charm, over which hangs the dark and threatening cloud of fascism and communism, bringing the second installment of the worst war contemporary man has ever seen. In that geography of intersecting interests, of noble people and opportunists, Falcó will have to fulfill a mission that could change the course of Spanish history.

In a world where Falangists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, Marxists, Nazis, elegant women, opportunistic creeps, and a bunch of murderers meet alongside men and women trying to fight for what they believe in, three characters will accompany Lorenzo Falcó, not without questioning or suspecting him: two young Falangist brothers, the Monteros, and Eva Rengel. Arturo Pérez-Reverte talks about all this in this interview.

—Lorenzo Falcó is a former arms smuggler and adventurer who works as a commissioned agent in interwar Europe, in this case in Spain in 1936. What is Falcó's war? What is this story about?

—This isn't a novel about war, nor is it even a novel about the Spanish Civil War. It's a novel of characters, of adventure, of spies, about that Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, a time of luxurious hotels and spas, but also sordid places. It's the Europe of fascism, totalitarianism, and communism. It's the Europe of worker revolts in the streets, of political uncertainty, of the storm clouds that had led to the First World War and would lead to the Second. 'Falcó' could have started in the Balkans or anywhere else on the continent, but you must admit, however, that the episode portrayed in the novel, the liberation of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had never been fictionalized before. Of course, a confrontation in which everyone takes sides was perfect for situating my character, for highlighting the amorality, apolitical nature, and lack of ideology of an adventurer. However, that doesn't make this story a Civil War novel.

—Your novel 'What We Become' (2012) was set in the 20th century. With 'Hombres buenos' (Good Men, 2015), you went back in time to the 18th century, and now you return to the 1930s. Why?

—When I sat down to write 'What We Become,' I began to find doors I hadn't seen before. I said to myself, "There are some hidden paths here." The character of Max Costa took me on a long journey. I gathered information for his story that I ultimately didn't use, but I realized that his world had a lot to explore. There was charm and glamour, as well as a lot of misery and inequality. So I kept it all in my head. Many other things coincided by chance in that process. My short book 'The Civil War Told to Young People' served to set a backdrop. Even 'Good Men' had something to do with it, because it portrayed two moral characters during a time of upheaval like the French Revolution. 'Falcó' is a consequence of my previous novels.

—Lorenzo Falcó isn't a soldier. He's been expelled from the Navy. He was an arms smuggler, a mercenary. However, at times he seems to have more of a sense of nobility than many others.

—There are nuances to that. To explain them, I need to draw a parallel with Diego Alatriste, who is a character with codes and rules. He's a soldier, someone who has had faith. Falcó isn't and hasn't. He's not driven by love of his motherland, but by adventure, women (which he obviously likes a lot), money, glamour, and traveling around. Falcó's loyalties are without ethics, because he's amoral. He's driven by the impulses of his heart and by his feelings, rather than by a sense of duty.

—However, he respects determination, courage, and daring. That's what dazzles him about Eva Rengel, one of the female characters who participates in the mission entrusted to him.

—What Falcó respects about Eva Rengel is her balls. He respects that she's a tough girl, capable of killing without hesitation. A woman capable of doing what he does. For Falcó, Eva Rengel is one of his own. Although one thing sets them apart: Eva Rengel does have faith. She believes in her struggle. Falcó doesn't.

—Falcó, like Alatriste, is a chastened hero?

—Falcó is a huge son of a bitch.

—But he inspires affection. There's something brutal and refined about him at the same time.

—Of course. He's nice, he's handsome, he has a charming manner.

—He's from a good family in Jerez. Elegant, down to the smallest detail.

—Elegance is also important in a scoundrel. Because elegance is always important. One can have an elitist upbringing in terms of education, family, and at the same time move in scoundrel circles. There are people like that who decide to explore other territories, out of debasement, adventure, their personality, whatever. Falcó is a guy who feels at home wherever you drop him, whether in an Istanbul brothel or on a luxury ocean liner. And that's his charm. But, of course, there's a way to conduct yourself in life. Even in a world of scoundrels, you have to know how to behave.

—Does Falcó belong to a extinct world?

—Me too. I was born in 1951. I arrived in a world that was already fading, but I still had time to see the last echoes in the ballroom; to hear the last musician play before closing his instrument case. I could see the last streamers on the floor; smell the perfume of the women who walked through the aisles; see the silver cufflinks; see my father combing his hair with glitter or dancing a tango. But I also saw the world of taverns, bars, wines served on marble counters, and long lines to get some olive oil from almost empy shops. I saw, on the one hand, that elegant world, but also another world of enormous social imbalances, resentments, defeat, and sadness. This book, like 'What We Become,' attempts to recreate that elegant yet terribly unfair world.

—In that Europe where Nazis, fascists, Falangists, republicans, thugs, and scoundrels converge, Falcó is the only one without a homeland.

—No, he doesn't have one. He doesn't feel close to the nationalists. He works for them because his boss works for them. He has no ideology. He goes where the adventure is. He likes to feel fear, adrenaline, danger, he likes women... There are people like that. He's a true adventurer. Alatriste, on the other hand, is forced to be a hero; he has a code. Falcó lives comfortably in that world of his.

—As in all your novels, the protagonists are in a constant struggle with themselves and with the world. In this case, there's a distinction between those who fight on the front lines and those who, being Falangists or republicans, remain in the rearguard taking advantage and settling old scores.