Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  5

  Miss Lucia noticed two men changing the licence plates on a Studebaker parked close to the corner and it seemed a little strange to her. One held a screwdriver, or perhaps it was only a penknife, she couldn't see too clearly at that distance, and was crouching to loosen the screws on the metal plate while the other, a big blond fellow with a bandage around his neck, held the new one in place. The woman slept in a shed on the patch of land at the back of the bakery and today had been awoken by the dawn light. She opened up the shop and had to put on the lights because it was still dark. From the window, whilst she sipped her mate, she became absorbed in watching the figures of the two men who, squatting next to one another, were cracking jokes and larking about. Or thaťs what Lucia surmised, because never for an instant did she see them look either concerned or stealthy, or even apprehensive over being caught out. Rather, they seemed to be carrying out their project as easily as they might have changed a car tyre.

  Lucia was very observant, her job in the bakery had developed her particular aptitude for observation, almost a sixth sense (she would later declare), because she had the ability to remember the face of the most casual customer if she happened on them in even the remotest city street, and several days later. But she needed no special powers of observation to understand what was happening on the corner with those guys fiddling about with the car plates on the Studebaker. Everyone knew each other in this district of Montevideo and it was highly exceptional for anything out of the ordinary to happen, for inexplicable occurrences to take place. In all the years she'd assumed a post in front of the shop, there'd only ever been one man who had had a car accident and he died on the pavement, all of a sudden and of a heart attack. He just lay there on the street, his mouth wide open, unable to breathe, and attempted to cover his face with a white handkerchief. Lucia approached when the man was already dead and stayed alone with the body in front of the bakery until the owner of the corner chemist's shop appeared and called an ambulance.

  This time matters were different, and there was the chance to intervene before it got too late. That was why she lifted the receiver and vacillated, for she didn't like getting mixed up in other people's lives, but she experienced a weird emotion, as though an important matter had been entrusted into her hands, and called the police. As soon as she did so, she switched off the bakery light and remained stock still there, just staring out.

  She again had the sensation she called 'the evil temptation', an impulse that sometimes caused her to be hurtful or to let someone else be hurtful to another, a temptation she had had to struggle against since her earliest childhood. For example, when the man had the heart attack, she remained silent, watching him die, and always thought that if she had reacted rather than allow herself to be swept along by the curiosity that had paralysed her, while the man with the livid face struggled and suffocated, spread eagled on the flagstones of the pavement, the man with the handkerchief over his face could have been saved. Now, in contrast, she acted almost without hesitation and, after lodging her complaint, settled herself to await the outcome. It looked like nothing more than a straightforward car heist, and she could never have envisaged what she was about to witness.

  You could monitor the whole street, in this quiet district of Montevideo, just by looking through the plate glass window. 'Better than the cinema,' Miss Lucia Passero was to say later on.

  A real orgy of blood (according to the papers) thus began in Uruguay on Wednesday, 4 November 1965, when from the bakery located on the corner of Enriqueta Comte and Riqué Streets, almost on Marmarajá Street, it was noted that on the opposite side of the road a red Studebaker was parked, inside which two men were sitting and smoking calmly.

  Moments later a second vehicle appeared - a black Hillman - from which another couple of unknown men got out, and handed a package to the former arrivals. The Hillman departed with its occupants and stopped on the street corner. It could then be observed that the two men emerged from the Studebaker and gave themselves the task of setting about exchanging the licence plates for new ones contained in the package of which they had taken delivery a few seconds earlier.

  Two policemen appeared at the corner and approached the Studebaker. The first person to catch sight of them in the mirror was Crow Mereles.

  'It's the cops,' he said.

  The Crow opened the car door and leaned on the mudguard, smoking, serene, as the two policemen approached. One was black, or rather half-caste, with flat features and tightly curled hair, and the other was a fat guy, exactly like every other fat cop in the city. There were lots of policemen who let themselves go and who got breathless if ever they ran, and whose only useful purpose was to kick the shit out of the poor sods who'd already been brought to the ground and were now lying there, defenceless, in the street; aiming their blows to the kidneys with the full weight of their enormous bodies behind them. But a negro - Crow had never seen a black cop. Or maybe they had them in Brazil. But then he'd never been to Brazil. And in North America, of course, the black cops in films from the United States used to kill other black North Americans all over the streets of the Bronx. That phrase formed in his head like a refrain while he allowed the two men to approach him. They were going to ask him for his documents. Mereles smiled amiably. The black was a couple of paces behind, and the fat guy approached them first.

  'Leave him to me,' said Gaucho Dorda.

  The fat policeman saluted him by tipping the front of his peaked cap with his index finger, and looked inside the car with a scowl. The Gaucho loathed pigs above all else, and before the guy had time to draw breath, he fired a shot into his chest. The man fell to the ground but did not die immediately, bawling, searching for cover under the edge of the kerb. The other policeman, the black, jumped out of the way, then crouched behind the car and began firing.

  'Cancela,' the black told him, 'call Headquarters.'

  Cancela must have had a walkie-talkie, but he was in no state to use it. He was lying in the gutter (Lucia could see him perfectly clearly), his chest stained with blood, breathing, or rather snoring - it sounded like - with difficulty, shifting his hand to cover the wound, to try, perhaps, to staunch the haemorrhage that was filling his throat with blood.

  Dorda put his arm out of the Studebaker window and gave Cancela the coup de grâce in his stomach. Dorda laughed out loud.

  'Die, pig,' he said and took aim at the other policeman while the Crow revved up the car and set it in motion.

  But the black was brave and leapt forward firing with his .45 and the twins crouched down in the car because he'd succeeded in wounding the Uruguayan they were bringing with them.

  The black paused in the middle of the street and continued firing while Mereles accelerated the car and set off around the corner with a squeal of tyres. During the exchange the black completely emptied his gun and had to take a moment's refuge on the threshold of the chemist's shop to reload. Following this (Lucia Passero continued) he went on firing until the car and its criminal occupants disappeared. It was like seeing a film projected for her alone, an unforgettable experience, those men crouched down and shooting, their faces frozen, their eyes steady, the dunglike smell of the gunpowder, the near-chestnut colour of the blood, the squeal of the tyres on the escaping car and the focused expression on the face of the black grasping his pistol in his two hands, holding steady, his legs spread wide on the paving stones. 'I saw,' said the woman, 'that one of the evil-doers had been wounded,' and it was true, she saw exactly how a bullet smashed the car's rear window as it passed by the bakery and saw also how one of those men shook his head and kept touching his waist, each time staring at the blood on his hand as he lifted it.

  'They got me,' the Uruguayan said and lowered his head to look at his blood-soaked hands as he pressed them against his abdomen. He was calm and frantic at one and the same time, so surprised at what had happened to him, he didn't know how to react. He was called Yamandú Raymond Acevedo and had never been wounded before. He'd agreed to work wit
h the Argentines on the car job because they were paying him a load of money and had promised him more to take them to the Brazilian frontier, to Rio Grande do Sul, up north past Santa Ana.

  'We can't keep going with you,' Kid Brignone was calmly saying to his face. 'Sorry, brother, but you'll have to get out.'

  'You're sending me to my death, Kid, don't leave me here in this state, I beg you, for God's sake.'

  Yamandú looked at him, whey-faced, begging first the Kid and then Dorda, who had the Beretta resting across his knees.

  'You're fucked, Yamandú,' said the Gaucho, 'you'll have to sort yourself out alone, we have to keep on going, nothing's going to happen to you.'

  'Don't be a bastard, Argie, don't just hand me over, let's go to Malito's and let him decide what to do.'

  Dorda lifted his Beretta and pointed it at his temple. 'Be grateful that I'm not polishing you off. If you get caught and sing, be sure I'll find you and cut off your balls.'

  'You're a pile of shit, you lot, you can't treat people like this,' replied the Uruguayan.

  The Crow barely slowed down and Yamandú opened the car door. He was going to have to chuck himself out in order to avoid being killed. He threw himself as far as possible from the car and fell sideways on to the tarmac.

  The car accelerated again and Dorda stuck the gun out of the window and fired at him, without managing to score a direct hit. To Yamandú this was proof that the Argentines were a lost cause, because there was an unwritten law in operation, a code of honour that you had to respect. Nobody abandons a wounded comrade who has behaved with absolute loyalty as if he were a nark. 'They were mad killers,' said Yamandú, 'living in complete delirium, they wanted to reach New York by car along the PanAmerican Highway, raiding banks along the way and robbing pharmacies for drug supplies. They were obsessed with this, they studied maps of all the side roads, and calculated how long it would take to get to North America. They were off their heads, hallucinating that they'd be working for the Puerto Rican mafia in New York, getting into the 'hood, into the Latin ghetto and starting over there, where nobody knew them. They couldn't even get out of Montevideo city centre, and they wanted to get to New York because the Kid had heard the tango singer who set up the robbery for them saying he'd met a Cuban with a restaurant in New York and they wanted to go and get into business with him, crazy stuff like that. I have never,' added Yamandú, 'come across guys like these.' No doubt Yamandú exaggerated, in order to shift the immense pressure he felt he was under and make himself out to be a simple bumpkin, no more than a stool-pigeon of the Argentines, who forced him to get involved in things he would never otherwise have gone near.

  'He'll squeal,' said the Gaucho, enraged at not having succeeded in finishing him off. 'He'll bring the lot of us down with him ... He knows all the houses, hiding places, where the hell are we going to go now?'

  'Calm down and let me think,' replied the Kid.

  'Think, what can you think about? That animal will squeal, fucking creep that he is, we have to go back and waste him.'

  'He's right,' said the Crow and reversed and then swung round at full speed, the car returning to the avenue where they'd dumped the Uruguayan. But when they got there, Yamandú had succeeded in dragging himself across a plot of wasteland and was hiding there, in a shed on the yard at the back of the hairdresser's, waiting for nightfall and the chance to make his getaway. He also persuaded himself, hidden there in a kind of covered gallery where the dryers were stored, looking like scuba-diving helmets with metal feet, the revolving armchairs with their white leather armrests, the basins with their round bowls pushing forward and all the tubes and sprays for hair-washing behind, with mirrors and boxes of combs and curlers, that he could just about hear the engine of the car that had returned and was searching the streets for him and it also seemed to him he could hear (or imagined he could hear) the Gaucho's voice calling him as if he were a kitten: 'Pussy, pussy, pussy.' 'He was entirely capable of doing that' (according to Yamandú) 'for he was a total speedfreak, completely off his head, who did whatever the Kid ordered him to, and the Kid was colder than a snake, he didn't care nothing for no one.'

  They took several turns around the area and even passed the plot of wasteland and the shed where Yamandú was hidden, but they didn't manage to find him and so left the centre when they heard the sound of approaching police patrol sirens. Without a doubt the police now had the details on the car, and as soon as he fell into their hands the Uruguayan would provide them with all the information necessary to identify them. As ever, Malito was off by himself, on his own in a pad over on Pocitos unknown to anyone, setting up a connection to get him back into Buenos Aires should the crossing into Brazil go awry. They had an appointment to meet him the following day. But by then he would already be aware of what had been happening.

  'We need to get clear altogether,' said the Crow. 'Fall back and regroup.'

  'Let's go, then,' said the Kid. 'Let's try and get there ahead of the cops.'

  They were absolutely certain that Yamandú was about to fall into their hands and that, of course, he'd see them stuffed. They stopped off at the safehouse where they'd been holed up since coming to Montevideo, and grabbed their arms and the money five minutes before the police got there. From then onwards, they broke all contact with the network Nando had set up for them in Uruguay, and began looking for somewhere to hide. They were completely cut off, everyone shunned them as if they were lepers.

  'I know where to go,' Kid Brignone said after a while.

  'D'you have a pad?' asked the Crow.

  They had paused in a side street off the main drag of the Rambla, facing the river. They had hidden the car under some trees in the Parque Rodo, and were tipping back beer from the bottle sitting on the running-board, with the car doors open, and the guns and cash stashed in the hole left by their removal of the rear passenger seats.

  'Wait here, you lot.'

  The Kid crossed the road, entered a café, and looked for a pay phone at the back of the bar.

  By this time Yamandú had been discovered in the middle of a ladies' hairdresser. The police out patrolling the district found him crouched at the back of the shop. In spite of the wound in his abdomen, the gunman attempted to escape but was brought down. He begged for mercy on his knees and finally implicated all his associates, letting them know how he got connected.

  'Don't kill me,' he pleaded, 'it was all the Argies' fault.'

  Their subject before them was one Yamandú Raymond Acevedo, of Uruguayan nationality, and with a long police record. He was taken to the Military Hospital, where he received first aid. The doctors did their utmost to keep him awake and alert.

  Raymond, under police interrogation, admitted to having been party to the gunfight in which police officer Cancela met his death, further admitting that he had continued on in the company of the Argentine criminals until they, in view of the fact that he - Yamandú - could no longer continue the flight because of his wound, attempted to kill him. His lengthy statement to the police allowed them to make a step-by-step reconstruction of their movements from the time they reached Montevideo. At the same time, the police immediately set in motion a series of raids to intercept the gang's progress.

  Having gathered sufficient physical details and particular characteristics of the four, they made contact with the police force across the River (again, according to the press). Then a series of photographic portraits of the gunmen confirmed their Argentine nationality. Of the four men in the group, Yamandú recognized three of the Argentine assailants from the rogues' gallery. They were Mereles, Brignone and Dorda. However, he knew nothing of where one Enrique Mario Malito was holed up.

  The criminal world found itself in a 'state of alert', for the investigations clearly demonstrated that the assassins, along with local swindlers and smugglers, had collaborated in concealing the Argentine gunmen, and were now in fear of police reprisals. The latest version to circulate was that Malito's gang had set off for Colonia in a desperate at
tempt to return across the River Plate into Buenos Aires. Today (or perhaps yesterday) the smuggler known as Omar Blasi Lentini had been detained, along with his pregnant wife and his two small children, for having procured shelter for the gang in the home of customs officer Pedro Glasser at number 2108 San Salvador Avenue. At once, the police were on the tracks of the Argentine criminal Hernando Heguilein, 'Nando', former member of the National Liberation Alliance (ALN) during Perón's reign, and accused by Lentini of being the lynchpin of every high-flying criminal who reached Uruguay from another country, and who had served as a link between the fugitives and the Uruguayan criminal world.

  On Friday, 5 November, a police task force, having succeeded in detaining Lentini - on grounds of acting for the 'El Cacho'{13} gang of juvenile delinquents - finally picked up Heguilein's trail.

  This individual was concealed in a house on Cufré Street, where the police took him by surprise in his pyjamas while he was shaving one morning. Despite being surrounded, he fled over the roofs and leapt from the flat roof of an adjacent house into the garden below, where he was finally captured. Nando said he'd left the gang when he became 'horrified at the cowardly way in which they had attempted to bump off Yamandú. I am a man of principles, a political prisoner. I belong to the National Justice Movement (MNJ){14} and fight for the return of General Perón,' declared the criminal.