Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  'On a teaspoon? On a desert island? Water? They sipped it?'

  'Like tea.' The Gaucho made a gesture of lifting a teaspoon, little finger crooked, sipping like a bird.

  The Crow laughed: he hadn't left the window the entire night through. He had spread his supply of Florinol out on a newspaper and continued taking one every so often, while the apartment floated in a pearly cloud around him.

  'Time to get out,' it sounds to the Gaucho like a voice emanating from an oracle. Gaucho Dorda listens to a chorus of voices issuing orders, voices so subdued you can scarcely hear them, least of all once the firing starts up.

  'You know, Kid, they don't speak when there's a racket going on, I can't hear them, they get erased, that's right, then all of a sudden those bitches start nagging again.'

  'We've got some maconha.'

  'Maconha?'

  'I used to live in Brazil, mate, didn't I tell you? There they call grass maconha ... this lot came from Paraguay ... the dark-skinned girl gave it me ... she kept it safe in a tin box in the kitchen, she did ...'

  The Kid got himself across the flat, along its invisible passages, crossing doorways, and finally reached the kitchen where he stumbled into the sideboard, rummaged around with his hand, and pulled out the tin, with its sweet scent of hash. 'La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha,'{19} the Kid returned singing, ya no puede caminar, porque le falta, porque no time ... ,' the radio operator was convinced he could hear him singing, Roque Pérez, from some corner of the building, someone, at least, was definitely singing this Mexican corrido from the Civil War period.

  'This toilet is totally flooded. You have to pee in this bucket and we'll chuck it out of the window on to the heads of the pigs ...'

  'Where did you get the grass?'

  'It was that little whore's, she brought it in from Paraguay…'

  They lit some joints and settled down to watch television. The bullets scarcely reached this side of the flat, close to the way out, and whenever the inmates stayed quiet for a while, the cops became nervous and started firing into the air.

  'Look, they've got an armoured personnel carrier, and there's around a thousand of them.'

  In the dawn drizzle you could see the squad and the lorries and the journalists on the pavement; the television showed it through a grey corrugated ridge of lines.

  'But they're not going to get us out of here. They're going to have to negotiate.'

  They were waiting for Malito. Perhaps it was true he had taken a hostage, the son of some aristocrat, and all of a sudden he'd appear on the television screen demanding their release. He was going to come and get them out, he was going to arrive with reinforcements, Malito was. The heavy squad, it'd be, Brazilians from Rio Grande do Sul. He was their mafia boss, was Malito, crazy but highly intelligent, always keeping his distance, not giving a fuck, but straight down the line with his own people, someone who'd never leave them in the lurch, if they could have soaked him by simply lifting up the receiver on the intercom and saying: 'I've got a meeting with Malito on 18 de julio Street.' The dark-skinned girl could have told him about it. As for Malito? Did he know she had a room in a boarding- house near the Mercado? Very much under surveillance just now. They had seen her appear numerous times on television talking nonsense and accusing all and sundry of raping her. Lies to throw them off the scent and get herself off the hook.

  'Baby,' said the Kid, and he was talking to the girl's image onscreen. 'Quiet down, skinny, don't keep gassing.' She looked straight at him, from out of the screen, and the Kid disappeared to the back of the flat and put the Winco on with the record by Head and Body:

  And if I can find a book of matches

  I'm goin' to burn this hotel down ...

  The Kid was singing along with the chorus to 'Parallel Lives'.

  The sounds of the night mingled with the dead music of the city itself. Was that Mereles' voice? Number Three's voice? Or could it be Number Two's?

  'Once I was trapped down a well for four days. I fell in as a kid and was stuck in there with all these insects crawling over my face and I couldn't shout because I was scared they'd get into my throat and in the end I was rescued by my dog who dug like crazy around the edge of the well.'

  Who was that talking? Roque Pérez's universe was growing narrower all the time; there was no space left in the diminutive control room where he was in charge of manoeuvres: he was constrained to follow the almost inaudible sounds emanating from the skeleton of the building. They generated a level of interference and were therefore connected with the spirit of an entire city. The voices travelled along interior canals, because inside the spider's web of the intercom the police had planted two microphones (or was there just one? one solitary microphone up there in the air?). They had installed them to pursue the paths taken by the drugs circulating through the nightclubs, and now they were using them to pursue the traces of these malefactors, although it was possible that they had placed him, Pérez, there in ten-hour shifts, to catch the secret the Argies were still concealing and the police chiefs wanted to elicit before killing them off. But there were additional voices coming in from the other side he couldn't decipher. Perhaps from the past, the radio operator was wondering. Maybe the words of the dead navigate their way through the subterranean sewage system and make it possible to follow the terrified prayer of two old women who'd locked themselves in the bathroom of some apartment or other.

  'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners ...'

  Where did this recital of the rosary come from, perhaps from the wireless operator's own memory, perhaps it was the voice of one of the gangsters, or the lamentation of a neighbour. He continued recording all these sounds, and next to him someone was trying to pick their way through the morass of voices. He couldn't leave, he was surrounded, he felt like a spy during the war, sending out messages from behind Japanese lines. A Uruguayan policeman, Corporal Roque Pérez, wireless operator by profession, dropped into the Battle of the River Plate. And if the gunmen took control of the building and discovered him, up there in his little attic, they'd execute him with a bullet to the back of the head at five metres.

  Every five minutes (approximately) the police employed microphones to intimidate them with a deafening blast, part of a psychological operation designed to make the pressure unbearable, while the technical corps of the Uruguayan State central intelligence service, using transmitters supplied by the SODRE,{20} listened in (despite the interference on the line) on the conversations of the besieged, courtesy of the three microphones hidden in the apartment only hours before it was surrounded.

  'There's no death penalty in this country.'

  'The death penalty ... I can't understand the idiot who'd allow himself to be caught so that he could be strapped to a chair and cooked ...'

  'You can be caught by them without meaning to be.'

  'Never.'

  'They seized Valerga when he was asleep and when they grabbed Beretta, they tackled him so he couldn't escape.'

  'There are only four methods of execution: hanging, firing squad, gas chamber and electric chair. You can wait ages to die. Sometimes as much as a minute, a minute and a half... Hold your breath and imagine it. The chair itself is pretty sinister: the smoke rising from your burnt skin has an unforgettable odour, it smells of roasting meat. They attach electrodes to the head and legs of the condemned man. You don't see flames, instead you see a change in the skin's colouring as it turns maroon, then black.'

  'And in Argentina, what's the system there? D'you know what it is? A bullet in the balls!'

  Dawn broke slowly and ponderously. To the drop in temperature was added the inconvenience of increasingly annoying rainfall. The firing continued spasmodically. When it was properly daylight the police, taking careful precautions, and over a period of two hours, were able to evacuate the tenants living opposite and below them, who'd found themselves trapped. The operation was covered by a fierce round of gunfire from the position overlooking the central well.

  The Fire
Brigade's largest ladder was propped against the balcony on the second floor, from where the residents could descend, their backs to the street, in the main terrified families who had suffered a situation of extreme anguish for a number of hours. They could observe housewives, their cheeks pale with fear, one of whom was begging that her miniature pooch, a Pekinese, be likewise saved and, together with her owner, placed in a police station, preferably the one on Maldonado Street.

  'My daughter and I,' according to Señora Vélez (broadcasting on Radio Carve), 'spent all our time at the far end of the kitchen where, through the plumbing pipes, we heard the lads shouting and guffawing. They're hunting them down like rats ... It upset me to hear that, you don't kill a Christian like that...'

  'It seems to me they're all dead,' said Señor Antúnez from the flat next door to number nine. 'It's some time since we heard shouts and guffaws. We're all right, but it was like living through the Second World War.'

  Once the adjacent apartments were emptied, the police prepared for the final offensive. Their first move was to order that the running water be cut off, after which came the electricity. Then they employed that super-well-known ruse of a 'Molotov cocktail', mixing them in empty bottles requisitioned from the corner bar. The idea was to throw them into flat number nine, seeking to start a fire that way. Once again, their efforts were in vain, as they were immediately caught and extinguished by the gunmen, who soaked blankets in the bath filled with water and succeeded in putting the fire out without allowing it to spread. Once again and on the spur of the moment, instead of becoming discouraged, the Argentines redoubled their efforts while the police intensified the gunfire in order to keep them busy.

  Whichever way you looked at it, the gunmen's situation had become critical. By taking over flat number three (opposite on the second floor, very close to number nine), the police succeeded in opening up a fresh angle of fire via a skylight, a post occupied by Commissioner Silva and Sergeant Mario Martinez from the Robbery and Larceny Division, the skilled Thompson machine-gun operator. They took it in turns to fire and to reload the weapon. This new breach, which opened a tiny angle with access to the bedroom at number nine, was immediately covered by the bandits.

  At eight in the morning, the Argentines resumed shooting their .45 pistols and the machine-guns resumed their response to every round fired by the police. They could only move around in an extremely restricted area of the apartment, as any attempt was blocked by the elite operatives.

  At the same time, a special agent from 12a, Aranguren, twenty-one years old, married, and a father of two, together with agent Julio C. Andrada, another youth of twenty-five, were both assigned to the flat, to cover the door giving on to the corridor, a scant three metres away from the gunmen's own front door. One of the malefactors (Dorda) hurled himself into the corridor and, through the half-open door of the adjacent flat, released another burst of machine-gunfire. Aranguren fell where he was and, as they lowered him out of the window and down on to the street, Andrada, a plainclothes secret policeman, dressed in brown protective clothing, was also wounded and lay where he fell on the kitchen floor of the flat next door, sheltered beneath the sink and far from the reach of the criminals.

  Finally, with the building plans in hand, a new method was sought: that of employing members of the fire brigade to perforate the floor of the upstairs flat leading into flat number nine and attack those already under siege from above.

  Several policemen climbed up the extending ladder to the second floor where the firefighters had propped it against the window with considerable precision. In order to cover the operation from flat number eleven, a stipple of fire hailed in through the skylights: ditto through the window giving on to the stairwell while the police went into flat number thirteen on the floor above, directly over the besieged den.

  That was how, at ten in the morning, a breach was opened in the floor of the flat over that occupied by the Argentines. The idea was to pump carbon monoxide in through the hole, and work was feverishly begun with a steel file in the flat overhead. The task progressed only slowly and in the end a compressor had to be requested from the electricity supply company in order to start working with a power drill.

  With the aid of a winch, a pneumatic drill was brought on to the flat roof. They hoisted it up via the corridor on the second floor, which gave on to the roof of one of the bedrooms in flat number nine.

  They drilled feverishly and in a few minutes a hole was opened up. The gunmen attempted to stall this latest manoeuvre by firing volley rounds, barely noticing that the hole was now admitting light. The intensity of fire through the windows giving on to the outside stairwells prevented them from gaining positions from which they could aim at their targets with any degree of conviction, let alone hit any of the workmen.

  From then on their time was limited. Numerous bottles filled with petrol were launched through the breach in the ceiling, each with a flaming wick. As it was afterwards confirmed, the floorboards caught fire, all kinds of other objects did too, including furniture and curtains. The air became impossible to breathe.

  They were also under direct fire from the breach, from as close as flat number eleven, situated beside that occupied by the gunmen.

  Exhausted by the interminable hours of gun battle, having suffered the effects of such a terrible skirmish, the gunmen were once again forced out of the apartment, emerging on to the first floor corridor. At the same time, two cops stationed on the ground floor did the same, coming out into the corridor leading to the staircase, leaving them no option but to hurl themselves towards the front hall of the building, seeking the fresh air of the street. The gunmen crossing the hall without pausing in their shooting got to Miguel Miranda almost on the threshold of the front door, along with another agent with the surname Rocha, who had been posted beside the wall.

  From outside there was a rush on the door by the troopers who'd heard another of their number fall, but the wounded cop turned and ran towards the entrance, firing with accuracy, and succeeding in forcing back the gunmen while he dragged Miranda's corpse on to the street.

  There was a hubbub of protest and fury from the crowd, and several policemen requested permission to mount a pair of machine-guns, each directed towards the interior of the building, intended to put paid to any further resistance.

  Silva's orders, and those of his Uruguayan officers, were to wear down the criminals before coming to the final offensive.

  Back inside the flat Dorda and Brignone, like two ghosts, wearing dampened handkerchiefs over their mouths to reduce the effects of the gas, once more abandoned their lair, venturing a couple of metres at a time down the corridor, from where they fired off a number of rounds before again retreating into the apartment.

  Their voices floated down from a distance, mingled with muffled sounds, with knocking in the pipes and the interminable barking of a dog. Mereles was leaning up against a door frame beside the kitchen window and now Dorda and Brignone had sat down together, glued to the window overlooking the street.

  'How long have we been here?'

  Shortly after midday another hefty round of firing resumed, indicating that from first to last the criminals were prepared for anything. Even for death, but only while killing. By now it was assumed that at least one of the gunmen was dead or at least severely injured. The next move was to throw the incendiary bombs into the flat, to succeed in forcing them away from the room with access to the skylight. That gave the further opportunity to other police officers to shoot from a number of different vantage points. That was when the battle climax was reached.

  Several men staved in the windows of a neighbouring apartment on the block at number 1182 Julio Herrera, with access on to the street, and gained a foothold there to hold the gunmen at bay by shooting at them from yet another angle, while the drill worked its way through the wall in the adjoining flat. The hole was pushed through at a low level in order that bullets could be used which blazed through surfaces, and which proved more efficacious
than those used hitherto.

  When the hole was ready the criminals, who never disregarded any possible orifice through which to attack, fired in their turn, wounding another agent from station 12a, Nelson Honorio Gonzálvez, in the chest, causing him to fall immediately from the first-floor balcony to the street below. He was put in an ambulance, but died on the way to hospital.

  The police redoubled their offensive and were responded to in kind from inside the apartment, but at the end of half an hour of deafening gunfire, the intensity of fire coming from the gunmen diminished, becoming more and more sporadic. It would seem that they were saving ammunition, but this really wasn't the case, merely that Brignone and Mereles had begun to weaken as a result of the wounds they'd received during fifteen hours of strife.

  The only one thus far unhurt was Dorda, who from time to time let off another round of machine-gunfire, in between tending to his two companions. A policeman had been posted outside, in the corridor, and was shooting through the window.

  Mereles got up to silence the fire from the sniper posted opposite, but before he could shoot, he received a blast that blew him into the living-room. He had gone into the kitchen to look for an angle of fire and died without being aware of what hit him, as if the effort involved in getting to the light of the window had drawn him beyond the world's domain.

  Or so the Kid deduced, as he saw the light shining through the window at the far end, then heard the Crow's groans as he fell on his back against the door into the room.

  'Crow,' the Kid said. But the Crow was already dead.

  Brignone sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall, firing into the air with his machine-gun, while the police continued their hammering with the pneumatic drill on the roof, making an infernal din as if a train were running overhead.

  Mereles had fallen close to the bedroom over which the breach had been opened up. The police barricaded outside behind cars and lorries received the news that possibly one of the criminals was dead. But given the flat's layout, it was impossible either to see inside or to verify the information.