Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  His uncle, Nino Noci to, was an avid Peronist supporter, elected to represent the wealthy Zona Norte, a leading figure in the Popular Unity party and interim president of the San Fernando Town Council. A few days earlier, the uncle had advised him of a meeting of the finance committee and he'd got the whole picture. The same evening Nocito went to hear his nephew sing in a low-life dive on Serrano and Honduras and, well away on his second bottle of wine, he began to sing himself.

  'Fontán ... there's at least five million in it.'

  They needed to employ a gang of thieves of the utmost trustworthiness, a group of professionals to put in charge of the operation. Reyes had to guarantee that his uncle would be taken care of.

  'Nobody can possibly know that I am mixed up in this. Nobody,' Nocito said. Nor did he, in his turn, wish to know who was going to be in on the job. He only wanted a half of a half, meaning a clean 75,000 dollars (according to his calculations).

  Fontán Reyes was told to wait for them in a house on Martinez Street where they were going to go to ground immediately after the robbery. They reckoned that within a half-hour everything could be sorted.

  'If we don't arrive within the half-hour,' announced Crow Mereles, 'that means we're moving on to second post.'

  Fontán Reyes had no idea where the next post was, nor was he at all sure what 'second post' meant. Malito had got to know the system through Nando Heguilein, a former member of the National Liberation Alliance, with whom he had become friends when they were both prisoners in the Sierra Chica a while ago. A cellular structure prevents everything collapsing like a chain of dominoes and gives you time to get out (according to Nando). You always have to cover your retreat.

  'And so?' inquired Fontán Reyes. 'What if they don't arrive?'

  'And so,' answered the Blond Gaucho, 'you'd need to hide your pretty face.'

  'And so that'd tell us there must be some sort of problem,' went on Mereles.

  Fontán Reyes observed the loaded weapons on the table and for the first time realized that he'd played for stakes of all- or-nothing. Until then he'd worked as their cover on a few dirty deals for his friends. He'd concealed them, following a robbery, in his house at Olivos, he'd brought the dope into Montevideo and had sold on a few 'raviolis' - 'wraps' - in seedy downtown bars. Easy work, but this time was different. Arms were involved, and probably corpses, and he was a direct accomplice. Naturally, he was risking himself for a decent sum.

  'At the very least,' his uncle had told him, 'it works out at a million pesos a head.'

  With 100,000 dollars he could open his bar in New York. A place where he could live out his retirement in peace.

  'Do you have somewhere to go tonight?' inquired Mereles, and Fontán Reyes jumped with surprise.

  He was going to wait for them in a place no one else knew about, then call them up by phone.

  'The operation is due to last six minutes,' insisted the Kid. 'Any longer and it gets too dangerous because there are two police points and a short-wave radio covering the whole twenty blocks.'

  'The key to it all,' said Fontán Reyes, 'is that there are no deep throats.'

  'Spoken like one who knows,' said Dorda.

  At this moment the door opened and a young blonde woman, almost a girl, dressed in a miniskirt and a flowery blouse, came into the room. She was barefoot and embraced Mereles.

  'Do you have some for me, little Daddy?' she asked.

  Mereles pushed some cocaine on a mirror over towards her and the Girl moved to his side and began chopping at it with a razor. Then she warmed it with a lighter while she hummed Paul McCartney's 'Yesterday'. She took out a 50- peso note, rolled it up into a cone, inserted it into one nostril and inhaled with a gentle snort. Dorda looked on in amazement and noticed how the Girl wasn't wearing a bra, you could see her breasts through her light blouse.

  'Delay, medium term, ten minutes, according to the traffic.'

  'There'll be two guards and a cop,' recited Brignone.

  'We have to kill the lot of them,' said Dorda suddenly. 'If you leave witnesses, they'll lock you up 'cause they're all out to do the rounds and spit on you.'

  The young girl's life had suddenly changed and she went along with them in the conviction that it wasn't going to offer her another chance like this. Her name was Bianca Galeano. In January she had travelled all by herself to Mar del Plata to visit a friend and celebrate, because she'd just got through her exams in the third year of secondary school a month earlier. On the Rambla one afternoon she'd got to know Mereles, a thin guy who was staying at the Provincial Hotel. Mereles introduced himself as the son of a landowner from Buenos Aires province, and Blanquita believed him. She had just reached her fifteenth birthday and by the time she'd learnt who Crow Mereles was and what he did, she was past caring. (On the contrary, she fancied him like crazy, fired by the idea of a gangster who loaded her with presents, and who pleased and excited her more and more.)

  She began living with him and the guys from the gang followed her with their eyes like starving dogs. Once on some wasteland, she had seen a cage of dogs dying of hunger, all chained up, who entwined and plaited themselves around one another, then threw themselves hungrily on whatever appeared, and these guys gave her exactly the same impression. If Mereles let them loose, they would all leap on her. Sooner or later, she knew, it was bound to happen. She imagined them staring at her if she walked by undressed, in her high heels, then saw herself in bed with the Kid, as Mereles had sometimes provoked her to. 'Do you want me to bring him here?' the degenerate would ask her and she'd begin to feel the heat. She liked that twin, pale as he was, he seemed to be about the same age as herself. But he was a faggot (according to the Crow). 'Or maybe you like the big guy?' Mereles would ask her, 'look what rough trade he is,' and Bianca would laugh and throw herself at him. 'Gimme,' she'd say, 'little Daddy.' Naked, in her high heels, the Girl strutted about, until he shoved her up against the mirror, and she leaned over the bench for him to have his way with her.

  She didn't want to know what the guys were planning and returned to her room. They were plotting something heavy (because something was always being plotted when they gathered to speak in low voices and spent days without leaving the house). She needed to study because she still had to deliver two subjects to obtain enough credits to finish secondary school. She was going to spend a few months with Mereles - rather like taking a holiday - and then everything was to go back to how it was before. 'You have to make the most of being young while you can,' her mother told her when she began bringing home the money. Her father, Don Antonio Galeano, was away with the fairies, he knew nothing about anything, went to work in the Sanitation Department, in a building that resembled a palace, on Rio Bamba and Cordoba. Then her mum was bound to come along and ruin everything, forever complaining about her father, who never earned above the minimum salary, and when she got wind of her Girl's altered circumstances she began stopping in alone with her, to get her to spill the beans. And in the end, daughters always do what their mothers want. When at last the mother came to meet Mereles, she took one look at the pervert Crow's eyes glued to her breasts and began to laugh out loud. The Girl stared at her and learnt that it was possible to be jealous of one's own mother. 'You look like sisters,' said Mereles, 'please permit me to give you a kiss.'

  'Sure, honey,' said the mother, 'you have to look after Blanquita for me, 'cause beware if her father finds out...'

  'Finds out what?'

  That he was married. Married and separated and always going with cheap country girls he'd picked up in cabarets down on the harbour.

  The Girl threw herself on the bed with her maths book and began thinking of other things. Mereles had promised to take her to Brazil to see the Carnival. Voices were lowered on the other side of the door, and she couldn't hear anything until a while later some giggles wafted through to her.

  Dorda tended to seem a little far gone and was attached to the notion of failure, viewing everything pessimistically yet always cracking dis
astrous jokes, so that ultimately everyone decided they had a good time with him.

  'They're going to shut off the route out of the square and we're going to be trapped and then they'll kill us like curs.'

  'Don't be an idiot, Gaucho,' said the Crow, 'Daddy will do the driving and will get you out by mounting the car on to the pavement, so avoiding all the cops.'

  Dorda began laughing, the spectacle of the car setting off against the traffic, riding on the pavement, headed towards the square in the midst of bullets and corpses, amused him no end.

  2

  The day of the robbery dawned fine and clear. At 15.02 on Wednesday 27 September 1965, the bank-clerk Alberto Martinez Tobar went to work at the cash desk in the San Fernando branch of the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. He was a tall fellow, red-faced and bug-eyed, who had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday and who only had a few more hours to live. He cracked jokes with the girls in the accounts section, and went down to the basement where the strongboxes were stored beside the black table stacked with the bags of money. There employees in their shirtsleeves counted notes, under the artificial light and noise of the ventilators.

  An underground tomb, a jail stashed with money, the bank cashier had thought. He had lived all his life in San Fernando and his father had worked for the Town Hall before him. He had a daughter who suffered acutely with her nerves, and it was costing him a fortune to have her attended to. Many times over, he had considered the possibility of stealing the money handed over into his safekeeping on a monthly basis. He had even gone as far as to mention it to his wife.

  On occasion he'd thought it'd be a simple matter to bring in a dummy briefcase, identical to the rest, filled with counterfeit money. It could be substituted for one of the others, and he could then walk out with serenity. It would only require arranging with the bank-clerk who happened to be a childhood friend. They could split the cash and carry on leading their lives as normal. The fortune would accrue to their children. He visualized the money kept in a secret safe in his cupboard, the money invested under a false number in a Swiss bank, the money hidden in a mattress, he imagined himself sleeping with the wads stored under the ticking, feeling them rustle as he tossed and turned during his nights of insomnia. On recent nights, when he couldn't sleep, he had told his wife how he contemplated effecting these changes. He spoke into the darkness and she listened to him, in silence. It was one of those ideas which kept him alive, and it added a certain spirit of adventure and a certain personal interest in the money transfers he made on a monthly basis.

  This particular afternoon, he deposited the briefcases on top of the table and the colleague with his green visor looked at the payment slip with its signatures and its stamps and began separating out wads of 10,000 pesos. There was a heap of money, 7,203,960 pesos to pay staff salaries and the costs of repairing the municipal sanitation works. They put the wads of new notes into the black briefcases, the leather worn through use, stuffing even the pleats and side pockets.

  Before leaving the Bank, Martinez Tobar complied with the security measures and attached the case to his left wrist with a small chain anchored with a padlock. Later on, someone was to say that he paid the ultimate price for this useless precaution.

  When he went out into the street he saw nothing: nobody sees anything in the moments leading up to a robbery. A wind whips up without warning and a guy gets knocked down, perhaps with a sharp blow to the back of the head, never knowing what happened. If anyone observes something suspicious afoot, he's bound to be dismissed as a timorous sort, already traumatized by a previous experience, and who's now convinced that history is about to repeat itself.

  Martinez Tobar looked at what he always noticed without scrutiny: the woman with the little fairground kiosk, the boy racing his dog, the store-keeper reopening for business after the siesta hour, but he failed to see Twisty on the lookout in the bar, propped up against the counter, knocking back a gin and studying the legs of the pregnant girl who came out of the shop next door. Pregnant women excited Twisty, and he remembered the movements of the woman in a house on Saavedra Street, while her husband was away at the office and he was still a young conscript. He had met her on the subway, when he gave up his seat to her and the woman started chatting to him, and he began enjoying her company. She was the same age as Twisty, twenty years old, her six- month pregnancy stretching her skin so taut it appeared transparent and they had to seek out the weirdest positions to be able to make it, he could only penetrate her if he propped himself up with one foot on the bed, which was when she turned her face and smiled at him. It distracted him to remember the woman in Saavedra, called either Graciela or Dora, but then he reverted to feeling tense because he saw the fellow leaving the bank with the briefcase and the money. He looked at his watch. Timed to the precise second.

  The two police guards chatted on the pavement. One of the Town Hall clerks, Abraham Spector, a huge and heavy fellow, tied his shoes with difficulty, leaning up against the bumpers of the pick-up. The square was quiet, tranquil even.

  'What's up, Fatso?' asked the clerk, and then greeted the security guys and got into the truck.

  The guards travelled in the rear seat, guys with the faces of sleepwalkers, heavy, their weapons across their laps, ex- gendarmes, former sharpshooters, retired junior officers, forever guarding somebody else's money, somebody else's women, imported cars, great mansions, faithful hounds, in total confidence, always armed and in heavy boots. One of them was called Juan José Balacco, he was sixty years old and a former police commissioner, and the other was a legal cop from the San Fernando first division, an eighteen-year-old heavyweight, Francisco Otero, whom everyone called Ringo Bonavena, because he wanted to be a boxer and trained every night in the Excursionistas gym with a Japanese trainer who had promised to make him champion of Argentina.

  They had to go back across the 200 metres that separated the Bank (on one corner of the square) from the Town Hall (on the other corner).

  'We're a little late,' Spector said.

  The clerk set the engine running. The pick-up proceeded along Third of February Street at walking pace and when it turned the corner there was a screech of rubber on tarmac and the sound of another car accelerating alongside them.

  The car was on top of them, driving against the one-way system, shooting through, as though driverless, and screeched to a halt.

  'What does this madman think he's doing?' asked Martinez Tobar, still prepared to be amused.

  Two guys leapt on to the pavement and one pulled a woman's stocking over his face (or so some witnesses said). He held a pair of scissors and stretched the nylon with the tips of his fingers, then, the stocking already pulled over his head, he slashed two holes level with his eyes.

  Spector was a large man, with a look of helplessness about him, wearing a striped shirt blotched with sweat. Of the four of them travelling in the pick-up, he was the only one to survive. He threw himself on the floor and they fired at him from above, but they hit the metal lid of his pocket watch, which deflected the bullet. A miracle (that he happened to be wearing his father's pocket watch). He was sitting on the pavement outside the Bank, suffocating, watching people hurry by and the ambulances pass. Journalists were gathering at the spot and the police cordoned off the street. Eventually a patrol car halted and Police Commissioner Silva stepped down. He was the chief of police for the Zona Norte of Greater Buenos Aires and in charge of the operation. He got down from his car, dressed in plain clothes, with a pistol cocked in his left hand and a walkie-talkie in his right, out of which you could hear voices giving orders and dictating numbers, and he approached Spector.

  'Come with me,' he said.

  Following a moment's uncertainty, Spector got up, slow and scared, and followed him.

  They proceeded to show the witness different photographs of robbers, gunmen and a selection of underworld characters who were potential authors of the deed, according to its most salient characteristics. Constrained by his overwhelming sen
se of confusion, the witness failed to recognize a single face (according to the daily papers).

  When the car pulled up in front of them, Spector noted that it was 15.11 by the Town Hall clock.

  A tall guy, dressed in a suit, got down from the car and, using both hands, pulled a woman's stocking down over his face, like someone pulling down a blind, and then he leant over the car seat and when he stood up again, he had a machine-gun in his hand. His head was made of rubber, of wax, shapeless, like a honeycomb stuck to his skin causing him to breathe deeply, or to snuffle, from where his voice emerged clipped and artificial. He resembled a wooden dummy, or perhaps a ghost.

  'Let's go, Kid,' Dorda said, gasping for breath as if asphyxiating. And to the driver he said: 'We'll be back ...'

  Then Mereles accelerated, and the ready-fitted motor of the Chevrolet, with its racing-car engine and low-slung chassis, roared in the silence of siesta hour, on Town Hall Square, in San Fernando.

  The Kid touched the medallion of the Virgin to bring himself luck and got out of the car. He was so thin and fragile and was so drugged that he looked diseased, as if he were a victim of tuberculosis, as they'd told the gunmen beforehand ('sick as a consumptive'), but he earnestly clasped the Beretta .45 in his two hands and when one of the guards moved, he discharged his weapon into his face. The bullet sounded dry, unreal, like a snapped branch.

  Dorda had the nylon of the woman's stocking stuck to his face and breathed heavily through the fabric stuck inside his mouth. Off to one side he could see a guy getting down from the truck, and started to fire.

  Two old fellows sunbathing on the plaza benches, along with a regular customer, busily perusing his newspaper seated at a table by the bar window opposite, saw how two or three men inside the Chevrolet 400, its plates registered in Buenos Aires province, leapt from the car, weapons in hand.

  They seemed enraged, aiming at everyone in sight, sweeping the air in semi-circles as they approached, in slow motion, towards the pick-up. The tallest (according to the witnesses) wore a woman's stocking over his face, but the other one had his features exposed. It was the skinny one with the face of an angel, the one all the witnesses began to call 'the Lad'. He got out of the car, smiled, took aim at the rear end of the pick-up with his machine-gun, then fired off a round.