Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  First some white smoke emanated through the tiny bathroom window that opened, like an eye, above the party wall between the flats. A thin column of white smoke, against the further whiteness of the mist.

  'Burning money is ugly, it's a sin. E peccato,'{17} added Dorda, in ecclesiastical Italian, and with a 1,000-peso note in his hand, there in the bathroom where he'd been taking speed, holding a Ronson lighter he'd pilfered from a crazy girl; he took it and burnt it, then looked at himself in the mirror and laughed. The Kid stood in the doorway, watching him and saying nothing.

  'Just think: to earn a bill this size, a security guard, for example' - security guards are always contracted in, and they know it, they always catch up with the crooks once they've got into the place through the skylight, that's when the fellow appears, an inane grin on his face - 'would have to work for a fortnight... and a bank-clerk, depending on his seniority, would have to work at least a month to get a bill of this size, as he whiles away his life counting other people's money.'

  In contrast, they had wads and wads of notes, all of their own. The pills were now dissolved, crushed and disappearing in a glass of Calcigenol, looking like a glass of milk, but tasting very different. The loot was in the bathroom, ready to burn in the basin. The Kid is laughing aloud. Dorda also laughs, if a little fearfully, at what he's cooking up.

  It was then, at some point or other, at some given moment, it became known that the criminals were setting fire to the five million pesos remaining to them from the raid on the San Fernando Town Hall from which, as is well known, they seized seven million.

  They began tossing burning 1,000-peso bills out of the window. From the kitchen skylight they succeeded in floating the burning money down towards the corner. The bills looked like butterflies of light, flaming notes.

  A buzz of indignation rippled through the crowd.

  They're burning it.'

  They're burning the money.'

  If the money were the sole justification for the murders they committed, and if what they did, they did for the money they were now burning, that had to mean they had no morals nor motives, that they acted and killed gratuitously, out of a taste for evil, out of pure evil, that they were born assassins, insensate criminals, degenerates. Filled with indignation, the citizens gathered to observe the scene, offering shouts of horror and loathing, looking like something from a witches' sabbath straight out of the Middle Ages (according to the papers), they couldn't bear the prospect of 500,000 dollars being burned before their very eyes, in a move that left the city and the country horror-struck, and which lasted precisely fifteen interminable minutes, which is exactly how long it takes to burn such an astronomical quantity of money, those notes that, for reasons beyond the authorities' control, were destroyed on a metal sheet called, in Uruguay, a 'hub' and which is used as the brazier for the grill in barbecueing the Sunday roast. It was in just such a 'hub' that the money went up in smoke, and the police stood by in stupefaction, for what could they do with criminals capable of such outrageous behaviour? Scandalized, people's minds indignantly and immediately turned to the poor, those lacking in basic necessities, the rural population of Uruguay living on the margins, and to the little orphans whose futures could have been secured by that very amount.

  'If they had only saved the life of a single one of the orphaned children, they would have given some sort of point to their existence, the cretins ...' announced a lady, 'but they are evil to the core, bad from the innards out, mere animals,' the journalists were told by the eye-witnesses, and the television cameras rolled, then transmitted all-day-round repeats of the rite which the TV presenter Jorge Foister labelled an act of cannibalism.

  'Burning innocent money is an act of cannibalism.'

  If they had given away the money, if they had thrown it out of the window at the people gathered on the street, if they agreed with the police to hand it over to a charitable foundation, everything would have gone differently for them.

  'For example, had they donated those hundreds of thousands to improving prison conditions where they themselves are going to be held ...'

  As it was, everyone understood perfectly well that this was a declaration of all-out war, a direct attack, a textbook case, waged on society as a whole.

  'They should be hanged.'

  'They should be left to die slowly, burnt to a crisp.'

  The idea got out that money is innocent, even when acquired as a consequence of death and crime. It couldn't be considered culpable, but rather it should be viewed as neutral, as a symbol that comes in useful depending on how one wants to use it.

  The notion also began to circulate that the burnt money served as an example of murderous madness. Only crazed killers and immoral beasts could be sufficiently cynical to burn 500,000 dollars. Such an act (the dailies said) was worse than all the crimes that they had committed, because it was an act of nihilism and an example of pure terrorism.

  In statements made to the magazine Marcha, the Uruguayan philosopher Washington Andrada signalled that however terrible one might consider it, such an action, a kind of innocent potlatch let loose on a society with no memory of such a ritual, an act absolute and free in itself, a gesture of sheer waste and sheer outpouring, would in other societies have been taken as a sacrifice made to the gods because only the most valiant is worthy of sacrifice and there is nothing more valiant between ourselves than money, so said Professor Andrada, and he was at once summoned by the magistrate.

  The manner in which they burnt the money is proof absolute of their evil genius, because they burnt the money by rendering clearly visible the bills of 1,000 pesos which gradually took light, one after the next, the 1,000-peso bills burned like butterflies whose wings are touched by the flames of a candle and beat for another second as they flare, flying on through the air though consumed by fire for an interminable instant before burning out and turning to ash.

  And after all these interminable minutes in which they say the notes burnt like flaming birds before transforming into a heap of charcoal, a funeral pyre to our social values (as declared an eye-witness on television), a wonderfully beautiful column of azure ash raining from the window in a shower resembling the calcified remains of the dead that get scattered across the ocean, or over the mountains and woods, only not over the filthy city streets, for ash must never drift on to the stone floor of our concrete jungles.

  In the wake of this act which hypnotized then paralysed everyone, the police came round first, reacting by launching a brutal offensive as if the time in which the Nihilists (as the newspapers now called them) completed their blind ritual had dazzled and delayed them, yet also left them prepared and further inclined to achieve the final hecatomb.

  8

  Weary with issuing useless orders, Commissioner Silva had stayed quiet for a while. He was at the control post, dressed in his white mackintosh, leaning on one elbow, alone and smoking a cigarette. He observed the darkened windows of the flat and saw the hesitant silhouettes of the malefactors, up there, still holding out. It was essential to kill them and prevent them from talking. About what? Had there been negotiations? 'Is it true, Police Commissioner,' the reporter on El Mundo noted down the questions in his exercise book, 'that some policemen, as has been said, arranged the malefactors' flight out of San Fernando in return for a cut of the booty?'

  Silva was the man responsible for having let the Argentines escape, and now every Uruguayan police officer who fell would be counted against him. The lad who wrote the police reports for El Mundo observed him from the middle of the street. That face, with its scar, its disdain, loneliness and wickedness, all lodged in the dead glint of his eyes. He caught a fleeting expression of anxiety in Silva, a look he swiftly wiped from his face. The commissioner hadn't allowed himself more than a moment to cover his eyes with the tips of his fingers before shooting another sideways glance at the front of the house illuminated by the beam of the spotlights. A cold glance of a hard guy, a look too fleeting to be faked (according to Ren
zi) and yet too deliberate to be entirely natural. How many years and how many inner struggles had it taken to perfect that kind of gesture of feigned unease?

  From out on the street, the reporter studied Silva's fragile appearance, which resembled a Japanese mask. His delicate hands, 'the hands of a woman', the pistol in his left hand cocked at the ground, like a hook or a prosthesis necessary to complete an imperfect human form. Armed with a weapon he could bluff anyone, he could confront the journalists who were even now beginning to surround him and to join him in gazing up at the half-open window to the hideout. The lad from El Mundo began taking notes on Silva's latest declarations.

  'They are mentally ill.'

  'Killing mentally ill people is not kindly looked upon by journalism in general,' noted the reporter with irony. 'They are supposed to be taken to the asylum, not executed ...'

  Silva stared at Renzi with his weary look; yet again the disrespectful and tedious adolescent, with his glasses and his unruly hair, his puppy face, so alien to the real world and the dangers of the situation, who'd landed like a parachutist, behaving like a professional solicitor, or as if he were a convict's kid brother complaining at the way criminals get treated in police stations.

  'And killing healthy people, that's kindly looked upon?' answered Silva in the listless voice of someone being called upon to explain the blindingly obvious.

  'Have you offered them a negotiated way out?'

  'How can you negotiate anything with criminals like these? Or haven't you been here during the past night?'

  'The cops have started to get jumpy,' someone announced.

  'And with reason. We're not going in and we don't need martyrs ...' said Silva. 'Even if we have to hold out for a week, we are going to maintain calm. Those gentlemen up there are psychopaths, homosexuals ...' he glowered at Renzi, 'clinical cases, human waste.'

  'They're made of ice, they have no pity, they're dead' (Silva was thinking). 'They're like living cadavers hellbent on just one thing, discovering quite how many of us they can take with them. They're a miniature army. Adrenalin helps them to overcome terror. They are covered with pinpricks from their needles, they've become no more than killing machines. They want to suss out the limits of what they can get away with, they'll never surrender, they'd sooner make us eat dirt. They've got no normal sense of danger, they carry death in their bloodstream, they've killed innocent people on the streets since the age of fifteen, they're the sons of alcoholics and syphilitics, headcases, simmering with resentment, desperate delinquents more dangerous than a whole command unit of professional soldiers, they're a pack of wolves gone to ground in someone's house.'

  'This is a war,' declared Silva. 'You have to bear in mind the tenets of war. Never allow combat to cease when one of your men has fallen. If a man falls, you have to continue. Otherwise what else is left for you to do? Survival is the sole glory of war,' went on Silva. 'And I want you to understand what I am saying. We have to wait.'

  Silva intuitively understood the gangsters' way of thinking. Obviously, he was closer to them than to these cub reporters, queers and mummy's darlings the lot of them, would-be heroes, but in reality pedants, ill-born and ill-bred.

  'And you, what do you do?' Commissioner Silva turned back, unexpectedly, towards Renzi.

  'I'm a correspondent on the Buenos Aires El Mundo.'

  'I can see that much but, aside from that, what do you do? Are you married, d'you have kids?'

  Emilio Renzi moved to one side, awkwardly leaning his weight on to his left foot, and smiled, surprised.

  'Nope, no kids. I live alone on the corner of Medrano and Rivadavia Streets, in the Almagro Hostel.' He fished for his documents in his jacket pocket, as if the cop was coming to arrest him. That was where he had gone too far, certain now that the fellow had already marked him down ever since the press conference back in Buenos Aires.

  'I'm a student and I earn my living as a journalist, just like you earn yours as a police officer, and if I'm asking you questions, that's because I want to give an accurate account of what's going on.'

  Silva studied him in amusement, as though the lad were some sort of circus clown, or a ridiculous mental defective.

  'An account? An accurate one? I don't reckon you have the balls for all that,' Silva laughed as he went over to the tent where the Uruguayan officers were meeting to plan the forthcoming attack.

  It was true that the only way to break the criminals' grip was to begin thinking like them, and Silva was convinced the gang, cornered like rats in a sewer with no way out, were determined to act the hero and doping themselves in order not to surrender and come downstairs.

  For example Mereles, alias the Crow, whose record he was well familiar with, as you could imagine, had always killed just because, because he was shit-scared, he wasn't a man, he was a bloodthirsty puppet, he beat women, there were a number of outstanding reports from women who'd gone with him. 'Courage is like insomnia,' Silva thought, 'you never know which of your worries will seize hold of your mind and persuade you to act the hero.'

  Surely they must have spent their lives watching war films and were now acting as if they thought they were a suicide commando unit fighting behind opposing battle lines, in foreign territory, surprised in their flat by the Russians the other side of the Wall in East Berlin, surrounded and resisting until someone or something came to their rescue, he imagined, and who better than Mereles. There existed a number of stories of military squads who penetrated enemy territory and managed to get through. Survival tactics for a Pacific island and for the apartment on a block where gas floated all the way up to the ceiling and keeping your flanks covered had to be a lot better than a beach-head in Vietnam.

  'In The Sands of Iwo Jima,'{18} the Crow sounded all at once delirious, 'the guys throw themselves down a well and survive a tank onslaught.'

  Dorda wanted to sleep a while and at moments he thought he was dreaming of trailing across the countryside, as a kid, hunting hares.

  'And what the fuck is The Sands of Iwo Jima?'

  The gang, survival, squalor, solitude, isolation, imminent danger, fellows who tumble into a well during an ambush.

  Sometimes they conversed in a distant murmur, each one to themselves, and at others they bawled orders, exhausted no doubt, with ever more frequent assaults, then rising again to adrenalin-induced euphoric peaks in their bloodstream as night fell and the sun began to whiten, just faintly, the waters of the river on the other side of the town.

  'When you're at the front, shafted, and you no longer give a shit, what you have to do is to carry on. It's the only way forward.' That was Number Two speaking.

  'Blocked in, backs against the wall, putting your head outside only occasionally, you feel that thinking serves no useful purpose, what'll you think anyway, the more things go round and round in your head, the less you find a way out, if I do this, or if I try that, maybe go out into the corridor, and all the time running into a brick wall that cuts you off, you're down and out, and you have to get up and get a grip, then set to, again - no?' says Number Three. 'Let's hope that Malito has got away and is watching what we're up to ...'

  On the television set they can see the dark-skinned girl saying that she had nothing to do with any of it.

  'I'd no idea that these were the Argentines the police were looking for, I got to know one of them on the Plaza Zavala quite by chance, and then two of them raped me ... But I never handed him in ... There's nothing worse,' went on the girl, her serious face looking straight to camera, 'than being a stool-pigeon.'

  Gradually, the dawn of a new day began to win out over the darkness. The criminals slowly reduced their firing from their provisional lair. The police in charge of the operation gathered round to peruse new battle plans. The crowd of the curious, kept at bay by the rain and cold, began to increase in size once more. The criminals seemed to be resting, keeping one of their number on guard duty, anticipating a possible final attack. From time to time they fired a few rounds to show they were st
ill alert.

  From all this, the police deduced that the gunmen, well- stocked with ammunition and ready for anything, were capable of maintaining their position to the last, which was why their attack strategy began to modify as the hours passed. They began to toy with a number of options, talking of launching a grenade of relatively low potency; of injecting the apartment where they were holed up with chemical products used to tamp down fires and which stick to the skin like liquid rubber or napalm, something they definitely would have used had the gang members emerged from their den; of making a breach in the roof in order to be able to fire directly down from the apartment overhead on the second floor; or to open up a hole in the wall adjoining apartment number eight on the first floor, with the same intention of firing on them from in there. The seconds of uncertainty dragged on into several minutes.

  Whenever the Gaucho was drugged, he swore to give up drugs, for that was when he believed himself capable of doing so because he was no longer propelled by the wild desire for fresh supplies and thought that a life lived in pursuit of his dealer wasn't a life worth bothering with. The problem was that once he lacked drugs, he couldn't give up, when he didn't have them, he couldn't even think of giving up, he thought only of one thing, of pursuing and obtaining drugs. And the worst of it was, he suddenly realized, horror-stricken, as if yet again the damned voices which had remained quiet for a while had now woken up in order to alarm him, what he finally realized was that if they remained banged up there, sooner or later they were going to find they'd run out of drugs altogether.

  'The gear,' he observed, 'is going to run out sooner or later, because however many grams there are, even if we ration ourselves like in a shipwreck ... you know, once I saw a guy like that on television, who said he'd taken water daily from a teaspoon, so that the water wouldn't run out, on their desert island.'