Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  'They're like flashes of lightning, like thunderclaps, like a white light, memories are,' Dorda announced. 'Here I am, and here I'll stay.'

  Everything about him was destroyed, the walls were stripped and broken, bare of plaster, their timbers exposed; a phenomenal quantity of spent lead was scattered through the bedrooms and living-room, the bathroom and the kitchen showed the full force of the fire that had raged there for several hours. What was left at his feet could no longer be recognized as a suite of furniture.

  'Come and get me out of here, Silva's merry men, Silva the shit, the pig, let the night reel you in ...'

  On the floor there still lay two .45 pistols, a PAM submachine-gun and a .38 calibre revolver, and in two untidy cases there still remained a few projectiles: that was the arsenal with which the three gunmen had mounted their fifteen-hour-long resistance, under siege from over 300 policemen.

  He smiled to himself, sitting alone with his voices reverberating inside him, lower now, then fired off another round, just to let them know he was still there.

  They were going to come for him when darkness fell, along the corridors, hunting him down, the search parties. They went around town in a black trap, wearing double-breasted suits. They got down at the station and there they deposited their handcuffed prisoners. They took Crazy Anselmo that way, all the people following behind, they boarded him on to the train, stuck him in an economy class compartment, a cop on either side, because he'd slit the throat of his boss who'd come across him committing a robbery at La Blanqueada. He was an immigrant killer, an assailant, and they'd hunted him through the villages and towns, and found him at dawn in the shunting yard at the station. His boss came down specially to insult him ('Filthy foreign shit') and the old eyetie Anselmo took him out with a stiletto. It was around this time that he, Dorda, must have been how old, maybe twelve or thirteen, around that sort of age, if his memory served him at all. After then nothing, as if someone had come along and erased everything else inside his head, and he'd remained stuck at that period of his life, only able to recall what had happened when he was little and that was it. They took the eyetie Anselmo out of the black trap and stood there waiting for the train to arrive bringing its load of passengers up from the south, on the empty station platform at Pila. The two cops and Crazy Anselmo, in his sandals and grey overalls, because he used to work for the post office, which was where he had started opening the envelopes and stealing their contents, writing letters to the women, then visiting them, and raping them, according to what people said. It seemed as if he only delivered the letters containing bad news, on grounds of his being a superstitious sort. They found the rest of the letters in the basement of his house, clearly logged, and when they found him, he came out shooting, and dedicated himself to rustling cattle and butchering the meat around the province, also to raping country girls in the most remote ranches of its furthest-flung corners. Dorda now managed to remember all of this, leaning out of the window and peering sideways, watching them move, there below in the street.

  The killer went with his hands cuffed in front of him, wrists tied to his waistband, but staring haughtily, proud of being an evil man, a rebel, the train tracks staring up at him and the two cops, with their moustaches and ponchos, quietly smoking, because they had the whole line to accompany him down to La Plata, on the passenger train from Bahia Bianca.

  'That's how you're going to end up,' the dead woman told him that night.

  The skylight in flat three and the breach in the dining-room wall on the second-floor neighbouring flat looking into the bedroom exposed a view of Mereles who had fallen 'dorsally supine' against the bedsprings propped against the far wall. With extreme care one could even perceive, from flat number eleven, Brignone, whose corpse lay in 'an intermediary position' between the kitchen and the hall. Only the third assassin was missing.

  The light was now entering between the curtains. He had enough drugs for another couple of hours.

  'Bring me some dope,' he yelped.

  'Surrender, you piece of shit,' came the reply.

  Through the breach opened to next door, the bodies of two gunmen could be seen, lying prone and riddled with innumerable bullets. Poised on the threshold, the foot of one gunman appeared to bear witness to a final attempt at flight in shooting his way out. Then in the flaťs dining-cum-living room lay the rest of his bloodstained body, face upwards, submerged in a pool of his own blood that spread out across almost the entire surface of the room. A few centimetres further on lay the other gunman, similarly soaked in his own lake of blood. The first gunman had been dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt; at his side lay his weapon: a Thompson machine-gun. The second gunman had been wearing blue trousers and a brown shirt. The third still remained seated, his back to the window, crouched in an alcove. That man was Dorda.

  They ran like rats through the passages, the cops. A priest would come and give him a blessing.

  'I'll take one more fix, with your permission, then come and get me if you wish.'

  Just in case, they fired off a few more rounds through the breach then chucked more teargas grenades in through the bathroom window. There was no reaction. A policeman leaned out into the corridor and a few seconds later fell riddled by a machine-gun round.

  The entrance door to the flat was swinging, like a petrified sign of death, on its lower hinges and bore the traces of a thousand perforations rent by bullets. Trails of splinters and traces of smoke, powder and blood filled the corridor.

  He had always been an object of interest for doctors and psychiatrists. The born criminal, the man who had been ruined since boyhood, dying by the law. It was a fate from which there was no escape and to which he had been brought like Anselmo to his economy class carriage in the Southern Railways. He didn't like the countryside, the plains were boringly flat, but he'd escape during siesta hour and get up on to the harvesters, they had an iron seat, wrought with holes, awkward to clamber on to, and you had to use a plank to brake with. He'd had the good fortune to mount the draught horses which were tethered to the carts, by threading a length of rope through the saddle-rings and under the girth, so the cart could be pulled forward. When you got them up the embankments, you could rest there near the wire fences, choosing the spot for two reasons. Number one, you had a panoramic view of the tracks and secondly because, all along the embankments, you tended to find gopher-holes and you could catch the rodents with the help of the dogs.

  He came to the city and went to live in a hostel, down in Barracas, but it was not something he talked about, he hardly even remembered it.

  Inside the building, in the alcove where the double bed had been, there was nothing left but a heap of wood shredded by repeated explosions caused by teargas grenades and the raking of machine-gunfire.

  The whole place was bathed in blood.

  It was as if a demolition company had moved in and completely destroyed the masonry. There was nothing left at all of the building; all that remained standing were the retaining walls.

  The police were not inclined to enter. They could not be certain, from the positions they had assumed, whether the three gunmen had committed suicide, or had died by one or another round of machine-gunfire let off against the front door, or else had died by a hand grenade that had been thrown at them from the floor above, through a hole opened up in the roof with a pneumatic drill.

  Dorda remained there, his weapons within reach, considering how to shoot his way out to the finale. He had awarded himself one more shot of cocaine.

  'Remember, Kid, when you walked down the middle of the road, when you were young, looking for pigeons' eggs in Bolivar, in the summertime. They bathed in the muddy waters of the lagoon and pricked the eggs with a pin and downed the contents in a gulp.'

  There was nothing left of the countryside, it was all under surveillance by the cops. He had these fast-flowing images, of a road and a car arriving filled with heavily-armed men. The voices were saying incomprehensible things to him, speaking to him at time
s in the sweet idiom of the little Polak in the furnished rooms. Who the hell was to know what she wanted to say, or how much she had suffered, poor thing, such a pretty woman, they brought her over by deception, on the pretext of marrying her off to a man of position, but then they locked her up in a boat and brought her into the interior and forced her to work at Madame Iniguez's establishment (the Chilean woman). She was a peasant girl who knew how to sew and make goulash, and they'd brought her over so she could have a family far from war and hunger. On one occasion he'd decided, as if in a dream, as if it were something he'd heard tell, that the best thing to do would be to kill her, he clearly heard her asking for him to kill her. He didn't want to, he couldn't want to. He tried to get the idea out of his head, but it had taken hold like vermin, like ticks, the voice, and the Gaucho closed his eyes, because the girl was standing at the foot of his bed, naked, with her russet hair reaching to her waist, and he could feel inside his skull a cramp like the wires transmitting his electric shocks, a voice ordering him to kill her, addressing him in that idiom peculiar to her that nobody in the region could comprehend, and yet the words were also begging him please to do her the favour of saving her, sparing her from the suffering of being among such brutal peasants from the neighbouring provinces (yes, exactly that, 'the neighbouring provinces'), nobody understood that she was a Polish princess who could no longer withstand solitude and suffering ('the suffering'), they had separated her from her daughter, from Nadia, they had taken her off to a doctor, because they said she had typhus ('had typhus'). A man gave her 100 pesos and took the infant wrapped in a napkin, took her off on a cart, then unloaded her at the brothel in Chivilcoy (as Dorda explained to Bunge). And the Gaucho understood those words, the words the Polak was saying, the captured princess, as though they were agreed signals, and she was telling him that they had loaded her on to a cart and taken her to the province of Santa Fe to work with the labourers gathering in the harvest, to be a camp follower and now she was lost, relegated to a special little cell because the blacks always chose her, because she was a redhead, a European, but she desired only to die and she permitted the Gaucho to caress her feet, and to act as her servant; naked, she stood facing the mirror, gazing at him with her princess's eyes, begging him to kill her and the Gaucho paid attention to that voice issuing such softly-spoken orders, telling him what to do, and reached for his Beretta down the side of his boot and targeted her eyes and in that instant her face transformed into an expression of terror that the Gaucho would never forget, it stayed with him forever stamped on his brain, the certainty that perhaps she'd become petrified at the ultimate moment, as happens to suicides when they finally repent and attempt to stay alive after all, and she was entirely nude, her russet hair streaming down her back and her hand raised, like this, in a holy gesture of blessing and terror while the Gaucho blew her head off.

  That was how they came to take the psychopath away, killing him with blows and injections strong enough to put horses to sleep, jabs that rendered him a species of zombie, of the living dead, causing all his bones to ache and leaving him unable to rise from his bed for the entire day, this assassin of defenceless women, suffocating in his straitjacket, stuffed into a cell with other madmen raving about wars and lotteries, and him lying there silently listening to his voices and to Rusita's voice begging him to kill her and one evening one of the crazies, Loco Gálvez, appeared with some curved scissors he'd stolen from the sanatorium and liberated all the enraged madmen and let them run off. That was at Christmas 1963, when everyone was preoccupied with the festivities and the Gaucho took a train to Gonnet, got out at Constitution, and began sleeping in the station, which was where he met up with the Kid, who'd recently arrived from Mar del Plata, with a suitcase, after having won a load of loot in the Casino, and whose face seemed familiar to him. They had grown up together in Batán as children, or at least had done time in a borstal there together, and so the Kid brought him along to live with him. He had this mental picture of the Kid coming along the platform, looking amused, with his case, as though he were looking for him, and the Gaucho asleep on a bench against a wall, right at the far end of the platform, when the Kid came up to him and said: 'I know you, you're from Santa Fe. You're the Blond Gaucho, we were in Batán together.'

  The Gaucho's memory was functioning none too well, but when he saw that face in the early morning mist, elegant and joyful as it appeared to him, he was sure it must be true, the Kid looked so like the figure of Christ silhouetted by the station lights.

  Commissioner Silva managed to slink his way towards the second floor flat and threw himself in through the ruined door, firing off machine-gun rounds in all directions. The very last gunman, Gaucho Dorda, rose unsteadily to his feet, already 'done in', made a great effort, and fired off his machine-gun without managing to hit his target, he was too weak, and Silva seemed to him to be far too far away, in the clarity of the afternoon light. So he let himself drop, like someone giving in to sleep after a night of insomnia.

  With every precaution in place, the police continued their advance, confirming as they did so that two of the gangsters (Mereles 'the Crow' and Brignone 'the Kiď) lay dead on the floor, and the third was severely wounded, and on the verge of death.

  Shortly afterwards the Chief of Police's call could be heard, signalling towards the street for the firing to cease, given that the criminals were no longer able to offer any further resistance. From the policemen's position could be seen the feet of one of the delinquents, lying by the doorway.

  When the journalist, weathered from the battlefields, entered the apartment, the spectacle before him acquired Danteesque dimensions. No other adjective could serve to describe it. Blood flooded the place and it seemed inconceivable that three men could have achieved such decisiveness and heroism. Dorda remained alive, his back against the broken bedhead, embracing the Kid as if he were cradling a toy doll in his arms.

  Two paramedics entered and lifted the wounded man, who continued smiling, his eyes wide open and an unintelligible murmur on his lips. When they took Dorda downstairs, curious passers-by and neighbours gathered on the landings, and the cops leapt on him and beat him into unconsciousness. 'A Christ figure,' noted the lad from El Mundo, 'the scapegoat, the idiot who has to bear the pain of us all.'

  The police were at the point of insurrection when they learnt that one of the gunmen was to be brought out from the building alive. To the cries of 'Murderer' and 'Death to the assassin', they crowded the stretcher and beat the dying man.

  When Dorda's bleeding body appeared, its bones clearly broken and, clearly visible, one eye wounded and his belly split open, yet still just alive, it first evoked a response of silence and stupor. The crowds blocked his passage, and the stretcher-bearers were forced to pause.

  He was the first to come out, still alive, the first they could see of those evil-doers who had battled heroically for sixteen hours. A fragile body, with the aspect of a boxer, a sacrificial victim, and at the sight of it a wave of loathing flowed through the crowd and when the first man hit him, it was as if the world had caved in, and the dykes of rancour had been breached.

  An almost unstoppable avalanche of passion was unleashed on to the luckless man.

  Four or five policemen and journalists hit him with their weapons and their cameras, and the wounded gunman became a pool of blood, still living and palpitating, who seemed to continue smiling and murmuring. 'Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners,' recited the Gaucho. He could see the church and the priest waiting for him in his home parish. Perhaps if he could make his confession, he could obtain atonement, or at least he could explain why he'd killed the redhead, because the voices had told him she no longer wanted to carry on living. In contrast, he himself now wanted to go on living. He wanted to return to lying with the body of the Kid, the two embracing together in bed, in some hostel lost in the remote provinces.

  The avalanche encircled him and hundreds of voices rose towards the heavy afternoon sun clamouring for his
death.

  'Kill him ... Go on, kill him now! ... Let him die!'

  No one had ever seen anything like it. According to some, the collective renunciation of control was being justified then and there by the terrible and cruel pain caused to society and its laws by the criminals.

  The desire for vengeance, which is perhaps the first spark in the electric shock of the human mind when it is cut into, coursed rapidly around the circuit of the crowd. And the crowd heaved: several hundred men and women from all walks of life clamouring for revenge.

  The police cordons were by now useless, and the bloody mass that was once Dorda was subjected to a hail of blows from every side, kicks, punches, spitting, insults - every kind of vulgarity and brutality.

  Finally he was torn from the tumult, and taken by ambulance to be transferred to the hospital at Maciel. It was 14.15 in the afternoon, and the ambulance into which they'd finally managed to board him was submerged in a human tide.

  Then the Argentine Chief of Police spoke, and his voice spread like oil over the troubled waters of the hyper-excited crowd.

  He requested calm, he requested pacification in order for the work of the justice system to take place, he requested a pause for meditation and profound mourning in memory of the departed.

  'I've awarded him his last blow,' added Silva.

  And over the heads of the crowd, in the heavy air of the afternoon, he raised his right fist, red with blood.

  Tears flowed copiously down the round and sagging jowls of Commissioner Silva, mingling with sweat and the afternoon heat, the teargas which still clung lazily to the treetops and the sour scent of blood of two more policemen, dead that very morning on the threshold of the building ...