Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

'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 attempt 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.

'Yes, yes, of course you do,' replied Police Commissioner Santana Cabris of the Investigations Bureau. 'But primarily you are a vicious Argie bastard who murders my police officers.'

Nando knew about torture, he knew he had to remain silent for as long as he possibly could. Because with the cattle prod, if you begin talking, you find you just can't stop. He was going to try to say nothing at all, not a single word, because he was afraid of having the location of Malito's safehouse forced out of him. Malito counted as his friend, not just any old fellow, he was a true old-style bandit and an idealist, this Malito, who could yet become a popular hero after the fashion of Di Giovanni or Scarfó, or even like that Ruggerito or the forger Alberto Lezin and the rest of the wild bunch who'd fought for the nationalist side.{15} They were going to have to kill him, thought Nando, 'cause he wasn't going to give away Malito's hiding-place.

He tried not to think while they were taking him down to the torture chamber. Nando had decided to keep his mind a blank, white as a new sheet or an unwritten page. They had bound his eyes, and were possibly intending to bring him before the judge within twenty-four hours. He had seen them in uglier moods on other occasions, and this time was certain the press were behind the police and that they would publicize the fact of his being taken prisoner.

The truth was that Heguilein's capture went almost unnoticed in the tight contract between the journalists and police back at Headquarters, when it transpired that they had found the missing face among the Argentine gunmen. It was from this time on (according to the reporter on El Mundo ) that the greatest barbecue that had ever been 'roasted' in the police annals of the River Plate division started heating up.

A few hours into the afternoon, in a Buenos Aires province police aeroplane, tourist class, the chief of the Buenos Aires police from Zona Norte, Police Commissioner Cayetano Silva, arrived at Carrasco airport to cooperate with the Uruguayan authorities.

As they taxied down the airport runway, and before descending from the aeroplane, Silva was sifting the information from his colleagues.

'We came across them quite by accident, in a ridiculous incident. They were switching the licence plates on a stolen car.'

'They're on their own. They've no further contacts.'

'Time to put on the pressure.'

'It's not necessary to go around arresting everyone. You need to leave some elements at large and wait until the Argies try and contact them.'

'With Yamandú picked up, they'll be out there, isolated.'

'So,' said Silva, 'if they're out there, isolated, they'll change their plans. What can they do? They'll attempt to leave the city.'

'Impossible, we've blocked all the ways out.'

'It's important to put it out through the newspapers that Yamandú is collaborating with us.'

The investigators had reached the conclusion that Malito and his accomplices were now finding themselves with rather less money in their pockets. The purchase of documents; the expenses of their clandestine transport — in the yacht the Santa Monica , as sources in the police department confirmed — across to Uruguay; the orgies that took place in their refuges; the hiring of cars and the apartments being used as hideouts, had all eaten into their capital. Tales of the orgies were related by Carlos Catania, a rent-boy who presented himself to the police spontaneously, and gave an account of the previous weekend's events. The evil-doers acquired boys and women and quantities of drugs, spending two days in a 'rave', as they called it, filled with 'acts of abject depravity'.

'They're sound,' said the seventeen-year-old, 'they gave me a suit.'

This youth was the first to mention Kid Brignone's visits to the redlight zone around the Plaza Zavala, and his friendship with Giselle.

'I want to speak to that girl alone,' Silva said.

Personnel from the Interior Ministry, exploiting the inexhaustible source of specific references which together make up night life in Montevideo — whisky bars, gaming rooms and the like — thus learnt that the Argie gunmen channelled their attempts to find 'a good place to go to ground' through the mediation of a young escort (the country girl from over the River Negro) who worked in the neighbourhood.