Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

'A black had seized a first-floor flat and was holding two hostages in that apartment.'

'The caretaker's children are dead, poor things, I saw them lying in the corridor.'

During the long hours that this journalist spent in that place information-gathering, all the various versions and permutations got repeated. Some said that Malito had managed to escape from the besieged flat and was going to return with reinforcements, others said that one of the malefactors was wounded. Time passed and the exchanges of fire took place in the middle of the night and under the white glare of the spotlights illuminating the façade and the windows surrounding the flat occupied by the Argentines.

Encircled, hemmed in, with dozens of revolvers and submachine-guns positioned at every possible opening and exit, as the hours went by amid the whizz of bullets, the three (or four) gunmen held out, refusing to give in, preferring a defiance born of desperation. They were being fired on from all sides at once. From the flat roofs they were firing at one of the apartment windows; from ground level up at the other one; and from the adjacent flat directly on to the entrance to flat number nine.

It was to be a battle to the death. The flat had been completely cut off and the gangsters were to be laid siege to by starvation, if necessary, although the police didn't cut off the water (or the light) in order not to adversely affect the other tenants. The gun battle was prolonged with interludes when avid members of the public covered themselves from the persistent drizzle in the doorways of houses and were interviewed by the television journalists.

They're intent on suicide, you can see they won't be taken prisoner.'

'I can understand that. No one who's ever been in jail wants to go back to being banged up.'

They've got the money in there with them and they'll use it to negotiate.'

The hypotheses and the mutual interrogations multiplied. Meanwhile the siege continued. The block was surrounded, nobody could get in or out of the area, the military barricade isolated the neighbourhood as if it were an island. Everyone had recent images of the Vietnam war in mind. But this time the battle was in a house in the city and the squad being besieged were acting like a group of ex-combatants who had supplied themselves with munitions and weapons of war, prepared themselves to defend their liberty to the end.

The police estimated that between 22.00 hours on the Friday and 02.00 early on the Saturday the gangsters had fired more than 500 rounds, in their pretence of having a complete arsenal at their fingertips. The PAM submachine- gun, with ultra-rapid firepower, could be heard to resound every few minutes, succeeded or preceded by other firing, with the rattle of a.45 calibre and possibly also of Luger pistols, weapons of war of the highest efficacy.

At one moment it was even possible to hear one of the gunmen yelling that he was going to give a display of all the arms at his disposal. That was when they heard the raking of machine-gun pistols with twelve shots a round, whose detonations clearly demonstrated that they were using large calibre bullets.

The thugs' bursts of machine-guns showed them to be in possession of rapid-fire weapons, because the Zona Norte's chief of police from Buenos Aires, Police Commissioner Silva, said he recognized the sound of Halcón machine-guns, without a doubt stolen from the Argentine Armed Forces. 'It needs to be borne in mind that (on current assumptions) one of the gang members had been a sergeant in the army, and that this was a possible explanation for the possession of these powerful weapons that could hold our police force at bay.'

It was a source of some surprise that these terrible bandits had gained control of such an arsenal, and the police were obliged to question how they could have got it into the country and how they had managed to get themselves from one place to the next across the city, taking so much weaponry and so many thousand projectiles along with them.

Another matter worthy of attention concerning the gangsters' decision is that while it was possible to launch a mass attack of gas grenades through the one window that looked out from flat number nine over the second inner well providing light and air to the block, the gunmen failed to emerge as anticipated. It was then necessary to deduce that they must also possess gas masks, enabling them to resist this otherwise infallible last resort. Or else to imagine a unique resolve on the part of the Argentines who, in the midst of the gas inferno, remained resolute in their resistance to orders to surrender and save their lives.

They no longer have any hope left, resistance is all.

'Why don't you come up and get us?'

'Their courage,' thought the El Mundo journalist, who had taken refuge in flat number eight, adjoining the besieged building, screwing in his flash lamp to obtain night photos of the battle scene, 'is directly proportional to the willingness to die.' The police always act in the conviction that the gunmen behave just like themselves, meaning that gangsters have the same unstable sense of balance when it comes to taking decisions or precautions as does the common man to whom a uniform — representing authority — has been handed, along with a weapon and the power to use it. But there's one crucial difference and it's the same degree of distinction as that between the struggle to win and the struggle not to be overthrown.

Having taken a number of photos, he went over to the corner and leaned against a bench, lit by a street lamp, and took rapid notes in his exercise book.

Quite how the gunmen had succeeded, garrisoned inside the flat, in surviving the huge quantity of teargas canisters thrown at them, was utterly incomprehensible. All the more so to those gathered on the northern corner of the block where the attempted raid was taking place, who could barely tolerate the cloud of gases the breeze was blowing across the street. Certain experts think that the Argentine gunmen possessed (or had made) gas masks, and one even insisted on having seen Dorda, with oxygen tubes and goggles partially covering his face, leaning like a monstrous insect out of the window for an interminable instant and firing off a round before shouting something in a voice which sounded as if it came from the depths of the ocean.

'Why don't you come up and get us, you wretches, what are you waiting for?'

Even the young El Mundo journalist succeeded in seeing, almost by chance and as if in a flash, the gunman with his face covered by a complicated gas mask.

The truth is that the lack of oxygen made them nauseous and faint, rather like altitude sickness, or as if the shortage of clean air impeded the blood getting to their brains and sharpened the desperation of their actions. Just now the Blond Gaucho emerged, half naked, through the window, attempting to shoot out the street lamps, along with the bulbs in the spotlights and the searchlights on the patrol cars, leaning halfway into the street, as if nothing more mattered to him than inhaling a little bit of fresh air.

The truth is that gas tends to rise to the ceiling, so that in the lower part of the room, at floor level, it is always possible to stretch out and breathe without serious difficulty. To warm the air and force the teargas upwards the Kid pulled the pillows off the beds on to the glass-topped table and set light to them. The flames gave the place a hellish aspect and the smoke rose and blackened the ceiling and walls. Lying face upwards on the floor, they could breathe easily, the infected air rose over them, like a cloud a metre above their heads. That was the way they got through the night, without major problems, throughout the gas attacks, which were repeated more and more sporadically as the police registered that this particular tactic was not affording them good results.