Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

'Tuesday will be the funeral, they always bury you three days after you die, 'cause if you come back again, you come back to life as a mummy, d'you remember the mummy, who came out of tomb all wrapped in bandages…'

'For example, you can hide yourself underneath the bathtub, they'll come and search, and they'll never find you…'

'Look, see, this machine isn't functioning properly,' the speaker stamps on the floor and the image settles down again, 'but take a look, it's crawling with journos… If you give yourself up, they can't get away with killing you.'

'They'll kill you either way, arsehole,' says Number Two. They shoot you here and drag you out dead, however many journos there are out there… anyway all journos are narks…'

And the cub reporter Renzi in flat number eight noted: 'The agonized waiting period extended. Exhaustion finally took hold of the policemen. The exchange of fire is no longer as intense. There are lapses of fifteen or twenty minutes during which not a single shot can be heard. Then a few stray shots from the marksmen positioned on the ground floor and the flat roof of the shed prompted the gunmen to respond with another volley.'

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was an audible pause over the intercom to the block, followed by the sound of one of the criminal's voices, saying: 'Greetings to Commissioner Silva. Silva! Are you there, sweetheart, flatface, executioner, bastard… Porky, Silva, come up here… why don't you come and play a round for the General's wife?{16} Who wins get out of here alive, who loses shits himself. There's five hundred grand in the bank, and I'll play you for it on a single throw of the dice. Hear them?' And it was true, you could hear the little marble bones rattling in their leather thimble.

'Enough fucking about, Che, it's me here talking to you. It's me, Silva,' says Silva, tranquil, in his Creole accent, in a voice clouded and wasted with alcohol and the quantity of cigarettes smoked during interrogations, attempting to soften up a swindler, a whore, or some poor lottery fixer. It was always the same, year in year out, paying them back with blows to the stomach as they're tied to their chairs, shouting at them in that rasping voice, like someone attempting to stick a pin into the ear of a zombie who refuses to parrot what one wants him to say. 'Why don't you lot come on down? Who's talking to me? Is that you, Malito? Come on down and we'll sort it all out, man to man, we'll negotiate here before the magistrate, I guarantee you, and I won't press charges for armed resistance as part of an illegal gang.'

'Well, why not just come up yourself? Hurry on up. Your daughter is getting it up the arse and you out there like an idiot, they've got her there in the bar toilet, the guy's a thin fellow with a shaft thick as your arm, and she's giving squeals of pleasure and shitting herself the more she gets off on it.'

That's how they spoke, filthier, more crude and brutal in their speech than even the cops, for all their experience in inventing insults intended to humiliate prisoners to the point where they become useless floppy puppets. Tough guys, from out of the toughest jails, broken on the electric grill, surrendering at last, after being forced to listen to Silva insulting and applying the torture machine to them for hours on end, to get them to spill the beans. The dead ends of the phrases used by men and women in the bedroom, in business and in the toilets, because the police and the crooks (so Renzi thought) are alone in knowing how to make words come alive, so much so and so sharp they can split your soul apart like an egg breaking on the sharp edge of a frying pan.

'It's not about money,' Number Two is saying and Pérez records the conversation, feeling as awkward as someone involuntarily spying or listening in on an unexpected confession, which is now being broadcast to everybody, Pérez included, who all listen awkwardly, to Number Two telling Silva: 'I'll hand over the money if you get your ugly mug up here, I'd let you come up and go back down without touching a hair of your head, but to get us out of here you're going to have to sweat a bit, after all who d'you think you're dealing with? You, Silva, what d'you want if you come up? Come on up, Che, you're used to screwing thieves when you've got them tied up, but when there's an armed opponent, a tough guy with balls, you crumple, Silva.'

The conversation continued on much the same lines, as if it were an extension of the combat. Witnesses to the conversation were frozen to the spot, hypnotized by what they were hearing, while Silva attempted to prolong the dialogue, to give Pérez time to record the voices and locate each one of the speakers, this was the reason why Silva sought to get his interlocutor (the Kid?) to continue doing battle over the intercom. And that voice so clearly belonging to a rent-boy, a criminal, a lunatic, rose again through the walls and reached all those gathered in the drizzle and in front of the encircled building.

'At approximately 03.30 hours today (for which read yesterday) the conversation was interrupted, despite the authorities' attempts to keep the intercom open and continue negotiations with the gangsters, they began hearing loud shouts from the criminals who were about to launch a bravura gesture, assuring them they were on the point of emerging prepared to kill any number of pigs and to some extent they began fulfilling their threats as it seemed as if one of their number — in the shelter of the shadows reigning in the corridor of the apartment block — got as far as the middle of the staircase and fired off a violent volley towards the street with a machine-gun.

'This made them think the criminals were about to come out, as the gunfire increased still further, cutting off the entrance to the apartments with a shower of lead.

'This was followed by a moment of despair during which those in the hall ran for the street. They left behind them a man who had fallen to the ground, bleeding heavily from four bullet wounds. It was Inspector Washington Santana Cabris de León, the Uruguayan chief of police. For the space of a few minutes he lay stretched out where he fell, given that the whole area was under a hail of the criminals' bullets.'

'You've sung your song, birdie… As for you pieces of shit, why don't you come up and take a look?'

Gaucho Dorda, half-naked, went out into the corridor, placed his gun on the man's neck and, in the midst of an infernal shooting, killed him with a bullet in the mouth. The police chief and the lunatic, degenerate, psychotic, Dorda the recidivist criminal (according to police sources) stared at each other for an eternity and then the Blond Gaucho, just before polishing him off, winked an eye and smiled at him.

'Die, arsehole,' said Dorda, and leapt smartly backwards.

The inspector's face was erased by the firepower as if it had exploded from inside his mouth and ripped the flesh outwards, leaving only a bloody hole behind (or so said an eye-witness).

After the initial shock, the first aid services rushed to remove and take him to hospital in a patrol car, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

'The critical tactic employed by Malito's gang, its tragic glamour,' (as Renzi was to later describe it in the police pages of his diary in El Mundo), 'fed on the conviction that every victory achieved under such impossible conditions increased their capacity to resist, and likewise increased their speed and strength. This was why what followed had the aspect of a tragic ritual that no one who was there that night could ever forget.'

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.