Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

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 still alert.