Ricardo Piglia: Money to Burn

She didn't want to know what the guys were planning and returned to her room. They were plotting something heavy (because something was always being plotted when they gathered to speak in low voices and spent days without leaving the house). She needed to study because she still had to deliver two subjects to obtain enough credits to finish secondary school. She was going to spend a few months with Mereles — rather like taking a holiday — and then everything was to go back to how it was before. 'You have to make the most of being young while you can,' her mother told her when she began bringing home the money. Her father, Don Antonio Galeano, was away with the fairies, he knew nothing about anything, went to work in the Sanitation Department, in a building that resembled a palace, on Rio Bamba and Cordoba. Then her mum was bound to come along and ruin everything, forever complaining about her father, who never earned above the minimum salary, and when she got wind of her Girl's altered circumstances she began stopping in alone with her, to get her to spill the beans. And in the end, daughters always do what their mothers want. When at last the mother came to meet Mereles, she took one look at the pervert Crow's eyes glued to her breasts and began to laugh out loud. The Girl stared at her and learnt that it was possible to be jealous of one's own mother. 'You look like sisters,' said Mereles, 'please permit me to give you a kiss.'

'Sure, honey,' said the mother, 'you have to look after Blanquita for me, 'cause beware if her father finds out…'

'Finds out what?'

That he was married. Married and separated and always going with cheap country girls he'd picked up in cabarets down on the harbour.

The Girl threw herself on the bed with her maths book and began thinking of other things. Mereles had promised to take her to Brazil to see the Carnival. Voices were lowered on the other side of the door, and she couldn't hear anything until a while later some giggles wafted through to her.

Dorda tended to seem a little far gone and was attached to the notion of failure, viewing everything pessimistically yet always cracking disastrous jokes, so that ultimately everyone decided they had a good time with him.

'They're going to shut off the route out of the square and we're going to be trapped and then they'll kill us like curs.'

'Don't be an idiot, Gaucho,' said the Crow, 'Daddy will do the driving and will get you out by mounting the car on to the pavement, so avoiding all the cops.'

Dorda began laughing, the spectacle of the car setting off against the traffic, riding on the pavement, headed towards the square in the midst of bullets and corpses, amused him no end.

The day of the robbery dawned fine and clear. At 15.02 on Wednesday 27 September 1965, the bank-clerk Alberto Martinez Tobar went to work at the cash desk in the San Fernando branch of the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. He was a tall fellow, red-faced and bug-eyed, who had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday and who only had a few more hours to live. He cracked jokes with the girls in the accounts section, and went down to the basement where the strongboxes were stored beside the black table stacked with the bags of money. There employees in their shirtsleeves counted notes, under the artificial light and noise of the ventilators.

An underground tomb, a jail stashed with money, the bank cashier had thought. He had lived all his life in San Fernando and his father had worked for the Town Hall before him. He had a daughter who suffered acutely with her nerves, and it was costing him a fortune to have her attended to. Many times over, he had considered the possibility of stealing the money handed over into his safekeeping on a monthly basis. He had even gone as far as to mention it to his wife.

On occasion he'd thought it'd be a simple matter to bring in a dummy briefcase, identical to the rest, filled with counterfeit money. It could be substituted for one of the others, and he could then walk out with serenity. It would only require arranging with the bank-clerk who happened to be a childhood friend. They could split the cash and carry on leading their lives as normal. The fortune would accrue to their children. He visualized the money kept in a secret safe in his cupboard, the money invested under a false number in a Swiss bank, the money hidden in a mattress, he imagined himself sleeping with the wads stored under the ticking, feeling them rustle as he tossed and turned during his nights of insomnia. On recent nights, when he couldn't sleep, he had told his wife how he contemplated effecting these changes. He spoke into the darkness and she listened to him, in silence. It was one of those ideas which kept him alive, and it added a certain spirit of adventure and a certain personal interest in the money transfers he made on a monthly basis.

This particular afternoon, he deposited the briefcases on top of the table and the colleague with his green visor looked at the payment slip with its signatures and its stamps and began separating out wads of 10,000 pesos. There was a heap of money, 7,203,960 pesos to pay staff salaries and the costs of repairing the municipal sanitation works. They put the wads of new notes into the black briefcases, the leather worn through use, stuffing even the pleats and side pockets.

Before leaving the Bank, Martinez Tobar complied with the security measures and attached the case to his left wrist with a small chain anchored with a padlock. Later on, someone was to say that he paid the ultimate price for this useless precaution.

When he went out into the street he saw nothing: nobody sees anything in the moments leading up to a robbery. A wind whips up without warning and a guy gets knocked down, perhaps with a sharp blow to the back of the head, never knowing what happened. If anyone observes something suspicious afoot, he's bound to be dismissed as a timorous sort, already traumatized by a previous experience, and who's now convinced that history is about to repeat itself.

Martinez Tobar looked at what he always noticed without scrutiny: the woman with the little fairground kiosk, the boy racing his dog, the store-keeper reopening for business after the siesta hour, but he failed to see Twisty on the lookout in the bar, propped up against the counter, knocking back a gin and studying the legs of the pregnant girl who came out of the shop next door. Pregnant women excited Twisty, and he remembered the movements of the woman in a house on Saavedra Street, while her husband was away at the office and he was still a young conscript. He had met her on the subway, when he gave up his seat to her and the woman started chatting to him, and he began enjoying her company. She was the same age as Twisty, twenty years old, her six- month pregnancy stretching her skin so taut it appeared transparent and they had to seek out the weirdest positions to be able to make it, he could only penetrate her if he propped himself up with one foot on the bed, which was when she turned her face and smiled at him. It distracted him to remember the woman in Saavedra, called either Graciela or Dora, but then he reverted to feeling tense because he saw the fellow leaving the bank with the briefcase and the money. He looked at his watch. Timed to the precise second.

The two police guards chatted on the pavement. One of the Town Hall clerks, Abraham Spector, a huge and heavy fellow, tied his shoes with difficulty, leaning up against the bumpers of the pick-up. The square was quiet, tranquil even.

'What's up, Fatso?' asked the clerk, and then greeted the security guys and got into the truck.

The guards travelled in the rear seat, guys with the faces of sleepwalkers, heavy, their weapons across their laps, ex- gendarmes, former sharpshooters, retired junior officers, forever guarding somebody else's money, somebody else's women, imported cars, great mansions, faithful hounds, in total confidence, always armed and in heavy boots. One of them was called Juan José Balacco, he was sixty years old and a former police commissioner, and the other was a legal cop from the San Fernando first division, an eighteen-year-old heavyweight, Francisco Otero, whom everyone called Ringo Bonavena, because he wanted to be a boxer and trained every night in the Excursionistas gym with a Japanese trainer who had promised to make him champion of Argentina.