Ricardo Piglia: Money to Burn

Neither the railway employee nor the friend of twenty years who accompanied him could give a coherent description of the assailants, given their state of excitement.

'As they escaped they found the level-crossing barriers closed at Madero Street and without stopping the car they sliced their way across them with a round of machine-gunfire' (according to the papers).

'There were two behind and one in front, with the radio on at full blast. The car was hooting loudly too.'

'The patrolman was following fifty metres behind them.'

'It seems incredible they made their getaway.'

Two guys hanging off the sides of the car with machine- guns in their hands.

According to some witnesses, among the Chevrolet's occupants there seemed to be a wounded man who was being supported by his comrades. In addition, the rear window of the car had been shattered by bullets.

The car came along Libertador Avenue honking its horn and forcing the traffic to open a path through until, at the crossroads between Libertador and Alvear Avenues, they came across a traffic police substation, which had been put on alert.

Officer Francisco Núñez decided to block the car's path and jumped out into the street but a fresh round of fire burst from the moving car and flung him against a wall. Without pausing in their flight, the yobs let off yet another round of machine-gunfire and peppered the front of the police substation.

The Chevrolet shot onwards at full speed with the gunmen still firing off at the police station. Three policemen got into a patrol car and began following them, their siren on at full blast.

Crow Mereles was fully absorbed in his driving. He was addicted to Florinol. He drank the best part of a bottle of the stuff daily, and it lent him a serene vision of life. Florinol is a tranquillizer which, when taken in large doses, functions somewhat like opium; he'd acquired the habit in Batán jail, where it's as obtainable as any legal medicine that doctors can offer on prescription and the nurses can give you in exchange for money or women. The deal was simple: the prisoners' women were far more appealing than the wives of the prison screws and so a market was established, or at any rate a transaction. Visiting hours were really only held to put the young fillies through their paces, as Mereles expressed it. Their fiancées, their girlfriends, the girls who enjoyed whiling away some time with a bit of rough who was up for doing anything to them, would go with a hick if it were required, even with a screw, in short, a no-hope loser who'd take his turn with them in the guards' office. One afternoon the Crow had succeeded in getting his girlfriend at the time, Bimba she was called — sexy all right, but always out of her skull, a total smackhead — to get off with the boss of Batán jail. The guy was nothing but an obese executioner who enjoyed making them all sweat, but whenever he saw the blonde appear, her bottom squeezed tightly into her jeans and wearing a diminutive embroidered T-shirt, he lost the plot. That was what allowed the Florinol and the dope to find their way in. No one could remember any more how exactly the story finished. Or whether or not Bimba carried on with the guy. Either way the Crow made it out of there in six months.

His head emptied itself out, it was carefully vacant, and he could no longer remember what had really happened, but because of that he was an exceptional driver, his mind a blank, and blood so cold that no one could match it. He drove sedated with Florinol and could have faced down a lorry and obliged it to do a U-turn to end up on an embankment. He'd even once gone on an escapade to Mar del Plata in a stolen car with his girlfriend and his girlfriend's mother, and started driving up the wrong side of Highway 2. All the other cars went charging on to the hard shoulder hooting their horns and the Girl laughed aloud and kept taking Vascolet. She — Blanquita — was crazy about the chocolate drink Vascolet (each to their own medicine, Mereles would say, enigmatically). He spoke in a strange manner, taking a while to figure out how to frame his words. By their sounds. His words always sounded serene, even when they were meaningless. Each to their own, but what a screwball, the Girl with her Vascolet!

On arriving at the corner of Libertador Avenue and Aristóbulo del Valle, the luck that had so far accompanied them seemed to run out. At some 150 metres from the military post at Martinez, the Chevrolet launched another round of machine-gunfire in which a policeman was wounded. The gunmen's car (according to the police report) effected a spectacular spin, running a serious risk of doubling back on itself, something it only just managed to avert. The car came to a halt across the street, blocking the traffic, and facing the opposite direction to the one it had been travelling in, coated in the effluent of a broken sewer, its rear window utterly shattered and a large bloodstain on the rear seat. Minutes went by and nobody got out of the car.

Busch, a local shopkeeper, came driving mildly along Libertador Avenue, in a placid frame of mind and from the opposite direction. He spotted the car stopped with its engine running and a man getting down from it rubbing his neck as if he'd been hurt, and imagined that an accident must have taken place.

Señor Eduardo Busch's habits were as regular as the white polka dots printed on the bales of cloth he sold. But today he'd been delayed by two minutes because the water had been cut off while he was washing himself. He hung on under the shower in the growing conviction that someone had it in for him, until he eventually emerged, dried himself, and was informed by his wife that the water had been cut off. He had been born in the same apartment he still lived in and had never gravitated out of the district. He knew all its noises, the shifting movement of the hours, and today it seemed to him he'd heard something unusual (distant thunder, stifled noises) to which he'd paid no attention. He had been out of sorts recently, because things weren't going at all well for him. He always left the house at 2.30 p.m. and at 2.50 p.m. he was opening up his business, but this afternoon he was a little behind and the delay (minimal, just by chance) changed everything. It gave him the opportunity to acquire a story that would last him to the end of his days. When he turned on to Madero Street, he thought there'd been an accident, for he spotted a car with its engine running and a guy getting out with a bag in his hand.

Being by nature a Good Samaritan, he stopped and saw the Kid coming towards him, smiling as he pulled out his Beretta.45 with his left hand.

'He came towards me and I thought he was going to kill me. He took forever to draw level with my car. He looked like a kid but had the face of a desperado.'

The Kid opened the door and Busch got out with his hands up. Two more guys descended from their car and got into the Rambler. They were dragging canvas bags along with them and were heavily armed, but it all happened so rapidly and so confusingly that it seemed like a dream, or so Señor Busch declared. 'We never imagine how these shameful acts come to pass, until we're caught up in them,' he later rationalized, philosophically.

'I'll never abandon the idea that we have to go to the assistance of our neighbour, even when it produces surprises such as this,' he added.

'One was dark and the other blond, the two of them looked very young and had army-style haircuts. There was a third one with a woman's stocking over his head.' All the descriptions converged, to no particular purpose.

They took off in the light-coloured Rambler that he'd bought the previous year. This was the car in which the assailants continued their flight.

They went along Libertador Avenue and after reaching Santa Fe Avenue at top speed — where they miraculously avoided another accident after emerging right into the path of a station wagon — they jumped a set of red lights and headed off along the PanAmerican Highway, the easiest escape route out of the area.