Ricardo Piglia: Money to Burn

Despite the elected muteness of the police chiefs, it soon transpired that there was a firm trail leading the investigators towards the gang's political contacts. Nor should one rule out the possibility that the gunmen had been contracted to act as decoys, as the visible elements in a far larger organization. Unofficially, there was talk of an operation maintained by the clandestine network of the so-called Peronist resistance. The police firmly inquired after all the locations visited by former militants in the organization led by Marcelo Queraltó and Patricio Kelly.{3}

Hernando Heguilein, Nando, had been loosening his ties with circles of Peronist nationalism and only maintained sporadic contact with certain militant trade unionists and former combatants of the movement dedicated to arms trafficking, renting safehouses and supplying secret workshops where passports and false documents could be manufactured (along with faked letters from Perón invoking an armed uprising). Here he was, driving along Boedo in a Chevrolet with all his papers in order, attempting to make any number of turns before heading off towards the bachelor pad on Arenales Street. He didn't want to phone them, nor to arrive early, because, like all the rest of them circling the city with the police hard on their tails, he was scared of falling into a bear pit, of accepting a poisoned chalice, or of falling into a trap, with the cops hanging out in the apartment. On various occasions Nando had managed to avert disaster, purely by instinct, because he took signs of unusual activity very seriously and responded very methodically, to consistently achieve the most satisfactory outcome.

He descended via Santa Fe, turned along Bulnes Street, and carried on for another half a block. There was a young couple canoodling against a tree and some guy reading a paper in a cab parked at the taxi rank at Berutti Street. The entrance to the building was reasonably quiet and the caretaker was sluicing down the paving stones. It was a good sign: porters make themselves scarce when the police are about to turn up. Half the porters in Buenos Aires belonged to the Communist Party and the other half were stool-pigeons, but not one of them was to be found whenever the cops set an ambush. Which explains Nando's conviction that the caretaker hosing down the pavement could as well have been a cop in camouflage, ready to shop him the instant he got in the lift.

Nando meandered along with a peaceful air, went into the hall, and down to the basement giving on to the garage. There was no one there. He crossed the corridor and went up the service staircase. He preferred to enter via the kitchen, for if the cops were already inside, he had a chance (however remote) of entrenching himself in the incinerator chute and defending himself with bullets.

But there were no policemen, everything was fine as he crossed the kitchen and went into the living-room, where the first thing he saw was Blond Gaucho stretched out across a sofa, with a bloodied bandage around his neck, and the Kid filing down the firing-pin on his piece, very carefully, on a rattan coffee table. Most amusing of all was the money piled up on a kind of inlaid Spanish cabinet with a mirror that duplicated its quantity, a heap of dosh on a white oilcloth, an hallucinatory spectacle, repeated in the pure waters of the mirror.

The Kid looked at it and gave a complicit grin, while the Gaucho gestured towards the closed bedroom door through which suffocated grunts and sexual groans were emerging. It had to be the Crow and the Girl, whiling away their lives there in bed.

'Malito's here,' said the Kid and nodded towards the room at the end. Then he went back to filing the firing-pin on his Beretta, trying to get the trigger as docile and sensitive to the touch as a butterfly. He didn't like Nando, he was cut from another block, resembling a cop, with his trimmed moustache and dead eyes. But he wasn't a real cop, although he had been a sort of one, an informer on the Alliance. 'Let's call him a political activist,' the Kid was sizing him up, a fool like any other, who would have themselves killed for the Old Man, in the end the most poisonous of all were those who joined with their fellows (or so they said) to resell arsenals of weaponry and raid banks under the pretext of raising funds for Perón's return. 'The Return, cabbage-heads,' thought the Kid, 'the only thing we have in common is that they pinch us to find out whether we're Peronist trade union puppets or not.'{4}

'Any news?'

'All going well,' said Nando. 'Shooting their mouths off without a clue about what's really what. They went and put Big Pig Silva in charge, he's a sly one, you need to watch out, he must be putting the squeeze on all the narks, and by this stage he'll have to have a lead from somewhere. Did you see the papers? Losing that car was a disaster. Were you the one who picked it up?'

'The Crow went. He collected it in Lanús, no fuss, it was a heavily modified job the cops had sold to a metal merchant. It was already marked.'

Nando warned them they'd need to spend two or three days locked indoors, lying low, until they'd sorted out the deal to get them across the River Plate. The Gaucho lowered the magazine he was reading and peered over the top.

'You're not Uruguayan, are you?'

They gazed at one another for a moment in silence and Nando shook his head.

'I'm not Uruguayan, but I'll get you over to Uruguay.'

'I know that, of course, but you have the look of a native,{5} you know, you sort of give the impression…' burbled the Gaucho. 'All Uruguayans look as if they've been widowed… The truth of the matter is, they all look like Peronists, Uruguayans do, all widows of the General.'

'You're a nice guy, Gaucho. What's up with you?' commented Nando. 'You've launched into speech, have you, now that you're feeling better?'

The Gaucho raised his newspaper again and resumed reading.

Nando spoke like this to him because the Gaucho was a man of few words, and got along with the Kid without the use of them. They'd often spend hours alone together, without speaking, thinking and listening to things. He could hear a kind of murmuring in his head, a short-wave radio attempting to infiltrate the plates of his skull, transmitting via the inner part of the brain, something along those lines.

At times there'd be an interference, strange sounds, people talking in unknown languages, chattering simultaneously, who knows whether from Japan, Russia, whatever. It didn't bother him too much because it had been going on ever since he was a boy. Other times it annoyed him, for example when he was trying to get to sleep, or when all at once phrases entered his head and he had to spit them out. Like just now, when he'd told Nando he was a Uruguayan widow. He'd heard it in the bones of his skull, he'd spat it out, and then the guy had looked at him strangely. He was not wanting to cause problems, and at the same time amusing himself thinking of what a turnip-head Nando was when he told him he had the aspect of a charma , a native Uruguayan. And the oddity of the word 'aspect' likewise evoked a grin in him. It sounded as if someone had told Nando he had a 'prospect' or an 'insect'. Something medicinal. So, he awarded himself an amphetamine, an Actemin. Nando and the Kid carried on chatting, but the Gaucho scarcely heard them, it was like the wind in the trees. He sat down on the bed and listened.

'Che,'{6} said Nando, looking first at the Kid and then at the closed door. 'Is Malito still in there?'

Malito was still in there, locked into the other room, the Venetian blinds pulled well down to screen out the sun's rays, in twilight, but with a bedside lamp on, shaped like a tulip and with a 25-watt bulb. Because he couldn't bear to go to sleep in darkness, after all those years in prison with the light on all night long, a little habit from the years in his cell. Nando had got to know Malito in the Sierra Chica prison back in '56 or '57, and remembered him as a reserved sort of lad, very young, who'd fallen into political hands as if by mistake. They'd tortured the lot of them as if it were an initiation ritual. Those were the tough days of the resistance, and Malito found himself on a block along with Communists and Trotskyists and the Nazis from the National Restoration Vanguard. He got into fights with them: there were a number of members of the Metallurgy trade union, two or three former army officers and a few guys from the Tacuara barracks. Malito and Nando became mates. It was from then you could date their unlikely alliance, founded on long hours of conversation through the dead prison nights. Both highly intelligent, they rapidly learnt from one another and as rapidly set about drawing up plans.