Ricardo Piglia: Money to Burn

They are called the twins because they're inseparable. But they aren't brothers, nor do they even look like one another. In fact, it would be hard to find two more different physical types. What they have in common is a way of looking at you, with their pale, placid eyes, a savage stare in a suspicious face. Dorda is heavy, quiet, with a ruddy face and an easy smile. Brignone is thin, slightly built, agile, has black hair and a complexion so pallid, it looks as if he's spent more time in jail than he actually has.

They got off the subway at Bulnes station and paused before the window of a photography shop to check they weren't being followed. They were bound to attract attention with their extravagant looks, like a couple of boxers, or undertakers escaped from a funeral parlour. They were elegantly and carefully dressed in black double-breasted suits, with cropped hair and manicured nails. The evening was calm, one of those clear, late spring afternoons with a white, translucent light. People were just leaving their offices to return home, an air of utter absorption about them.

They waited for the traffic lights to change and crossed Santa Fe Avenue, leading towards Arenales Street. They'd boarded the subway at Constitución and made a number of changes, making sure that nobody was following them. Dorda was very superstitious, forever spotting negative signals, and engaged in numerous secret rituals, which tended to complicate his life. He liked riding the subways, moving beneath the yellow light of platforms and tunnels, getting into carriages and letting himself be carried along. Whenever he was in danger (and he was always in danger) he felt secure and protected travelling through the city's entrails like that. It was simple, really, to escape detection by the undercover cops. All that was required was for him to nip back on to the empty platform at the last possible moment, allowing the train to go on without him, in order to confirm that he was in the clear.

Brignone was trying to calm him down.

'It'll turn out right, everything's under control.'

'I don't like there being so many people mixed up in it.'

'If something's going to happen to you, it'll happen whether anyone else is mixed up in it or not. If you catch a dose of bad luck, there's nobody can save you. If you stopped to buy cigarettes, you could be off and lost forever in just a minute.'

'And why do we all have to meet up now?'

An initial raid has to be properly planned, after which iťs essential to move fast to prevent word getting out. Fast means two or three days, from when you get the first information until the time you finally go to ground in a neighbouring country. You always have to pay, laying out money up front, while juggling with the risk that whoever sells you the information might also be selling it elsewhere.

The twins set off to their post on a block along Arenales Street. A clean position in a safe quarter of town, on the alley leading to the beer factory. They had rented it as an operational centre from which to coordinate all their movements.

'It's a bachelor pad in a swanky district, like a safehouse where you can set things up and hang out,' Malito had told them, when he contracted them in.

The twins were heavyweights, men of action, and Malito had come down in their favour, putting them in charge of information-gathering. At the same time, Malito remained mistrustful, that was for sure, guarding the loot with every possible security measure, each one under his control, an invalid who never let himself be seen. He was the invisible man, the magical brain, operating at a distance, with his own strange set of circuits and contacts and connections, 'Mad Mala', as mad Dorda called him. Because he was anyway called Malito, that was his real surname. Back in Devo to he'd known a cop called Hangman, which must have been even worse. To be called Hangman, or Slave, or even, like another of their acquaintances, Traitor — with surnames like that around, better to be called Malito. The rest of them had nicknames (Brignone was the Kid, Dorda was the Blond Gaucho) but Malito was his own nickname. Ratfaced, his eyes clinging either side of his nose, chinless, utterly serene, with his dyed hair and a woman's hands, a phenomenal intelligence. He knew about motors, circuits, could assemble a bomb in minutes, fiddling with his fingers just so, adjusting the timer, the little flasks of nitrate, all without looking. The hands of a blind man or a pianist, with the capacity to send a whole police station up in smoke.

Malito was the boss and had made his plans and prepared his contacts with politicians and the police who furnished him with data, maps, details and to whom, in return, he would give half of the proceeds. There were a whole lot of players in this game, but Malito was convinced he had at least ten to twelve hours' advantage over the others, that he could leave them waiting for their pay-off and escape with the dough, across the border into Uruguay.

That afternoon they'd split themselves into two groups. The twins were off to the Arenales apartment to carefully review every step of the operation once again. Meanwhile Malito rented a room in the hotel opposite the place where they were planning to mount the assault. From the hotel window he could see San Fernando Square and the Provincial Bank building. He tried to visualize their movements, the split-second timing of the raid, the getaway against the oneway traffic and the density of the flow of cars at that hour.

The pick-up truck belonging to the treasurer would leave to the left, advancing clockwise, obliged to approach from the front and halt before entering the gateway of the Town Hall. The one-way system made it necessary for it to circle the entire square and cut them off in midstream. They had to kill the driver and all the guards before they could draw their weapons, since the only thing going for them was the element of surprise.

Some witnesses swore they'd seen Malito in the hotel with a woman. Others swore they'd only seen two guys and definitely no woman. One of the pair was a skinny and nervous youth, constantly injecting himself, Twisty Bazán, who, that afternoon, really was in the San Fernando hotel room with Malito, observing every movement at the Bank from the window overlooking the street. Following the robbery, the police cleared out the place and in the bathroom they found syringes, a lighter and the remaining crystals. The police assumed that Twisty was the young man who'd gone down to the bar and asked for an alcohol warmer. As usual, the witnesses all contradict one another, but they all agree that the youth resembled an actor and that he had a wild look about him. From this it was inferred that it was he who'd been injecting heroin just before the robbery and that he'd requested the lighter in order to heat the drug. From then on the witnesses began calling him 'the Lad'. And thereafter confusion reigned in distinguishing between Bazán and Brignone, as several witnesses were certain that the two of them were one whom everyone called the Lad. A highly nervous skinny young guy, who held his gun in his left hand, with its barrel pointed skywards, as though he were a plain-clothes cop. Eye-witnesses in situations like these can sense their blood racing with adrenalin, causing them to become emotional and then clouded because they have witnessed an event simultaneously clear and confusing to them. Some averred they had seen a car crossing just in front of the pick-up and heard a racket, with one guy on the ground kicking his feet as he died.