Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

Before we’d set out, Great Dane had explained to us that Bone slept in that house, plus two trained and armed bodyguards. Their alibis were driver and caretaker. The driver slept in the room next to Bone’s, at the end of the hall. The caretaker was in an exterior room, attached to the garage in the courtyard. A door connected the courtyard with the hallway that led to Bone’s room, and another door led to the kitchen. We saw them in the blueprints. There were those three and Bone’s mother. Her room was on the second floor. Plus the cook, who slept below in a room off the kitchen. Of dogs, no one said a word.

Behind the empire sofa, I pressed my face, I pressed my entire body to the floor. A gunshot rang out. Then another, then machine-gun fire from an AK. I saw Iris running. Something flew from her hand to the floor. A bright and violent light flashed and illuminated the enormous crystal chandelier and reflected in the big, gold-framed mirror of the living room. Then came the explosion with its deafening blast. The room filled with smoke. From that moment on everything was sudden, simultaneous, and impossible to follow. Every tenth of a second is a minute, every minute, an hour. The gunshots filled my ears and blotted out the world. I heard machine-gun fire and bits of plaster and molding falling, leaving the brick walls exposed; tables, lamps — if they were in fact lamps — blown to pieces, all very close by. The thunder of the bullets filled my ears until they felt as if they would explode. There was no room in my brain for that maddening jackhammer.

Macha, it must have been Macha, went running past toward the bedroom at the back. Great Dane’s blond mane was behind him. I seemed to sense a shadow moving near me, close to the wall. I looked at the shadow and then it jumped. It leaped off the ground. And it immediately sank down, leaving behind it a slight pink halo of pulverized tissue that floated in the air for a split second. Iris was coming toward me, firing. I was terrified. She jumped over the empire sofa and over me and she slid along that wall. The silence of a tomb. The gases burned my throat and nose. The smoke was clearing.

Chico Marín cut off the passage to the kitchen and the patio; Iris controlled the hallway that led to the bedroom at the back, Bone’s room, and she was looking upward. No one moved. The shootout hadn’t lasted more than three seconds. When the order came, I crawled out from my hiding place behind the sofa and over the floor, following the light from a flashlight. That was according to the plan. Then, by the light of the streetlight, I saw very clearly on the floor a Kalashnikov that I almost stepped on, and, no more than two yards away from me, a shape; spreading out over the parquet, a pasty and pinkish pulp dotted with white lumps.

At that moment, I tried to comprehend what was happening, to interpret reality according to the plan. I couldn’t do it. And I knew why: the explosion of light up above, close to the ceiling, its tremendous crash, the cloud of smoke, the footsteps of several attackers shooting and running in rigorous accord in opposite directions, it all confounds the observer, leaves him bewildered. With his attention so fatally divided, the only thing he can do, if he manages to do anything, is to shoot at the shape. They had explained it to us many times in Rinconada de Maipú, we had practiced, but it was quite another thing to live it. I’ll describe it now in order: Iris, whom I lost sight of in the noise and smoke of the explosion, neutralized the first of the defenders. The man emerged, as we had foreseen might happen, through the kitchen door. But Macha was already running past with his pistol held in both hands toward the hall at the back, Great Dane following. Chico Marín rushed over, firing, to take up the position Iris had left. And there I saw his shaved head now, next to the door to the kitchen. In the meantime Iris threw herself toward the wall at my back. An unexpected fighter had appeared, firing an AK. Iris unloaded her CZ into him. From there she dominated the entrance to Bone’s room. Iris had saved my life.

I stopped next to the window. Iris approached the stairs, staying close to the wall as she moved. They ordered me to go up. At that moment I saw a loose, severed foot with its black Nike in a pool of thick blood, and a hand missing three fingers with a light blue shirt cuff still intact. The smell was unbearable. I forget a lot of what I saw. But I can’t forget that smell. What could be in that stench I couldn’t help but breathe? Shit, of course, and the sweat of fear, and dust and plaster and gunpowder and paint and smashed bricks and smoke and gases, I guess, and tiny particles of blood and human tissue suspended in the air. I breathed it all in, reeking as it filled the hollows of my body. At the end of the hall I could hear gunshots and silences. Nothing sounds louder than the silence between gunshots. A bullet whizzing past much closer paralyzed me. I thought it had grazed my arm. Chico Marín’s shaved head bounced against the wall. He looked at me, moving his eyes that were terrifyingly wide-open. He opened his mouth to say something to me, but he suddenly fell silent and collapsed against the wall, smearing its blue-green wallpaper. What is left of a person killed in combat is impossible to align with what he was in life. Something had changed. By now it was clear that nothing corresponded to the plan. They’d been waiting for us and there were more fighters than we expected. They were shooting at us from the second floor and the shots from the end of the hallway were coming faster and faster.

“Cover me! Cover me!” shouted Iris.

I started to shoot while she climbed the stairs doubled over. A short gun fell to the floor. It came from upstairs. I waited. “Come up!” It was Iris. I recognized the Andean profile of Galdámez on the landing of the stairs. “Not yet! Don’t come up yet!” Iris shouted. The noise was unbearable. Pieces of glass were falling and shattering as they hit the floor, fragments of stucco and plaster molding were returning to white dust. The enormous chandelier in the living room suddenly plummeted with a crash of metal and shattering crystal. With that crash, Indio Galdámez rushed upstairs, firing. I went up behind him. They were still shooting at us. I recognized the clatter of an AK-47. A body slid down the stairs past me, leaving a trail of blood. It was a woman. It wasn’t Iris. Silence again. I waited. Nothing. “Now!” Iris shouted to me. Lit clearly by the streetlight, she was standing on the threshold. She was panting and her eyes were full of fear. There were bloodstains on her pants and her left running shoe. Galdámez was checking the second floor, slamming doors and pounding.

I went over a leg wearing blue Levi’s that ended in a natural leather boot. There was beauty in that old contact of jeans with the leather of the Texan boot. I saw that, where my eyes fell. I remembered the Gringo dead in Plaza Concha y Toro the night I gave Rafa up, his cowboy boots. Half of that man’s torso had ended up under a colored pane of glass. And in the skin of his anemic face, the encrusted shards shone like crushed ice. The skylight is destroyed, I thought. An idiotic thought, right? His fingers and arms were still moving. Sparks, electric reflexes.

It took no effort at all to overpower the poor old woman. She had practically fainted. “There’s no one else on this floor,” shouted Indio Galdámez. “Those three who were shooting at us must have come in from the house next door,” he shouted, his voice high and uneven. “And they brought the dogs, I’m sure.”

She was in bed but dressed in street clothes. Iris blindfolded her and tied her up with expert knots; I put a rag in her mouth, and a strip of plastic tape sealed her lips. We waited. No more shots were fired. I was still panting, and I had a crazy desire to smoke. Iris told me no, not a chance.