Money to Burn

3

The evening papers carried headline news of the catastrophe. Their first hypotheses invited readers to visualize some kind of commando raid. Investigative journalists associated the robbery with an assault mounted on the Bank's own health centre by a group of nationalists some months previously.{1}

There were, according to their surmises, certain common elements: people from Tacuara or from the Peronist resistance, lower army officers released from the services and now in the employ, if rumours were to be believed, of the Algerian guerrilla movement. 'The Algerians', as they were called in the movement, led by José Luis Nell and Joe Baxter, burst into the health centre waving machine-guns and made off with 300,000 dollars. The police were following a line of investigation in which cells of Peronist nationalists had begun operating alongside common criminals in an explosive combination that was keeping the authorities seriously worried. There was something in it. Hernando Heguilein, 'Nando', a former member of the National Liberation Alliance,{2} a recognized shock troop during the period of Peronism, had been mentioned together with Malito at the siege on Arenales Street, there to resolve the gang's operational withdrawal and retreat. Nando was a man of action, a patriot in the eyes of some, a 'mole' according to others, a bloodthirsty lumpen proletarian in the view of the police inside the Department.

The daily papers' articles were written between the lines and numerous counter-intelligence operations were covertly running in the midst of the news.

For example, it was revealed that in checking over the Chevrolet left abandoned by the assailants, the police confirmed their suspicion that one of them had been wounded. From inside the car they recovered: one long-sleeved grey pullover, one hand towel, and one sack, all stained with blood. There were traces of drugs on the car floor, as well as several syringes and a small phial of anticoagulant. As well as all this, they found two 45-calibre double-barrel Halcón sub- machine-guns, each able to take sixty-four bullets, and an unopened case of ammunition. By way of detail illustrative of the assailants' danger to the public (or so said the press), they could point to the fact that each machine-gun had been modified so that the safety catch was jammed with a bolt in the intention that, when it was fired, it emptied whole rounds of fifty bullets at a time. The car itself showed four points of impact on its nearside wing. Next to the site of the accident, and beside the gunmen's car, lay a kit-style bag with 18,000 pesos still inside it. When an examination of the arms left behind in the Chevrolet by the assailants following the car crash was undertaken, it was established that those firing the 9-millimetre machine-gun must have been using a weapon belonging to the same category as a German make, known as a Bergman, or a Paraguayan Piripipi.

According to the most up-to-date reports, the police investigating the bloody assault paid particular attention to the bags abandoned by the malefactors during their flight (some from the crashed Chevrolet, others fallen during the chase). They were made of sailcloth, navy-style, and it was assumed that they were specially manufactured to transport the stolen money. This type of bag is commonly used as military issue. The police made contact with their corresponding numbers in the Naval Prefecture. In addition to all this, the 45-calibre Halcón is a strictly military-issue weapon. It was via this route that an investigation opened into the assumed military connections of the gang.

Inside the car, experts from the Fingerprints Division of the Scientific Police Superintendence dusted for fingerprints supposedly left by the assailants in differing places and on the weapons themselves, and these fingerprints were supposed to lead the investigators to conclusions regarding the identity of the fugitives.

That evening, when the press stories were put to bed, personnel belonging to the Robberies and Larcenies Division conducted a number of house-to-house searches and even house break-ins at various points of the Federal Capital and of Greater Buenos Aires in the search for gang members.

On reading the newspapers, Malito was surprised by the speed with which the police got on their tail. To the typically repulsive and abject style that was their wont (according to Malito), the daily papers now added details intended to embellish the facts in a shamelessly crude and explicit manner ('… Andrea Clara Fonseca, six years of age, who let go of her mother's hand, was hit by a hail of machine-gunfire let loose by one of the criminals, and her face was turned into a bloody cavity…'). 'A bloody cavity', Malito returned again to slowly reading that line, without thinking of anything at all, without seeing anything apart from the letters and the blurry image of a fair-haired child resembling a naked cherub in a church. At times, the savage pleasure with which he read the police news convinced him of the impossibility of excavating the moral root of the facts of his life, because in reading about what he himself had done, he felt both satisfied at not having been recognized, and at the same time saddened at not seeing his own photo, while secretly preening himself at this dissemination of his disgrace being anxiously devoured by thousands upon thousands of readers.

Malito was then, like every true gangster, an avid reader of the crime pages of the daily papers, and this was one of his weaknesses, because the primitive sensationalism that cruelly resurfaced in the face of each new crime (the fair-haired girl whose face had been destroyed by gunfire) made him think that his brain was not all that strange when compared with those degenerate sadists who gloat over horrors and catastrophes, made him think his mind was on a level with the minds of those guys who'd done what he read about in the papers, and he secretly thought of himself as one of those criminals, even though in public everyone looked on him as a cold and calculating type, a scientist who organized his actions with the same precision as a surgeon. Naturally, a surgeon (like his father, for example) lived with his hands tainted with blood, ripping open the flesh of naked and defenceless invalids and trepanning away with sophisticated instruments, puncturing and mechanically sawing at the living skulls of his beloved victims.

Abandoning the Chevrolet had been a mistake, and this error gave the police a trail which was enough to provoke a chain reaction, causing all the dominoes to topple in a row. Malito knew that they had broken into the San Fernando hotel where he'd spent the night preceding the assault with Twisty Bazán. Naturally enough, the police weren't revealing any information they'd obtained there.

In a manner at once threatening and indifferent, the police announced they knew the identity of at least two of the gang members. Or so the second chief of the Robberies and Petty Larcenies Division of the Zona Norte in the province of Buenos Aires, Cayetano Silva, assured the press.

'I am leaving aside the possibility that a degree of internal collusion with personnel at the Town Hall may have taken place a priori,' declared Police Commissioner Silva.

They were putting up a smokescreen, to protect their line of information. Malito had the feeling that they were already waiting there on his doorstep. Things never work out as you expect them to, and luck is more important than courage, more important than intelligence and security measures. Fortune, paradoxically, always favours the side of the established order of things and is (along with denunciation and torture) the principal means by which investigators can close the loop and finally snare those who attempt to render themselves invisible in the urban jungle.

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.

'Any group who's daring enough can do a lot in a country like this,' Nando was wont to say. 'There's swindlers all over the place. A highly disciplined and ordered group, a band of well-armed spivs can achieve anything here.' And here was where they were. He thought it best to gather together an armed gang of insiders rather than go outside and recruit people he'd need to train up.

Nando dreamed of bringing them into the Organization. Laying pipe-bombs, robbing banks, cutting electric cables, starting fires, raising hell. But things worked out otherwise and it was the old swindling insiders who ended up making Nando their Organizer. He was gifted with clearsightedness, and a strategic perspective. It was he who'd provided the necessary intelligence to mount a raid on the Bank. He had umpteen contacts which he'd used to establish the essential lines of withdrawal and retreat after the operation. He knew everyone, and he knew how to operate. He'd obtain the falsified documents, the necessary shipments, the Uruguayan contacts, and provide bribes and the outlets for selling on arms. He was at the heart of everything and was planning a secret crossing to Uruguay. But there were still many problems to be resolved before making a move. And Nando wasn't in favour of getting mixed up with the police and the informers who made the handover during the raid.

Malito sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette: all the weapons were spread out on the table, and the newspapers were strewn around the floor. He'd no desire to share out the loot, not with the narks, nor with the cops.

'You're daft, they'll denounce you straight away.'

'Nando, if I were to hand over half the cash to those idiots who didn't lift a finger while we risked our bollocks,' here Malito grinned, 'then I really would be daft.'

The situation was confused; the police were attempting to disguise what they knew, they appeared disorientated and followed their established tendency to link the assault to Peronist right-wing factions. Was that where they were looking? Nando wasn't sure, though he knew Silva the Big Pig well enough. Police Commissioner Silva, from Robberies and Larceny, didn't believe in investigating, he simply went for torture and denunciation as his chosen methods. (As soon as they were detained, the gunmen knew to cut themselves with razors, on their forearms and legs, to prevent the cattle prods being used on them. 'If there's blood there's no cattle prod, because you'd collapse instantly from the electric current.') He'd mounted a death squad on the Brazilian model. But Silva always acted within the law, always with the backing of the Federal Police, because his working hypothesis was that every crime had a political significance. 'Common criminality no longer exists,' Silva was wont to wax lyrical. 'Nowadays all our criminals are ideological ones. It's the legacy that Peronism bequeathed us. Any young thug you catch in the act of thuggery automatically shouts "Long live Perón!" or "Evita still lives!" when you go to snatch him. They're all social delinquents, terrorists who get up in the middle of the night, leave their women asleep in bed, take the number 60 bus, get out somewhere near a level-crossing and blow up a train. If, like the Algerians, they're at war with the whole of society, they'll be wanting to kill the lot of us.' This was the reason (according to Silva) why you had to coordinate police activity with the State Intelligence Service and purge the shit from the city.

Cold, intelligent, a real professional, well trained but utterly fanatical, that Commissioner Silva. He had his own weird personal history which nobody knew too well: according to some, a daughter of his had been killed in an attack on her way home from school; according to others, his wife had been rendered paralysed (when she was thrown down a lift-shaft); still others claimed he'd taken a bullet in the balls and been left impotent; all these stories and more ran in various versions. He was paranoid, he never slept; he had a number of extravagant notions as to the political future and the advance of Communism and of the vulgar masses. He always gave the correct line, advancing some set-piece argument or other, offering detailed digressions by way of explanation. Those in the Peronist resistance (resumed Silva), weary of militant heroics, had begun to take their own direct action. It was vital to sever this connection, or else the bad old days when the anarchists held sway would return, when no one could distinguish the crooks from the politicians. The gallant criminal divisions of Buenos Aires province had been waging a campaign of extermination. They killed all they encountered bearing arms and took no prisoners. And they'd encountered only support from the head of Federal Police, who saw only a call to Armageddon in every strike threat.

'Silva smells a rat in everything that happens. He'll hang on a little longer because he wants to be certain, but his staff is stuffed with stoolies who keep him abreast of things…'

'Have you lot spoken to him?'

'We've got people in the Head Office and we know what they're up to, but Silva only talks to himself, never even to his own mother. Get the picture?' inquired Nando.

'Yup,' replied Malito. He was evidently worried. 'Call the Crow.'

The Crow emerged from the nest where he was bedbound with the Girl, then went over and shut himself in the room with Malito and Nando. After a while he came out, wearing a bored expression.

'Come on in, Kid,' he said and stared at the Gaucho. 'Malito says that you're his eyes and ears, observing everything from the balcony overlooking the street.'

Dorda was wounded in the neck, not seriously, but a bullet had rebounded off his pistol butt and hit the nape of his neck. He began bleeding heavily and everyone assumed he was going to die, but in a few hours the wound began to scab over and he began to look better. But he was weakened by the considerable loss of blood and the Kid had been looking after him.

'What's up?'

'Nothing. I'll let you know.'

Dorda didn't move. He stared at Kid Brignone, who stuck his pistol in his belt and also went through into the other room.

'Up you get, Gaucho,' said the Crow from the doorway. 'And keep watch over the lovenest.'

Gaucho Dorda remained alone in the room. Without shifting from his position on the sofa, he searched out the bottle of amphetamines, swallowing two of them without water. They on their side of the door were hatching plots. They didn't speak to him, they never asked him anything. The Kid was in charge of making plans. As far as the Gaucho was concerned, he and the Kid were one and the same. Twinned brothers, identical twins, belonging to the mafia fraternity, meaning (here Dorda struggled to explain himself) they understood each other without words, they acted telepathically. It even seemed to him that he felt the same way as Kid Brignone. That was why Dorda left the daily timetable to be settled by the Kid. Money and decision- taking mattered little to him. His sole interest was in drugs, 'his obscure pathological mentality' (according to the report by Dr Bunge, the prison psychiatrist), he rarely thought of anything else apart from drugs and the voices to which he paid secret attention. It was logical (again according to Dr Bunge) that the Gaucho would leave all the decisions to the Kid. 'A very interesting case of Gestalt symbiosis. There may be two of them, but they function as a single entity. The Gaucho acts as the body, solely responsible for executing the action, a psychotic killer; the Kid is the brains and does the thinking for him.'

However, he also heard voices, the Blond Gaucho. Not all the time, but from time to time, he heard voices, inside his head, between the plates of his skull. Women addressing him, issuing commands. That was his secret and Dr Bunge determined it was necessary to give him various tests and various sessions of hypnotherapy so that the themes of this intimate music might be drawn out. Dr Bunge became obsessed with this case, became struck by these voices his prisoner-patient Dorda listened to in silence. 'They tell me there's a lagoon up near Carhué, and that if you throw yourself into the water, there's so much salt in it you float, and they say that there some bastard chieftain met his death, a Ranquel indian{7} who drowned there when they tied a millstone to his neck, 'cause they said he fucked some poor gringo he'd caught and chained to a post by the ankle, that indian went and did it to him over on the indian settlement, this Coliqueo chief I'm telling you about. And they drowned him in the lake. Ever since then the poor devil appears from time to time, floating on the surface still dressed in his plumes, and the current carries him away through the marshes between the flatlands of rushes and reeds like a ghost.' Then his voice would go all lethargic and he'd repeat, the Blond Gaucho, a fragment from the Holy Bible (Matthew XVIII: 6) which a priest had read to him: 'And whomsoever should scandalize a white man, were it better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he be drowned in the depth of the lagoon at Carhué.'

Apart from the voices, he was a regular sort of guy. On occasions even Dr Bunge thought he was faking it, this Dorda, looking to escape from the law by feigning madness and avoiding a sentence. In any case, Dr Bunge wrote in his report that Dorda's 'character pathology' had all the indications of a behavioural aberration, with a tendency towards aphasia. Because he heard voices he spoke little: they were the explanation for his taciturnity. Those who avoid speech, for example the autistic, are always hearing voices, people talking to them, they live on another frequency, preoccupied by the hubbub, an interminable muttering, listening to instructions, shouts, suffocated giggles, receiving orders. (Sometimes they called him 'the Slapper', these voices, all these women, calling to Gaucho Dorda, 'Come here Slapper, Slag, Bitch,' and he kept quiet, without moving, so that nobody could hear what they were saying to him, sadly gazing into space, occasionally longing to cry but without giving in so that no one would ever discover that he was a woman.) He took the greatest pride in his decision-taking and in maintaining sang-froid. Nobody could read his mind, or hear what his women said to him. He sported a brand of sunglasses called Clipper, with reflective lenses, he'd found them in a glove-pocket one afternoon when he was robbing a posh car out near leafy Palermo. He liked them, found them elegant, they afforded him a worldly air and he looked at himself in profile in the mirror, in every bathroom, in every shop window.

Right now he removed his Clippers, and with extreme care began perusing the design of an outboard motor on a launch drawn to scale. He was still sprawled across the sofa, studying a magazine called Popular Mechanics, and pausing now and then to draw engines. He sat down and placed a sheet of kitchen paper on the side table and began tracing with the tip of his pencil.

At that moment the Girl appeared, dressed in a man's shirt, and went barefoot into the kitchen.

'Want something, Doll?' asked the Gaucho.

'Nothing, thanks,' replied the Girl and the Gaucho watched as her shirt lifted above her arse while she stood on tiptoes to reach down the dope from the top shelf of the kitchen dresser.

'Give us a kiss,' asked Dorda.

The Girl paused in the doorway and gave him a smirk. She treated him as if he were invisible, or made of wood. He could see the little curls of pubic hair beneath the folds of the Crow's silk shirt, he could see the Girl's — the Doll's — pubis.

He visualized the soft rub of the silk between her legs and couldn't stop staring at her.

'What are you looking at? Just wait till I tell Daddy about you,' said the Girl and she went back into her room.

The Gaucho made as if to get himself up and follow her, but fell back across the cushions, with a faint smile on his face. When he was annoyed, he beamed like a child.

He looked at the closed door through half-screwed eyes, he was all screwed up over screwing and had a convergent squint (as his late mother put it), which enhanced his appearance as a highly dangerous obsessive type, which is what he was (according to Dr Bunge's report).

Dorda thus possessed the perfect look of the category of subject he represented (added Dr Bunge), a criminal lunatic who performed criminal deeds with a nervous smile, angelical and soullesss. When he was a boy, his late mother surprised him chopping a live chick in half with a shearing blade, and she removed him from the henhouse to the police station, whipping him with a leather strap, to have him banged up at Longchamps.

'My very own mother!' he stammered, without knowing whether to curse or to thank her for her efforts at straightening out his life. 'Wickedness,' said Dorda, flying high on the mixture of speed and coke, 'is not something that happens with intention, it's a bright shining light that comes and carries you away.'

He was repeatedly detained as a child, and at the age of fifteen they sent him to the Melchor Romero neuropsychiatrie clinic, near to La Plata. The youngest sectioned inmate in its entire history he'd proudly say, Dorda would. They sat him down in a white room with the other crazies and he hardly reached up to the table. But he was a veritable Judas, a child criminal: he killed cats by putting them into wasps' nests. A very complex operation.

'I don't want to boast,' the Gaucho said, 'but I made some wire cages so secure that the kitten couldn't move, it could only cry and squawk like a hen. The pussycat.'

Soon afterwards he killed a hobo, with his fists, in order to steal his torch. First off they took him to the police station, where they beat him to a pulp, then they sectioned him in the psychiatric hospital.

The doctor on duty was a bald fellow with glasses who wrote notes in an exercise book. He sent him to a unit for non-aggressive crazies and the first night he was raped by three male nurses. One made him suck him off, the next held him down, and the third stuffed him up the arse.

'A dick as big as this,' Dorda indicated the size with his hands. 'And I don't want to boast, or anything.'

He became meat for the madhouse. He'd escape and they'd recapture him, he'd escape again and roam around the train stations, through Retiro or Once, living off petty crimes and hold-ups, burgling empty houses. From the moment he spotted a car to when he took it out, he needed just two minutes, maximum two and a half. The fastest draw in the West, because he kept his patch to Morón or Haedo (on the west of the city). He came from the countryside and was always drawn to the city outskirts. He had the ruddy face of a peasant, straw-coloured hair, sky-blue eyes. He was a provincial from the provinces, from a family of Piedmontese immigrants at Maria Juana in the Santa Fe province, hard-working people, as taciturn as he but who didn't hear voices. According to his mother, evil came to him as naturally, and he welcomed it with the same force and obstinacy, as hard work to his father and his brothers.

'Out in the countryside, the sun's fit to fry your brains. The birds fall from the trees with the summer heatwave. You don't earn anything with the sweat of your labours,' the Gaucho Dorda decided. The more you work, the less you have, my youngest brother had to sell his house when his wife fell ill and he'd worked hard his whole life long.'

'Of course he did,' the Kid laughed aloud. 'Maybe the idiot's getting wise: the more you work, the more of a slave you become…'

Kid Brignone and Gaucho Dorda, forever together, had got to know one another in Batán jail, that old heap of shit, both happening to end up in a unit filled with faggots. Whores, trannies, queens… the whole selection box.

'The first time a man queered me, I thought I'd get pregnant,' said Dorda. 'Let's see if I'll go for the op now. I was still a kid when I first saw his stiffie and I thought I'd faint with delight.' He laughed loudly and pulled a stupid face. Dorda was acting the clown, making Malito nervous, he the pro, disliking coarse jokes, disliking rent boys. According to Malito, all whores talked too much.

But that wasn't true, the Kid protested, there were queens who'd lasted through torture sessions with the cattle prod without singing, and he personally knew several who played the macho and as soon as they saw the rubber straps began to sing aloud.

'Mad Margarita, a trannie, filled her gob with razor blades and made a real mess of her mouth, and when she stuck her tongue out at the cops she said: "If you want, I'll suck it for you, sweetheart, but you'll never get me to squeal…"

'They killed her and had to throw her in the river at Quilmes, completely naked but for her bracelet and ear-rings, but they never did get a word out of her.'

'You have to be all male to get yourself fucked by a macho,' decided Gaucho Dorda. And he smiled like a child, cooler than a cat. There was one guy he planted a darning needle into a lung of, the fellow went whishsh, the air went out of him like a balloon and he was left completely deflated. They called him Mental. And Gaucho didn't like being called Mental, or being called Menial. The Blond Gaucho demanded more respect. 'I've been a lost soul from the very start,' and he smiled like a girl.

The Kid immediately clocked that the Gaucho was highly intelligent, but completely off his head.

'Psychotic,' added Dr Bunge, chief headshrinker at Melchor Romero.

That was why he heard voices. Those who kill for killing's sake do it because they hear voices, they hear people talking, they're in contact with the energy exchange, with the voices of the dead, with lost women, 'it sounds like a humming,' said Dorda, 'an electric buzz you can hear going cric, cric inside your brains, that doesn't let you get to sleep.'

'You suffer a thousand martyrdoms, you madman, with that radio always playing in your head, you know what that means. They talk to you, they tell you all kinds of obscenities.'

The Kid worried about the Blond Gaucho and looked after and defended him. He picked him for the assault on San Fernando. Malito called him because he'd carefully observed the Kid and needed a heavyweight from the next generation, he wanted to renew the team, enough of old fogeys ('For old fogeys you can stop at me,' Malito would say, having recently celebrated his fortieth.) He put the job his way, and the Kid responded with: 'If we go fifty fifty with the cops, how much do we end up taking home?'

'Minimum, half a million… divided between four of us.'

'And the other half-million?'

'It's theirs,' said Malito.

'They' were those who set up the deal, including the cops and those on the Town Council. The Kid gave this some thought. He delayed reaching a decision. They were on borrowed time: if he got caught again he would never get out.

'I'll come in with the Blond Gaucho as my second. Otherwise count me out.'

'Who d'you think you are?' asked Malito. 'Man and wife?'

'Of course, cretin,' answered the Kid.

When the flesh urged they shared a bed, the Kid and the Blond Gaucho, but generally less and less. Dorda was a semi- mystic: he preferred to let himself be taken and didn't jerk off because he was deeply suspicious. He thought that if he lost his juices, he'd lose what little light still illuminated his mind, and he'd be left high and dry, without an idea in his head.

'I'm up to here with playing Little Bo Peep. Seriously, doctor,' Gaucho told the doctor, as though it was a heavy load to bear, 'when you're banged up by the cops, what are you to do? Do it to yourself every half-hour like a monkey… or like a dog licking itself, haven't you noticed, doctor? Dogs lick themselves off, in Devoto jail there was a guy from Entre Ríos who could suck himself off, he doubled over like a piece of wire, stuck out his tongue and sucked away…' the Gaucho was laughing.

'Well and good, Dorda,' answered Dr Bunge. 'That'll be all for today.' And he noted on his pad: 'Sexual obsession, polymorphous perversion, uncontrolled libido. Dangerous, psychotic, perverted. Parkinson's Disease.'

The Gaucho had a slight tremor, electric and almost imperceptible, but he explained it away with his schema of aerated and corporal humours.

'We are composed of air,' he declared. 'Skin and air. Beyond this, inside ourselves, everything is all wet, wetness covers everything between skin and air,' he was attempting to explain things scientifically this Blond Gaucho, 'and there are some little tubes…'

This vision of man as a balloon was confirmed to him when he saw the guy he'd pricked with a darning needle deflate and fall to the floor like clothes dropped there at the end of the day. The guy, on the floor, like so much dirty washing.

'We're made of spunk, air and blood,' announced the Gaucho, one night when he was flying on coke and loquacity.

'He was full of words,' recalled and recounted the Kid, 'he'd swallowed a load of first-class stuff we'd lifted from the car glove compartment of a deputy in the National Assembly.'

'There are these little tubes,' went on Dorda, and here he pointed to his chest, 'going from here to there,' and he fingered his way around his ribcage. 'Like, made of plastic, they are, and they empty and refill, empty and refill. When they're filled, you think, and when they're empty, you sleep. If you remember something, like back when you were a kid, it's because those things, memories or whatever, happened to be out there in the air, they just came along, didn't they, those things you remember, blowing in the wind, right there for you to catch. Am I right, Kid?'.

'Naturally,' Brignone said to him, letting him be right.

Highly intelligent, that Dorda, if very locked in on himself, with that problem of his, aphasia, that dumbness which meant he didn't speak for a month on end, communicating simply with signs and gestures, rolling his eyes to the skies, or pursing his lips to make himself understood. Only the Kid could understand him, that loony Gaucho. But he was the most complete and courageous guy you could ever wish to see (according to Brignone). There was the time he confronted the police with a.9 and he held them at bay until the Kid could get there with a car jammed in reverse and pull him out, in Lanús. It was awesome. Stock still, firing with both hands, serenely — bang, bang — even elegantly, and the cops shitting themselves with fear. When they come across a character like that, decisive, who doesn't give a fart, they give him respect. 'If there'd been a war, let's just suppose, say he'd been born in the time of General San Martín,{8} that Gaucho,' or so the Kid proposed, 'they'd have erected a monument to him. He'd have been I dunno what, some kind of a hero, but he was born out of his time. He has this problem about expressing himself, which makes him very introverted. Perfect for carrying out special assignments. He'll go and kill off anyone, and do it in the blink of an eye. Once, during a robbery, the cashier wasn't prepared to play along with it, thought it was some sort of a game, and he acted like a fool, the cashier did, in that bank, 'cause he couldn't see a gun, 'cause the Gaucho wasn't showing his weapon.

'So he said: "This is a raid."

'And the prick of a cashier, when he saw him there, looking like a mental defective, thought it was all a joke, and that he was fooling. "Get out," he said. Or "Stop fucking with me, dumbo," he might have said. Dorda scarcely moved his hand, just slightly like this, inside the pocket of his white coat (because he'd put on a medic's, one he'd taken from the hospital) and he emptied the chamber into the guy's face.

The bank staff themselves all rushed to fill his bag when they saw him smiling broadly after stiffing the guy, the cashier guy. A very, very heavy guy, Gaucho Dorda, a total loony. They don't beat him up either, the cops, don't put him through their paces. You might as well kill him, for all the talk you'll get out of him.'

'You remind me of a fellow I picked up once in the Retiro station, in the toilet — did I tell you this one, Gaucho? — a fellow like you, I was peeing, the guy was circling me, staring at my thing, circling me again, so then I began making small talk and the fellow held out a sheet of paper which read: I'm deaf-and-mute. So I did it anyway. And he paid me 150 pesos. He breathed heavily while he was shafting me, 'cause of course he couldn't say anything, but he let out his breath, exhaled, enjoying it.'

'I'm deaf-and-mute too,' the Kid went on and burst out laughing and the Gaucho gazed at him contentedly, before he too uttered a disturbed little cackle.

Dorda remembered it, and he also loved the Kid. He couldn't say as much, but he was willing to give his life for Brignone. Right now he made an effort, and got up. It was hard work thinking, but he was doing it and his mind was running on like a translation machine (according to Dr Bunge), everything seemed directed personally to upset him (well, him or the Brignone Kid). They spoke to him and he translated. For example, when he was a boy, he used to attend the church cinema, since he, Dorda, was from the countryside, and in the country cinema is a religious devotion. 'If you went to Mass,' (recounted the Gaucho) 'the priest would give you, when you left, a ticket (and if you'd taken communion, the priest would give you two) which got you in free to the parish cinema, which was showing after morning mass.' Dorda could get to see even a whole series of films and translated every one, as if he were on screen, as if he'd lived it all himself. 'Once we had to take him out of the screening, because he pulled out his willy and began weeing: in the film he could see a child urinating, his back to the audience, urinating in the night, in the middle of the countryside…': deposition from the sacristan to Dr Bunge, included in his psychiatric report.) A devout believer, Dorda, always wishing to remain in God's grace, and his mother went so far as to declare that he had wanted to become parish priest at Del Valle (a village some five kilometres away from his family home) where the Brothers of the Sacred Heart were based, but when he was on his way to visit, a hobo stopped and took advantage of him, and from that time stemmed all his many misfortunes.

At that moment, Mereles came out of the room.

'What are you up to, dickhead?' he asked the Gaucho, who seemed to be in a dream. 'Come on. We've got to go down and make a phone call.'

They'd decided not to pay out and to stuff everyone else. That was why Malito had determined to change plans and get him to ring Twisty Bazán. It was six o'clock on the Thursday morning. He didn't let him tell Twisty where they were holed up, but he sent him along to meet Fontán Reyes in a bar on Carlos Pellegrini and Lavalle, so as to keep him occupied while they shifted themselves to the other safehouse. He gave the order to depart and regroup at Nando's house over in Barracas. That was where they intended to wait until the new network was in place to get them over to Uruguay.

Tall, skinny, with his vulture's eyes and a superior smile on his lips, Twisty Bazán was arrested three hours after the call. To cover himself, Silva said Bazán had been detained in the vicinity of the square where the robbery had taken place. He had a weapon on him. He said he was carrying the gun 'to kill the stray dogs that have overrun Hurlingham'. The truth is he was a police informer. Silva had had him hooked for over a year as a nark, in return for leaving him free to circulate the Bajo among the drugs and the whores.