Money to Burn

6

The garçonnière installed in flat number nine, on Julio Herrera and Obes Streets, is a small complex of near-empty rooms, painted a pale green. The door to the flat (the bell doesn't work so, to get in touch with its occasional inhabitants, it's necessary to do so via the intercom system down at street level) opens on to a narrow corridor where (the youth who wrote the police reports for El Mundo pointed out) the doors to other flats are also located. It's on the first floor of the apartment block, which has no lift, being only three storeys high. It is important to bear this detail in mind.

Once inside the flat, the first sight afforded to the viewer is that of a kind of living-cum-dining-room of some four metres by three, on whose left-hand side there runs a kitchen, in which there's finally a window giving on to an inner well intended to provide air and light. The kitchen contains a marble-topped counter with a sink in the middle and cupboards underneath. The visitor who enters this flat will meet with empty walls and scant living-room furniture. The door that ought to separate the living room from the kitchen is also missing.

Next in line, opening on to the living-room, there are three doors leading to the two bedrooms and to the bathroom.

The first of these rooms, overlooking the central well, is the alcove used by the dark-skinned girl from north of the River Negro and in it can still be seen a bed, a shelf and a small wardrobe, a wicker table with a glass top, and a chair. There was nothing else in there at all apart from a small lamp on the shelf and, also on the shelf, a photo of the country girl. The bare walls give the flat that atmosphere of precariousness which such places have.

The next room looks on to a second inner well (for light and air) and is also an alcove which was used by the subtenants of the flat, along with the numerous occasional visitors who came, by one way or another, to have the key to the apartment or to have access to borrowing it. There's a double bed in the middle of the room, a toilet to the left and a wardrobe to the right, facing the foot of the bed. To the right, in the middle of the room, another window opens on to the inner well (affording light and air). The basic difference between this bedroom and the other is that the one belonging to the dark-skinned girl from north of the River Negro has polished parquet flooring and its walls are whitewashed, in this room the reverse is the case. The room has no regular incumbents: nobody is bothered to keep it in even a minimum state of cleanliness.

Finally there is the bathroom, containing nothing but the usual fittings, just a General Electric boiler and a blue plastic curtain running around the bath. Above the bath there is a window that opens on to the inner well, affording light and air.

'Across the other side there's nothing at all, only the patio.'

Mereles had clambered on to the edge of the bath and was leaning out, looking downwards from the window. Grey walls, lit windows and beneath them the corrugated iron roof of a shed. The Kid and Dorda headed into the living-room.

'There's a TV here, look…'

'Didn't I tell you it was reasonably well furnished…'

'Che, what a stink there is in the toilet…'

'So,' the Kid continued explaining, 'we went, because you'll remember, Crazy, that before, we wanted to go to Mexico, and I had a friend who went and bought a passport, because he had so many stamps on his, he was called Suárez and was helped by his surname (because every other person is called that) and it was in Mexico they finally bumped him off…'

'Listen to me, Rubberlips, who in their right mind would think of going to Mexico… The altitude bursts your eardrums, and once in La Paz my snout poured blood simply from opening my bedroom window.'

'But what I'm telling you is that you have to get to New York. There's a highway that runs from the Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, didn't you know that? Look at the map and it's like a thread, running and running, all through the open countryside, the Germans built it, they brought in the diggers, made the natives do the work and you could get from one end to the other by bicycle.'

'I'm going to crash here, chuck over the bolster, would you? Let's eat something.'

They had bought chickens on a spit and whisky and corned beef, enough reserves to last them a week, in case they couldn't move around.

'Hi Che, and is Malito coming over soon?' Mereles was stuffing chicken down him and drinking whisky out of a plastic tooth-mug. 'Should we wait for him? Does the country girl know him or not?'

'I've sent a message to let him know we're here.'

'I saw on the TV that you can rob a cinema if you come in through the rear door, through that little room where the projectionist sits… You enter, cut off the exit, fire over the heads of the audience to get them down on the floor, and make off with the loot of all those punters who came in to see a film and then you get out through the window of the projection room. It's perfect, all in darkness, the film keeps on running and covers any noise you make…'

'What do you mean, you saw it on television?'

'It was a programme about security lapses in public places… Imagine the dosh you could make from a full cinema…'

They had to await Malito's arrival with a new car and papers, to leave with him at dawn and head out north, bury themselves in the countryside, hide out in a maizefield in Durazno, or Canelones.

'So as far as you're concerned, it should all be left in the hands of fate… If he comes, he comes, and if he doesn't come, then what? It seems a poor deal to me.'

'It's a rough deal, but there isn't another on offer. We have to stick together and wait.'

'If we hold out for a week here for things to die down outside, that'd be better. I like this place.'

'But Malito's due to turn up here by tonight?…'

'Listen, if you want to strike out alone, just try it, you're taking a big chance.'

'Don't be an idiot, what do you want…'

'Anyway, where do you know this guy from, that flatface who wants to take you off to Mexico?'

'I got to know him in Bolivia, he had a Harley-Davidson 500 with a sidecar and travelled full tilt across the country, shooting at hares with his.45, over arid desert, with his helmet and goggles, the peasants leaned on their spades and exchanged glances, the madman making his bike leap like a spring trying to re-enter a trap, but the bike, you know what they're like, like aeroplanes, those bikes, always up in the air, and the guy was a madman, seriously mad, right, I can tell you that he kept his daughter locked upstairs at his farm because she looked like her mother, the girl did, and the flat- face made her dress up in the dead woman's clothes, and walk along in front of him, and I dunno what lots of other things he made her do, and when he went to Mexico he wrote letters to his daughter, she was a stunning looking bitch, you know, that girl, amazing little breasts, and even after they killed the guy, the girl continued receiving love letters from her father, I'd no idea who was writing them, the kid was a real headcase after being mixed up in all that…'

Mereles emerged from the kitchen with some packs of cards and a jar of chickpeas. He had stashed the weapons and the loot in the little room next door and they were now ready to spend a quiet night, waiting for Malito to come and seek them out.

'I found some packs of cards, leťs play three-handed poker.'

'Let's go… every chickpea is worth ten grand, I'll deal… Let's see what we get…'

At that point they heard a buzzer, perhaps they even heard it before it sounded, an instant before they first heard the metallic buzz and then the voice calling up to them.

They'd been playing cards for a little while, on the wicker table covered with a white kitchen cloth, by the light of a fringed chandelier, in the middle of the room overlooking the street, when they heard the metallic buzzer, sounding like a rat squealing, a devil shrieking, a microphone making a metallic hum as it's first connected and then the voice warning them to give themselves up.

It was the police.

The voice that reached them was distorted, a falsetto, a typical pig's voice, twisted and arrogant, empty of every sentiment apart from those of an executioner. The type of voice used to bellowing, convinced that the other will obey or dissolve on the spot. This is the voice of authority, the one you hear over loudspeakers in the cells, in hospital corridors, in the dungeons where they transport prisoners in the middle of the night, across the empty city down into the police station basements to torture them with lashes and electricity.

Mereles and the Kid exchanged looks.

The pigs.'

Hearts thumping at a thousand beats, heads feeling as if illuminated by a white light and thoughts grabbing brains like leeches. All for an instant and then it was impossible to feel or think at all. What has to be most feared, the worst thing in life, always happens out of the blue, without anyone being ready for it, which makes it all the worse, because one is both waiting but has no time to get used to the idea and is caught out, paralysed, yet obliged to act and take decisions. The bottom line is that what one most secretly fears always occurs, and all along they had been convinced they had the cops on top of them, or at least breathing down their necks, and that the lair into which they had clambered was too tranquil, too perfect, that they ought to have stayed out on the streets, going round and round in the car until they'd invented a means of escaping the city and the police roadblocks, they'd thought of doing it but had felt too claustrophobic and nobody had said anything, and now it was too late, and they were all corralled in here together.

'We know who you are. You are completely surrounded.'

'Everyone in flat number nine, come out with your hands held high.'

The Kid switched out the lights and the Gaucho leapt across to the little room and began handing out the Thompson, the.9 Falcon, the sawn-off shotgun, spinning them across the floor towards the windows where the Kid and the Crow had holed themselves up.

An icy light came in from the street and illuminated the flat with a ghostly sheen. The white spotlights on the reflectors entered between the slats on the Venetian blinds and filled the air with stripes, luminous rays floating in the dust like a cloud. The three remained, semi-concealed, tattooed by the rays of light, and leaned out of the window, attempting to figure out where things stood.

'It was that little whore…'

'And Malito?…'

'How many are there? Why aren't they coming up?'

They moved in the twilight and tried to locate the police. Their first sensation was that they were being forced to move blind, encircled by the utmost danger, like someone driving in the countryside at night, sensing he's about to crash, and feeling the air with his hands, as though to divine whether there's an electric current out there, in the midst of all that darkness. The only light indoors was the glow of the television left on without sound. Dorda was in a corner and opened his bag of drugs. He held his machine-gun in one hand while with the other he was chopping up the coke on his watch-face. It was 10.40 p.m.

'We have you surrounded. This is the chief of police speaking. Hand yourselves over now.'

In the darkness the Kid is crouching and cautiously leaning out of the window. In the street shadows can be seen, two patrol cars can be seen, two searchlights illuminating the building's façade can be seen.

'What's up?' asks Dorda.

'We're fucked.'

Dorda puts the machine-gun down on the floor, sits down with his back propped against the wall, opens a small rectangular box of silvery metal, and then in a complicated and rapid manoeuvre shoots himself a dose of cocaine into a vein in his right arm. He does so because he can hear voices in the distance, now, soft voices, women's voices, and he doesn't want to hear them, he wants the whiteness to cure them, the white that rises in his veins wiping the noise of the voices, in the plates of his brain, between his bones, the passages have their own capillaries along which the delicate women's voices are echoing. Dorda hears all of this, all of the time, he tells the Kid as much, he's trying to speak in a low voice, while the cops deliberate and they deliberate too, at floor level, like rats, stuck in their crevices, in their cracks, squealing, their teeth sharpened, that's where the voices he's hearing come from. Kid. He was raving about rats, about insects infesting the nostrils of dead bodies.

'I saw photos.'

'You saw photos,' sighed the Kid. 'Quiet down, Gaucho, we're going to make them shit themselves, don't listen to what they're saying, keep watch here.'

'Malito, we know you're in apartment number nine. Surrender and come downstairs, we have a magistrate with us.'

Squatting down, the Crow curses under his breath: 'That mad shithead.'

'They think he's up here with us.'

'So much the better,' Dorda's laughing now. 'That way they think there are more of us.' Sitting on the floor, he pokes the gun out of the window. 'Shall a fire off a shot? Just one little shot?'

'Calm down, Gaucho,' the Kid tells him.

Dorda once more chops the drug on his watch-face, using his Spanish penknife with its two blades, lifting the coke on the sharpest edge, raising it with a firm wrist, without trembling, to his nose which flares and inhales, not injecting this time, it's more direct, reaches through the interstices of his skull, the whiteness, the pure air. And this is the only sound in the middle of the night. The Blond Gaucho's avid breathing as he snorts the cocaine.

The police offer a guarantee of safe-conduct to the criminals in the presence of the aforesaid Investigating Magistrate of the Second District Dr José Pedro Púrpura, but the guys don't answer him. The apartment remains in darkness, in silence, the police illuminate the walls, windows, with the patrol car's searchlight as though they were making signals from a lighthouse to a ship, but nobody responds.

Colonel Ventura Rodriguez, the Uruguayan chief of military police, once the house was 'completely encircled' (according to sources) approached the door and used the intercom system — or 'electronic caretaker' — to tell the occupants in flat number nine they were surrounded and should surrender, offering assurances that their lives would be respected. Mereles was now in the kitchen, intercom phone in hand, and the Kid standing at his side. They had opened the door to the freezer and the cold clarity of its spectral glow allowed them to look at one another while they pressed their faces to the receiver to listen.

'Why don't you come up and get us?' shouted the Kid.

'My friend, this is the chief of police speaking, I am the one who is guaranteeing that your lives will be respected.'

'Why don't you come up and play a round of poker with us, Chief?'

'Here is the magistrate who will safeguard your defence, and assures you that you will not be taken to Buenos Aires.'

'But that's what we want, sunshine, to go and fight in Buenos Aires, where that bastard of a Police Commissioner Silva is…'

'I can't do any more for you lot. I can only guarantee your lives and a fair trial…'

Fresh and worse insults were the only response. At one moment or other they answered that while the police were getting hungry, they were eating roast chicken and slugging whisky, in addition to which they still had three million pesos to divvy out.

'And you, how much do you earn? You'll be killing each other over small change…'

Comments made by the criminals demonstrate that they were evidently under the influence of alcohol and drugs. A stream of curses and foul language signalled to the chief of police the impossibility of 'dialogue and negotiation' with those cornered and that the incident was threatening to turn violent. As if in further demonstration of this was the relay of their voices on the building's intercom demanding to know if there were Argentine cops among those surrounding the house, challenging these compatriots to be the first to come and arrest them.

'Bring on the Argentine cops…'

'We want the Argie pigs…'

It is known that this type of criminal (indicated the police doctor in charge of the first aid post installed at the siege), particularly in the cases of the three who concern us here, is likely to be a drug addict, needing to maintain his habit in order to survive the kinds of conditions in which these three now found themselves. In corroboration of this fact, in a police search carried out later, they found 144 wraps of a drug known as Dexamil Spanzule and various 'raviolis' of cocaine that in their haste to get out the criminals had abandoned there. But persistent consumption can, as we know, induce hallucinations over a sustained period, something it was impossible to verify at this stage of the proceedings.

Further proof that the criminals found themselves in abnormal psychical conditions due to drug abuse was found in the fact that, on encountering themselves in such a difficult situation, today (yesterday) during last night, when the chief of police tried to intimidate them into giving themselves up, they replied: 'No, we're all doing just fine where we are, thanks, eating chicken and drinking whisky, while you lot are standing around outside getting hungry!'

'Why not come upstairs? We're inviting you…!'

The Crow signalled to the Kid and they moved back, still crouching down, to one side. They looked at one another, close to, leaning against the wall.

'Do we go out?'

'No. Let them come and get us, if they've got the balls. Malito will soon be here to get us out… Something'll happen, he must have run into them a short time ago, when he got near, since the block is bound to be surrounded and he couldn't get through. We have to hold out… and make a try for it when they weaken a bit… Let's try and make it out on to the flat roof.'

'Where are the cops positioned?' asked the Kid. 'Can you manage to see them?'

'They're all over the place.' Dorda was amusing himself. 'There are about a thousand… and they've got lorries, ambulances, patrol cars… Let them come up, let them just try… It'll be like potting starlings.'

'Lorries, whatever do they want lorries for…'

'To take away the corpses…' said the Crow and at that instant the firing began.

First there came the dry juddering of a 9-millimetre and then the noise of a machine-gun.

Dorda, squatting by the window, looked out on to the street and smiled.

He was looking out of the window in the unused room, which opens on to the inner well for light and air, and also looks into the corresponding window of the block opposite, through which the police had opened fire on to the besieged criminals. The round was responded to in kind by the Argentines and was prolonged by intermittent firing, much to the amazement of the entire population of Montevideo who began to follow the events on radio and television.

At a given moment there came a loud shout from one of the criminals.

'One to the door and the others to the upper windows.'

That was the strategy they employed throughout the night.

The apartment's location turned it into a mortal trap. There was no way out. But in its defence, it has to be said that it was the perfect hideout. The sole means of accessing the door was along the corridor and the door itself was protected by a bend in the staircase. Any attempted advance by that route was sheer suicide. The police continually fired down the corridor (there are hundreds of bullet holes in the walls and the plastering has fallen off exposing the brickwork) and the gunmen fired against the wall, mounting a submachine-gun at every one of the breaches opened up by the tracer bullets, in the hope that the projectiles would ricochet off the walls and rebound into the street.

'Once, in Avellaneda, the pigs holed us up in a shed, me and my youngest brother by Letrina Ortiz, and we found a basement leading into the sewers… A narrow opening no wider than this,' Mereles demonstrated the size, 'and we got out through there.'

They became energetic, trying to move around without being seen from any of the points controlled by the police. They had put the television on the floor so that it wouldn't get shot up and, from time to time, whenever there was a pause, they watched what was happening in the street. They also followed the account of what was going on on Radio Carve, the heightened register of the voices of their presenters, taking turns to recount the intense moments being lived in the city of Montevideo ever since the Argies occupied the el Liberaij apartment block. People had gathered together in the district, were making absurd statements into microphones and in front of cameras, as if they all understood exactly what was happening and were its actual and immediate witnesses. Thanks to the television screen, the Kid and the Gaucho realized that outside it had begun to drizzle, it was as if they were lost in space, holed up in a kind of capsule, a submarine (Dorda said) that had run out of fuel and was resting on the rocks at the bottom of the sea. The shots were like depth charges that shook them without succeeding in dislodging them.

The police confined themselves to firing at the door, preventing the faintest possibility of escape. They kept up a repeated, terrifying, angled fire at the kitchen skylight which gave on to the inner well. A continuous stream of iron poured through that skylight, barely illuminated in the shadows, whenever one of the criminals attempted to gain access to the kitchen.

'They're never going to get in this way. There are over six clear metres from here to the staircase.'

'So long as we hold out, they can't approach from the front.'

'It was the whore,' said Dorda.

'Don't think so.'

'It's the ill luck we bring with us.'

'You stick by the window.'

'How much dope is there?'

'Malito, surrender, you're surrounded.'

'The buggers think that Stripey is in here with us…'

At this moment, through the window, there came a huge explosion, shattering the panes. With it came two teargas bombs.

'Get water… from the bathroom.'

They covered their faces with damp handkerchiefs and used wet towels to pick up the two smouldering bombs and toss them back out through the window towards the staircase and down into the hall below. The police and journalists (and the excessively curious) retreated on receiving an unexpected shower of teargas. The police decided to delay before resuming the gas attacks, and to switch tactics. They were going to attempt to gain control of the flat roof on the neighbouring house and, from there, to control the bathroom window.

The police connect up another spotlight which begins sweeping a white light across the room. Mereles fires through the door while Dorda covers the window. The Kid opens the door and leans out on to the corridor.

'D'you see anything?'

He goes to the window which looks out on to the terrace.

'They're going to try and cut us off from the flat roof.' He retreats rapidly, and returns to them. 'From there they can control all the rooftops.'

'They're trying to come in from above.'

'Impossible: if they do that to us, they'll be showering us in shit.'

The three remain calm, seated on the floor with their backs to the wall, covering every angle into the flat; they're simultaneously tranquil and high as kites, full of amphetamines, loaded with every kind of drug. The police are always more fearful than the gangsters, they have to do it all for a salary (according to Dorda), a meagre salary at that, for their retirement years, with the little woman at home whining because her workhorse earns so poorly, has to do night shifts, outside in the rain, who the hell would think of becoming a cop, only a saddo, a guy who has no better idea of what to do with his life, a 'pusillanimous' type (he had acquired the adjective during his time in jail, and he enjoyed it because it sounded like someone without a soul, spirit, anima). 'They become cops because they want a secure existence and that's how they lose their lives, since, to get them out of here, they were going to approach them calmly, because there was no way they were going to gamble their lives, except that a few of the cops (Police Commissioner Silva, for example) knew that the loot was all stashed inside, and imagined they could get in there ahead of the rest, stick the dosh in their pockets, then say that nothing had been found. There was nothing there at all.'

But it was a tricky situation, and the game was up. The Kid decided to tell them they still had half the green stuff left, to be offered as a sweetener to anyone who helped them get away. He had said as much to the chief of police over the intercom, and the message had been broadcast on television, as proof (according to the journalists) that the criminals were willing to gamble the lives of everyone involved in this delicate recovery operation. 'Recovering what or whom?' the Kid had wondered to himself, according to Dorda. 'See how they'll come out with any old rubbish.'

'They're not going to be able to force us out, they'll have to negotiate.'

'To get us out, they'll have to come up the staircase and cross the corridor. It'll be like potting starlings.'

The Kid went into the kitchen and leaned on the buzzer to the intercom, lifted the receiver and began shouting until he heard someone downstairs actually listening to him.

'If that stinking sonofabitch Silva is down there, send him up to negotiate, he can't cry off this time. We have a proposal to make, 'cause if we don't, a lot of people are down to die tonight… You've got to get involved, Uruguayan arseholes, at some point in this story… We're Peronist activists, exiles, fighting for the General's return. We've a lot of information, Silva, would you like me to start telling them what I know?'

There was a pause, you could hear the cables crackling and the soft hum of the rain, below, but the police down there listening offered no reply.

Silva then approached the intercom and leaned on the buzzer. He wasn't going to speak to those pieces of shit, he was going to spring them from their lair and only then were they going to have to squeal.

'Get us a cab, leave us free to go to Chuy, on the border, and we'll hand over the loot and won't speak to anyone. What d'you think, boss?' said the Kid.

There was a silence, you could hear the Gaucho whistling as if he were summoning a dog, and eventually a Uruguayan police officer approached the intercom and looked steadily at Silva, who gave him a gesture of consent.

'The Uruguayan police do not negotiate with criminals, sir. Surrender and you'll save your lives. If not, we'll be obliged to take even more drastic action.'

'Go fuck yourself.'

'Your rights are protected by the magistrate.'

'What liars you are, you arseholes, as soon as you've got us, you'll stick us into the pan and fry our guts.'

The crowd of journalists registered the conversation on their microphones pressed to the wall surrounding the intercom.

Another crowd of the curious had begun to circulate in the area when they heard the first shots and the TV cameras of the Montecarlo de Montevideo channel had begun a live broadcast, covering events as they unfolded. It even reached the gunmen (as the press had pointed out it would) watching television in their room, watching the events of which they were themselves the protagonists. And in all the neighbouring houses it became commonplace for individuals to shield themselves with cushions to protect themselves from stray bullets, or to hide under their beds, still watching what was happening in their very own neighbourhood. For their part, radios were relaying the siege via live transmissions from flats they had previously rented, and journalists were circulating the immediate environment of the buildings with their microphones permanently on. For hours the entire population of Montevideo was tuned in to the momentous events that were shaking the country.

At 11.50 p.m., three men offered themselves as volunteers, in order to enter and break down the apartment door. After a brief deliberation, the police command accepted their offer and ordered them to take action. Cautiously, Inspector Walter Lopez Pachiarotti, along with Commissioners Washington Santana Cabris de León, in charge of the Department of Investigations, and Domingo Ganduglia, in charge of Division 20a, crouched low and ran across the entrance to the building and advanced along the corridor. The three men went into the central hall in the apartment block, at the far end of which a staircase doubles to the right, and ends up at the doors to flat number nine. Officer Galindez volunteered himself as an additional fourth man to cover the rearguard action. All four then filed up the staircase, forming a rhomboid in the classic formation of a frontal attack.

Ganduglia went in front with a cocked Uzi submachine-gun, bringing along Santana Cabris on his left and Lopez Pachiarotti on his right, in a protective fan closed by Galindez at its base, between the two of them. The lights had been turned out and the staircase was a dusky tunnel rising towards the light in the besieged apartment. A sepulchral silence flooded the place, men advanced tense and pitched forward. Suddenly the fourth man at the back tripped on a step and, in falling, grabbed hold of Ganduglia, who fell in turn. That was what saved his life since, through a window to the right of those climbing up the staircase, Dorda had positioned his weapon and now fired off a volley of machine-gunfire, aiming from the floor upwards, hitting Cabris in the thorax and the head and wounding the rest.

'They gave it me, the sonsofabitch… my sainted mother,' one could hear the unfortunate man wail while Dorda laughed out loud from the window.

'Pig,' he yelled, 'executioner, I got you. Come on, come on up, shitless Uruguayans…'

Facing upwards, with three gigantic wounds in his body and his eyes wide open, in agony, breathing with hoarse groans, in the midst of a horrific haemorrhage, the thirty- two-year-old officer was the father of two children about to be made orphans by his death. Beside him, another wounded man was dragging himself towards the exit, while a third stared at the blood gushing from his chest and could not believe that his ill fortune had brought him to realize his own worst fears. Meanwhile Officer Ganduglia felt no pain at all, only cold, as if his own hand on his belly were made of ice. He had an abdominal wound and didn't even want to look at it.

Beneath the headlamps on the lorries and the outside lamps, in the zone illuminated by the spotlights, lit to prevent the gunmen from slipping away through the windows, the remains of the two dead young men and the third man with the stomach wound were laid out on the pavement. They looked less like two young men who had departed this life (according to the reporter on El Mundo) than like something thrown out by a cement mixer, nothing more was left of them than lumps of bone, pieces of intestines, and hanging flesh belonging to those who, it was now impossible to believe, had so recently been endowed with life. For those who die from bullet wounds don't die cleanly as in war films, where the wounded give an elegant sort of pirouette and fall, whole, like wax dolls; no, those who die in a shoot-out are decimated by the firepower and bits of their bodies get strewn across the floor, like animal parts in a slaughterhouse.

The cameras panned across the wounded because for the first time ever in history it was possible to transmit it all live, without censorship, including even the dead men's faces as seen in the battle of law against crime. Should a man prolong dying, his death is dirtier than you could ever imagine: chunks of torn flesh and bone and blood staining the pavement along with the terrifying groans of the dying.

The one who died here (noted Renzi, in his little exercise book) died at once, before his body could register the least surprise or comprehension, only its preceding fear, the fear previous to climbing the staircase towards the flat where the gunmen were holed up.

'They're like rabid dogs. I remember,' said a policeman, 'that when I was a little kid my parents locked our black hound, Wolf, into their bedroom. He was a rabid dog who leapt up the walls in his fury and he had to be killed through the little skylight, slashed with a knife, from above, while he leapt in his madness, that dog.'

'The wounded should be moved now,' said Commissioner Silva, who was observing the scene from the sidelines. 'A wound in living flesh is the worst there is, because the guy endlessly wails and complains, lowering the spirits of the troop.' Then he raised his voice to yell: 'Don't be such a pansy, for fuck's sake.'

But the lad who'd had his leg blown apart carried on howling and calling for his mother. The commissioner was surprised, in contrast, by the measured tones of the young officer with the shot-away stomach who moaned only feebly, with a groan of pain, and raved: 'We entered the corridor and they leapt on us firing. They were nude, drugged, they just materialized like ghosts, about five or six of them. It's going to be tough smoking them out of their lair.'

For his part, the lad with the leg wound was stupefied, as if it were him who was stretched out on the floor of the corridor, wounded; that night he'd agreed to do guard duty in place of a friend who wanted to make a move on the wife of a footballer from Peñarol, away on tour with his team. It was the only night his friend could get near the bitch, and he, like a complete patsy, had agreed to substitute for him and do the guard duty and was now stretched out on the floor shot through with a bullet that had destroyed his leg. Everything was like a bad dream, for over the last two years things had got back on track for him, he had married the woman he had always pursued and had done so despite having to convince her it was worth marrying him even though he was a cop, he had spoken and spoken to her until he convinced her, because she was sickened by the sight of cops, but in the end she resigned herself, seeing that he was much like any other young lad, and, after getting married, they'd bought a little house in Pocitos, with credit from the Police Forces Cooperative Society, but now everything was thrown off track again because the wound was bound to get infested with gangrene and he could see himself with his leg cut off, dragging along on crutches, the turn-up on the right leg of his trousers rolled back to knee-level and held together by a large safety- pin, and then a cold sweat made his teeth chatter and he screwed his eyes up tighter.

Indoors, Mereles is sitting on the floor, his back glued to the wall, with a damp handkerchief tied around his nose and mouth to dissipate the effects of the gases which hover in the stuffy air, although more faintly now, and the Kid is across the room, against the bathroom wall, also seated on the floor, and has set the machine-gun to one side, because weapons get hot with sustained use and can sometimes burn the palms of your hands. That and the sensation of a stomach clenched tight as a fist is the only thing he can feel any more, says the Kid. That and the sense of surprise in remembering the dark girl from the River Negro, the sweet bearer of death. Could it have been her who bore the ill luck that had brought them to this?

'Do you think they could have followed me …'

'Don't get worked up about that now. In any case, we didn't have anywhere else to go… This country's full of shit, Uruguay has to be smaller than a flagstone, where the hell can you hide in a place this size? I told Malito as much, we should have stayed in Buenos Aires, we had a thousand hideouts there. But here… We're cooked.'

'Malito has probably already crossed the pond… He has his own streak of luck, a seam of cold blood, on one occasion he went into a police station just when every cop out there was looking for him just because he wanted to lodge a complaint about a neighbour turning up his radio too loud.' Mereles guffawed. 'See how crazy he is, I don't care what you say, he could get through, get in here and pull us out.'

'Or else die along with us.'

'So… why not?'

'If he can get in, it has to be because he knows how to get out…'

'Oh yeah, in the blink of an eye,' says Dorda, and takes a slug of whisky from the bottle.

They laugh. They don't think any further ahead than the next ten seconds. That's the first thing to learn. It's better not to think about what's going to happen. In order to be able to carry on and not get paralysed with fright, you have to advance step by step, check out how whatever's going on right now pans out, take one thing at a time. Now it's a matter of getting as far as the kitchen and collecting some water. They're not going to let you cross the corridor. Now drag yourself over to one of the windows. They moved around the flat as if it had invisible walls. The police had placed special services marksmen to cover every position and they had had to figure out how to protect themselves, swiftly learning that there were many sites inside the flat at risk from bullets. So they made a sketch, the Crow and Kid Brignone, inside the flat, with a pencil, and traced the lines of fire and saw that it was impossible to cross here and that they had to walk sideways there, as if they were somnambulists, moving as if only in profile, supported by thin air, following invisible corridors, to avoid becoming targets.

'See?' asked Mereles. 'Here's an exit and here's the staircase.'

'Give me cover.'

Dorda stops in the door and begins firing downwards, while the Kid and the Crow slip away towards the passage and search for the fire exit down on to the flat roof.

'Look above you. The roofs are crawling with cops.'