Money to Burn

1

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.

Perhaps they'd thought of taking refuge in the hotel following the robbery, in case they didn't manage to get away.

What was most likely was that they had two guys covering the Bank from the hotel and three more who arrived in a Chevrolet 400 'well fitted out' according to every version. Fast as a bullet, that car. Perhaps one of the criminals was a mechanic responsible for fine-tuning the engine at over 5,000 revs, converting it into a sedan as smooth as silk.

San Fernando is a residential suburb of Buenos Aires, its peaceful leafy streets lined with grand private mansions from the early years of the twentieth century, now either transformed into schools or abandoned on the heights above the river.

The square was tranquil in the white light of spring.

While Malito and Twisty Bazán spent the afternoon and evening in the San Fernando hotel, the rest of the gang shut themselves into the flat on Arenales Street. They had heisted a car out in the province and stored it in the basement garage, then unloaded the gear and the weapons up through the service stairway and stayed inside, with the blinds pulled down, to await their orders.

There could be nothing worse than the evening before, with everything lined up ready to go out on the streets and start shooting, each of them believing himself clairvoyant, capable of seeing visions, any old thing appearing as a sign of ill omen, or an informer looking for unusual signs of movement and passing info on to the police who then go and set an ambush to greet your arrival, because if your luck's down, or so Dorda says, you have to call the whole thing off, return to point zero, and leave well alone for another month before trying again.

The handover was on the twenty-eighth of every month, at three in the afternoon: the loot was moved from the Provincial Bank to the Town Council offices. A wagonload of cash, close on 600,000 dollars, trundling around the block, following the lines of the square from left to right, a total of seven minutes from when the money appeared in the doorway of the Bank to getting it loaded on to the station wagon and from there inside the Town Council, by the back door.

'I'll tell you one thing, little bro,' Dorda smiled at the Kid Brignone, 'you've never been mixed up in anything half as "scientific" as this, we've got the lot under control.'

The Kid stared at him uncertainly, drinking beer from the neck of the bottle, stretched out on the sofa, shoeless and in his shirtsleeves, facing the shimmering and soundless television set in the living-room that looked out over Arenales Street. The flat was new, clean, and silent, all its papers in order. The gang's driver, 'Crow' Mereles, had rented it for his 'girlfriend', as he called her, and everyone in the district had been given to assume that Mereles was a landowner from Buenos Aires province who supported the Girl and her family. Right now the girlfriend's family had gone on holiday to Mar del Plata and the flat had been converted into what Malito called his operational base.

That night they had to go carefully, without letting themselves be spotted, without talking to anyone, lying low. Downstairs there was a telephone, in the building's lower basement, and from there it was possible to call through to the room in the San Fernando hotel every two or three hours. As Malito told them: 'Always use the phone in the garage, never ring out from the house phone.'

He had a number of obsessions, this Malito: the phone was one of them. According to him, every phone in the city was tapped. But he also had other manias, Mad Mala did, according to Dorda the Loopy. He couldn't stand sunlight, couldn't stand seeing lots of people together, and was continually wiping down his hands with pure alcohol. He liked the dry refreshing sensation of the alcohol on his skin. His father had been a doctor and he would say that doctors always wash their hands in alcohol, right up to the elbows, after finishing their consultations, so he inherited the habit from him.

'Every germ,' Malito loved to explain, 'gets transmitted through the hands, via the fingernails. If people refrained from shaking hands, at least ten per cent of the population wouldn't die, those who now die from all the hand bugs.'

Those who die through violence (according to him) are less than half the number of those dead of infectious diseases and nobody takes the doctors into custody (Malito laughed out loud at his joke). Sometimes he liked to imagine the women and children he passed in the street wearing surgeons' rubber gloves and hygienic masks, every citizen of the capital in a mask, to avert contact and avoid contagion.

Malito was from Rosario and had taken his degree course in Engineering up to the fourth year. At times he got them to call him the Engineer, although in secret they all called him Stripey. That was because a further reason for his madness was the marks all over his body, still showing as thick weals, a legacy of being whipped at a police station in Turdera with metal springs stripped from a bed by the brute of a provincial policeman. Malito later went after him, and seized him late one night when the guy was just getting out of a bus, and drowned him in a puddle. He forced him to his knees, plunged his face in the mud, and it's said he pulled down his trousers and raped him while the cop struggled to try to free himself with his head under water. Or so it's said, one never knows. Nice type, that Malito, pushy, a bit on the sly side. Not many like him in these parts. He always managed to get others to do what he wanted, as if it were all their own idea.

On the other hand, nobody had ever encountered a more fortunate fellow than Malito. He possessed a god of his own to watch over him. And a halo of perfection which led to everyone wanting to work with him. That was why in the space of two days he had organized the assault on the wages van of the San Fernando municipality No minor matter, or no small beer (according to Twisty Bazán), with at least a half- million in play.

So there was the phone in a wooden box, downstairs in the garage to the flat on Arenales Street, from which they talked to Malito the previous night.

Malito envisaged the robbery as a military operation and had issued them all with strict instructions, so the plotters now wanted to go over the entire plan one last time.

Crow Mereles, a thin guy with bulging eyes, had a sheet of paper showing a plan of the square and was finishing off drawing in the final details.

'We have four minutes. The van is coming from the Bank and has to go this way around the square. Am I right or am I right?'

The guy handing it over was a tango singer who called himself Fontán Reyes; he'd been the last to arrive at the flat on Arenales Street, looked pale and nervous, and sat himself down in a corner. Following the Crow's question, everyone remained silent and stared in his direction. Eventually Reyes got up and went over to the table.

'The van arrives with its windows open,' he said.

Everything had to be done in broad daylight, at ten past three in the afternoon, and in the town centre of San Fernando. The wages money was taken out of the Bank and transported to the Town Hall, only 200 metres away. Given the one-way system, the wages van had to follow the direction of the traffic all the way around the square.

'It takes on average between seven and ten minutes, depending on the traffic.'

'And how many guards accompany it?'

'Two policemen, here and here. With the guy in the van, that makes three.'

Reyes is nervous. Scared to death, if the truth were told (as he was later to admit). Fontán Reyes is his nom d'artiste. His real name is Atir Omar Nocito and he's thirty-nine years old, and he used to sing with Juan Sánchez Gorio's orchestra and he'd acted on radio and television, and he'd even managed to record a double-sided tango record with 'Esta noche de copas' and 'Noche de locura', accompanied on the piano by Osvaldo Manzi. His moment of glory came with the Carnival in 1960, when he made his debut with Héctor Varela as Argentino Ledesma's heir apparent. Then he began to have drug problems. In June he went to Chile to duet with Raul Lavié, but within a month he'd lost his voice and couldn't speak. Too much cocaine, everyone assumed. What's for sure is that he was obliged to return home and thus began his run of lousy luck, so he ended up singing in a bar in Almagro, to guitar accompaniment. Recently he'd managed a few slots at festivals, dances at local clubs, sporadically touring the low-life dives in outer Buenos Aires.

Luck is a strange commodity and chooses to turn up when least expected. One night, in a rundown tavern, some guys were out looking for Reyes to offer him a gig and, as if in a dream, he learnt of a major cash delivery, and realized he was in a position to go for the big time, and he gambled everything on one throw of the dice. He called Malito. Fontán Reyes wanted to get in and then out sharpish, but that afternoon in the flat on Arenales Street he found himself getting thoroughly boxed in, he didn't know which way to turn, he was pathetically afraid, this down-at-heel tango singer, afraid of everything (especially, he said, of Gaucho Dorda, a head- case, a mental subnormal), of being killed before they gave him his share, of being handed over, of being used as a dupe by the police. He was desperate, down and out, wanting to cut loose. His dream was to give it his best shot, to get paid and take off, start all over again in another place (changing his name, changing his country), imagining that with the money he could open an Argentinian restaurant in New York, entertaining a latino clientele. On one occasion he'd stopped off in Manhattan with Juan Sánchez Gorio and spent a wild night at Charlie's on West 53rd Street, a restaurant managed by a Cuban crazy about tango. He needed the dough to invest, because the Cuban had promised to help him if he arrived in New York with 'start-up capital', but everything got more dangerous by the day since he'd thrown in his lot with these guys who seemed to be forever hallucinating, as though they were perpetually high. They laughed at anything and everything and never went to sleep. Hard-boiled characters, assassins who enjoyed killing for its own sake, not exactly the kind of people one could trust.

His uncle, Nino Noci to, was an avid Peronist supporter, elected to represent the wealthy Zona Norte, a leading figure in the Popular Unity party and interim president of the San Fernando Town Council. A few days earlier, the uncle had advised him of a meeting of the finance committee and he'd got the whole picture. The same evening Nocito went to hear his nephew sing in a low-life dive on Serrano and Honduras and, well away on his second bottle of wine, he began to sing himself.

'Fontán… there's at least five million in it.'

They needed to employ a gang of thieves of the utmost trustworthiness, a group of professionals to put in charge of the operation. Reyes had to guarantee that his uncle would be taken care of.

'Nobody can possibly know that I am mixed up in this. Nobody,' Nocito said. Nor did he, in his turn, wish to know who was going to be in on the job. He only wanted a half of a half, meaning a clean 75,000 dollars (according to his calculations).

Fontán Reyes was told to wait for them in a house on Martinez Street where they were going to go to ground immediately after the robbery. They reckoned that within a half-hour everything could be sorted.

'If we don't arrive within the half-hour,' announced Crow Mereles, 'that means we're moving on to second post.'

Fontán Reyes had no idea where the next post was, nor was he at all sure what 'second post' meant. Malito had got to know the system through Nando Heguilein, a former member of the National Liberation Alliance, with whom he had become friends when they were both prisoners in the Sierra Chica a while ago. A cellular structure prevents everything collapsing like a chain of dominoes and gives you time to get out (according to Nando). You always have to cover your retreat.

'And so?' inquired Fontán Reyes. 'What if they don't arrive?'

'And so,' answered the Blond Gaucho, 'you'd need to hide your pretty face.'

'And so that'd tell us there must be some sort of problem,' went on Mereles.

Fontán Reyes observed the loaded weapons on the table and for the first time realized that he'd played for stakes of all- or-nothing. Until then he'd worked as their cover on a few dirty deals for his friends. He'd concealed them, following a robbery, in his house at Olivos, he'd brought the dope into Montevideo and had sold on a few 'raviolis' — 'wraps' — in seedy downtown bars. Easy work, but this time was different. Arms were involved, and probably corpses, and he was a direct accomplice. Naturally, he was risking himself for a decent sum.

'At the very least,' his uncle had told him, 'it works out at a million pesos a head.'

With 100,000 dollars he could open his bar in New York. A place where he could live out his retirement in peace.

'Do you have somewhere to go tonight?' inquired Mereles, and Fontán Reyes jumped with surprise.

He was going to wait for them in a place no one else knew about, then call them up by phone.

'The operation is due to last six minutes,' insisted the Kid. 'Any longer and it gets too dangerous because there are two police points and a short-wave radio covering the whole twenty blocks.'

'The key to it all,' said Fontán Reyes, 'is that there are no deep throats.'

'Spoken like one who knows,' said Dorda.

At this moment the door opened and a young blonde woman, almost a girl, dressed in a miniskirt and a flowery blouse, came into the room. She was barefoot and embraced Mereles.

'Do you have some for me, little Daddy?' she asked.

Mereles pushed some cocaine on a mirror over towards her and the Girl moved to his side and began chopping at it with a razor. Then she warmed it with a lighter while she hummed Paul McCartney's 'Yesterday'. She took out a 50- peso note, rolled it up into a cone, inserted it into one nostril and inhaled with a gentle snort. Dorda looked on in amazement and noticed how the Girl wasn't wearing a bra, you could see her breasts through her light blouse.

'Delay, medium term, ten minutes, according to the traffic.'

'There'll be two guards and a cop,' recited Brignone.

'We have to kill the lot of them,' said Dorda suddenly. 'If you leave witnesses, they'll lock you up 'cause they're all out to do the rounds and spit on you.'

The young girl's life had suddenly changed and she went along with them in the conviction that it wasn't going to offer her another chance like this. Her name was Bianca Galeano. In January she had travelled all by herself to Mar del Plata to visit a friend and celebrate, because she'd just got through her exams in the third year of secondary school a month earlier. On the Rambla one afternoon she'd got to know Mereles, a thin guy who was staying at the Provincial Hotel. Mereles introduced himself as the son of a landowner from Buenos Aires province, and Blanquita believed him. She had just reached her fifteenth birthday and by the time she'd learnt who Crow Mereles was and what he did, she was past caring. (On the contrary, she fancied him like crazy, fired by the idea of a gangster who loaded her with presents, and who pleased and excited her more and more.)

She began living with him and the guys from the gang followed her with their eyes like starving dogs. Once on some wasteland, she had seen a cage of dogs dying of hunger, all chained up, who entwined and plaited themselves around one another, then threw themselves hungrily on whatever appeared, and these guys gave her exactly the same impression. If Mereles let them loose, they would all leap on her. Sooner or later, she knew, it was bound to happen. She imagined them staring at her if she walked by undressed, in her high heels, then saw herself in bed with the Kid, as Mereles had sometimes provoked her to. 'Do you want me to bring him here?' the degenerate would ask her and she'd begin to feel the heat. She liked that twin, pale as he was, he seemed to be about the same age as herself. But he was a faggot (according to the Crow). 'Or maybe you like the big guy?' Mereles would ask her, 'look what rough trade he is,' and Bianca would laugh and throw herself at him. 'Gimme,' she'd say, 'little Daddy.' Naked, in her high heels, the Girl strutted about, until he shoved her up against the mirror, and she leaned over the bench for him to have his way with her.

She didn't want to know what the guys were planning and returned to her room. They were plotting something heavy (because something was always being plotted when they gathered to speak in low voices and spent days without leaving the house). She needed to study because she still had to deliver two subjects to obtain enough credits to finish secondary school. She was going to spend a few months with Mereles — rather like taking a holiday — and then everything was to go back to how it was before. 'You have to make the most of being young while you can,' her mother told her when she began bringing home the money. Her father, Don Antonio Galeano, was away with the fairies, he knew nothing about anything, went to work in the Sanitation Department, in a building that resembled a palace, on Rio Bamba and Cordoba. Then her mum was bound to come along and ruin everything, forever complaining about her father, who never earned above the minimum salary, and when she got wind of her Girl's altered circumstances she began stopping in alone with her, to get her to spill the beans. And in the end, daughters always do what their mothers want. When at last the mother came to meet Mereles, she took one look at the pervert Crow's eyes glued to her breasts and began to laugh out loud. The Girl stared at her and learnt that it was possible to be jealous of one's own mother. 'You look like sisters,' said Mereles, 'please permit me to give you a kiss.'

'Sure, honey,' said the mother, 'you have to look after Blanquita for me, 'cause beware if her father finds out…'

'Finds out what?'

That he was married. Married and separated and always going with cheap country girls he'd picked up in cabarets down on the harbour.

The Girl threw herself on the bed with her maths book and began thinking of other things. Mereles had promised to take her to Brazil to see the Carnival. Voices were lowered on the other side of the door, and she couldn't hear anything until a while later some giggles wafted through to her.

Dorda tended to seem a little far gone and was attached to the notion of failure, viewing everything pessimistically yet always cracking disastrous jokes, so that ultimately everyone decided they had a good time with him.

'They're going to shut off the route out of the square and we're going to be trapped and then they'll kill us like curs.'

'Don't be an idiot, Gaucho,' said the Crow, 'Daddy will do the driving and will get you out by mounting the car on to the pavement, so avoiding all the cops.'

Dorda began laughing, the spectacle of the car setting off against the traffic, riding on the pavement, headed towards the square in the midst of bullets and corpses, amused him no end.