Money to Burn

2

The day of the robbery dawned fine and clear. At 15.02 on Wednesday 27 September 1965, the bank-clerk Alberto Martinez Tobar went to work at the cash desk in the San Fernando branch of the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. He was a tall fellow, red-faced and bug-eyed, who had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday and who only had a few more hours to live. He cracked jokes with the girls in the accounts section, and went down to the basement where the strongboxes were stored beside the black table stacked with the bags of money. There employees in their shirtsleeves counted notes, under the artificial light and noise of the ventilators.

An underground tomb, a jail stashed with money, the bank cashier had thought. He had lived all his life in San Fernando and his father had worked for the Town Hall before him. He had a daughter who suffered acutely with her nerves, and it was costing him a fortune to have her attended to. Many times over, he had considered the possibility of stealing the money handed over into his safekeeping on a monthly basis. He had even gone as far as to mention it to his wife.

On occasion he'd thought it'd be a simple matter to bring in a dummy briefcase, identical to the rest, filled with counterfeit money. It could be substituted for one of the others, and he could then walk out with serenity. It would only require arranging with the bank-clerk who happened to be a childhood friend. They could split the cash and carry on leading their lives as normal. The fortune would accrue to their children. He visualized the money kept in a secret safe in his cupboard, the money invested under a false number in a Swiss bank, the money hidden in a mattress, he imagined himself sleeping with the wads stored under the ticking, feeling them rustle as he tossed and turned during his nights of insomnia. On recent nights, when he couldn't sleep, he had told his wife how he contemplated effecting these changes. He spoke into the darkness and she listened to him, in silence. It was one of those ideas which kept him alive, and it added a certain spirit of adventure and a certain personal interest in the money transfers he made on a monthly basis.

This particular afternoon, he deposited the briefcases on top of the table and the colleague with his green visor looked at the payment slip with its signatures and its stamps and began separating out wads of 10,000 pesos. There was a heap of money, 7,203,960 pesos to pay staff salaries and the costs of repairing the municipal sanitation works. They put the wads of new notes into the black briefcases, the leather worn through use, stuffing even the pleats and side pockets.

Before leaving the Bank, Martinez Tobar complied with the security measures and attached the case to his left wrist with a small chain anchored with a padlock. Later on, someone was to say that he paid the ultimate price for this useless precaution.

When he went out into the street he saw nothing: nobody sees anything in the moments leading up to a robbery. A wind whips up without warning and a guy gets knocked down, perhaps with a sharp blow to the back of the head, never knowing what happened. If anyone observes something suspicious afoot, he's bound to be dismissed as a timorous sort, already traumatized by a previous experience, and who's now convinced that history is about to repeat itself.

Martinez Tobar looked at what he always noticed without scrutiny: the woman with the little fairground kiosk, the boy racing his dog, the store-keeper reopening for business after the siesta hour, but he failed to see Twisty on the lookout in the bar, propped up against the counter, knocking back a gin and studying the legs of the pregnant girl who came out of the shop next door. Pregnant women excited Twisty, and he remembered the movements of the woman in a house on Saavedra Street, while her husband was away at the office and he was still a young conscript. He had met her on the subway, when he gave up his seat to her and the woman started chatting to him, and he began enjoying her company. She was the same age as Twisty, twenty years old, her six- month pregnancy stretching her skin so taut it appeared transparent and they had to seek out the weirdest positions to be able to make it, he could only penetrate her if he propped himself up with one foot on the bed, which was when she turned her face and smiled at him. It distracted him to remember the woman in Saavedra, called either Graciela or Dora, but then he reverted to feeling tense because he saw the fellow leaving the bank with the briefcase and the money. He looked at his watch. Timed to the precise second.

The two police guards chatted on the pavement. One of the Town Hall clerks, Abraham Spector, a huge and heavy fellow, tied his shoes with difficulty, leaning up against the bumpers of the pick-up. The square was quiet, tranquil even.

'What's up, Fatso?' asked the clerk, and then greeted the security guys and got into the truck.

The guards travelled in the rear seat, guys with the faces of sleepwalkers, heavy, their weapons across their laps, ex- gendarmes, former sharpshooters, retired junior officers, forever guarding somebody else's money, somebody else's women, imported cars, great mansions, faithful hounds, in total confidence, always armed and in heavy boots. One of them was called Juan José Balacco, he was sixty years old and a former police commissioner, and the other was a legal cop from the San Fernando first division, an eighteen-year-old heavyweight, Francisco Otero, whom everyone called Ringo Bonavena, because he wanted to be a boxer and trained every night in the Excursionistas gym with a Japanese trainer who had promised to make him champion of Argentina.

They had to go back across the 200 metres that separated the Bank (on one corner of the square) from the Town Hall (on the other corner).

'We're a little late,' Spector said.

The clerk set the engine running. The pick-up proceeded along Third of February Street at walking pace and when it turned the corner there was a screech of rubber on tarmac and the sound of another car accelerating alongside them.

The car was on top of them, driving against the one-way system, shooting through, as though driverless, and screeched to a halt.

'What does this madman think he's doing?' asked Martinez Tobar, still prepared to be amused.

Two guys leapt on to the pavement and one pulled a woman's stocking over his face (or so some witnesses said). He held a pair of scissors and stretched the nylon with the tips of his fingers, then, the stocking already pulled over his head, he slashed two holes level with his eyes.

Spector was a large man, with a look of helplessness about him, wearing a striped shirt blotched with sweat. Of the four of them travelling in the pick-up, he was the only one to survive. He threw himself on the floor and they fired at him from above, but they hit the metal lid of his pocket watch, which deflected the bullet. A miracle (that he happened to be wearing his father's pocket watch). He was sitting on the pavement outside the Bank, suffocating, watching people hurry by and the ambulances pass. Journalists were gathering at the spot and the police cordoned off the street. Eventually a patrol car halted and Police Commissioner Silva stepped down. He was the chief of police for the Zona Norte of Greater Buenos Aires and in charge of the operation. He got down from his car, dressed in plain clothes, with a pistol cocked in his left hand and a walkie-talkie in his right, out of which you could hear voices giving orders and dictating numbers, and he approached Spector.

'Come with me,' he said.

Following a moment's uncertainty, Spector got up, slow and scared, and followed him.

They proceeded to show the witness different photographs of robbers, gunmen and a selection of underworld characters who were potential authors of the deed, according to its most salient characteristics. Constrained by his overwhelming sense of confusion, the witness failed to recognize a single face (according to the daily papers).

When the car pulled up in front of them, Spector noted that it was 15.11 by the Town Hall clock.

A tall guy, dressed in a suit, got down from the car and, using both hands, pulled a woman's stocking down over his face, like someone pulling down a blind, and then he leant over the car seat and when he stood up again, he had a machine-gun in his hand. His head was made of rubber, of wax, shapeless, like a honeycomb stuck to his skin causing him to breathe deeply, or to snuffle, from where his voice emerged clipped and artificial. He resembled a wooden dummy, or perhaps a ghost.

'Let's go, Kid,' Dorda said, gasping for breath as if asphyxiating. And to the driver he said: 'We'll be back…'

Then Mereles accelerated, and the ready-fitted motor of the Chevrolet, with its racing-car engine and low-slung chassis, roared in the silence of siesta hour, on Town Hall Square, in San Fernando.

The Kid touched the medallion of the Virgin to bring himself luck and got out of the car. He was so thin and fragile and was so drugged that he looked diseased, as if he were a victim of tuberculosis, as they'd told the gunmen beforehand ('sick as a consumptive'), but he earnestly clasped the Beretta.45 in his two hands and when one of the guards moved, he discharged his weapon into his face. The bullet sounded dry, unreal, like a snapped branch.

Dorda had the nylon of the woman's stocking stuck to his face and breathed heavily through the fabric stuck inside his mouth. Off to one side he could see a guy getting down from the truck, and started to fire.

Two old fellows sunbathing on the plaza benches, along with a regular customer, busily perusing his newspaper seated at a table by the bar window opposite, saw how two or three men inside the Chevrolet 400, its plates registered in Buenos Aires province, leapt from the car, weapons in hand.

They seemed enraged, aiming at everyone in sight, sweeping the air in semi-circles as they approached, in slow motion, towards the pick-up. The tallest (according to the witnesses) wore a woman's stocking over his face, but the other one had his features exposed. It was the skinny one with the face of an angel, the one all the witnesses began to call 'the Lad'. He got out of the car, smiled, took aim at the rear end of the pick-up with his machine-gun, then fired off a round.

From the square, one of the retired chaps caught sunbathing saw how the bodies bounced off the seats and the blood splashed off the car windows.

'The fat one was alive when the round was over,' declared one of the old men, 'he tried to open the door and escape and at the same moment saw the guy with a woman's stocking pulled over his head walking along the middle of the road towards the pick-up, and threw himself down on to the pavement.'

He looked like a gigantic bundle, Fatso Spector, thrown against the car and all that in broad sunlight.

Over and again he was convinced they were going to kill him. He remembered the face of the skinny guy who'd regarded him with a glint of irony. Spector closed his eyes and prepared to die, but felt something like a kick in his chest and was saved by the metal watch his father had left to him.

The assailants he managed to catch sight of were two young men dressed in blue suits. Their hair was cropped short, very short, military style. When the firing was over, it was all he could do to run as far as the Bank and ask for help.

Now he was getting nervous, afraid that the police would accuse him of complicity in the handover.

'So you got to see the assailants at close range…'

It wasn't a question, but Spector answered it anyway.

'One was dark and the other blond, both were really young and with razored haircuts like soldiers.'

'Describe what you saw.'

He described one. It was Twisty Bazán.

'He was in the bar and then he crossed the square with a pistol in his hand.'

'You mean he was the driver, the one with a stocking over his face, the blond one, and then there was another.'

Spector nodded his head obediently. Had they told him there were four, he would have sworn that indeed, four there were.

The fellow with his face covered by a stocking moved quietly down the middle of the street, and seemed to be smiling, though perhaps this was a grimace induced by the silken mask he had put over his face and tied up on top like a bun. Martinez Tobar was wounded, lying on the floor, doubled over, leaning on his left side, with his briefcase tied to his wrist, and he wasn't able to see when the Kid pulled out the wire-cutters, sliced through the chain and picked up the briefcase with the loot in it, then, as he was moving backwards after all this, fired a shot at his chest. He was equally unable to see when the Gaucho with his stocking-covered face killed the policeman with a shot to the back of the neck.

He'd killed him, that Gaucho Dorda, not because the policeman posed a threat but just because. He killed him because he loathed the police more than anything else in the world and he imagined, in some irrational fashion, that each and every cop he killed would somehow not be replaced. 'One less', was the Gaucho's byword, as if he were reducing the number of troops possessed by an enemy army whose forces would never be renewed. If they carried on killing policemen as a matter of course, at once, without malice, like someone popping off sparrows, those condemned shits of policemen (born with the souls of policemen, souls of hicks), then they'd have to think twice before letting themselves be carried away by their vocation as public executioners, they'd become afraid of getting bumped off in their turn, and thus (he concluded) every day the army of slugs would have fewer troops. So he reasoned, but in a more muddled and lyrical style, as if he were killing cops in a dream, as if he'd been let loose in open countryside with a shotgun; this was the line of thought the Blond Gaucho would follow in his one-man war against the army of slugs.

To kill like that, in cold blood, just because, signified just the opposite (to the police): that these characters would never respect any of the implicit agreements governing the unwritten law between the law and the lawless, that the latter were poisonous, they were thugs, ex-cons, ugly-mug convicts who'd be only too pleased to see the entire police force in Buenos Aires province lined up against a firing squad.

The indescribable confusion produced by this perfidious attack did not make it possible, in the ensuing seconds, to establish precisely what had happened (or so said the daily papers). It was a burst of brutal violence, a blind explosion. An intense battle, lasting just as long as it took for the traffic lights to change. It was over in moments, and afterwards the street was suddenly strewn with corpses.

The shooting at pointblank range caused the death of police agent Otero and fatally wounded the cashier Martinez Tobar in the thorax, also injuring the security guard Balacco in the right leg, before he was dispatched in cold blood by one of the armed men. As for the bank-clerk Spector, stunned and confused, he ran to the Bank to beg for assistance.

Later on it could be confirmed (according to the information given by police officer Silva) that the agent Otero would have been equally unable, even had he emerged unscathed from the attack, to have used his regulation pistol given that one of the bullets fired by the gunmen had lodged in it, putting it out of action. As for the submachine-gun they carried to protect the money while in transit, somebody had put it on a high shelf inside the lorry and nobody could manage to reach it down.

Those who had witnessed the shooting came and went through the place like sleepwalkers, happy to have come through unscathed and horrified at what they had seen. All of a sudden that tranquil afternoon had shown how it could rapidly be transformed into a nightmare.

The burst of bullets unleashed by the assailants also caught Diego Garcia, who was leaving a bar in the immediate neighbourhood of the firing. He was taken to hospital where he died shortly afterwards. He was known to live in Haedo and to have travelled to San Fernando in response to an advert asking for carpenters and cabinet-makers. He had paused at the bar on the square to knock back a glass of gin, and when he left to go and present himself at the sawmill, he was killed by a stray bullet. He was twenty-three years old, and in his pocket were found twelve pesos and a train ticket.

According to one version, armed guards in a building opposite the Town Hall managed to exchange fire with the gunmen, but this remained unconfirmed.

It was noted that one of the assailants was assisted in getting into the car, giving rise to the assumption (according to the police report) that he was wounded. They saw the guy with the masked face throw a white bag, made of canvas, out of the back door of the car as it was already moving and then drop another bag while the Chevrolet set off at full speed for Madero, against the one-way system, towards Martinez Street, in other words towards the city centre of Buenos Aires.

The car was revving at full throttle, running zigzags, hooting its horn at everyone to get out of the way. Two of the gunmen were hanging out of the windows with half their bodies outside, their machine-guns in their hands, firing behind them.

'Give it them round for round, bullet for bullet,' yelled the Kid while Mereles stayed very focused on the driving, crouched forwards, his face pressed up against the windscreen, without any consideration (according to one witness) for the presence of other cars or of the children coming out of school and without waiting for the traffic lights which stopped the cars on the avenue, fixated only on an imaginary line down the street drawing them on to freedom, to the flat on Arenales Street where the Girl was waiting for them, sprawled on the bed studying maths. The Crow was at the wheel of the Chevrolet, and every other car had to get out of the way and let him through.

Everyone in the neighbourhood watched through half- open windows as the black car sped by like a rush of wind. Outside, some of them threw themselves on to the ground, or clustered behind tree-trunks, paralysed with fear, mothers who were on the streets, their children clutching their hands. When people are part of a funeral cortège and look out of the hearse window, they can see those outside removing their hats (should they be wearing hats), slowly and silently crossing themselves as the procession makes its way onwards. The relatives watch the line of people clamped to the wall, along the pavement, who pay their respects, but now from the car it's amusing to observe the disorder (or so the Kid saw it), the idiots throwing themselves to the ground, taking refuge in nearby entrance halls — looking like astonished gargoyles.

'Is it all there?' yelled Mereles, pale in the afternoon light. He held the Chevrolet and crossed the avenue like a sudden draught, still running flat out. He felt the bag beside him without looking at it, and touched the money.

'The loot? Is it all there?' Mereles was laughing.

They hadn't counted it but the canvas bag stuffed with cash was so heavy it could have been filled with stones. Lumps of cement, concealing the fine notes, all in usable currency, packed into a canvas bag tied with a naval knot.

'We were in it up to our necks,' said Dorda.

His shirt was stained with blood, a bullet had grazed his neck, a graze that still burned him. 'But we saved ourselves, Kid, and now we've got to get there,' said the Blond Gaucho, glancing at the Chevrolet's rearview mirror. 'All the dosh in the world.'

He too felt for a bag, then grabbed some powder. They rubbed the cocaine on their gums, they couldn't inhale the stuff at that speed, using their hands like claws to hook out the drug with two crooked fingers from the brown paper bag dangling from the car seat, then rubbing it round their gums and their tongues. Money is just the same as drugs: what's fundamental is its possession, knowing it's there, touching it, checking it's still in the cupboard, there in its bag slung among the clothes, checking there's still a half-kilo of the stuff, a hundred grand's worth, being content with that. The first day of the rest of their lives started here.

Nothing can match flying along in a specially tuned car, with double fuel injection and your foot slammed down on the accelerator, the steering wheel stuck to your hands and taking the loot along in the back with you to go and live in Miami or Caracas. That was life at full speed ahead.

'There's a ferry can take us across to Uruguay. It'll take two hours, two hours ten, to cross the pond,' said the Kid.

Was that a question? No one answered. Each one did their own thing and shouted their piece, as if fleeing alone across the countryside on a railway track, with a train bearing down from behind. 'We can go via Colonia and it'll take two hours. Get through Tigre district and, well, we can grab a boat, rent a ferry, buy an aeroplane, eh, darling?' The Kid laughed out loud and took more cocaine with his hand in a claw from the brown paper bag. His tongue and his palate had gone numb, and his voice sounded weird.

'With the acceleration we've got,' said the Gaucho, 'the car could be our ferry.'

'Hey, here's a level-crossing… and here's a dead loss of a crossing-keeper.'

'Leave him to me.'

Brignone stuck his body out of the window and, when he saw what he was doing, Dorda did likewise out of the opposite window.

Their machine-gun round sliced through the closed barriers at the level-crossing.

Sparks were flying and wood splintering.

'I had no idea the barriers were so flimsy,' and Kid Brignone laughed out loud.

'They were hanging half outside of the windows and cut clean through,' relayed the crossing-keeper.

Neither the railway employee nor the friend of twenty years who accompanied him could give a coherent description of the assailants, given their state of excitement.

'As they escaped they found the level-crossing barriers closed at Madero Street and without stopping the car they sliced their way across them with a round of machine-gunfire' (according to the papers).

'There were two behind and one in front, with the radio on at full blast. The car was hooting loudly too.'

'The patrolman was following fifty metres behind them.'

'It seems incredible they made their getaway.'

Two guys hanging off the sides of the car with machine- guns in their hands.

According to some witnesses, among the Chevrolet's occupants there seemed to be a wounded man who was being supported by his comrades. In addition, the rear window of the car had been shattered by bullets.

The car came along Libertador Avenue honking its horn and forcing the traffic to open a path through until, at the crossroads between Libertador and Alvear Avenues, they came across a traffic police substation, which had been put on alert.

Officer Francisco Núñez decided to block the car's path and jumped out into the street but a fresh round of fire burst from the moving car and flung him against a wall. Without pausing in their flight, the yobs let off yet another round of machine-gunfire and peppered the front of the police substation.

The Chevrolet shot onwards at full speed with the gunmen still firing off at the police station. Three policemen got into a patrol car and began following them, their siren on at full blast.

Crow Mereles was fully absorbed in his driving. He was addicted to Florinol. He drank the best part of a bottle of the stuff daily, and it lent him a serene vision of life. Florinol is a tranquillizer which, when taken in large doses, functions somewhat like opium; he'd acquired the habit in Batán jail, where it's as obtainable as any legal medicine that doctors can offer on prescription and the nurses can give you in exchange for money or women. The deal was simple: the prisoners' women were far more appealing than the wives of the prison screws and so a market was established, or at any rate a transaction. Visiting hours were really only held to put the young fillies through their paces, as Mereles expressed it. Their fiancées, their girlfriends, the girls who enjoyed whiling away some time with a bit of rough who was up for doing anything to them, would go with a hick if it were required, even with a screw, in short, a no-hope loser who'd take his turn with them in the guards' office. One afternoon the Crow had succeeded in getting his girlfriend at the time, Bimba she was called — sexy all right, but always out of her skull, a total smackhead — to get off with the boss of Batán jail. The guy was nothing but an obese executioner who enjoyed making them all sweat, but whenever he saw the blonde appear, her bottom squeezed tightly into her jeans and wearing a diminutive embroidered T-shirt, he lost the plot. That was what allowed the Florinol and the dope to find their way in. No one could remember any more how exactly the story finished. Or whether or not Bimba carried on with the guy. Either way the Crow made it out of there in six months.

His head emptied itself out, it was carefully vacant, and he could no longer remember what had really happened, but because of that he was an exceptional driver, his mind a blank, and blood so cold that no one could match it. He drove sedated with Florinol and could have faced down a lorry and obliged it to do a U-turn to end up on an embankment. He'd even once gone on an escapade to Mar del Plata in a stolen car with his girlfriend and his girlfriend's mother, and started driving up the wrong side of Highway 2. All the other cars went charging on to the hard shoulder hooting their horns and the Girl laughed aloud and kept taking Vascolet. She — Blanquita — was crazy about the chocolate drink Vascolet (each to their own medicine, Mereles would say, enigmatically). He spoke in a strange manner, taking a while to figure out how to frame his words. By their sounds. His words always sounded serene, even when they were meaningless. Each to their own, but what a screwball, the Girl with her Vascolet!

On arriving at the corner of Libertador Avenue and Aristóbulo del Valle, the luck that had so far accompanied them seemed to run out. At some 150 metres from the military post at Martinez, the Chevrolet launched another round of machine-gunfire in which a policeman was wounded. The gunmen's car (according to the police report) effected a spectacular spin, running a serious risk of doubling back on itself, something it only just managed to avert. The car came to a halt across the street, blocking the traffic, and facing the opposite direction to the one it had been travelling in, coated in the effluent of a broken sewer, its rear window utterly shattered and a large bloodstain on the rear seat. Minutes went by and nobody got out of the car.

Busch, a local shopkeeper, came driving mildly along Libertador Avenue, in a placid frame of mind and from the opposite direction. He spotted the car stopped with its engine running and a man getting down from it rubbing his neck as if he'd been hurt, and imagined that an accident must have taken place.

Señor Eduardo Busch's habits were as regular as the white polka dots printed on the bales of cloth he sold. But today he'd been delayed by two minutes because the water had been cut off while he was washing himself. He hung on under the shower in the growing conviction that someone had it in for him, until he eventually emerged, dried himself, and was informed by his wife that the water had been cut off. He had been born in the same apartment he still lived in and had never gravitated out of the district. He knew all its noises, the shifting movement of the hours, and today it seemed to him he'd heard something unusual (distant thunder, stifled noises) to which he'd paid no attention. He had been out of sorts recently, because things weren't going at all well for him. He always left the house at 2.30 p.m. and at 2.50 p.m. he was opening up his business, but this afternoon he was a little behind and the delay (minimal, just by chance) changed everything. It gave him the opportunity to acquire a story that would last him to the end of his days. When he turned on to Madero Street, he thought there'd been an accident, for he spotted a car with its engine running and a guy getting out with a bag in his hand.

Being by nature a Good Samaritan, he stopped and saw the Kid coming towards him, smiling as he pulled out his Beretta.45 with his left hand.

'He came towards me and I thought he was going to kill me. He took forever to draw level with my car. He looked like a kid but had the face of a desperado.'

The Kid opened the door and Busch got out with his hands up. Two more guys descended from their car and got into the Rambler. They were dragging canvas bags along with them and were heavily armed, but it all happened so rapidly and so confusingly that it seemed like a dream, or so Señor Busch declared. 'We never imagine how these shameful acts come to pass, until we're caught up in them,' he later rationalized, philosophically.

'I'll never abandon the idea that we have to go to the assistance of our neighbour, even when it produces surprises such as this,' he added.

'One was dark and the other blond, the two of them looked very young and had army-style haircuts. There was a third one with a woman's stocking over his head.' All the descriptions converged, to no particular purpose.

They took off in the light-coloured Rambler that he'd bought the previous year. This was the car in which the assailants continued their flight.

They went along Libertador Avenue and after reaching Santa Fe Avenue at top speed — where they miraculously avoided another accident after emerging right into the path of a station wagon — they jumped a set of red lights and headed off along the PanAmerican Highway, the easiest escape route out of the area.

By this stage all the highway police had been alerted, along with all the surveillance divisions along the main routes in and out of the Federal Capital. And the Federal Police's radio command centre had also been switched to high alert.

However, neither the police stations nor the mobile police units covering the wealthy Zona Norte in the city suburbs could keep up with the pace set by the gunmen in their stolen Rambler. A great many provincial police divisions were out that night patrolling a wide swath of Greater Buenos Aires.