Money to Burn

7

The lengthy Odyssey which had already lasted for four hours at the time of writing this account began at approximately 22.00 hours yesterday and towards midnight a massive police operation, in which some 300 men were deployed, was mounted. They occupied the flat roofs and the neighbouring houses. Shortly after midnight the gunmen emerged from the flat on to the corridor, where they fired on the street and the nearby terraces, seeking to blaze a way out. An intense blast of shooting was followed by a period of relative calm. The firing from pistols and revolvers diminished in intensity.

A while back they had succeeded in evacuating several of the flats in the building, alerting those unable to leave by telephone that they should remain lying down on the floors of the inside rooms. The police clearly feared that the criminals intended to occupy one or more of the next-door flats and take hostages.

It was possible, in the midst of the gloom, to observe some of the neighbours depart, terrified and in their nightclothes, carrying their belongings. Some of the tenants interviewed by the journalists elaborated the most extravagant theories.

'At first I thought it was a fire,' announced Señor Magariños, wearing a black overcoat on top of his blue pyjamas. Then I thought an aeroplane had fallen on top of the building.'

'… or the madwoman on the fourth floor,' added Señor Acuña, 'making yet another suicide attempt…'

'A black had seized a first-floor flat and was holding two hostages in that apartment.'

'The caretaker's children are dead, poor things, I saw them lying in the corridor.'

During the long hours that this journalist spent in that place information-gathering, all the various versions and permutations got repeated. Some said that Malito had managed to escape from the besieged flat and was going to return with reinforcements, others said that one of the malefactors was wounded. Time passed and the exchanges of fire took place in the middle of the night and under the white glare of the spotlights illuminating the façade and the windows surrounding the flat occupied by the Argentines.

Encircled, hemmed in, with dozens of revolvers and submachine-guns positioned at every possible opening and exit, as the hours went by amid the whizz of bullets, the three (or four) gunmen held out, refusing to give in, preferring a defiance born of desperation. They were being fired on from all sides at once. From the flat roofs they were firing at one of the apartment windows; from ground level up at the other one; and from the adjacent flat directly on to the entrance to flat number nine.

It was to be a battle to the death. The flat had been completely cut off and the gangsters were to be laid siege to by starvation, if necessary, although the police didn't cut off the water (or the light) in order not to adversely affect the other tenants. The gun battle was prolonged with interludes when avid members of the public covered themselves from the persistent drizzle in the doorways of houses and were interviewed by the television journalists.

They're intent on suicide, you can see they won't be taken prisoner.'

'I can understand that. No one who's ever been in jail wants to go back to being banged up.'

They've got the money in there with them and they'll use it to negotiate.'

The hypotheses and the mutual interrogations multiplied. Meanwhile the siege continued. The block was surrounded, nobody could get in or out of the area, the military barricade isolated the neighbourhood as if it were an island. Everyone had recent images of the Vietnam war in mind. But this time the battle was in a house in the city and the squad being besieged were acting like a group of ex-combatants who had supplied themselves with munitions and weapons of war, prepared themselves to defend their liberty to the end.

The police estimated that between 22.00 hours on the Friday and 02.00 early on the Saturday the gangsters had fired more than 500 rounds, in their pretence of having a complete arsenal at their fingertips. The PAM submachine- gun, with ultra-rapid firepower, could be heard to resound every few minutes, succeeded or preceded by other firing, with the rattle of a.45 calibre and possibly also of Luger pistols, weapons of war of the highest efficacy.

At one moment it was even possible to hear one of the gunmen yelling that he was going to give a display of all the arms at his disposal. That was when they heard the raking of machine-gun pistols with twelve shots a round, whose detonations clearly demonstrated that they were using large calibre bullets.

The thugs' bursts of machine-guns showed them to be in possession of rapid-fire weapons, because the Zona Norte's chief of police from Buenos Aires, Police Commissioner Silva, said he recognized the sound of Halcón machine-guns, without a doubt stolen from the Argentine Armed Forces. 'It needs to be borne in mind that (on current assumptions) one of the gang members had been a sergeant in the army, and that this was a possible explanation for the possession of these powerful weapons that could hold our police force at bay.'

It was a source of some surprise that these terrible bandits had gained control of such an arsenal, and the police were obliged to question how they could have got it into the country and how they had managed to get themselves from one place to the next across the city, taking so much weaponry and so many thousand projectiles along with them.

Another matter worthy of attention concerning the gangsters' decision is that while it was possible to launch a mass attack of gas grenades through the one window that looked out from flat number nine over the second inner well providing light and air to the block, the gunmen failed to emerge as anticipated. It was then necessary to deduce that they must also possess gas masks, enabling them to resist this otherwise infallible last resort. Or else to imagine a unique resolve on the part of the Argentines who, in the midst of the gas inferno, remained resolute in their resistance to orders to surrender and save their lives.

They no longer have any hope left, resistance is all.

'Why don't you come up and get us?'

'Their courage,' thought the El Mundo journalist, who had taken refuge in flat number eight, adjoining the besieged building, screwing in his flash lamp to obtain night photos of the battle scene, 'is directly proportional to the willingness to die.' The police always act in the conviction that the gunmen behave just like themselves, meaning that gangsters have the same unstable sense of balance when it comes to taking decisions or precautions as does the common man to whom a uniform — representing authority — has been handed, along with a weapon and the power to use it. But there's one crucial difference and it's the same degree of distinction as that between the struggle to win and the struggle not to be overthrown.

Having taken a number of photos, he went over to the corner and leaned against a bench, lit by a street lamp, and took rapid notes in his exercise book.

Quite how the gunmen had succeeded, garrisoned inside the flat, in surviving the huge quantity of teargas canisters thrown at them, was utterly incomprehensible. All the more so to those gathered on the northern corner of the block where the attempted raid was taking place, who could barely tolerate the cloud of gases the breeze was blowing across the street. Certain experts think that the Argentine gunmen possessed (or had made) gas masks, and one even insisted on having seen Dorda, with oxygen tubes and goggles partially covering his face, leaning like a monstrous insect out of the window for an interminable instant and firing off a round before shouting something in a voice which sounded as if it came from the depths of the ocean.

'Why don't you come up and get us, you wretches, what are you waiting for?'

Even the young El Mundo journalist succeeded in seeing, almost by chance and as if in a flash, the gunman with his face covered by a complicated gas mask.

The truth is that the lack of oxygen made them nauseous and faint, rather like altitude sickness, or as if the shortage of clean air impeded the blood getting to their brains and sharpened the desperation of their actions. Just now the Blond Gaucho emerged, half naked, through the window, attempting to shoot out the street lamps, along with the bulbs in the spotlights and the searchlights on the patrol cars, leaning halfway into the street, as if nothing more mattered to him than inhaling a little bit of fresh air.

The truth is that gas tends to rise to the ceiling, so that in the lower part of the room, at floor level, it is always possible to stretch out and breathe without serious difficulty. To warm the air and force the teargas upwards the Kid pulled the pillows off the beds on to the glass-topped table and set light to them. The flames gave the place a hellish aspect and the smoke rose and blackened the ceiling and walls. Lying face upwards on the floor, they could breathe easily, the infected air rose over them, like a cloud a metre above their heads. That was the way they got through the night, without major problems, throughout the gas attacks, which were repeated more and more sporadically as the police registered that this particular tactic was not affording them good results.

Everyone seemed to comprehend that the gas, rather than modifying the resistance of the besieged bandits, was hardening their resolve. Their insults could be clearly heard between the din of battle and the incessant rattling of machine-gunfire. The gunmen's resistance was also attributed by certain specialists from the police force to favourable air currents inside the flat which, through the two windows giving on to the two outdoor patios, generated a kind of air corridor which renewed the fresh air available, and sent the polluted air out on to the streets where the effects of the gas were felt by the police themselves, not to mention all the curious passers-by positioned outside.

At one point the police decided to employ hand grenades but were worried about the neighbours still trapped there in the block, since it had not been possible to evacuate several of the apartments in the gunmen's line of fire and the residents were uttering heart-rending cries and calls for help from the adjacent windows throughout the night, for they found themselves in the midst of the din of battle, where they were abandoned and locked up with their children, flattened on the floor without daring to move lest the police commence some sort of salvage operation. They seemed to be currently running the same risks as the criminals.

'In one sense,' Silva declared, his face drawn with fatigue, his white scar whiter than ever in the icy skin of his face, 'the gunmen are holding all the neighbours hostage in the block of flats. And this circumscribes our movements. We have to think carefully what we need to do in order not to put innocent lives at risk. It explains,' he elaborated, 'why this operation is taking longer than the period generally necessary to detain four criminals.'

When the night was well advanced the gunmen made a final attempt to get out of the flat and gain control of the corridor, from where they fired on the street and over the neighbouring roofs, seeking a way out. After that violent gun- fight there followed a period of relative calm.

'I never thought we were going to get ourselves stuck down a well and end up hounded like dogs.'

Who did that voice come from? By now a transistor and an intelligence operator, earphones pressed to the heating system, were attempting to find out what was taking place in the besieged flat. But the sound was either dead or muffled and drowned in a confused sequence of signals coming from all over the building: a maddened and tortured multitude of groans and insults with which the imagination of Roque Pérez (the wireless operator) gambled and lost. These were the screams of lost souls writhing in the agonies of hell, stray spirits locked inside the concentric circles of Dante'sInferno, for they were already dead, those who, when they spoke, made their voices come through from the other side of life, the condemned, those who have truly abandoned all hope. 'Into what kind of cacophony were their voices transformed?' the wireless operator asked himself, once he could concentrate and began to distinguish out sharp wails, shots and shouts, and again words in some strange language. A dog had been left shut in a bedroom of the next door apartment and barked incessantly. A landscape filled with noise only two centimetres away from his ear drums and across which, like a thread of madness, one could make out the characteristic register, weak and fluting, of a clarinet in a dance orchestra, playing on the radio inside one of the flats, in some remote place that defied location. And alongside all this, the sound of voices, like murmurs of the dead, or words lost in the din of the night.

The person listening in on the conversations was Roque Pérez, the police wireless operator with his headphones pressed to his ears and fingers fiddling with the switches to lower certain vibrations and erase the buzz in the voices, searching to receive their dialogue clean and clear, buried in the tiny soundproofed room in the stairwell, using his levers to control the sound, needing time to establish a sound contact and record the disjointed voices echoing from the apartment under siege. They had planted two microphones, but one had been knocked out by the bullets and transmitted clarinet music as if it had become hooked up to a radio buried in the city. Pérez attempted to identify the voices, figure out who was whom, figure out how many there were, hoping (according to what Silva told him) that one of them would weaken and consider giving himself up, hoping that soon some discord might emerge between the gangsters, and they'd be able to work on one of them, perhaps with an offer of legal privileges, to get him to abandon the gang and surrender. There was a fellow they called Number One who spoke ceaselessly, in a murmur, alone, almost up against the microphone, he had to be over one side, near the heating radiator, the mike concealed close at hand, and Roque Pérez couldn't work out who he was, so he called him One (in fact he was Dorda).

'As for me,' Number One is relating, 'in recent years, when I used to live in Canuelas, and was out on bail, but I had already left home, and lived on the ranch, I began to collect goldfinches in an aviary and every morning I would release one of them. I'd think that if the birds took note that every day at dawn one of them would be set free, like. I wondered if the little birds had in their eyes a place where they kept their memories, bearing in mind that their sight is as sharp as needles. I thought, I did, of how the little goldfinch sings, then the night arrives, and in the morning a hand is inserted that sets one free, so the other one, let us suppose, his brother, let's say a brother goldfinch, gets animated, takes note, says, "I'll decide to sing all day long, then the night falls so I'll sleep a while, and when the sun is up, a hand will appear and set me free in the open air, leave me free just to fly away."' There was a prolonged pause or the sound of some interference. 'Just like us humans locked away, yet we too hang on to the hope that, come sunrise, something new and good will dawn.'

'And it's not always like that.'

'No, it's not always like that… True enough. Do you want some? I've got it. A piece of luck, wasn't it, that we've got some, that I bought some weed, in the port, on our way out, from the seadog who brought us here, a kilo and a half, dope of the first order, higher than top quality, say I, it's always worth having too much rather than too little.'

They chatted on about anything at all, about how the goldfinches had flown free. None of that mattered for now, he (Roque Pérez) didn't want to record the sense, only the sound, the differences between their voices, their levels, and their breathing, in order to learn to identify each one in turn.

'Somewhere out there, and we can't say when but perhaps when the sun comes up, Malito will turn up, Gaucho, and he'll get us out.'

'So Number Two isn't the Crow,' noted Roque Pérez, 'the Crow has to be Number Three or Number One. And the one speaking is Two' (that makes Kid Brignone Number Two).

'A marble headstone on the tomb of the deceased, my father, I had to sell the goldfinches to pay for it, he was in the soil, without anything, just a little barbed wire fence around the patch, the old woman buried him there, we had a plot of ground there on the slope down to the flowerbeds outside the station, where the cemetery ended up, out at Cañuelas, the saddest place in the world, as soon as the graves began to get dismantled by people eager to move in, set up their homesteads and live there, among the dead.'

'They're delirious,' thought Roque Pérez. 'Too many drugs, too many hallucinogenics, old-style hallucinogens at that. They take cocaine, they shoot up everything, they can put up with anything, it's the only way they can cope with the world,' said Roque Pérez, 'they act the macho because they're high on whisky and speed.' Pérez had studied medicine, but entered the police force because he enjoyed wireless operating, he was a great radio fan and trained himself as a technician working in sound rooms and recording studios, and he'd had to get used to living boxed into a cabin, deciphering radiophonic conversations, useless dialogues in order to locate illegal card sharps, police informers, politicians who don't want to compromise, minor matters, but now, ever since Friday night, he had got his great opportunity: the live secret transmission of what was going on inside apartment number nine, laid siege to by the Montevidean police. Voices, groans, moans, intermittent cries for help, isolated wails. For example, at the moment, there's Number Two:

'Tuesday will be the funeral, they always bury you three days after you die, 'cause if you come back again, you come back to life as a mummy, d'you remember the mummy, who came out of tomb all wrapped in bandages…'

'For example, you can hide yourself underneath the bathtub, they'll come and search, and they'll never find you…'

'Look, see, this machine isn't functioning properly,' the speaker stamps on the floor and the image settles down again, 'but take a look, it's crawling with journos… If you give yourself up, they can't get away with killing you.'

'They'll kill you either way, arsehole,' says Number Two. They shoot you here and drag you out dead, however many journos there are out there… anyway all journos are narks…'

And the cub reporter Renzi in flat number eight noted: 'The agonized waiting period extended. Exhaustion finally took hold of the policemen. The exchange of fire is no longer as intense. There are lapses of fifteen or twenty minutes during which not a single shot can be heard. Then a few stray shots from the marksmen positioned on the ground floor and the flat roof of the shed prompted the gunmen to respond with another volley.'

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was an audible pause over the intercom to the block, followed by the sound of one of the criminal's voices, saying: 'Greetings to Commissioner Silva. Silva! Are you there, sweetheart, flatface, executioner, bastard… Porky, Silva, come up here… why don't you come and play a round for the General's wife?{16} Who wins get out of here alive, who loses shits himself. There's five hundred grand in the bank, and I'll play you for it on a single throw of the dice. Hear them?' And it was true, you could hear the little marble bones rattling in their leather thimble.

'Enough fucking about, Che, it's me here talking to you. It's me, Silva,' says Silva, tranquil, in his Creole accent, in a voice clouded and wasted with alcohol and the quantity of cigarettes smoked during interrogations, attempting to soften up a swindler, a whore, or some poor lottery fixer. It was always the same, year in year out, paying them back with blows to the stomach as they're tied to their chairs, shouting at them in that rasping voice, like someone attempting to stick a pin into the ear of a zombie who refuses to parrot what one wants him to say. 'Why don't you lot come on down? Who's talking to me? Is that you, Malito? Come on down and we'll sort it all out, man to man, we'll negotiate here before the magistrate, I guarantee you, and I won't press charges for armed resistance as part of an illegal gang.'

'Well, why not just come up yourself? Hurry on up. Your daughter is getting it up the arse and you out there like an idiot, they've got her there in the bar toilet, the guy's a thin fellow with a shaft thick as your arm, and she's giving squeals of pleasure and shitting herself the more she gets off on it.'

That's how they spoke, filthier, more crude and brutal in their speech than even the cops, for all their experience in inventing insults intended to humiliate prisoners to the point where they become useless floppy puppets. Tough guys, from out of the toughest jails, broken on the electric grill, surrendering at last, after being forced to listen to Silva insulting and applying the torture machine to them for hours on end, to get them to spill the beans. The dead ends of the phrases used by men and women in the bedroom, in business and in the toilets, because the police and the crooks (so Renzi thought) are alone in knowing how to make words come alive, so much so and so sharp they can split your soul apart like an egg breaking on the sharp edge of a frying pan.

'It's not about money,' Number Two is saying and Pérez records the conversation, feeling as awkward as someone involuntarily spying or listening in on an unexpected confession, which is now being broadcast to everybody, Pérez included, who all listen awkwardly, to Number Two telling Silva: 'I'll hand over the money if you get your ugly mug up here, I'd let you come up and go back down without touching a hair of your head, but to get us out of here you're going to have to sweat a bit, after all who d'you think you're dealing with? You, Silva, what d'you want if you come up? Come on up, Che, you're used to screwing thieves when you've got them tied up, but when there's an armed opponent, a tough guy with balls, you crumple, Silva.'

The conversation continued on much the same lines, as if it were an extension of the combat. Witnesses to the conversation were frozen to the spot, hypnotized by what they were hearing, while Silva attempted to prolong the dialogue, to give Pérez time to record the voices and locate each one of the speakers, this was the reason why Silva sought to get his interlocutor (the Kid?) to continue doing battle over the intercom. And that voice so clearly belonging to a rent-boy, a criminal, a lunatic, rose again through the walls and reached all those gathered in the drizzle and in front of the encircled building.

'At approximately 03.30 hours today (for which read yesterday) the conversation was interrupted, despite the authorities' attempts to keep the intercom open and continue negotiations with the gangsters, they began hearing loud shouts from the criminals who were about to launch a bravura gesture, assuring them they were on the point of emerging prepared to kill any number of pigs and to some extent they began fulfilling their threats as it seemed as if one of their number — in the shelter of the shadows reigning in the corridor of the apartment block — got as far as the middle of the staircase and fired off a violent volley towards the street with a machine-gun.

'This made them think the criminals were about to come out, as the gunfire increased still further, cutting off the entrance to the apartments with a shower of lead.

'This was followed by a moment of despair during which those in the hall ran for the street. They left behind them a man who had fallen to the ground, bleeding heavily from four bullet wounds. It was Inspector Washington Santana Cabris de León, the Uruguayan chief of police. For the space of a few minutes he lay stretched out where he fell, given that the whole area was under a hail of the criminals' bullets.'

'You've sung your song, birdie… As for you pieces of shit, why don't you come up and take a look?'

Gaucho Dorda, half-naked, went out into the corridor, placed his gun on the man's neck and, in the midst of an infernal shooting, killed him with a bullet in the mouth. The police chief and the lunatic, degenerate, psychotic, Dorda the recidivist criminal (according to police sources) stared at each other for an eternity and then the Blond Gaucho, just before polishing him off, winked an eye and smiled at him.

'Die, arsehole,' said Dorda, and leapt smartly backwards.

The inspector's face was erased by the firepower as if it had exploded from inside his mouth and ripped the flesh outwards, leaving only a bloody hole behind (or so said an eye-witness).

After the initial shock, the first aid services rushed to remove and take him to hospital in a patrol car, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

'The critical tactic employed by Malito's gang, its tragic glamour,' (as Renzi was to later describe it in the police pages of his diary in El Mundo), 'fed on the conviction that every victory achieved under such impossible conditions increased their capacity to resist, and likewise increased their speed and strength. This was why what followed had the aspect of a tragic ritual that no one who was there that night could ever forget.'

First some white smoke emanated through the tiny bathroom window that opened, like an eye, above the party wall between the flats. A thin column of white smoke, against the further whiteness of the mist.

'Burning money is ugly, it's a sin. E peccato,'{17} added Dorda, in ecclesiastical Italian, and with a 1,000-peso note in his hand, there in the bathroom where he'd been taking speed, holding a Ronson lighter he'd pilfered from a crazy girl; he took it and burnt it, then looked at himself in the mirror and laughed. The Kid stood in the doorway, watching him and saying nothing.

'Just think: to earn a bill this size, a security guard, for example' — security guards are always contracted in, and they know it, they always catch up with the crooks once they've got into the place through the skylight, that's when the fellow appears, an inane grin on his face — 'would have to work for a fortnight… and a bank-clerk, depending on his seniority, would have to work at least a month to get a bill of this size, as he whiles away his life counting other people's money.'

In contrast, they had wads and wads of notes, all of their own. The pills were now dissolved, crushed and disappearing in a glass of Calcigenol, looking like a glass of milk, but tasting very different. The loot was in the bathroom, ready to burn in the basin. The Kid is laughing aloud. Dorda also laughs, if a little fearfully, at what he's cooking up.

It was then, at some point or other, at some given moment, it became known that the criminals were setting fire to the five million pesos remaining to them from the raid on the San Fernando Town Hall from which, as is well known, they seized seven million.

They began tossing burning 1,000-peso bills out of the window. From the kitchen skylight they succeeded in floating the burning money down towards the corner. The bills looked like butterflies of light, flaming notes.

A buzz of indignation rippled through the crowd.

They're burning it.'

They're burning the money.'

If the money were the sole justification for the murders they committed, and if what they did, they did for the money they were now burning, that had to mean they had no morals nor motives, that they acted and killed gratuitously, out of a taste for evil, out of pure evil, that they were born assassins, insensate criminals, degenerates. Filled with indignation, the citizens gathered to observe the scene, offering shouts of horror and loathing, looking like something from a witches' sabbath straight out of the Middle Ages (according to the papers), they couldn't bear the prospect of 500,000 dollars being burned before their very eyes, in a move that left the city and the country horror-struck, and which lasted precisely fifteen interminable minutes, which is exactly how long it takes to burn such an astronomical quantity of money, those notes that, for reasons beyond the authorities' control, were destroyed on a metal sheet called, in Uruguay, a 'hub' and which is used as the brazier for the grill in barbecueing the Sunday roast. It was in just such a 'hub' that the money went up in smoke, and the police stood by in stupefaction, for what could they do with criminals capable of such outrageous behaviour? Scandalized, people's minds indignantly and immediately turned to the poor, those lacking in basic necessities, the rural population of Uruguay living on the margins, and to the little orphans whose futures could have been secured by that very amount.

'If they had only saved the life of a single one of the orphaned children, they would have given some sort of point to their existence, the cretins…' announced a lady, 'but they are evil to the core, bad from the innards out, mere animals,' the journalists were told by the eye-witnesses, and the television cameras rolled, then transmitted all-day-round repeats of the rite which the TV presenter Jorge Foister labelled an act of cannibalism.

'Burning innocent money is an act of cannibalism.'

If they had given away the money, if they had thrown it out of the window at the people gathered on the street, if they agreed with the police to hand it over to a charitable foundation, everything would have gone differently for them.

'For example, had they donated those hundreds of thousands to improving prison conditions where they themselves are going to be held…'

As it was, everyone understood perfectly well that this was a declaration of all-out war, a direct attack, a textbook case, waged on society as a whole.

'They should be hanged.'

'They should be left to die slowly, burnt to a crisp.'

The idea got out that money is innocent, even when acquired as a consequence of death and crime. It couldn't be considered culpable, but rather it should be viewed as neutral, as a symbol that comes in useful depending on how one wants to use it.

The notion also began to circulate that the burnt money served as an example of murderous madness. Only crazed killers and immoral beasts could be sufficiently cynical to burn 500,000 dollars. Such an act (the dailies said) was worse than all the crimes that they had committed, because it was an act of nihilism and an example of pure terrorism.

In statements made to the magazine Marcha, the Uruguayan philosopher Washington Andrada signalled that however terrible one might consider it, such an action, a kind of innocent potlatch let loose on a society with no memory of such a ritual, an act absolute and free in itself, a gesture of sheer waste and sheer outpouring, would in other societies have been taken as a sacrifice made to the gods because only the most valiant is worthy of sacrifice and there is nothing more valiant between ourselves than money, so said Professor Andrada, and he was at once summoned by the magistrate.

The manner in which they burnt the money is proof absolute of their evil genius, because they burnt the money by rendering clearly visible the bills of 1,000 pesos which gradually took light, one after the next, the 1,000-peso bills burned like butterflies whose wings are touched by the flames of a candle and beat for another second as they flare, flying on through the air though consumed by fire for an interminable instant before burning out and turning to ash.

And after all these interminable minutes in which they say the notes burnt like flaming birds before transforming into a heap of charcoal, a funeral pyre to our social values (as declared an eye-witness on television), a wonderfully beautiful column of azure ash raining from the window in a shower resembling the calcified remains of the dead that get scattered across the ocean, or over the mountains and woods, only not over the filthy city streets, for ash must never drift on to the stone floor of our concrete jungles.

In the wake of this act which hypnotized then paralysed everyone, the police came round first, reacting by launching a brutal offensive as if the time in which the Nihilists (as the newspapers now called them) completed their blind ritual had dazzled and delayed them, yet also left them prepared and further inclined to achieve the final hecatomb.