Money to Burn Read online

  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 answ
ered 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.'