Money to Burn Page 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Go fuck yourself.'

  'Your rights are protected by the magistrate.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Do you think they could have followed me …'

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

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

  'Or else die along with us.'

  'So ... why not?'

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

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

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

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

  'Give me cover.'

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

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

  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 fir
epower, 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.