Money to Burn (16 page)

'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 with 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.'

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.