Money to Burn (3 page)

Dorda began laughing, the spectacle of the car setting off against the traffic, riding on the pavement, headed towards the square in the midst of bullets and corpses, amused him no end.

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.