Sweet Money (7 page)

 

 

A woman of undefined age appears from the next room, dragging her feet. She’s missing her two front teeth and the rest of them are broken and yellowed. She looks Fatso up and down and slams the glass down on the table.

 

 

One-Eyed looks at José and forces a smile. He serves Horacio some wine, then turns back to José and smiles.

 

 

The goodbye ritual is short and sweet. After the man walks through the curtain, the other two check each other out during a long moment of silence. Finally, One-Eyed gets up, goes to the doorway, pulls back the curtain, looks
up and down the alleyway and returns. He switches on the radio; a rasping cumbia is playing and he turns the volume way up.

 

 

One-Eyed’s formidable laugh finishes up in a hacking cough that turns his one eye red; he pounds himself on the chest to quell it.

 

 

One-Eyed Giardina stands up, tells the woman to keep Horacio company and leaves. She sits down, lights a cigarette and stares at him while she fiddles with a box of matches. Horacio can’t remember if he’s seen her before or if she just reminds him of somebody else, but he knows that what he has in front of him is the ruins of a woman who once was beautiful. She still has some of a beautiful woman’s gestures, something her appearance can’t completely cancel out. Ten minutes later Giardina returns carrying a gun wrapped in a flannel cloth. The woman, clearly obeying rules long since established,
immediately gets up and leaves. One-Eyed places the package on the table and lights a cigarette, motioning to Horacio to unwrap it. He slowly folds back the flannel. One-Eyed was telling the truth: there in front of him is a Ruger MK II .22LR semi-automatic stainless-steel pistol. Few guns are as well made as this one. It’ll cost him a fortune, but it’ll be well worth it. Light, trustworthy, he’s never heard of one of these jamming. It has one feature that makes it the king of close-range shooting: the chamber is mounted on a system of springs that dampens the recoil from the detonation. The long barrel considerably reduces the report from this notably quiet pistol. To miss with this you’d have to be a real moron.

 

 

A few blocks from there, on Viamonte past Leandro Alem, Miranda is sitting and waiting for Bangs and Dandy at one of the tables in the back of El Navegante. He orders a bottle of Gancia wine and a plate of olives. He sees them enter: Dandy’s fatter and Bangs is more nervous than ever. They join him at the table. Anybody seeing
the three of them would think they were co-workers out on a dinner date. They order pork loin with chips
a la provenzal
, red wine and soda water. Dandy digs in, Bangs talks non-stop. Miranda observes: the crow’s feet, the reading glasses, the slow reaction time, the unsteady hands, the hearing loss, the liver spots and that look of only slightly haughty resignation. Bangs speaks now with a lisp – his tongue is dual-tasking, making sure his dentures don’t pop out. Dandy’s movements are a lot less precise; he looks depressed, dispirited. The etchings time has left on his friends’ faces are merely a reflection of the same on his own. He looks at the three of them in the mirror on the wall and asks himself:
I’m going to rob a bank with these buffoons?
The prospect does not inspire much confidence; on the other hand, he doesn’t like the young ones. Those hoods are way too crazy, they snort a lot of blow, they want everything yesterday, they’re greedy and strung out, they turn violent at the slightest excuse, and at the drop of a hat they’ll stab you in the back or betray you without the least little qualm. He prefers old-school crooks, those who live by a code of honour, who aren’t going to turn you in or sell you out for a couple of pesos. People with experience, who’ve been inside and know it’s better to stay out. Like these two. Something can always go wrong, and time for robbery is always less than for murder. His plan is good, so good that he gets more and more excited as he spells it out to his accomplices, who also get excited just listening to him. His divine inspiration spreads a gold patina over all their regrets, which just a moment before had soured the scene with bitterness.

 

 

The technical part of the discussion continues till midnight. They work out the details, weigh all the pros and cons. They decide that Mole will look after the loot and how they’ll divvy it up. The most complicated part is choosing the team. The three of them trust and respect each other, but it won’t be an easy matter to choose two others. One guy’s inside, another’s sick, the other’s retired, they don’t trust that one and that one’s crazy. They deal out then discard one name after another and finally decide on Fastfingers to drive the getaway car. Valentín, a drama student, will drive the truck. Mole will be in charge of setting things up with them. Valentín will place the
order at the lumberyard. A few minutes before the order leaves the warehouse, he’ll show up and ask them to add a few things to it, then he’ll get in the truck with the driver to show him the way. Their destination will be an abandoned house that has a long driveway to the back of the property. When they get there, he’ll subdue him and leave him tied up in a shack in the back. Then he’ll take the truck to the police station and act out the delivery scene.

 

Mole hands out a few thousand to make sure nobody gets into trouble before the day of the robbery. At the door to the restaurant, Bangs stops the first taxi that drives by.

 

 

Dandy starts down Leandro Alem, then turns down La Boca on his way to his dealer’s house; he wants some good blow, not like that shit he sold him last time and that he’ll have to make good on now. Miranda starts toward Retiro. He’s going to scope out some weapons for the heist. He turns into Villa 31. When he’s a few yards from his destination he sees someone coming out of the same shack he’s headed for. Quickly, he slips down a side street and watches from the shadows as Horacio leaves. He can tell he’s a cop in a split second. He watches him walk away whistling. Then he steps out of his hiding place, goes up to the curtain and claps his hands. When One-Eyed appears and greets him, the stench of cheap wine on his breath hits him in the face like a backhanded slap.

 

10

It’s been two days since Ramona left him at a pension in Chacarita with a few australes, a bottle of analgesics and a lot of advice. She said she’d call or come by, but he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of her and has no way of getting in touch. This morning the owner came to ask him how long he’d be staying because someone else was interested in the room. He also told him he’d have to pay in advance.

 

He counts the money he has left. He’s got to do something, and he’s got to do it now. He gulps down three aspirins, gets dressed and goes out without a clear idea where he’s headed or what he’s going to do once he gets there. He walks through the streets, trying to recognize this Buenos Aires that’s shining in all its plastic splendour. The new economic policy, the Austral Plan, is basically just more of the same: a repeat performance of the
plata dulce
, or “sweet money” period during the dictatorship. Finally free from state terror, consumers are partying it up, officials are getting their knickers in a twist talking about democracy, and the majority say they never heard of the atrocities committed during the Dirty War. The dollar is worth less than the austral,
and people are rushing all over the place trying to buy the very latest imported toys. Shop windows manage to look little better than a bad imitation of their cheapest American counterparts. The frenetic compulsion to buy is heightened by the unconscious certainty that this prosperity is fleeting. In the meantime, the faces of hunger and poverty that nobody seems to want to see are already showing up at the party. The captains of the financial sector accumulate capital as they gnaw constantly at the feet of the presidential throne where, buoyed up by his image as the champion of democracy, Alfonsín reposes in confidence.

 

He heads for the city centre. He’s considering a visit to police headquarters; he’s still got one friend in Criminal Records, but it may be too dangerous to get anywhere near the place. If the Apostles killed Jorge, he might be in their sights as well. Ramona’s fear when she found out and the alacrity with which she washed her hands of him can only mean one thing: he’s a marked man. She didn’t say it in so many words, but it is implicit, and even if he was being paranoid, entering headquarters through the main door doesn’t seem like the best way to find out.

He keeps walking till after one o’clock. He sits down on a bench in Plaza Lavalle. The effect of the aspirin begins to wear off, and the wound in his chest starts to hurt, less than yesterday though,
and more than tomorrow
, Lascano thinks in an unusual burst of optimism.

The shootout happened just a few blocks away; that was the day he saw Eva for the last time. He’d rented a safe deposit box at a nearby bank and put twenty thousand dollars in it. Eva had found the money by accident in a
house she was hiding in when the military came to get her. Then, when all hell broke loose with Giribaldi and his death squad, they went to get the money so they could get out of town, but there they met Giribaldi’s henchmen, right at the door to the bank, and that’s when it all came down. The last thing he saw was Eva running away.
Did she manage to get the money? Maybe yes, maybe no. What if it all happened so fast she didn’t have time, and she had to escape without it?
He knows he’s desperately clutching at straws, out of necessity, because he can’t come up with another idea. Someone he used to know, a guy named Fermín, worked at that bank. He decides to go there, only a few blocks away. When he gets there, he sees that there is, indeed, a bank. His memory of it, though, is quite different: the one he remembers had a kind of Soviet-style austerity and a different name. He goes in anyway. The safe deposit boxes used to be in the rear, almost within reach, the offices have made way for desks separated by carpeted partitions, and the tellers are all very young women dressed in uniforms of skirts and jackets, which look just like men’s business suits with a touch of sexy “lite”. Banks used to look like prisons; now they look more like a cross between a boutique and a brothel. The walls are covered with posters showing young men and women, smiling and prosperous, offering “package deals” with bombastic names, that include bank accounts, credit cards,
loans for the life you deserve
. Everything carefully designed to neatly package and tie up the customer. The deviousness here is so obvious that even the guy who designed the poster should be put in jail. On one side is the only office with glass walls. A small sign says “F. Martínez – Manager”. Lascano lowers
his eyes and meets those of Fermín, who looks at him as if he were seeing a ghost.