Money to Burn (6 page)

'You're not Uruguayan, are you?'

They gazed at one another for a moment in silence and Nando shook his head.

'I'm not Uruguayan, but I'll get you over to Uruguay.'

'I know that, of course, but you have the look of a native,
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you know, you sort of give the impression
...
' burbled the Gaucho. 'All Uruguayans look as if they've been widowed
...
The truth of the matter is, they all look like Peronists, Uruguayans do, all widows of the General.'

'You're a nice guy, Gaucho. What's up with you?' commented Nando. 'You've launched into speech, have you, now that you're feeling better?'

The Gaucho raised his newspaper again and resumed reading.

Nando spoke like this to him because the Gaucho was a man of few words, and got along with the Kid without the use of them. They'd often spend hours alone together, without speaking, thinking and listening to things. He could hear a kind of murmuring in his head, a short-wave radio attempting to infiltrate the plates of his skull, transmitting via the inner part of the brain, something along those lines.

At times there'd be an interference, strange sounds, people talking in unknown languages, chattering simultaneously, who knows whether from Japan, Russia, whatever. It didn't bother him too much because it had been going on ever since he was a boy. Other times it annoyed him, for example when he was trying to get to sleep, or when all at once phrases entered his head and he had to spit them out. Like just now, when he'd told Nando he was a Uruguayan widow. He'd heard it in the bones of his skull, he'd spat it out, and then the guy had looked at him strangely. He was not wanting to cause problems, and at the same time amusing himself thinking of what a turnip-head Nando was when he told him he had the aspect of a
charma
, a native Uruguayan. And the oddity of the word 'aspect' likewise evoked a grin in him. It sounded as if someone had told Nando he had a 'prospect' or an 'insect'. Something medicinal. So, he awarded himself an amphetamine, an Actemin. Nando and the Kid carried on chatting, but the Gaucho scarcely heard them, it was like the wind in the trees. He sat down on the bed and listened.

'Che,'
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said Nando, looking first at the Kid and then at the closed door. 'Is Malito still in there?'

Malito was still in there, locked into the other room, the Venetian blinds pulled well down to screen out the sun's rays, in twilight, but with a bedside lamp on, shaped like a tulip and with a 25-watt bulb. Because he couldn't bear to go to sleep in darkness, after all those years in prison with the light on all night long, a little habit from the years in his cell. Nando had got to know Malito in the Sierra Chica prison back in '56 or '57, and remembered him as a reserved sort of lad, very young, who'd fallen into political hands as if by mistake. They'd tortured the lot of them as if it were an initiation ritual. Those were the tough days of the resistance, and Malito found himself on a block along with Communists and Trotskyists and the Nazis from the National Restoration Vanguard. He got into fights with them: there were a number of members of the Metallurgy trade union, two or three former army officers and a few guys from the Tacuara barracks. Malito and Nando became mates. It was from then you could date their unlikely alliance, founded on long hours of conversation through the dead prison nights. Both highly intelligent, they rapidly learnt from one another and as rapidly set about drawing up plans.

'Any group who's daring enough can do a lot in a country like this,' Nando was wont to say. 'There's swindlers all over the place. A highly disciplined and ordered group, a band of well-armed spivs can achieve anything here.' And here was where they were. He thought it best to gather together an armed gang of insiders rather than go outside and recruit people he'd need to train up.

Nando dreamed of bringing them into the Organization. Laying pipe-bombs, robbing banks, cutting electric cables, starting fires, raising hell. But things worked out otherwise and it was the old swindling insiders who ended up making Nando their Organizer. He was gifted with clearsightedness, and a strategic perspective. It was he who'd provided the necessary intelligence to mount a raid on the Bank. He had umpteen contacts which he'd used to establish the essential lines of withdrawal and retreat after the operation. He knew everyone, and he knew how to operate. He'd obtain the falsified documents, the necessary shipments, the Uruguayan contacts, and provide bribes and the outlets for selling on arms. He was at the heart of everything and was planning a secret crossing to Uruguay. But there were still many problems to be resolved before making a move. And Nando wasn't in favour of getting mixed up with the police and the informers who made the handover during the raid.

Malito sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette: all the weapons were spread out on the table, and the newspapers were strewn around the floor. He'd no desire to share out the loot, not with the narks, nor with the cops.

'You're daft, they'll denounce you straight away.'

'Nando, if I were to hand over half the cash to those idiots who didn't lift a finger while we risked our bollocks,' here Malito grinned, 'then I really would be daft.'

The situation was confused; the police were attempting to disguise what they knew, they appeared disorientated and followed their established tendency to link the assault to Peronist right-wing factions. Was that where they were looking? Nando wasn't sure, though he knew Silva the Big Pig well enough. Police Commissioner Silva, from Robberies and Larceny, didn't believe in investigating, he simply went for torture and denunciation as his chosen methods. (As soon as they were detained, the gunmen knew to cut themselves with razors, on their forearms and legs, to prevent the cattle prods being used on them. 'If there's blood there's no cattle prod, because you'd collapse instantly from the electric current.') He'd mounted a death squad on the Brazilian model. But Silva always acted within the law, always with the backing of the Federal Police, because his working hypothesis was that every crime had a political significance. 'Common criminality no longer exists,' Silva was wont to wax lyrical. 'Nowadays all our criminals are ideological ones. It's the legacy that Peronism bequeathed us. Any young thug you catch in the act of thuggery automatically shouts "Long live Perón!" or "Evita still lives!" when you go to snatch him. They're all social delinquents, terrorists who get up in the middle of the night, leave their women asleep in bed, take the number 60 bus, get out somewhere near a level-crossing and blow up a train. If, like the Algerians, they're at war with the whole of society, they'll be wanting to kill the lot of us.' This was the reason (according to Silva) why you had to coordinate police activity with the State Intelligence Service and purge the shit from the city.

Cold, intelligent, a real professional, well trained but utterly fanatical, that Commissioner Silva. He had his own weird personal history which nobody knew too well: according to some, a daughter of his had been killed in an attack on her way home from school; according to others, his wife had been rendered paralysed (when she was thrown down a lift-shaft); still others claimed he'd taken a bullet in the balls and been left impotent; all these stories and more ran in various versions. He was paranoid, he never slept; he had a number of extravagant notions as to the political future and the advance of Communism and of the vulgar masses. He always gave the correct line, advancing some set-piece argument or other, offering detailed digressions by way of explanation. Those in the Peronist resistance (resumed Silva), weary of militant heroics, had begun to take their own direct action. It was vital to sever this connection, or else the bad old days when the anarchists held sway would return, when no one could distinguish the crooks from the politicians. The gallant criminal divisions of Buenos Aires province had been waging a campaign of extermination. They killed all they encountered bearing arms and took no prisoners. And they'd encountered only support from the head of Federal Police, who saw only a call to Armageddon in every strike threat.

'Silva smells a rat in everything that happens. He'll hang on a little longer because he wants to be certain, but his staff is stuffed with stoolies who keep him abreast of things
...
'

'Have you lot spoken to him?'

'We've got people in the Head Office and we know what they're up to, but Silva only talks to himself, never even to his own mother. Get the picture?' inquired Nando.

'Yup,' replied Malito. He was evidently worried. 'Call the Crow.'

The Crow emerged from the nest where he was bedbound with the Girl, then went over and shut himself in the room with Malito and Nando. After a while he came out, wearing a bored expression.

'Come on in, Kid,' he said and stared at the Gaucho. 'Malito says that you're his eyes and ears, observing everything from the balcony overlooking the street.'

Dorda was wounded in the neck, not seriously, but a bullet had rebounded off his pistol butt and hit the nape of his neck. He began bleeding heavily and everyone assumed he was going to die, but in a few hours the wound began to scab over and he began to look better. But he was weakened by the considerable loss of blood and the Kid had been looking after him.

'What's up?'

'Nothing. I'll let you know.'

Dorda didn't move. He stared at Kid Brignone, who stuck his pistol in his belt and also went through into the other room.

'Up you get, Gaucho,' said the Crow from the doorway. 'And keep watch over the lovenest.'

Gaucho Dorda remained alone in the room. Without shifting from his position on the sofa, he searched out the bottle of amphetamines, swallowing two of them without water. They on their side of the door were hatching plots. They didn't speak to him, they never asked him anything. The Kid was in charge of making plans. As far as the Gaucho was concerned, he and the Kid were one and the same. Twinned brothers, identical twins, belonging to the mafia fraternity, meaning (here Dorda struggled to explain himself) they understood each other without words, they acted telepathically. It even seemed to him that he felt the same way as Kid Brignone. That was why Dorda left the daily timetable to be settled by the Kid. Money and decision- taking mattered little to him. His sole interest was in drugs, 'his obscure pathological mentality' (according to the report by Dr Bunge, the prison psychiatrist), he rarely thought of anything else apart from drugs and the voices to which he paid secret attention. It was logical (again according to Dr Bunge) that the Gaucho would leave all the decisions to the Kid. 'A very interesting case of Gestalt symbiosis. There may be two of them, but they function as a single entity. The Gaucho acts as the body, solely responsible for executing the action, a psychotic killer; the Kid is the brains and does the thinking for him.'

However, he also heard voices, the Blond Gaucho. Not all the time, but from time to time, he heard voices, inside his head, between the plates of his skull. Women addressing him, issuing commands. That was his secret and Dr Bunge determined it was necessary to give him various tests and various sessions of hypnotherapy so that the themes of this intimate music might be drawn out. Dr Bunge became obsessed with this case, became struck by these voices his prisoner-patient Dorda listened to in silence. 'They tell me there's a lagoon up near Carhué, and that if you throw yourself into the water, there's so much salt in it you float, and they say that there some bastard chieftain met his death, a Ranquel indian
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who drowned there when they tied a millstone to his neck, 'cause they said he fucked some poor gringo he'd caught and chained to a post by the ankle, that indian went and did it to him over on the indian settlement, this Coliqueo chief I'm telling you about. And they drowned him in the lake. Ever since then the poor devil appears from time to time, floating on the surface still dressed in his plumes, and the current carries him away through the marshes between the flatlands of rushes and reeds like a ghost.' Then his voice would go all lethargic and he'd repeat, the Blond Gaucho, a fragment from the Holy Bible (Matthew XVIII: 6) which a priest had read to him: 'And whomsoever should scandalize a white man, were it better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he be drowned in the depth of the lagoon at Carhué.'

Apart from the voices, he was a regular sort of guy. On occasions even Dr Bunge thought he was faking it, this Dorda, looking to escape from the law by feigning madness and avoiding a sentence. In any case, Dr Bunge wrote in his report that Dorda's 'character pathology' had all the indications of a behavioural aberration, with a tendency towards aphasia. Because he heard voices he spoke little: they were the explanation for his taciturnity. Those who avoid speech, for example the autistic, are always hearing voices, people talking to them, they live on another frequency, preoccupied by the hubbub, an interminable muttering, listening to instructions, shouts, suffocated giggles, receiving orders. (Sometimes they called him 'the Slapper', these voices, all these women, calling to Gaucho Dorda, 'Come here Slapper, Slag, Bitch,' and he kept quiet, without moving, so that nobody could hear what they were saying to him, sadly gazing into space, occasionally longing to cry but without giving in so that no one would ever discover that he was a woman.) He took the greatest pride in his decision-taking and in maintaining sang-froid. Nobody could read his mind, or hear what his women said to him. He sported a brand of sunglasses called Clipper, with reflective lenses, he'd found them in a glove-pocket one afternoon when he was robbing a posh car out near leafy Palermo. He liked them, found them elegant, they afforded him a worldly air and he looked at himself in profile in the mirror, in every bathroom, in every shop window.

Right now he removed his Clippers, and with extreme care began perusing the design of an outboard motor on a launch drawn to scale. He was still sprawled across the sofa, studying a magazine called
Popular Mechanics
, and pausing now and then to draw engines. He sat down and placed a sheet of kitchen paper on the side table and began tracing with the tip of his pencil.