Money to Burn (23 page)

The Gaucho's memory was functioning none too well, but when he saw that face in the early morning mist, elegant and joyful as it appeared to him, he was sure it must be true, the Kid looked so like the figure of Christ silhouetted by the station lights.

Commissioner Silva managed to slink his way towards the second floor flat and threw himself in through the ruined door, firing off machine-gun rounds in all directions. The very last gunman, Gaucho Dorda, rose unsteadily to his feet, already 'done in', made a great effort, and fired off his machine-gun without managing to hit his target, he was too weak, and Silva seemed to him to be far too far away, in the clarity of the afternoon light. So he let himself drop, like someone giving in to sleep after a night of insomnia.

With every precaution in place, the police continued their advance, confirming as they did so that two of the gangsters (Mereles 'the Crow' and Brignone 'the Kiď) lay dead on the floor, and the third was severely wounded, and on the verge of death.

Shortly afterwards the Chief of Police's call could be heard, signalling towards the street for the firing to cease, given that the criminals were no longer able to offer any further resistance. From the policemen's position could be seen the feet of one of the delinquents, lying by the doorway.

When the journalist, weathered from the battlefields, entered the apartment, the spectacle before him acquired Danteesque dimensions. No other adjective could serve to describe it. Blood flooded the place and it seemed inconceivable that three men could have achieved such decisiveness and heroism. Dorda remained alive, his back against the broken bedhead, embracing the Kid as if he were cradling a toy doll in his arms.

Two paramedics entered and lifted the wounded man, who continued smiling, his eyes wide open and an unintelligible murmur on his lips. When they took Dorda downstairs, curious passers-by and neighbours gathered on the landings, and the cops leapt on him and beat him into unconsciousness. 'A Christ figure,' noted the lad from
El Mundo
, 'the scapegoat, the idiot who has to bear the pain of us all.'

The police were at the point of insurrection when they learnt that one of the gunmen was to be brought out from the building alive. To the cries of 'Murderer' and 'Death to the assassin', they crowded the stretcher and beat the dying man.

When Dorda's bleeding body appeared, its bones clearly broken and, clearly visible, one eye wounded and his belly split open, yet still just alive, it first evoked a response of silence and stupor. The crowds blocked his passage, and the stretcher-bearers were forced to pause.

He was the first to come out, still alive, the first they could see of those evil-doers who had battled heroically for sixteen hours. A fragile body, with the aspect of a boxer, a sacrificial victim, and at the sight of it a wave of loathing flowed through the crowd and when the first man hit him, it was as if the world had caved in, and the dykes of rancour had been breached.

An almost unstoppable avalanche of passion was unleashed on to the luckless man.

Four or five policemen and journalists hit him with their weapons and their cameras, and the wounded gunman became a pool of blood, still living and palpitating, who seemed to continue smiling and murmuring. 'Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners,' recited the Gaucho. He could see the church and the priest waiting for him in his home parish. Perhaps if he could make his confession, he could obtain atonement, or at least he could explain why he'd killed the redhead, because the voices had told him she no longer wanted to carry on living. In contrast, he himself now wanted to go on living. He wanted to return to lying with the body of the Kid, the two embracing together in bed, in some hostel lost in the remote provinces.

The avalanche encircled him and hundreds of voices rose towards the heavy afternoon sun clamouring for his death.

'Kill
him
...
Go on, kill him now!
...
Let him die!'

No one had ever seen anything like it. According to some, the collective renunciation of control was being justified then and there by the terrible and cruel pain caused to society and its laws by the criminals.

The desire for vengeance, which is perhaps the first spark in the electric shock of the human mind when it is cut into, coursed rapidly around the circuit of the crowd. And the crowd heaved: several hundred men and women from all walks of life clamouring for revenge.

The police cordons were by now useless, and the bloody mass that was once Dorda was subjected to a hail of blows from every side, kicks, punches, spitting, insults - every kind of vulgarity and brutality.

Finally he was torn from the tumult, and taken by ambulance to be transferred to the hospital at Maciel. It was 14.15 in the afternoon, and the ambulance into which they'd finally managed to board him was submerged in a human tide.

Then the Argentine Chief of Police spoke, and his voice spread like oil over the troubled waters of the hyper-excited crowd.

He requested calm, he requested pacification in order for the work of the justice system to take place, he requested a pause for meditation and profound mourning in memory of the departed.

'I've awarded him his last blow,' added Silva.

And over the heads of the crowd, in the heavy air of the afternoon, he raised his right fist, red with blood.

Tears flowed copiously down the round and sagging jowls of Commissioner Silva, mingling with sweat and the afternoon heat, the teargas which still clung lazily to the treetops and the sour scent of blood of two more policemen, dead that very morning on the threshold of the building
...

Leaving, travelling against the one-way system on Canelones Street and going south, the Public Health ambulance headed towards Maciel Hospital at full speed. They haven't killed me, and they're not going to be able to kill me.' He could taste the flavour of blood on his lips and the pain of a smashed tooth and could see the whiteness of the afternoon through his clouded vision.

'My mother always knew that I was destined to be misunderstood and nobody has ever understood me, but occasionally I've succeeded in getting someone to love me. Oh father,' he said as if it were a far-off echo, 'the skewbald horse will come and carry me away from here.' Then at last he could be reunited with the Kid Brignone, in the open country, out in the cornfields, out in the quiet nights. The ambulance siren retreated, and was lost as it turned the corner of the crossroads and Herrera Street was at last empty once more.

This novel tells a true story. It involves a minor case, already forgotten among police chronicles, which for me none the less, the more I investigated it, acquired the aura and pathos of a legend. The facts occurred in two capital cities (Buenos Aires and Montevideo) between 27 September and 6 November 1965. I have respected the continuity of the action and (wherever possible) the language of the protagonists and the witnesses of this history. Its dialogues and opinions do not in all instances correspond to the precise localities where they were first expressed, but I have always used original material in the account of the words and actions of its characters.

Throughout the book I have attempted to maintain the stylistic register and 'metaphorical gesture' (as Brecht called it) of the social reports whose theme remains illegal violence.

The mass of material documentation has been deployed as dictated by the plot, meaning that whenever I have been unable to confirm the facts with direct sources, I have opted to omit that particular version. This explains why the great unknown of the book (its 'fantastical instant') has to be the mysterious disappearance of Enrique Mario Malito, the gang's leader. Nobody really knows what happened to him in the hours following the siege. Numerous hypotheses exist regarding his fate but I have chosen to respect the intrigue woven by the story's protagonists.

Some say he split from the gang at the moment when they were surprised changing the plates on the Studebaker and that he travelled in the Hillman to get away from Marmajará Street ahead of the confrontation with the police. He had a rendezvous arranged with Brignone for the next day, but the succession of captures and the siege of the block of flats cut their connection. The most plausible account assures us that, despite being isolated and without contacts, he managed to escape and cross to Buenos Aires and that he died in a shootout in Floresta in 1969. The most extravagant version recounts that he managed to flee over the rooftops just as the police arrived, and that he hid himself in a water tank where he remained alive for two days until he could escape to Paraguay where he lived in Asuncion until his death (from cancer) in 1982 under an assumed name (that of Anlbal Stocker, according to some sources).

For his part, the Gaucho Dorda recovered from his wounds and was extradited to Buenos Aires where he died the following year, assassinated during a revolt that took place in Caseros jail (it would appear to have been initiated by a police infiltrator). During his stay in hospital and in prison (in Uruguay) in January and February of 1966, he was interviewed by the employee of the daily
El Mundo
from Buenos Aires, which published some of Dorda's statements in features published on 14 and 15 March 1966. In addition, I obtained access to the transcripts of Dorda's interrogation, which reside in the annals of the case and the psychiatric reports of Dr Amadeo Bunge. I owe a further debt of gratitude to my friend Dr Aníbal Reynal, a judge of the primary courts, for granting me permission to consult and index this mass of material. The assistance of the judge of Assizes of the 12th District of Montevideo, Dr Nelson Sassia, was of immense value, for he allowed me to work with the statements of witnesses and the clerks to the court used in the case. It was here I came across the testimonial accounts offered by Margarita Taibo, Nando Heguilein and Yamandú Raymond Acevedo, among others of those involved. In Buenos Aires, the lawyer Raúl Anaya permitted me to consult records of the interrogations of Bianca Galeano, Fontán Reyes, Carlos Nino and others implicated in the case. I also obtained access to the declarations of Police Commissioner Cayetano Silva in his internal summary when he was obliged to bring a defence in an internal inquiry mounted by the police on grounds of his presumed complicity (an investigation that reached no final conclusion on the matter).

The remaining significant source for this book was the transcript of the secret recordings made by the police department on Herrera and Obes Streets, to which I obtained access thanks to an order of Dr Sassia, who facilitated my work with this confidential material. In November 1965 the Montevideo newspaper
Marcha
published a lengthy interview done by journalist Carlos M. Gutiérrez with the Uruguayan radio operator Roque Pérez, responsible for the technical control of all the recordings made in the apartment block at the time.

Naturally, I also went to the archives of all the newspapers published during that period. In Buenos Aires there were the
Crónica, Clarín,
La
Nación
and
La Razón
de Buenos Aires
;
in Montevideo,
El
Dia, Acción,
El
Pais
and
Debate.
Of particular usefulness were the accounts and additional notes signed simply E.R., who covered the assault and served as the Argentine paper
El Mundo's
special reporter on the spot. I have freely reproduced from these accounts, without which it would have been impossible to obtain an exact reconstruction of the facts narrated in this book.

Thanks to the generosity of my friend the sculptor Carlos Boccardo, who lived in Montevideo throughout the events described on the corner of Herrera and Obes Streets, I was able to orchestrate the different versions of this same story from a variety of descriptions and evidence.

My first link to the story as related in this book (as always happens in every non-fictional account) occurred by chance. One afternoon, at the end of March or beginning of April 1966, I took a train
en route
to Bolivia. There I met Bianca Galeano, called by the newspapers 'the concubine' of the gunman Mereles ('the Crow'). She was sixteen years old but looked like a woman of thirty, and was in the process of fleeing the authorities. She told me an extraordinary tale which I half-believed, tailoring it to elicit (as indeed it did) a quantity of meals taken in the train's buffet car. During the long hours of the journey, which lasted over two days, she told me that she had just been released from jail; that she had been held a prisoner for six months for associating with a gang of thieves who had robbed the San Fernando Bank; and that she was going into exile to live in the Bolivian capital of La Paz. She gave me a first, muddled version of the deeds I vaguely recalled having read in the dailies some months earlier.

The girl spoke of a gangster who had taught her about the other side of life, and who had since died, brought down after having resisted like a hero for fifteen hours, and sparked in me the initial interest in her story. 'There were around three hundred cops, and they held out surrounded by the lot of them, but nobody could smoke them out of their lair,' the girl said in a vocabulary that sounded hostile, like words angrily used to describe a defeat that should have ended in victory. The kid had given up attending secondary school, become a cocaine junkie (as I could confirm after only a short time travelling together), though she described herself as the daughter of a judge, and swore that the Crow had left her pregnant. She spoke to me about the Twins, Kid Brignone and Gaucho Dorda, and about Malito and Twisty Bazán, and I listened to her as if brought face to face with the Argentine version of a Greek tragedy. The heroes were determined to confront and resist the insurmountable, and chose death as their destiny.

I got out in San Salvador, in Jujuy province, because I wanted to reach Yavi for the Holy Week processions. The train stopped for half an hour for the railway gauges to be changed. She got out with me, and we bade one another farewell at the zinc counter of a bar alongside the platform, where we drank a Brazilian beer together. I recall taking notes of what she told me both on the train and at the station, then again when I reached the hotel (for in those days I still considered that a writer had to go everywhere with his journalist's notepad). Then a while later (in 1968 or '69) I started properly researching the story, and wrote a first draft of this book.