The Mad Toy (4 page)

If the acids in the nitro-glycerine destroy the eggshell, make it a sheath out of gun cotton. Nobody will suspect that the harmless-looking sheath hides an explosive charge.

Enrique’s Proposal
– The Club should have a library of
scientific
works in order for its associates to be certain that they are robbing and killing according to the most modern industrial procedures. Also, after being a member of the Club for three months, each associate will be obliged to own a Browning pistol, a pair of rubber gloves and 100 grams of chloroform. The Club’s official chemist will be Associate Silvio.

Lucio’s Proposal
– All bullets should be poisoned with prussic acid and its toxic power should be tested by shooting a dog’s tail off with a single shot. The dog has to die in ten minutes.

‘
Che
, Silvio.’

‘What?’ Enrique said.

‘I was just thinking. We should organise clubs in every town in the Republic.’

‘No, the important thing,’ I interrupted, ‘is to practise for what we’re doing tomorrow. There’s no point concerning
ourselves
with trifles now.’

Lucio pulled up a bundle of dirty clothes that he was using as an ottoman. I continued:

‘Training as thieves has one key advantage: it makes you cold-blooded, which is the most important thing for the job. Also, experiencing danger makes you prudent.’

Enrique said:

‘Let’s cut all this speechifying and get down to something interesting. Here in the alley behind the butcher’s shop – the wall of Irzubeta’s house gave onto this alley – there’s a gringo who parks his car every night and then goes off to sleep in a room he rents in one of those big old houses in Zamudio Street. What about it Silvio, if we make his magneto and his horn… disappear?’

‘You know that’s a serious job?’

‘There’s no danger,
che
. We jump over the wall. The butcher sleeps like the dead. Yeah, we’ll have to wear gloves, I guess.’

‘And the dog?’

‘And why should I care? I’m friends with the dog.’

‘I just think he’s going to go off on one.’

‘What do you think, Silvio?’

‘And don’t forget that we’ll make more than a hundred for the magneto.’

‘It’s a good job, but slippery.’

‘Lucio, are you up for it?’

‘Trying to strong-arm me?… sure… I’ll put on my old trousers so I don’t rip my Sunday best…’

‘And you, Silvio?’

‘I’ll get out as soon as the old lady’s asleep.’

‘When should we meet up?’

‘Look,
che
, Enrique. I don’t like the job.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like it. They’re going to suspect us. The alley… The dog that didn’t bark in the night-time… if we can get there so easily we’re bound to leave traces… I don’t like it. You know I’m up for anything, but I don’t like it. It’s too close and the pigs are too nosy.’

‘Well we won’t do it then.’

We smiled as if we had just escaped from danger.

And so we lived days of unparalleled emotion, enjoying the money we had made from our robberies, money that had a special value for us and even seemed to speak to us in its own lively idiom.

The banknotes with their coloured pictures seemed to us to be the most meaningful, the nickel coins jangled merrily as we juggled them in our palms. Yes, money that we acquired through our scams seemed much more worthy and subtle, seemed to have some kind of maximum value, seemed to whisper in our ears with smiling praise and enticing mischief. It wasn’t the vile and odious money that is hated because it needs to be earned by hard work, but rather it was supple money, a silver sphere with two goblin legs and a dwarfish beard, jocular money, dancing money whose smell, like good wine, intoxicated us.

Our eyes were untroubled; I would dare say that our
foreheads
were haloed with a nimbus of pride and daring. Pride in knowing that if our actions had become public we would have been taken before a judge.

Sitting round a café table, we sometimes spoke about this:

‘What would you do with the Judge in the Criminal Court?’

‘I,’ Enrique replied, ‘I would speak to him about Darwin and Le Dantec.’ (Enrique was an atheist.)

‘And you, Silvio?’

‘I wouldn’t tell them anything, even if they cut my throat.’

‘And what about the rubber?’

We would look at each other in fright. We were terrified of the ‘rubber’, that truncheon that left no visible marks on its victim’s flesh; the rubber truncheon that is used to punish the bodies of thieves in the Police Department when they are slow in
confessing
their crimes.

With scarcely repressed rage, I replied:

‘They will never break me. They’ll have to kill me first.’

Whenever one of us would say this word,
kill
, the nerves in our faces would quiver, our eyes would remain fixed and open, looking at an illusory and distant scene of butchery, and our nostrils would flare as we breathed in the smell of gunpowder and blood.

‘That’s why we need to poison the bullets,’ Lucio insisted.

‘And make bombs,’ I continued. ‘No mercy. We have to blow them up, terrorize the fuzz. When their guard is down, bullets… send bombs to the judges through the post.’

This was how we spoke around the café table, solemn and enjoying our impunity before all other people, all the people who did not know that we were thieves, and a delicious fear gripped our hearts as we thought about the way in which these unknown girls who were passing by would look at us if they only knew that we, so young and so well-dressed, were thieves… Thieves!

A few days later, I met with Enrique and Lucio in a café at midnight to finalise the details of a robbery we were planning to commit.

Choosing the most solitary corner, we sat down at a table next to the window.

A thin rain tapped on the glass as the orchestra unleashed the dying climax of a jailhouse tango.

‘Are you sure, Lucio, that there are no guards?’

‘Positive. It’s holiday time and everyone’s gone away.’

We were discussing nothing less than taking down a school library.

Enrique, thoughtful, supported his cheek with one hand. The peak of his cap shaded his eyes.

I was worried.

Lucio was looking around with the satisfaction of someone on whom life smiles. In order to convince me that there was no danger he screwed up his forehead and spoke to me
confidentially
for the tenth time:

‘I know the route. What are you worried about? All you have to do is jump over the fence that goes from the street to the patio. The porters sleep in a separate room on the third floor. The library is on the second floor on the other side of the building.’

‘It’s an easy job, it’s in the bag,’ Enrique said. ‘It’d be a great job if we could get away with the Encyclopaedic Dictionary.’

‘And how are we going to carry twenty-eight volumes? You’re mad… unless you order a removal van.’

Some cars drove past with their tops down and the brightness of their arc lights, falling on the trees, threw long trembling stains on the ground. The waiter brought us coffee. The tables around us were still empty, up on the stage the musicians were chatting, and the sound of heels stamping on the ground came from the billiard room, where enthusiasts were applauding a particularly complicated cannon.

‘Shall we play some three-hand
tute?
’
7

‘Lay off your
tute
, man.’

‘It looks like it’s raining.’

‘All the better,’ said Enrique. ‘This is the sort of night that Montparnasse and Thénardier liked. Thénardier said: “Jean
Jacques Rousseau did worse than me.” He was a
ranún
, Thénardier was; I love that gypsy word.’
8

‘Is it still raining?’

I looked out onto the small square.

The water was falling at a slant, and between two rows of trees the wind moved it in a grey curtain.

Looking at the greenness of the branches and foliage lit up in the silver clarity of the arc lamps, I had a vision of parks shaken on a summer night by the noise of popular festivals, and the red rockets exploding in the blue sky. This unconscious evocation made me sad.

I have a clear memory of that last eventful night.

The musicians set free another song, one that on the
blackboard
was given the English name
Kiss-me
.

In this downbeat atmosphere, the melody swayed in a distant and tragic rhythm. I would have said that it was the voice of a chorus of poor emigrants on the deck of a transatlantic ferry, singing as the sun drowned in the heavy green waters.

I remember how my attention was drawn to the head of a violinist, Socratic and resplendently bald. There were
smoked-glass
spectacles balanced on his nose and you could tell how much his covered eyes had to work by the way in which his neck stuck out over the music stand.

Lucio asked me:

‘Are you still with Eleonora?’

‘No, we broke up already. She didn’t want to be my girlfriend any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because.’

Her image, united with the long sobs of the violins,
penetrated
me violently. It was a summons from my other voice, to look on her serene and sweet face. Oh! How her now distant smile had filled me with a painful ecstasy, and from the table, in
words of the spirit, I spoke to her as follows, while I enjoyed a bitterness that had more savour than any voluptuous pleasure:

‘Ah! If only I could have told you how much I loved you, with the music of
Kiss-me
as our accompaniment… to use this song to keep you from going… then perhaps… but she had loved me too… is it not true that you loved me, Eleonora?’

‘It’s stopped raining… Let’s go.’

‘Let’s go.’

Enrique threw a few coins on the table. He asked me:

‘Do you have the revolver?’

‘Yes.’

‘It won’t get stuck?’

‘I tried it out the other day. The bullet went through two builders’ planks.’

Irzubeta added:

‘If this goes well I’ll buy myself a Browning; but just in case I’ve brought my knuckle-dusters.’

‘Are they sharpened?’

‘Pointy as anything.’

A policeman walked towards us across the lawn in the middle of the square.

Lucio called out in a loud voice, loud enough for the cop to hear him:

‘The geography teacher’s out to get me,
che
, really has it in for me!’

Once we’d crossed the square diagonally, we found ourselves in front of the school walls, and when we got there we noticed that it was beginning to rain again.

There was a line of bushy plane trees around the corner of the building, which made the darkness in that triangle extremely thick. The rain made its own music on the foliage.

A tall fence bared its sharp teeth as it tied the two tall and sombre school buildings together.

Walking slowly we scrutinised the darkness; then without saying a word I climbed up the bars, put a foot in one of the rings that linked every pair of railings and jumped right down into the patio, staying for a few seconds in the position I had fallen into, that is, crouching down, my eyes immobile,
touching
the wet tiles with my fingertips.

‘No one’s here,
che
,’ whispered Enrique, who had just followed me down.

‘It doesn’t look like it, but why’s Lucio not coming?’

We heard the regular beat of horseshoes on the cobbles in the street, and then another horse passing by, and the noise
gradually
died away in the shadows.

Lucio stuck his head over the iron lances. He put his foot into a crosspiece and then fell with such skill that the tiles scarcely crunched under the sole of his shoe.

‘Who was it,
che
?’

‘A policeman and then a watchman. I made it look like I was waiting for the
bondi
.’
9

‘Let’s put our gloves on,
che
.’

‘Sure, I forgot in the excitement.’

‘And now where do we go? It’s darker than…’

‘This way.’

Lucio was our guide; I unholstered my revolver and the three of us headed towards the patio that was covered by the
second-floor
terrace.

In the darkness it was possible almost to make out a
colonnade
.

Suddenly I became bitingly conscious of such superiority over my fellow humans that I grasped Enrique’s arm in a brotherly fashion and said:

‘We’re going very slowly.’

And I incautiously abandoned my measured slow pace and made the noise of my steps ring out.

From the edge of the buildings the footsteps came back multiplied.

The certainty of our absolute impunity infected my
comrades
with an absolute optimism, and we laughed with such strident guffaws that from the dark street a stray dog barked at us three times.

Happy that we could slap danger in the face with such courage, we would have liked to have been accompanied by the bright sounds of a fanfare and the joyful clatter of a
drum-band
, we would have liked to wake everyone up, to show them the joy that fills one’s soul when you tear up the lawbooks and head smiling into sin.

Lucio, who was at our head, turned round:

‘I move that we attack the National Bank in a few days. Silvio, you can open the strongboxes with your arclamps.’

‘Bonnot must be applauding us from hell,’ Enrique said.

‘Long live the apaches Lacombe
10
and Valet,’ I exclaimed.

‘Eureka,’ Lucio shouted.

‘What’s up?’

The young man replied:

‘That’s it… didn’t I tell you, Lucio? They’ll have to put up a statue to you… that’s it, you know what?’

We gathered round him.

‘Have you noticed? Did you notice, Enrique, that there’s a jewellery shop next to the Electra Cinema…? I’m serious,
che
, don’t laugh. There’s no roof on the cinema toilet… I remember that well; we can get onto the jewellery shop roof from there. We buy some tickets and we’re in and out before the show’s over. We can put chloroform through the keyhole with an eye dropper.’