Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia Read Free Book Online Page A

hosing down the pavement could as well have been a cop in camouflage, ready to shop him the instant he got in the lift.
    Nando meandered along with a peaceful air, went into the hall, and down to the basement giving on to the garage. There was no one there. He crossed the corridor and went up the service staircase. He preferred to enter via the kitchen, for if the cops were already inside, he had a chance (however remote) of entrenching himself in the incinerator chute and defending himself with bullets.
    But there were no policemen, everything was fine as he crossed the kitchen and went into the living-room, where the first thing he saw was Blond Gaucho stretched out across a sofa, with a bloodied bandage around his neck, and the Kid filing down the firing-pin on his piece, very carefully, on a rattan coffee table. Most amusing of all was the money piled up on a kind of inlaid Spanish cabinet with a mirror that duplicated its quantity, a heap of dosh on a white oilcloth, an hallucinatory spectacle, repeated in the pure waters of the mirror.
    The Kid looked at it and gave a complicit grin, while the Gaucho gestured towards the closed bedroom door through which suffocated grunts and sexual groans were emerging. It had to be the Crow and the Girl, whiling away their lives there in bed.
    'Malito's here,' said the Kid and nodded towards the room at the end. Then he went back to filing the firing-pin on his Beretta, trying to get the trigger as docile and sensitive to the touch as a butterfly. He didn't like Nando, he was cut from another block, resembling a cop, with his trimmed moustache and dead eyes. But he wasn't a real cop, although he had been a sort of one, an informer on the Alliance. 'Let's call him a political activist,' the Kid was sizing him up, a fool like any other, who would have themselves killed for the Old Man, in the end the most poisonous of all were those who joined with their fellows (or so they said) to resell arsenals of weaponry and raid banks under the pretext of raising funds for Perón's return. 'The Return, cabbage-heads,' thought the Kid, 'the only thing we have in common is that they pinch us to find out whether we're Peronist trade union puppets or not.' {4}
    'Any news?'
    'All going well,' said Nando. 'Shooting their mouths off without a clue about what's really what. They went and put Big Pig Silva in charge, he's a sly one, you need to watch out, he must be putting the squeeze on all the narks, and by this stage he'll have to have a lead from somewhere. Did you see the papers? Losing that car was a disaster. Were you the one who picked it up?'
    'The Crow went. He collected it in Lanús, no fuss, it was a heavily modified job the cops had sold to a metal merchant. It was already marked.'
    Nando warned them they'd need to spend two or three days locked indoors, lying low, until they'd sorted out the deal to get them across the River Plate. The Gaucho lowered the magazine he was reading and peered over the top.
    '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, {5} 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