Authors: Ricardo Piglia
Everyone seemed to comprehend that the gas, rather than modifying the resistance of the besieged bandits, was hardening their resolve. Their insults could be clearly heard between the din of battle and the incessant rattling of machine-gunfire. The gunmen's resistance was also attributed by certain specialists from the police force to favourable air currents inside the flat which, through the two windows giving on to the two outdoor patios, generated a kind of air corridor which renewed the fresh air available, and sent the polluted air out on to the streets where the effects of the gas were felt by the police themselves, not to mention all the curious passers-by positioned outside.
At one point the police decided to employ hand grenades but were worried about the neighbours still trapped there in the block, since it had not been possible to evacuate several of the apartments in the gunmen's line of fire and the residents were uttering heart-rending cries and calls for help from the adjacent windows throughout the night, for they found themselves in the midst of the din of battle, where they were abandoned and locked up with their children, flattened on the floor without daring to move lest the police commence some sort of salvage operation. They seemed to be currently running the same risks as the criminals.
'In one sense,' Silva declared, his face drawn with fatigue, his white scar whiter than ever in the icy skin of his face, 'the gunmen are holding all the neighbours hostage in the block of flats. And this circumscribes our movements. We have to think carefully what we need to do in order not to put innocent lives at risk. It explains,' he elaborated, 'why this operation is taking longer than the period generally necessary to detain four criminals.'
When the night was well advanced the gunmen made a final attempt to get out of the flat and gain control of the corridor, from where they fired on the street and over the neighbouring roofs, seeking a way out. After that violent gun- fight there followed a period of relative calm.
'I never thought we were going to get ourselves stuck down a well and end up hounded like dogs.'
Who did that voice come from? By now a transistor and an intelligence operator, earphones pressed to the heating system, were attempting to find out what was taking place in the besieged flat. But the sound was either dead or muffled and drowned in a confused sequence of signals coming from all over the building: a maddened and tortured multitude of groans and insults with which the imagination of Roque Pérez (the wireless operator) gambled and lost. These were the screams of lost souls writhing in the agonies of hell, stray spirits locked inside the concentric circles of Dante's
Inferno
,
for they were already dead, those who, when they spoke, made their voices come through from the other side of life, the condemned, those who have truly abandoned all hope. 'Into what kind of cacophony were their voices transformed?' the wireless operator asked himself, once he could concentrate and began to distinguish out sharp wails, shots and shouts, and again words in some strange language. A dog had been left shut in a bedroom of the next door apartment and barked incessantly. A landscape filled with noise only two centimetres away from his ear drums and across which, like a thread of madness, one could make out the characteristic register, weak and fluting, of a clarinet in a dance orchestra, playing on the radio inside one of the flats, in some remote place that defied location. And alongside all this, the sound of voices, like murmurs of the dead, or words lost in the din of the night.
The person listening in on the conversations was Roque Pérez, the police wireless operator with his headphones pressed to his ears and fingers fiddling with the switches to lower certain vibrations and erase the buzz in the voices, searching to receive their dialogue clean and clear, buried in the tiny soundproofed room in the stairwell, using his levers to control the sound, needing time to establish a sound contact and record the disjointed voices echoing from the apartment under siege. They had planted two microphones, but one had been knocked out by the bullets and transmitted clarinet music as if it had become hooked up to a radio buried in the city. Pérez attempted to identify the voices, figure out who was whom, figure out how many there were, hoping (according to what Silva told him) that one of them would weaken and consider giving himself up, hoping that soon some discord might emerge between the gangsters, and they'd be able to work on one of them, perhaps with an offer of legal privileges, to get him to abandon the gang and surrender. There was a fellow they called Number One who spoke ceaselessly, in a murmur, alone, almost up against the microphone, he had to be over one side, near the heating radiator, the mike concealed close at hand, and Roque Pérez couldn't work out who he was, so he called him One (in fact he was Dorda).
'As for me,' Number One is relating, 'in recent years, when I used to live in Canuelas, and was out on bail, but I had already left home, and lived on the ranch, I began to collect goldfinches in an aviary and every morning I would release one of them. I'd think that if the birds took note that every day at dawn one of them would be set free, like. I wondered if the little birds had in their eyes a place where they kept their memories, bearing in mind that their sight is as sharp as needles. I thought, I did, of how the little goldfinch sings, then the night arrives, and in the morning a hand is inserted that sets one free, so the other one, let us suppose, his brother, let's say a brother goldfinch, gets animated, takes note, says, "I'll decide to sing all day long, then the night falls so I'll sleep a while, and when the sun is up, a hand will appear and set me free in the open air, leave me free just to fly away."' There was a prolonged pause or the sound of some interference. 'Just like us humans locked away, yet we too hang on to the hope that, come sunrise, something new and good will dawn.'
'And it's not always like that.'
'No, it's not always like that
...
True enough. Do you want some? I've got it. A piece of luck, wasn't it, that we've got some, that I bought some weed, in the port, on our way out, from the seadog who brought us here, a kilo and a half, dope of the first order, higher than top quality, say I, it's always worth having too much rather than too little.'
They chatted on about anything at all, about how the goldfinches had flown free. None of that mattered for now, he (Roque Pérez) didn't want to record the sense, only the sound, the differences between their voices, their levels, and their breathing, in order to learn to identify each one in turn.
'Somewhere out there, and we can't say when but perhaps when the sun comes up, Malito will turn up, Gaucho, and he'll get us out.'
'So Number Two isn't the Crow,' noted Roque Pérez, 'the Crow has to be Number Three or Number One. And the one speaking is Two' (that makes Kid Brignone Number Two).
'A marble headstone on the tomb of the deceased, my father, I had to sell the goldfinches to pay for it, he was in the soil, without anything, just a little barbed wire fence around the patch, the old woman buried him there, we had a plot of ground there on the slope down to the flowerbeds outside the station, where the cemetery ended up, out at Cañuelas, the saddest place in the world, as soon as the graves began to get dismantled by people eager to move in, set up their homesteads and live there, among the dead.'
'They're delirious,' thought Roque Pérez. 'Too many drugs, too many hallucinogenics, old-style hallucinogens at that. They take cocaine, they shoot up everything, they can put up with anything, it's the only way they can cope with the world,' said Roque Pérez, 'they act the macho because they're high on whisky and speed.' Pérez had studied medicine, but entered the police force because he enjoyed wireless operating, he was a great radio fan and trained himself as a technician working in sound rooms and recording studios, and he'd had to get used to living boxed into a cabin, deciphering radiophonic conversations, useless dialogues in order to locate illegal card sharps, police informers, politicians who don't want to compromise, minor matters, but now, ever since Friday night, he had got his great opportunity: the live secret transmission of what was going on inside apartment number nine, laid siege to by the Montevidean police. Voices, groans, moans, intermittent cries for help, isolated wails. For example, at the moment, there's Number Two:
'Tuesday will be the funeral, they always bury you three days after you die, 'cause if you come back again, you come back to life as a mummy, d'you remember the mummy, who came out of tomb all wrapped in bandages
...
'
'For example, you can hide yourself underneath the bathtub, they'll come and search, and they'll never find you
...
'
'Look, see, this machine isn't functioning properly,' the speaker stamps on the floor and the image settles down again, 'but take a look, it's crawling with journos
...
If you give yourself up, they can't get away with killing you.'
'They'll kill you either way, arsehole,' says Number Two. They shoot you here and drag you out dead, however many journos there are out there
...
anyway all journos are narks
...
'
And the cub reporter Renzi in flat number eight noted: 'The agonized waiting period extended. Exhaustion finally took hold of the policemen. The exchange of fire is no longer as intense. There are lapses of fifteen or twenty minutes during which not a single shot can be heard. Then a few stray shots from the marksmen positioned on the ground floor and the flat roof of the shed prompted the gunmen to respond with another volley.'
Then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was an audible pause over the intercom to the block, followed by the sound of one of the criminal's voices, saying: 'Greetings to Commissioner Silva. Silva! Are you there, sweetheart, flatface, executioner, bastard
...
Porky, Silva, come up here
...
why don't you come and play a round for the General's wife?
{16}
Who wins get out of here alive, who loses shits himself. There's five hundred grand in the bank, and I'll play you for it on a single throw of the dice. Hear them?' And it was true, you could hear the little marble bones rattling in their leather thimble.
'Enough fucking about, Che, it's me here talking to you. It's me, Silva,' says Silva, tranquil, in his Creole accent, in a voice clouded and wasted with alcohol and the quantity of cigarettes smoked during interrogations, attempting to soften up a swindler, a whore, or some poor lottery fixer. It was always the same, year in year out, paying them back with blows to the stomach as they're tied to their chairs, shouting at them in that rasping voice, like someone attempting to stick a pin into the ear of a zombie who refuses to parrot what one wants him to say. 'Why don't you lot come on down? Who's talking to me? Is that you, Malito? Come on down and we'll sort it all out, man to man, we'll negotiate here before the magistrate, I guarantee you, and I won't press charges for armed resistance as part of an illegal gang.'
'Well, why not just come up yourself? Hurry on up. Your daughter is getting it up the arse and you out there like an idiot, they've got her there in the bar toilet, the guy's a thin fellow with a shaft thick as your arm, and she's giving squeals of pleasure and shitting herself the more she gets off on it.'
That's how they spoke, filthier, more crude and brutal in their speech than even the cops, for all their experience in inventing insults intended to humiliate prisoners to the point where they become useless floppy puppets. Tough guys, from out of the toughest jails, broken on the electric grill, surrendering at last, after being forced to listen to Silva insulting and applying the torture machine to them for hours on end, to get them to spill the beans. The dead ends of the phrases used by men and women in the bedroom, in business and in the toilets, because the police and the crooks (so Renzi thought) are alone in knowing how to make words come alive, so much so and so sharp they can split your soul apart like an egg breaking on the sharp edge of a frying pan.
'It's not about money,' Number Two is saying and Pérez records the conversation, feeling as awkward as someone involuntarily spying or listening in on an unexpected confession, which is now being broadcast to everybody, Pérez included, who all listen awkwardly, to Number Two telling Silva: 'I'll hand over the money if you get your ugly mug up here, I'd let you come up and go back down without touching a hair of your head, but to get us out of here you're going to have to sweat a bit, after all who d'you think you're dealing with? You, Silva, what d'you want if you come up? Come on up, Che, you're used to screwing thieves when you've got them tied up, but when there's an armed opponent, a tough guy with balls, you crumple, Silva.'
The conversation continued on much the same lines, as if it were an extension of the combat. Witnesses to the conversation were frozen to the spot, hypnotized by what they were hearing, while Silva attempted to prolong the dialogue, to give Pérez time to record the voices and locate each one of the speakers, this was the reason why Silva sought to get his interlocutor (the Kid?) to continue doing battle over the intercom. And that voice so clearly belonging to a rent-boy, a criminal, a lunatic, rose again through the walls and reached all those gathered in the drizzle and in front of the encircled building.
'At approximately 03.30 hours today (for which read yesterday) the conversation was interrupted, despite the authorities' attempts to keep the intercom open and continue negotiations with the gangsters, they began hearing loud shouts from the criminals who were about to launch a bravura gesture, assuring them they were on the point of emerging prepared to kill any number of pigs and to some extent they began fulfilling their threats as it seemed as if one of their number - in the shelter of the shadows reigning in the corridor of the apartment block - got as far as the middle of the staircase and fired off a violent volley towards the street with a machine-gun.
'This made them think the criminals were about to come out, as the gunfire increased still further, cutting off the entrance to the apartments with a shower of lead.