Money to Burn Read Free Page B

maybe you like the big guy?' Mereles would ask her, 'look what rough trade he is,' and Bianca would laugh and throw herself at him. 'Gimme,' she'd say, 'little Daddy.' Naked, in her high heels, the Girl strutted about, until he shoved her up against the mirror, and she leaned over the bench for him to have his way with her.
    She didn't want to know what the guys were planning and returned to her room. They were plotting something heavy (because something was always being plotted when they gathered to speak in low voices and spent days without leaving the house). She needed to study because she still had to deliver two subjects to obtain enough credits to finish secondary school. She was going to spend a few months with Mereles - rather like taking a holiday - and then everything was to go back to how it was before. 'You have to make the most of being young while you can,' her mother told her when she began bringing home the money. Her father, Don Antonio Galeano, was away with the fairies, he knew nothing about anything, went to work in the Sanitation Department, in a building that resembled a palace, on Rio Bamba and Cordoba. Then her mum was bound to come along and ruin everything, forever complaining about her father, who never earned above the minimum salary, and when she got wind of her Girl's altered circumstances she began stopping in alone with her, to get her to spill the beans. And in the end, daughters always do what their mothers want. When at last the mother came to meet Mereles, she took one look at the pervert Crow's eyes glued to her breasts and began to laugh out loud. The Girl stared at her and learnt that it was possible to be jealous of one's own mother. 'You look like sisters,' said Mereles, 'please permit me to give you a kiss.'
    'Sure, honey,' said the mother, 'you have to look after Blanquita for me, 'cause beware if her father finds out ... '
    'Finds out what?'
    That he was married. Married and separated and always going with cheap country girls he'd picked up in cabarets down on the harbour.
    The Girl threw herself on the bed with her maths book and began thinking of other things. Mereles had promised to take her to Brazil to see the Carnival. Voices were lowered on the other side of the door, and she couldn't hear anything until a while later some giggles wafted through to her.
    Dorda tended to seem a little far gone and was attached to the notion of failure, viewing everything pessimistically yet always cracking disastrous jokes, so that ultimately everyone decided they had a good time with him.
    'They're going to shut off the route out of the square and we're going to be trapped and then they'll kill us like curs.'
    'Don't be an idiot, Gaucho,' said the Crow, 'Daddy will do the driving and will get you out by mounting the car on to the pavement, so avoiding all the cops.'
    Dorda began laughing, the spectacle of the car setting off against the traffic, riding on the pavement, headed towards the square in the midst of bullets and corpses, amused him no end.

2
    The day of the robbery dawned fine and clear. At 15.02 on Wednesday 27 September 1965, the bank-clerk Alberto Martinez Tobar went to work at the cash desk in the San Fernando branch of the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. He was a tall fellow, red-faced and bug-eyed, who had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday and who only had a few more hours to live. He cracked jokes with the girls in the accounts section, and went down to the basement where the strongboxes were stored beside the black table stacked with the bags of money. There employees in their shirtsleeves counted notes, under the artificial light and noise of the ventilators.
    An underground tomb, a jail stashed with money, the bank cashier had thought. He had lived all his life in San Fernando and his father had worked for the Town Hall before him. He had a daughter who suffered acutely with her nerves, and it was costing him a fortune to have her attended to. Many times over, he