Who was above Commander Max? I don’t know. There was also Commander Iñaqui. He was important. That’s all I ever knew. At the top of the pyramid, Commander Joel. There was also a man who, as you know, had the job of “general liaison” and whom everyone called “Bone.”
We had instruction and indoctrination meetings, which we went to compartmentalized, for safety. They put us in a car with blindfolds over our eyes and they brought us to a house that we wouldn’t know how to find again. Sometimes, the entire meeting would take place with us blindfolded. In that case, when we came in, the brother who would talk to us was already waiting there. The opposite happened with our other leaders. They would say: Commander Iñaqui is here in the room waiting for you. And he would start talking very quietly, you could barely hear him, and little by little, he raised his voice without ever reaching a full-blown shout. His voice was insinuating, serene, intimate, and full of silence. An intensely personal voice. It had a hypnotic power. After a while it was impossible not to feel complicit. You were caught up and bowled over.
One afternoon he talked to us about the color red. I’ll never forget it. In Saint Petersburg, at the start of the revolution in February 1917, he told us, when people were going out into the streets to protest, the Cossacks were sent to restore the tsarist order. In Nevsky Prospect, not far from the Kazan Cathedral, a squadron held back the fevered crowd. Everyone thought a massacre was about to start. Then a young girl stepped out from the crowd and, dignified, slowly approached the Cossacks. Amid a silence full of expectation, the girl pulled out from under her shawl a stem of red roses, and she offered it to the official. The people looked on, stupefied. The official bent down from his horse and took the flowers. The crowd shouted enthusiastically. For the first time shouts were heard in favor of the “Cossack brothers.” Then they let the protestors pass into the center of Saint Petersburg. It was a decisive moment. That’s how the October Revolution began, with the red color of that bunch of roses, he said. Later, the red of spilled blood would come. The word “red” (krasnyi, in Russian), he told us, is related to the word “beautiful” (krasivyi). The place for icons in a Russian house, the place for sacred objects, was red. “The red-beautiful,” he told us, “has power. Red will always be the color of the revolution: ‘krasnyi.”’
EIGHTEEN
The woman with glasses and the Bic pen examined the fake Argentine passport I handed her. Through the bars and without speaking, she showed me on her calculator the number of pesos I could buy with the two hundred dollars I’d given her. I nodded. She hit the buttons with fingers tipped with blunt, purple-painted nails, and she passed me the receipt through the drawer so I could sign it. Canelo was behind me; I could hear him breathing. I stared at my fingertips, at their transparent layers of dried adhesive, and I checked the time: one thirty. According to our information, every day at that exact time, a man with white hair and dark suit and a halting walk opened the heavy door that led to the two registers and protected them from the public, left the currency exchange with a faux-leather briefcase, and went straight to the Bank of Chile to deposit traveler’s checks and other documents.
At the other register, to my left, an elderly couple with German accents. They were calmly changing their money. A bald clerk about fifty years old was helping them. There were no other customers. The place had been well chosen by those who did the planning.
The German man coughed. “Smoker’s cough,” I thought to myself, and then Canelo’s harsh shout paralyzed me along with everyone else. I saw his ski mask covering his face and I put mine on, too; I imagined my sketch spread out on the kitchen table of the safe house, my bars, my pencil drawing of the door; I saw the white-haired employee drawn with a real pallor now in that real door, and he was looking at the drawn revolver with frightened eyes, eyes that no one would be able to sketch. He wavered for a second with the door shut before opening it and surrendering to Canelo, backing up with his hands raised and never taking his eyes from the barrel of the Smith and Wesson. The cashier followed his example without hesitation.
I felt like I was taking too long and I tried to hurry, but I couldn’t, I kept lagging behind like I was in a slow-motion movie, and there was a deceptive silence and I knew I needed to draw my gun right away but I couldn’t because my hand would not obey me. But finally I went in, I went in through the aisle behind the registers, following Canelo, and I found in my hand a trembling Beretta that was already threatening the cashier. She was watching in astonishment, without dropping her Bic pen. The silence was suddenly full of unbearable noise. The out-of-step orders from Canelo and Kid of the Day. And Kid of the Day came past shoving the German couple in front of him. But it wasn’t just that. Everything sounded too loud. The white-haired employee and the bald cashier and the German couple disappeared through the interior hallway, with Canelo pointing his gun at them. The plan was for him to lock them in the bathroom and stand guard. That must be what he was doing, I guessed. That’s what that brutal slam of the door must have been. I looked at my watch: I couldn’t read the time. I looked at the cameras sweeping the place, the red light always on. Kid of the Day passed by me and I saw the horrible scar they’d given him on his forehead as camouflage, and he seemed to jump suddenly. I was in a cloud, with no up or down. What was he doing? Oh, I remember, he was going back to keep watch at the entrance and to lock the front door. That was all according to plan.
And me? I was pointing my gun at the cashier with the Bic pen. Following the orders I barked in a hoarse voice from a throat with no saliva, she was patiently turning the dials of the Bash safe. In those years, that’s the kind of safes they used in Chilean banks. And I looked and saw the clock on the wall, a big, round clock with a restless, jumpy second hand. Its relentless tick tock was unbearable. We had to hurry. When it opened, the metal door of the Bash safe must have been some twelve centimeters thick. The woman with the Bic was about to empty the bills into my purse. But she was unresolved. In spite of my Beretta, which was still shaking a bit, not a lot, as I tried to keep it steady. Ridiculous, I told myself, a well-trained combatant like me. The layers of adhesive were coming off my fingertips. I must be sweating a lot, I thought. The butt of the gun was sticky. My makeup must be getting smeared, I thought.
“There’s thirty thousand,” she whispered, and she pointed at the rolls of bills. I saw them so clearly. The colors shone, the letters and numbers were of astonishing precision. Those old bills, encircled by their elastic bands, vibrated with a new intensity. But the woman, in spite of my orders, was too slow. She picked up one roll. I suffered through every millisecond of the imprecise journey her chubby hand with its purple nails made to my purse. It was a long and clumsy trip, let me tell you. And there was still another to come. The thought was exasperating, with her sluggishness. And another. And then, the pesos. Several million. More than four, she said. When I heard the sound of my purse’s clasp, I felt my heart beating and beating, marking time with the rhythm of a solitary drum.