But now she was telling me that no, she didn’t have the keys to the closet. And I repeated the order and she was shaking her head and telling me no, that the keys to the closet were only handled by the manager and the manager, of course, wasn’t there. This wasn’t in the plan. She was “fixed.” That’s what we had been told. I looked at the camera on the wall above the door with its red light. We knew what we had to do. There was a reason this place had been chosen. We had to bring the tape with us no matter what. Just as planned. And it had to be done before some customer tried to come in, got suspicious, and called the police. We were in the manager’s office. I hit the woman in the teeth with the butt of my Beretta. It made a loud noise. The sound of teeth. I repeated the order to open up, open it any way she could. The closet door had a small opening where the cable passed through. She had me get a nail file from her purse and she started to pick the lock, holding it with nervous fingers. I leaned over to look at the clock on the walclass="underline" the second hand was still moving with fidgety jumps. “Hurry up, shit!” I said. I heard a shout and a thud: the closet was open. Canelo had opened it with a single kick. Now the alarm, we knew, would go off in twenty seconds. And then the police would come. They would be here in six minutes, they would block off the streets and start searching for us. By that time I had already to be in a taxi speeding west on Moneda. She knelt down. I looked at those buttons and the little blue and yellow lights in the darkness of the closet. I searched anxiously for the one that said “Eject.” I was thinking: the seconds are going by even though I don’t feel them, they’re going by and she can’t find the “Eject” button and I can’t find the “Eject” button either. I was thinking: there can’t be more than ten seconds before the alarm goes off, there can’t be more than nine, and I still can’t find the button. I heard the sound of inner gears, dull, tight, and short. A pause. Then another sound, open and dry. I waited. I felt my heart pounding like a second hand. I heard a rough, dragging sound. She made a sudden movement and I brought my Beretta to her head. She turned slowly to face me with her hands up. In her left hand she had the tape, which she gave to me. I held in my hand everything the cameras had filmed. Suddenly, I was discombobulated. Something yanked me out of my head. The howl of the alarm had destroyed that sliver of time we inhabited. It became the only thing happening. It bore into our skulls like a jackhammer. The police. The police would spread out through the city behind us.
We put the woman with the others in the bathroom. Canelo shouted at them, saying anyone who followed us would get a bullet between the eyes. We threw our ski masks on the floor and ran out. Canelo first, then me, and further back Kid of the Day, covering our retreat. Before crossing the threshold I looked at my watch. We’d been inside a little over three minutes.
And Canelo saw something I had not when he shouted at me: “Run! Run!” Because when I started running toward Calle Moneda, zigzagging through the people, as we’d been taught, I heard, like I told you, his Smith and Wesson.44 and, afterward, the 9mm CZs, but not the machine-gun fire of our AK. And one brother, Samuel, he was called, had been posted outside the currency exchange to cover Canelo, Kid of the Day, and me with a Kalashnikov hidden beneath his ample coat. It was the only long gun, the report would say in its analysis of the situation: Never again only one man with a long gun. The struggle has passed to another phase. While I was zigzagging though the pedestrian street I managed to think that Samuel’s AK-47 must be silent because he had given us up. I was wrong. I found out much later that Canelo had seen Samuel fall. It was right at the moment we were coming out of the currency exchange. Samuel went down without ever making a sound.
The street was full of people at that hour. A woman and a young man gave their versions to the police. And we had two lookouts. One was Rafa, across from the currency exchange, who was watching the exits to Alameda and north to Calle Moneda, which was the emergency route. And the other lookout, Puma, was watching the southern route leading to the subway station that, according to the plan, we would go through to get to the taxi. Rafa and Puma, who both escaped, wrote a report for the Directorate. The report gave the names of the heroes who had died in battle, Canelo, Samuel, and Kid Díaz, and of the survivors, Rafa and Puma. It also stated that I had been captured by the enemy.
Samuel, according to the report, was attacked from behind at the exact moment he approached the door of the currency exchange to cover us. He had to check with our two lookouts, who would give him a signal that meant “all’s well” or “danger.” Samuel had to repeat the signal to Canelo and cover us with his Kalashnikov, which was easily capable of reaching a human target three hundred yards away. It’s dependable, that gun. For rapid fire, it’s the best. It’s so easy to use. I know that gun by heart. The Polish AKMS, too, the one that has a folding stock and is a little lighter. The one Samuel was carrying that day weighs a little over nine pounds, seven ounces when loaded. It has thirty rounds in its clip. But Samuel, as Rafa remembered, bent backward violently over the back of a man who turned around and knelt down. His AK fell to the ground as his legs flailed desperately. Several people dressed as civilians and indistinguishable from the pedestrians — agents, of course — surrounded the spot, and no one could see when Samuel’s body fell to the ground.
“Garrote” is what they call that maneuver in the intelligence manuals. The victim is taken by surprise and a short, very thin wire is put around the neck and pulled hard. The man goes backward, falls heavily over the bent back that his assassin offers him, and he’s strangled. A silent way to kill. I never managed to find out who the assassin was. They finished Samuel off with a silenced shot as soon as he hit the pavement. Two days later, his body appeared in one of our safe houses that stood empty. Suicide, they said. No one believed it.
In the meantime, Canelo had opened fire on the man coming at him head-on, and people scattered, shouting and running. In the curve of the street, the protuberance of a building served as cover. At first he didn’t know where to fire, because all he saw was Samuel’s body bent roughly and a man underneath shielding himself with it. He fell back, covering me. Another agent shot at him from the side leading to Ahumada. That’s where he aimed his next shot.
After that the report of the skirmish gets hazier. Bone, they say, got personally involved in reconstructing the battle. He wanted to extract lessons. Our training was based, in part, on the stories of different confrontations. The idea was for the combatant to imagine the kinds of situations he or she could possibly face. The problem was, of course, that no encounter was the same as any other. Even so, the study of these cases, of past failures and successes, prepared us for the day of combat. Most of our fighters — as was my case until that morning — spent years and years without meeting the enemy in a firefight, without hearing the whistle of a bullet seeking their bodies; in other words, without being subjected to the test of reality. Shooting at a flesh-and-blood person who’s also armed is different from target practice on a bottle hanging from a tree branch, you understand.
I used to wonder how true to life these kinds of reconstructions really were. We’ll never know. The Spartan grew impatient when someone like me raised epistemological objections. He’d gotten used to acting quickly and taking risks without waiting for certainties. To me it seemed like the stories we were given left out and censored doubts or alternative hypotheses. It was a polished and carefully selected version of what memory was capable of restoring. I would have preferred an interpretation that was more open and contradictory to the facts. I was suspicious of so much precision. Because, they warned us from the start that a shootout in the streets is a confusing, fleeting event, and you remember it in fragments. No one was watching it all from outside in order to give a complete, unified view. In spite of that warning, they inevitably put forth, borne on a fallacious and inviolable voluntarism, an ordered chain of events, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But I always held onto the doubts appropriate to a graduate in French literature.