Trash - Andy Mulligan [43]
I made one little change, which Gardo laughed at me for – but wasn’t I the hero in the end? I have never liked being nailed up inside a house, and I did it for Raphael too, who still wasn’t sleeping good: I got an old tyre lever, and loosened part of the roof. Emergency exit, just in case – because we knew things were getting hotter and hotter. We knew this was real, scary heat, all around us – even in the weather there was a wind, and the freak typhoon hovering over the sea, and we all felt something big was coming. There was no way back from it now, and for the boys it meant they couldn’t even see their people again – I heard them whispering and wondering, and Raphael cried at night for his auntie and his cousins.
They could never go back to the dumpsite: they had lost their homes, I guess.
We knew most of all that everything depended on that damn Bible, and the little bit of paper we had, with the lines of numbers. We had to get that Bible, and set those two things together.
So Gardo risked it, and one day borrowed my dirty clothes and walked all the way to Colva Prison.
He sat and sat, working out where the guards came out, and he spent another two days watching the different shifts, pretending to be deaf and dumb. When he spotted the guard he was looking for, he followed him.
He followed him away from the prison, then he let the guard see him and followed some more. The guard – Marco – he just kept going and going, then found some little tea-house in the Chinese quarter. Just the two of them. That was so brave of Gardo, because we’d all worked out how the guard must know there was a price on Gardo’s head. We’d gone over it and over it: the prison must have got wise to his connection to the dump, and talked to the police. They would have given anything to know what the old man and he had talked about.
The big question, therefore, was if we could trust Marco.
When Gardo came back, he told us bad news.
‘The man wants twenty,’ he said.
He meant twenty thousand, of course. That was the price of the Bible.
Raphael cursed and said: ‘You sure he’s got it? You sure he’ll give it?’
Gardo thought he had, but what was dangerous was whether he’d really hand it over. He could so easily take a bit of money, say half – and then hand us in. How big a reward would they be offering for news of Gardo? The one thing none of us talked about was what would happen to us if we got arrested. We all knew that if we got taken again, we’d never get out, we’d be dead. I was getting nightmares too by this stage, waking up crying, all three of us like little boys.
But we stuck together like a gang.
‘You think he’ll give it?’ said Raphael for the hundredth time. ‘Even if we get that kind of money – you think it’s safe?’
Gardo shrugged. ‘We either forget it,’ he said, ‘and live here for ever. Or we give it a go.’
Twenty thousand pesos, though, and I had a little under two. My going-home money, squandering it on sitting around. Like I said, we all knew we were near something huge, but the thing we were near had fences all around it. Raphael read papers to me, and every day there was an update on the Zapanta robbery, with more little hints about how it happened. Police following leads and hoping to arrest someone soon. The fat man saying nothing, but the old scandal of what he did or didn’t steal himself was being raked over again, and his big face looking dirty and not smiling any more. The stories would finish the same way every time: Nothing ever proved against him. Gardo told us again and again what the old man in prison had said, and we all knew who we believed.
I wanted that fat pig’s money so bad I was