The Anarchist Expropriators by Bayer Osvaldo Sharkey Paul

Author:Bayer, Osvaldo,Sharkey, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2015-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Mark Twain has regaled us with the grotesque adventures of these detectives, with their magnifying glasses, following the trail of a runaway elephant. Absorbed by their quest, noses pressed to the ground, they scrutinize the imprints left among the very many others by the feet of the fabulous pachyderm. Suddenly they blunder into an unexpected bulk. Whereupon they raise their eyes and find themselves nose to nose with the elephant which the have only just sighted, a few millimeters ahead, in spite of his monumental size, and almost accidentally. That is exactly what is happening to our police—the world’s best. In their efforts to see better, they can see nothing, and when they can see something, it is because others let themselves be discovered. If there were any doubt as to the theoretical efficiency of our detectives, it would be dispelled by their infallible hypotheses. But once on the ground, one vexatious detail, one wasted minute, any error of timing, space, or distance puts a bewildering distance between these expert sleuths and their quarry. The finest music-hall entertainment certainly could not have dreamed up scarier and more comical situations than those offered to us on a daily basis by the world’s finest police force in the most spectacular of investigations.

The newspaper Crítica had raked in the profits from its edition given over to the Rawson Hospital raid and to detailed descriptions of the pursuit of the fugitives into Uruguay; its circulation was climbing steadily and people could not get enough of its news. One could even have imagined that the paper was on the fugitives’ side, but obviously that was far from the truth. Roscigna was well aware of this: he had a fine grasp of the methods of the sensational press. Basically Crítica kept the police on the alert. The four anarchists would rather that nobody talked about them than that they should be front page news every day in the best-selling newspaper, not to mention on its inside pages, complete with drawings of them. But Roscigna was not a man easily riled. Had it been Di Giovanni, for instance, he would have gone in person to the editors, defying all risks, and ordered the editor in chief to cease his campaign on the pain of taking four bullets for his trouble. But Roscigna was to make maximum capital out of the coverage in Crítica. He sent in several letters, which Botana [the publisher] reprinted in each edition. These letters—a play that Vázquez Paredes would utilize later on—were peppered with clues, place names, and imaginary witnesses that only baffled the police more.

The days went by and Santiago, Zavala, Gariboto, and all their sleuths had to admit defeat and go home. It only remained for them to wait and to trust in that irreplaceable police weapon: informers, persons to be found in every walk of life: servants, porters, news vendors, drivers, office workers, lawyers, doctors, servicemen’s parents, sacristans, the devoutly religious, prostitutes, and pimps. This whole spectrum of free collaborators was the most effective “fifth column” that the police deployed to defeat anarchist activism.

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