A Quiet Flame (30 page)

I bought some more cigarettes, a
Prensa,
and a copy of the
Argentinisches Tageblatt
—the only German-language newspaper it was safe to read, in the sense that it didn’t mark you out as a Nazi. But the main reason for going into the station was the knife shop. Mostly, the blades were for tourists: bone-handled cutlery for chartered surveyors and accountants who fancied themselves as gauchos or street-fighting tango-dancers. A few of the less spectacular knives looked about right for what I had in mind. I bought two: a long, thin stiletto for pushing right through a keyway and tripping the catch within a lock housing, and something bigger for jimmying a window. I tucked the big one under my belt, in the small of my back, gaucho style, and slipped the little stiletto inside my breast pocket. When the shop clerk shot me a look, I smiled benignly and said, “I like to be well armed when my sister comes to dinner.”

He’d have looked a lot more surprised if he’d seen my shoulder holster.

Half an hour passed. Forty-five minutes turned into an hour. I’d just started to curse Anna when, finally, she showed up, wearing an ensemble of old clothes supplied by Edith Head. A nice plaid shirt, neatly pressed jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, a pair of flat heels, and a large leather handbag. And too late, I realized my mistake. Telling a woman like Anna to come out wearing old clothes was like telling Berenson to frame a great painting with firewood. I guessed she had probably changed her clothes several times just to make sure that the old clothes she had on were the best old clothes she could have chosen to wear. Not that it mattered what she was wearing. Anna Yagubsky would have looked wonderful wearing half a pantomime horse.

She eyed the Belgrano train uncertainly.

“Are we taking the train somewhere?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. But not this one. I hear the slow train to paradise is more comfortable. No, I wanted to meet you here so I wouldn’t miss you in the dark outside. But now that I’ve seen you again, I realize I wouldn’t miss you in an exodus.”

She blushed a little. I led her out of the station. With that huge, echoing cathedral of a building behind us, we walked east, through a double row of parked trolleybuses, and into a big open square dominated by a red-brick clock tower that was now striking the hour. Under acacia trees, people played music and lovers trysted on benches. Anna took my arm, and it would have seemed romantic if we hadn’t been planning trespass and the illegal entry of a public building.

“What do you know about the Immigrants’ Hotel?” I asked her as we crossed Eduardo Manero.

“Is that where we’re going? I wondered if it might be.” She shrugged. “There’s been an Immigrants’ Hotel here since the middle of the last century. My parents could probably tell you more about it. They stayed there when they first came to Argentina. In the beginning, any poor immigrant arriving in the country could get free board and lodging there for five days. Then, in the thirties, it was any poor immigrant who wasn’t Jewish. I’m not sure when they closed it. There was something in the paper about it last year, I think.”

We approached a honey-colored, four-story building that was almost as big as the railway station. Surrounded by a fence, it looked more like a prison than a hotel, and I reflected that this had probably been closer to its real purpose. The fence wasn’t more than six feet high but the top wire was barbed and it did the job. We kept walking until we found a gate. There was a sign that read PROHIBIDA LA ENTRADA and, underneath, a large Eagle padlock that must have been there since the hotel was built.

When she saw the big gaucho knife in my hand, Anna’s eyes widened.

“This is what happens when you ask questions people don’t want you to ask,” I said. “They lock up the answers.” I flicked open the padlock.

“Aiee,” said Anna, wincing.

“Fortunately for me, they use crummy locks that wouldn’t keep out a rat with a toothpick.” I pushed open the gate and walked into an arrivals yard overgrown with tufts of grass and jacaranda trees. A gust of wind blew a sheet of newsprint to my feet. I picked it up. It was a two-month-old page from
El Laborista,
a Perónist rag. I hoped it was the last time anyone had been there. It certainly looked that way. There were no lights in any of the hundred or so windows. Only the sound of distant traffic driving along Eduardo Manero and a train moving in the rail yards disturbed the quiet of the abandoned hotel.

“I don’t like this,” admitted Anna.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But my
castellano
isn’t up to the kind of legalese and bureaucratic language you usually find in official documents. If we do find something, we’ll probably need those beautiful eyes of yours to read it.”

“And here was me thinking you just wanted some company.” She glanced around nervously. “I just hope there aren’t any rats. I get enough of those at work.”

“Just take it easy, okay? From the look of this place, nobody’s been here in a while.”

The main doorway smelled strongly of cat piss. The frosted windows were covered with cobwebs and salt from the estuary river. A largish spider scrambled away as my shoes disturbed its gossamer repose. I forced another padlock with the big knife and then raked the Yale on the door with the stiletto.

“Do you always carry a complete cutlery drawer in your pockets?” she asked.

“It’s that or a set of keys,” I said, gouging at the lock’s mechanism.

“Where were you during choir practice? You do that like you’ve done it before.”

“I used to be a cop, remember? We do all of the things criminals do, but for much less money. Or in this case, no money at all.”

“Money’s a big thing with you, I can tell.”

“Maybe that’s because I don’t have very much.”

“Well, then. We have something in common.”

“Maybe when this is all over, you can show me your gratitude.”

“Sure. I’ll write you a nice letter on my best notepaper. How does that sound?”

“If we find your miracle, you can write to the local archbishop with evidence of my heroic virtue. And maybe, in a hundred years, they’ll make me a saint. Saint Bernhard. They did it before, they can do it again. Hell, they even did it for a lousy dog. By the way, that’s my real name. Bernhard Gunther.”

“I suppose there is a doglike quality about you,” she said.

I finished raking the lock.

“Sure. I’m fond of children and I’m loyal to my family, when I have one. Just don’t hang a little barrel of brandy around my neck unless you expect me to drink it.”

My voice was full of bravado. I was trying to stop her from being scared. In truth, I was just as nervous as she was. More so, probably. When you’d seen as many people killed as I had, you know how easy it is to get killed.

“Did you bring those flashlights?”

She opened her bag to reveal a bicycle lamp and a little hand dynamo you had to keep squeezed to make it light. I took the bicycle lamp.

“Don’t switch on until we’re inside,” I told her. I opened the door and poked my muzzle inside the hotel. It wasn’t the one on my face. It was the one on my gun.

We went inside, our footsteps echoing on the cheap marble floor like those of two ghosts uncertain about which part of the building to go and haunt. There was a strong smell of mildew and damp. I switched on the bicycle lamp, illuminating a double-height hallway. There was no one about. I put away my gun.

“What are we looking for?” she whispered.

“Boxes. Packing cases. Filing cabinets. Anything that might contain records of immigration. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to dump them here when this place closed down.”

I offered Anna my hand, but she brushed it off and laughed.

“I stopped being afraid of the dark when I was seven,” she said. “These days I even manage to put myself to bed.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.

“It’s odd of me, I know. But somehow I feel safer that way.”

We walked the length of the building and found four large dormitories on the ground floor. One of these still had beds, and I counted two hundred fifty, which, if the upper floors were the same, meant that as many as five thousand people had once lived in the building.

“My poor parents,” said Anna. “I had no idea that it was like this.”

“It’s not so bad. Believe me, the German idea of resettlement was a lot worse than this.”

In the communal washrooms between the dormitories were sixteen square sinks as big as a car door. And beyond the farthest washroom was a locked door. The padlock, which was a new one, told me we were probably in the right place. Someone had felt obliged to secure what was on the other side of the door with a lock superior to the ones on the gate and on the front door. But new or not, this padlock yielded just as easily to my gaucho’s knife. I pushed the door open with the sole of my shoe and shone the light inside.

“I think we found what we’re looking for,” I said, although it was evident that the real work was only just beginning. There were dozens of filing cabinets—as many as a hundred—in five ranks, one in front of the other, like tightly dressed lines of soldiers, so that it was impossible to open one without moving the one in front of it.

“This is going to take hours,” said Anna.

“It looks as though we are going to spend the night together, after all.”

“Then you’d better make the most of it,” she said. She put the lamp down on the floor, faced the cabinet at the head of the first rank, and pointed at the cabinet heading the second. “Here, you look in that one and I’ll look in this one.”

I blew some dust off. A mistake. There was too much dust. It filled the air and made us cough. I pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet and started to riffle through names beginning with the letter Z. “Zhabotinsky, Zhukov, Zinoviev. These are all Z’s. You don’t suppose the one behind this one could be the Y cabinet, do you? Like Y for Yrigoyen, Youngblood, and Yagubsky?”

I slammed the drawer shut and we moved that cabinet out of the way of the one behind. Even before I had wrestled it completely clear, Anna had hauled the top drawer of the next cabinet open. There was more strength in her arm than she realized. Or possibly she was suddenly too excited to know her own strength. Either way, she managed to pull the entire drawer completely out of the cabinet and, narrowly missing her toes and mine, it thudded on the marble floor with the sound of a door closing in some deep pit of hell.

“Do you want to try that again?” I asked. “Only I don’t think they heard it in the Casa Rosada.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Let’s hope not.”

Anna was already kneeling in front of the fallen drawer and, with the light from the little hand dynamo she was holding, examining the contents. “You were right,” she cried excitedly. “These are the Y’s.”

I picked the bicycle lamp off the floor and trained the beam on her hands.

Then she said, “I don’t believe it,” and removed one thin file from the pack. “Yagubsky.”

Even in the semidarkness I could see the tears in her eyes. Her voice was choked, too.

“It seems that you can work miracles after all, Saint Bernhard.”

Then she opened the file.

It was empty.

 

 

 

ANNA STARED at the empty file for a long moment. Then she flung it aside angrily and, sinking back on her haunches, let out an enormous sigh. “So much for your miracle,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t want to be a saint, anyway.”

After a while, I went to find the empty file. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was empty, all right. But the file wasn’t without information. There was a date on the plain manila cover.

“When did you say they disappeared?”

“January 1947.”

“This file is dated March 1947. And look. Underneath their names are written the words ‘Judio’ and ‘Judia.’ Jew and Jewess. And there’s the small matter of a rubber stamp in red ink.”

Anna looked at it. “D12,” she said. “What’s D12?”

“There’s another date and a signature inside the stamp. The signature is illegible. But the date is clear enough. April 1947.”

“Yes, but what is D12?”

“I have no idea.”

I went back to the cabinet and removed another file. This one belonged to a John Yorath. From Wales. And it was full of information. Details of entry visas, details of John Yorath’s medical history, a record of his stay at the Hotel de Inmigrantes, a copy of a
cédula,
everything. But not Jewish. And no “D12” stamp on the cover.

“They were here,” said Anna excitedly. “This proves that they were here.”

“I think it also proves that they’re not here any longer.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Clearly, however, they were arrested. And then deported, perhaps.”

“I told you. We’ve never heard from them. Not since January 1947.”

“Then perhaps they were imprisoned.” Warming to my theme, I said, “You’re a lawyer, Anna. Tell me about the prisons in this country.”

“Let’s see. There’s the prison at Parque Ameghino, here in the city. And the Villa Devoto, of course. Where Perón imprisons his political enemies. Then there’s San Miguel, where regular criminals are sent. Where else? Yes, a military jail on Martín García Island, in the River Plate. That’s where Perón himself was imprisoned when he was originally deposed, in October 1945. Yes, yes, you might imprison a great many people on Martín García.” She thought for a moment. “But wait a minute. There’s nowhere more remote than Neuquén prison in the Andean foothills. You hear stories about Neuquén. But almost nothing is known about it except that the people who are sent there never return. Do you really think it’s possible? That they could be in jail? All this time?”

“I don’t know, Anna.” I waved at the regiment of filing cabinets ranked in front of us. “But it’s just possible we’ll find the answers in one of these.”