A Quiet Flame (4 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“His name was in all the newspapers. I used to follow all your cases, as closely as I was able. Yes indeed, you were a hero of mine, Herr Gunther.”

By now he was shaking my hand. “And now you’re here. Amazing.”

Perón glanced at his gold wristwatch. I was beginning to bore him. The cop saw it, too. Not much escaped him. We might have lost the president’s attention altogether if Evita hadn’t walked up to me and given me a once-over like I was a spavined horse.

Eva Perón’s was a good figure, if you liked women who were interesting to draw. I never yet have seen a painting that convinces me those old masters preferred women who were skinny. Evita’s figure was interesting in all the right places between the knees and the shoulders. Which is not to say that I found her attractive. She was too cool, too businesslike, too efficient, too composed for my taste. I like a little vulnerability in my women. Especially at breakfast time. In her navy-blue suit Evita already looked dressed to launch a ship. Somewhere more important than here, talking to me, anyway. On the back of her bottle-blond hair was a little navy-blue velvet beret, while over her arm was a Russian winter’s worth of sables. Not that any of that caught my eye very much. Mostly my eyes were on the mint candies she was wearing—the little chandeliers of diamonds in her ears, the floral bouquet of diamonds on her lapel, and the dazzling golfball on her finger. It looked like it had been an excellent year for Van Cleef & Arpels.

“So, we have a famous detective, here in Buenos Aires,” she said. “How very fascinating.”

“I don’t know about famous,” I said. “ ‘Famous’ is a word for a boxer or a movie star, not a detective. Sure, the police leaders of Weimar encouraged the newspapers to believe that some of us were more successful than others. But that was just public relations. To give the public confidence in our ability to solve crimes. I’m afraid you couldn’t write more than a couple of very dull paragraphs in today’s newspapers about the kind of detective I was, ma’am.”

Eva Perón tried a smile, but it didn’t stay long. Her lipstick was flawless and her teeth were perfect, but her eyes weren’t in it. It was like being smiled at by a temperate glacier.

“Your modesty is, shall we say, typical of all your fellow countrymen,” she said. “It seems none of you was ever very important. Always it is someone else who deserves the credit or, more usually, the blame. Isn’t that right, Herr Gunther?”

There were a lot of things I might have said to that. But when the president’s wife takes a swing at you, it’s best to take it on the chin as though you’ve got a boiler-plated jaw, even if it does hurt.

“Only ten years ago, Germans thought they should rule the world. Now all they want to do is live quietly and be left alone. Is that what you want, Herr Gunther? To live quietly? To be left alone?”

It was the cop who came to my aid. “Please, ma’am,” he said. “He is just being modest. Take my word for it. Herr Gunther was a great detective.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

“Take the compliment, Herr Gunther. If I can remember your name, after all these years, then surely you would have to agree that, in this case at least, modesty is misplaced.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I allowed.

“Well,” said Evita. “I must be going. I’ll leave Herr Gunther and Colonel Montalbán to their mutual admiration.”

I watched her go. I was glad to see the back of her. More important, I was glad to see her behind. Even under the president’s eye it demanded attention. I didn’t know any Argentine tango tunes, but watching her closely sheathed tail as she stalked gracefully out of her husband’s office, I felt like humming one. In a different room and wearing a clean shirt, I might have tried slapping it. Some men liked slapping a guitar or a set of dominoes. With me it was a woman’s ass. It wasn’t exactly a hobby. But I was good at it. A man ought to be good at something.

When she was gone, the president climbed back into the front seat and took over the steering wheel. I wondered how much he would let her get away with before he slapped her himself. Quite a bit, probably. It’s a common failing with older dictators when they have younger wives.

In German, Perón said, “Don’t mind my wife, Herr Gunther. She doesn’t understand that you spoke from”—he slapped his stomach with the flat of his hand—“down here. You spoke as you felt you had to speak. And I’m flattered that you did so. We see something in each other, perhaps. Something important. Obeying other people is one thing. Any fool can do that. But obeying oneself, submitting oneself to the most rigid and implacable of disciplines, that is what is important. Is it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

Perón nodded. “So you are not a doctor. Therefore we cannot help you practice medicine. Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“There is one thing, sir,” I said. “Maybe I’m not much of a sailor. Or maybe I’m just getting old. But lately I’ve not been feeling myself, sir. I’d like to see a doctor, if I could. A real one. Find out if there’s anything actually wrong with me, or if I’m just homesick. Although right now that does seem a little unlikely.”

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

S
EVERAL WEEKS PASSED. I got my
cédula
and moved out of the safe house on Calle Monasterio into a nice little hotel called the San Martín, in the Florida district. The place was owned and managed by an English couple, the Lloyds, who treated me with such courtesy that it was hard to believe our two countries had ever been at war. It’s only after a war that you actually find out how much you have in common with your enemies. I discovered the English were just like us Germans, with one major advantage: they were not German.

The San Martín was full of Old World charm, with glass cupolas and comfortable furniture, and good home cooking if you enjoyed steak and chips. It was just around the corner from the more expensive Richmond Hotel, which had a café I liked enough to make it a regular port of call.

The Richmond was a clubby sort of place. There was a long room with wood panels and pillars and mirrored ceilings and English hunting prints and leather armchairs. A small orchestra played tangos and Mozart and, for all I knew, a few Mozart tangos. The smoke-filled basement was a home to men playing billiards, men playing dominoes, and, most important of all, men playing chess. Women were not welcome in the basement at the Richmond. Argentine men took women very seriously. Too seriously to have them around while they were playing billiards or chess. Either that or Argentine women were just very good at billiards and chess.

Back in Berlin, during the dog days of the Weimar Republic, I’d been a regular chess player at the Romanisches Café. Once or twice I had even had a lesson from the great Lasker, who was a regular there, too. It hadn’t made me a better player, just better able to appreciate being beaten by someone as good as Lasker.

It was in the Richmond basement that Colonel Montalbán found me, locked in an end game with a diminutive, rat-faced Scotsman called Melville. I might have forced a draw if I’d had the patience of a Philidor. But then Philidor never had to play chess under the eye of the secret police. Although he almost did. Luckily for Philidor, he was in England when the French Revolution took place. Wisely, he never went back. There are more important things to lose than a game of chess. Like your head. Colonel Montalbán didn’t have the cold eye of a Robespierre, but I felt it on me all the same. And instead of asking myself how I was going to exploit my extra pawn to best advantage, I started asking myself what the colonel could want with me. After that it was just a matter of time before I lost. I didn’t mind losing to the rat-faced Scotsman. He’d beaten me before. What I minded was the free tip that accompanied the clammy handshake.

“You should always put the rook behind the pawn,” he said in his lisping European Spanish, which sounds and smells very different from Latin American Spanish. “Except, of course, when it is the incorrect thing to do.”

If Melville had been Lasker, I would have welcomed the advice. But he was Melville, a barbed-wire sales agent from Glasgow, with bad breath and an unhealthy interest in young girls.

Montalbán followed me upstairs. “You play a good game,” he said.

“I do all right. At least I do until the cops turn up. It takes the edge off my concentration.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. I like you being sorry. It’s a load off my mind.”

“We’re not like that in Argentina,” he said. “It’s all right to criticize the government.”

“That’s not the way I heard it. And if you ask from whom, you’ll just prove me right.”

Colonel Montalbán shrugged and lit a cigarette. “There’s criticism and there’s criticism,” he said. “It’s my job to know the subtle difference.”

“I should think that’s easy enough when you have your
oyentes
?” The
oyentes
were the people
porteños
called Perón’s spies—people who eavesdropped on conversations in bars, on buses, and even on the telephone.

The colonel raised his eyebrows. “So, you already know about the
oyentes.
I’m impressed. Not that I should be, I suppose. Not from a famous Berlin detective like yourself.”

“I’m an exile, Colonel. It pays to keep your mouth shut and your ears open.”

“And what is it that you hear?”

“I did hear the one about the two river rats, one from Argentina and the other from Uruguay. The rat from Uruguay was starving, so it swam across the River Plate in the hope that it might find something to eat. Halfway across, it met an Argentine rat swimming in the opposite direction. The Uruguayan rat was surprised and asked why such a well-fed-looking rat was going to Uruguay when there was so much to eat in Argentina. And the Argentine rat told him—”

“ ‘I just want to squeak now and then.’ ” Colonel Montalbán smiled wearily. “It’s an old joke.”

I pointed at an empty table but the colonel shook his head and then nodded at the door. I followed him outside, onto Florida. The street was closed to traffic between the hours of eleven a.m. and four p.m. so that pedestrians could inspect the attractively dressed windows of big shops like Gath & Chaves in comfort. But it could just as easily have been so that men could inspect the attractively dressed women. Of these there were plenty. After Munich and Vienna, Buenos Aires felt like a Paris catwalk.

The colonel had parked off Florida, on Tucumán, outside the Claridge Hotel. His car was a lime-colored Chevrolet convertible with polished wooden doors, whitewall tires, red leather seats, and, on the hood, an enormous spotlight, in case he needed to interrogate a parking attendant. When you sat in it, you felt like you should have been towing a water-skier.

“So this is what the polenta drives in B.A.,” I remarked, running my hand over the door. It had the height and feel of a bar top in a deluxe hotel. I suppose it made sense. A nice pink house for the president. A lime-colored convertible for his deputy head of security and intelligence. Fascism never looked so pretty. The firing squads probably wore tutus.

We drove west on Moreno with the top up. What was probably a cold winter’s day to the colonel felt pleasantly springlike to me. The temperature was in the mid-teens, but most
porteños
were walking around wearing hats and coats, as if it were Munich in January.

“Where are we going?”

“Police headquarters.”

“My favorite.”

“Relax,” he said, chuckling. “There’s something I want you to see.”

“I hope it’s your new summer uniforms. If so, I can save you a journey. I think they should be the same color as the Casa Rosada. To help make policemen in Argentina more popular. It’s hard not to like a cop when he’s wearing pink.”

“Do you always talk so much? What ever happened to keeping your mouth shut and your ears open?”

“After twelve years of Nazism it’s nice to squeak a little now and again.”

We drove through the entrance of a handsome nineteenth-century building that didn’t look much like a police station. I was beginning to understand a little of Argentine culture from a keen appreciation of its architecture. It was a very Catholic country. Even the police station looked like there was a basilica inside, one that was dedicated probably to Saint Michael, the patron of cops.

It might not have looked like a police station but it certainly smelled like one. All police stations smell of shit and fear.

Colonel Montalbán led the way through a warren of marble-floored corridors. Cops carrying files climbed out of our way as we went along.

“I’m beginning to think you might be someone important,” I said.

We stopped outside a door where the air seemed more fetid. It made me think of visiting the aquarium at the Berlin Zoo when I was a child. Or perhaps the reptile house. Something wet and slimy and uncomfortable, anyway. The colonel took out a packet of Capstan Navy Cut, offered me one, and then lit us both. “Deodorants,” he said. “In here is the judicial mortuary.”

“Do you bring all your first dates here?”

“Just you, my friend.”

“I feel I should warn you that I’m the squeamish sort. I don’t like mortuaries. Especially when there are dead bodies in them.”

“Come, now. You worked in Homicide, didn’t you?”

“That was years ago. It’s the living I want to be with as I get older, Colonel. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to spend time with the dead when I’m dead myself.”

The colonel pushed open the door and waited. It seemed I didn’t have much choice but to go inside. The smell got worse. Like a dead alligator. Something wet and slimy and definitely dead. A man wearing white scrubs and bright green rubber gloves came to meet us. He was vaguely Indian-looking, dark-skinned with even darker rings under his eyes, one of which was milky, like an oyster. I had the idea he’d just crawled out of one of his body drawers. He and the colonel exchanged a silent mime of nods and head jerks, and then the green gloves went to work. Less than a minute later, I was looking at the naked body of an adolescent girl. At least I think it was a girl. What usually passed for clues in this department appeared to be missing. And not just the exterior parts, but quite a few of the internal ones, too. I’d seen more obviously fatal injuries, but only on the western front, in 1917. Everything south of her navel appeared to have been mislaid.