A Quiet Flame (44 page)

“There’s nothing here,” said Anna. “Just a lot of sugar and a lot more sky.” She paused. “What exactly does this place look like, anyway?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “But I’ll know it when I see it.” I tossed the map onto her lap, shoved the jeep in gear, and drove on.

A few minutes later, we came to the ruins of a village. A village that didn’t appear on the map. Small, white, roofless shacks lined the road, and a derelict church was home to a number of stray dogs, but there was no sign of anyone living there.

“Where have all the people gone?”

“I suppose they were moved by the government. This whole area will be flooded when they dam the river.”

“I’m missing it already,” she said.

At the bottom of the street, a narrow alley led off to the right and, on a wall, we saw the faintest outline of an arrow and the words LAGUNA DULCE—Sweet Lagoon. We turned down the alley, which became a dirt track leading into a narrow valley. A thick canopy of trees covered the track, and I switched on the headlights until we were in sunlight again.

“I’d hate to run out of gas here,” observed Anna as we bounced from one pothole to another. “The middle of nowhere has its depressing moments.”

“Anytime you want to go back, just say the word.”

“And miss what’s just around the next corner? I don’t think so.”

At last, we came to a clearing and a kind of crossroads.

“Which way now?” she asked.

I drove a little farther on before reversing to the crossroads and choosing another direction. A moment or two later, I saw it.

“This is the right way,” I said.

“How do you know?”

I slowed down. In the bushes by the side of the track was an empty wooden roll labeled GLASGOW WIRE. I pointed to it. “This is where the Scotsman delivered his wire.”

“And you think it was for a refugee camp?”

“Yes.”

That was what I had told her. But already I was beginning to realize that if a refugee camp had once existed out here, it didn’t any longer. The whole valley was deserted. Any refugee camp would have needed supplies. Supplies needed transport. There was no evidence that anyone had been down that red-clay road in a while. Our own tire tracks were the only ones visible.

We drove on for almost a mile until I found what we were looking for. A thick line of trees and a barbed-wire gate in front of an anonymous dirt road that led farther down into the valley. Behind the tree line was an equally high barbed-wire fence. There was a sign in Spanish on the gate. Translated, it read:

PRIVATE PROPERTY OF THE CAPRI CONSTRUCTION AND HYDROELECTRIC COMPANY. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. KEEP OUT. DANGER.

There were three padlocked chains around the gate, and as it was about ten feet high, I hardly saw us climbing over it. Moreover, the padlocks were of a type that usually resisted picking. I steered the jeep off the road and into a small gap in the tree line. Then I cut the engine.

“I think we’re here,” I said.

“What now?” asked Anna, surveying the fence.

I unlocked the toolbox in the back of the jeep and searched it hopefully. It seemed that Geller went equipped for almost any eventuality. I found a pair of hand-sized, heavy-duty wire cutters. We were in business.

“Now, we walk,” I said.

We walked through the trees and along the length of the fence. There was no one about. Even the birds remained silent here. All the same, I figured it was better to cut the wire about thirty or forty yards from the jeep, in case anyone saw it and stopped to see why it was there. With the wire cutters in hand, I set about making an entrance for us.

“We’ll just go in and have a look and see what there is to see,” I said.

“Don’t you think we should maybe come back and do this in the dark? In case anyone sees us?”

“Stand back.” As I cut another length of Melville’s wire, it zipped away into the trees, singing like a broken piano string.

Anna looked around nervously.

“You really are quite tenacious, aren’t you?” she said.

I pocketed the wire cutters. Something bit me, and I slapped my neck. I almost wished it had been her. “Tenacious?” I grinned. “This is your search for answers. Not mine.”

“Then perhaps I just lost my appetite for them,” she said. “Fear does that to you. I certainly haven’t forgotten what happened the last time we broke into somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.”

“Good point,” I said, and took out my gun. I opened and closed the magazine, checked that everything was working, and slipped off the safety. Then I stepped through the gap I’d made in the fence.

Reluctantly, Anna followed. “I suppose killing people gets easier each time that you do it. That’s what they say, isn’t it?”

“They usually don’t know what they’re talking about,” I said, treading carefully through the trees. “The first time I killed a man was in the trenches. And it was me or him. I can’t say I’ve ever killed anyone who didn’t have it coming.”

“What about conscience?”

I let the gun lie flat on my hand for a moment. “Maybe you’d feel better if I put this away.”

“No,” she said quickly.

“So it’s all right if I have to kill someone, just as long as your conscience is clear, is that it?”

“Maybe if I was as tough as you, I could do it. I mean, shoot someone. But I’m not.”

“Angel? If there’s one thing the last war proved it’s that anyone can kill anyone. All you need is a reason. And a gun.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“There are no murderers,” I said. “There are just plumbers and shopkeepers and lawyers who kill people. Everyone’s quite normal until they pull the trigger. That’s all you need to fight a war. Lots of ordinary people to kill lots of other ordinary people. Couldn’t be easier.”

“And that makes it all right?”

“No. But that’s the way it is.”

She said nothing to that, and for a while, we walked in silence, as if the preternaturally quiet forest had affected us in some way. There was just a light breeze in the treetops and the sound of twigs cracking under our feet to remind us of where we were. Then, emerging from the trees, we found ourselves facing a second wire fence. It was about two hundred meters long, and behind it stood a number of temporary-looking wooden buildings. At opposite ends of the fence were watchtowers and, fortunately for us, these were not manned. The camp, if camp this was, looked deserted. I took out the wire cutters.

“Melville called this place Dulce,” I said, snipping one length of the little Scotsman’s galvanized wire, and then another.

“Someone’s idea of a joke, perhaps,” said Anna. “There’s nothing sweet about it.”

“It’s my guess that this is where they held illegal Jewish immigrants like your aunt and uncle, and Isabel Pekerman’s sisters. That’s the assumption I’ve been working on, anyway.”

We ducked through the wire and into the camp.

I counted five watchtowers—one on each corner of the perimeter fence and a fifth in the center of the camp, overlooking a kind of trench that seemed to connect one long barrack to another. Near the main gate was a small guardhouse. A road led into the camp from the main gate and onto what looked like a parade ground. In the center of the parade ground was an empty flagpole. Nearest to the place where we had entered the camp was a large ranch house. We peered through the dusty windows. There was furniture: tables, chairs, an old radio, a picture of Juan Perón, a room with a dozen or so beds on which the mattresses had been rolled up. In a canteen-sized kitchen, pots and pans hung neatly on a wall-mounted rack. I tried the door, and found it was not locked.

We went inside, breathing a musty, mildewed air. On a table we found an old copy of
La Prensa.
On the front page was a picture of Perón wearing a military uniform, a white officer’s cap, white gloves, a sash in the colors of the Argentine national flag, and a big, generous grin. The lead story was something about Perón announcing his first five-year plan to boost the country’s newly nationalized industries. I showed it to Anna, pointing out the date.

“Nineteen forty-seven,” I said. “I guess that was the last time anyone was here.”

“I certainly hope so,” she said.

I walked into another room and picked up an old helmet. Other rooms were no more enlightening.

“This must have been where the soldiers relaxed,” I said.

We went outside again, crossing the parade ground to a group of four long barracks. We went inside one. It was like a stable, except that instead of stalls there were wide wooden shelves, some of which were covered with handfuls of straw, and almost a minute had passed before I realized that these were supposed to be beds. Probably two or three people could have been accommodated on each of the shelves.

Anna looked at me with pain in her eyes, and I could tell she had arrived at the same conclusion. Neither of us spoke. She stayed close to me and eventually took my left hand. My gun was still in my right. We went into the second barrack, which was much like the first. So was the third. I was reminded of the POW camp I had been held in by the Russians. Apart from the weather, this place looked almost grim.

The fourth building was just a long, empty shed. The far end of the shed led down into a sort of trench that was covered with a ceiling of more barbed wire. The trench was about thirty yards long and two yards wide. We entered it and walked down into a barrack that you knew was there only when you had entered the trench. This one was divided into three chambers by two wooden walls. Each chamber was about ten feet high and thirty feet wide, and the inside walls were covered with sheets of zinc. On the ceiling were shower pipes. The door of each chamber was extra thick and could be closed from the outside by an iron locking bar. These doors were sealed with rubber gaskets around the edges. In each of the three chambers, a copper pipe entered through a wall a few inches above a tiled floor. The pipes were all connected to a large central stove in the corridor outside the chambers. By now I had a very bad feeling about this place.

Anna was looking at the pipes on the ceiling. “So where did the water come from?” she asked, glancing around. “I didn’t see a water tank on the roof.”

“Perhaps they took it away,” I said.

“Why? They haven’t taken anything else away.” She glanced down at the floor. “And what are these? Tram rails? What?” She followed the tram rails to the far end of the barrack and some double doors next to a big extractor fan set in the wall. She pushed open the doors and went outside.

“Perhaps we should leave now,” I called out, going after her. I holstered my gun and tried to take her by the hand, but she lifted it away and kept on walking.

“Not until I understand what this place is,” she said.

I tried to inject some calm into my voice. “Come on, Anna. Let’s go.” I wondered how much she knew of what had gone on at the camps in Poland. “We’ve seen enough, don’t you think? They’re not here. Perhaps they never were.”

The rails led along the side of five grass-covered mounds about twenty feet wide and forty feet long. Next to these were a number of heavy-duty flatbed trolleys of the kind that might have been used in a railway yard. The trolleys were covered in rust, but the design was clear enough: each trolley could be raised to tip its cargo into one of the pits. And I was beginning to suspect what probably lay underneath the grass-covered mounds.

“Earthworks,” I said.

“Earthworks? No, I don’t think so.”

“Yes,” I said. “I expect they were going to build some more of these barracks and then changed their minds.”

It sounded pathetic. I knew perfectly well what I was looking at. And by now, so did she.

Slowly, Anna was bending forward to look at something on the grass-covered mound that had caught her eye. She started to crouch. Then she was on her knees, glancing around, finding a piece of wood and using it to scrape at the ground around an almost colorless plant that was growing out of the pit in front of her.

“What is it?” I asked, coming closer. “Have you found something?”

She sat back on her haunches and I saw that it wasn’t a plant at all, but a child’s hand—a decomposed, partly skeletal human hand. Anna shook her head, whispered something, and then, putting her hand to her mouth, tried to stifle the emotion rising in her throat. Then she crossed herself.

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. The purpose of the camp was now clear to us both.
These mounds were mass graves.

“How many, do you think?” she said finally. “In each one?”

It was my turn to be nervous now. I was looking around for some sign that we might have been observed. A death camp was more than I had bargained for. Much more. “I dunno. Maybe a thousand. Look, we really should leave. Now.”

“Yes, you’re right.” She found a handkerchief and wiped her eye. “Just give me a minute, will you? My aunt and uncle are probably buried in one of these pits.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Can you honestly think of a better explanation?”

“Look,” I said. “The people who are buried here. You don’t know that they’re Jewish. They could be Argentines. Political opponents of the Peróns. There’s no reason to suppose—”

“That’s a gas chamber in there,” she said, looking back at the barrack from which we had just emerged. “Isn’t it? Come on, Gunther. You were in the SS. You of all people should be able to recognize one.”

I said nothing.

“I never heard of Perón’s political opponents being gassed,” she said. “Shot, yes. Tossed out of a plane. Yes. But not gassed. Only Jews get gassed. This place. This camp. Is a place of death. That’s why they were brought here. To be gassed. I can feel it. Everywhere. I could feel it in that dummy shower-barrack. I can feel it here, most of all.”

“We have to leave,” I said.