A Quiet Flame Read online

  Through the telescope I watched the polished black front door. It was opened by a man wearing a light-colored tweed suit. His hair was dark and he had a short, Errol Flynn-style mustache. He and the policeman seemed to know each other. The man from the house smiled to reveal a noticeable gap between the two front teeth on his upper jaw. Then he placed an avuncular hand on the girl’s shoulder and spoke kindly to her. The girl, who had seemed nervous until now, was reassured. The man pointed at the handcuffs, and the cop took them off. The girl rubbed her wrists and then put her thumbnail between her teeth. She had long brown hair and skin the color of honey. She was wearing a red corduroy dress and red-and-black stockings. Her knees touched when she talked, and when she smiled it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. The man from the house ushered the girl inside, looked at the cop, and pointed after her, as if inviting him in, too. The cop shook his head. The man went inside, the door closed, and the cop went to sit in the car, where he smoked a cigarette, tipped his cap forward, folded his arms, and went to sleep.

  I glanced at my wristwatch. It was two o’clock.

  Ninety minutes passed before the door opened again. The man from the house followed the girl onto the veranda. He picked up the cat and showed it off to her. The girl stroked the cat’s head and put some candy in her mouth. The man put the cat down and they went down the steps. The girl was moving more slowly than before, coming down the steps as if each one were several feet high. I looked through the telescope again. Her head hung heavy on her shoulders but not as heavy as her eyelids. She looked like she’d been drugged. Several paces ahead of her, the man tapped the window of the police car and the cop sat bolt upright, as if something sharp had come through the bottom of his seat. The man opened the rear passenger door of the car and turned to see where the girl was and saw that she had stopped walking altogether, although she was hardly standing still. She resembled a tree that was about to topple. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed, and she was breathing deeply through her nose in an effort not to faint. The man went back to her and put his arm around her waist. The next thing, she bent forward and vomited into the gutter. The man looked around for the cop and said something sharply. The cop came over, collected the girl up in his arms, and laid her on the backseat of the car. He closed the door, took off his cap, wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and said something to the man, who bent forward, waved at the prostrate girl through the car window, and then stood back and waited. He looked around. He looked in my direction. I was about thirty yards up the street. I didn’t think he could see me. He didn’t. The police car started, the man waved again as it drove off, and then he turned and went back up to the house.

  I folded away the telescope and returned it to the glove box. I swallowed a mouthful of cognac from the flask in my pocket and got out of the car. I collected a file and notepad off the passenger seat, shifted my shoulder holster a few inches, rubbed the still-tender scar on my collarbone, and walked up the steps. The dog started barking again. Sitting on the white balustrade, the cat, which was the size and shape of a feather duster, viewed me with vertical-eyed scrutiny. It was a minor demon, the familiar to its diabolic owner.

  I hauled on the doorbell, heard a chime that sounded like something from a clock tower, and gazed back across the street. The woman in the pink dressing gown was getting dressed now. I was still watching when the door opened behind me.

  “You certainly couldn’t miss the postman,” I said, speaking German. “Not with a bell like that. It lasts as long as a heavenly choir.” I showed him my ID. “I wonder if I might come in and ask you a few questions.”

  A strong smell of ether hung in the air, underscoring the obvious inconvenience of my visit. But Helmut Gregor was a German, and a German knew better than to argue with credentials like mine. The Gestapo no longer existed, but the idea and influence of the Gestapo lived on in the minds of all Germans old enough to know the difference between wedding rings and a set of brass knuckles. Especially in Argentina.

  “You’d better come in,” he said, standing politely to one side. “Herr . . . ?”

  “Hausner,” I said. “Carlos Hausner.”

  “A German working for Central State Intelligence. That’s rather unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There was a time when we were quite good at this sort of thing.”

  He smiled thinly and closed the door.

  We were standing in a high-ceilinged hallway with a marble floor. I had a brief glimpse of what looked like a surgery at the far end of that hallway, before Gregor closed the frosted door in front of it.

  He paused, as if half inclined to force me to ask my questions in the hallway, then he seemed to change his mind and led the way into an elegant sitting room. Beneath an ornate gilt mirror was an elegant stone fireplace and, in front of this, a hardwood Chinese tea table and a couple of handsome leather armchairs. He waved me to one of them.

  I sat down and glanced around. On a sideboard was a collection of silver mate gourds and, on the table in front of us, a copy of the Free Press, which was the Nazi-leaning German-language daily. On another table was a photograph of a man wearing plus-fours, riding a bicycle. Another photograph showed a man wearing white tie and tails on his wedding day. In neither of these two photographs did the man have a mustache, and this made it easier for me to remember him as the man I’d met on the steps of Dr. Kassner’s Berlin house back in the summer of 1932. The man he’d called Beppo. The man who was now calling himself Helmut Gregor. Apart from the mustache, he didn’t look so very different. He was not quite forty, and his hair was still thick and dark brown, and without a hint of gray. He wasn’t smiling, but his mouth remained slightly open, his lip curled, like a dog getting ready to growl or to bite. His eyes were different from how I remembered them. They were like the cat’s eyes: wary and watchful and full of nine lives’ worth of dark secrets.

  “I’m sorry for disturbing your lunch.” I pointed at a glass of milk and a sandwich that lay uneaten on a silver tray on the floor, next to the leg of his chair. At the same time I wondered if the milk and the sandwich might have been meant for his young female visitor.

  “That’s all right. What can I do for you?”

  I rattled off the usual spiel about the Argentine passport and the good-conduct pass and how everything was nothing more than a formality because I was ex-SS myself and knew the score. Hearing this, he asked me about my war service, and after I’d supplied the edited version that left out my time with the German War Crimes Bureau, he seemed to relax a little, like a fishing line slackening after several minutes in the water.

  “I was also in Russia,” he said. “With the medical corps of the Viking Division. And in particular, at the Battle of Rostow.”

  “I heard it was tough there,” I offered.

  “It was tough everywhere.”

  I opened the file I had brought with me. Helmut Gregor’s file. “If I could just check a few basic details.”

  “Certainly.”

  “You were born on—?”

  “March 16, 1911.”

  “In?”

  “Günzburg.”

  I shook my head. “It’s somewhere on the Danube. That’s as much as I know about it. I’m from Berlin, myself. No. Wait a minute. There was someone I knew who was from Günzburg. A fellow named Pieck. Walter Pieck. He was in the SS, too. At Dachau concentration camp, I think it was. Perhaps you knew him.”

  “Yes. His father was the local police chief. We knew each other slightly, before the war. But I was never at Dachau. I was never at any concentration camp. As I said, I was in the Viking Division of the Waffen-SS.”

  “And what did your own father do? In Günzburg?”

  “He sold—still sells—farm machinery. Threshing machines, that kind of thing. All very ordinary. But I believe he’s still the town’s largest employer.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pen poised. “I’ve missed a question. Name of father and mother, please.”

&nbs
p; “Is this really necessary?”

  “It’s normal on most passport applications.”

  He nodded. “Karl and Walburga Mengele.”

  “Walburga. That’s an unusual name.”

  “Yes. Isn’t it? Walburga was an English saint who lived and died in Germany. I assume you’ve heard of Walpurgis Night? On the first of May? That’s when her relics were transferred to some church or other.”

  “I thought that was some kind of Witches’ Sabbath.”

  “I believe it’s also that,” he said.

  “And you are Josef. Any brothers or sisters?”

  “Two brothers. Alois and Karl Junior.”

  “I won’t keep you much longer, Dr. Mengele.” I smiled.

  “I prefer Dr. Gregor.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Now then. Where was it that you qualified?”

  “Why is this relevant?”

  “You’re still practicing as a doctor, aren’t you? I should say it was highly relevant.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not used to answering so many questions, truthfully. I’ve spent the last five years being someone else. I’m sure you know what that’s like.”

  “I certainly do. Now perhaps you understand why it is that the Argentine government asked me to carry out this task. Because I’m a German and an SS man, just like you. In order that you and our other old comrades could be put at ease about the whole process. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Yes. It makes quite a lot of sense, when you think about it.”

  I shrugged. “On the other hand, if you don’t want to have an Argentine passport, we can stop this right now.” I shook my head. “I mean, it certainly won’t make me itch, as the saying goes.”

  “Please, do carry on.”

  I frowned, as if thinking of something else.

  “I insist,” he added.

  “No, it’s just that I’ve got a feeling we’ve met before.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure I would have remembered.”

  “In Berlin, wasn’t it? The summer of 1932.”

  “In the summer of 1932, I was in Munich.”

  “Yes, surely you remember. It was at the home of another doctor. Dr. Richard Kassner. On Dönhoff-Platz?”

  “I don’t recall knowing a Dr. Kassner.”

  I unbuttoned my coat so that I could treat his eyes to a little taste of the gun I was wearing. Just in case he thought to try something surgical on me. Like trepanning a little hole in my head with a pistol. Because by now I had no doubt he was armed. There was something heavier than a packet of cigarettes in one of his coat pockets. I didn’t know exactly what Mengele had done during the war. The only thing I knew was what Eichmann had told me. That Mengele had done something bestial at Auschwitz. And for this reason he was one of the most wanted men in Europe.

  “Come now. Surely you remember. What was it he used to call you? Biffo, wasn’t it? No, wait a minute. It was Bippo. Whatever happened to Kassner?”

  “I really think you’re mistaking me for someone else. If you don’t mind me saying so, this was eighteen years ago.”

  “No, it’s all coming back to me now. You see, Herr Doktor Mengele—Beppo—I was a policeman in 1932. Working for the Homicide Division in Berlin KRIPO. A detective investigating the murder of Anita Schwarz. Do you remember her, perhaps?”

  He crossed his legs, coolly. “No. Look, this is all very confusing. I think I need a cigarette.”

  His hand went into the pocket. But I was quicker.

  “Uh-uh,” I said, and holding the Smith & Wesson just a few inches above his belly, I smacked his hand out of his coat pocket and then took out a walnut-handled PPK. I glanced at it briefly. It was a thirty-eight with a Nazi eagle on the grip.

  “Not very clever of you,” I said. “Keeping something like this.”

  “You’re the one who’s not being very clever,” he said.

  I pocketed the pistol and sat down again. “Oh? How’s that?”

  “Because I’m a friend of the president.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I advise you to put that gun away and leave now.”

  “Not before we’ve had a little talk, Mengele. About old times.” I thumbed back the hammer on the Smith. “And if I don’t like the answers, then I’m going to have to offer you a prompt. In the foot. And then in the leg. I’m sure you know how it works, Doctor. A Socratic dialogue?”

  “Socratic?”

  “Yes. I encourage you to reflect and to think and, together”—I waved the gun at him—“together we search for the truth to some important questions. No philosophical training is needed, but if I think you’re not trying to help us reach a consensus—well, you remember what happened to Socrates, don’t you? His fellow Athenians forced him to put a gun to his head and blow his own brains out. Something like that, anyway.”

  “Why on earth do you care what happened to Anita Schwarz?” Mengele asked angrily. “It was almost twenty years ago.”

  “Not just Anita Schwarz. Elizabeth Bremer, too. The girl in Munich?”

  “It wasn’t what you think,” he insisted.

  “No? What was it, then? Dadaism? I seem to remember that was quite popular before the Nazis. Let’s see now. You eviscerated those two girls because you were an artist who believed in meaning through chaos. You used their insides for a collage. Or perhaps a nice photograph. There were you and Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters. No? How about this, then? You were a medical student who decided to make a bit of extra money by offering backstreet abortions to underage girls. It’s the details I’m not clear about. The when and the how.”

  “If I tell you, will you leave me alone?”

  “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to shoot you.” I took aim at his foot. “Then I’ll leave you alone. To bleed to death.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Let’s start in Munich. With Elizabeth Bremer.”

  Mengele shook his head until, seeing me take aim at his foot again, he waved his hands. “No, no, I’m just trying to cast my mind back. But it’s difficult. So much has happened since then. You’ve no idea how irrelevant all this seems to a man like me. You’re talking about two accidental deaths that happened almost twenty years ago.” He laughed bitterly. “I was at Auschwitz, you know. And what happened there was, of course, quite extraordinary. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened. Three million died at Auschwitz. Three million. And you just want to talk about two children.”

  “I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to finish an investigation.”

  “Listen to yourself. You sound like one of those stupid Canadian cowboys. What is it that they call them? The Mounties? They always get their man. Is that really all this is? Professional pride? Or is there something else I’m missing?”

  “I’m asking the questions, Doctor. But as it happens, there is some professional pride here, yes. I’m sure you know what that’s like, you being a professional man yourself. I got taken off this case, for political reasons. Because I wasn’t a Nazi. I didn’t like that then and I don’t like it now. So. Let’s start with Walter Pieck. You knew him quite well, didn’t you? From Günzburg.”

  “Of course. Everyone knows everyone else in Günzburg. It’s a very Catholic little town. Walter and I were at school together. At least until he failed his Abitur. He was always more interested in sports. Especially winter sports. He was a fantastic skater and skier. And I should know. I’m a good skier myself. Anyway, he quarreled with his father and went to work in Munich. I passed my Abitur and went to study in Munich. We lived very separate lives but, occasionally, we would meet up for a beer. I even lent him a bit of money now and then.

  “My family was quite wealthy by the standards of Günzburg. Even today, Günzburg is the Mengele family. But my father, Karl, was a cold figure and somewhat jealous of me, I think. For this reason, perhaps, he kept me short of money when I was at medical school and I resolved to earn some extra myself.
It so happened that another old friend’s girl was pregnant, and, having already studied quite a bit on the subject of obstetrics and gynecology as a student, I offered to help them get rid of it. Actually, it’s quite a simple procedure. Before long, I’d carried out several abortions. I made quite a bit of money. I bought a small car with the proceeds.

  “Then Walter’s girlfriend got pregnant. Elizabeth was a lovely girl. Too good for Walter. Anyway, she was adamant that she didn’t want to keep the child. She wanted to go to university and study medicine herself.” Mengele frowned and shook his head. “I thought I was helping her. But. There were complications. A hemorrhage. Even in a hospital bed, she would probably have died, you understand. But this was in my apartment, in Munich. And I had no way of helping her. She bled to death on my kitchen table.” He paused for a moment and almost looked troubled at the memory of it. “You must remember, I was still a young man, with my whole future ahead of me. I wanted to help people. As a doctor, you understand. Anyway, I panicked. I had a dead body on my hands. And it would have been quite obvious to any pathologist that she had had an abortion. I was desperate to cover my tracks.

  “It was Walter’s idea, really, that I should remove all her sexual organs. There had been some lurid details of an old lust murder in some magazine he’d been reading, and he said that if we made Elizabeth’s death look like one of those, it would at least ensure the police did not come looking for an illegal abortionist. I agreed. So I cut her up, like something out of an anatomy lesson, and Walter disposed of her body. His father in Günzburg gave him an alibi. Said he’d been at home at the time of Elizabeth’s death. He was used to doing that for Walter. But after that, Walter had to toe the line. Do what his father told him. Which is how he ended up joining the SS. To keep him out of trouble.” Mengele laughed. “Ironic, really, when you think about it. The Americans shot him at Dachau.” He shook his head. “But I certainly didn’t mean to kill that poor girl. She was lovely. A real Aryan beauty. I was trying to help her. And why not? She made a mistake, that’s all. It happens all the time. And to the most respectable people.”