A Quiet Flame Read online

  The younger man by the door unfolded his arms and pushed himself off the wall. He glanced at the man with the beard for a moment. “If the police have no objection?” His German was every bit as fluent as his master’s.

  The man with the beard shook his head.

  “I’ll ask Ramón Carrillo to look into it, shall I, sir?” said Rodolfo. From the pocket of his beautifully tailored pinstripe suit he took out a small leather notebook and made a note with a silver propelling pencil.

  Perón nodded. “Please do,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder a second time.

  In spite of his declared admiration for goose-stepping, I found myself liking the president. I liked him for his motor scooter and his ridiculous plus-fours. I liked him for his slugger’s paw and his stupid little dogs. I liked him for his warm welcome and the easy way he had about him. And—who knows?—maybe I liked him because I badly needed to like someone. Maybe that’s why he was president, I don’t know. But there was something about Juan Perón that made me want to take a gamble on him. Which is why after months of pretending to be someone else who was pretending to be Dr. Carlos Hausner, I decided to level with him about who and what I really was.

  3

  BUENOS AIRES, 1950

  I PUT OUT my cigarette in an ashtray as big as a wheel hub, which lay on the president’s uncluttered desk. Next to the ashtray was a Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry box—the leather kind that looks like it would make a swell gift on its own. I figured the contents of that box were pinned to the little blonde’s lapel. She was fussing with the dogs as I started my noble-sounding monologue. It took only a minute to get her attention. I flatter myself that when the spirit moves me, I can make myself more interesting than any small dog. Besides, I guessed it wasn’t every day that someone in the president’s office tells him he’d made a mistake.

  “Mr. President, sir,” I said. “I think there’s something I should tell you. Since this is a Catholic country, maybe you can call it confession.” Seeing all their faces blanch, I smiled. “It’s all right. I’m not about to tell you about all the terrible things I did during the war. There were some things I’m not happy about, sure. But I don’t have the lives of innocent men and women on my conscience. No, my confession is something much more ordinary. You see, I’m not a doctor at all, sir. There was a doctor back in Germany. A fellow named Gruen. He wanted to go and live in America, only he worried what might happen to him if they ever found out what he’d done during the war. So, to take the heat off himself, he decided to make it look like I was him. Then he told the Israelis and the Allied war-crimes people where to come and look for me. Anyway, he did such a good job of convincing everyone I was him that I was obliged to go on the run. Eventually I turned for help to the old comrades and the Delegation for Argentine Emigration in Europe. Carlos, here. Don’t get me wrong, sir, I’m very grateful to be here. I had a hard job convincing an Israeli death squad that I wasn’t Gruen and was obliged to leave a couple of them dead in the snow near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. So you see, I really am a fugitive. I’m just not the fugitive you might think I am. And in particular, I am not and never have been a doctor.”

  “So who the hell are you? Really?” It was Carlos Fuldner, and he sounded annoyed.

  “My real name is Bernhard Gunther. I was in the SD. Working for intelligence. I was captured by the Russians and was interned in a camp before escaping. But before the war I was a policeman. A detective with the Berlin police force.”

  “Did you say a detective?” This was the man with the small beard and the tinted glasses. The one I’d marked down as a cop. “What kind of a detective?”

  “I worked in Homicide, mostly.”

  “What was your rank?” asked the cop.

  “When war was declared in 1939, I was a KOK. A Kriminal Oberkommissar. A chief inspector.”

  “Then you’ll remember Ernst Gennat.”

  “Of course. He was my mentor. Taught me everything I know.”

  “What was it that the newspapers used to call him?”

  “The Full Ernst. On account of his bulk and fondness for cakes.”

  “What happened to him? Do you know?”

  “He was deputy chief of the criminal police until his death in 1939. He had a heart attack.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Too many cakes.”

  “Gunther, Gunther,” he said, as though trying to shake a thought like an apple from a tree growing in the back of his head. “Yes, of course. I know you.”

  “You do?”

  “I was in Berlin. Before the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Studying jurisprudence at the university.”

  The cop came closer, close enough for me to smell the coffee and the cigarettes on his breath, and took off his glasses. I guessed he smoked a lot. For one thing, there was a cigarette in his mouth, and for another, his voice sounded like a smoked herring. There were laugh lines around the gray iron filings that constituted his mustache and his beard, but the walnut of a frown knotted between his bloodshot blue eyes told me that maybe he’d got out of the habit of smiling. His eyes narrowed as he searched my face for more answers.

  “You know, you were a hero of mine. Believe it or not, you’re one of the reasons I gave up the idea of being a lawyer and became a policeman instead.” He looked at Perón. “Sir, this man was a famous Berlin detective. When I first went there, in 1928, there was a notorious strangler. His name was Gormann. This is the man who caught him. At the time it was quite a cause célèbre.” He looked back at me. “I’m right, aren’t I? You are that Gunther.”

  “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?”
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  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.”

  4

  BUENOS AIRES, 1950

  SEVERAL 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 wood
en 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.