A Quiet Flame Read online

  All of us did our best to be civilized and polite. Even Anna, who responded to the thrown-down gauntlet of so much unexpected beauty by finding a little bit of extra beauty inside herself and switching it on like an electric light. But it was difficult to maintain this genteel atmosphere when the last guest was Otto Skorzeny. Especially as he had been drinking.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked when he saw me.

  “Having dinner, I hope.”

  Skorzeny draped a big arm around my shoulder. It felt as heavy as an iron bar. “This fellow is all right, Hans,” he told Kammler. “He’s my confidant. He’s going to help me to make sure those greaseballs never get their hands on the Reichsbank’s money.”

  Anna shot me a look.

  “How’s the hand, Otto?” I asked him, anxious to change the subject.

  Skorzeny inspected his big mitt. It was covered in some livid-looking scars from when he had punched King George’s picture. It was clear he had forgotten how the scars had come to be there at all. “My hand? Yes. I remember now. How’s your ingrown toenail, or whatever it was?”

  “He’s fine,” said Anna, putting her arm through mine.

  “Who are you?” he asked her.

  “His nurse. Only somehow he manages to look after himself very well without me. I wonder why I came at all.”

  “Have you known each other for long?” asked Frau Kammler.

  “They’re engaged to be married,” said Heinrich Grund.

  “Really?” said Frau Kammler.

  “It’s for his own good,” said Anna.

  “Do you have any friends as good-looking as you?” Skorzeny asked her.

  “No. But you seem to have plenty of friends of your own.”

  Skorzeny looked at me, then at Kammler and Grund. “You’re right,” he said. “My old comrades.”

  Anna shot me another look. I hoped she didn’t have the gun on her. The way things were going, I thought she might shoot everyone, including me.

  “But I need a good woman,” he complained.

  “What about Evita?” I asked. “How’s it coming along with her?” Skorzeny pulled a face. “Not a chance. Bitch.”

  “Otto, please,” said Frau Kammler. “There are children present.”

  Skorzeny looked at Mercedes and grinned with open admiration. She was grinning back at him. “Mercedes? She’s hardly that.”

  “Thank you, Otto,” said Mercedes. “At least there’s someone here who’s prepared to treat me like a grown-up. Anyway, he’s right, Mommy. Eva Perón is a bitch.”

  “That will do, Mercedes.” Her mother lit a cigarette in a holder the length of a blowpipe. Scolding Skorzeny gently, she took him over to the most comfortable-looking sofa and sat down with him. Evidently, she had experience of his behavior, because a minute later the hero of the Gran Sasso was asleep and snoring loudly.

  We dined without him.

  As promised, the dinner prepared by Goering’s chef was excellent. And very German. I ate things I hadn’t tasted since before the war. Even Anna was impressed.

  “Tell your chef that I’m in love with him,” she said, full of charm now.

  Kammler took his wife’s hand. “And I am in love with my wife,” he said, bringing the long, slender hand to his lips.

  She smiled back at him and took his hand back to her mouth, then nuzzled it tenderly, like a favorite pet.

  “Tell me, Anna,” said Kammler. “Have you ever seen two people who were so much in love as us?”

  “No. I can’t say I ever did.” Anna smiled politely and looked at me. “I do hope that I’m as lucky as you are.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy this woman makes me,” said Kammler. “I think that I would die if she left me. Really I would. I’d just die without her.”

  “So, Anna,” said Grund. “When are you and Bernie planning to get married?”

  “That all depends,” she said, treating me to one of her most saccharine smiles.

  “On what?” asked Grund.

  “He has a small quest to perform for me first.”

  “So he’s a true knight,” said Mercedes. “How romantic. Just like Parsifal.”

  “Actually, he’s more like Don Quixote,” said Anna, taking my hand and squeezing it playfully. “My knight is a little older than most knights errant. Aren’t you, darling?”

  Grund laughed. “I like her, Bernie,” he said. “I like her a lot. But she’s much too clever for you.”

  “I hope not, Heinrich.”

  “And what is this quest?” asked Mercedes.

  “I want him to slay a dragon for me,” said Anna, with eyes widening. “In a manner of speaking.”

  When dinner was over, we returned to the living room and found Skorzeny was gone, to everyone’s relief. A little after that, Mercedes went to bed, followed closely by her mother and then Anna, who mischievously blew me a kiss as she went up. I breathed a sigh of relief that we had managed to get through the evening without her shooting anyone. I said I needed some night air, and having taken one of the cigars offered me by my host, I went outside.

  There’s nothing like staring at a night sky to make you feel a long way from home. Especially when that sky is in South America and home is in Germany. The sky above the Sierra was bigger than any I’d ever seen, which made me feel smaller than the smallest point of silvery light on that great black vault. Perhaps that was why it was there. To make us feel small. To stop us from thinking that any of us is at all important enough to be a member of a master race and nonsense like that.

  After a moment, I heard a match scrape and, looking around, I saw Heinrich Grund lighting a cigarette. He stared up the heavens, took a deep drag on the cigarette, and said, “You’re a lucky fellow, Bernie. She’s really very lovely. And a bit of a handful, I imagine.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Do you ever think of that kid in Berlin? The crippled one who got herself murdered back in ’thirty-two? Anita Schwarz, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “And you remember the arguments we used to have? About her. Me saying it was all for the best that people like her died and you saying that mercy killing was wrong.” He shrugged. “Something like that, anyway. The fact is, Bernie, I really had no idea what I was talking about. No idea at all. It’s one thing saying it. But it’s quite another doing it.” He was silent for a while. Then he asked, “Do you think there’s a God, Bernie?”

  “No. How could there be? If there was, you wouldn’t be here now. Neither of us would.”

  Grund nodded. “I was glad when we lost the war,” he said. “I expect that surprises you. But I was glad it was all over. The killing, I mean. And when we came here, it seemed like a fresh start.” He shook his head sadly as if weighed down by something monumentally heavy. “Only it wasn’t.”

  When he had been silent for almost a minute, I said, “Do you want to talk about it, Heinrich?”

  He let out an unsteady, tremulous sort of breath and shook his head. “Words don’t help. They only seem to make it worse. For me, at any rate. I don’t have Kammler’s strength. His sense of absolute certainty.”

  “I expect it helps having his family around,” I said, trying to change the subject. “How long have they been here?”

  “I dunno. A few months, I suppose.” Grund clapped himself on the chest. “For him, Hitler still lives, in here. Always will, probably. For him and a lot of other Germans. But not me. Not anymore.”

  There was nothing I could say to this. There was nothing I wanted to say. We had both made our choices and were living with the consequences of those, good or bad. I wasn’t sure I’d come off any better than Grund, but at least, thanks to Anna, I still had some hope for the future. Grund didn’t seem to have hope left in anything at all.

  I left him on the terrace, with his thoughts and his fears and whatever else a man like him goes to bed with, impaled on the shards of his conscience.

  Anna sat up in bed as I came through our bedroom door. The bed
side light was on. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and started to unlace my shoes. I wanted to say something tender to her, but there was still something on her mind.

  “Well?” she said. “Did you think of something? Some sort of punishment for that bastard Kammler?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”

  “Something terrible?”

  “Yes. I think it will be. For him.”

  23

  BUENOS AIRES, 1950

  TWO DAYS LATER, we arrived back in Buenos Aires. Since it seemed unlikely that the colonel would have heard Kammler’s news—that his men had picked me up next to the secret camp at Dulce—with any equanimity, I told Anna I needed some time to straighten things out with him before we could count ourselves safe. For now, I told her, she should go home and stay indoors until I called her. Better still, she should go stay with a friend.

  I had no way of knowing if Anna was likely to take my advice, since, for most of the journey back from Tucumán, she hadn’t really been speaking to me. She didn’t like my idea about what we were going to do about Hans Kammler. She didn’t think it was enough of a punishment, and told me that as far as she was concerned, our relationship was over.

  Maybe she meant that. And maybe she didn’t. There was no time to make sure. I was coming out of the Richmond when they picked me up a second time. It might have been the same three men, only it was a little hard to tell, with the dark glasses and the matching mustaches. The car was another black Ford sedan, but not the same one that had driven me to Caseros. This car had a cigarette burn on the rear seat and a large bloodstain on the carpet. Or it might have been coffee. It might have been molasses. But over the years, you get to recognize a bloodstain when you see one on a car floor. I tried to keep calm but this time it wasn’t working. Only I wasn’t worried for myself as much as I was worried for Anna.

  This was the moment I realized I was in love with her. That’s usually the way, of course. It’s only when you have something taken away that you realize how important it was to you. I was worried about her because, after all, I’d been warned, and in no uncertain terms. Naturally, the colonel would have guessed what I was up to when Kammler telephoned him. That I was sticking my nose into Argentina’s biggest secret. Not the Pulqui II jet-fighter aircraft, not even an atom bomb, but the fate of several thousand illegal Jewish refugees. The puzzle was why the colonel hadn’t just told Kammler to kill us both. I guessed I was about to find out. Only this time we sped past Caseros.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” growled one of my chaperones.

  “Mystery tour, huh? I like surprises.”

  “You won’t like this one,” he said ominously. And the other two laughed.

  “You know, I’ve been trying to get in touch with your boss, Colonel Montalbán. I called him several times last night. I need to speak with him very urgently. I have some important information for him. Will he be where we’re going?” I glanced out of the window and saw that we were driving southwest. “I know he’ll want to speak to me.”

  I nodded, almost as if trying to convince myself of this. But struggling for the right Spanish vocabulary to find something else that would convince them of my need to see the colonel, I found myself unable to say anything much at all. There was a hole in the pit of my stomach the size of the football stadium at La Boca. My greatest worry was that this metaphorical hole might soon become a real one.

  “Anyone got a Spanish dictionary?” I asked. No one answered. “How about a cigarette?”

  One of the thugs sandwiching me shifted on his backside, squeezing me for a moment as he reached for a packet of smokes. I caught the smell of sweat on his jacket and the oil in his hair and saw a little blackjack poking out of his breast pocket. I hoped it was going to stay there. I’d been blackjacked before and I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. He turned back with the packet in his hands and pushed open the little cardboard drawer. My fingers reached for one. The cigarettes looked like little white heads tucked up in bed, which was where I wished I was now. I put the cigarette in my mouth and waited while he found his lighter.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, and bent my head down to the flame. Too late I remembered it had been an old Gestapo trick. Straight out of the unofficial manual. Part III. How to silence a talkative suspect in the back of a black car. One fist holds the lighter. The other comes across from the other side of the car as the suspect ducks down to the flame, and knocks him out cold. At least, that’s what I suppose must have happened. It was that, or the Argies really did have an atom bomb and, accidentally, someone had pressed the fire button instead of the bezel on a cigarette lighter. For me, the effect was pretty much the same, however. One minute it was a nice, sunny day. The next, darkness all over the land until the ninth hour. And the sensation that I was humming like a very sick bee, as if someone had just put twenty thousand volts through a metal cap and a brine-soaked sponge attached to my cranium. For a moment or two, I thought I heard laughter. The same kind of laughter you get when you’re a cat in a sack full of stones and someone drops you down a well. I hit the water without so much as a splash and disappeared below the surface. It was a deep well and the water was very cold. The laughter went away. I stopped mewing. That was the general idea. I was pacified, the way the Gestapo liked. For some reason, I remembered Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo. He only lasted until 1934, when Goering lost control of the Prussian police. He ended up as a local government official in Cologne or Hannover, and found himself dismissed altogether when he refused to arrest the city’s Jews. What happened to him after that? A sucker punch and a trip to a concentration camp, no doubt. Like poor Frieda Bamberger, who died in the middle of nowhere with rubber seals on the shower doors. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I felt like I was already under the earth. I felt my hand poking up through the ground. Reaching for life . . .

  Someone wrestled my arms around behind my back and tied my wrists together. I was blindfolded now. I was standing up and leaning across the warm hood of the Ford. I could hear the sound of airplanes. We were at an airport. I thought it must be Ezeira.

  Two men lifted me under the arms and dragged me across the tarmac. My feet weren’t coming with me. It didn’t seem to hinder our progress. The noise of the aircraft engine grew louder. A metallic, oily smell filled the air and I felt the wind of the propeller in my face. It seemed to revive me a little.

  “I feel I should warn you,” I said. “I’m not a good air traveler.” They hauled me up a short flight of metal steps and then flung me down on a hard, metallic floor. There was something else on the floor besides me. The something else shifted and groaned, and I realized there were others in the same boat as me. Except that it wasn’t a boat. It might have been better if it had been. Either way, I had now guessed what lay ahead of us. A river trip. The River Plate. Perhaps it was better this way, after all. At least we wouldn’t drown. The fall would kill us.

  The door closed and the aircraft began to move. Someone, a man a few feet away, was reciting a prayer. Someone else was retching with fear. There was a strong smell of vomit and human incontinence and gasoline.

  “So the rumors are true, then?” I said. “There are no parachutes in the Argentine air force?”

  A woman started crying. I hoped it wasn’t Anna.

  The plane engines roared. Just two of them, I thought. A C-47 Dakota, most likely. You often saw them heading out over the River Plate. People sitting outside the Richmond would look up from their newspapers and their coffees and make jokes about these airplanes. “There goes the opposition,” or “Why can’t Communists swim in the River Plate? Because their hands are tied together.” The floor underneath me began to vibrate loudly. I felt the plane accelerate, and we started our takeoff. A few seconds later, there was a lurch, and we were airborne and the vibration settled into a steady, droning rhythm. The plane began to climb. The woman crying was almost hysterical by now.

  �
��Anna?” I called. “Is that you? It’s me—”

  Someone slapped me hard across the face. “No talking,” said a man’s voice. He lit a cigarette, and suddenly I remembered why I was a smoker. The smell of tobacco is the most wonderful smell in the universe when you’re facing death. I remember being shelled in 1916 and how a cigarette had got me through without my losing my nerve or my bowels.

  “I wouldn’t mind a smoke,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”

  I heard a man’s voice murmur something from the opposite end of the aircraft and, a few seconds later and much to my surprise, some fingers pushed a cigarette between my lips. It was already alight. I rolled it into the corner of my mouth and let my lungs go to work on it.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I tried to make myself more comfortable. It wasn’t easy, but I hadn’t expected it would be. The cord around my wrists was as tight as the skin on a fat snake. My hands felt like balloons. I managed to straighten my legs, which weren’t tied, and kicked someone else. Maybe I would kick a shark in the eye before I drowned. Always supposing I hit the Río and lived. I wondered how high the pilot was planning to go before they started bailing us out.

  Minutes passed. I was down to the filter. I spat the cigarette out of my mouth and it burned my shoulder before ending up on the deck. I hoped it might hit a pool of gasoline and cause a small fire. That would teach them. Then what sounded like a handful of gravel hit the fuselage. It was raining. I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. To make peace with myself. Negotiations opened slowly. I told Gunther he should think of himself as one of the lucky ones. How many others had ever managed to escape from the Russians? I was still telling myself how lucky I was, when someone interrupted my winning streak and opened the door. Cold air and rain blasted through the guts of the plane with a sound like the roaring of some terrible cloud-monster. A minotaur of the skies that needed to be served with regular human sacrifice.

  It was impossible to guess how many human sacrifices were planned. I thought there were at least six or seven of us on that plane. With the door open now, the engines seemed to throttle back a little. There was movement all around me but, so far, no one had tried to move me toward the door. There was some sort of commotion and then a naked woman fell on me. I could tell she was naked because her breast squashed against my face and she was screaming. As they hauled her off me, I decided I had to say something or I’d be telling it to the seagulls.