A Quiet Flame

9 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I DID NOT OPEN the old KRIPO files that Colonel Montalbán had somehow obtained from Berlin. In spite of what I had told him, the details of the case were still quite familiar to me. I knew perfectly well why it was I had been unable to apprehend Anita Schwarz’s murderer. But I started work all the same.

I was looking for a missing girl who just might be dead. And I was keeping an eye out for one of my old comrades who just might be a psychopath.

Neither of the investigative questions I had been set by the hero-worshipping Argentine policeman seemed likely to get the answer he was looking for. Mostly, I was just looking out for myself. But I went along with his idea, of course. What other choice did I have?

At first, I was nervous about playing the part the colonel had written for me. For one thing, I wanted as little to do with other ex-SS men as possible; and, for another, I was convinced that, in spite of Montalbán’s assurances, they would be hostile to someone asking a lot of questions concerning events most of them probably wanted to forget. But, more often than not, the colonel turned out to be right. As soon as I mentioned the word “passport,” it seemed there was nothing that Europe’s most wanted war criminals were not prepared to talk to me about. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that many of these creatures actually welcomed the chance to unburden themselves—to talk about their crimes and even to justify them, as if they were meeting a psychiatrist or a priest.

In the beginning, I went to their places of work. Most of the Nazis in Buenos Aires had good, well-paying jobs. They worked for a variety of companies, such as the Capri Construction Company, the Fuldner Bank, Vianord Travel, the local Mercedes-Benz plant, the Osram lightbulb company, Caffetti, Orbis Gas Appliances, the Wander Laboratory, and Sedalana Textiles. A few worked in slightly humbler occupations at the Dürer Haus bookshop in the city center, the Adam restaurant, and the ABC café. One or two worked for the secret police, although these remained—for the moment, at least—something of a mystery to me.

A man at work, however, is often a very different person from the man he is at home. It was important that I encountered these men relaxed and off guard. And after a short while, I started turning up at their houses and their apartments in true Gestapo fashion, which is to say late at night, or early in the morning. I kept my eyes and ears open and, always, I kept my true opinion of these men a secret. It would hardly have done to give my honest impression of any of them. There were times, of course, when I wanted to unholster the Smith & Wesson given to me by Montalbán and put a bullet in an old comrade’s head. More commonly, I went away from their homes wondering what kind of country I was in that would give sanctuary to beasts like these. Of course, I already knew, only too well, what kind of country had produced them.

Some were happy, or at least content with their new lives. Some had attractive new wives or mistresses, and sometimes both. One or two were rich. Only a few were filled with quiet regret. But mostly they were ruthlessly unrepentant.

THE ONLY SORROW displayed by Dr. Carl Vaernet related to his no longer being able to experiment freely on homosexual prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp. He was quite open about this, his life’s “most important work.”

Vaernet was from Denmark but living with his wife and children at Calle Uriarte 2251, close to the Plaza Italia in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. Dark, thick-set, with shadowy eyes and a mouth full of pessimism and bad breath, he was operating an endocrinology clinic offering expensive “cures” to the better-off parents of Argentine homosexuals. A very masculine country, Argentina regarded being joto, or pájaro, as a danger to the health of the nation.

“When your Red Cross passport runs out,” I told Vaernet, “that is, if it hasn’t run out already, you will have to apply to the federal police for a special passport. To get this passport you will have to prove that while you have been resident in Argentina you’ve been a person of good conduct. Friends—if you have any—will have to oblige with testimonials as to your character and integrity. If this proves to be the case—as I’m sure it will—I myself will issue you with the good-conduct pass that you can then use to apply to a court of first instance for an Argentine passport. Naturally, the passport can be in a different name. The important thing is that you will be able to travel freely again in Europe, without fear of arrest. Like any normal Argentine citizen.”

“Well, of course, we’d like to visit our eldest son, Kjeld, in Denmark,” confessed Vaernet. He smiled at the thought of it. “Much as we love it here in Buenos Aires, home is always home, eh, Herr Hausner?”

We were sitting in the drawing room. There was a baby grand piano with a number of framed photographs on the lid. One of the photographs was of the Peróns and their poodles—Eva holding the black one, Juan holding the white—together looking like an advertisement for Scotch whiskey.

Vaernet’s wife served tea and facturas, little sweet pastries that were very popular with the sweet-toothed porteños. She was tall, thin, and nervous. I took out a pad of paper and a pen and tried to appear properly bureaucratic.

“Date and place of birth?” I asked.

“April 28, 1893. Copenhagen.”

“My own birthday is April 20,” I said. When he looked blank, I added, “The Führer’s birthday.” It wasn’t true, of course, but it was always a good way of making men like him think that I was some kind of die-hard Nazi and, therefore, someone to be trusted.

“Of course. How silly of me not to remember.”

“That’s all right. I’m from Munich.” Another lie. “Ever been to Munich?”

“No.”

“Lovely city. At least it was.”

After a short series of anodyne questions, I said, “Many Germans have come to Argentina believing that the government is not interested in their backgrounds. That it doesn’t care what a man did in Europe before he arrived in this country. I’m afraid that just isn’t true. At least not anymore. The government doesn’t judge a man for what he did during the war. The past is past. And whatever you’ve done, it certainly won’t affect your being able to stay in this country. But I’m sure you’ll agree it does have some bearing on who you are now and what kind of citizen you might become. What I’m saying is this: The government doesn’t want to issue a passport to anyone who might do something to make himself an embarrassment to the government. So. You may speak to me in total confidence. Remember, I was an SS officer, like yourself. My honor is loyalty. But I do urge you to be candid, Doctor.”

Dr. Vaernet nodded. “I’m certainly not ashamed of what I did,” he said.

At this, his wife got up and left the room, as if the prospect of her husband’s speaking frankly about his work might be too much for her. The way the conversation turned out, I can’t say I blamed her.

“Reichsführer Himmler regarded my attempts to surgically cure homosexuals as work of the greatest national importance to the ideal of German racial purity,” he said earnestly. “At Buchenwald, I implanted hormone briquettes into the groins of a number of the pink triangles. All of these men were cured of their homosexuality and released back into normal life.”

There was a lot, lot more of this, and while Vaernet struck me as being a thoroughgoing bastard—I never yet met a queer who didn’t strike me as someone quite comfortable being that way—I wasn’t convinced he was a psychopath of the kind that could have eviscerated a fifteen-year-old just for the hell of it.

On the piano, next to the picture of the Peróns, was a photograph of a girl about the same age as Fabienne von Bader. I picked it up. “Your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She goes to the same school as Fabienne von Bader, doesn’t she?”

Vaernet nodded.

“Naturally, you’d be aware she’s disappeared.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Were they friends?”

“No, not really.”

“Has she spoken about it?”

“Yes. But nothing important, you understand. If it had been of any relevance, I’d have called the police.”

“Of course.”

He shrugged. “They asked a lot of questions about Fabienne.”

“They were here?”

“Yes. My wife and I formed the impression that they thought Fabienne had run away.”

“It’s what children do, sometimes. Well.” I turned toward the door. “I had better be going. Thank you for your time. Oh, one more thing. We were talking about proving oneself to be a person of good character.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a respectable man, Herr Doktor. Anyone can see that. I shouldn’t think that there will be any problems with issuing you a good-conduct pass. No problems at all. However.”

“Yes?”

“I hesitate to mention it. But you being a doctor . . . I’m sure you’ll understand why I have to ask this kind of thing. Is there anyone among our old comrades here in Argentina who you think might not be worthy of a good-conduct pass? Someone who might potentially bring real disrepute to Argentina?”

“It’s an interesting question,” said the doctor.

“I know and I hate asking it. We’re all of us in the same boat, after all. But sometimes these questions have to be asked. How else are we to judge a man, if we don’t listen to what other people say about him?” I shrugged. “It might be something that’s happened here. Or something that happened back in Europe. During the war, perhaps.”

“No, no, you’re quite right to ask, Herr Hausner. And I appreciate your confidence. Well then, let me see.” He sipped some tea and thought for a moment. “Yes. There’s a fellow called Eisenstedt, Wilhelm von Eisenstedt, who was an SS captain at Buchenwald. He lives in a house on Calle Monasterio and calls himself Fernando Eifler. He’s let himself go a bit. Drinks too much. But at Buchenwald he was notoriously and sadistically homosexual.”

I tried to suppress a smile. Eifler had been the man in the dressing gown with whom I’d shared the safe house on Monasterio when I first arrived in Argentina. So that was who and what he was.

“Also, yes, also a man called Pedro Olmos. His real name is Walter Kutschmann, and he’s another ex-SS captain. Kutschmann was a murderer by anyone’s definition of the word. Someone who enjoyed killing for killing’s sake.”

Vaernet described Kutchsmann’s wartime activities in detail.

“I believe he now works for Osram. The lightbulb company. I can’t answer for what kind of man he is today. But his wife Geralda’s conduct is less than proper, in my opinion. She gasses stray dogs for a living. Can you imagine such a thing? What kind of a person could do that? What kind of a woman is it who gasses poor dumb animals for a living?”

I could easily have answered him. Only he wouldn’t have understood. But I went to see Pedro Olmos anyway.

He and his wife lived on the outskirts of the city, near the electrical factory where Pedro Olmos worked. He was younger than I’d imagined, no more than thirty-five, which meant he was in his mid-twenties when he’d been a Gestapo captain in Paris; and little more than a boy when he’d been a lieutenant murdering Jews in Poland as part of a special action group. He had been just eighteen when Anita Schwarz was murdered in 1932, and I thought he was probably too young to be the man I was looking for. But you never can tell.

Pedro Olmos was from Dresden. He had met and married Geralda in Buenos Aires. They had several dogs and cats but no children. They were a good-looking couple. Geralda didn’t speak German, which was probably why Pedro felt able to confess that he’d been a lot more than just friendly with Coco Chanel while he was stationed in Paris. He was certainly smooth enough. He spoke excellent Spanish, French, and some Polish, which, he said, was why he was working in Osram’s travel department. Both he and Geralda were much exercised about the city’s stray-dog population, which was considerable, and they had a grant from the city authorities to round them up and gas them. It seemed an unusual occupation for a woman who described herself as an animal lover. She even took me to their basement and showed me the humane-killing facility she used. This was a simple metal hut with a rubber-sealed door that was attached to a petrol generator. Geralda carefully explained that when the dogs were dead, she burned the bodies in their household incinerator. She seemed very proud of her “humane service” and described it in a way that made me think she’d never heard of such a thing as a gas van. Given Olmos’s SS background, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine that perhaps she had got the idea from her husband.

I asked him the same question I had asked Vaernet: Was there anyone among our old comrades in Argentina whom he considered to be beyond the pale?

“Oh, yes.” Olmos spoke with alacrity, and I was beginning to realize that there was not much loyalty among the old comrades. “I can give you the name of just such a man. Probably the most dangerous man I’ve ever met, anywhere. His name is Otto Skorzeny.”

I tried not to look surprised. Naturally, I knew of Otto Skorzeny. Few Germans had not heard of the daring author of Mussolini’s mountaintop rescue in 1943. I even remembered seeing photographs of his heavily scarred face in all the magazines when Hitler had awarded him the Knight’s Cross. He certainly looked like a dangerous man. The trouble was, Skorzeny did not appear on the list of names that the colonel had given me. And until his name came up, I’d had no idea that he was still alive, let alone that he now lived in Argentina. A ruthless killer, yes. But a psychopath? I decided to ask Montalbán about him when next I saw him.

Meanwhile, Pedro Olmos had thought of someone else he considered a person undeserving of a good-conduct pass. The ratline, as the Americans called organizations like the ODESSA and the Old Comrades, which existed to help Nazis escape from Europe, was beginning to look well named. The man Olmos thought of was called Kurt Christmann.

Christmann was interesting to me, because he was from Munich and born in 1907, which made him twenty-five at the time of Anita Schwarz’s murder. He was forty-three years old, once a lawyer who now worked for the Fuldner Bank on Avenida Córdoba. Christmann lived in a comfortable apartment on Esmeralda and, within five minutes of meeting him, I had marked him down as a definite suspect. He had commanded a killing detail in Russia. For a while, I’d been in the Ukraine myself, of course. It gave us something to talk about. Something I could use to help gain his confidence and get him talking.

Fair-haired, with rimless glasses and a musician’s slender hands, Christmann wasn’t exactly the kind of blond beast you’d have seen striding across the screen in a Leni Riefenstahl movie. He was more the sort you’d have seen walking quietly through a law library with a couple of books under his arm. Until he’d joined the SS in 1942, he’d worked for the Gestapo in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Salzburg, and I marked him down as the kind of promotion-hungry, medal-seeking Nazi I’d often met before. Not so much blood and iron as bleach and Bakelite.

“So you were out in Ukraine, too,” he said, going all comradely on me. “Which part?”

“White Ruthenia. Minsk. Lvov. Lutsk. All over.”

“We were in the southern part of Russia, mainly,” he said. “Krasnodar and Stavropol. And in the northern Caucasus. The action group was headed by Otto Ohlendorf, and Beerkamp. My unit was commanded by an officer named Seetzen. Nice fellow. We had three gas vans at our disposal. Two big Saurers and a little Diamond. Mostly it was clearing out hospitals and asylums. The children’s homes were the worst. But don’t think these were normal healthy kids, mind. They weren’t. They were gimps, you know? Feebleminded, retarded kids. Bedridden, disabled. Better off out of it, if you asked me. Especially given the way the Popovs looked after them, which was to say hardly at all. The conditions in some of these places were appalling. In a way, gassing them like we did was a bloody kindness. Putting them out of their misery, we were. You’d have done the same for an injured horse. Anyway, that’s the way we looked at it.”

He paused, as if recalling some of the terrible scenes that he had witnessed. I almost pitied him. I wouldn’t have had his thoughts for anything.

“Mind you, it was still hard work. Not everyone could stick it. Some of the kids would catch on as to what was happening and we’d have to throw them in the vans. That could be pretty rough. We had to shoot a few who tried to escape. But once they were inside the van and the doors were shut, it was pretty quick, I think. They’d hammer on the sides of the truck for a few minutes and that would be it. Over. The more of them we managed to squeeze into the truck, the quicker it would be. I was in charge of that detail between August 1942 and July 1943, by which time we were in general retreat, of course.

“Then I went to Klagenfurt, where I was chief of the Gestapo. Then Koblenz, where I was also head of the Gestapo. After the war I was interned in Dachau, by the Amis, only I managed to escape. Hopeless, they were, the Amis. Couldn’t guard a fire. Then it was Rome, and the Vatican, before I ended up here. Right now, I’m working for Fuldner, but I’m planning to try the real estate business. There’s plenty of money to be made in this city. But I do miss Austria. Most of all I miss the skiing. I was the German police ski champion, you know.”

“Really?” Clearly, I had misjudged him completely. He might have been a murdering bastard but he was a sporting murdering bastard.

“You are right to look surprised, Herr Hausner.” He laughed. “I’ve been ill, you see. I was in Brazil before coming here to Argentina and managed to pick up a case of malaria. Really, I’ve still not recovered full health.” He went into the kitchen and opened the door of a new-looking Di Tella refrigerator. “Beer?”

“No, thanks.” I was particular about whom I drank with. “Not while I’m on duty.”

Kurt Christmann laughed. “I used to be like you,” he said, opening a beer bottle. “But now I try to be more like the Argentines. I even take a siesta in the afternoon. People like me and you, Hausner. We’re lucky to be alive.” He nodded. “A passport would be good. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to Germany. Germany’s finished, I think, now that the Popovs are there. There’s nothing there for me, except perhaps a hangman’s noose.”

“We did what we had to do,” I said. “What we were told to do.” I knew this speech well enough by now. I’d heard it often during the last five years. “We were just carrying out orders. If we’d refused to obey, we would have been shot ourselves.”

“That’s right,” agreed Christmann. “That’s right. We were only obeying orders.”

Now that I’d let him run a bit, I decided to try to reel the line in.

“Mind you,” I said. “There were some. A few. A few rotten apples who enjoyed the killing. Who went beyond the normal course of duty.”

Christmann pressed the beer bottle to his cheek and thought for a moment; then he shook his head. “You know something? I really don’t think that’s true. Not that I saw, anyway. Maybe it was different in your outfit. But the men I was with, in the Ukraine. All of them handled themselves with great courage and fortitude. That’s what I miss most. The comradeship. The brothers in arms. That’s what I miss most.”

I nodded, in seeming sympathy. “I miss Berlin, most of all,” I said. “Munich, too. But Berlin most of all.”

“You know something? I never went to Berlin.”

“What? Never?”

“No.” He chuckled and drank some more beer. “I don’t suppose I shall ever see it now, eh?”

I went away, full of satisfaction at having done an excellent day’s work. It’s the people you meet that make being a detective so rewarding. Once in a while you meet a real sweetie, like Kurt Christmann, who restores your faith in medieval justice and vigilantism and other, thoroughly sensible Latin American practices like strappado and the garrote. Sometimes it’s hard to walk away from people like that without shaking your head and wondering how it ever got to be that bad.

How did it ever get to be that bad?

I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering. And perhaps, after all those demented, sometimes cannibalistic killers we had during the Weimar years, we ought to have seen it coming: the murder squads and the death factories. Killers who were demented but also quite ordinary. Krantz, the schoolboy. Denke, the shopkeeper. Grossmann, the door-to-door salesman. Gormann, the bank clerk. Ordinary people who committed crimes of unparalleled savagery. As I was looking back at them now, they seemed like a sign of that which was to follow. The camp commanders and the Gestapo types. The desk murderers and the sadistic doctors. The ordinary fritzes who were capable of such dreadful atrocities. The quiet, respectable, Mozart-loving Germans among whom I was now cast away to live.

What did it take to murder thousands of children, week in week out? An ordinary person? Or someone who might have done it before?

Kurt Christmann had spent a whole year of his life gassing Russian and Ukrainian children. The feebleminded, the retarded, the bedridden, and the disabled. Children like Anita Schwarz. Perhaps, for him, there had been more to it than just obeying orders. Perhaps he had actually disliked disabled children. Maybe even enough to have murdered one in Berlin. I certainly hadn’t forgotten that he was from Munich. I’d always had a strong suspicion that the man I’d been looking for, in 1932, had come from Munich.