A Quiet Flame

11 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

IT WAS LUNCHTIME, and the café at the Richmond Hotel was busy with hungry porteños. I went down to the basement, found an empty table, and set out a chessboard. I wasn’t looking for a game with anyone other than myself. That way I figured I stood a better chance of winning. Also I needed to clear my head of old Nazis and their war crimes for a while. They were starting to get me down.

I tried not to stare at her, but this was almost impossible. She was a stunningly beautiful girl. Eyes just naturally followed her around the room like cows trotting after a milkmaid. But mostly it was hard not to stare at her because she seemed to be staring at me. I didn’t flatter myself she actually wanted to meet me. I guessed I was old enough to be her father. There had to be some mistake. She was tall and slim, with a spectacular waterfall of black, curly hair. Her eyes were the shape and color of chocolate-covered almonds. She wore a tailored tweed jacket buttoned tight at the waist, and a matching long pencil skirt that made me wish I had a couple of sheets of paper. Her figure was all right if you liked them built like expensive thoroughbreds. I happened to like them built that way just fine.

She walked toward me, her high heels perforating the polished wooden air of the Richmond’s quiet basement like the slow beat of a tall clock. Expensive perfume tugged an edge of the air I was breathing. It made a very pleasant change from the smell of coffee and cigarettes and my own dyspeptic middle age.

As soon as she spoke to me, it was obvious she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. She spoke in castellano. I was pleased about that. It meant I had to pay extra attention to her lips and the way her small pink tongue rested on her gypsum-white teeth.

“Forgive me for interrupting your game, señor,” she said. “But are you Carlos Hausner, perhaps?”

“I am.”

“Might I sit down and talk to you for a moment?”

I looked around. Three tables away, the little Scotsman, Melville, was playing chess with a man whose leathery brown face belonged on the back of a horse. Two younger porteños with Cuban heels and silver-buckled belts were engaged in a rather vigorous game of billiards. They put as much vitality into their noisy cue shots as Furtwängler conducting the Kaim Orchestra. All of their eyes were on their respective games but their ears and their attention to the Richmond’s resolutely masculine traditions were on us.

I shook my head. “My opponent, the Invisible Man, gets a little irritated when people sit on his lap. We’d better go upstairs.”

I let her walk ahead of me. It was the polite thing to do and it gave me a chance to study the seams of her stockings. These were straight, as if someone had fixed them using a theodolite. Fortunately, her legs were anything but. They had better curves than the Mille Miglia and were probably just as challenging to negotiate. We found a quiet table near the window. I waved a waiter over. She ordered a coffee, and I ordered something I had no interest in drinking, so long as she was around. When you’re having a cup of coffee with the best-looking woman who’s spoken to you in months, there are better things to do than drink it. She took one of my cigarettes and let me light it for her. It was yet another excuse to pay close attention to her big, sensuous mouth. Sometimes I think that’s why men invented smoking.

“My name is Anna Yagubsky,” she said. “I live with my parents in Belgrano. My father used to be a musician in the orchestra at the Teatro Colón. My mother sells English ceramics from a shop on Bartolomé Mitre. Both of them are Russian immigrants. They came here before the Revolution, to escape the czar and his pogroms.”

“Do you speak Russian, Anna?”

“Yes. Fluently. Why?”

“Because my Russian is better than my Spanish.”

She smiled a little smile and we spoke in Russian.

“I am a legal officer,” she explained. “I work in an office next to the law courts on Calle Talcahuano. Someone—a friend of mine in the police, it doesn’t matter who—told me about you, Señor Hausner. He told me that before the war you were a famous detective, in Berlin.”

“That’s right.” I saw no advantage to myself in disagreeing with her. No advantage at all. I was keen to be someone who looked good in her eyes—not least because every time I saw myself in a mirror, my own eyes were telling me something different. And I’m not just talking about my appearance. I still had all my hair. There was even quite a bit of color left in it. But my face was hardly what it used to be, while my stomach was more than it had ever been. I was stiff when I awoke in the morning, in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons. And I had thyroid cancer. Apart from all that, I was just fine and dandy.

“You were a famous detective and now you’re working for the secret police.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a secret police if I admitted that was true, now would it?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said. “Nevertheless, you are working for them, aren’t you?”

I smiled my best enigmatic smile—the one that didn’t show my teeth. “What can I do for you, Señorita Yagubsky?”

“Please. Call me Anna. In case you hadn’t already guessed, I’m a Jew. That’s an important part of my story.”

“I rather supposed you were when you mentioned pogroms.”

“My aunt and uncle went to Germany from Russia. Somehow they survived the war and came to South America in 1945. But Jews were not welcome in Argentina, in spite of the fact there were a lot of Jews living here already. You see, this is a fascist, anti-Semitic country. And until recently, there was a secret government directive, called Directive Eleven, that denied entry visas to all Jews. Even to Jews who had family here already, such as my aunt and uncle. But like many other Jews who wanted to live here, they managed to get into Paraguay. And from there, eventually, they were successful in coming across the land border and entering the country illegally. For a while, they lived very quietly in a small town called Colón, in the province of Entre Ríos, north of Buenos Aires. From time to time my father would go and see them with money, clothes, food, whatever we could spare. And they waited for an opportunity to come and live here in Buenos Aires.

“But then one day, about three years ago, they disappeared. My father went to Colón and found them gone. The neighbors knew nothing about where they had gone, or if they did, they weren’t saying. And because they were illegal, my father couldn’t very well go to the police and ask them. Since then, we’ve heard nothing. Nothing at all. For obvious reasons, my parents are reluctant to make inquiries about them, in case they get into trouble. The directive may have ended, but this is still a military dictatorship, and people—opposition people—are sometimes arrested and thrown into prison and never seen again. So we still have no idea if they are alive or dead. What we do know is that they weren’t the only illegal Jews who have disappeared. We’ve heard of other Jewish families who have lost relatives in Argentina, but nobody knows anything for sure.” She shrugged. “Then I heard about you. I heard that you used to look for missing persons in Germany, before the war. And, well, it seemed more than likely that some of those missing persons must also have been Jewish. And I thought— no, that’s not true—I hoped that you might help. I’m not asking that you do anything very much. In your position, you might hear something. Something that might shed a little light on what happened to them.”

“Couldn’t you hire yourselves a private detective?” I suggested. “Or a retired policeman, perhaps.”

“We already tried that,” she said. “Policemen here are not very honest, Señor Hausner. He robbed us of all our savings and told us nothing.”

“I’d like to help you, señorita.” I shook my head. “But I don’t know what I could do. Really, I don’t. I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t know my way around very well. And I’m still learning the language. Trying to settle in. To make myself feel a little bit at home. You’d be wasting your money. Really.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t offering to pay you, señor. All my extra money goes to supporting my parents. My father doesn’t play much anymore. He used to give music lessons but doesn’t have the necessary patience. My mother works in someone else’s shop. The pay is not good. The fact is, I hoped you might help me out of the kindness of your heart.”

“I see.”

This was one I hadn’t heard before. A request to work for nothing. In the ordinary course of things, I might have shown her the door. But she was hardly ordinary. Among the many things I had to admire about her already I was now obliged to add her chutzpah. But it seemed she hadn’t finished telling me what she was prepared to offer in lieu of money. She colored a little as she told me what this was.

“I can imagine how difficult it might be to settle into a new life in a new country,” she said. “It takes time to adjust. To make new friends. You might say that as a daughter of immigrants I have a greater understanding of the challenges that lie ahead of you.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway. I was thinking. That since I can’t afford to pay you. Perhaps. Perhaps I might become your friend.”

“Well, that’s a new one,” I said.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting anything else. No, I was thinking that we might go and see a play, perhaps. I could show you around the city. Introduce you to some people. From time to time I might even cook you dinner. Really, I’m very good company.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“In a way, we’d be helping each other.”

“Yes, I can see how you might think that.”

Maybe if she hadn’t been quite so good-looking I might have turned her down. There was also her Jewishness to take into account. I hadn’t forgotten the Ukraine in 1941. And the guilt I felt toward all Jewish people. I didn’t want to help Anna Yagubsky, but somehow I felt I had to.

“All right, I’ll help you.” Stammering a little, I added, “That is to say, I’ll do what I can. I’m not promising anything, you understand. But I will try to help you. I could use a home-cooked dinner now and then.”

“Friends,” she said, and we shook hands.

“Actually, you’re the first friend I’ve made since I got here. Besides, I’d like to do something noble for once.”

“Oh? Why? I’m curious.”

“Don’t be. It doesn’t help either of us.”

“What you say makes me think that you think you have to do something noble to atone for something else you did. Something not so noble, perhaps.”

“That’s my business. I will tell you this, though. Don’t ever ask me about it. That’s part of my price, Anna. You don’t ever ask me about it. All right? Are we agreed?”

She nodded, finally.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“All right, then. Now. Tell me. How did you find me?”

“I told you. I have a friend in the police. As a matter of fact, he’s the same bastard cop who robbed us of our savings. But he feels guilty about it now and wants to help in any way he can. Unfortunately, he has spent all the money. Gambled it away. It was he who told me where you were staying. It wasn’t so very difficult, I think. It’s on your cédula. All he had to do was to look it up. I went to your hotel and followed you here.”

“The less this cop knows about what I’m doing, the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

She nodded and sipped her coffee.

“Your uncle and aunt. What were their names?”

“Yagubsky, same as mine.” She picked up her bag, found her wallet, and handed me a business card. “Here,” she said. “That’s how you spell it. Their names were Esther and Roman Yagubsky. Roman is my father’s twin brother.”

I pocketed the card. “Three years, you say?”

She nodded.

I lit a cigarette and sighed a pessimistic cloud of smoke.

“Three years is a long time with a missing-persons case. Three months, maybe we could find a lead. But three years. And not a word. Not even a postcard?”

“Nothing. We went to the Israeli Embassy. We asked if maybe they had emigrated to Israel. But there was no trace of them there, either.”

“Shall I tell you what I think? Honestly?”

“If it’s that you think they’re probably dead, then I agree with you. I’m not an idiot, Señor Hausner. I can read the runes with something like this. But my father is an old man. And a twin. Let me tell you, twins are strange about things like this. My father says he feels Roman is still in Argentina. And he’d like to know for sure, that’s all. Is it so much to ask?”

“Maybe. And nothing is ever for sure in this business. You’d better take that on board now. Nothing is ever for sure.”

“Except death,” she said. “That’s about as sure as anything can get, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “You might certainly think that. What I meant is that truth is rarely the truth and the things you thought weren’t true often turn out not to be false. I realize that sounds confusing, and it was meant to be, because that’s the business I’m in. Although I don’t want to be in it, particularly. Not again. I thought I was finished with the whole dirty process of asking questions I don’t get straight answers to. That and putting myself in harm’s way just because someone asks me to look for his lost dog when really he’d lost his neighbor’s cat. I thought I was through with it, and I’m not, and when I say nothing’s for sure in this business, then I mean it, because generally I say exactly what I mean. And I’m right, too, because it’ll turn out that there was something you didn’t tell me that you should have told me, which would have made things clearer right from the start. So nothing’s for sure, Anna. Not when there are people involved. Not when they bring you their problems and ask for your help. Especially then. I’ve seen it a hundred times, angel. Nothing’s for sure. No, not even death when the dead turn out to be alive and well and living in Buenos Aires. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. If the dead people walking around this city all of a sudden really were dead, the undertakers wouldn’t be able to cope with the sudden rush of business.”

Her face had colored again. Her nostrils had flared. The isosceles of muscles between her chin and her collarbone had stiffened, like something metallic. If I’d had a little wand, I could have used it to tap out the part for triangle in the bridal chorus from Lohengrin.

“You think I’m lying?” She started gathering her gloves and handbag as if she was about to climb to the highest hills of Dudgeon. “You mean you think I’m a liar.”

“Are you?”

“And I thought we were going to be friends,” she said, her thighs pushing back at the chair underneath her bottom.

I grabbed her wrist.

“Easy on the floor polish,” I said. “I was just giving you my client speech. The one I use when there’s nothing in it for me. It takes a lot longer than a hard slap on the ear and a palm pressed on top of a Holy Bible but, in the end, it saves a lot of time. That way, if it does turn out that you’re lying, you won’t hold it against me when I have to warm your cheeks.”

“Are you always this cynical? Or is it just me?” Her bottom stayed on the chair, for now.

“I’m never cynical, Anna, except when I’m questioning the sincerity of human motives.”

“I wonder. What was it that happened to you, Señor Hausner? Something. I don’t know. In your own personal history. That made you this way.”

“My history?” I grinned. “You make it sound like it’s something that’s over. Well, it’s not. In fact, it’s not even history. Not yet. And didn’t I tell you? Don’t ever ask me about it, angel.”

BEING SORT OF A SPY MYSELF, I swiftly came to the conclusion that what I needed most was the help of another spy. And there was only one person I could trust, almost, in the whole of Argentina, and that was Pedro Geller, who had come across on the boat from Genoa with Eichmann and me. He was working for Capri Construction in Tucumán, and since half of the ex-SS men in the country were also working for Capri, enlisting his help seemed like a way of swatting two flies with one newspaper. The only trouble was that Tucumán was more than seven hundred miles to the north of Buenos Aires. So, a couple of days after my meeting with Anna Yagubsky, I took the Mitre line from the city’s Retiro railway station. The train, which went via Córdoba and terminated in La Paz, Bolivia, was comfortable enough in first class. But the journey lasted twenty-three hours, so I took the advice of Colonel Montalbán and equipped myself with books and newspapers and plenty to eat and drink and smoke. Since the weather in Tucumán was likely to be warmer than in Buenos Aires, and much of the journey there took place at altitude, the doctor had also given me some tranquilizers in case my thyroid problem meant I had difficulty breathing. So far, I had been lucky. The only time I’d had difficulty breathing was when Anna Yagubsky had introduced herself to me.

The heating on the train failed soon after we left Retiro, and for most of the journey I was cold. Too cold to sleep. By the time we reached Tucumán, I was exhausted. I checked into the Coventry Hotel and went straight to bed. I slept for the next twelve hours, which was something I hadn’t done since before the war.

Tucumán was the most populous city in the north, with about two hundred thousand people. It sat on a plain in front of some spectacular mountains called the Sierra del Aconquija. There were lots of colonial-style buildings, a couple of nice parks, a government palace, a cathedral, and a statue of liberty. But New York it wasn’t. There was a prevailing smell of horse shit in the air of Tucumán. Tucumán wasn’t a one-horse town so much as a horseshit town. Even the soap in my hotel bathroom seemed to smell of it.

Pedro Geller worked at Capri’s technical office in El Cadillal, a small town about twenty miles outside Tucumán, but we met up in the city at the company’s main office on Río Portero. Given the nature of my mission, we didn’t stay there for very long. I asked him to let me take him to the best restaurant he could think of, and so we went to the Plaza Hotel, close to the cathedral. I made a mental note to stay there instead of the Coventry if ever I was unlucky enough to come to Tucumán again.

Geller, whom I knew better as Herbert Kuhlmann, was twenty-six years old and had been a captain with an SS-Panzer division. During the battle for France, in 1944, his unit had executed thirty-six captured Canadians. Geller’s commanding officer was now serving a life sentence in a Canadian jail and, fearing an arrest and a similar sentence, Geller had wisely fled to South America. He looked tanned and fit and seemed to be enjoying his new life.

“Actually, the work is rather interesting,” he explained over a glass of German beer. “The Dulce River runs for about three hundred miles through Córdoba Province and we’re building a dam on it. The Los Quiroga dam. It’ll be quite a sight when it’s finished, Bernie. Three hundred meters long, fifty meters high, with thirty-two floodgates. Of course, it’s not exactly popular with everyone. These things rarely are. A lot of local farms and villages will disappear forever under millions of gallons of flood water. But the dam is going to provide water and hydroelectric power for the whole province.”

“How’s our more famous friend?”

“Ricardo? He hates it here. He lives with some peasant girl in a small mountain village called La Cocha, about seventy miles south of here. He doesn’t come into Tucumán any more than he has to. Scared to show his face, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re both of us working for an old comrade, of course. They’re everywhere in Tucumán. He’s an Austrian professor by the name of Pelkhofer, Armin Pelkhofer. He’s a water engineer. He and Ricardo seem to know each other from the war, when he was called Armin Schoklitsch. But I have no idea what he did then that brought him here now.”

“Nothing good,” I said, “if he knew Ricardo.”

“Quite so. Anyway, we carry out river survey reports for the prof. Hydrological analysis, that kind of thing. Not much to it, really. But I’m out in the fresh air a lot, which suits me after all those months of hiding out in lofts and basements. I shall miss this. Didn’t I tell you? After another six months here I shall transfer to Capri’s personnel department, in Buenos Aires.”

We ate some lunch. The steaks were good. The food was always good in Argentina. Just as long as you ordered steak.

“What about you, Bernie? What brings you this far north?”

“I’m working for the police. I’m supposed to be checking out old comrades. Deciding whether they’re worthy of the good-conduct pass they will need to get an Argie passport. Yours is already in the file.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it. To be honest, it’s mostly just a cover story so that I can ask some of our old comrades a lot of awkward questions. Like, what did you do in the war, Fritz? The Argies are a bit jumpy that they’ll unwittingly hand out a passport to some mass-murdering psycho and that the Amis will find out about it and kick up an international fuss.”

“I see. Tricky stuff.”

“I was hoping you might help, Herbert. After all, it goes without saying that Capri—the Compañía Alemana para Recién Inmigrados—is the largest employer of ex-SS in the country.”

“Of course I’ll help,” said Geller. “You’re just about my only friend in this country, Bernie. Well, there’s you and a girl I met back in Buenos Aires.”

“Good for you, kid. Apart from Ricardo, who else have you come across who might be worse than the worst?”

“I get the picture. A bastard who gives the rest of us bastards a bad name, eh?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Let’s see now. There’s Erwin Fleiss. He’s a nasty piece of work. From Innsbruck. He made a rather tasteless joke about organizing some Jewish pogrom there, in 1938. We’ve got a couple of gauleiters. One from Brunswick, and one from Styria. Some Luftwaffe general called Kramer. Another fellow, who was part of Hitler’s bodyguard. Of course, there’s a lot more of them back at head office in Buenos Aires. I could probably find out quite a lot about them for you when I’m working there. But, like I say, that won’t be for a while.” He frowned. “Who else? There’s Wolf Probst. Yes, he’s a ruthless character, I think. Might be a good idea to check him out.”

“I’m particularly looking for someone who might just have murdered again, since arriving here in Argentina.”

“Now I see. Set a thief to catch a thief, is that it?”

“Something like that,” I said. “The kind of man I’m looking for is someone who probably enjoys cruelty and killing for its own sake.”

Geller shook his head. “No one springs to mind, I’m afraid. I mean, Ricardo’s a bastard, but he’s not a psychopathic bastard, if you follow me. Look here, why don’t you ask him? I mean, he must have been to murder camps and seen some horrible things. Met some horrible people. Probably the very types you’re looking for.”

“I wonder,” I said.

“What?”

“If he’d cooperate.”

“A passport’s a passport. We both know what that’s worth when you’re sweating it out in someone’s basement in Genoa. Ricardo, too.”

“This village where he lives?”

“La Cocha.”

“How long would it take me to get there?”

“At least two hours, depending on the river. We’ve had a lot of rain in these parts, of late. I could drive you there if you wanted. If we left now, we could be there and back before dark.” Geller chuckled.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Just that it might be amusing to see Ricardo’s face when you tell him that you’re working for the police. That’s really going to make his day.”

“Worth a two-hour drive?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

GELLER’S CAR was a jeep the color of an apricot: just four heavy-duty wheels, a tall steering column, two uncomfortable seats, and a tailgate. We hadn’t driven very far before I realized why Geller was driving it. The roads south of Tucumán were little better than dirt tracks through sprawling fields of sugarcane with only the ingenios—the industrial mills—of the large sugar companies to remind us that we weren’t about to fall off the edge of the earth. By the time we reached La Cocha, it was impossible to imagine being anywhere farther from Germany and the long arm of Allied military justice.

If Tucumán was a horseshit town, then La Cocha was its poor pig-shit cousin. A Gadarene number of swine seemed to be wandering about the muddy streets as our jeep bounced into the place, scattering a flock of chickens like an exploding mortar bomb of clucks and feathers, and attracting the attention of a number of dogs whose prominent rib cages didn’t seem to interfere with their propensity to bark. From a tall chimney poured a cloud of black smoke; at its base was an open oven. For Eichmann, it looked like a home away from home. Using a long-handled wooden peel, a man was moving bread in and out of the oven. In his excellent castellano, Geller asked the baker for directions to the house of Ricardo Klement.

“You mean the Nazi?” asked the baker.

Geller looked at me and grinned. “That’s him,” he said.

With a finger that was all knuckle and dirty nail, as if it belonged to an orangutan that was studying witchcraft, the baker pointed down the track, past a small auto-repair shop, to a two-story blockhouse with no visible windows. “He lives at the villa.”

We drove a short distance and pulled up between a line of washing and an outhouse, from which Eichmann emerged hurriedly, carrying a newspaper and buttoning his trousers. He was followed by a strong cloacal smell. It was evident he had been alarmed by the sound of the jeep, and the obvious relief he felt that we were not the Argentine military come to arrest and hand him over to a war-crimes tribunal quickly gave way to irritation.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, his lip curling in a way I now regarded as quite characteristic. It was strange, I thought, how one side of his face appeared to be quite normal, even pleasant, while the other side looked twisted and malevolent. It was like meeting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same moment.

“I was in Tucumán, so I thought I’d come and see how you are,” I said affably. I opened my bag and took out a carton of Senior Service. “I brought you some cigarettes. They’re English but I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

Eichmann grunted a thank-you and took the carton. “You’d better come into the villa,” he said grudgingly.

He pushed open a very tall wooden door that was in need of several licks of green paint, and we stepped inside. From the outside, things did not augur well. Calling that blockhouse a villa was a bit like calling a child’s sandcastle the Schloss Neuschwanstein. Inside, though, things were better. There was some plasterwork on top of the brickwork. The floors were level and covered with flagstones and some cheap Indian rugs. But the small barred windows gave the place a suitably penal atmosphere. Eichmann might have evaded Allied justice, but he was hardly living a life of luxury. A half-naked woman peered out from behind a door. Angrily, Eichmann jerked his head at her and she disappeared again.

I walked over to one of the windows and looked out at a largish, well-planted garden. There were some hutches containing several rabbits he must have kept for meat and beyond, an old black DeSoto with three wheels. A quick getaway did not seem to be on Eichmann’s mind.

He collected a large kettle off a cast-iron range and poured hot water into two hollow gourds. “¿Mate?” he asked us.

“Please,” I said. Since coming to Argentina, I hadn’t tasted the stuff. But everyone in the country drank it.

He put little metal straws in the gourds and then handed them to us.

There was sugar in it, but it still tasted bitter, like green tea with a froth on it. Akin to drinking water with a cigarette in it, I thought. But Geller seemed to like the stuff. And so did Eichmann. As soon as Geller had finished his gourd, he handed it over to our host, who added some more hot water and, without changing the straw, drank some himself.

“So what brings you all the way out here?” he said. “It can’t just be a social call.”

“I’m working for the SIDE,” I said. “The Perónist Intelligence Service?”

His eyelid flickered like an almost spent lightbulb. He tried not to let it show, but we all knew what he was thinking. Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel and close confidant of Reinhard Heydrich, had been reduced to performing hydrological surveys on the other side of nowhere, while I enjoyed a position of some power and influence in a field Eichmann might have considered his own. Gunther, the reluctant SS man and political adversary possessed of the very job that he, Eichmann, should have had. He said nothing. He took a shot at a smile. It looked more like something had got stuck under his bridge.

“I’m supposed to decide which of our old comrades is worthy of a good-conduct pass,” I said. “You need one to be able to apply for a passport in this country.”

“I should have expected that loyalty to your blood and your oath as an SS man would oblige you to treat the issue of any such documentation as a mere formality.” He spoke stiffly. Softening somewhat, he added, “After all, we’re all sitting on the same inkblot, are we not?” He finished the mate noisily, like a child sucking up the very last drop of a fizzy drink.

“On the face of it, that’s true,” I said. “However, the Perónist government is already under considerable pressure from the Americans—”

“From the Jews, more like,” he said.

“—to clean up its backyard. While there’s no question that any of us are about to be shown the door, nevertheless there are a few people in government who worry that some of us may be guilty of greater crimes than was originally suspected.” I shrugged and looked at Geller. “I mean, it’s one thing to kill men in the heat of battle. And it’s another to take pleasure in the murders of innocent women and children. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Eichmann shrugged. “I don’t know about innocent,” he said. “We were exterminating an enemy. Speaking for myself, I didn’t hate the Jews so much. But I don’t regret anything I did. I never committed any crimes. And I never killed anyone. Not even in the heat of battle, as you put it. I was little more than a civil servant. A bureaucrat who only obeyed orders. That was the code we all lived by in the SS. Obedience. Discipline. Blood and honor. If I have any regrets at all, it is that there wasn’t time to finish the job. To kill every Jew in Europe.”

This was the first time I had ever heard Eichmann speak about the Jewish extermination. And wanting to hear more, I tried to lead him on.

“I’m glad you mentioned blood and honor,” I said. “Because it seems to me that there were a few who dragged the reputation of the SS down into the dirt.”

“Quite,” said Geller.

“A few who exceeded their orders. Who killed for sport and pleasure. Who carried out inhumane medical experiments.”

“A lot of that has been exaggerated by the Russians,” insisted Eichmann. “Lies told by the Communists to justify their own crimes in Germany. To stop the rest of the world from feeling sorry for Germany. To give the Soviets carte blanche to do whatever they like with the German people.”

“It wasn’t all lies,” I said. “I’m afraid a lot of it was true, Ricardo. And even if you don’t believe it, the possibility that some of it might be true is what worries the government now. Which is why I’ve been charged to conduct this investigation. Look, Ricardo, I’m not after you. But I’m afraid I can’t regard some SS as old comrades.”

“We were at war,” said Eichmann. “We were killing an enemy who wanted to kill us. That can get pretty brutal. At a certain level, the human costs are immaterial. What mattered most was making sure that the job got done. Trouble-free deportations. That was my specialty. And believe me, I tried to make things as humane as I could. Gas was seen as the humane alternative to mass shootings. Yes, there were some, perhaps, who went too far, but look here, there’s always some bad barley in the beer. That’s inevitable in any organization. Especially one that achieved what was achieved. And during a war, too. Five million. Can you credit the scale of it? No, I don’t think you can. Either of you. Five million Jews. Liquidated in less than two years. And you’re quibbling about the morality of a few bad apples.”

“Not me,” I said. “The Argentine government.”

“What? You want a name, is that it? In return for my good-conduct pass? You want me to play Judas for you?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes.”

“I never liked you, Gunther,” said Eichmann, his nose wrinkled with distaste. He tore open the carton of cigarettes and then lit one, with the air of a man who hadn’t had a decent smoke in a long while. Then he sat down at a plain wooden table and studied the smoke from the tip, as if trying to divine guidance from the gods about what to say next.

“But perhaps there is such a man as you describe,” he said carefully. “Only I want your word that you won’t ever tell him that it was I who informed on him.”

“You have my word on it.”

“This man, he and I met by chance at a café in the center of Buenos Aires. Not long after we arrived. The ABC café. He told me he’s done very well for himself since he came here. Very well indeed.” Eichmann smiled thinly. “He offered me money. Me. A colonel in the SS, and him a mere captain. Can you imagine it? Patronizing bastard. Him, with all his connections and his family money. Living in the lap of luxury. And me, buried here, in this godforsaken hole.” Eichmann took a near-lethal drag at his cigarette, swallowed, and then shook his head. “He was a cruel man. Still is. I don’t know how he sleeps. I couldn’t. Not in his skin. I saw what he did. Once. A long time ago. It seems so long ago that I must have been a child when it happened. Well, perhaps I was, in a way. But I’ve never forgotten it. No one could. No one human. I first met him in 1942. In Berlin. How I miss Berlin. And then again in 1943. At Auschwitz.” He grinned bitterly. “I don’t miss that place at all.”

“This captain,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“He calls himself Gregor. Helmut Gregor.”