A Quiet Flame

13 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I WAS WORKING LATE in my office at the Casa Rosada. It wasn’t much more than a desk and a filing cabinet and a coatrack in the corner of the larger SIDE office overlooking Irigoyen and facing the Ministry of Finance. My so-called colleagues left me quite alone, which reminded me a little of Paul Herzefelde’s desk in the detectives’ room at police headquarters in Munich. It wasn’t that they thought I was Jewish, merely that they didn’t trust me, and I can’t say I blamed them. I had no idea what Colonel Montalbán had told people about me. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps everything. Perhaps something quite misleading. But that’s the thing about being a spy. It’s easy to get the idea you’re being spied on.

The KRIPO case files from Berlin were open on the desk in front of me. The box that had contained them was the nearest thing to a time machine I was ever likely to encounter. It all seemed so long ago. And it seemed like yesterday. What was it that Hedda Adlon used to say? The Confucian curse. May you live in interesting times. Yes, that was it. I’d certainly done that, all right. As lives went, mine had been more interesting than most.

By now I had a clear recollection of everything that had happened during the last months of the Weimar Republic, and it was plain to me that the only reason I hadn’t managed to solve the Anita Schwarz murder was that following my meeting with Kurt Melcher I never worked Homicide again. After I came back from a week’s leave, I took up my new post in the records department, hoping against hope that somehow the SDP would turn its fortunes around and that the republic might be restored to full health. It didn’t happen.

The elections of July 31, 1932, found the Nazis gaining more seats in the Reichstag but still without the overall majority that would have enabled Hitler to form a government. Incredibly, the Communists then sided with the Nazis in parliament to force a vote of no-confidence in Papen’s hapless government. After that, I disliked the Communists even more than I disliked the Nazis.

Once again the Reichstag was dissolved. And once again an election was called, this time for November 6. And, once again, the republic clung on by its fingernails as the Nazis failed to achieve an overall majority. It was now Schleicher’s turn to take a shot at being chancellor of Germany. He lasted two months. Another putsch was forecast. And, desperate for someone who could govern Germany with any authority whatsoever, Hindenburg sacked the incompetent Schleicher and asked Adolf Hitler, the only party leader who hadn’t had a turn at being chancellor, to form a government.

Less than thirty days later, Hitler made certain that there could be no more inconclusive elections. On February 27, 1933, he burned down the Reichstag. The Nazi revolution had begun. Not long after that, I left the police and went to work at the Hotel Adlon. I forgot all about Anita Schwarz. And I never again spoke to Ernst Gennat. Not even five years later, when I went back to the Alex at the request of General Heydrich.

It was all there in the box file. My notes, my reports, my police diary, my memoranda, Illmann’s forensic report, my original list of suspects. And more. Much more. Because it was only now I realized it wasn’t just the Anita Schwarz notes the box contained but the case notes on the murder of Elizabeth Bremer as well. After I had left Homicide, the Schwarz case had been handed to my sergeant, Heinrich Grund, and he had managed to have Herzefelde’s notes sent to him from Munich. Much to my surprise, I was now looking at the very case file I had traveled to see during that fateful July of 1932.

Most of Herzefelde’s inquiry had been focused on Walter Pieck, a twenty-two-year-old man from Günzburg. Pieck was Elizabeth Bremer’s skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium in Munich. In summer he was a tennis coach at the Ausstellungspark. He was also a member of the right-wing Stahlhelm and a Nazi Party member since 1930. It was hard to see what a twenty-two-year-old man could have seen in a fifteen-year-old girl. At least it was until you looked at Elizabeth Bremer’s photograph. She looked just like Lana Turner and, just like Lana, filled every inch of the sweater she was wearing in the picture. The happiest moments of my life have been the few I passed at home in the bosom of my family. They would have been even happier if my family had been possessed of a bosom like Elizabeth Bremer’s. I’d seen a bigger chest, but only on a pirate ship.

Reading Herzefelde’s case notes, I was reminded that Pieck had maintained Elizabeth had binned him the week before her murder because she had caught him reading her diary. In Elizabeth’s eyes, this was an unpardonable sin, and to me, her upset was easy to understand: over the years I’ve read a few private diaries myself, and not always for the best. Hardly satisfied with this explanation, Grund had got hold of the diary, and noticed that Elizabeth was in the habit of noting her menstrual period with the Greek letter omega. In the weeks preceding her murder, a sigma had replaced the omega in Elizabeth Bremer’s diary, leading Grund to suppose that she may have been pregnant. Grund had interviewed Pieck and suggested that this had been the real reason why he had been in the habit of reading his young girlfriend’s diary, and that he had helped to procure her an illegal abortion. But, despite several days of questioning, Pieck had steadfastly denied this. What was more, Pieck had a cast-iron alibi in the shape of his father, who just happened to be the police chief of Günzburg, which is several hundred miles from Berlin.

Neither Elizabeth’s own doctor nor any of her school friends knew about a pregnancy. But Grund noted Elizabeth had inherited some money in her grandfather’s will, which she had used to open a savings account, and that the day before her death she had withdrawn almost half of this money and none of it had been found on her body. And he had concluded that even if Pieck had not helped her to procure an abortion, Elizabeth—by all accounts a resourceful and capable girl—must have managed to do so by herself. And that Anita Schwarz might have done the same. And that these abortions had been botched. And that the illegal abortionist had sought to cover his tracks by making their accidental deaths look like lust murders.

I couldn’t disagree with much of Grund’s conclusions. And yet no one was ever arrested for the murders. The leads seemed to dry up and, after 1933, there were only two more notes on the file. One was that in 1934, Walter Pieck joined the SS and became a guard at Dachau concentration camp. The other concerned Anita Schwarz’s father, Otto.

Having joined the Berlin police in 1933, as Kurt Daluege’s deputy assistant, Otto Schwarz was subsequently appointed as a judge.

I got up from my desk and went to the window. The lights were on in the Ministry of Finance. Probably they were trying to work out what to do about Argentina’s rampant inflation. Either that or they were having to work late to decide how they were going to raise the money to pay for Evita’s jewelry. The street below was busy with people. For some reason there was a long line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. And traffic. Buenos Aires was always full of traffic: taxis, trolleybuses, micros, American cars, and trucks, like so many unconnected thoughts in a detective’s brain. Outside my window, all the traffic was going in the same direction. So were my thoughts. I told myself that just maybe I had it all figured out, more or less.

Anita Schwarz must have got pregnant and, fearing the scandal that might result from the discovery of their disabled daughter’s amateur prostitution, Herr and Frau Schwarz must have paid the medicine man from Munich to carry out an abortion on her. Probably that was why she had been carrying so much money in her pocket. Only the abortion procedure had gone wrong and, anxious to cover up his crime, the medicine man had tried to make her death look like a lust murder. The same way he had done in Munich. After all, it was better for him that the police should be looking for some kind of crazed sex-killer than an incompetent doctor. Lots of women had died at the hands of illegal abortionists. They weren’t called backstreet angel-makers for nothing. I recalled the case of one man, a dentist in the Bavarian city of Ulm, who, during the 1920s, had actually strangled several pregnant women for sex while he was supposed to have been giving them abortions.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked my theory. The man I had been looking for was a doctor, or some sort of medicine man, most probably from Munich. My first idea was the jelly doctor, Kassner, until I remembered checking out his alibi: on the day of Anita Schwarz’s murder, he’d been at a urologists’ conference in Hannover. And then I remembered his estranged wife’s young friend, the Gypsy-looking type with a little open-topped Opel, from Munich. Beppo. That was his name. A strange name for a German. Kassner had said he was a student at Munich University. A medical student, perhaps. But how many students could have afforded a new Opel? Unless, of course, he’d been supplementing his income by carrying out illegal abortions. Possibly in Kassner’s own apartment, when he wasn’t there. And if, like many students who came to sample Berlin’s world-famous nightlife, this Beppo had contracted a venereal disease, who better than Kassner to help him out with a course of protonsil, the new magic-bullet cure? It would certainly have explained why Kassner’s own address had appeared on the suspect list I’d made using KRIPO’s Devil’s Directory and the patient list copied in Kassner’s office. Beppo, then. The man I’d met outside Kassner’s own front door. Why not? In which case, if somehow he was here, in Argentina, I might easily recognize him again. Of course, if he was in Argentina, that would have to mean that he’d done something criminal to have left Germany in the first place. Something in the SS, perhaps. Not that he’d seemed like the ideal SS type. Not in 1932. Back then they’d liked them to look Aryan, blond and blue-eyed, like Heydrich. Like me. Beppo had certainly not been that.

I tried to picture him again in my mind’s eye. Medium height, good-looking, but swarthy with it. Yes, like a Gypsy. The Nazis had hated Gypsies almost as much as they had hated the Jews. Of course, he wouldn’t have been the first person to have joined the SS who wasn’t the perfect Aryan type. Himmler, for one. Eichmann, for another. But if Beppo had been possessed of a medical qualification, and had been able to prove that his family had been free of non-Aryan blood for four generations, he might easily have got himself into the medical corps of a Waffen-SS unit. I decided to ask Dr. Vaernet if he could remember such a man.

“Working late, I see.” It was Colonel Montalbán.

“Yes. I do my best thinking at night. When it’s quiet.”

“Me, I’m more of a morning person.”

“You surprise me. I thought you people liked to arrest people in the middle of the night.”

He smiled. “Actually, no. We prefer to arrest people first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

He came over to the window and pointed at the line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. “You see those people? On the other side of Irigoyen? They’re there to see Evita.”

“I thought it was a little late to be looking for a job.”

“She spends every evening and half the night in there,” he said. “Handing out money and favors to the country’s poor and sick and homeless.”

“Very noble. And during an election year, pragmatic, too.”

“That’s not why she does it. You’re a German. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Was it the Nazis who made you so cynical?”

“No. I’ve been cynical since March of 1915.”

“What happened then?”

“The Second Battle of Ypres.”

“Of course.”

“I sometimes think if we’d won that, we’d have won the war, which would have been better for everyone, in the long run. The British and the Germans would have agreed on a peace, and Hitler would have remained in well-deserved obscurity.”

“Luis Irigoyen, who was related to our president and was our ambassador in Germany—he’s the one this street is named after—he met Hitler many times and admired him enormously. He told me once that Hitler was the most fascinating man he ever met.”

This mention of Hitler prompted me to recall Anna Yagubsky and her missing relatives. And choosing my words carefully, I tried to bring up the subject of Argentine Jews with Montalbán.

“Is that why Argentina resisted Jewish emigration?”

He shrugged. “It was a very difficult time. There were so many who wanted to come here. It just wasn’t possible to accommodate them all. We’re not a big country like America or Canada.”

I avoided the temptation to remind the colonel that, according to my travel guide, Argentina was the eighth-largest country in the world.

“And was that how Directive Eleven came into existence?”

Montalbán’s eyes narrowed. “Directive Eleven is not a healthy thing to know about in Argentina. Who told you about it?”

“One hears things.”

“Yes, but from whom?”

“This is the Central State Intelligence Department,” I said. “Not Radio El Mundo. It would be surprising if one didn’t hear the odd secret in a place like this. Besides, my ability to speak castellano is improving all the time.”

“So I noticed.”

“I even heard that Martin Bormann is living in Argentina.”

“That’s certainly what the Americans believe. Which is the best reason of all to know that it’s not true. Only do try to remember what I told you. In Argentina it is better to know everything than to know too much.”

“Tell me, Colonel. Have there been any other murders?”

“Murders?”

“You know. When one person kills another on purpose. In this case, a schoolgirl. Like the one you showed me at the police headquarters. The one missing her wedding trousseau.”

He shook his head.

“And the missing girl? Fabienne von Bader?”

“She is still missing.” He smiled sadly. “I had hoped you would have found her by now.”

“No. Not yet. But I may be close to discovering the true identity of the man who killed Anita Schwarz.”

For a moment, he looked puzzled.

“She was the girl who was murdered in Berlin, back in 1932. You know? The one you remembered reading about in the German newspapers when I was still your idea of a hero.”

“Yes, of course. Do you think he might be here, after all?”

“It’s a little early to say if he is. Especially as I’m still waiting to see that doctor you told me about. The one from New York? The specialist.”

“Dr. Pack? That’s exactly why I came to see you. To tell you. He’s here. In Buenos Aires. He arrived today. He can see you tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, depending on—”

“His other, more important patient. I know. I know. But not too much. Just everything. I won’t forget.”

“See that you don’t. For your own sake.” He nodded. “You’re an interesting man, señor. No doubt about it.”

“Yes. I know that, too. I’ve had an interesting life.”

I OUGHT TO HAVE PAID more attention to the warning the colonel had given me. But I always was a sucker for a pretty face. Especially a pretty face as beautiful as Anna Yagubsky’s.

My desk was on the second floor. On the floor below was the archivo where SIDE’s files were stored. I decided to look in on my way out. I was already in the habit of going in there. For each old comrade I interviewed, I added to his file a detailed record of who he was and what crimes he had committed. I didn’t think I would be risking very much by looking in some other, unrelated files. The only question was how this was to be achieved.

In Berlin, all known and suspected enemies of the Third Reich had been registered in the A Index, located in Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The A Index, also known as “the Office Index,” was the most modern criminal records system in the world. Or so Heydrich had once told me. The index comprised half a million cards on people the Gestapo considered to be worthy of attention. It was set on a huge, horizontally mounted, circular card carousel with an electric motor and a dedicated operator who could locate any one of those half a million cards in less than a minute. Heydrich, a firm believer in the old axiom that knowledge is power, called it his “wheel of fortune.” More than anyone, it was Heydrich who helped to revolutionize the old Prussian political police and made the SD one of the largest employers in Germany. By 1935, more than six hundred officials worked in the Gestapo’s Berlin records division alone.

Nothing so sophisticated or large existed in Buenos Aires, although the system worked well enough at the Casa Rosada. A staff of twenty worked around the clock in five shifts of four. Files were kept on opposition politicians, trade-union officials, Communists, left-wing intellectuals, members of parliament, disaffected army officers, homosexuals, and religious leaders. These files were stored in mobile shelving that was operated by a system of locking handwheels and referenced according to name and subject by a series of leather-bound ledgers called los libros marrones. Access to the files was controlled via a simple signature system, unless the file was deemed sensitive, in which case the entry in the libros marrones was written up in red.

The senior officer on duty in the archivo was known as the OR—the oficial registro—and he was supposed to supervise and authorize the acquisition and use of all written material. I knew at least two of these ORs reasonably well. To them I had confessed my former trade as a Berlin policeman and, in an effort to ingratiate myself, I had even regaled them with descriptions of the apparent omniscience of the Gestapo filing system. Most of what I told them, however, was based on the few months I had spent in KRIPO’s records division following my exit from Homicide, but sometimes I just made it up. Not that the ORs knew the difference. One of them, whom I knew only as Marcello, was keen to use the Gestapo filing system as a model for updating its SIDE counterpart, and I had promised to help him write a detailed memo for submission to the head of SIDE, Rodolfo Freude.

I knew that Marcello would be on duty in the archivo and, as I came through the swing doors, I saw him in his usual position, behind the main desk. This was completely circular, and with its Argentine flag and sidearmed military officers, it looked more like a defensive redoubt than a records division. Except that Marcello hardly resembled anything military in a uniform that fitted him only where it gripped him. Whenever I saw him, he always reminded me of one of those baby-faced boy soldiers drafted to defend Hitler’s bunker against the Red Army during the fall of Berlin.

I returned the updated files on Carl Vaernet and Pedro Olmos and asked for the file on Helmut Gregor. Marcello took the returned files, checked the libros marrones for Helmut Gregor, and then dispatched one of the junior officers to go and retrieve it from the shelves. I watched as the officer started to wind the handwheel, like a man opening a lock gate, until the relevant shelf had moved far along an invisible track to permit his ingress.

“Tell me more about your A Index,” said Marcello, who was of Italian-Argentine origin.

“All right,” I said, hoping that I might waltz him in the direction I wanted. “There were three kinds of cards. In Group One, all cards had a red mark, indicating an enemy of the state. In Group Two, a blue mark, indicating someone to be arrested in time of national emergency. And in Group Three, a green mark, indicating people who were subject to surveillance at all times. All these marks were on the left side of the card. On the right side of the card, a second color mark indicated a Communist, someone suspected of being in the Resistance, a Jew, a Jehovah’s Witness, a homosexual, a Freemason, and so on. The whole index was updated twice a year. At the beginning and at the end of the summer. Our busiest time. Himmler insisted on it.”

“Fascinating,” said Marcello.

“Informers had special files. And so did agents. But all of these files were completely separate from those held by the Abwehr—German military intelligence.”

“You mean they didn’t share intelligence?”

“Absolutely not. They hated each other.”

Now that I’d danced with him, I figured it was time to make my move.

“Do you have a file on a Jewish couple called the Yagubskys?” I asked innocently.

Marcello removed the heavy brown-leather-bound ledger from the curving shelf behind him and consulted it with a frequently licked forefinger. He must have licked it a thousand times every day, and I was surprised it wasn’t worn away, like a stick of salt. A minute or so later, he was shaking his head. “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

I told him some more. Made up stuff about how Heydrich had planned to build a huge, switch-programmed electronic machine to deliver the same information as the wheel of fortune by teleprinter paper tape, and in a tenth of the time. I let Marcello ooh and aah about that for a while before I asked him if I could see the files relating to Directive 11.

Marcello didn’t consult his brown books before answering; and he flinched a little, as if it bothered him that he was about to fail me again.

“No, we’ve got nothing about that, either,” he explained. “Files like that aren’t kept here. Not anymore. All files relating to the Argentine Immigration Service were removed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about a year ago. And I believe they were put in storage.”

“Oh? Where?”

“At the old Hotel de Inmigrantes. It’s on the north dock, on the other side of the Avenida Eduardo Madero. It was constructed at the beginning of the century to deal with the huge number of immigrants coming here to Argentina. Rather like Ellis Island, in New York. The place is more or less derelict now. Even the rats stay clear of it. I believe there’s just a skeleton staff that works there. I haven’t been there myself, but one of the other ORs helped to move some cabinets there and said it was all a bit primitive. If you were looking for something there, it would probably be best to go through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

I shook my head. “It’s really not that important,” I said.

I DROVE to President Perón Station, parked my car, and found a telephone. I called the number Anna Yagubsky had given me. An old man answered, his voice full of suspicion. I guessed it was her father. When I gave him my name, he started to ask a lot of questions, none of which I could have answered even if I’d wanted to.

“Listen, Señor Yagubsky, I’d love to talk awhile with you, only I’m a little pressed for time right now. So would you mind just putting your questions on hold and fetching your daughter to the phone?”

“There’s no need to be rude about it,” he said.

“As a matter of fact, I was trying very hard not to be rude about it.”

“I’m amazed that you have any clients at all, Señor Hausner, if this is how you treat them.”

“Clients? Uh-huh. Exactly what did your daughter tell you about me, Señor Yagubsky?”

“That you’re a private detective. And that she hired you to find my brother.”

I smiled. “What about your sister-in-law?”

“To be really honest with you, my sister-in-law I can live without. I never understood why Roman married her. And we never got along that well. Are you married, señor?”

“Have been. Not anymore.”

“Well, at least you know what you’re doing without.”

I pushed another coin into the telephone. “Right now, I’m in danger of going without speaking to your daughter. That was my last five centavos.”

“All right, all right. That’s the trouble with you Germans. You’ve always got a reason to be in a hurry.” He laid the receiver down with a clunk, and a long minute later, Anna came on the line.

“What did you say to my father?”

“There’s really no time to explain. I want you to meet me at President Perón Station in half an hour.”

“Couldn’t it be tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow’s no good. I might have a hospital appointment tomorrow. Maybe the day after as well.” I quickly lit a cigarette. “Look, just be here as soon as you can. I’ll wait by the Belgrano platform.”

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

“Wear some old clothes. And bring a flashlight. Two, if you have them. And a flask of coffee. We’re liable to be a while.”

“But where are we going?”

“To do a little digging.”

“You’re scaring me. Maybe I should bring a pick and shovel, too.”

“No, angel, not with those lovely hands of yours. Take it easy. We’re not looking to dig anyone up. We’re just going to dig around in some old immigration files and it’s liable to get a little dusty, that’s all.”

“I’m very relieved to hear it. For a minute I thought—I mean, I’m a little bit squeamish about digging up dead bodies. Especially at night.”

“I hear that normally that’s the best time to do that kind of thing. Even the dead aren’t paying much attention.”

“This is Buenos Aires, Señor Hausner. The dead are always paying attention in Buenos Aires. That’s why we built La Recoleta. So we wouldn’t forget it. Death is a way of life for us.”

“You’re talking to a German, angel. When we invented the SS, we had the last word in death cults, believe me.” The phone began to demand more money. “And that was my last five centavos. So get your beautiful behind over here, like I told you.”

“Yes, sir.”

I put down the receiver. I regretted involving Anna. There was some risk in what I was planning. But I couldn’t think of anyone else who might have helped me to understand whatever documents were being stored in the Hotel de Inmigrantes. Then again, she was involved. It was her aunt and uncle we were looking for. She wasn’t paying me enough to take all of the risks on my own. And since she wasn’t paying me anything at all, she could damn well come along for the ride and like it. I was of two minds about her calling me “sir” like that. It made me feel like someone worthy of respect by virtue of my age. Which was something, I told myself, I was going to have to get used to. As long as I was getting older. That was okay. You had to remain alive to get older.

I bought some more cigarettes, a Prensa, and a copy of the Argentinisches Tageblatt—the only German-language newspaper it was safe to read, in the sense that it didn’t mark you out as a Nazi. But the main reason for going into the station was the knife shop. Mostly, the blades were for tourists: bone-handled cutlery for chartered surveyors and accountants who fancied themselves as gauchos or street-fighting tango-dancers. A few of the less spectacular knives looked about right for what I had in mind. I bought two: a long, thin stiletto for pushing right through a keyway and tripping the catch within a lock housing, and something bigger for jimmying a window. I tucked the big one under my belt, in the small of my back, gaucho style, and slipped the little stiletto inside my breast pocket. When the shop clerk shot me a look, I smiled benignly and said, “I like to be well armed when my sister comes to dinner.”

He’d have looked a lot more surprised if he’d seen my shoulder holster.

Half an hour passed. Forty-five minutes turned into an hour. I’d just started to curse Anna when, finally, she showed up, wearing an ensemble of old clothes supplied by Edith Head. A nice plaid shirt, neatly pressed jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, a pair of flat heels, and a large leather handbag. And too late, I realized my mistake. Telling a woman like Anna to come out wearing old clothes was like telling Berenson to frame a great painting with firewood. I guessed she had probably changed her clothes several times just to make sure that the old clothes she had on were the best old clothes she could have chosen to wear. Not that it mattered what she was wearing. Anna Yagubsky would have looked wonderful wearing half a pantomime horse.

She eyed the Belgrano train uncertainly.

“Are we taking the train somewhere?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. But not this one. I hear the slow train to paradise is more comfortable. No, I wanted to meet you here so I wouldn’t miss you in the dark outside. But now that I’ve seen you again, I realize I wouldn’t miss you in an exodus.”

She blushed a little. I led her out of the station. With that huge, echoing cathedral of a building behind us, we walked east, through a double row of parked trolleybuses, and into a big open square dominated by a red-brick clock tower that was now striking the hour. Under acacia trees, people played music and lovers trysted on benches. Anna took my arm, and it would have seemed romantic if we hadn’t been planning trespass and the illegal entry of a public building.

“What do you know about the Immigrants’ Hotel?” I asked her as we crossed Eduardo Manero.

“Is that where we’re going? I wondered if it might be.” She shrugged. “There’s been an Immigrants’ Hotel here since the middle of the last century. My parents could probably tell you more about it. They stayed there when they first came to Argentina. In the beginning, any poor immigrant arriving in the country could get free board and lodging there for five days. Then, in the thirties, it was any poor immigrant who wasn’t Jewish. I’m not sure when they closed it. There was something in the paper about it last year, I think.”

We approached a honey-colored, four-story building that was almost as big as the railway station. Surrounded by a fence, it looked more like a prison than a hotel, and I reflected that this had probably been closer to its real purpose. The fence wasn’t more than six feet high but the top wire was barbed and it did the job. We kept walking until we found a gate. There was a sign that read PROHIBIDA LA ENTRADA and, underneath, a large Eagle padlock that must have been there since the hotel was built.

When she saw the big gaucho knife in my hand, Anna’s eyes widened.

“This is what happens when you ask questions people don’t want you to ask,” I said. “They lock up the answers.” I flicked open the padlock.

“Aiee,” said Anna, wincing.

“Fortunately for me, they use crummy locks that wouldn’t keep out a rat with a toothpick.” I pushed open the gate and walked into an arrivals yard overgrown with tufts of grass and jacaranda trees. A gust of wind blew a sheet of newsprint to my feet. I picked it up. It was a two-month-old page from El Laborista, a Perónist rag. I hoped it was the last time anyone had been there. It certainly looked that way. There were no lights in any of the hundred or so windows. Only the sound of distant traffic driving along Eduardo Manero and a train moving in the rail yards disturbed the quiet of the abandoned hotel.

“I don’t like this,” admitted Anna.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But my castellano isn’t up to the kind of legalese and bureaucratic language you usually find in official documents. If we do find something, we’ll probably need those beautiful eyes of yours to read it.”

“And here was me thinking you just wanted some company.” She glanced around nervously. “I just hope there aren’t any rats. I get enough of those at work.”

“Just take it easy, okay? From the look of this place, nobody’s been here in a while.”

The main doorway smelled strongly of cat piss. The frosted windows were covered with cobwebs and salt from the estuary river. A largish spider scrambled away as my shoes disturbed its gossamer repose. I forced another padlock with the big knife and then raked the Yale on the door with the stiletto.

“Do you always carry a complete cutlery drawer in your pockets?” she asked.

“It’s that or a set of keys,” I said, gouging at the lock’s mechanism.

“Where were you during choir practice? You do that like you’ve done it before.”

“I used to be a cop, remember? We do all of the things criminals do, but for much less money. Or in this case, no money at all.”

“Money’s a big thing with you, I can tell.”

“Maybe that’s because I don’t have very much.”

“Well, then. We have something in common.”

“Maybe when this is all over, you can show me your gratitude.”

“Sure. I’ll write you a nice letter on my best notepaper. How does that sound?”

“If we find your miracle, you can write to the local archbishop with evidence of my heroic virtue. And maybe, in a hundred years, they’ll make me a saint. Saint Bernhard. They did it before, they can do it again. Hell, they even did it for a lousy dog. By the way, that’s my real name. Bernhard Gunther.”

“I suppose there is a doglike quality about you,” she said.

I finished raking the lock.

“Sure. I’m fond of children and I’m loyal to my family, when I have one. Just don’t hang a little barrel of brandy around my neck unless you expect me to drink it.”

My voice was full of bravado. I was trying to stop her from being scared. In truth, I was just as nervous as she was. More so, probably. When you’d seen as many people killed as I had, you know how easy it is to get killed.

“Did you bring those flashlights?”

She opened her bag to reveal a bicycle lamp and a little hand dynamo you had to keep squeezed to make it light. I took the bicycle lamp.

“Don’t switch on until we’re inside,” I told her. I opened the door and poked my muzzle inside the hotel. It wasn’t the one on my face. It was the one on my gun.

We went inside, our footsteps echoing on the cheap marble floor like those of two ghosts uncertain about which part of the building to go and haunt. There was a strong smell of mildew and damp. I switched on the bicycle lamp, illuminating a double-height hallway. There was no one about. I put away my gun.

“What are we looking for?” she whispered.

“Boxes. Packing cases. Filing cabinets. Anything that might contain records of immigration. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to dump them here when this place closed down.”

I offered Anna my hand, but she brushed it off and laughed.

“I stopped being afraid of the dark when I was seven,” she said. “These days I even manage to put myself to bed.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.

“It’s odd of me, I know. But somehow I feel safer that way.”

We walked the length of the building and found four large dormitories on the ground floor. One of these still had beds, and I counted two hundred fifty, which, if the upper floors were the same, meant that as many as five thousand people had once lived in the building.

“My poor parents,” said Anna. “I had no idea that it was like this.”

“It’s not so bad. Believe me, the German idea of resettlement was a lot worse than this.”

In the communal washrooms between the dormitories were sixteen square sinks as big as a car door. And beyond the farthest washroom was a locked door. The padlock, which was a new one, told me we were probably in the right place. Someone had felt obliged to secure what was on the other side of the door with a lock superior to the ones on the gate and on the front door. But new or not, this padlock yielded just as easily to my gaucho’s knife. I pushed the door open with the sole of my shoe and shone the light inside.

“I think we found what we’re looking for,” I said, although it was evident that the real work was only just beginning. There were dozens of filing cabinets—as many as a hundred—in five ranks, one in front of the other, like tightly dressed lines of soldiers, so that it was impossible to open one without moving the one in front of it.

“This is going to take hours,” said Anna.

“It looks as though we are going to spend the night together, after all.”

“Then you’d better make the most of it,” she said. She put the lamp down on the floor, faced the cabinet at the head of the first rank, and pointed at the cabinet heading the second. “Here, you look in that one and I’ll look in this one.”

I blew some dust off. A mistake. There was too much dust. It filled the air and made us cough. I pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet and started to riffle through names beginning with the letter Z. “Zhabotinsky, Zhukov, Zinoviev. These are all Z’s. You don’t suppose the one behind this one could be the Y cabinet, do you? Like Y for Yrigoyen, Youngblood, and Yagubsky?”

I slammed the drawer shut and we moved that cabinet out of the way of the one behind. Even before I had wrestled it completely clear, Anna had hauled the top drawer of the next cabinet open. There was more strength in her arm than she realized. Or possibly she was suddenly too excited to know her own strength. Either way, she managed to pull the entire drawer completely out of the cabinet and, narrowly missing her toes and mine, it thudded on the marble floor with the sound of a door closing in some deep pit of hell.

“Do you want to try that again?” I asked. “Only I don’t think they heard it in the Casa Rosada.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Let’s hope not.”

Anna was already kneeling in front of the fallen drawer and, with the light from the little hand dynamo she was holding, examining the contents. “You were right,” she cried excitedly. “These are the Y’s.”

I picked the bicycle lamp off the floor and trained the beam on her hands.

Then she said, “I don’t believe it,” and removed one thin file from the pack. “Yagubsky.”

Even in the semidarkness I could see the tears in her eyes. Her voice was choked, too.

“It seems that you can work miracles after all, Saint Bernhard.”

Then she opened the file.

It was empty.

ANNA STARED at the empty file for a long moment. Then she flung it aside angrily and, sinking back on her haunches, let out an enormous sigh. “So much for your miracle,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t want to be a saint, anyway.”

After a while, I went to find the empty file. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was empty, all right. But the file wasn’t without information. There was a date on the plain manila cover.

“When did you say they disappeared?”

“January 1947.”

“This file is dated March 1947. And look. Underneath their names are written the words ‘Judio’ and ‘Judia.’ Jew and Jewess. And there’s the small matter of a rubber stamp in red ink.”

Anna looked at it. “D12,” she said. “What’s D12?”

“There’s another date and a signature inside the stamp. The signature is illegible. But the date is clear enough. April 1947.”

“Yes, but what is D12?”

“I have no idea.”

I went back to the cabinet and removed another file. This one belonged to a John Yorath. From Wales. And it was full of information. Details of entry visas, details of John Yorath’s medical history, a record of his stay at the Hotel de Inmigrantes, a copy of a cédula, everything. But not Jewish. And no “D12” stamp on the cover.

“They were here,” said Anna excitedly. “This proves that they were here.”

“I think it also proves that they’re not here any longer.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Clearly, however, they were arrested. And then deported, perhaps.”

“I told you. We’ve never heard from them. Not since January 1947.”

“Then perhaps they were imprisoned.” Warming to my theme, I said, “You’re a lawyer, Anna. Tell me about the prisons in this country.”

“Let’s see. There’s the prison at Parque Ameghino, here in the city. And the Villa Devoto, of course. Where Perón imprisons his political enemies. Then there’s San Miguel, where regular criminals are sent. Where else? Yes, a military jail on Martín García Island, in the River Plate. That’s where Perón himself was imprisoned when he was originally deposed, in October 1945. Yes, yes, you might imprison a great many people on Martín García.” She thought for a moment. “But wait a minute. There’s nowhere more remote than Neuquén prison in the Andean foothills. You hear stories about Neuquén. But almost nothing is known about it except that the people who are sent there never return. Do you really think it’s possible? That they could be in jail? All this time?”

“I don’t know, Anna.” I waved at the regiment of filing cabinets ranked in front of us. “But it’s just possible we’ll find the answers in one of these.”

“You really know how to show a girl a good time, Gunther.” She stood up and went over to the next cabinet and drew the drawer open.

AN HOUR OR SO before dawn, exhausted and grimy with dust, and having found nothing else of any interest, we decided to call it a night.

We stayed too long. I knew that because as we came back into the front hall, someone switched on the electric lights. Anna uttered a little stifled scream. I wasn’t exactly happy about this turn of events myself. Especially as the person who had switched on the lights was pointing a gun at us. Not that he was much of a person. It was easy to see why Marcello had talked about a skeleton staff. I’ve seen healthier-looking men in coffins. He was about five feet, six inches tall, with lank, greasy, gray hair, eyebrows that looked like two halves of a mustache that had been separated for its own good, and a rat’s narrow, recreant features. He wore a cheap suit, a vest that looked like a rag in a mechanic’s greasy hands, no socks, and no shoes. There was a bottle in his coat pocket that was probably his breakfast and, in the corner of his mouth, a length of drooping tobacco ash that had once been a cigarette. As he spoke, it fell onto the floor.

“What are you doing here?” he said in a voice made indistinct with phlegm and alcohol and a lack of teeth. In fact, there was just one tooth on his prominent upper jaw: a front tooth that looked like the last pin standing in a game of skittles.

“I’m a policeman,” I said. “I needed to look at an old file urgently. I’m afraid there was no time to go through proper procedures.”

“Is that right?” He nodded at Anna. “And what’s her story?”

“None of your goddamn business,” I said. “Look, take a look at my ID, will you? It’s just like I told you.”

“You’re no cop. Not with that accent.”

“I’m secret police. SIDE. I’m one of Colonel Montalbán’s people.”

“Never heard of him.”

“We both report to Rodolfo Freude. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”

“Matter of fact, I have. It was him who gave me my orders. Explicit orders. He says no one. And I mean no one. No one gets in this place without the express authority, in writing, of the president himself.” He grinned. “Have you got a letter from the president?”

He crept forward and patted me down, his fingers quickly turning my pockets inside out. He grinned. “Thought not.”

Up close, I wasn’t inclined to change my impression of him. He looked inferior and second-rate. But there was nothing second-rate about the gun in his hand. That was special. A .38 Police Special, with a two-inch barrel and a nice bright blue finish. It was the only thing about him that looked like it was in perfect working order. It had crossed my mind to tackle him while he was searching my pockets. But the Police Special quickly changed it for me. He found my gun and tossed it away. He even found the little stiletto in my breast pocket. But he didn’t find the gaucho knife hidden under my belt in the small of my back.

He backed away and patted Anna down, mostly on her breasts, which seemed to give him an idea.

“You,” he told her. “Pretty lady. Take off your jacket and your shirt.”

She stared at him with dumb insolence and, when nothing happened, he got handy with the gun, pressing it under her chin. “You’d better do it, pretty lady, or I’ll blow your head off.”

“Do as he says, Anna. He means it.”

The man grinned his one-toothed grin and stood back to enjoy the sight of her undressing. “The brassiere, too. Take it off. Let’s see those titties.”

Anna looked at me, desperately. I nodded back at her. She unhooked her bra and let it fall onto the ground.

The man licked his lips, staring at her bared breasts. “Now those are nice,” he said. “Real nice titties. Nicest titties I’ve seen in a while.”

I pressed my spine back a little against my belt, feeling the big sheath knife that was there and wondering if I even knew how to throw a knife—especially one that looked as if it belonged on a butcher’s chopping block.

The man with one tooth reached forward and tried to take one of Anna’s nipples between his forefinger and thumb, but she shrank away from his touch behind the shield of her forearms.

“Stand still,” he said, twitching nervously. “Stand still or I’ll shoot you, pretty lady.”

Anna closed her eyes and let him take hold of her nipple. At first he just kneaded it with his fingers, like a man rolling tobacco. But then he started to squeeze, hard. Her face told me that much. So did his. He was smiling with sadistic pleasure, enjoying the pain he was inflicting on her. Anna bore it silently for a while, but that only seemed to make him do it harder, until she begged him to stop. He did. But only to squeeze her other nipple.

By now I had the knife in my hand. I slid it up inside the forearm of my sleeve. There was too much distance between the two of us to risk attacking him with the blade in my hand. Most likely he would have shot me, and then raped and killed her. It was too much gun to take a chance with. But throwing the knife was risky, too.

I let the knife slide into the palm of my hand and gripped the blade like a hammer.

Anna sank onto her knees, whimpering with pain, only he kept hold of her, his face contorted with ghastly pleasure, enjoying every second of the agony that was written in her face.

“You bastard,” she said.

That was my cue, and with a small step forward and both arms pointed straight at the target, I threw the knife, putting my whole hip into it to add to the power of my throw. I aimed at his side, just below his outstretched hand that was still twisting her nipple.

He cried out. The knife appeared to hit him in the ribs, but then it was in his hand. He let it go and it fell onto the ground. At the same time, he shot at me and missed. I felt the bullet zip over my head. I rolled quickly forward, expecting to find myself facing the two-inch barrel, or worse. Instead I found myself staring at a man who was now on all fours, coughing blood onto the ground between his hands and then curling up into a ball, holding his side. I glanced at the knife and, seeing the blood on the blade, guessed that it must have pierced his side to a depth of several inches before he had plucked it out of his torso.

My close proximity seemed to deflect him from the pain and distress of his wound. Twisting his whole body to one side, he tried to shoot again, only this time without lifting his forearm from the stab wound in his side.

“Look out,” yelled Anna.

But I was already over him, wrestling the gun from the grip of his bloody hand even as it fired harmlessly into the ceiling. Anna screamed. I punched him hard on the side of the head, but the fight had already gone out of him. I tiptoed away from him, trying to avoid the pool of his blood that was spreading on the floor like an expanding red balloon. He wasn’t dead yet. But I could tell there was no saving him. The blade had gone through a major artery. Just like a bayonet. From the amount of blood on the floor, it was clear he would be dead in minutes.

“Are you all right?” I picked up Anna’s brassiere and handed it to her.

“Yes,” she whispered. Her hands were cupping her breasts, and her eyes were full of tears. She was looking at him, almost as if she pitied him.

“Put your clothes on,” I said. “We have to leave. Now. Someone might have heard those shots.”

I put his gun under my belt, holstered my own, put the flashlights in Anna’s bag and picked up the two knives. Then I glanced around for anything the cops might get their teeth into. A button. A hank of hair. An earring. The little spots of color on a canvas, like Georges Seurat, that Ernst Gennat had been fond of. But there was nothing. Just him, wheezing his last breaths away. A dead body that didn’t know it yet.

“What about him?” asked Anna, buttoning her shirt. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“He’s finished,” I said. “By the time an ambulance gets here he’ll be dead.” I took hold of her arm and moved her smartly toward the door, then switched out the light. “With any luck, by the time anyone finds him, the rats will have spoiled the evidence.”

Anna took my hand off her arm and switched the light on again. “I told you. I don’t like rats.”

“Maybe you can flash a message in Morse code while you’re at it,” I said. “Just to make sure people know that there’s someone here.” But I left the light on.

“He’s still a human being,” she said, going back to the body on the floor. Trying to keep her shoes out of the blood, she dropped down on her haunches and, shaking her head helplessly, she looked back at me as if begging for a clue about what to do next.

The man twitched several times and then lay still.

“I had a rather different impression,” I said.

Crouching down beside her, I pressed my fingers hard under his ear and paused for the sake of verisimilitude.

“Well?”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“What do you want me to do, write out a death certificate?”

“The poor man,” she whispered. Then she did something that struck me as an odd thing to do if you were a Jew: she crossed herself.

“Speaking for myself, I’m glad the poor man’s dead. The poor man was going to rape and kill you. But not before the poor man killed me, probably. The poor man had it coming, if you ask me. Now, if you’re quite through grieving for the poor man, I’d like to get out of here before the cops or any of the poor man’s friends show up and wonder if this murder weapon I’m holding in my hand makes me a suspect. In case you’ve forgotten, they have the death penalty for murder in Argentina.”

Anna glanced at the gaucho knife and nodded.

I went to the door and switched out the light. She followed me outside. At the gate in the fence, I told her to wait a minute. I ran to the edge of the north dock and hurled the knife as far as I could into the River Plate. As soon as I heard the evidence hit the water, I felt better. I’ve seen what lawyers can do with evidence.

Together we walked back to where I had left my car, in front of the railway station. The sun was coming up. Another day was dawning for everyone except the man with one tooth who was now lying dead on the floor of the Immigrants’ Hotel. I felt very tired. In every way it had been a long night.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Does this sort of thing happen to you often, Herr—what did you say your real name was again?”

“Gunther, Bernhard Gunther. And you make it sound like you weren’t there, Anna.”

“I can assure you, I’m not likely to forget this evening in a hurry.” She stopped walking for a moment and then threw up.

I gave her my handkerchief. She wiped her mouth and took a deep breath.

“All right now?” I asked.

She nodded. We reached my car and got in.

“That was quite a date,” she said. “Next time, let’s just go to the theater.”

“I’ll take you home,” I said.

Anna shook her head and wound down the window. “No. I can’t go home. Not yet. Not feeling the way I do now. And after what happened, I don’t want to be alone, either. Let’s stay here for a moment. I just need to be still for a while.”

I poured some of the coffee she’d brought. She drank it and then watched me smoke a cigarette.

“What?”

“No trembling hands. No unsteady lips on that cigarette. No deep drags. You smoke that cigarette like nothing happened. Just how ruthless are you, Herr Gunther?”

“I’m still here, Anna. I guess that speaks for itself.”

I leaned across the seat and kissed her. She seemed to enjoy it. Then I said, “Tell me your address and I’ll drive you home. You’ve been out all night. Your father will be worried about you.”

“I guess you’re not as ruthless as I thought.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

I started the engine.

“So,” she said. “You really are going to drive me home. That’s a first. Maybe you do want to be a saint after all.”

She was right, of course. The fact is, I wanted to prove to her how polished and shiny my armor really was. I drove quickly. I wanted to get her home before I changed my mind. Nobility swims only so far in my gut before it hits its head on something hard and unyielding. Especially where she was concerned.