A Quiet Flame

19 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

THE NEXT MORNING I thought some more about what Isabel Pekerman had told me about Argentina’s white-slave traffic. I wondered if it might be connected with what Perón and Mengele were up to with young girls. None of it made much sense. I decided my brain needed a completely different kind of problem to work on. I had most of the morning before I had to go meet von Bader and the colonel, so after breakfast I went to the Richmond in search of a game of chess.

Melville was there, and I played a Caro-Kann defense to a victory in just thirty-three moves that Bronstein would have been proud of. Afterward, I let him buy me a drink and we sat outside for a while and watched the world go by. Usually I paid no attention to the little Scotsman’s chatter. On this occasion, however, I found myself listening to him more closely.

“That was quite a peach you brought in here the other week,” he observed, full of envy.

“She is, isn’t she?” I said, assuming he was talking about Anna.

“Much too tall for me, of course,” he said, laughing.

Melville couldn’t have been more than five-feet-three. Red-haired, bearded, with a wicked gap-toothed grin, he looked like something kept to amuse the Spanish royal family.

“Me, I need them much shorter,” he added. “And that generally means younger, too.”

I felt my ears prick up at this admission. “How much younger?”

“The age isn’t important,” he said. “Not for a short-arse like me. I have to take what I can get.”

“Yes, but there’s young and there’s too young, surely?”

“Is there?” He laughed. “I dunno.”

“Well, just how young is too young? You must have some idea.”

He thought for a moment and then shrugged silently.

“So what’s the youngest you’ve ever had?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m interested, that’s all. I mean, with some of these girls you meet these days, well, sometimes, it’s a little hard to tell how old they are.” I was hoping to draw him out on a subject Melville was already beginning to look evasive about. “The makeup they wear. The clothes. Some of them have experience way beyond their years. Back in Germany, for instance, I had a few close shaves, I can tell you. Of course I was a lot younger then myself. And Germany was Germany. Girls were naked in the clubs and naked in the parks. Before the Nazis, sun worship—naturism, they called it—it was all the rage. Like I say, that was Germany. Sex was our national pastime. Under the Weimar Republic, we were famous for it. But this. This is a Roman Catholic country. I’d have thought that things were a bit different here.”

“Then you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you?” Melville uttered his manic gargoyle’s laugh. “To tell the truth, this country’s a paradise for perverts like me. It’s one of the reasons I live here. All the unripe fruit. You only have to reach up and pick it off the tree.”

Again I felt my ears prick up. The Castilian phrase Melville used to describe young girls was fruta inmadura—the very same phrase the colonel had used to describe Perón’s similar predilection.

“I don’t know about Germany,” said Melville. “I’ve not actually been there. But it would have to be pretty bloody good to beat the Argentine for lecheras.”

“Lecheras?”

“Milkmaids.”

I nodded. “Is it true, what I’ve heard? That the general likes them pretty young himself?”

Melville pursed his lips and looked evasive again.

“Maybe that’s why you can get away with it,” I said.

“You make it sound like a crime, Hausner.”

“Isn’t it? I don’t know.”

“These girls know what they’re doing, believe me.” He rolled an emaciated little cigarette and held the match up to his mouth. The roll-up crackled into flames like a tiny forest fire. With one chuckling puff he managed to consume almost a third of it.

“So where would I go?” I asked, affecting nonchalant curiosity. “If I was thinking of picking it off the tree, like you describe.”

“One of the pesar poco joints down at the portside in La Boca,” he said. “Of course you would have to be introduced by a member.” He lifted his whole mug in the air in a big self-satisfied grin. “Like me.”

Restraining my first impulse—to introduce his jaw to a short uppercut—I smiled and said, “That’s a date, then.”

“Mind you,” he said, “the fruta inmadura scene is not what it used to be. Immediately after the war, the country was flooded with underweight baggage. That’s what we used to call the really fragile fruit that was coming from Europe. Little Jewish virgins escaping to a better life, they imagined. All of them looking for the caballero blanco. A few found one. Some grew up and went on the game. The rest? Who knows?”

“Who knows, indeed? The way I hear it, some of those illegal Jews got themselves picked up by the secret police. And disappeared.”

Melville pulled a face and shook his head. “Everyone disappears at one time or another in Argentina. It’s a national bloody pastime. The porteños get depressed about all kinds of shit. And then they take off for a while. Sooner or later most of them turn up again, without a word of explanation. Like nothing happened. As for the Jews, well, it’s my own experience they’re an especially melancholy lot. Which, if you don’t mind me saying so, is largely the fault of your own countrymen, Hausner.”

I nodded, conceding the point, which was well made.

“Now, take Perón,” he said, warming to his theme. “He was vice president and secretary of war in the government of General Edelmiro Farrell. Then he disappeared. His colleagues had arrested him and put him in jail on Martín García Island. Then Evita organizes some mass demonstrations of popular support, and a week later he’s back. Six months after that, he’s the president. He disappears. He comes back. It’s a very Argentine story.”

“Not everyone has an Evita,” I said. “And not everyone who disappears comes back, surely. You can’t deny that the jails are full of Perón’s political opponents.”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Besides, most of those people are Communists. Do you want to see this country handed over to the Communists like Poland and Hungary and East Germany? Like Bolivia?”

“No, not at all.”

“Well, then. You ask me, they’re doing the best they can. This is a fine country. Perhaps the finest country in the whole of South America. With excellent prospects for economic growth. And I’d much rather live in Argentina than in Britain. Even without the unripe fruit.”

Melville flicked the pungent roll-up into the street. It was something I’d dearly like to have done to him.

“What are you doing here anyway, Melville?” I asked, trying to conceal the exasperation I felt with him. “I mean, what is it that you do? Your work. Your job.”

“I told you before,” he said. “Obviously you weren’t listening.” He laughed. “But there’s no great mystery about what I do for a living. Unlike some I could mention.” He shot me a look as if to say he meant me. “I work for Glasgow Wire. We supply a range of stock fencing and wire products to cattle ranchers all over the Argentine.”

I tried to stifle a yawn and failed. He was right. He had told me before. It was just that I’d seen no reason to think it was something I ought to remember.

“It sounds boring, I know,” he said wryly. “But there wouldn’t be a beef industry in this country without galvanized-wire products. I sell it in fifty-meter rolls, by the pallet. The Argie cattlemen buy miles of the stuff. They can’t get enough of it. And not just the cattlemen. Wire is important to all sorts of people.”

“Really?” This time the yawn got the better of me.

Melville seemed to regard my apparent disinterest as a challenge.

“Oh, yes. Why, just a few years ago, one of your own countrymen awarded me quite a large contract. He was an engineer working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What was his name, now? Kammler. That’s right. Dr. Hans Kammler. Ever heard of him?”

The name itched a little, although I couldn’t think why.

“I had several meetings with your Mr. Kammler at the San Martín Palace, in Arenales. An interesting man. During the war he was a general in the SS. I expect you knew him.”

“All right. I was in the SS. Satisfied?”

Melville smacked his thigh with the flat of his hand. “I knew it,” he said triumphantly. “I just knew it. Course it doesn’t matter to me what you did. The war’s over now. And we’re going to need Germany if we’re to keep the Russians out of Europe.”

“What would the Ministry of Foreign Affairs need with a large quantity of wire fencing?” I asked.

“You’d better ask your General Kammler,” said Melville. “We met several times, he and I. The last time at a place near Tucumán, where I delivered the wire.”

“Oh, right,” I said, my curiosity relaxing a little now. “You must mean the hydroelectric plant run by the Capri Construction Company.”

“No, no. They’re a client of mine, it’s true. But this was something different. Something much more secret. My guess is that it was something to do with the atom bomb. Of course, I could be wrong. But Perón’s always wanted Argentina to be the first nuclear power in South America. Kammler used to refer to the project as memorandum something or other. A number.”

“Eleven? Directive Eleven?”

“That’s right. No, wait. It was Directive Twelve.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Quite sure. Either way, it was all top-secret stuff. They paid well over the odds for the wire. Largely, I suppose, because we had to deliver the stuff to a valley in the middle of nowhere in the Sierra de Aconquija. Oh, it was easy enough as far as Tucumán itself. There’s quite a reasonable railway from Buenos Aires to Tucumán, as you probably know. But from there to Dulce—that was the name of the facility they were building up there, after the river of the same name, I suppose—we had to use mules. Hundreds of mules.”

“Melville. Do you think you could point the place out on a map?”

He smiled uncertainly. “I think I probably said too much already. I mean, if it is a secret nuclear facility, they might not care for me telling people exactly where it is.”

“You have a point there,” I admitted. “They’d probably kill you if they found out you’d told someone like me about it. In fact, I’m quite sure of it. But on the other hand”—I lifted my jacket clear of the shoulder holster I was wearing and let him see the Smith that was nesting there—“on the other hand, it isn’t so good, either. In a moment, you and I are going to walk to the bookshop across the street. And I’m going to buy a map. And either your brains or your finger is going to be on it by the time I leave.”

“You’re joking,” he said.

“I’m German. We’re not exactly famous for our sense of humor, Melville. Especially not when it comes to killing people. We take that sort of thing quite seriously. Which is why we’re so good at it.”

“Suppose I don’t want to go to the bookshop,” he said, looking around. The Richmond was busy. “You wouldn’t dare shoot me here, in front of all these people.”

“Why not? I’ve finished my coffee. And you’ve thoughtfully taken care of the check. It certainly won’t spoil my morning to put a bullet in your head. And when the cops ask me why I did it, I’ll simply tell them you resisted arrest.” I took out my SIDE credentials and showed them to him. “You see, I’m sort of a cop, myself. The secret kind that doesn’t usually get held to account.”

“So that’s what you do.” Melville uttered his manic laugh. Only now it was more of a nervous laugh. “I was kind of wondering.”

“Well, now that your curiosity has been satisfied, let’s go. And try to remember what I said about the German sense of humor.”

In the Figuera bookshop on the corner of Florida and Alsina, I bought a map of Argentina for a hundred pesos and, taking Melville by the arm, walked him onto Plaza de Mayo, where, in full sight of the Casa Rosada, I unfolded the map on the grass.

“So let’s have it,” I said. “Where exactly was this place? And if I find you’ve lied to me, I’m going to come back like Banquo in that play of yours, Scotsman. And I’m going to make your hair a lot more red than it is now.”

The Scotsman moved a forefinger north from Buenos Aires, past Córdoba and Santiago del Estero, and west of La Cocha, where Eichmann was now living.

“About here,” he said. “It’s not actually marked on the map. But that’s where I met Kammler. Just north of Andalgalá there are a couple of lagoons in a depression near the basin of the Dulce River. They were building a small railway when I saw the place. Probably to make it easier to move materials up there.”

“Yeah, probably,” I said, folding up the map and sliding it into my pocket. “If you’ll take my advice, you won’t mention this to anyone. Probably they’d kill you before killing me, but only after torturing you first. Luckily for you, they already tortured me and it didn’t work, so you’re in the clear from my end of this conversation. The best thing you could do now would be just to go away and forget you ever met me. Not even across a chessboard.”

“Suits me,” Melville said, and walked quickly away.

I took another good look at the map and told myself Colonel Montalbán would have been disappointed in me: I really wasn’t much of a detective. Who would ever have thought that Melville—the bore in the Richmond bar—might turn out to hold the key to the whole case? I was almost amused at the accidental way I had managed to obtain the clue to what Directive 12 was, and where it had been implemented. But Melville was wrong about one thing. Directive 12 had nothing to do with a secret nuclear facility, and everything to do with the empty file from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Anna and I had found in the old Hotel de Inmigrantes. I was certain of that.