A Quiet Flame

22 TUCUMÁN, 1950

I WAS STILL thrusting away between Anna’s thighs when I heard a twig break on the forest floor behind me. I twisted around to see some men. None of them were wearing uniforms, but two of them had rifles slung over their shoulders. That was good, I thought. At the same time, I grabbed something with which to cover our nakedness.

There were three of them, and they were dressed for riding. They wore blue shirts, leather vests, denim trousers, riding boots, and spurs. The man without a rifle had a silver belt buckle as big as a breastplate, an ornate-looking gun belt, and over his wrist was looped a short, stiff leather whip. He was more obviously Spanish than his companions, who appeared to be mestizos—local Indians. His face was badly pockmarked, but he had a quiet confidence in his manner that seemed to indicate his scars didn’t matter to him.

“I would ask what you are doing here,” he said, grinning, “only it seems obvious.”

“Is it any business of yours?” I said, dressing quickly.

“This is private property,” he said. “That makes it my business.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was watching Anna put on her clothes, which was almost as pleasurable a sight as watching her take them off.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We got lost. We stopped to look at the map and then one thing led to another. You know how it is, I expect.” I glanced around. “It seemed like a nice, quiet spot. No one around.”

“You were wrong.”

Then, out of the trees, came a fourth man, riding a fine white horse and very different from the other three. He wore an immaculate white short-sleeved shirt, a black military-style cap, a pair of gray riding breeches, and black boots that were as shiny as the gold watch on his slim wrist. He had a head like a giant bird of prey.

“The fence has been cut,” he told the pockmarked gaucho.

“Not by us,” said Anna.

“Claims they stopped here for a quiet fuck,” said the head gaucho.

Silently, the man on the white horse rode around us while we finished dressing. My holster and gun were still on the ground somewhere, only I hadn’t been able to find them.

He said, “Who are you, and what are you doing in this part of the country?”

His castellano was better than mine. There was something about his mouth that made it better for speaking Spanish. The size and shape of the chin governing the mouth caused me to suspect that maybe there were a couple of Habsburgs in his family. But he was German. That much I was certain of, and instinctively I knew this must be Hans Kammler.

“I work for the SIDE,” I said. “My identification is in my coat pocket.”

I handed the coat to the head gaucho, who quickly found my wallet and handed it to his boss.

“My name is Carlos Hausner. I’m German. I came here to interview old comrades so that they can be issued the good-conduct passes they’ll need to obtain an Argentine passport. Colonel Montalbán at the Casa Rosada will vouch for me. So will Carlos Fuldner and Pedro Geller at Capri Construction. I’m afraid we got a bit lost. As I was saying to this gentleman, we stopped to take a look at the map and, I’m afraid, one thing led to another.”

The German on the white horse looked through my wallet and then tossed it back to me before turning his attention to Anna. “And who are you?” he asked.

“His fiancée.”

The German looked at me and smiled. “And you say you’re an old comrade.”

“I was an officer in the SS. Like you, Herr General.”

“It’s that obvious, is it?” The German looked disappointed.

“Only to me, sir,” I said, clicking my heels together and hoping that my show of Prussian obsequiousness might excuse Anna and me.

“A job with SIDE, a fiancée.” He smiled. “My, you have settled in here, haven’t you?” The horse shifted under him and he wheeled it around so that he could keep staring down at us. “Tell me, Hausner. Do you always bring your fiancée along when you’re on police business?”

“No, sir. The fact is, my castellano is fine in Buenos Aires. But out here it lets me down sometimes. The accent is a little difficult for me to understand.”

“Most of the people in this part of the world are of Guaraní stock,” he said, speaking German at last. “They are an inferior Indian race, but on a ranch, they have their uses. Herding, branding, fence mending.”

I nodded toward the barbed-wire fence. “Is this your fence, Herr General?”

“No,” he said. “But my men keep an eye on it. You see, this is a high-security area. Few people ever venture this far down the valley. Which leaves me with something of a dilemma.”

“Oh? What’s that, sir?”

“I should have thought that was obvious. If you didn’t cut the fence, then who did? You see my problem.”

“Yes, sir.” I shook my head awkwardly. “Well, we certainly haven’t seen anyone. Mind you, we haven’t been here that long.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

The horse lifted its tail and did what horses do. He didn’t seem to believe my story, either.

The general nodded sharply at the head gaucho. “You’d better bring them along.” He spoke in castellano, and it seemed evident that neither the head man nor the two Guaraní spoke any German.

We walked back to where we’d left the jeep. Three horses were waiting patiently for their riders. The two Guaraní mounted up and took the third horse’s bridle, while the head gaucho climbed in the back of the jeep. I noticed that his holster was unbuttoned, and decided he looked like the type who might be quick on the draw. Besides, under his belt was a knife as long as Chile.

“Just stick to the story,” I told Anna in Russian.

“All right. But I don’t think he believed it.”

She climbed into the passenger seat, lit a nervous-looking cigarette, and tried to ignore the head gaucho’s brown eyes on the back of her head. “Who was that Nazi, anyway?”

“I think he’s the Nazi who built that camp,” I said. “And many others like it.” I climbed into the driver’s seat, took the cigarette from her mouth, puffed it for a moment, and then put it back, only it didn’t stick. Her jaw was hanging down like the ramp on a truck. So I put the cigarette in my own mouth.

“You mean?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.” I started the jeep. “Which makes him extremely dangerous. So do exactly what I say and maybe we’ll live to know better than to tell the tale.”

The head gaucho tapped me impatiently on the shoulder. “Drive,” he said in castellano. He pointed farther up the road toward the three horsemen and the high Sierra.

I put the jeep in gear and drove slowly along the road.

“It’s just one man,” said Anna. “Why don’t you throw him out or something? We could easily escape three men on horses, couldn’t we?”

“For one thing, this man behind me is armed to the teeth. And for another, so are all his friends, and they know this country much better than me. Besides, I lost my gun back there in the trees.”

“That’s what you think,” she said. “It’s under my bra strap, between my shoulder blades.”

“Anna, listen to me. Promise you won’t do anything stupid. You don’t know what you’re up against. These men are professionals. They handle guns every day. So let me deal with it. I’m sure we can talk our way out of this.”

“That man, the general,” she said. “If he really did what you said he did, he deserves to be shot.”

“Sure he does. Only he’s not going to be shot, unless it’s by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

The head gaucho pushed his head between us. From the smell of his breath, I guessed he was a stranger to the toothbrush. “Shut up talking German and drive,” he said fiercely. For added emphasis, he produced his knife and pressed the tip under my ribs. I felt like a horse who had been pricked with a spur.

“I get the point,” I said, and put my foot down.

SITTING ON THE EDGE of a mountain slope with an excellent view of the valley below, it was more like a little piece of old Heidelberg than a ranch—tesserae of handsome wooden chalets, ivy-wrapped castle-style turrets, and a small chapel complete with a bell tower. Under the arch of the main building was a huge wooden tun that, from the bottles beside it, looked like it was filled with red wine. On the cobbled courtyard in front was an ornamental circular garden with a bronze fawn leaping through a facsimile cliff-edge waterfall, and I almost expected to see the Student Prince soaking his head under it after a night on the beer. My surprise at seeing a corner of Baden-Württemberg in Argentina was quickly overtaken by the sight of a familiar face. Walking toward me, his hand held out in front, was my old detective sergeant, Heinrich Grund. To my relief, he seemed pleased to see me.

“Bernie Gunther,” he said. “I thought it was you. What brings you up here?”

I pointed at the head gaucho with whom Grund had been speaking just a minute or two before. “Him,” I said.

Grund shook his head and laughed. “Same old Bernie. Always in trouble with the powers that be.”

Even after almost two decades, he looked like a boxer. A retired boxer. He was grayer than I remembered. There were deep lines in his face. And more of a stomach in front of him. But he still had a face like a welder’s mask, and a fist as big as a speedball.

“Is that what he is?”

“González. Oh, yes. He’s the estate manager. Runs everything around here. He seems to think you might have been spying.”

“Spying? On what, exactly?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Grund’s eyes licked Anna up and down for a moment. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your lady friend?”

“Anna? This is Heinrich Grund. We were in the Berlin police together about a thousand years ago.”

“Is it that long?”

It certainly felt that long. I hadn’t seen Grund since the summer of 1938, when he was already a senior officer in the Gestapo and we’d been very much at arm’s length with each other. When last I’d heard of him, he was a major in an EG—a special action group—in the Crimea. I didn’t know what he’d done. I didn’t want to know. But it wasn’t difficult to imagine.

“Heinrich,” I said, continuing the formal introduction. “This is Anna Yagubsky. According to her, she’s my fiancée.”

“Then I certainly wouldn’t argue with her.” Grund took her hand and, smoother than I remembered him, bowed like a proper German officer. “Charmed, I’m sure.”

“I wish I could say the same,” said Anna. “I don’t know why we’ve been brought here. Really I don’t.”

“I’m afraid she’s not very happy with me,” I told Grund. “I promised her a nice drive from Tucumán and I managed to get us lost. The general and his men found us somewhere down in the valley. I’m not sure but I think it was somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.”

“Yes, González told me he found you at Camp Dulce, down at the Sweet Lagoon. Now that’s a very secret place. And, by the way, we don’t call him ‘the general.’ We call him ‘the doctor.’ Whom you’ve met, of course. Anyway, he’s a close friend of Perón and takes all breaches of local security very seriously.”

I shrugged. “Occupational hazard, I suppose. I mean, we all of us have to take security very seriously.”

“Not like up here you don’t.” Grund turned and pointed at the tops of the Sierra behind us. “The other side of that is Chile. There’s a secret pass that was used by the Guaraní Indians that only the doctor and González know about. The least sniff of trouble, and we can all be off on our travels again.” Grund smiled. “This place is the perfect hideout.”

“What is this place?” asked Anna. “It looks more town than village, I think.”

“It was built by a German. A fellow named Carlos Wiederhold, toward the end of the last century. But quite soon after finishing it, he found an even nicer spot, to the south of here. Place called Bariloche. So he went there and built a whole town in similar style. There are lots of old comrades down there. You should visit it sometime.”

“Perhaps I will,” I said. “Always supposing I can get a clean bill of health from the doctor.”

“Naturally, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Heinrich.”

Grund shook his head. “Only I’m still finding it kind of hard to believe. Bernie Gunther being here in Argentina, like the rest of us. I always had you pegged as a bit of a Commie. What the hell happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Isn’t it always?”

“But not right now, eh?”

“Sure.” Grund started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You, a fugitive war criminal. The same as me. The war made fools of us all, didn’t it?”

“That’s certainly been my experience.”

I heard the sound of horses and looked around to see Kammler and his men riding up the slope toward us. The SS general lifted his boots out of the stirrups and slipped off his horse like a jockey. Grund went over to speak to him. Anna was watching Kammler closely. I was watching Anna. I put my hand lightly on her back. The gun wasn’t there.

“Where is it?” I murmured.

“Under my belt,” she said. “Where I can reach it.”

“If you kill him—”

“What, and spoil your little Nazi reunion? I wouldn’t want to do that.”

There seemed no point in arguing that one. I said, “If you kill him, they’ll kill us both.”

“After what I’ve seen, do you really think I care?”

“Yes. And if you don’t, then you certainly ought to. You’re still a young woman. One day you might have children. Perhaps you ought to think about them.”

“I don’t think I want to bring children into a country like this.”

“Then pick another country. I did.”

“Yes, I should think you would feel quite at home here,” she said bitterly. “For you, this must seem like a real home away from home.”

“Anna, please be quiet. Be quiet and let me think.”

When Kammler had finished speaking to Grund, he approached us with a sort of smile on his lean face, taking his cap off, his arm extended toward us both in a show of avuncular hospitality. Now that he had dismounted, I was able to get a better look at him. He was well over six feet tall. His hair was invisibly short and gray at the sides, but longer and darker on the crown, so that it looked like a yarmulke. The skull on his sticklike neck had been taken from Easter Island, probably. The eyes were set in cavelike sockets so deep and shadowy they almost looked empty, as if the bird of prey that hatched him had pecked them out. His physique was very spare but strong, like something that had been unwound from one of Melville’s spools of Glasgow barbed wire. For a moment I couldn’t quite place his accent. And then I guessed he was Prussian—one of those Baltic-coast Prussians who eat herring for breakfast and keep griffins for sport.

“I’ve been talking to your old friend Grund,” he said, “and I’ve decided not to kill you.”

“I’m sure we’re very relieved to hear it,” said Anna, and smiled sweetly at me. “Aren’t we, dear?”

Kammler glanced uncertainly at Anna. “Yes, Grund has vouched for you. And so did your Colonel Montalbán.”

“You called Montalbán?” I said.

“You seem surprised at that.”

“It’s just that I don’t see any telephone lines up here.”

“You’re right. There are none. No, I called him from a phone down there.” He turned and pointed into the valley. “An old service telephone from the days when the hydroelectrical people from Capri were here.”

“That’s quite a view you have there, Doctor,” said Anna.

“Yes. Of course, soon much of it will be under several fathoms of water.”

“Won’t that be a little bit inconvenient?” she asked him. “What will happen to your telephone? To your road?”

He smiled patiently. “We shall build another road, of course. Workers are plentiful and cheap in this part of the world.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling thinly. “I can imagine.”

“Besides,” he added, “a lake will be nicer. I think it will be just like Switzerland.”

We went up to the main house. It was made of stone bricks and pale-colored wood. I counted about twenty-five windows on the three-story front. The central part of the house was a red-roofed turret, at the top of which was a man with a pair of binoculars and a rifle. The lower windows had Tyrolean-style shutters and window boxes filled with flowers. As we came up to the front door, I thought we might meet the Aryan Ski Association coming the other way. Certainly the air was more Alpine up here than it had been down in the valley.

Inside the house, we were met by German-speaking servants, including a butler wearing a white cotton jacket. A big log was burning in the fireplace. There were flowers in tall vases, and pictures and bronzes of horses everywhere you looked.

“What a lovely house,” said Anna. “It’s all very Germanic.”

“You’ll both stay to dinner, of course,” said Kammler. “My chef used to cook for Hermann Goering.”

“Now, there was someone who really enjoyed his food,” Anna said.

Kammler smiled at Anna, uncertain of her temperament. I knew how he felt. I was trying to think of a way of getting her to shut up without using the back of my hand.

“My dear,” he said, “after your exertions, perhaps you’d like to go and freshen up a bit.” To a hefty-looking maid hovering in the background, he said, “Show her to a room upstairs.”

I watched Anna go up a staircase as wide as a small road and hoped she would have the good sense not to come back with the gun in her hand. Now that Kammler was being friendly and hospitable, my greatest fear was that she might turn into an avenging angel.

We went into an enormous living room. Heinrich Grund followed at a respectful distance, like a faithful aide-de-camp. He was wearing a blue shirt and tie and a gray suit that was nicely tailored, although not well enough to conceal the fact that he was also wearing a shoulder holster. None of these people looked like they were taking any chances with their security. The living room was like an art gallery with sofas. There were several old masters and quite a few new ones. I could see that Kammler had escaped from the ruins of Europe with a lot more than just his life. In a tall, freestanding Oriental-style cage, a canary flapped its wings and twittered like a little yellow fairy. Past a pair of French windows an immaculate lawn stretched into the distance like the green felt on some divine billiards table. It all looked a very long way from Auschwitz-Birkenau. But in case it wasn’t quite far enough, there was a plane parked on the lawn.

I heard a pop and turned to see Kammler opening a bottle.

“I usually have a glass of champagne about this time. Will you join me?”

I said I would.

“It’s my one real luxury,” he said, handing me a flute.

I almost laughed as I noticed the box of Partagas on the sideboard, the Lalique decanter and glasses, and the silver bowl of roses on the coffee table.

“Deutz,” he said. “Rather difficult to get up here.” And then, lifting his glass in a toast, he said, “To Germany.”

“To Germany,” I said, and sipped the delicious champagne. Glancing out of the window at the little silver plane on the runway-sized lawn, I said, “What’s that? A BFW?”

“Yes. A 109 Taifun. Do you fly, Herr Gunther?”

“No, sir. I finished my war working for the OKW. Military Intelligence, on the Russian front. Accurate plane-spotting was a matter of life and death.”

“I was in Luftwaffe when the war started,” said Kammler. “Working as an architect for the Air Ministry. After 1940, there really wasn’t much opportunity for an architect with the RLM, so I joined the SS. I was chief of Department C, building soap factories and new weapons facilities.”

“Soap factories?”

Kammler chuckled. “Yes. You know. Soap.”

“Oh. Yes. The camps. Of course.” I drank some champagne.

“How’s your champagne?”

“Excellent.” But the truth was, it wasn’t. Not anymore. The sour taste in my mouth had made certain of that.

“Heinrich and I got out early, in May 1945,” said Kammler. “He was my head of security at Jonastal, weren’t you, Heinrich?”

“Yes, Herr Doktor.” Grund raised his glass to his master. “We just got in a staff car and drove west.”

“We were building the German bomb at Jonastal, so naturally the Amis welcomed us with open arms. And we went to New Mexico. To work on their own bomb program. We stayed for almost a year. By then, however, it had dawned on them that, at the end of the war, I was effectively number three in the SS hierarchy. Which made my continued employment in the USA very sensitive. So I came to Argentina. And Heinrich was good enough to come with me.”

“It was my honor, sir.”

“Gradually, I was able to get most of my things out of storage and shipped here. Which is how you find me now. It’s a little remote, but we have pretty much everything you would want. My wife and daughter are with me now. And they’ll be joining us for dinner. Where exactly are they now, Heinrich?”

“They’re looking at some new calves, sir.”

“How many cattle do you have?” I inquired.

“About thirty thousand head of cattle and about fifteen thousand sheep. In many ways, the work is not so dissimilar from what I did during the war. We rear the beasts, drive them into Tucumán, and then transfer them by rail to Buenos Aires for slaughter.”

He seemed unashamed by this confession.

“We’re not the biggest estancia in these parts. Not by a long way. But we bring a certain efficiency to the running of an estate not usually seen in Argentina.”

“German efficiency, sir,” added Grund.

“Precisely,” affirmed Kammler. He turned to face a little Führer shrine I hadn’t noticed before. There were several photographs of Hitler, a small bronze bust of his distinctive head, a few military decorations, a Nazi armband, and a pair of Sabbath candlesticks that looked as if someone used them to keep the leader’s flame alight on the Nazi high holy days—January 30, April 20, April 30, and November 8. Kammler nodded reverently at his shrine. “Yes, indeed. German efficiency. German superiority. We have him to thank for always reminding us of that fact.”

I didn’t see it that way, of course, but for the moment, I kept my reservations to myself. We were a very long way from the comparative safety of Buenos Aires.

When I’d finished my champagne, Kammler suggested I might go upstairs and wash. The maid showed me to a bedroom where I found Anna lying on an elaborately carved wooden bed. She waited until the maid was gone, then sprang up.

“This is very cozy, isn’t it? His own private Berghof. Just like the Führer. Who knows? Maybe he’ll put in a guest appearance at dinner. Now, that would be interesting. Or how about Martin Bormann? You know, I always wanted to meet him. Only I ought to tell you now, I’m a little worried about dinner. I don’t know the words of the Horst Wessel Song. And let’s not beat around the burning bush. I’m a Jew. Jews and Nazis don’t mix.”

“I don’t mind you sticking it to me, Anna. But please try to cut the sarcasm in front of the general. He’s beginning to notice. And no confessions about who and what you are. That would really cook our goose.” I looked around the room. “Where’s the gun?”

“Hidden.”

“Hidden where?”

She shook her head.

“Still thinking of shooting him?”

“I know, he should suffer more. Shooting is too quick. Gas would be better. Perhaps I can leave the oven on in the kitchen before we go to bed tonight.”

“Anna, please. Listen to me. These are very dangerous people. Even now, Heinrich is carrying a gun. And he’s a professional. Before you can even cock that Smith, he’ll blow your head off.”

“What do you mean, ‘cock’?”

I shook my head. “See what I mean? You don’t even know how to shoot.”

“You could show me.”

“Look, those dead people in that camp. They could be anyone.”

“They could be. But they’re not. We both know who and what they are. You said so yourself. It was a camp created by order of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What else would they want a camp for but to imprison foreign refugees? And your friend. The Scotsman. Melville. It was he who mentioned Directive Twelve. An order for barbed wire to be delivered to a German SS general called Kammler. Directive Twelve, Bernie. That implies something more serious than Directive Eleven, don’t you think?” She took a deep breath. “Besides, before we left Tucumán this morning, you told me it was Kammler who built the big death camps. Auschwitz. Birkenau. Treblinka. Surely you must agree that he deserves to be shot for that alone.”

“Perhaps. Yes, of course. But I can promise you, shooting Kammler here, today, isn’t the answer. There has to be another way.”

“I don’t see how we can arrest him. Not in Argentina. Do you?”

I shook my head.

“Then shooting him is best.”

I smiled. “See what I mean? There’s no such thing as a murderer. There’s just a plumber or a shopkeeper or a lawyer who kills someone else. Ordinary people. People like you, Anna.”

“This isn’t murder. This will be an execution.”

“Don’t you think that’s what those SS men used to tell themselves when they started shooting pits full of Jews?”

“All I know is that he can’t be allowed to get away with it.”

“Anna, I promise you. I will think of something. Just don’t do anything rash. All right?”

She remained silent. I took her hand but she snatched it away again, angrily.

“All right?”

She let out a long sigh. “All right.”

A LITTLE LATER, the maid brought us some evening clothes. A black beaded gown that made Anna look stunning. A dinner jacket, dress shirt, and bow tie that somehow managed to fit me.

“Well, what do you know, we look almost civilized,” Anna said, straightening my tie. There was some perfume on the dressing table. She put some on. “Smells like dead flowers,” she observed.

“Actually, I rather like it,” I said.

“It figures. Anything dead probably smells good to a Nazi.”

“I wish you’d lay off that Nazi gibe.”

“I rather thought that was the point, Gunther. To make them think you’re one of them. So we can save our skins.” She got up and paused in front of the full-length cheval mirror. “Well, I’m ready for anything. Maybe even a killing or two.”

We went down to dinner. Besides Kammler, Grund, Anna, and me, there were three other people.

“This is my wife, Pilar, and my daughter, Mercedes,” said Kammler.

“Welcome to Wiederhold,” said Frau Kammler.

She was tall and thin and elegant, with perfect semicircular eyebrows that looked like they’d been drawn by Giotto, and lots of wavy fair hair either side of her face, which lent her a spaniel look. She belonged in the Cologne Prize winners’ enclosure at Weidenpesch racecourse. But I wouldn’t have raced her; I’d have put her out to stud at a million dollars a time. Frau Kammler’s daughter was no less beautiful and no less charming. She looked about sixteen, but was perhaps younger. Her hair was more Titian than red, because as soon as you saw her, you thought she belonged on a velvet couch in the studio of a great painter with an eye for beauty. When I saw her, I was sorry I didn’t paint myself. Her eyes were a peculiar shade of green, like an emerald with a trace of lapis lazuli, but quietly knowing, too, like she was about to check your king and you were just too dumb to know it yet.

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

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

“Having dinner, I hope.”

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

Anna shot me a look.

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

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

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

“Who are you?” he asked her.

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

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

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

“Really?” said Frau Kammler.

“It’s for his own good,” said Anna.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We dined without him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On what?” asked Grund.

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

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

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

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

“I hope not, Heinrich.”

“And what is this quest?” asked Mercedes.

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

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

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

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

“Yes, she is.”

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

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”

“Something terrible?”

“Yes. I think it will be. For him.”