A Quiet Flame

23 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

TWO DAYS LATER, we arrived back in Buenos Aires. Since it seemed unlikely that the colonel would have heard Kammler’s news—that his men had picked me up next to the secret camp at Dulce—with any equanimity, I told Anna I needed some time to straighten things out with him before we could count ourselves safe. For now, I told her, she should go home and stay indoors until I called her. Better still, she should go stay with a friend.

I had no way of knowing if Anna was likely to take my advice, since, for most of the journey back from Tucumán, she hadn’t really been speaking to me. She didn’t like my idea about what we were going to do about Hans Kammler. She didn’t think it was enough of a punishment, and told me that as far as she was concerned, our relationship was over.

Maybe she meant that. And maybe she didn’t. There was no time to make sure. I was coming out of the Richmond when they picked me up a second time. It might have been the same three men, only it was a little hard to tell, with the dark glasses and the matching mustaches. The car was another black Ford sedan, but not the same one that had driven me to Caseros. This car had a cigarette burn on the rear seat and a large bloodstain on the carpet. Or it might have been coffee. It might have been molasses. But over the years, you get to recognize a bloodstain when you see one on a car floor. I tried to keep calm but this time it wasn’t working. Only I wasn’t worried for myself as much as I was worried for Anna.

This was the moment I realized I was in love with her. That’s usually the way, of course. It’s only when you have something taken away that you realize how important it was to you. I was worried about her because, after all, I’d been warned, and in no uncertain terms. Naturally, the colonel would have guessed what I was up to when Kammler telephoned him. That I was sticking my nose into Argentina’s biggest secret. Not the Pulqui II jet-fighter aircraft, not even an atom bomb, but the fate of several thousand illegal Jewish refugees. The puzzle was why the colonel hadn’t just told Kammler to kill us both. I guessed I was about to find out. Only this time we sped past Caseros.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” growled one of my chaperones.

“Mystery tour, huh? I like surprises.”

“You won’t like this one,” he said ominously. And the other two laughed.

“You know, I’ve been trying to get in touch with your boss, Colonel Montalbán. I called him several times last night. I need to speak with him very urgently. I have some important information for him. Will he be where we’re going?” I glanced out of the window and saw that we were driving southwest. “I know he’ll want to speak to me.”

I nodded, almost as if trying to convince myself of this. But struggling for the right Spanish vocabulary to find something else that would convince them of my need to see the colonel, I found myself unable to say anything much at all. There was a hole in the pit of my stomach the size of the football stadium at La Boca. My greatest worry was that this metaphorical hole might soon become a real one.

“Anyone got a Spanish dictionary?” I asked. No one answered. “How about a cigarette?”

One of the thugs sandwiching me shifted on his backside, squeezing me for a moment as he reached for a packet of smokes. I caught the smell of sweat on his jacket and the oil in his hair and saw a little blackjack poking out of his breast pocket. I hoped it was going to stay there. I’d been blackjacked before and I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. He turned back with the packet in his hands and pushed open the little cardboard drawer. My fingers reached for one. The cigarettes looked like little white heads tucked up in bed, which was where I wished I was now. I put the cigarette in my mouth and waited while he found his lighter.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and bent my head down to the flame. Too late I remembered it had been an old Gestapo trick. Straight out of the unofficial manual. Part III. How to silence a talkative suspect in the back of a black car. One fist holds the lighter. The other comes across from the other side of the car as the suspect ducks down to the flame, and knocks him out cold. At least, that’s what I suppose must have happened. It was that, or the Argies really did have an atom bomb and, accidentally, someone had pressed the fire button instead of the bezel on a cigarette lighter. For me, the effect was pretty much the same, however. One minute it was a nice, sunny day. The next, darkness all over the land until the ninth hour. And the sensation that I was humming like a very sick bee, as if someone had just put twenty thousand volts through a metal cap and a brine-soaked sponge attached to my cranium. For a moment or two, I thought I heard laughter. The same kind of laughter you get when you’re a cat in a sack full of stones and someone drops you down a well. I hit the water without so much as a splash and disappeared below the surface. It was a deep well and the water was very cold. The laughter went away. I stopped mewing. That was the general idea. I was pacified, the way the Gestapo liked. For some reason, I remembered Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo. He only lasted until 1934, when Goering lost control of the Prussian police. He ended up as a local government official in Cologne or Hannover, and found himself dismissed altogether when he refused to arrest the city’s Jews. What happened to him after that? A sucker punch and a trip to a concentration camp, no doubt. Like poor Frieda Bamberger, who died in the middle of nowhere with rubber seals on the shower doors. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I felt like I was already under the earth. I felt my hand poking up through the ground. Reaching for life . . .

Someone wrestled my arms around behind my back and tied my wrists together. I was blindfolded now. I was standing up and leaning across the warm hood of the Ford. I could hear the sound of airplanes. We were at an airport. I thought it must be Ezeira.

Two men lifted me under the arms and dragged me across the tarmac. My feet weren’t coming with me. It didn’t seem to hinder our progress. The noise of the aircraft engine grew louder. A metallic, oily smell filled the air and I felt the wind of the propeller in my face. It seemed to revive me a little.

“I feel I should warn you,” I said. “I’m not a good air traveler.” They hauled me up a short flight of metal steps and then flung me down on a hard, metallic floor. There was something else on the floor besides me. The something else shifted and groaned, and I realized there were others in the same boat as me. Except that it wasn’t a boat. It might have been better if it had been. Either way, I had now guessed what lay ahead of us. A river trip. The River Plate. Perhaps it was better this way, after all. At least we wouldn’t drown. The fall would kill us.

The door closed and the aircraft began to move. Someone, a man a few feet away, was reciting a prayer. Someone else was retching with fear. There was a strong smell of vomit and human incontinence and gasoline.

“So the rumors are true, then?” I said. “There are no parachutes in the Argentine air force?”

A woman started crying. I hoped it wasn’t Anna.

The plane engines roared. Just two of them, I thought. A C-47 Dakota, most likely. You often saw them heading out over the River Plate. People sitting outside the Richmond would look up from their newspapers and their coffees and make jokes about these airplanes. “There goes the opposition,” or “Why can’t Communists swim in the River Plate? Because their hands are tied together.” The floor underneath me began to vibrate loudly. I felt the plane accelerate, and we started our takeoff. A few seconds later, there was a lurch, and we were airborne and the vibration settled into a steady, droning rhythm. The plane began to climb. The woman crying was almost hysterical by now.

“Anna?” I called. “Is that you? It’s me—”

Someone slapped me hard across the face. “No talking,” said a man’s voice. He lit a cigarette, and suddenly I remembered why I was a smoker. The smell of tobacco is the most wonderful smell in the universe when you’re facing death. I remember being shelled in 1916 and how a cigarette had got me through without my losing my nerve or my bowels.

“I wouldn’t mind a smoke,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”

I heard a man’s voice murmur something from the opposite end of the aircraft and, a few seconds later and much to my surprise, some fingers pushed a cigarette between my lips. It was already alight. I rolled it into the corner of my mouth and let my lungs go to work on it.

“Thanks,” I said.

I tried to make myself more comfortable. It wasn’t easy, but I hadn’t expected it would be. The cord around my wrists was as tight as the skin on a fat snake. My hands felt like balloons. I managed to straighten my legs, which weren’t tied, and kicked someone else. Maybe I would kick a shark in the eye before I drowned. Always supposing I hit the Río and lived. I wondered how high the pilot was planning to go before they started bailing us out.

Minutes passed. I was down to the filter. I spat the cigarette out of my mouth and it burned my shoulder before ending up on the deck. I hoped it might hit a pool of gasoline and cause a small fire. That would teach them. Then what sounded like a handful of gravel hit the fuselage. It was raining. I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. To make peace with myself. Negotiations opened slowly. I told Gunther he should think of himself as one of the lucky ones. How many others had ever managed to escape from the Russians? I was still telling myself how lucky I was, when someone interrupted my winning streak and opened the door. Cold air and rain blasted through the guts of the plane with a sound like the roaring of some terrible cloud-monster. A minotaur of the skies that needed to be served with regular human sacrifice.

It was impossible to guess how many human sacrifices were planned. I thought there were at least six or seven of us on that plane. With the door open now, the engines seemed to throttle back a little. There was movement all around me but, so far, no one had tried to move me toward the door. There was some sort of commotion and then a naked woman fell on me. I could tell she was naked because her breast squashed against my face and she was screaming. As they hauled her off me, I decided I had to say something or I’d be telling it to the seagulls.

“Colonel Montalbán? If you’re there, speak to me, you bastard.”

The woman who was screaming started begging them not to kill her. It wasn’t Anna. The voice was older, more mature, huskier, not well educated. It was hard to say more about her voice because, suddenly, it was not there, and I sensed she wasn’t there, either.

Behind me, a man was praying the same prayer over and over again, as if the repetition might make it count for more in the long line of prayers that were already winging their way ahead of us to the divine waiting room. From the speed of his prayers and his breathing and the way his position changed, I guessed he was next in line to the door. And even as I was thinking this, he was gone, too, his final scream, as he was bundled out of the plane, lost forever in the slipstream of eternity.

I tried to shake the blindfold off my eyes but it was useless. I might as well have had no eyes at all. Only I wished that they had stopped up my ears as well, as they deported the other men and women, one by one, through the open door of the plane. It was like having a front-row seat in the dress circle of hell.

I bellowed like a man roasting on a spit, cursing their mothers and their fathers and their bastard children. I told the colonel what I thought of him and his country and his president and his cancerous wife, and how I was going to have the last laugh because only I knew what he and she had dearly wanted to know, and that I wasn’t going to tell him anything now, not even if they did throw me out of the plane. I told them that I was spitting in all their faces in the knowledge that at least I was going to die knowing that I’d thwarted their stupid schemes. Someone slapped me. I ignored it and kept on talking.

“A month from now. A week. Maybe even tomorrow. You and that dumb blond whore are going to ask yourself if Gunther really knew what he said he knew. If he really could have told you what you wanted to find out most in the world. Where you can find her. Where she’s been hiding all this time. Don’t you want to find out, Colonel?”

I heard a woman scream several times before the open door silenced her permanently. Some sadistic part of my brain tried to persuade me that there had been something about her scream that had seemed familiar. Her perfume, too. But I wasn’t buying it. I hadn’t any more reason for thinking Anna was on the plane than for believing the colonel was. If she had done as I had told her and gone to stay with a friend, there was every reason to suppose she was all right.

Someone snatched off my blindfold. I was just in time to see two of my mustachioed friends carrying a man to the open door behind the wing. Mercifully, the man was unconscious. He was wearing just underpants. His hands and his feet were tied and he looked like he’d been badly beaten. Either that or his face had been stung by a whole jungleful of bees. The less said about his toes the better. The two who threw him out of the plane probably thought they were doing him a favor. One of them pulled a filthy handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his brow. It was hard work. Then they looked at me.

“What did you expect?” said a voice behind me. “I warned you to leave it alone.”

My neck was painful from when I’d been slugged but, gritting my teeth, I turned my head into the pain to meet the colonel’s eye.

“I didn’t expect to find what I found,” I said. “I didn’t expect the unthinkable. Not again. Not here. This is supposed to be a new world. I didn’t expect it would be just like the old one. But you know, now that I’ve seen your national airline and how it handles double-booked passengers, suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so surprising.”

“This?” He shrugged. “It’s easier this way. There’s no evidence. No camps. No bodies. No graves. Nothing. No one can ever prove anything. It’s a one-way ticket. No one comes back to tell the tale.”

“Who were they, anyway? Those people who disappeared just now.”

“People like you, Gunther. People who asked too many questions.”

“Is that all you’ve got against me?” I got a grin going and tried to make my mouth hang on to it, like I still had an ace up my sleeve. It didn’t feel right. My lips were trembling too much, but from here on, a show-and-tell was all I had going for me. If he decided I was bluffing, I was in for a flying lesson. He knew it. I knew it. The two stooges by the still-open door of the Dakota knew it. “Hell, I’m a detective, Colonel. It’s my job to ask too many questions. To stick my nose in where it’s not wanted. You of all people should know that. Everything’s my business until I find out what I’ve been hired to find out. That’s the way this racket works.”

“Nevertheless, you were warned. Not to ask questions about Directive Eleven. I couldn’t have been more specific. I thought, after your trip to Caseros, you might appreciate that a little more keenly.” He sighed. “I was wrong, of course. And now you’re in a tight spot. Truly, I regret having to kill you, Gunther. I meant all I said when we first met. You really were a hero of mine.”

“Well, then, let’s get to it,” I said.

“You’re forgetting something, surely?”

“I don’t pray so well these days, if that’s what you mean. And my memory is not so good at altitude. How high are we, anyway?”

“About five thousand feet.”

“That explains why it’s so damned drafty in here. Perhaps if those two altar boys were to close the door, I might warm up a little. I’m like a lizard that way. You’ll be surprised what I can do for you if you just let me sit for a while on a nice warm rock.”

The colonel jerked his head at the door, and with a weary look of disappointment, like some French Catholic noblemen denied the pleasure of defenestrating a big-mouthed Huguenot, the two men closed it. “There,” the colonel said. “How’s your memory now?”

“Improving all the time. Perhaps when we’re on the ground again, I’ll remember Evita’s daughter’s name. That’s assuming she really is Evita’s daughter. To my untutored, cynical eye, she and the president’s wife looked very unalike.”

“You’re bluffing, Gunther.”

“Maybe. But you can’t afford to take a chance on that, can you? If you knew any different, Colonel, I’d be in the river, looking for my old comrades from the Graf Spee.”

“So why not tell me?”

“Don’t make me laugh. As soon as I’ve spilled my guts, there’s nothing to stop you from spilling me out the door.”

“Maybe. But look at it this way. If you tell me when we’re on the ground, there’s nothing to stop me killing you in a day or two. A week from now.”

“You’re right. I never looked at it that way. You’d better think of something to put my mind at ease about that possibility, or you’ll wind up not knowing anything at all.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. Really I don’t. You work it out. You’re the colonel. Perhaps if I had another cigarette and my hands free, we might reach some sort of understanding.”

The colonel put his hand in the pocket of his suit. It came out with a switchblade as big as a drumstick. He turned me around and sawed at the cord binding my wrists. While I was rubbing some pain back into my hands, he put the knife away and took out his cigarettes. He shook one loose from the pack, put it into my mouth, and then tossed me a book of matches. If I’d had any feeling in my hands, I might have caught them. One of the colonel’s thugs picked up the matches and got my cigarette going for me. Meanwhile, the colonel leaned through the open cockpit door and spoke to the pilot. A moment later, the plane began to turn back toward the city.

I was desperate to know if Anna had been one of those poor people thrown out of the aircraft. But I hardly knew how to ask the colonel. If I didn’t ask about Anna, he might get the idea there was no one important in my life who might be used against me. If I did ask, I’d be putting her in grave danger.

“We’re going back to Ezeira,” he said.

“I feel better already. Never was one for air travel.”

I glanced around the inside of the plane. There was a large pool of blood and something worse on the floor. Now that the door was closed, I could smell the lingering stench of fear inside the Dakota. There were some seats up front. The colonel sat in one. I got up off the floor and went and sat beside him. I leaned across his lap and glanced out of the window at the gray river beneath us.

“The people you just murdered,” I said. “I suppose that they were Communists.”

“Some were.”

“And the others? There were women, weren’t there?”

“These are enlightened times we live in, Gunther. Women can be Communists, too. Sometimes—no, usually—they’re more fanatical than the men. More courageous, also. I wonder if you could take as much torture as one of the women we just dumped.”

I said nothing.

“You know, I could always take you back to Caseros. Have my men go to work on you with that electric cattle prod. Then you’d tell me what I want to know.”

“I know a little bit more about torture than you think, Colonel. I know that if you torture a man to make him tell you lots of things, then gradually he’ll give them up, one by one. But if you torture a man to make him tell you one thing, the chances are he’ll clam up and take it. Make it a contest of wills. Now that I know how important this is to you, Colonel, I’d make it my life’s last mission to say nothing.”

“A tough guy, huh?”

“Only when I have to be.”

“I believe you are. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I like you.”

“Sure you like me. That’s why you wanted to throw me out of a plane at five thousand feet.”

“You don’t think I enjoy this sort of thing, do you? But it has to be done. If the Communists were in power, they’d do the same thing to us, I can assure you.”

“That’s what Hitler used to say.”

“Wasn’t he right? Look what Stalin has done.”

“It’s the politics of the cemetery, Colonel. I should know. I just crawled out of the one called Germany.”

The colonel sighed. “Perhaps you’re right. But I think it’s better to live without principles than be righteous and dead. That’s what I’ve learned in the cemetery. There’s this, too, that I’ve learned. If my father leaves me a gold watch, I want my son to have it after me, not some paisano carrying a copy of Marx he’s never read. They want my watch? They’d better kill me first. Or it’s out the door they go. They’d better know that in Argentina we practice the redistribution of health. Anyone goes around thinking that all property is theft soon finds out that all killing is not murder. The last Communist we hang will be the one who helped himself to our rope.”

“I don’t want to take anything from anyone, Colonel. When I came here, I wanted a quiet life, remember? Nothing made your business my business except you. For all I care, you can hang all the Communists in South America on your Christmas tree. All the Nazis, too. But when you hire me to be your dog and sniff around, you shouldn’t be surprised if I bark a bit and piss on your flower bed. That may be embarrassing to you, but that’s the way it is. I embarrass myself sometimes.”

“Fair enough.”

“Fair enough, he says. You haven’t played fair with me since I got off the damn boat, Colonel. I want to know everything. And when I know everything, I’m going to get off this plane and I’m going back to my hotel and I’m going to take a bath. And when I’ve had some dinner and I’m good and ready and I’ve understood how everything works, I’m going to tell you what you want to know. And when you find that I’m telling the truth, you and von Bader and Evita are going to be so damned grateful you’re even going to pay me like you all said you would.”

“As you wish, Gunther.”

“No. Just what I said. What I wish would be too much to expect.”