A Quiet Flame (2 page)

“We haven’t had anything like that since what’s called Tragic Week. And even that was mostly political. Anarchists, you know. Back in 1919.”

“Anarchists, Bolsheviks, Jews, they’re all the same animal,” said Eichmann, who had become unusually talkative.

“Of course, during the last war, the government issued an order forbidding all Jewish immigration to Argentina. But more recently things have changed. The Americans have put pressure on Perón to soften our Jewish policy. To let them come and settle here. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more Jews on that boat than anyone else.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” said Eichmann.

“It’s all right,” insisted Fuldner. “You’re quite safe here.
Porteños
don’t give a damn about what happened in Europe. Least of all to the Jews. Besides, nobody believes half of what’s been in the English-language papers and on the newsreels.”

“Half would be quite bad enough,” I murmured. It was enough to push a stick through the spokes of a conversation I was starting to dislike. But mostly it was just Eichmann I disliked. I much preferred the other Eichmann. The one who had spent the last four weeks saying almost nothing, and keeping his loathsome opinions to himself. It was too soon to have much of an opinion about Carlos Fuldner.

From the back of his well-oiled head I judged Fuldner to be around forty. His German was fluent but with a little soft color on the edges of the tones. To speak the language of Goethe and Schiller, you have to stick your vowels in a pencil sharpener. He liked to talk, that much was evident. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t good-looking, but then he wasn’t short or ugly either, just ordinary, in a good suit, with good manners, and a nice manicure. I got another look at him when he pulled up at a level crossing and turned around to offer us some cigarettes. His mouth was wide and sensuous, his eyes were lazy but intelligent, and his forehead was as high as a church cupola. If you’d been casting a movie, you’d have picked him to play a priest, or a lawyer, or maybe a hotel manager. He snapped his thumb on a Dunhill, lit his cigarette, then began telling us about himself. That was fine by me. Now that we were no longer talking about Jews, Eichmann stared out of the window and looked bored. But I’m the kind who listens politely to stories about my redeemer. After all, that’s why my mother sent me to Sunday school.

“I was born here, in Buenos Aires, to German immigrants,” said Fuldner. “But for a while, we went back to live in Germany, in Kassel, where I went to school. After school I worked in Hamburg. Then, in 1932, I joined the SS and was a captain before being seconded to the SD to run an intelligence operation back here in Argentina. Since the war I and a few others have been running Vianord—a travel agency dedicated to helping our old comrades to escape from Europe. Of course, none of it would be possible without the help of the president and his wife, Eva. It was during Evita’s trip to Rome, in 1947, to meet the pope, that she began to see the necessity of giving men such as you a fresh start in life.”

“So there’s still some anti-Semitism in the country, after all,” I remarked.

Kuhlmann laughed, and so did Fuldner. But Eichmann remained silent.

“It’s good to be with Germans again,” said Fuldner. “Humor is not a national characteristic of the Argentines. They’re much too concerned with their dignity to laugh at very much, least of all themselves.”

“They sound a lot like fascists,” I said.

“That’s another thing. Fascism here is only skin-deep. The Argentines don’t have the will or the inclination to be proper fascists.”

“Maybe I’m going to like it here more than I thought,” I said.

“Really,” exclaimed Eichmann.

“Don’t mind me, Herr Fuldner,” I said. “I’m not quite as rabid as our friend here wearing the bow tie and glasses, that’s all. He’s still in denial. To do with all kinds of things. For all I know, he still holds fast to the idea that the Third Reich is going to last for a thousand years.”

“You mean it isn’t?”

Kuhlmann chuckled.

“Must you make a joke about everything, Hausner?” Eichmann’s tone was testy and impatient.

“I only make jokes about the things that strike me as funny,” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of making a joke about something really important. Not and risk upsetting you, Ricardo.”

I felt Eichmann’s eyes burning into my cheek, and when I turned to face him, his mouth went thin and puritanical. For a moment he continued staring at me with the air of one who wished it was down the sights of a rifle.

“What
are
you doing here, Herr Doktor Hausner?”

“The same thing as you, Ricardo. I’m getting away from it all.”

“Yes, but why? Why? You don’t seem like much of a Nazi.”

“I’m the beefsteak kind. Brown on the outside only. Inside I’m really quite red.”

Eichmann stared out the window as if he couldn’t bear to look at me for a minute longer.

“I could use a good steak,” murmured Kuhlmann.

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” said Fuldner. “In Germany a steak is a steak, but here it’s a patriotic duty.”

We were still driving through the dockyards. Most of the names on the bonded warehouses and oil tanks were British or American: Oakley & Watling, Glasgow Wire, Wainwright Brothers, Ingham Clark, English Electric, Crompton Parkinson, and Western Telegraph. In front of a big, open warehouse a dozen rolls of newsprint the size of hayricks were turning to pulp in the early-morning rain. Laughing, Fuldner pointed them out.

“There,” he said, almost triumphantly. “That’s Perónism in action. Perón doesn’t close down opposition newspapers or arrest their editors. He doesn’t even stop them from having newsprint. He just makes sure that by the time it reaches them the newsprint isn’t fit to use. You see, Perón has all the major labor unions in his pocket. That’s your Argentine brand of fascism, right there.”

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

B
UENOS AIRES LOOKED and smelled like any European capital city before the war. As we drove through the busy streets, I wound down the window and took a deep, euphoric breath of exhaust fumes, cigar smoke, coffee, expensive cologne, cooked meat, fresh fruit, flowers, and money. It was like returning to earth after a journey into space. Germany, with its rationing and war damage and guilt and Allied tribunals, seemed a million miles away. In Buenos Aires there was lots of traffic because there was lots of petrol. The carefree people were well dressed and well fed, because the shops were full of clothes and food. Far from being a remote backwater, Buenos Aires was almost a Belle Époque throwback. Almost.

The safe house was at Calle Monasterio 1429 in the Florida district. Fuldner said Florida was the smartest part of Buenos Aires, but you wouldn’t have known it from the inside of the safe house. The outside was shielded by a carapace of overgrown pine trees, and it was called a safe house probably because, from the street, you wouldn’t have known it was there at all. Inside, you knew it was there but wished it weren’t. The kitchen was rustic. The ceiling fans were just rusty. The wallpaper in all the rooms was yellow, although not by design, and the furniture looked as if it was trying to return to nature. Poisonous, half decayed, vaguely fungal, it was the kind of house that belonged in a bottle of formaldehyde.

I was shown to a bedroom with a broken shutter, a threadbare rug, and a brass bed with a mattress as thin as a slice of rye bread and about as comfortable. Through the grimy, cobwebbed window I looked out onto a little garden overgrown with jasmine, ferns, and vines. There was a small fountain that hadn’t worked in a while: a cat had littered several kittens in it, right underneath a copper waterspout that was as green as the cat’s eyes. But it wasn’t all bad news. At least I had my own bathroom. The bathtub was full of old books, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a bath in it. I like to read when I’m in the bath.

Another German was already staying there. His face was red and puffy and there were bags under his eyes like a naval cook’s hammock. His hair was the color of straw and about as tidy, and his body was thin and scarred with what looked like bullet holes. These were easy to see, because he wore his malodorous remnant of a dressing gown off one shoulder, like a toga. On his legs were varicose veins as big as fossilized lizards. He seemed a stoic sort, who probably slept in a barrel, but for the pint of liquor in his dressing-gown pocket and the monocle in his eye, which added a jaunty, polished touch. It looked like a sprig of parsley on a cowpat.

Fuldner introduced him as Fernando Eifler but I didn’t suppose that was his real name. The three of us smiled politely but we were all possessed of the same thought: that if we stayed in the safe house long enough, we would end up like Fernando Eifler.

“I say, do any of you chaps have a cigarette?” asked Eifler. “I seem to have run out.”

Kuhlmann handed one over and helped him get it alight. Meanwhile Fuldner apologized for the poor quarters, saying it was only for a few days and explained that the only reason Eifler was still there was that he had turned down every job offered to him by the DAIE, the organization that had brought us to Argentina. He said this quite matter-of-factly, but our new housemate bristled noticeably.

“I didn’t come halfway around the world to work,” Eifler said sourly. “What do you take me for? I’m a German officer and a gentleman, not a bloody bank clerk. Really, Fuldner. It’s too much to expect. There was no talk of working for a living when we were back in Genoa. I’d never have come if I’d known you people expected me to earn my bread and butter. I mean it’s bad enough that one has to leave one’s family home in Germany without obliging one to accept the added humiliation of reporting regularly to an employer.”

“Perhaps you’d have preferred it if the Allies had hanged you, Herr Eifler?” said Eichmann.

“An American noose or an Argentinean halter,” said Eifler. “It’s not much of a choice for a man of my background. Frankly, I should prefer to have been shot by the Popovs than face a clerk’s desk at nine o’clock every morning. It’s uncivilized.” He smiled thinly at Kuhlmann. “Thank you for the cigarette. And by the way, welcome to Argentina. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.” He bowed stiffly, limped into his room, and closed the door behind him.

Fuldner shrugged and said, “Some find it harder to adjust than others. Especially aristocrats like Eifler.”

“I might have known,” sniffed Eichmann.

“I’ll leave you and Herr Geller to settle in,” Fuldner told Eichmann. Then he looked at me. “Herr Hausner. You have an appointment this morning.”

“Me?”

“Yes. We’re going to the police station at Moreno,” he said. “To the Registry of Foreign Persons. All new arrivals have to report there in order to obtain a
cédula de identidad.
I can assure you it’s only a matter of routine, Herr Doktor Hausner. Photographs and fingerprints, that kind of thing. You’ll all need to have one to work, of course, but for appearances’ sake, it’s best you don’t all go at the same time.”

But outside the safe house Fuldner confessed that while it was true that all of us would require a
cédula
from the local police station, this was not, in fact, where we were now going. “Only I had to tell them something,” he said. “I could hardly tell them where we’re really going without hurting their feelings.”

“We certainly wouldn’t want that to happen, no,” I said, climbing into the car.

“And please, when we come back, don’t for Christ’s sake say where you’ve been. Thanks to Eifler, there’s already enough resentment in that house without you adding to the store of it.”

“Of course. It’ll be our little secret.”

“You’re making a joke,” he said, starting the engine and driving us away. “But I’m the one who’s going to be laughing when you find out where you’re going.”

“Don’t tell me I’m being deported already.”

“No, nothing like that. We’re going to see the president.”

“Juan Perón wants to see me?”

Fuldner laughed just like he’d said he would. I guess my face did look kind of silly at that.

“What did I do? Win an important award? Most promising Nazi newcomer to Argentina?”

“Believe it or not, Perón likes to greet a lot of German officers who arrive here in Argentina, personally. He’s very fond of Germany and the Germans.”

“It’s not everyone you can say that about.”

“He is a military man, after all.”

“I imagine that’s why they made him a general.”

“He likes to meet medical men, most of all. Perón’s grandfather was a doctor. He himself wanted to be a doctor, but instead he went to the National Military Academy.”

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” I said. “Killing people instead of healing them.”

Dropping a couple of ice cubes into my voice, I said, “Don’t think I’m not well aware of the great honor, Carlos. But you know, it’s been quite a few years since I plugged my ears with a stethoscope. I hope he’s not looking to me to come up with a cure for cancer, or to give him the gossip from the latest German medical journal. After all, I’ve been hiding out in the coal shed for the last five years.”

“Relax,” said Fuldner. “You’re not the first Nazi doctor I’ve had to introduce to the president. And I don’t suppose you’ll be the last. Your being a medical man is merely a confirmation of the fact that you are an educated man, and a gentleman.”

“When the occasion demands, I can pass for a gentleman,” I said. I buttoned my shirt collar, straightened my tie, and checked my watch. “Does he always receive visitors with his boiled eggs and his newspaper?”

“Perón is usually in his office by seven,” said Fuldner. “In there. The Casa Rosada.”

Fuldner nodded at a pink-colored building at the far side of a plaza lined with palm trees and statuary. It looked like an Indian maharajah’s palace I’d once seen in a magazine. “Pink,” I said. “My favorite color for a government building. Who knows? Maybe Hitler might still have been in power if he’d had the Reich chancellery painted a nicer color than gray.”