A Quiet Flame (20 page)

“Yes.”

“You’re a respectable man, Herr Doktor. Anyone can see that. I shouldn’t think that there will be any problems with issuing you a good-conduct pass. No problems at all. However.”

“Yes?”

“I hesitate to mention it. But you being a doctor . . . I’m sure you’ll understand why I have to ask this kind of thing. Is there anyone among our old comrades here in Argentina who you think might not be worthy of a good-conduct pass? Someone who might potentially bring real disrepute to Argentina?”

“It’s an interesting question,” said the doctor.

“I know and I hate asking it. We’re all of us in the same boat, after all. But sometimes these questions have to be asked. How else are we to judge a man, if we don’t listen to what other people say about him?” I shrugged. “It might be something that’s happened here. Or something that happened back in Europe. During the war, perhaps.”

“No, no, you’re quite right to ask, Herr Hausner. And I appreciate your confidence. Well then, let me see.” He sipped some tea and thought for a moment. “Yes. There’s a fellow called Eisenstedt, Wilhelm von Eisenstedt, who was an SS captain at Buchenwald. He lives in a house on Calle Monasterio and calls himself Fernando Eifler. He’s let himself go a bit. Drinks too much. But at Buchenwald he was notoriously and sadistically homosexual.”

I tried to suppress a smile. Eifler had been the man in the dressing gown with whom I’d shared the safe house on Monasterio when I first arrived in Argentina. So that was who and what he was.

“Also, yes, also a man called Pedro Olmos. His real name is Walter Kutschmann, and he’s another ex-SS captain. Kutschmann was a murderer by anyone’s definition of the word. Someone who enjoyed killing for killing’s sake.”

Vaernet described Kutchsmann’s wartime activities in detail.

“I believe he now works for Osram. The lightbulb company. I can’t answer for what kind of man he is today. But his wife Geralda’s conduct is less than proper, in my opinion. She gasses stray dogs for a living. Can you imagine such a thing? What kind of a person could do that? What kind of a woman is it who gasses poor dumb animals for a living?”

I could easily have answered him. Only he wouldn’t have understood. But I went to see Pedro Olmos anyway.

He and his wife lived on the outskirts of the city, near the electrical factory where Pedro Olmos worked. He was younger than I’d imagined, no more than thirty-five, which meant he was in his mid-twenties when he’d been a Gestapo captain in Paris; and little more than a boy when he’d been a lieutenant murdering Jews in Poland as part of a special action group. He had been just eighteen when Anita Schwarz was murdered in 1932, and I thought he was probably too young to be the man I was looking for. But you never can tell.

Pedro Olmos was from Dresden. He had met and married Geralda in Buenos Aires. They had several dogs and cats but no children. They were a good-looking couple. Geralda didn’t speak German, which was probably why Pedro felt able to confess that he’d been a lot more than just friendly with Coco Chanel while he was stationed in Paris. He was certainly smooth enough. He spoke excellent Spanish, French, and some Polish, which, he said, was why he was working in Osram’s travel department. Both he and Geralda were much exercised about the city’s stray-dog population, which was considerable, and they had a grant from the city authorities to round them up and gas them. It seemed an unusual occupation for a woman who described herself as an animal lover. She even took me to their basement and showed me the humane-killing facility she used. This was a simple metal hut with a rubber-sealed door that was attached to a petrol generator. Geralda carefully explained that when the dogs were dead, she burned the bodies in their household incinerator. She seemed very proud of her “humane service” and described it in a way that made me think she’d never heard of such a thing as a gas van. Given Olmos’s SS background, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine that perhaps she had got the idea from her husband.

I asked him the same question I had asked Vaernet: Was there anyone among our old comrades in Argentina whom he considered to be beyond the pale?

“Oh, yes.” Olmos spoke with alacrity, and I was beginning to realize that there was not much loyalty among the old comrades. “I can give you the name of just such a man. Probably the most dangerous man I’ve ever met, anywhere. His name is Otto Skorzeny.”

I tried not to look surprised. Naturally, I knew of Otto Skorzeny. Few Germans had not heard of the daring author of Mussolini’s mountaintop rescue in 1943. I even remembered seeing photographs of his heavily scarred face in all the magazines when Hitler had awarded him the Knight’s Cross. He certainly looked like a dangerous man. The trouble was, Skorzeny did not appear on the list of names that the colonel had given me. And until his name came up, I’d had no idea that he was still alive, let alone that he now lived in Argentina. A ruthless killer, yes. But a psychopath? I decided to ask Montalbán about him when next I saw him.

Meanwhile, Pedro Olmos had thought of someone else he considered a person undeserving of a good-conduct pass. The ratline, as the Americans called organizations like the ODESSA and the Old Comrades, which existed to help Nazis escape from Europe, was beginning to look well named. The man Olmos thought of was called Kurt Christmann.

Christmann was interesting to me, because he was from Munich and born in 1907, which made him twenty-five at the time of Anita Schwarz’s murder. He was forty-three years old, once a lawyer who now worked for the Fuldner Bank on Avenida Córdoba. Christmann lived in a comfortable apartment on Esmeralda and, within five minutes of meeting him, I had marked him down as a definite suspect. He had commanded a killing detail in Russia. For a while, I’d been in the Ukraine myself, of course. It gave us something to talk about. Something I could use to help gain his confidence and get him talking.

Fair-haired, with rimless glasses and a musician’s slender hands, Christmann wasn’t exactly the kind of blond beast you’d have seen striding across the screen in a Leni Riefenstahl movie. He was more the sort you’d have seen walking quietly through a law library with a couple of books under his arm. Until he’d joined the SS in 1942, he’d worked for the Gestapo in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Salzburg, and I marked him down as the kind of promotion-hungry, medal-seeking Nazi I’d often met before. Not so much blood and iron as bleach and Bakelite.

“So you were out in Ukraine, too,” he said, going all comradely on me. “Which part?”

“White Ruthenia. Minsk. Lvov. Lutsk. All over.”

“We were in the southern part of Russia, mainly,” he said. “Krasnodar and Stavropol. And in the northern Caucasus. The action group was headed by Otto Ohlendorf, and Beerkamp. My unit was commanded by an officer named Seetzen. Nice fellow. We had three gas vans at our disposal. Two big Saurers and a little Diamond. Mostly it was clearing out hospitals and asylums. The children’s homes were the worst. But don’t think these were normal healthy kids, mind. They weren’t. They were gimps, you know? Feebleminded, retarded kids. Bedridden, disabled. Better off out of it, if you asked me. Especially given the way the Popovs looked after them, which was to say hardly at all. The conditions in some of these places were appalling. In a way, gassing them like we did was a bloody kindness. Putting them out of their misery, we were. You’d have done the same for an injured horse. Anyway, that’s the way we looked at it.”

He paused, as if recalling some of the terrible scenes that he had witnessed. I almost pitied him. I wouldn’t have had his thoughts for anything.

“Mind you, it was still hard work. Not everyone could stick it. Some of the kids would catch on as to what was happening and we’d have to throw them in the vans. That could be pretty rough. We had to shoot a few who tried to escape. But once they were inside the van and the doors were shut, it was pretty quick, I think. They’d hammer on the sides of the truck for a few minutes and that would be it. Over. The more of them we managed to squeeze into the truck, the quicker it would be. I was in charge of that detail between August 1942 and July 1943, by which time we were in general retreat, of course.

“Then I went to Klagenfurt, where I was chief of the Gestapo. Then Koblenz, where I was also head of the Gestapo. After the war I was interned in Dachau, by the Amis, only I managed to escape. Hopeless, they were, the Amis. Couldn’t guard a fire. Then it was Rome, and the Vatican, before I ended up here. Right now, I’m working for Fuldner, but I’m planning to try the real estate business. There’s plenty of money to be made in this city. But I do miss Austria. Most of all I miss the skiing. I was the German police ski champion, you know.”

“Really?” Clearly, I had misjudged him completely. He might have been a murdering bastard but he was a sporting murdering bastard.

“You are right to look surprised, Herr Hausner.” He laughed. “I’ve been ill, you see. I was in Brazil before coming here to Argentina and managed to pick up a case of malaria. Really, I’ve still not recovered full health.” He went into the kitchen and opened the door of a new-looking Di Tella refrigerator. “Beer?”

“No, thanks.” I was particular about whom I drank with. “Not while I’m on duty.”

Kurt Christmann laughed. “I used to be like you,” he said, opening a beer bottle. “But now I try to be more like the Argentines. I even take a siesta in the afternoon. People like me and you, Hausner. We’re lucky to be alive.” He nodded. “A passport would be good. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to Germany. Germany’s finished, I think, now that the Popovs are there. There’s nothing there for me, except perhaps a hangman’s noose.”

“We did what we had to do,” I said. “What we were told to do.” I knew this speech well enough by now. I’d heard it often during the last five years. “We were just carrying out orders. If we’d refused to obey, we would have been shot ourselves.”

“That’s right,” agreed Christmann. “That’s right. We were only obeying orders.”

Now that I’d let him run a bit, I decided to try to reel the line in.

“Mind you,” I said. “There were some. A few. A few rotten apples who enjoyed the killing. Who went beyond the normal course of duty.”

Christmann pressed the beer bottle to his cheek and thought for a moment; then he shook his head. “You know something? I really don’t think that’s true. Not that I saw, anyway. Maybe it was different in your outfit. But the men I was with, in the Ukraine. All of them handled themselves with great courage and fortitude. That’s what I miss most. The comradeship. The brothers in arms. That’s what I miss most.”

I nodded, in seeming sympathy. “I miss Berlin, most of all,” I said. “Munich, too. But Berlin most of all.”

“You know something? I never went to Berlin.”

“What? Never?”

“No.” He chuckled and drank some more beer. “I don’t suppose I shall ever see it now, eh?”

I went away, full of satisfaction at having done an excellent day’s work. It’s the people you meet that make being a detective so rewarding. Once in a while you meet a real sweetie, like Kurt Christmann, who restores your faith in medieval justice and vigilantism and other, thoroughly sensible Latin American practices like strappado and the garrote. Sometimes it’s hard to walk away from people like that without shaking your head and wondering how it ever got to be that bad.

How did it ever get to be that bad?

I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering. And perhaps, after all those demented, sometimes cannibalistic killers we had during the Weimar years, we ought to have seen it coming: the murder squads and the death factories. Killers who were demented but also quite ordinary. Krantz, the schoolboy. Denke, the shopkeeper. Grossmann, the door-to-door salesman. Gormann, the bank clerk. Ordinary people who committed crimes of unparalleled savagery. As I was looking back at them now, they seemed like a sign of that which was to follow. The camp commanders and the Gestapo types. The desk murderers and the sadistic doctors. The ordinary fritzes who were capable of such dreadful atrocities. The quiet, respectable, Mozart-loving Germans among whom I was now cast away to live.

What did it take to murder thousands of children, week in week out? An ordinary person? Or someone who might have done it before?

Kurt Christmann had spent a whole year of his life gassing Russian and Ukrainian children. The feebleminded, the retarded, the bedridden, and the disabled. Children like Anita Schwarz. Perhaps, for him, there had been more to it than just obeying orders. Perhaps he had actually disliked disabled children. Maybe even enough to have murdered one in Berlin. I certainly hadn’t forgotten that he was from Munich. I’d always had a strong suspicion that the man I’d been looking for, in 1932, had come from Munich.

BERLIN, 1932

T
HERE WERE TWO MEN waiting by my car. They were wearing hats and double-breasted suits that were all buttoned up the way you do when you’ve got more than just a fountain pen in your breast pocket. I told myself they were a little far south to be Ricci Kamm’s. A little too smooth, too. Ring members tended to wear broken noses and cauliflower ears the way some men wear watch chains and carry canes. There was all that and the fact that they looked pleased to see me. When you’ve been in the zoo as long as I have, you kind of get to know when an animal is going to attack. It gets all nervous and agitated, because, for most people, it’s upsetting to kill someone. But these two were calm and self-assured.

“Are you Gunther?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you say next?”

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

“So why isn’t someone here?”

“Because he’s in the Eldorado. Buying you a drink.”

“Does this someone have a name?”

“Herr Diels. Rudolf Diels.”

“Maybe I’m the shy type. Maybe I don’t like the Eldorado. Besides, it’s a little early for a nightclub.”