A Quiet Flame (34 page)

“Sure, Otto, sure.”

He held out his bloody hand for me to shake. I took it and felt the strength in his forearm and, closer to him now, saw the dirty ice in his blue eyes and breathed the rank odor of his decaying breath. There was a little gold star in his lapel. I didn’t know what it was, but I wondered whether he would grind to a halt if I removed it, like the murderous creature in Gustav Meyrink’s
The Golem.

If only life were that simple.

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I
T WAS A SHORT CONVALESCENCE. But not so short that I wasn’t able to lie in bed and do nothing but think. And after a while, I managed to put some of the bits together in my mind. Unfortunately, it was the kind of puzzle where the jigsaw was still moving, and if I wasn’t very careful, the narrow vertical blade might slice off my fingers while I was trying to arrange the interlocking pieces. Or worse than that. Living long enough to see the whole picture might prove to be difficult. Yet I could hardly just put it all down and walk away. I don’t care for a word like “retirement,” but that was what I wanted. I was tired of solving puzzles. Argentina was a beautiful country. I wanted to sit on the beach at Mar del Plata, to see the regattas at Tigre, or visit the lakes at Nahuel Hupi. Unfortunately, nobody wanted me to do what I wanted. What they wanted was for me to do what they wanted. And much as I wished things to be different, I couldn’t see a way around any of this. I did, however, decide to attend to things according to my own idea of precedence.

Contrary to what I’d told Colonel Montalbán, I did hate loose ends. It had always bothered me that I’d never arrested Anita Schwarz’s killer. Not just for the sake of my professional pride but for the sake of Paul Herzefelde’s professional pride, too. So the first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was drive to the house of Helmut Gregor. By now I had a pretty shrewd idea of who and what he was, but I wanted to make sure before I threw it back in the colonel’s face.

Helmut Gregor lived in the nicest part of Florida. The house, at Calle Arenales 2460, was a handsome, spacious, colonial-type white stucco mansion owned by a wealthy Argentine businessman called Gerard Malbranc. There was a pillared veranda out front and, chained to the balustrade, a medium-sized dog that was doing its best to ignore the tantalizing proximity of a long-haired cat that seemed to have the run of the place.

I staked out the house. I had a flask of coffee, some cognac, one or two newspapers, and several books in German from the Dürer Haus bookshop. I had even borrowed a small telescope. It was a nice, quiet street and, despite my best intentions, I left the books and the papers alone and slept, with one eye half open. One time I sat up and saw a rather handsome couple ride by on even more handsome horses. They wore normal clothes and used English saddles. Florida wasn’t the kind of neighborhood to see anything more picturesque. On Calle Arenales a gaucho would have looked about as inconspicuous as a football on a cathedral altar. Another time I looked up to see a van from Gath & Chaves delivering a bed to a woman wearing a pink silk dressing gown. From the way she was dressed, I had the idea she was probably planning to sleep on it the minute the two apes lifting it into her home were back in their van. I wouldn’t have minded joining her.

In the late afternoon, after I’d been there several hours, a police car showed up. A policeman and a girl of about fourteen got out of the car. The policeman looked old enough to be her grandfather. He might have been her
caballero blanco,
which was what
porteños
called a sugar daddy, but uniformed cops don’t usually make enough to spend it on anyone other than their fat wives and their ugly children. Of course, he might actually have been a father taking his stunningly attractive young daughter to an appointment with the family doctor. But for the fact that most fathers don’t usually put their daughters in handcuffs. Not unless they’ve been very bad indeed. The dog started to bark as they mounted the steps to the front door. The cop patted the dog’s head. It stopped barking.

Through the telescope I watched the polished black front door. It was opened by a man wearing a light-colored tweed suit. His hair was dark and he had a short, Errol Flynn-style mustache. He and the policeman seemed to know each other. The man from the house smiled to reveal a noticeable gap between the two front teeth on his upper jaw. Then he placed an avuncular hand on the girl’s shoulder and spoke kindly to her. The girl, who had seemed nervous until now, was reassured. The man pointed at the handcuffs, and the cop took them off. The girl rubbed her wrists and then put her thumbnail between her teeth. She had long brown hair and skin the color of honey. She was wearing a red corduroy dress and red-and-black stockings. Her knees touched when she talked, and when she smiled it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. The man from the house ushered the girl inside, looked at the cop, and pointed after her, as if inviting him in, too. The cop shook his head. The man went inside, the door closed, and the cop went to sit in the car, where he smoked a cigarette, tipped his cap forward, folded his arms, and went to sleep.

I glanced at my wristwatch. It was two o’clock.

Ninety minutes passed before the door opened again. The man from the house followed the girl onto the veranda. He picked up the cat and showed it off to her. The girl stroked the cat’s head and put some candy in her mouth. The man put the cat down and they went down the steps. The girl was moving more slowly than before, coming down the steps as if each one were several feet high. I looked through the telescope again. Her head hung heavy on her shoulders but not as heavy as her eyelids. She looked like she’d been drugged. Several paces ahead of her, the man tapped the window of the police car and the cop sat bolt upright, as if something sharp had come through the bottom of his seat. The man opened the rear passenger door of the car and turned to see where the girl was and saw that she had stopped walking altogether, although she was hardly standing still. She resembled a tree that was about to topple. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed, and she was breathing deeply through her nose in an effort not to faint. The man went back to her and put his arm around her waist. The next thing, she bent forward and vomited into the gutter. The man looked around for the cop and said something sharply. The cop came over, collected the girl up in his arms, and laid her on the backseat of the car. He closed the door, took off his cap, wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and said something to the man, who bent forward, waved at the prostrate girl through the car window, and then stood back and waited. He looked around. He looked in my direction. I was about thirty yards up the street. I didn’t think he could see me. He didn’t. The police car started, the man waved again as it drove off, and then he turned and went back up to the house.

I folded away the telescope and returned it to the glove box. I swallowed a mouthful of cognac from the flask in my pocket and got out of the car. I collected a file and notepad off the passenger seat, shifted my shoulder holster a few inches, rubbed the still-tender scar on my collarbone, and walked up the steps. The dog started barking again. Sitting on the white balustrade, the cat, which was the size and shape of a feather duster, viewed me with vertical-eyed scrutiny. It was a minor demon, the familiar to its diabolic owner.

I hauled on the doorbell, heard a chime that sounded like something from a clock tower, and gazed back across the street. The woman in the pink dressing gown was getting dressed now. I was still watching when the door opened behind me.

“You certainly couldn’t miss the postman,” I said, speaking German. “Not with a bell like that. It lasts as long as a heavenly choir.” I showed him my ID. “I wonder if I might come in and ask you a few questions.”

A strong smell of ether hung in the air, underscoring the obvious inconvenience of my visit. But Helmut Gregor was a German, and a German knew better than to argue with credentials like mine. The Gestapo no longer existed, but the idea and influence of the Gestapo lived on in the minds of all Germans old enough to know the difference between wedding rings and a set of brass knuckles. Especially in Argentina.

“You’d better come in,” he said, standing politely to one side. “Herr . . . ?”

“Hausner,” I said. “Carlos Hausner.”

“A German working for Central State Intelligence. That’s rather unusual, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There was a time when we were quite good at this sort of thing.”

He smiled thinly and closed the door.

We were standing in a high-ceilinged hallway with a marble floor. I had a brief glimpse of what looked like a surgery at the far end of that hallway, before Gregor closed the frosted door in front of it.

He paused, as if half inclined to force me to ask my questions in the hallway, then he seemed to change his mind and led the way into an elegant sitting room. Beneath an ornate gilt mirror was an elegant stone fireplace and, in front of this, a hardwood Chinese tea table and a couple of handsome leather armchairs. He waved me to one of them.

I sat down and glanced around. On a sideboard was a collection of silver
mate
gourds and, on the table in front of us, a copy of the
Free Press,
which was the Nazi-leaning German-language daily. On another table was a photograph of a man wearing plus-fours, riding a bicycle. Another photograph showed a man wearing white tie and tails on his wedding day. In neither of these two photographs did the man have a mustache, and this made it easier for me to remember him as the man I’d met on the steps of Dr. Kassner’s Berlin house back in the summer of 1932. The man he’d called Beppo. The man who was now calling himself Helmut Gregor. Apart from the mustache, he didn’t look so very different. He was not quite forty, and his hair was still thick and dark brown, and without a hint of gray. He wasn’t smiling, but his mouth remained slightly open, his lip curled, like a dog getting ready to growl or to bite. His eyes were different from how I remembered them. They were like the cat’s eyes: wary and watchful and full of nine lives’ worth of dark secrets.

“I’m sorry for disturbing your lunch.” I pointed at a glass of milk and a sandwich that lay uneaten on a silver tray on the floor, next to the leg of his chair. At the same time I wondered if the milk and the sandwich might have been meant for his young female visitor.

“That’s all right. What can I do for you?”

I rattled off the usual spiel about the Argentine passport and the good-conduct pass and how everything was nothing more than a formality because I was ex-SS myself and knew the score. Hearing this, he asked me about my war service, and after I’d supplied the edited version that left out my time with the German War Crimes Bureau, he seemed to relax a little, like a fishing line slackening after several minutes in the water.

“I was also in Russia,” he said. “With the medical corps of the Viking Division. And in particular, at the Battle of Rostow.”

“I heard it was tough there,” I offered.

“It was tough everywhere.”

I opened the file I had brought with me. Helmut Gregor’s file. “If I could just check a few basic details.”

“Certainly.”

“You were born on—?”

“March 16, 1911.”

“In?”

“Günzburg.”

I shook my head. “It’s somewhere on the Danube. That’s as much as I know about it. I’m from Berlin, myself. No. Wait a minute. There was someone I knew who was from Günzburg. A fellow named Pieck. Walter Pieck. He was in the SS, too. At Dachau concentration camp, I think it was. Perhaps you knew him.”

“Yes. His father was the local police chief. We knew each other slightly, before the war. But I was never at Dachau. I was never at any concentration camp. As I said, I was in the Viking Division of the Waffen-SS.”

“And what did your own father do? In Günzburg?”

“He sold—still sells—farm machinery. Threshing machines, that kind of thing. All very ordinary. But I believe he’s still the town’s largest employer.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, pen poised. “I’ve missed a question. Name of father and mother, please.”

“Is this really necessary?”

“It’s normal on most passport applications.”

He nodded. “Karl and Walburga Mengele.”

“Walburga. That’s an unusual name.”

“Yes. Isn’t it? Walburga was an English saint who lived and died in Germany. I assume you’ve heard of Walpurgis Night? On the first of May? That’s when her relics were transferred to some church or other.”

“I thought that was some kind of Witches’ Sabbath.”

“I believe it’s also that,” he said.

“And you are Josef. Any brothers or sisters?”

“Two brothers. Alois and Karl Junior.”

“I won’t keep you much longer, Dr. Mengele.” I smiled.

“I prefer Dr. Gregor.”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Now then. Where was it that you qualified?”

“Why is this relevant?”

“You’re still practicing as a doctor, aren’t you? I should say it was highly relevant.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not used to answering so many questions, truthfully. I’ve spent the last five years being someone else. I’m sure you know what that’s like.”

“I certainly do. Now perhaps you understand why it is that the Argentine government asked me to carry out this task. Because I’m a German and an SS man, just like you. In order that you and our other old comrades could be put at ease about the whole process. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Yes. It makes quite a lot of sense, when you think about it.”

I shrugged. “On the other hand, if you don’t want to have an Argentine passport, we can stop this right now.” I shook my head. “I mean, it certainly won’t make me itch, as the saying goes.”

“Please, do carry on.”

I frowned, as if thinking of something else.

“I insist,” he added.