A Quiet Flame (36 page)

“And now?”

“Now? I live a very quiet life. I am a humble doctor, as you can see.”

“Not so humble, I think. Tell me about the girl who was here half an hour ago. I suppose you just polished her toenails and combed her hair.”

“You are way out of your depth, Hausner.”

“That’s all right. I’m a good swimmer.”

“You’ll have to be. You know what they do with the people they don’t like, in Argentina? They take them for a plane ride. And push them out over the River Plate at ten thousand feet. Listen to me, man. Forget you ever saw that girl.”

I put the gun down and sprang forward, gathering his cashmere coat lapels in one hand and then slapping him hard on each side of his astonished, swarthy face—forehand and backhand, like a Ping-Pong champion.

“When I want to listen to you, I’ll slap you first,” I said. “Now, let’s have the rest of it. Every rotten detail of your filthy work in this city. You got that? I want it all, or I’ll show you the real meaning of an unworthy life.”

I pushed him back down on the chair and let go of his lapels. Mengele’s eyes were cold and narrow now, like small stones in a snowball. His face was pale, except where the palm and back of my hand had crimsoned his cheeks. He put his hand on his jaw and snarled an answer back at me like a cowed dog.

“Perón has a taste for young girls,” he said. “Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Virgins. And none who are using contraception, any more than he does. He likes the tightness of a young girl because his penis is so small. I’m telling you that because just knowing it in a country like this will get you killed, Hausner. He told me this when we first met. And since July of last year, when I came to Argentina, I’ve carried out as many as thirty abortions for him.”

“And Grete Wohlauf?”

“Who’s she?”

“A fifteen-year-old girl in the police morgue.”

“I don’t know their names,” he said. “But I can tell you this. None of these girls has died. I’m good at what I do now.”

I didn’t doubt it. Everyone has a skill in life. Destroying life was his.

“Fabienne von Bader? What about her?”

“As I said, I don’t know their names.”

For some reason, I believed him.

“You know, I’m not the only one,” he said. “The only German doctor doing this, I mean. Being an SS doctor is an attractive combination for the general. It means that, unlike the local Catholic doctors, who have scruples about carrying out abortions, we have to do what we’re told or risk being sent back to face Allied justice.”

“So that’s why he likes to meet doctors from Germany.”

“Yes. And that means I’m important to him. That I’m serving his needs. Can you say the same?” Mengele smiled. “No, I thought not. You’re just a stupid policeman with a taste for the sentimental. You won’t last long here. These people are just as ruthless as we Germans. Perhaps more so. You see, they’re easier to understand. It’s money and power that motivates them. Not ideology. Not hatred. Not history. Just money and power.”

I showed him the Smith in my fist. “Don’t be so sure I’m not as ruthless as they are. I’m liable to shoot you in the stomach and then sit back to watch you die. Just for the hell of it. You would probably call that an experiment. Maybe I will shoot you, at that. They’d probably give me the Nobel Prize for medicine. Right now, however, you’re going to find a pen and paper and then you’re going to write out everything you just told me. Including the part about the president’s taste in young girls and the useful cleaning-up service you provide for him afterward. And then you’re going to sign it.”

“With pleasure,” said Mengele. “I’ll be signing your death warrant. Before you die, I think I’m going to visit you in your cell. I’ll make sure to bring my medical bag. Perhaps I’ll remove one of your organs while you’re still alive.”

“Until then,” I said, “you’ll do what I tell you and smile while you’re doing it, or I’ll want to know why.”

I slapped him again, just for the pleasure of it. I could have slapped him all afternoon. He was that kind of guy. Some people just bring out the worst in me.

He wrote out the confession. I read it and put it in my pocket.

“Since you’re in a confessional mood,” I said, “I have one more question for you.” I brought the gun nearer his face. “And remember: I’m in the mood to use this. So you’d better answer carefully. What do you know about Directive Eleven?”

“All I know is that it was something to do with preventing displaced Jews from coming here.” He shrugged. “That’s it.”

I reached into my pocket and took out the little
chai
necklace Anna Yagubsky had given to me. I let it spin in the light for a moment. I could see that he recognized what it was.

“That was a neat trick, ripping their guts out like that so as to put us off the scent,” I said. “But you’re not the only one who can do that kind of thing. If I have to shoot you, I’ll leave this little
chai
near your body.
Chai
is a Hebrew word that means ‘life.’ The police will find it and assume that one of those Israeli murder squads caught up with you. They won’t look for me, Mengele. So I’m going to ask you just one more time. What do you know about Directive Eleven?”

Mengele had gripped the underside of his chair. Still holding it tightly, he leaned forward and yelled at me: “I don’t know anything else about it! I don’t know anything else! I don’t know anything else!” Then his head fell onto his chest and he started to weep. “I don’t know anything else,” he sobbed. “I’ve told you all I know.”

I stood up, slightly horrified at this outburst and the way I’d suddenly reduced him to the level of a schoolboy. It was odd. I felt only disgust with him. But what was odder still was the disgust I now felt with myself. At the darkness that dwelt within me. At the darkness that dwells within us all.

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I
GOT UP AT SIX, just like always, had a bath, and then ate some breakfast. The Lloyds served something called a “full English breakfast”: two fried eggs, two strips of bacon, a sausage, a tomato, some mushrooms, and toast. I certainly felt full by the time I’d finished. Every time I ate one, I came away with the same thought. It was hard to believe anyone could have fought a war on a breakfast like that.

I went outside to buy some cigarettes. I paid no attention to the car that overtook me until it stopped and two doors opened. It was a black Ford sedan with nothing to indicate that it was a police car, unless you counted the two men with dark glasses and matching mustaches, who sprang out and walked swiftly toward me. I’d seen them before. In Berlin. In Munich. And in Vienna. All over the world, they were always the same thickset men with thickset brains and thickset knuckles. And they had the same practical and dynamic manner, regarding me as if I were an embarrassing piece of furniture, to be moved as quickly as possible to the backseat of the black car. I’d been removed before. Many times. When I was a private detective in Berlin, it had been a kind of occupational hazard. The Gestapo never much liked private bulls, even though Himmler had once used a Munich firm to find out if his brother-in-law was cheating on his sister.

Instinctively, I turned to avoid them and came up against thickset number three. I was searched and inside the car before I drew my next nervous breath. Nobody said anything. Except me. It kept my mind off the road ahead and the speed at which we were now moving.

“You boys are good,” I said. “Look here, I don’t suppose it would do any good to mention that my SIDE credentials are in my breast pocket. No? I guess not.”

We headed south, toward San Telmo. I made a few more cracks in
castellano,
which got ignored, and after a while, I gave in to their thickset silence. The car turned west near the Ministry of War. At sixteen stories, with two separate wings, it was the thickest-set building in Buenos Aires and it dominated the surrounding area like the Great Pyramid of Cheops. From the look of it, things hardly augured well for neighboring countries like Chile and Uruguay. After a while, we came to a pleasant little park and, behind this, a castellated fortress that looked as if it had been there since Francisco Pizarro had come to South America. As we drove through the main wooden gate, I almost expected the car to be hit with boulders and boiling oil poured on us from the battlements. We parked, and I was hustled outside of the car and down some steps in the courtyard. At the end of a long, damp corridor, I was placed in a short damp cell, searched by a man who was almost as big as the thickset Ministry of War, and then left alone with a chair, a wooden bunk, and a chamber pot for company. The pot was half full or half empty, depending on the way you look at these things.

I sat on the floor, which looked more comfortable than the chair or the bunk, and waited. In some faraway, rat-infested tower, a man was laughing hysterically. Nearer to where I was being held, water was trickling noisily onto a floor, and not being particularly thirsty, I hardly minded the sound. But after several hours had elapsed, I started to feel differently about it.

It was dusk when the door finally opened again. Two men came into my cell. They had their sleeves rolled up as if they meant business. One was small and muscular, and the other was large and muscular. The smaller one held what looked like a walking stick made of metal, with a two-pin electric plug on the end. The larger one held me. I struggled against him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t see his face. It was somewhere above the cloud line. The smaller one had tiny blue eyes like semiprecious stones.

“Welcome to Caseros,” he said with mock politeness. “Outside there is a little monument to the victims of the 1871 yellow-fever outbreak. In the deepest dungeon of this fortress is a pit where the bodies were thrown. Every year there are more and more victims of the 1871 yellow-fever outbreak. Understand?”

“I think so.”

“You’ve been asking questions about Directive Eleven.”

“Have I?”

“I should like to know why that is. And what you think you know.”

“So far I know very little. Possibly it precedes Directive Twelve. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone one day discovered that it followed Directive Ten. How am I doing so far?”

“Not very well. You’re German, yes?”

I nodded.

“The country of Beethoven and Goethe. Printing and X-rays. Aspirin and the rocket engine.”

“Don’t forget the
Hindenburg,
” I said.

“You must feel very proud. In Argentina we have given the modern world only one invention.” He lifted his metal stick. “The electric cattle prod. It speaks for itself, does it not? The device emits a strong bolt of electricity, sufficient to move a cow wherever one wants it to go. On average, a cow weighs about two thousand pounds. Ten times as much as you, perhaps. But this is still a highly effective means of shocking the animal into submission. So you can imagine the effect it will have on a human being. At least I hope you can imagine it while I’m asking my next question.”

“I’ll certainly try my best,” I said.

He rolled up one sleeve to reveal an arm covered in a shocking amount of hair. Somewhere in Argentina there was a freak show missing its missing link. The frayed cuff of the sleeve went all the way up the arm to the crescent of sweat underneath his armpit before he stopped rolling. Probably he didn’t want to get anything on his shirt. At the very least, he looked like a man who took his work seriously.

“I should like to know the name of the person who told you about Directive Eleven.”

“It was someone at the Casa Rosada. One of my colleagues, I suppose. I don’t remember who, exactly. Look, one hears all kinds of talk in a place like that.”

The small hairy man tore open the body of my shirt to reveal the scar on my collarbone. He tapped it with his filthiest fingernail. “Aiee. You’ve had an operation. Forgive me, I didn’t know. What was the matter with you?”

“I had half of my thyroid removed.”

“Why?”

“It was cancerous.”

He nodded, almost sympathetic. “It’s healing nicely.” Then he touched the scar with the end of the cattle prod. Fortunately for me, it was not yet switched on. “Normally, we concentrate on the genitals. But in your case, I think we might make an exception.” He jerked his head at the big man holding me. A moment or two later, I was tied securely to the chair in my cell.

“The name of the person who told you about Directive Eleven, please,” he said.

I tried to put Anna Yagubsky’s name to the farthest corner of my mind. I wasn’t worried that I’d reveal that she was the person who’d told me about Directive Eleven, but I’d seen the way pain can jolt words out of a man. I hated to think what a pair like this would do to a woman like her. So I started telling myself that the person who’d told me about Directive Eleven was Marcello, the duty officer in the records department at the Casa Rosada. Just in case I had to say something. I shook my head. “Look. Honestly. I don’t remember. It was weeks ago. There were several of us talking in the records department. It could have been anyone.”

But he wasn’t listening. “Here,” he said. “Let me help jog your memory.” He touched my knee with the cattle prod, and this time it was switched on. Even through the material of my trousers, the pain shifted me and the chair several feet along the floor and left my leg jerking uncontrollably for several minutes.

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” he said. “And you’re going to think that was just a tickle when I put it on your bare flesh.”

“I’m laughing already.”

“Then the joke is on you, I’m afraid.” He came at me again with the cattle prod, aiming it squarely at the scar on my collarbone. For a split second, I had a vision of the remains of my thyroid sizzling inside my throat like a piece of fried liver. Then a voice I recognized said,

“That’s enough, I think.” It was Colonel Montalbán. “Untie him.”