A Quiet Flame (40 page)

“My mother got me out of Poland just before the war. I was twenty-five years old. She gave me some jewels and I managed to bribe my way into Argentina. My two sisters were too young to come with me. At the time, one was ten and the other was eight. The plan was that I’d send for them when I could. I wrote to tell my mother I was well, and received a letter back from a neighbor, saying that my mother and sisters were now in France, and in hiding. Then, in 1945, I received word that my two sisters were false weight aboard a cargo ship from Bilbao.”

“False weight?”

“It’s what we used to call an illegal immigrant on a ship. When the ship docked here in Buenos Aires, however, there was no sign of either of them. My then husband made some inquiries. He was a former policeman. He found out that they had both been sold by the captain to a
casita.
As
franchuchas.
”

I shook my head.

“A
franchucha
is what the
porteños
call a French prostitute. A
gallina
is what they call one from Russia. Wherever they come from, they usually always had one thing in common: they were Jewish. At one time, half the prostitutes in this city were Jewish. Not by choice. Most of them were sold into it. Like slaves. Then my husband ran away with what was left of my money and most of Anna’s. By the time he came back, he’d spent it all and I needed to make a living. So I am as you see me now. I do a little acting, some dancing. Sometimes a little bit more, when the man is nice. My new life had one major advantage, however. It allowed me to search for my sisters. And about two years ago, I discovered they’d been arrested the previous year, in a police raid on a
casita.
They were taken to San Miguel prison. But instead of appearing before the magistrates, they disappeared from prison altogether. Since then, I’ve heard nothing from them. Nobody has. It’s like they never existed.

“It was my ex-husband, Pablo, who introduced me to the colonel. And I really only took the job with Señor von Bader in the hope that I might find an opportunity to ask the colonel about my two sisters.”

“And did you?”

“No. For the simple reason that he and von Bader made some remarks about Jews. Anti-Semitic remarks. You remember?”

“I remember.”

“As a result, I didn’t think it likely he was going to be very sympathetic to my situation. Then I noticed how you didn’t seem comfortable with those remarks, either. And what kind eyes you seemed to have. And I decided to abandon my plan to speak to the colonel, and speak to you instead. Or at least to persuade Anna to speak to you about our situation. The rest you know. She’s broke, of course. But very beautiful. I hardly expected you would help us for nothing. I can assure you, nobody does anything for nothing in this country.”

“Don’t count on it happening a lot that way. I pay just as easily as the next man. Sometimes the halo slips and I get an appetite for all the usual vices and some of the unusual ones, too.”

“I’ll try to bear that in mind,” she said. “It’ll give me something to think about the next time I can’t get to sleep.”

“How old were your sisters when they got here?”

“Fourteen and sixteen.”

“Is there much of a white-slavery racket here in Buenos Aires?”

“Listen, there’s a racket in that sort of thing almost anywhere you go. Girls arrive somewhere that’s a long way from home. They’ve no money, no papers, and there’s no way back. They find they have to work to pay off the hidden costs of their passage. I’m just lucky the same thing didn’t happen to me. Whatever I do, I do by choice. More or less.”

“Who does the buying and the selling?”

“You mean of the baggage? The girls?”

I nodded.

“First of all, this doesn’t happen so much anymore. The supply of new girls has dwindled. The sellers were usually the same men who organized passage for these girls. Ship’s captains, first mates, all from places like Marseilles, Bilbao, Vigo, Oporto, Tenerife, and even Dakar. Younger girls like my sisters were ‘underweight.’ Older girls were ‘overweight.’ If they were really young, the girls were called ‘fragile’—too young ever to see daylight during the voyage. The trade was controlled by a Pole in Montevideo, called Mihanovich. Montevideo was where all the ships docked before coming on to Buenos Aires. Some stayed in Uruguay. But usually the girls were sent here, where more money was to be made from their sale. Mihanovich would make a deal with the men from the Center. That’s what we call organized crime in this city. It’s called the Center because it’s based in the area between Corrientes, Belgrano, the docks, and San Nicolás. A lot of it is run by two French families, one from Marseilles and the other from Paris. So the men from the Center would buy the girls from Mihanovich, scare the hell out of them when they got here, and put them to work in the
casitas
of Buenos Aires. You’re a sailor with a few days’ leave and a cockstand? This is the place to go. There are more
casitas
in this part of Buenos Aires than in the rest of Argentina. Even the cops go carefully around here. So you can imagine how I felt knowing my two teenage sisters were put to work there.” She shook her head bitterly. “This city is like something from the Last Judgment.”

I lit another cigarette and let the smoke curl into my eyes. I wanted to punish them for looking into her cleavage when what I needed most was for them to do their job and keep looking her in the eye so that I might get a better fix on whether she was telling the truth. But I guess that’s how things like cleavages evolved in the first place. I shifted on my chair and looked at the room. Isabel Pekerman made Buenos Aires sound a lot like Berlin during the last days of the Weimar Republic. But to my cynical old eyes, nothing of what I’d seen here compared with the old German capital. The girls who were dancing were still wearing their clothes, and the men who were their partners were at least men, most of them, and not something in between. The band could carry a tune and there was no pretense to sophistication. I didn’t doubt what Isabel Pekerman had said. But whereas Berlin had flaunted its vice and corruption, Buenos Aires hid its appetite for depravity like an old priest sipping from a brandy bottle concealed in the pocket of a cassock.

She took my hand, opened my palm, and looked closely at it. Running her forefinger over the various lines and mounds, she said, “According to your hand, we’re going to spend the night together, after all.”

“Like I said, it’s been a hell of a day.”

“It might look bad for me if you don’t,” she said, contradicting much of what had been said earlier on. “After all, you already paid for it. Blue Vincent will think I’m losing my touch.”

“No, he won’t. Not if he’s got eyes in his head.”

Putting her arms around me, she said, “No? Come on. It might be fun. It’s been ages since I slept with a man I really liked.”

“Small world,” I said, and stood up to leave her.

As things turned out, I should have stayed.

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

T
HE NEXT MORNING I thought some more about what Isabel Pekerman had told me about Argentina’s white-slave traffic. I wondered if it might be connected with what Perón and Mengele were up to with young girls. None of it made much sense. I decided my brain needed a completely different kind of problem to work on. I had most of the morning before I had to go meet von Bader and the colonel, so after breakfast I went to the Richmond in search of a game of chess.

Melville was there, and I played a Caro-Kann defense to a victory in just thirty-three moves that Bronstein would have been proud of. Afterward, I let him buy me a drink and we sat outside for a while and watched the world go by. Usually I paid no attention to the little Scotsman’s chatter. On this occasion, however, I found myself listening to him more closely.

“That was quite a peach you brought in here the other week,” he observed, full of envy.

“She is, isn’t she?” I said, assuming he was talking about Anna.

“Much too tall for me, of course,” he said, laughing.

Melville couldn’t have been more than five-feet-three. Red-haired, bearded, with a wicked gap-toothed grin, he looked like something kept to amuse the Spanish royal family.

“Me, I need them much shorter,” he added. “And that generally means younger, too.”

I felt my ears prick up at this admission. “How much younger?”

“The age isn’t important,” he said. “Not for a short-arse like me. I have to take what I can get.”

“Yes, but there’s young and there’s too young, surely?”

“Is there?” He laughed. “I dunno.”

“Well, just how young is too young? You must have some idea.”

He thought for a moment and then shrugged silently.

“So what’s the youngest you’ve ever had?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m interested, that’s all. I mean, with some of these girls you meet these days, well, sometimes, it’s a little hard to tell how old they are.” I was hoping to draw him out on a subject Melville was already beginning to look evasive about. “The makeup they wear. The clothes. Some of them have experience way beyond their years. Back in Germany, for instance, I had a few close shaves, I can tell you. Of course I was a lot younger then myself. And Germany was Germany. Girls were naked in the clubs and naked in the parks. Before the Nazis, sun worship—naturism, they called it—it was all the rage. Like I say, that was Germany. Sex was our national pastime. Under the Weimar Republic, we were famous for it. But this. This is a Roman Catholic country. I’d have thought that things were a bit different here.”

“Then you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you?” Melville uttered his manic gargoyle’s laugh. “To tell the truth, this country’s a paradise for perverts like me. It’s one of the reasons I live here. All the unripe fruit. You only have to reach up and pick it off the tree.”

Again I felt my ears prick up. The Castilian phrase Melville used to describe young girls was
fruta inmadura
—the very same phrase the colonel had used to describe Perón’s similar predilection.

“I don’t know about Germany,” said Melville. “I’ve not actually been there. But it would have to be pretty bloody good to beat the Argentine for
lecheras.
”

“Milkmaids.”

I nodded. “Is it true, what I’ve heard? That the general likes them pretty young himself?”

Melville pursed his lips and looked evasive again.

“Maybe that’s why you can get away with it,” I said.

“You make it sound like a crime, Hausner.”

“Isn’t it? I don’t know.”

“These girls know what they’re doing, believe me.” He rolled an emaciated little cigarette and held the match up to his mouth. The roll-up crackled into flames like a tiny forest fire. With one chuckling puff he managed to consume almost a third of it.

“So where would I go?” I asked, affecting nonchalant curiosity. “If I was thinking of picking it off the tree, like you describe.”

“One of the
pesar poco
joints down at the portside in La Boca,” he said. “Of course you would have to be introduced by a member.” He lifted his whole mug in the air in a big self-satisfied grin. “Like me.”

Restraining my first impulse—to introduce his jaw to a short uppercut—I smiled and said, “That’s a date, then.”

“Mind you,” he said, “the
fruta inmadura
scene is not what it used to be. Immediately after the war, the country was flooded with underweight baggage. That’s what we used to call the really fragile fruit that was coming from Europe. Little Jewish virgins escaping to a better life, they imagined. All of them looking for the
caballero blanco.
A few found one. Some grew up and went on the game. The rest? Who knows?”

“Who knows, indeed? The way I hear it, some of those illegal Jews got themselves picked up by the secret police. And disappeared.”

Melville pulled a face and shook his head. “Everyone disappears at one time or another in Argentina. It’s a national bloody pastime. The
porteños
get depressed about all kinds of shit. And then they take off for a while. Sooner or later most of them turn up again, without a word of explanation. Like nothing happened. As for the Jews, well, it’s my own experience they’re an especially melancholy lot. Which, if you don’t mind me saying so, is largely the fault of your own countrymen, Hausner.”

I nodded, conceding the point, which was well made.

“Now, take Perón,” he said, warming to his theme. “He was vice president and secretary of war in the government of General Edelmiro Farrell. Then he disappeared. His colleagues had arrested him and put him in jail on Martín García Island. Then Evita organizes some mass demonstrations of popular support, and a week later he’s back. Six months after that, he’s the president. He disappears. He comes back. It’s a very Argentine story.”

“Not everyone has an Evita,” I said. “And not everyone who disappears comes back, surely. You can’t deny that the jails are full of Perón’s political opponents.”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Besides, most of those people are Communists. Do you want to see this country handed over to the Communists like Poland and Hungary and East Germany? Like Bolivia?”

“No, not at all.”

“Well, then. You ask me, they’re doing the best they can. This is a fine country. Perhaps the finest country in the whole of South America. With excellent prospects for economic growth. And I’d much rather live in Argentina than in Britain. Even without the unripe fruit.”

Melville flicked the pungent roll-up into the street. It was something I’d dearly like to have done to him.

“What are you doing here anyway, Melville?” I asked, trying to conceal the exasperation I felt with him. “I mean, what is it that you do? Your work. Your job.”

“I told you before,” he said. “Obviously you weren’t listening.” He laughed. “But there’s no great mystery about what I do for a living. Unlike
some
I could mention.” He shot me a look as if to say he meant me. “I work for Glasgow Wire. We supply a range of stock fencing and wire products to cattle ranchers all over the Argentine.”