A Quiet Flame (43 page)

I told Anna everything. That is, everything I had done during the war and its aftermath up to the time I’d set sail for Argentina. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to anyone about it honestly, leaving nothing out and not trying to justify what I myself had done. But at the end of it all, I told her who was really to blame for it all.

“I blame the Communists for calling a general strike in November 1932, which forced an election. I blame von Hindenburg for being too old to tell Hitler where to get off. I blame six million unemployed—a third of the workforce—for wanting a job at any price, even if it meant Hitler’s price. I blame the army for not putting an end to the street violence during the Weimar Republic and for backing Hitler in 1933. I blame the French. I blame von Schleicher. I blame the British. I blame Goebbels and I blame all those rich businessmen who bankrolled the Nazis. I blame von Papen and Rathenau and Ebert and Scheidemann and Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I blame the Spartakists and I blame the Freikorps. I blame the Great War for taking away the value of human life. I blame the inflation and the Bauhaus and Dada and Max Reinhardt. I blame Himmler and Goering and Hitler and the SS and Weimar and the whores and the pimps. But most of all I blame myself. I blame myself for doing nothing. Which was less than I ought to have done. Which was all that was required for Nazism to succeed. I share the guilt. I put my survival ahead of all other considerations. That is self-evident. If I was truly innocent, then I’d be dead, Anna. And I’m not.

“For the last five years, I’ve been letting myself off the hook. I had to come to Argentina and see myself in the eyes of these other ex-SS men to understand that. I was a part of it. I tried not to be and failed. I was there. I wore the uniform. I share the responsibility.”

Anna Yagubsky lifted her eyebrows and looked away. “My God,” she said. “You’ve had an interesting life.”

I smiled, thinking of Hedda Adlon and her Chinese curse.

“Oh, I’m not judging you,” said Anna. “I wouldn’t say you were guilty of much. Then again, you’re not entirely innocent, either, are you? But it seems to me as if you’ve already paid a kind of price for what you did. You were a prisoner of the Russians. That must have been awful. And now you’re helping me. It strikes me that you wouldn’t do that if you were like the rest of your old comrades. It’s not up to me to forgive you. That’s up to God. Always supposing you believe in God. But I’ll pray for Him to forgive you. And maybe you could try praying yourself.”

I could hardly have risked her disapproval again by telling her I didn’t believe in God any more than I had believed in Adolf Hitler. A Jew who was a Roman Catholic wasn’t someone who was likely to treat the matter of my atheism lightly. After what I’d just told her, I needed to win her favor back again. So I nodded and said, “Maybe I’ll do that.” And if there was a God, I figured He’d probably understand. After all, it’s easy to stop believing in God when you’ve stopped believing in anything else. When you’ve stopped believing in yourself.

TUCUMÁN, 1950

W
E REACHED TUCUMÁN the following evening. Or just about. The train was late and it was almost midnight by the time it rumbled into the local station. The place looked better at night. Government House was lit up like a Christmas tree. Under the palm trees on the Plaza Independencia, couples were dancing the tango. Argentines seemed to need little or no excuse to tango. For all I knew, the dancers in the main square were really waiting for a bus. The station itself was full of children. None of them were interested in the submarine-shaped locomotive that was cooling down after our day-long journey. They wanted money. Kids were just like everyone else, in that respect. I shared out a handful of coins and then found us a taxi. I told the driver to take us to the Plaza.

“Why do you want to go there?” he asked.

“Because the last time I saw it, the Plaza was a hotel.”

“You should go to the Coventry. I could get you a rate there.”

“You and your brother, right?” I said, remembering the last time I’d been in Tucumán.

The driver laughed and looked around. “That’s right. You’d like my brother.”

“I’m sure I would. And I guess I couldn’t like him less than I liked the Coventry. Actually, I think they liked me there less than I liked them. Because I was covered in bites when I left. I don’t mind sharing my bed with anyone as long as they’ve got just two legs. When the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry in England, I figure they must have been thinking of the hotel here in Tucumán.”

We drove to the Plaza.

Like most good hotels in Argentina, it was trying to look like it was somewhere else. Madrid, probably. Or maybe London. There was the usual amount of oak panel on the walls and marble on the floors. I laid an arm on the front desk like I meant business and looked across at the clerk. He wore a dark suit that matched his mustache. His face and hair were shiny with the same stuff they used on the machinery of the little elevator cage that stood at right angles to the desk. He bobbed his head at me and showed me some teeth that were heavily stained with tobacco.

“We’d like a large room,” I told him. It sounded better than asking for a large bed, but that was what we really wanted. “With a bath. And what passes for a view in this city.”

“And not noisy, either,” Anna added. “We don’t like noise except when we make it ourselves.”

“There’s our bridal suite,” he said, firing a hungry-looking glance at Anna.

I was feeling kind of hungry myself. The clerk offered to show it to us. Anna asked to see the rate instead. Then she offered to pay about half of what he was asking, in cash. This would never have worked in Germany. But in Tucumán it was normal. In Tucumán, they haggled with the priest when he gave them a penance. Ten minutes later, we were in the room.

The bridal suite was adequate. There was a pair of French windows that opened onto a balcony with a view of the high Sierra and a strong smell of orange blossom that made a pleasant change from horses. There was a big bathroom with a view of the rest of the suite and a strong smell of soap that made a pleasant change from drains. Most important of all, there was a bed. The bed was the size of Mato Grosso. Before long, it had a view of Anna’s naked body and a strong smell of her perfume, which made a pleasant change from my own bachelor smell. We made a night of it. Every time I woke, I reached for her. And every time she woke, she reached for me. We certainly didn’t sleep very much. The bed was too hard for sleep, which was just fine by me. I certainly had not expected to enjoy Tucumán half as much as I did.

When morning finally came, I took a cold bath, which helped me wake up. Then I ordered us some breakfast. We were still eating it when Pedro Geller called up and said he was waiting for me downstairs in the hotel lobby. I met him alone. The fewer people knew about Anna’s involvement the better, I told myself. Geller and I went outside, to the spot where he’d left the jeep.

“I found out where Skorzeny is staying,” he said. “At a big ranch in a place called Wiederhold. It’s owned by a wealthy sugar farmer called Luis Freiburg. And when I say wealthy, I mean wealthy. He made millions in compensation when a couple of thousand acres of his estate were purchased by the government as part of the hydroelectric project. That land is due to be flooded when the dam at La Quiroga is finished.” Geller laughed. “Now, here’s the really interesting thing. It turns out that Freiburg is none other than that SS general you told me about.”

“Hans Kammler?”

“That’s right. According to Ricardo, Kammler is an engineer who oversaw all the major SS construction projects during the war. Like the Mittelwerk facility and all the extermination camps, like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Made himself a fortune in the process. Yes, he was quite a man, this Kammler. Ricardo told me that Himmler regarded Kammler as one of his most capable and talented men.”

“Ricardo told you all this?”

“He can get quite talkative when he’s had a few,” said Geller. “Yesterday evening, we were coming out of Capri’s technical branch office in Cadillal when we saw a big white American car driven by Skorzeny. Ricardo recognized Kammler immediately.”

“What did Kammler look like?”

“Thin, bony, hooked nose. Aged about fifty. Eagle-like, you might say. Had his wife and daughter with him. From Germany, I think. That’s one of the reasons Ricardo hates him. Because he’s got his wife and daughter with him. Although I rather think Ricardo’s jealous of anyone who got out of Germany with lots of money in his trouser pockets. That or anyone who’s made a better fist of life in Argentina than he has. You included.”

“Did Ricardo say why Skorzeny might be staying with Kammler?”

“Yes.”

Momentarily, Geller looked troubled. I offered him a cigarette. He took one, let me light it for him, and remained silent.

“Come on, Herbert,” I said, using his real name for once, and lighting one for myself.

Geller sighed. “This is top-secret stuff, Bernie. I mean even Ricardo looked a bit shifty when he told me.”

“Ricardo always looks shifty,” I said.

“Well, naturally he worries that his past will catch up with him. We all do. Even you, probably. But this isn’t past. This is now. Have you ever heard of Project Poplar?”

“Poplar? Like the tree?”

Geller nodded. “Apparently, Perón wants to build an atomic bomb. The scuttlebutt around Capri is that Kammler is the director of Perón’s nuclear-weapons program. Just like he was in Germany, at Riesengebirge and Ebensee. And that Skorzeny is his head of security.”

“You’d need a lot of money for something like that.” Even as I said it, I remembered that Perón already seemed to have access to hundreds of millions of dollars of Nazi money, and if Evita had her way, possibly billions more dollars in Switzerland. “You also need a lot of scientists,” I added. “Have you seen lots of scientists?”

“I don’t know. I don’t imagine they drive around wearing white coats and carrying slide rules, do you?”

“Good point.”

There was a map on the seat of the jeep, and a toolbox in the back. “Show me where Kammler’s ranch is,” I told Geller.

“Wiederhold?” Geller took the map and moved a finger southwest of Tucumán. “It’s here. Just a few miles north of the Dulce River. A few miles to the south and a little to the east, and the frosts make sugarcane impossible. Cane would be impossible in Tucumán, too, if it wasn’t for the Sierra del Aconquija.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “You’re not thinking of going there, are you?”

“No. I’m going here.” I pointed to one of the lagoons on the Dulce River. “Just north of Andalgalá. To a place called Dulce.”

“Never heard of it,” said Geller. “There’s the Dulce River, but I’ve not heard of a town of that name.”

Geller’s map was more detailed than the one I’d bought in Buenos Aires. But he was right: there was nowhere called Dulce. Just a couple of anonymous lagoons. All the same, I didn’t think Melville would have dared to mislead me again. Not after the threats I had made against his miserable life.

“How accurate is this map?” I asked.

“Very. It’s based on an old muleteers’ map. Up until the beginning of the century, mules were the only way to get around this whole area. As many as sixty thousand mules a year used to get sold in Santa, north of here. Nobody knew these trails better than those old muleteers.”

“May I borrow this?”

“Sure,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve found your top bastard. This murderer you’ve been after.”

“Something like that. It’s best I don’t tell you any more, Herbert. Not right now.”

Geller shrugged. “Not knowing won’t make me itch.” He grinned. “While you’re borrowing my jeep, I’m off to see a rather attractive girl who works for the Institute of Anthropology, here in Tucumán. I’m planning to let her study me in considerable detail.”

 

 

 

I TRIED TO PERSUADE Anna to stay behind, at the hotel, but she wasn’t having it.

“I told you before, Gunther. I’m not the type who sits at home darning your socks. I didn’t get to be a lawyer without outsmarting a few dumb cops.”

“For a lawyer you don’t seem to have much in the way of caution.”

“I never said I was a good lawyer. But get this straight. I started this case and I intend to see it through.”

“You know something? For a lawyer, you’re a pretty nice girl. I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Do all Germans treat women like they’re made of porcelain? No wonder you lost the war. Come on. Let’s get in the car.”

Anna and I drove southwest out of the city. Soon we were on a narrow, pitted road that was bordered on both sides by the parted waves of a Red Sea of sugarcane. This was green on top, and an impenetrable wooden thicket below. There were miles of the stuff, almost as if imagination had failed the earth’s creator.

“Sugarcane. It’s just a lot of giant grass,” said Anna.

“Sure, but I’d hate to see the lawn mowers.”

From time to time I was obliged to slow down as we passed little walking thickets of cane that, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to be loads on the backs of mules, which elicited cries of pity from Anna. Every few miles we came across a shantytown of concrete-block houses with corrugated iron roofs. Half-naked children chewing lengths of sugarcane like dogs gnawing bones observed our arrival and departure from their
villas miseria
with wild, gesticulating enthusiasm. From the metropolitan comfort of Buenos Aires, Argentina had looked like an affluent country; but out here, on the plantations of the humid pampa, the eighth-largest country in the world seemed one of the poorest.

Several miles farther on, the sugarcane receded and we came to some fields of corn that led down to the River Dulce and a wooden bridge that wasn’t much more than a continuation of the dirt road. On the other side, I pulled over and took another look at the map. I had the Sierra rising in front of me, the river on my right, fields of maize on my left, and the road leading down a long incline immediately ahead of us.