by Joseph Kanon
“I need to leave this message for Mrs. Crane. Would you see that she gets it?”
“Mrs. Crane?”
“Yes. American? I thought she said she was staying here. Would you check?”
The deskman consulted a book. “Hanna Crane,” he said.
“Yes. I thought she said the Atlantic. Would the house phone put me through or do I need a room number?”
The deskman shook his head. “She’s no longer here.”
“She checked out? But we had an appointment—”
“Today. There was some family emergency, I believe.”
“Oh,” Aaron said, playing concerned. His only lead. He fingered the envelope. “Did she leave a forwarding address? I could send—”
“No, no forwarding address.”
“But if it’s family, she must be going home,” Aaron said, working it out. “What address did she give when she checked in?”
The deskman looked up. “I’m afraid we can’t—”
Aaron moved the envelope toward him. “You can write it then if you like. I just want to make sure she gets this. What will she think—me not showing up. Was her father with her?” Trying it.
“Her father.” He looked at Aaron, a desk clerk’s raised eyebrow, talking code. “I don’t know. I didn’t come on until this evening.” He glanced down. “No one else is registered for the room.”
“He probably went ahead. Would you send this, then? I’ll pay for the postage, of course.” While I read upside down as you write.
But again the desk clerk shook his head. “No mailing address. Just Buenos Aires.”
“Ah,” Aaron said, pulling back the envelope, giving in. “Well, then I missed her. Sorry to bother you.”
He turned away, oddly elated. Gone, but not without leaving a scent. All Max would have needed.
II BUENOS AIRES
5
IN THE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD of the southern hemisphere, November was early summer, the jacarandas still blooming and the worst of the humidity a month or two off. After the coats and mufflers of Hamburg it was startling to see people in short sleeves. The flight had taken forever and would have taken even longer in the forties, Aaron thought, the time and distance disorienting, reminders that you were somewhere else. Downtown, on Corrientes, the lumbering buses and movie marquees were familiar, any city, but the faces on the magazine covers were unknown to him, famous in some other world. What must it have been like for Schramm, any of them, knowing they were here for good, through the looking glass.
Jamie Campbell, the station chief, had booked him a room in a residential hotel on Calle Posadas.
“It’s on my hook, so nothing fancy,” Aaron had said on the phone.
“So I hear. You’re on leave. What is that anyway?”
“It means I pay. And nobody meets me at the airport.”
“OK. I’ll buy you a drink when you get in. Alvear Palace. Right around the corner from you. Put on a clean shirt. And maybe you’ll tell me what you’re doing down here. Or maybe not.”
Given the irregular layout of the room, the hotel must have been an apartment building, chopped up now, with an elevator added in the middle, but the street was pleasant, lined with trees, and what did it matter where he stayed? He had the rest of the afternoon to walk, to see the city, and he strolled through Recoleta, then over to the Plaza San Martín with its European palaces and leather shops. Calle Florida was busy with shoppers, but the rest of the neighborhood had the sleepy emptiness of a rich district in summer, people away at country houses or traveling.
At the turn of the century, during the great boom, Buenos Aires had wanted to be Paris, and here and there it was, belle epoque mansions and iron grillwork and a subway station that could have been on one of the grand boulevards. But it was Paris and not Paris, the same dislocating feeling he’d had looking at the magazine covers—everything familiar and unknown at the same time. He felt oddly invisible walking the streets. No one would run into him, no one knew who he was. Even the trees were alien—forming classic allées, lining the broad avenues, but flowering with bursts of tropical red or twisting with exotic roots. It was an ideal city for walking, mostly flat and sprawling out toward the even flatter pampas, a kind of Latin Chicago, stretched between prairies and the gray metallic water at its edge. Except here no one faced the water, the riverfront a working port of docks and railway sidings. Paris but not Paris.
“You should have started without me,” Jamie said, only a few minutes late. “This one’s on expenses. I’m supposed to find out what you’re doing here.”
“Wonderful how they look after you, isn’t it?”
“And you’re not going to tell me. So let’s enjoy the drink anyway. How do you like this?” he said, his hand taking in the red plush lobby.
“Quite a pile,” Aaron said, following the hand.
The Alvear Palace was another dream of Paris, an art deco front with a Ritz-like bar to match, and an enfilade corridor in grand hotel style, chandeliers and deep-pile carpets and large swags of curtain.
“Just don’t eat here. Unless you’ve got money we don’t know about. Martini?” He signaled the waiter, who nodded, evidently familiar with the order.
“Did you get the address?” Aaron said.
“For Mrs. Crane?” He pulled out an envelope and handed it to Aaron. “Why do you want it? Can I ask?”
“I promised a friend I’d contact her. Fritz Gruber, a reporter. For a series he’s doing. Sons of the Reich.”
“Sons?”
“And daughters. She’s Otto Schramm’s daughter.”
“Mm. You’re a little late to the party, aren’t you? That’s old news now—at least here. The papers had a field day with it for about five minutes. Not much since. Rough on her. Socially. Invitations start drying up when they know you’re a war criminal.”
“She wasn’t.”
“But he was. It turns out. So it rubs off. Anyway, the ropes started going up for her right after it came out. Who Helmut Braun really was. Too bad. Nice woman. Ah,” he said as the martinis arrived.
“You know her?”
“I’ve met her. It’s a small town in a big city, the ex-pats. You keep bumping into the same people in the same places. Here, for instance. Fucking Rick’s Café. Course, it’s easy for her, she’s just down the street, so this is her local. Maybe she’ll show up tonight. Then you won’t need that.” He nodded to the envelope. “We’re not supposed to do this, you know. Use the Agency for private business. Why the interest?”
“Me? None. The friend doing the book can’t travel—he’s in the hospital—so I said I’d help him out, that’s all.”
“While you just happened to be in Buenos Aires. Where everybody comes. On leave.”
“What’s wrong with Buenos Aires? It looked OK to me. I had a walk around.”
“Oh, BA’s fine. If you like steak. But it’s a long way to come for a steak.” He sipped his drink. “Sons of the Reich. You’ll be heading out to Bariloche then. The mountains. They’re still wearing lederhosen there. You squint and you’re in Bavaria. Your buddy Schramm had a place there.” Another nod toward the envelope. “But you knew that.” Fishing.
“Who’s Mr. Crane?”
“Tommy? His family was in business down here. His grandmother came from one of the cattle families. You know, Jockey Club people.” Aaron looked up, seeing the grainy photograph. “But the real money was back in the States. Scrap, believe it or not. They made a killing during the war. Not that Tommy ever touched a rusty pipe. Just a swizzle stick at the Stork. Anyway, he was here—a family visit—and I guess it all looked good to Hanna, so she married him. She was just a kid, maybe she thought they’d be living at El Morocco. She stuck it out for a few years. Then after she figured out she’d heard everything he was ever going to say—back here. With a hell of a settlement, they say. On the town a lot. And then Braun turns out to be somebody else and it gets awkward. Easier to do your drinking alone.”
“Does she?”
<
br /> “It’s an expression. I doubt it. She likes a drink, but not like that. She was upset, that’s all.”
“She didn’t know? He was Schramm?”
“They say not. Not the kind of thing you confide in a child. So some surprise. Course, she can still see the Germans. They think he’s a fucking hero. And Perón’s buddies. Old Dr. Freude at the Intelligence Bureau. He protected him. They’re all still here, more or less. If that’s who you want to see.” He took another drink. “What makes you think she’ll talk to you about this? Five bucks says she throws a drink in your face.”
“There she is,” Aaron said, glancing over Jamie’s shoulder.
She had stopped at the entrance, waiting for the maître d’, giving the room a quick once-over, then turning back to her group. Another woman and two men, talking quietly and laughing, out for the evening. She had loosened the tight bun of hair, which now fell to her shoulders, and the funeral suit had become a cocktail dress, smart, drawing looks from some of the other women. But the posture was the same—shoulders straight, eyes fixed in front of her as she glided past the tables.
“Want to meet her?” Campbell said.
Aaron shook his head. “Too many people. I’ll wait.”
“Better with an intro.”
“From you? Does she know who you are?”
Campbell shrugged. “They assume everybody at the embassy is Agency.” He paused. “But that’s not the same as knowing.”
“I don’t want to scare her.”
He watched her for a minute. Easy with the others, everybody ordering drinks, the room dimly lit and elegant. Her life here, the same one she must have led in New York, only the seasons different. For a second he thought she had looked over at him, but then she turned to the man next to her, smiling, back in the small circle of their table. The same cheekbones. “How could she not know,” he said, half to himself.
“What, about Braun? We didn’t. Of course, we weren’t looking for that.”
“What were you looking for?”
Campbell shifted in his seat. “The Germans weren’t happy when Perón had to leave in ’55. As long as he was around, they had nothing to worry about. They were all on the same side. Now, you never know. So some of them would like him back.”
“After all these years? Is that likely?”
“Here? A lot of people have fond memories. And every time something goes wrong, there he is, sitting in Madrid, looking better and better.”
“But not to Uncle Sam.”
“Right. Illia may not be much, but he’s still better than a fascist dictator with a bug up his ass about American influence. And a bad habit of nationalizing things. So every time his old friends in the army get together, we like to know about it. Same with the Germans. But the Germans are hard to turn. The reason they came here in the first place is we were trying to put them on trial back home. So not a lot of love lost there. And you know, over the years, you don’t see yourself going crazy. How about a Nazi encore with the Church begging you to save the world from Communism? Sound good to you? It does to them. Some of them anyway. So we like to keep tabs on what they’re up to.”
“Including Braun?”
“For a while. But there wasn’t much. The Germans all know each other. You see them at the ABC restaurant, having a beer, but that’s as far as it went with him. Maybe he was too smart. Maybe he thought his money would protect him. But we never got anything on him. No Fourth Reich stuff.”
“So she thought he was just a businessman?” Aaron said, looking over Campbell’s shoulder again, her blonde hair like candlelight in the dim room. “She had to know.”
Campbell shrugged. “Ask her. Let me guess the answer.”
Now she was leaning forward with her cigarette, a lighter appearing like magic, her movements slow and practiced, almost languorous. When she sat back, the smoke seemed to form a curtain between her and the others, a retreat none of them noticed. More talk, smiling, but not really following anymore, somewhere off by herself. Thinking what? Her face blank, veiled by the smoke. Maybe back in Hamburg, with memories of Doro. Maybe in New York with her boy husband. But not here. Smoking and smiling but not here. He looked for a second at the others. None of them knew her, had even seen her go. And suddenly, an impulse, like a jump of blood, he wanted to know, not just Otto and what she knew, but everything, what she thought behind the smoke.
“What else?” he said, still looking at her.
“It’s all in there,” Campbell said, indicating the envelope. “Field report.”
“You had her under surveillance?”
“Part of the report on her father, that’s all. We have a lot of time down here. What if he’s using his daughter? As a courier, something like that. So why not check, just to be sure. We have the time.”
“And?”
“Nothing. She shops. She goes out. She stays in. She likes the Alvear. She sees a shrink twice a week.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow.
“Wouldn’t you? Given the family. Anyway, that’s nothing special in BA. Everybody sees a shrink. There’s a whole neighborhood, all shrink offices. Villa Freud. Really. It’s what people do here. Maybe the air.”
“Who’s the boyfriend?” he said, eyes back at her table.
“No idea. Not the first, though. She’s not shy.”
“Any of them serious?”
“You want to interview her or fuck her?”
Aaron shot him a look.
“Just asking. Two different things. You don’t want to confuse them.” He took a sip of his drink. “Unless you’re doing one to get the other.”
Aaron looked at him again. “I’ll let you know how it goes. Since you’re interested. You like peepholes too?”
Campbell put up his hand. “Just saying.”
“Meanwhile, could you get a copy of the accident report?”
“Whose? Braun’s? Why?”
“I’d like to know how she reacted. When she identified the body. I don’t want to bring it up if—”
“She didn’t identify the body. Rudel did.”
“Who?”
“Hans-Ulrich Rudel. Luftwaffe ace. Everybody’s best friend. If you’re German. He put some money into Der Weg. Old pal of Braun’s. Great minds think alike, or something like that. And since he was there—”
“He was there? At the accident?”
Campbell nodded. “Yes. They were together, but he was lucky. Why?” Alert now, afraid of missing something.
“Isn’t it usual for the family—”
“Well, his daughter. There wasn’t any question about it. Nobody knew him better than Rudel. And it’s a hell of a thing, make her look at something like that. Then the family doctor backed him up. Markus Bildener. So they had two IDs. They didn’t need her, put her through that.”
Aaron sat back, glancing again over Jamie’s shoulder. Had she refused to do it, be part of the plan? Or had she only been told later, the fake death something she had to accept? Uneasy with it, still nervous at Ohlsdorf, now hiding behind smoke.
“What?” Jamie said.
“Nothing. The martini just hit me. Right off the plane.”
Jamie looked at him, his face cloudy with some interior debate.
“What are you doing here?” he said finally. “I’m really asking this time.” What he had come to say.
“You mean Langley’s asking,” Aaron said. “They’re worried about me? With all the problems of the world—”
“They don’t want you to be another one.”
“How?”
“Uncle chases Nazis. Dies. Next thing you know, the nephew shows up in Buenos Aires. Who comes to Buenos Aires? People looking for Nazis. So maybe some unfinished business. That could be a problem.”
“The only Nazi I’m looking for is dead.”
“Which is why I gave you that.” He motioned to the envelope. “But not everybody’s dead. You don’t want to step on any toes.”
Aaron stared at him for a minute. “Especially
if they’re our Nazis. Working for us.”
Jamie took another sip of the martini. “However unlikely that would be.”
“But it’s a wicked world and you play the cards you’re dealt. And so on.”
“And so on.”
“This is what you came to tell me?”
“Your uncle wanted to lock them all up. Maybe he was right—not very nice people. But sometimes a bad guy’s useful.”
Aaron picked up the envelope. “This one isn’t. He’s dead. Look, before you get yourself in a twist about this, I’m really just interested in their kids.”
“Which ones?”
“You want a list?”
“The office insists.”
“So somebody is working for us.”
Jamie shrugged. “It’s hard getting leverage. Sometimes promises are made.”
“Like not putting him on trial? A big fish, then.” Testing.
“We’re not in the trial business.” The sound of a door closing, Aaron standing outside.
He drained his glass. “So I don’t talk to anybody without clearing it with you first, that right?”
Jamie nodded.
“But I’m cleared to talk to Mrs. Crane.”
“If she wants to talk to you.”
“How about the Eichmann kids? He wasn’t on the payroll, was he?”
Jamie glanced up. “It’s not a joke. We need to know what you’re up to. You don’t want to wander off the ranch.”
“Wander off the ranch. Christ, Jamie, you’re beginning to sound like them.”
He looked over his glass. “I am them. So are you.”
“I’m on leave. I’m not working for anyone right now.”
“You’re never on leave. Not in this job. You know that.”
“So this is an order.”
