A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  “I’m the beefsteak kind. Brown on the outside only. Inside I’m really quite red.”

  Eichmann stared out the window as if he couldn’t bear to look at me for a minute longer.

  “I could use a good steak,” murmured Kuhlmann.

  “Then you’ve come to the right place,” said Fuldner. “In Germany a steak is a steak, but here it’s a patriotic duty.”

  We were still driving through the dockyards. Most of the names on the bonded warehouses and oil tanks were British or American: Oakley & Watling, Glasgow Wire, Wainwright Brothers, Ingham Clark, English Electric, Crompton Parkinson, and Western Telegraph. In front of a big, open warehouse a dozen rolls of newsprint the size of hayricks were turning to pulp in the early-morning rain. Laughing, Fuldner pointed them out.

  “There,” he said, almost triumphantly. “That’s Perónism in action. Perón doesn’t close down opposition newspapers or arrest their editors. He doesn’t even stop them from having newsprint. He just makes sure that by the time it reaches them the newsprint isn’t fit to use. You see, Perón has all the major labor unions in his pocket. That’s your Argentine brand of fascism, right there.”

  2

  BUENOS AIRES, 1950

  BUENOS AIRES LOOKED and smelled like any European capital city before the war. As we drove through the busy streets, I wound down the window and took a deep, euphoric breath of exhaust fumes, cigar smoke, coffee, expensive cologne, cooked meat, fresh fruit, flowers, and money. It was like returning to earth after a journey into space. Germany, with its rationing and war damage and guilt and Allied tribunals, seemed a million miles away. In Buenos Aires there was lots of traffic because there was lots of petrol. The carefree people were well dressed and well fed, because the shops were full of clothes and food. Far from being a remote backwater, Buenos Aires was almost a Belle Époque throwback. Almost.

  The safe house was at Calle Monasterio 1429 in the Florida district. Fuldner said Florida was the smartest part of Buenos Aires, but you wouldn’t have known it from the inside of the safe house. The outside was shielded by a carapace of overgrown pine trees, and it was called a safe house probably because, from the street, you wouldn’t have known it was there at all. Inside, you knew it was there but wished it weren’t. The kitchen was rustic. The ceiling fans were just rusty. The wallpaper in all the rooms was yellow, although not by design, and the furniture looked as if it was trying to return to nature. Poisonous, half decayed, vaguely fungal, it was the kind of house that belonged in a bottle of formaldehyde.

  I was shown to a bedroom with a broken shutter, a threadbare rug, and a brass bed with a mattress as thin as a slice of rye bread and about as comfortable. Through the grimy, cobwebbed window I looked out onto a little garden overgrown with jasmine, ferns, and vines. There was a small fountain that hadn’t worked in a while: a cat had littered several kittens in it, right underneath a copper waterspout that was as green as the cat’s eyes. But it wasn’t all bad news. At least I had my own bathroom. The bathtub was full of old books, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a bath in it. I like to read when I’m in the bath.

  Another German was already staying there. His face was red and puffy and there were bags under his eyes like a naval cook’s hammock. His hair was the color of straw and about as tidy, and his body was thin and scarred with what looked like bullet holes. These were easy to see, because he wore his malodorous remnant of a dressing gown off one shoulder, like a toga. On his legs were varicose veins as big as fossilized lizards. He seemed a stoic sort, who probably slept in a barrel, but for the pint of liquor in his dressing-gown pocket and the monocle in his eye, which added a jaunty, polished touch. It looked like a sprig of parsley on a cowpat.

  Fuldner introduced him as Fernando Eifler but I didn’t suppose that was his real name. The three of us smiled politely but we were all possessed of the same thought: that if we stayed in the safe house long enough, we would end up like Fernando Eifler.

  “I say, do any of you chaps have a cigarette?” asked Eifler. “I seem to have run out.”

  Kuhlmann handed one over and helped him get it alight. Meanwhile Fuldner apologized for the poor quarters, saying it was only for a few days and explained that the only reason Eifler was still there was that he had turned down every job offered to him by the DAIE, the organization that had brought us to Argentina. He said this quite matter-of-factly, but our new housemate bristled noticeably.

  “I didn’t come halfway around the world to work,” Eifler said sourly. “What do you take me for? I’m a German officer and a gentleman, not a bloody bank clerk. Really, Fuldner. It’s too much to expect. There was no talk of working for a living when we were back in Genoa. I’d never have come if I’d known you people expected me to earn my bread and butter. I mean it’s bad enough that one has to leave one’s family home in Germany without obliging one to accept the added humiliation of reporting regularly to an employer.”

  “Perhaps you’d have preferred it if the Allies had hanged you, Herr Eifler?” said Eichmann.

  “An American noose or an Argentinean halter,” said Eifler. “It’s not much of a choice for a man of my background. Frankly, I should prefer to have been shot by the Popovs than face a clerk’s desk at nine o’clock every morning. It’s uncivilized.” He smiled thinly at Kuhlmann. “Thank you for the cigarette. And by the way, welcome to Argentina. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.” He bowed stiffly, limped into his room, and closed the door behind him.

  Fuldner shrugged and said, “Some find it harder to adjust than others. Especially aristocrats like Eifler.”

  “I might have known,” sniffed Eichmann.

  “I’ll leave you and Herr Geller to settle in,” Fuldner told Eichmann. Then he looked at me. “Herr Hausner. You have an appointment this morning.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. We’re going to the police station at Moreno,” he said. “To the Registry of Foreign Persons. All new arrivals have to report there in order to obtain a cédula de identidad. I can assure you it’s only a matter of routine, Herr Doktor Hausner. Photographs and fingerprints, that kind of thing. You’ll all need to have one to work, of course, but for appearances’ sake, it’s best you don’t all go at the same time.”

  But outside the safe house Fuldner confessed that while it was true that all of us would require a cédula from the local police station, this was not, in fact, where we were now going. “Only I had to tell them something,” he said. “I could hardly tell them where we’re really going without hurting their feelings.”

  “We certainly wouldn’t want that to happen, no,” I said, climbing into the car.

  “And please, when we come back, don’t for Christ’s sake say where you’ve been. Thanks to Eifler, there’s already enough resentment in that house without you adding to the store of it.”

  “Of course. It’ll be our little secret.”

  “You’re making a joke,” he said, starting the engine and driving us away. “But I’m the one who’s going to be laughing when you find out where you’re going.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m being deported already.”

  “No, nothing like that. We’re going to see the president.”

  “Juan Perón wants to see me?”

  Fuldner laughed just like he’d said he would. I guess my face did look kind of silly at that.

  “What did I do? Win an important award? Most promising Nazi newcomer to Argentina?”

  “Believe it or not, Perón likes to greet a lot of German officers who arrive here in Argentina, personally. He’s very fond of Germany and the Germans.”

  “It’s not everyone you can say that about.”

  “He is a military man, after all.”

  “I imagine that’s why they made him a general.”

  “He likes to meet medical men, most of all. Perón’s grandfather was a doctor. He himself wanted to be a doctor, but instead he went to the National Military Academy.”

  “It’s an easy mistake to make,” I said.
“Killing people instead of healing them.”

  Dropping a couple of ice cubes into my voice, I said, “Don’t think I’m not well aware of the great honor, Carlos. But you know, it’s been quite a few years since I plugged my ears with a stethoscope. I hope he’s not looking to me to come up with a cure for cancer, or to give him the gossip from the latest German medical journal. After all, I’ve been hiding out in the coal shed for the last five years.”

  “Relax,” said Fuldner. “You’re not the first Nazi doctor I’ve had to introduce to the president. And I don’t suppose you’ll be the last. Your being a medical man is merely a confirmation of the fact that you are an educated man, and a gentleman.”

  “When the occasion demands, I can pass for a gentleman,” I said. I buttoned my shirt collar, straightened my tie, and checked my watch. “Does he always receive visitors with his boiled eggs and his newspaper?”

  “Perón is usually in his office by seven,” said Fuldner. “In there. The Casa Rosada.”

  Fuldner nodded at a pink-colored building at the far side of a plaza lined with palm trees and statuary. It looked like an Indian maharajah’s palace I’d once seen in a magazine. “Pink,” I said. “My favorite color for a government building. Who knows? Maybe Hitler might still have been in power if he’d had the Reich chancellery painted a nicer color than gray.”

  “There’s a story why it’s pink,” said Fuldner.

  “Don’t tell me. It’ll help me to relax if I can think of Perón as the kind of president who prefers pink. Believe me, Carlos, this is all very reassuring.”

  “That reminds me. You were joking about being a red, weren’t you?”

  “I was in a Soviet prison camp for almost two years, Carlos. What do you think?”

  He drove around to a side entrance and waved a security pass at the guard on the barrier before carrying on through to a central courtyard. In front of an ornate marble stairway stood two grenadiers. With tall hats and drawn sabers, they looked like an illustration from an old fairy tale. I glanced up at the loggia-style upper gallery that overlooked the courtyard, half expecting to see Zorro show up for a fencing lesson. Instead I caught sight of a neat little blonde eyeing us with interest. She was wearing more diamonds than seemed decent at breakfast time and an elaborate baker’s loaf of a hairstyle. I thought I might borrow a saber and cut myself a slice of it if I got a bit peckish.

  “That’s her,” said Fuldner. “Evita. The president’s wife.”

  “Somehow I didn’t think she was the cleaning lady. Not with all the mints she’s wearing.”

  We walked up the stairway into a richly furnished hall where several women were milling about. Despite the fact Perón’s was a military dictatorship, nobody up here was wearing a uniform. When I remarked on this, Fuldner told me that Perón didn’t care for uniforms, preferring a degree of informality that people sometimes found surprising. I might also have remarked that the women in the hall were very beautiful and that perhaps he preferred them to uglier ones, in which case he was a dictator after my own heart. The kind of dictator I would have been myself if a highly developed sense of social justice and democracy had not hindered my own will to power and autocracy.

  Contrary to what Fuldner had told me, it seemed that the president had not yet arrived at his desk. And while we awaited his much anticipated arrival, one of the secretaries fetched us coffee on a little silver tray. Then we smoked. The secretaries smoked, too. Everyone in Buenos Aires smoked. For all I knew, even the cats and dogs had a twenty-a-day habit. Then, outside the high windows, I heard a noise like a lawn mower. I put down my coffee cup and went to take a look. I was just in time to see a tall man climbing off a motor scooter. It was the president, although I would hardly have known that from his modest means of transport or his casual appearance. I kept comparing Perón with Hitler and trying to imagine the Führer dressed for golf and riding a lime-green scooter down the Wilhelmstrasse.

  The president parked the scooter and came up the stairs two at a time, his thick English brogues hitting the marble steps like the sound of someone working the heavy bag in the gym. He may have looked more like a golfer in his flat cap, tan-colored zip-up cardigan, brown plus-fours, and thick woolen socks, but he had a boxer’s grace and build. Not quite six feet tall, with dark hair brushed back on his head and a nose more Roman than the Colosseum, he reminded me of Primo Carnera, the Italian heavyweight. They would have been about the same age, too. I figured Perón to be in his early fifties. The dark hair looked as if it got blacked and polished every day when the grenadiers cleaned their riding boots.

  One of the secretaries handed him some papers while another threw open the double doors of his office. In there, the look was more conventionally autocratic. There were lots of equestrian bronzes, oak paneling, portraits that were still wet, expensive rugs, and Corinthian columns. He waved us to a couple of leather armchairs, tossed the papers onto a desk the size of a trebuchet, and flung his cap and jacket to another secretary, who hugged them to her not-insubstantial bosom in a way that made me think she wished he was still wearing them.

  Someone else brought him a little demitasse of coffee, a glass of water, a gold pen, and a gold holder with a cigarette already lit. He took a loud sip of coffee, put the holder in his mouth, picked up the pen, and started to add his signature to the documents presented earlier. I was close enough to pay attention to his signature style: the flourishing, egoistic capital J; the aggressive, showy final downward stroke of the n of “Perón.” On the basis of his handwriting, I made a quick psychological evaluation of the man and concluded that he was the neurotic, anal-retentive type who preferred people to be able to read what he had actually written. Not like a doctor at all, I told myself with relief.

  Apologizing in almost fluent German for keeping us waiting, Perón carried a silver cigarette box to our fingers. Then we shook hands and I felt the heavy knob of bone at the base of his thumb that made me think yet again of him as a boxer. That and the broken veins under the thin skin that covered his high cheekbones, and the dental plate that was revealed by his easy smile. In a country where no one has a sense of humor, the smiling man is king. I smiled back, thanked him for his hospitality, and then complimented the president on his German, in Spanish.

  “No, please,” Perón answered, in German. “I very much enjoy speaking German. It’s good practice for me. When I was a young cadet at our military school, all of our instructors were Germans. This was before the Great War, in 1911. We had to learn German because our weapons were German and all of our technical manuals were in German. We even learned to goose-step. Every day at six p.m., my grenadiers goose-step onto the Plaza de Mayo to take the flag down from the pole. The next time you visit, you must make sure it’s at that time so that you can see for yourself.”

  “I will, sir.” I let him light my cigarette. “But I think my own goose-stepping days are over. These days it’s as much as I can do to climb a set of stairs without running out of breath.”

  “Me, too.” Perón grinned. “But I try to keep fit. I like to ride and to ski when I have the chance. In 1939, I went skiing in the Alps. In Austria and Germany. Germany was wonderful then. A well-oiled machine. It was like being inside one of those great big Mercedes-Benz motorcars. Smooth and powerful and exciting. Yes, it was an important time in my life.”

  “Yes, sir.” I kept on smiling at him, as though I agreed with every word he said. The fact was, I hated the sight of goose-stepping soldiers. To me it was one of the most unpleasant sights in the world; something both terrifying and ridiculous that defied you to laugh at it. And as for 1939, it had been an important time in everyone’s life. Especially if you happened to be Polish, or French, or British, or even German. Who in Europe would ever forget 1939?

  “How are things in Germany right now?” he asked.

  “For the ordinary fellow, they’re pretty tough,” I said. “But it really depends on whose zone you’re in. Worst of all is the Soviet zone of occupation. Things are h
ardest of all where the Ivans are in charge. Even for the Ivans. Most people just want to put the war behind them and get on with the reconstruction.”

  “It’s amazing what has been achieved in such a short period of time,” said Perón.

  “Oh, I don’t just mean reconstruction of our cities, sir. Although of course that is important. No, I mean the reconstruction of our most fundamental beliefs and institutions. Freedom, justice, democracy. A parliament. A fair-minded police force. An independent judiciary. Eventually, when all of that has been recovered, we might regain some self-respect.”

  Perón’s eyes narrowed. “I must say you don’t sound very much like a Nazi,” he said.

  “It has been five years, sir,” I said. “Since we lost the war. There’s no point in thinking about what’s gone. Germany needs to look to the future.”

  “That’s what we need in Argentina,” said Perón. “Some forward thinking. A bit of the German can-do, eh, Fuldner?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir,” I said, “but from what I’ve seen so far, there’s nothing Germany can teach Argentina.”

  “This is a very Catholic country, Dr. Hausner,” he told me. “It’s very set in its ways. We need modern thinking. We need scientists. Good managers. Technicians. Doctors like yourself.” He clapped me on the shoulder.

  Two little poodles ambled in, accompanied by a strong smell of expensive perfume, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the blonde with the Ku-damm hairdo and the diamonds had entered the room. With her were two men. One was of medium height, with fair hair and a mustache, and a quiet, unassuming way about him. The other looked older, about forty, and was taller and physically more powerful; he was gray-haired and wore thick-framed, tinted glasses and a small beard and mustache. Something about him made me think he might be a cop.

  “Will you practice medicine again?” Perón asked me. “I’m sure we can make that possible. Rodolfo?”