by Philip Kerr
“Couldn’t you hire yourselves a private detective?” I suggested. “Or a retired policeman, perhaps.”
“We already tried that,” she said. “Policemen here are not very honest, Señor Hausner. He robbed us of all our savings and told us nothing.”
“I’d like to help you, señorita.” I shook my head. “But I don’t know what I could do. Really, I don’t. I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t know my way around very well. And I’m still learning the language. Trying to settle in. To make myself feel a little bit at home. You’d be wasting your money. Really.”
“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t offering to pay you, señor. All my extra money goes to supporting my parents. My father doesn’t play much anymore. He used to give music lessons but doesn’t have the necessary patience. My mother works in someone else’s shop. The pay is not good. The fact is, I hoped you might help me out of the kindness of your heart.”
“I see.”
This was one I hadn’t heard before. A request to work for nothing. In the ordinary course of things, I might have shown her the door. But she was hardly ordinary. Among the many things I had to admire about her already I was now obliged to add her chutzpah. But it seemed she hadn’t finished telling me what she was prepared to offer in lieu of money. She colored a little as she told me what this was.
“I can imagine how difficult it might be to settle into a new life in a new country,” she said. “It takes time to adjust. To make new friends. You might say that as a daughter of immigrants I have a greater understanding of the challenges that lie ahead of you.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway. I was thinking. That since I can’t afford to pay you. Perhaps. Perhaps I might become your friend.”
“Well, that’s a new one,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting anything else. No, I was thinking that we might go and see a play, perhaps. I could show you around the city. Introduce you to some people. From time to time I might even cook you dinner. Really, I’m very good company.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“In a way, we’d be helping each other.”
“Yes, I can see how you might think that.”
Maybe if she hadn’t been quite so good-looking I might have turned her down. There was also her Jewishness to take into account. I hadn’t forgotten the Ukraine in 1941. And the guilt I felt toward all Jewish people. I didn’t want to help Anna Yagubsky, but somehow I felt I had to.
“All right, I’ll help you.” Stammering a little, I added, “That is to say, I’ll do what I can. I’m not promising anything, you understand. But I will try to help you. I could use a home-cooked dinner now and then.”
“Friends,” she said, and we shook hands.
“Actually, you’re the first friend I’ve made since I got here. Besides, I’d like to do something noble for once.”
“Oh? Why? I’m curious.”
“Don’t be. It doesn’t help either of us.”
“What you say makes me think that you think you have to do something noble to atone for something else you did. Something not so noble, perhaps.”
“That’s my business. I will tell you this, though. Don’t ever ask me about it. That’s part of my price, Anna. You don’t ever ask me about it. All right? Are we agreed?”
She nodded, finally.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“All right, then. Now. Tell me. How did you find me?”
“I told you. I have a friend in the police. As a matter of fact, he’s the same bastard cop who robbed us of our savings. But he feels guilty about it now and wants to help in any way he can. Unfortunately, he has spent all the money. Gambled it away. It was he who told me where you were staying. It wasn’t so very difficult, I think. It’s on your cédula. All he had to do was to look it up. I went to your hotel and followed you here.”
“The less this cop knows about what I’m doing, the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
She nodded and sipped her coffee.
“Your uncle and aunt. What were their names?”
“Yagubsky, same as mine.” She picked up her bag, found her wallet, and handed me a business card. “Here,” she said. “That’s how you spell it. Their names were Esther and Roman Yagubsky. Roman is my father’s twin brother.”
I pocketed the card. “Three years, you say?”
She nodded.
I lit a cigarette and sighed a pessimistic cloud of smoke.
“Three years is a long time with a missing-persons case. Three months, maybe we could find a lead. But three years. And not a word. Not even a postcard?”
“Nothing. We went to the Israeli Embassy. We asked if maybe they had emigrated to Israel. But there was no trace of them there, either.”
“Shall I tell you what I think? Honestly?”
“If it’s that you think they’re probably dead, then I agree with you. I’m not an idiot, Señor Hausner. I can read the runes with something like this. But my father is an old man. And a twin. Let me tell you, twins are strange about things like this. My father says he feels Roman is still in Argentina. And he’d like to know for sure, that’s all. Is it so much to ask?”
“Maybe. And nothing is ever for sure in this business. You’d better take that on board now. Nothing is ever for sure.”
“Except death,” she said. “That’s about as sure as anything can get, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “You might certainly think that. What I meant is that truth is rarely the truth and the things you thought weren’t true often turn out not to be false. I realize that sounds confusing, and it was meant to be, because that’s the business I’m in. Although I don’t want to be in it, particularly. Not again. I thought I was finished with the whole dirty process of asking questions I don’t get straight answers to. That and putting myself in harm’s way just because someone asks me to look for his lost dog when really he’d lost his neighbor’s cat. I thought I was through with it, and I’m not, and when I say nothing’s for sure in this business, then I mean it, because generally I say exactly what I mean. And I’m right, too, because it’ll turn out that there was something you didn’t tell me that you should have told me, which would have made things clearer right from the start. So nothing’s for sure, Anna. Not when there are people involved. Not when they bring you their problems and ask for your help. Especially then. I’ve seen it a hundred times, angel. Nothing’s for sure. No, not even death when the dead turn out to be alive and well and living in Buenos Aires. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. If the dead people walking around this city all of a sudden really were dead, the undertakers wouldn’t be able to cope with the sudden rush of business.”
Her face had colored again. Her nostrils had flared. The isosceles of muscles between her chin and her collarbone had stiffened, like something metallic. If I’d had a little wand, I could have used it to tap out the part for triangle in the bridal chorus from Lohengrin.
“You think I’m lying?” She started gathering her gloves and handbag as if she was about to climb to the highest hills of Dudgeon. “You mean you think I’m a liar.”
“Are you?”
“And I thought we were going to be friends,” she said, her thighs pushing back at the chair underneath her bottom.
I grabbed her wrist.
“Easy on the floor polish,” I said. “I was just giving you my client speech. The one I use when there’s nothing in it for me. It takes a lot longer than a hard slap on the ear and a palm pressed on top of a Holy Bible but, in the end, it saves a lot of time. That way, if it does turn out that you’re lying, you won’t hold it against me when I have to warm your cheeks.”
“Are you always this cynical? Or is it just me?” Her bottom stayed on the chair, for now.
“I’m never cynical, Anna, except when I’m questioning the sincerity of human motives.”
“I wonder. What was it that happened to you, Señor Hausner? Something. I don’t know. In your own personal hist
ory. That made you this way.”
“My history?” I grinned. “You make it sound like it’s something that’s over. Well, it’s not. In fact, it’s not even history. Not yet. And didn’t I tell you? Don’t ever ask me about it, angel.”
BEING SORT OF A SPY MYSELF, I swiftly came to the conclusion that what I needed most was the help of another spy. And there was only one person I could trust, almost, in the whole of Argentina, and that was Pedro Geller, who had come across on the boat from Genoa with Eichmann and me. He was working for Capri Construction in Tucumán, and since half of the ex-SS men in the country were also working for Capri, enlisting his help seemed like a way of swatting two flies with one newspaper. The only trouble was that Tucumán was more than seven hundred miles to the north of Buenos Aires. So, a couple of days after my meeting with Anna Yagubsky, I took the Mitre line from the city’s Retiro railway station. The train, which went via Córdoba and terminated in La Paz, Bolivia, was comfortable enough in first class. But the journey lasted twenty-three hours, so I took the advice of Colonel Montalbán and equipped myself with books and newspapers and plenty to eat and drink and smoke. Since the weather in Tucumán was likely to be warmer than in Buenos Aires, and much of the journey there took place at altitude, the doctor had also given me some tranquilizers in case my thyroid problem meant I had difficulty breathing. So far, I had been lucky. The only time I’d had difficulty breathing was when Anna Yagubsky had introduced herself to me.
The heating on the train failed soon after we left Retiro, and for most of the journey I was cold. Too cold to sleep. By the time we reached Tucumán, I was exhausted. I checked into the Coventry Hotel and went straight to bed. I slept for the next twelve hours, which was something I hadn’t done since before the war.
Tucumán was the most populous city in the north, with about two hundred thousand people. It sat on a plain in front of some spectacular mountains called the Sierra del Aconquija. There were lots of colonial-style buildings, a couple of nice parks, a government palace, a cathedral, and a statue of liberty. But New York it wasn’t. There was a prevailing smell of horse shit in the air of Tucumán. Tucumán wasn’t a one-horse town so much as a horseshit town. Even the soap in my hotel bathroom seemed to smell of it.
Pedro Geller worked at Capri’s technical office in El Cadillal, a small town about twenty miles outside Tucumán, but we met up in the city at the company’s main office on Río Portero. Given the nature of my mission, we didn’t stay there for very long. I asked him to let me take him to the best restaurant he could think of, and so we went to the Plaza Hotel, close to the cathedral. I made a mental note to stay there instead of the Coventry if ever I was unlucky enough to come to Tucumán again.
Geller, whom I knew better as Herbert Kuhlmann, was twenty-six years old and had been a captain with an SS-Panzer division. During the battle for France, in 1944, his unit had executed thirty-six captured Canadians. Geller’s commanding officer was now serving a life sentence in a Canadian jail and, fearing an arrest and a similar sentence, Geller had wisely fled to South America. He looked tanned and fit and seemed to be enjoying his new life.
“Actually, the work is rather interesting,” he explained over a glass of German beer. “The Dulce River runs for about three hundred miles through Córdoba Province and we’re building a dam on it. The Los Quiroga dam. It’ll be quite a sight when it’s finished, Bernie. Three hundred meters long, fifty meters high, with thirty-two floodgates. Of course, it’s not exactly popular with everyone. These things rarely are. A lot of local farms and villages will disappear forever under millions of gallons of flood water. But the dam is going to provide water and hydroelectric power for the whole province.”
“How’s our more famous friend?”
“Ricardo? He hates it here. He lives with some peasant girl in a small mountain village called La Cocha, about seventy miles south of here. He doesn’t come into Tucumán any more than he has to. Scared to show his face, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re both of us working for an old comrade, of course. They’re everywhere in Tucumán. He’s an Austrian professor by the name of Pelkhofer, Armin Pelkhofer. He’s a water engineer. He and Ricardo seem to know each other from the war, when he was called Armin Schoklitsch. But I have no idea what he did then that brought him here now.”
“Nothing good,” I said, “if he knew Ricardo.”
“Quite so. Anyway, we carry out river survey reports for the prof. Hydrological analysis, that kind of thing. Not much to it, really. But I’m out in the fresh air a lot, which suits me after all those months of hiding out in lofts and basements. I shall miss this. Didn’t I tell you? After another six months here I shall transfer to Capri’s personnel department, in Buenos Aires.”
We ate some lunch. The steaks were good. The food was always good in Argentina. Just as long as you ordered steak.
“What about you, Bernie? What brings you this far north?”
“I’m working for the police. I’m supposed to be checking out old comrades. Deciding whether they’re worthy of the good-conduct pass they will need to get an Argie passport. Yours is already in the file.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t mention it. To be honest, it’s mostly just a cover story so that I can ask some of our old comrades a lot of awkward questions. Like, what did you do in the war, Fritz? The Argies are a bit jumpy that they’ll unwittingly hand out a passport to some mass-murdering psycho and that the Amis will find out about it and kick up an international fuss.”
“I see. Tricky stuff.”
“I was hoping you might help, Herbert. After all, it goes without saying that Capri—the Compañía Alemana para Recién Inmigrados—is the largest employer of ex-SS in the country.”
“Of course I’ll help,” said Geller. “You’re just about my only friend in this country, Bernie. Well, there’s you and a girl I met back in Buenos Aires.”
“Good for you, kid. Apart from Ricardo, who else have you come across who might be worse than the worst?”
“I get the picture. A bastard who gives the rest of us bastards a bad name, eh?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Let’s see now. There’s Erwin Fleiss. He’s a nasty piece of work. From Innsbruck. He made a rather tasteless joke about organizing some Jewish pogrom there, in 1938. We’ve got a couple of gauleiters. One from Brunswick, and one from Styria. Some Luftwaffe general called Kramer. Another fellow, who was part of Hitler’s bodyguard. Of course, there’s a lot more of them back at head office in Buenos Aires. I could probably find out quite a lot about them for you when I’m working there. But, like I say, that won’t be for a while.” He frowned. “Who else? There’s Wolf Probst. Yes, he’s a ruthless character, I think. Might be a good idea to check him out.”
“I’m particularly looking for someone who might just have murdered again, since arriving here in Argentina.”
“Now I see. Set a thief to catch a thief, is that it?”
“Something like that,” I said. “The kind of man I’m looking for is someone who probably enjoys cruelty and killing for its own sake.”
Geller shook his head. “No one springs to mind, I’m afraid. I mean, Ricardo’s a bastard, but he’s not a psychopathic bastard, if you follow me. Look here, why don’t you ask him? I mean, he must have been to murder camps and seen some horrible things. Met some horrible people. Probably the very types you’re looking for.”
“I wonder,” I said.
“What?”
“If he’d cooperate.”
“A passport’s a passport. We both know what that’s worth when you’re sweating it out in someone’s basement in Genoa. Ricardo, too.”
“This village where he lives?”
“La Cocha.”
“How long would it take me to get there?”
“At least two hours, depending on the river. We’ve had a lot of rain in these parts, of late. I could drive you there if you wanted. If we left now, we could be there and back before dark.” Geller chuc
kled.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just that it might be amusing to see Ricardo’s face when you tell him that you’re working for the police. That’s really going to make his day.”
“Worth a two-hour drive?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
GELLER’S CAR was a jeep the color of an apricot: just four heavy-duty wheels, a tall steering column, two uncomfortable seats, and a tailgate. We hadn’t driven very far before I realized why Geller was driving it. The roads south of Tucumán were little better than dirt tracks through sprawling fields of sugarcane with only the ingenios—the industrial mills—of the large sugar companies to remind us that we weren’t about to fall off the edge of the earth. By the time we reached La Cocha, it was impossible to imagine being anywhere farther from Germany and the long arm of Allied military justice.
If Tucumán was a horseshit town, then La Cocha was its poor pig-shit cousin. A Gadarene number of swine seemed to be wandering about the muddy streets as our jeep bounced into the place, scattering a flock of chickens like an exploding mortar bomb of clucks and feathers, and attracting the attention of a number of dogs whose prominent rib cages didn’t seem to interfere with their propensity to bark. From a tall chimney poured a cloud of black smoke; at its base was an open oven. For Eichmann, it looked like a home away from home. Using a long-handled wooden peel, a man was moving bread in and out of the oven. In his excellent castellano, Geller asked the baker for directions to the house of Ricardo Klement.