A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  “No. Not yet. But I may be close to discovering the true identity of the man who killed Anita Schwarz.”

  For a moment, he looked puzzled.

  “She was the girl who was murdered in Berlin, back in 1932. You know? The one you remembered reading about in the German newspapers when I was still your idea of a hero.”

  “Yes, of course. Do you think he might be here, after all?”

  “It’s a little early to say if he is. Especially as I’m still waiting to see that doctor you told me about. The one from New York? The specialist.”

  “Dr. Pack? That’s exactly why I came to see you. To tell you. He’s here. In Buenos Aires. He arrived today. He can see you tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, depending on—”

  “His other, more important patient. I know. I know. But not too much. Just everything. I won’t forget.”

  “See that you don’t. For your own sake.” He nodded. “You’re an interesting man, señor. No doubt about it.”

  “Yes. I know that, too. I’ve had an interesting life.”

  I OUGHT TO HAVE PAID more attention to the warning the colonel had given me. But I always was a sucker for a pretty face. Especially a pretty face as beautiful as Anna Yagubsky’s.

  My desk was on the second floor. On the floor below was the archivo where SIDE’s files were stored. I decided to look in on my way out. I was already in the habit of going in there. For each old comrade I interviewed, I added to his file a detailed record of who he was and what crimes he had committed. I didn’t think I would be risking very much by looking in some other, unrelated files. The only question was how this was to be achieved.

  In Berlin, all known and suspected enemies of the Third Reich had been registered in the A Index, located in Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The A Index, also known as “the Office Index,” was the most modern criminal records system in the world. Or so Heydrich had once told me. The index comprised half a million cards on people the Gestapo considered to be worthy of attention. It was set on a huge, horizontally mounted, circular card carousel with an electric motor and a dedicated operator who could locate any one of those half a million cards in less than a minute. Heydrich, a firm believer in the old axiom that knowledge is power, called it his “wheel of fortune.” More than anyone, it was Heydrich who helped to revolutionize the old Prussian political police and made the SD one of the largest employers in Germany. By 1935, more than six hundred officials worked in the Gestapo’s Berlin records division alone.

  Nothing so sophisticated or large existed in Buenos Aires, although the system worked well enough at the Casa Rosada. A staff of twenty worked around the clock in five shifts of four. Files were kept on opposition politicians, trade-union officials, Communists, left-wing intellectuals, members of parliament, disaffected army officers, homosexuals, and religious leaders. These files were stored in mobile shelving that was operated by a system of locking handwheels and referenced according to name and subject by a series of leather-bound ledgers called los libros marrones. Access to the files was controlled via a simple signature system, unless the file was deemed sensitive, in which case the entry in the libros marrones was written up in red.

  The senior officer on duty in the archivo was known as the OR—the oficial registro—and he was supposed to supervise and authorize the acquisition and use of all written material. I knew at least two of these ORs reasonably well. To them I had confessed my former trade as a Berlin policeman and, in an effort to ingratiate myself, I had even regaled them with descriptions of the apparent omniscience of the Gestapo filing system. Most of what I told them, however, was based on the few months I had spent in KRIPO’s records division following my exit from Homicide, but sometimes I just made it up. Not that the ORs knew the difference. One of them, whom I knew only as Marcello, was keen to use the Gestapo filing system as a model for updating its SIDE counterpart, and I had promised to help him write a detailed memo for submission to the head of SIDE, Rodolfo Freude.

  I knew that Marcello would be on duty in the archivo and, as I came through the swing doors, I saw him in his usual position, behind the main desk. This was completely circular, and with its Argentine flag and sidearmed military officers, it looked more like a defensive redoubt than a records division. Except that Marcello hardly resembled anything military in a uniform that fitted him only where it gripped him. Whenever I saw him, he always reminded me of one of those baby-faced boy soldiers drafted to defend Hitler’s bunker against the Red Army during the fall of Berlin.

  I returned the updated files on Carl Vaernet and Pedro Olmos and asked for the file on Helmut Gregor. Marcello took the returned files, checked the libros marrones for Helmut Gregor, and then dispatched one of the junior officers to go and retrieve it from the shelves. I watched as the officer started to wind the handwheel, like a man opening a lock gate, until the relevant shelf had moved far along an invisible track to permit his ingress.

  “Tell me more about your A Index,” said Marcello, who was of Italian-Argentine origin.

  “All right,” I said, hoping that I might waltz him in the direction I wanted. “There were three kinds of cards. In Group One, all cards had a red mark, indicating an enemy of the state. In Group Two, a blue mark, indicating someone to be arrested in time of national emergency. And in Group Three, a green mark, indicating people who were subject to surveillance at all times. All these marks were on the left side of the card. On the right side of the card, a second color mark indicated a Communist, someone suspected of being in the Resistance, a Jew, a Jehovah’s Witness, a homosexual, a Freemason, and so on. The whole index was updated twice a year. At the beginning and at the end of the summer. Our busiest time. Himmler insisted on it.”

  “Fascinating,” said Marcello.

  “Informers had special files. And so did agents. But all of these files were completely separate from those held by the Abwehr—German military intelligence.”

  “You mean they didn’t share intelligence?”

  “Absolutely not. They hated each other.”

  Now that I’d danced with him, I figured it was time to make my move.

  “Do you have a file on a Jewish couple called the Yagubskys?” I asked innocently.

  Marcello removed the heavy brown-leather-bound ledger from the curving shelf behind him and consulted it with a frequently licked forefinger. He must have licked it a thousand times every day, and I was surprised it wasn’t worn away, like a stick of salt. A minute or so later, he was shaking his head. “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  I told him some more. Made up stuff about how Heydrich had planned to build a huge, switch-programmed electronic machine to deliver the same information as the wheel of fortune by teleprinter paper tape, and in a tenth of the time. I let Marcello ooh and aah about that for a while before I asked him if I could see the files relating to Directive 11.

  Marcello didn’t consult his brown books before answering; and he flinched a little, as if it bothered him that he was about to fail me again.

  “No, we’ve got nothing about that, either,” he explained. “Files like that aren’t kept here. Not anymore. All files relating to the Argentine Immigration Service were removed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about a year ago. And I believe they were put in storage.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  “At the old Hotel de Inmigrantes. It’s on the north dock, on the other side of the Avenida Eduardo Madero. It was constructed at the beginning of the century to deal with the huge number of immigrants coming here to Argentina. Rather like Ellis Island, in New York. The place is more or less derelict now. Even the rats stay clear of it. I believe there’s just a skeleton staff that works there. I haven’t been there myself, but one of the other ORs helped to move some cabinets there and said it was all a bit primitive. If you were looking for something there, it would probably be best to go through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

  I shook my head. “It’s really not that important,” I said.

  I DROVE
to President Perón Station, parked my car, and found a telephone. I called the number Anna Yagubsky had given me. An old man answered, his voice full of suspicion. I guessed it was her father. When I gave him my name, he started to ask a lot of questions, none of which I could have answered even if I’d wanted to.

  “Listen, Señor Yagubsky, I’d love to talk awhile with you, only I’m a little pressed for time right now. So would you mind just putting your questions on hold and fetching your daughter to the phone?”

  “There’s no need to be rude about it,” he said.

  “As a matter of fact, I was trying very hard not to be rude about it.”

  “I’m amazed that you have any clients at all, Señor Hausner, if this is how you treat them.”

  “Clients? Uh-huh. Exactly what did your daughter tell you about me, Señor Yagubsky?”

  “That you’re a private detective. And that she hired you to find my brother.”

  I smiled. “What about your sister-in-law?”

  “To be really honest with you, my sister-in-law I can live without. I never understood why Roman married her. And we never got along that well. Are you married, señor?”

  “Have been. Not anymore.”

  “Well, at least you know what you’re doing without.”

  I pushed another coin into the telephone. “Right now, I’m in danger of going without speaking to your daughter. That was my last five centavos.”

  “All right, all right. That’s the trouble with you Germans. You’ve always got a reason to be in a hurry.” He laid the receiver down with a clunk, and a long minute later, Anna came on the line.

  “What did you say to my father?”

  “There’s really no time to explain. I want you to meet me at President Perón Station in half an hour.”

  “Couldn’t it be tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow’s no good. I might have a hospital appointment tomorrow. Maybe the day after as well.” I quickly lit a cigarette. “Look, just be here as soon as you can. I’ll wait by the Belgrano platform.”

  “Can’t you tell me anything?”

  “Wear some old clothes. And bring a flashlight. Two, if you have them. And a flask of coffee. We’re liable to be a while.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “To do a little digging.”

  “You’re scaring me. Maybe I should bring a pick and shovel, too.”

  “No, angel, not with those lovely hands of yours. Take it easy. We’re not looking to dig anyone up. We’re just going to dig around in some old immigration files and it’s liable to get a little dusty, that’s all.”

  “I’m very relieved to hear it. For a minute I thought—I mean, I’m a little bit squeamish about digging up dead bodies. Especially at night.”

  “I hear that normally that’s the best time to do that kind of thing. Even the dead aren’t paying much attention.”

  “This is Buenos Aires, Señor Hausner. The dead are always paying attention in Buenos Aires. That’s why we built La Recoleta. So we wouldn’t forget it. Death is a way of life for us.”

  “You’re talking to a German, angel. When we invented the SS, we had the last word in death cults, believe me.” The phone began to demand more money. “And that was my last five centavos. So get your beautiful behind over here, like I told you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I put down the receiver. I regretted involving Anna. There was some risk in what I was planning. But I couldn’t think of anyone else who might have helped me to understand whatever documents were being stored in the Hotel de Inmigrantes. Then again, she was involved. It was her aunt and uncle we were looking for. She wasn’t paying me enough to take all of the risks on my own. And since she wasn’t paying me anything at all, she could damn well come along for the ride and like it. I was of two minds about her calling me “sir” like that. It made me feel like someone worthy of respect by virtue of my age. Which was something, I told myself, I was going to have to get used to. As long as I was getting older. That was okay. You had to remain alive to get older.

  I bought some more cigarettes, a Prensa, and a copy of the Argentinisches Tageblatt—the only German-language newspaper it was safe to read, in the sense that it didn’t mark you out as a Nazi. But the main reason for going into the station was the knife shop. Mostly, the blades were for tourists: bone-handled cutlery for chartered surveyors and accountants who fancied themselves as gauchos or street-fighting tango-dancers. A few of the less spectacular knives looked about right for what I had in mind. I bought two: a long, thin stiletto for pushing right through a keyway and tripping the catch within a lock housing, and something bigger for jimmying a window. I tucked the big one under my belt, in the small of my back, gaucho style, and slipped the little stiletto inside my breast pocket. When the shop clerk shot me a look, I smiled benignly and said, “I like to be well armed when my sister comes to dinner.”

  He’d have looked a lot more surprised if he’d seen my shoulder holster.

  Half an hour passed. Forty-five minutes turned into an hour. I’d just started to curse Anna when, finally, she showed up, wearing an ensemble of old clothes supplied by Edith Head. A nice plaid shirt, neatly pressed jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, a pair of flat heels, and a large leather handbag. And too late, I realized my mistake. Telling a woman like Anna to come out wearing old clothes was like telling Berenson to frame a great painting with firewood. I guessed she had probably changed her clothes several times just to make sure that the old clothes she had on were the best old clothes she could have chosen to wear. Not that it mattered what she was wearing. Anna Yagubsky would have looked wonderful wearing half a pantomime horse.

  She eyed the Belgrano train uncertainly.

  “Are we taking the train somewhere?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind. But not this one. I hear the slow train to paradise is more comfortable. No, I wanted to meet you here so I wouldn’t miss you in the dark outside. But now that I’ve seen you again, I realize I wouldn’t miss you in an exodus.”

  She blushed a little. I led her out of the station. With that huge, echoing cathedral of a building behind us, we walked east, through a double row of parked trolleybuses, and into a big open square dominated by a red-brick clock tower that was now striking the hour. Under acacia trees, people played music and lovers trysted on benches. Anna took my arm, and it would have seemed romantic if we hadn’t been planning trespass and the illegal entry of a public building.

  “What do you know about the Immigrants’ Hotel?” I asked her as we crossed Eduardo Manero.

  “Is that where we’re going? I wondered if it might be.” She shrugged. “There’s been an Immigrants’ Hotel here since the middle of the last century. My parents could probably tell you more about it. They stayed there when they first came to Argentina. In the beginning, any poor immigrant arriving in the country could get free board and lodging there for five days. Then, in the thirties, it was any poor immigrant who wasn’t Jewish. I’m not sure when they closed it. There was something in the paper about it last year, I think.”

  We approached a honey-colored, four-story building that was almost as big as the railway station. Surrounded by a fence, it looked more like a prison than a hotel, and I reflected that this had probably been closer to its real purpose. The fence wasn’t more than six feet high but the top wire was barbed and it did the job. We kept walking until we found a gate. There was a sign that read PROHIBIDA LA ENTRADA and, underneath, a large Eagle padlock that must have been there since the hotel was built.

  When she saw the big gaucho knife in my hand, Anna’s eyes widened.

  “This is what happens when you ask questions people don’t want you to ask,” I said. “They lock up the answers.” I flicked open the padlock.

  “Aiee,” said Anna, wincing.

  “Fortunately for me, they use crummy locks that wouldn’t keep out a rat with a toothpick.” I pushed open the gate and walked into an arrivals yard overgrown with tufts of grass and jacaranda
trees. A gust of wind blew a sheet of newsprint to my feet. I picked it up. It was a two-month-old page from El Laborista, a Perónist rag. I hoped it was the last time anyone had been there. It certainly looked that way. There were no lights in any of the hundred or so windows. Only the sound of distant traffic driving along Eduardo Manero and a train moving in the rail yards disturbed the quiet of the abandoned hotel.

  “I don’t like this,” admitted Anna.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But my castellano isn’t up to the kind of legalese and bureaucratic language you usually find in official documents. If we do find something, we’ll probably need those beautiful eyes of yours to read it.”

  “And here was me thinking you just wanted some company.” She glanced around nervously. “I just hope there aren’t any rats. I get enough of those at work.”

  “Just take it easy, okay? From the look of this place, nobody’s been here in a while.”

  The main doorway smelled strongly of cat piss. The frosted windows were covered with cobwebs and salt from the estuary river. A largish spider scrambled away as my shoes disturbed its gossamer repose. I forced another padlock with the big knife and then raked the Yale on the door with the stiletto.

  “Do you always carry a complete cutlery drawer in your pockets?” she asked.

  “It’s that or a set of keys,” I said, gouging at the lock’s mechanism.

  “Where were you during choir practice? You do that like you’ve done it before.”

  “I used to be a cop, remember? We do all of the things criminals do, but for much less money. Or in this case, no money at all.”

  “Money’s a big thing with you, I can tell.”

  “Maybe that’s because I don’t have very much.”

  “Well, then. We have something in common.”

  “Maybe when this is all over, you can show me your gratitude.”

  “Sure. I’ll write you a nice letter on my best notepaper. How does that sound?”

  “If we find your miracle, you can write to the local archbishop with evidence of my heroic virtue. And maybe, in a hundred years, they’ll make me a saint. Saint Bernhard. They did it before, they can do it again. Hell, they even did it for a lousy dog. By the way, that’s my real name. Bernhard Gunther.”