A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  In the doorway was a sort of coop that was home to the casita woman, a largish Negress who sat in an easy chair humming an altogether different tune from the one played by the tango orchestra. On her thigh was a paper napkin and a pair of lamb chops. Maybe they were her dinner, but they might just as easily have been the remains of the last man to cause trouble for the huge vigilante. She smiled a big, uneven smile that was as white as a swath of snowdrops, and gave me a sizing up-and-down look.

  “You looking for a stepney?”

  I shrugged. My castellano had much improved, but it fell apart like a cheap suit the minute it got snagged on the local slang.

  “You know. The café crème.”

  “I’m looking for Isabel Pekerman,” I said.

  “Where you from, honey?”

  “Germany.”

  “It’s twenty pesos, Adolf,” said the casita woman. “Don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but the lady’s canfinflero is Blue Vincent, and Vincent prefers it if you give him the bouquet before you speaks to the gallina.”

  “I only want to speak to her.”

  “Don’t make no difference if you’re a hunter or not. Every one of these creolos is from the Center and if you speaks to baggage you’ll have to give him a bouquet. It’s that kind of joint.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” I peeled off a couple of notes and pressed them into her leathery hand.

  “Uh-huh.” She shifted for a moment and tucked the notes under one of her substantial buttocks. It looked as safe there as in any bank vault. “You’ll find her on the dance floor, probably.”

  I breast-stroked my way through a beaded curtain into a scene from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The brick walls were covered in graffiti and old posters. Around a dirty wooden dance floor were lots of little marble-topped tables. The low lights on the ceiling barely illuminated the lowlifes below. There were women with skirts slit up to their navels and men with trilbies pulled down low over their watchful eyes. The orchestra looked as oily as the music it was playing. The only thing that seemed to be lacking in the place was Rudolph Valentino dressed in a poncho with a whip in his hand and a pout on his mouth. Nobody paid me any attention. Nobody except the taller of the two women who were dancing the tango with eyes that had done a lot more than just meet.

  I hardly recognized her from before. She looked like a circus horse. Her mane was long and very blond with just a touch of gray. Her eyes were big but not as big as her beautiful curving behind, which her skirt did nothing to conceal. She was also wearing a kind of spangled leotard that almost preserved her modesty. At least I think it was a leotard only, it was a little hard to be sure the way it disappeared between her buttocks.

  I stared hard back at her, just to let her know I’d seen her. She stared back and then pointed at a table. I sat down. A waiter appeared. Everyone else seemed to be drinking cubano from large, round glasses. I ordered the same and lit a cigarette.

  A burly man came over to my table. He was wearing boots, black trousers, a gray jacket that was a size too small for him, and a white scarf. He had pimp written all over him like the numbers on a pack of cards. He sat down, turned slowly to look at the circus horse. When she nodded at him, he looked back at me, spreading his mouth into a smile that was somehow both approving and pitying at the same time. I worked it out. He approved my choice of woman but pitied me for being the kind of jerk who would even contemplate the kind of degrading transaction that was about to occur. There was no fear in his craggy face. It was a tough face. It looked like something you could use to beat a carpet. When he spoke, his breath sharpened my thirst for strong liquor. I kept my nose in my glass until he’d finished blowing his patter my way.

  Silently, I tossed some notes onto the table. I wasn’t in the mood for anything except information but, sometimes, information costs the same as the more intimate relations. He gathered the money in his fist and went away. Only then did she come over and sit down.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I’ll get the money back off him at the end of the evening and pay you back later. But you did the right thing to pay him. Vincent’s not an unreasonable man, but he’s my creolo and creolos like things to look like what they’re supposed to look like. In case you’re wondering, he’s not my pimp.”

  “If you say so.”

  “A creolo just looks out for a girl. Kind of like a bodyguard. Some of the men I dance with. They can get a little rough sometimes.”

  “It’s okay about the money. Keep it.”

  “You mean, you want to?”

  “I mean keep the money. That’s all. It’s information I’m after. Nothing more. No offense, but it’s been a hell of a day.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Let’s just talk.” I sipped some of my cubano. “You look different from the last time we met.”

  A waiter placed a drink in front of her. She ignored it and him.

  “So who put you up to it?”

  “The cop. The one who brought you. He came to my apartment and said he’d seen me in a show and that he had a special kind of job for me. If I did as I was told, I’d make some money and keep some nice clothes into the bargain. All I had to do was play a rich, worried mother.” She shrugged. “That was easy enough. There was a time when I had a rich, worried mother of my own.” She lit a cigarette. “So I met von Bader and we talked.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Most of the day. We didn’t really know what time you were going to show up.”

  “And this was all for my benefit?”

  “Ostensibly, yes. But Colonel Montalbán wanted me to report on von Bader as well.”

  “Yes, that does sound like him. Two jobs for the price of one.” I nodded. “So how was he? Von Bader?”

  “Nervous. But nice. A couple of times I heard him on the telephone. I think he was planning to go abroad. He made and received several calls to and from Switzerland while I was there. I know that because once he asked me to answer the telephone. He was in the bathroom. I speak German, as you know. I also speak Polish and Spanish. By birth I’m a German Pole. From Danzig.” She puffed at the cigarette but seemed irritated with it and put it out only half smoked. “Sorry, but I’m a little bit on edge about this. The colonel was none too pleased when I said I couldn’t repeat the performance tomorrow morning. He’s not the kind of man one lets down lightly.”

  “So why did you?”

  “When von Bader said that you were a famous German detective and that you’d often looked for missing persons, in Berlin, before the war, I’m afraid I rather lost interest in their scheme. Whatever that is. You see, it was I who told Anna Yagubsky about you. And I who suggested that she might approach you for help. I thought that by helping Anna find her missing aunt and uncle you might also help me find my missing sisters. And, since you were helping me, albeit by proxy, I decided to help you. I decided to put you in the picture, as much as I’m able, concerning what the colonel and von Bader are up to. You see, the girl, Fabienne, has gone off with her mother and nobody knows where. That’s pretty much all I know. Von Bader wants to leave the country, but he can’t until he knows they’re safe. I dunno. Something like that. Either way, I’m taking a big risk telling you all this.”

  “So why do it at all?”

  “Because Anna says she’s sure that you’re the man who’s going to find them. And I don’t mean Fabienne and her mother. I mean our relatives. Anna’s and mine.”

  I sighed. “Go ahead. Tell me about them. Tell me about yourself.” I shrugged. “Why not? I’ve paid for your time.”

  “My mother got me out of Poland just before the war. I was twenty-five years old. She gave me some jewels and I managed to bribe my way into Argentina. My two sisters were too young to come with me. At the time, one was ten and the other was eight. The plan was that I’d send for them when I could. I wrote to tell my mother I was well, and received a letter back from a neighbor, saying that my mother and sisters were
now in France, and in hiding. Then, in 1945, I received word that my two sisters were false weight aboard a cargo ship from Bilbao.”

  “False weight?”

  “It’s what we used to call an illegal immigrant on a ship. When the ship docked here in Buenos Aires, however, there was no sign of either of them. My then husband made some inquiries. He was a former policeman. He found out that they had both been sold by the captain to a casita. As franchuchas.”

  I shook my head.

  “A franchucha is what the porteños call a French prostitute. A gallina is what they call one from Russia. Wherever they come from, they usually always had one thing in common: they were Jewish. At one time, half the prostitutes in this city were Jewish. Not by choice. Most of them were sold into it. Like slaves. Then my husband ran away with what was left of my money and most of Anna’s. By the time he came back, he’d spent it all and I needed to make a living. So I am as you see me now. I do a little acting, some dancing. Sometimes a little bit more, when the man is nice. My new life had one major advantage, however. It allowed me to search for my sisters. And about two years ago, I discovered they’d been arrested the previous year, in a police raid on a casita. They were taken to San Miguel prison. But instead of appearing before the magistrates, they disappeared from prison altogether. Since then, I’ve heard nothing from them. Nobody has. It’s like they never existed.

  “It was my ex-husband, Pablo, who introduced me to the colonel. And I really only took the job with Señor von Bader in the hope that I might find an opportunity to ask the colonel about my two sisters.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. For the simple reason that he and von Bader made some remarks about Jews. Anti-Semitic remarks. You remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “As a result, I didn’t think it likely he was going to be very sympathetic to my situation. Then I noticed how you didn’t seem comfortable with those remarks, either. And what kind eyes you seemed to have. And I decided to abandon my plan to speak to the colonel, and speak to you instead. Or at least to persuade Anna to speak to you about our situation. The rest you know. She’s broke, of course. But very beautiful. I hardly expected you would help us for nothing. I can assure you, nobody does anything for nothing in this country.”

  “Don’t count on it happening a lot that way. I pay just as easily as the next man. Sometimes the halo slips and I get an appetite for all the usual vices and some of the unusual ones, too.”

  “I’ll try to bear that in mind,” she said. “It’ll give me something to think about the next time I can’t get to sleep.”

  “How old were your sisters when they got here?”

  “Fourteen and sixteen.”

  “Is there much of a white-slavery racket here in Buenos Aires?”

  “Listen, there’s a racket in that sort of thing almost anywhere you go. Girls arrive somewhere that’s a long way from home. They’ve no money, no papers, and there’s no way back. They find they have to work to pay off the hidden costs of their passage. I’m just lucky the same thing didn’t happen to me. Whatever I do, I do by choice. More or less.”

  “Who does the buying and the selling?”

  “You mean of the baggage? The girls?”

  I nodded.

  “First of all, this doesn’t happen so much anymore. The supply of new girls has dwindled. The sellers were usually the same men who organized passage for these girls. Ship’s captains, first mates, all from places like Marseilles, Bilbao, Vigo, Oporto, Tenerife, and even Dakar. Younger girls like my sisters were ‘underweight.’ Older girls were ‘overweight.’ If they were really young, the girls were called ‘fragile’—too young ever to see daylight during the voyage. The trade was controlled by a Pole in Montevideo, called Mihanovich. Montevideo was where all the ships docked before coming on to Buenos Aires. Some stayed in Uruguay. But usually the girls were sent here, where more money was to be made from their sale. Mihanovich would make a deal with the men from the Center. That’s what we call organized crime in this city. It’s called the Center because it’s based in the area between Corrientes, Belgrano, the docks, and San Nicolás. A lot of it is run by two French families, one from Marseilles and the other from Paris. So the men from the Center would buy the girls from Mihanovich, scare the hell out of them when they got here, and put them to work in the casitas of Buenos Aires. You’re a sailor with a few days’ leave and a cockstand? This is the place to go. There are more casitas in this part of Buenos Aires than in the rest of Argentina. Even the cops go carefully around here. So you can imagine how I felt knowing my two teenage sisters were put to work there.” She shook her head bitterly. “This city is like something from the Last Judgment.”

  I lit another cigarette and let the smoke curl into my eyes. I wanted to punish them for looking into her cleavage when what I needed most was for them to do their job and keep looking her in the eye so that I might get a better fix on whether she was telling the truth. But I guess that’s how things like cleavages evolved in the first place. I shifted on my chair and looked at the room. Isabel Pekerman made Buenos Aires sound a lot like Berlin during the last days of the Weimar Republic. But to my cynical old eyes, nothing of what I’d seen here compared with the old German capital. The girls who were dancing were still wearing their clothes, and the men who were their partners were at least men, most of them, and not something in between. The band could carry a tune and there was no pretense to sophistication. I didn’t doubt what Isabel Pekerman had said. But whereas Berlin had flaunted its vice and corruption, Buenos Aires hid its appetite for depravity like an old priest sipping from a brandy bottle concealed in the pocket of a cassock.

  She took my hand, opened my palm, and looked closely at it. Running her forefinger over the various lines and mounds, she said, “According to your hand, we’re going to spend the night together, after all.”

  “Like I said, it’s been a hell of a day.”

  “It might look bad for me if you don’t,” she said, contradicting much of what had been said earlier on. “After all, you already paid for it. Blue Vincent will think I’m losing my touch.”

  “No, he won’t. Not if he’s got eyes in his head.”

  Putting her arms around me, she said, “No? Come on. It might be fun. It’s been ages since I slept with a man I really liked.”

  “Small world,” I said, and stood up to leave her.

  As things turned out, I should have stayed.

  19

  BUENOS AIRES, 1950

  THE NEXT MORNING I thought some more about what Isabel Pekerman had told me about Argentina’s white-slave traffic. I wondered if it might be connected with what Perón and Mengele were up to with young girls. None of it made much sense. I decided my brain needed a completely different kind of problem to work on. I had most of the morning before I had to go meet von Bader and the colonel, so after breakfast I went to the Richmond in search of a game of chess.

  Melville was there, and I played a Caro-Kann defense to a victory in just thirty-three moves that Bronstein would have been proud of. Afterward, I let him buy me a drink and we sat outside for a while and watched the world go by. Usually I paid no attention to the little Scotsman’s chatter. On this occasion, however, I found myself listening to him more closely.

  “That was quite a peach you brought in here the other week,” he observed, full of envy.

  “She is, isn’t she?” I said, assuming he was talking about Anna.

  “Much too tall for me, of course,” he said, laughing.

  Melville couldn’t have been more than five-feet-three. Red-haired, bearded, with a wicked gap-toothed grin, he looked like something kept to amuse the Spanish royal family.

  “Me, I need them much shorter,” he added. “And that generally means younger, too.”

  I felt my ears prick up at this admission. “How much younger?”

  “The age isn’t important,” he said. “Not for a short-arse like me. I have to take what I can get.”

 
“Yes, but there’s young and there’s too young, surely?”

  “Is there?” He laughed. “I dunno.”

  “Well, just how young is too young? You must have some idea.”

  He thought for a moment and then shrugged silently.

  “So what’s the youngest you’ve ever had?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I’m interested, that’s all. I mean, with some of these girls you meet these days, well, sometimes, it’s a little hard to tell how old they are.” I was hoping to draw him out on a subject Melville was already beginning to look evasive about. “The makeup they wear. The clothes. Some of them have experience way beyond their years. Back in Germany, for instance, I had a few close shaves, I can tell you. Of course I was a lot younger then myself. And Germany was Germany. Girls were naked in the clubs and naked in the parks. Before the Nazis, sun worship—naturism, they called it—it was all the rage. Like I say, that was Germany. Sex was our national pastime. Under the Weimar Republic, we were famous for it. But this. This is a Roman Catholic country. I’d have thought that things were a bit different here.”

  “Then you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you?” Melville uttered his manic gargoyle’s laugh. “To tell the truth, this country’s a paradise for perverts like me. It’s one of the reasons I live here. All the unripe fruit. You only have to reach up and pick it off the tree.”

  Again I felt my ears prick up. The Castilian phrase Melville used to describe young girls was fruta inmadura—the very same phrase the colonel had used to describe Perón’s similar predilection.

  “I don’t know about Germany,” said Melville. “I’ve not actually been there. But it would have to be pretty bloody good to beat the Argentine for lecheras.”

  “Lecheras?”

  “Milkmaids.”

  I nodded. “Is it true, what I’ve heard? That the general likes them pretty young himself?”

  Melville pursed his lips and looked evasive again.

  “Maybe that’s why you can get away with it,” I said.

  “You make it sound like a crime, Hausner.”