A Quiet Flame (25 page)

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 chuckled.

“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.

“You mean the Nazi?” asked the baker.

Geller looked at me and grinned. “That’s him,” he said.

With a finger that was all knuckle and dirty nail, as if it belonged to an orangutan that was studying witchcraft, the baker pointed down the track, past a small auto-repair shop, to a two-story blockhouse with no visible windows. “He lives at the villa.”

We drove a short distance and pulled up between a line of washing and an outhouse, from which Eichmann emerged hurriedly, carrying a newspaper and buttoning his trousers. He was followed by a strong cloacal smell. It was evident he had been alarmed by the sound of the jeep, and the obvious relief he felt that we were not the Argentine military come to arrest and hand him over to a war-crimes tribunal quickly gave way to irritation.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, his lip curling in a way I now regarded as quite characteristic. It was strange, I thought, how one side of his face appeared to be quite normal, even pleasant, while the other side looked twisted and malevolent. It was like meeting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same moment.

“I was in Tucumán, so I thought I’d come and see how you are,” I said affably. I opened my bag and took out a carton of Senior Service. “I brought you some cigarettes. They’re English but I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

Eichmann grunted a thank-you and took the carton. “You’d better come into the villa,” he said grudgingly.

He pushed open a very tall wooden door that was in need of several licks of green paint, and we stepped inside. From the outside, things did not augur well. Calling that blockhouse a villa was a bit like calling a child’s sandcastle the Schloss Neuschwanstein. Inside, though, things were better. There was some plasterwork on top of the brickwork. The floors were level and covered with flagstones and some cheap Indian rugs. But the small barred windows gave the place a suitably penal atmosphere. Eichmann might have evaded Allied justice, but he was hardly living a life of luxury. A half-naked woman peered out from behind a door. Angrily, Eichmann jerked his head at her and she disappeared again.

I walked over to one of the windows and looked out at a largish, well-planted garden. There were some hutches containing several rabbits he must have kept for meat and beyond, an old black DeSoto with three wheels. A quick getaway did not seem to be on Eichmann’s mind.

He collected a large kettle off a cast-iron range and poured hot water into two hollow gourds.
“¿Mate?”
he asked us.

“Please,” I said. Since coming to Argentina, I hadn’t tasted the stuff. But everyone in the country drank it.

He put little metal straws in the gourds and then handed them to us.

There was sugar in it, but it still tasted bitter, like green tea with a froth on it. Akin to drinking water with a cigarette in it, I thought. But Geller seemed to like the stuff. And so did Eichmann. As soon as Geller had finished his gourd, he handed it over to our host, who added some more hot water and, without changing the straw, drank some himself.

“So what brings you all the way out here?” he said. “It can’t just be a social call.”

“I’m working for the SIDE,” I said. “The Perónist Intelligence Service?”

His eyelid flickered like an almost spent lightbulb. He tried not to let it show, but we all knew what he was thinking. Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel and close confidant of Reinhard Heydrich, had been reduced to performing hydrological surveys on the other side of nowhere, while I enjoyed a position of some power and influence in a field Eichmann might have considered his own. Gunther, the reluctant SS man and political adversary possessed of the very job that he, Eichmann, should have had. He said nothing. He took a shot at a smile. It looked more like something had got stuck under his bridge.

“I’m supposed to decide which of our old comrades is worthy of a good-conduct pass,” I said. “You need one to be able to apply for a passport in this country.”

“I should have expected that loyalty to your blood and your oath as an SS man would oblige you to treat the issue of any such documentation as a mere formality.” He spoke stiffly. Softening somewhat, he added, “After all, we’re all sitting on the same inkblot, are we not?” He finished the
mate
noisily, like a child sucking up the very last drop of a fizzy drink.

“On the face of it, that’s true,” I said. “However, the Perónist government is already under considerable pressure from the Americans—”

“From the Jews, more like,” he said.

“—to clean up its backyard. While there’s no question that any of us are about to be shown the door, nevertheless there are a few people in government who worry that some of us may be guilty of greater crimes than was originally suspected.” I shrugged and looked at Geller. “I mean, it’s one thing to kill men in the heat of battle. And it’s another to take pleasure in the murders of innocent women and children. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Eichmann shrugged. “I don’t know about innocent,” he said. “We were exterminating an enemy. Speaking for myself, I didn’t hate the Jews so much. But I don’t regret anything I did. I never committed any crimes. And I never killed anyone. Not even in the heat of battle, as you put it. I was little more than a civil servant. A bureaucrat who only obeyed orders. That was the code we all lived by in the SS. Obedience. Discipline. Blood and honor. If I have any regrets at all, it is that there wasn’t time to finish the job. To kill every Jew in Europe.”

This was the first time I had ever heard Eichmann speak about the Jewish extermination. And wanting to hear more, I tried to lead him on.

“I’m glad you mentioned blood and honor,” I said. “Because it seems to me that there were a few who dragged the reputation of the SS down into the dirt.”

“Quite,” said Geller.

“A few who exceeded their orders. Who killed for sport and pleasure. Who carried out inhumane medical experiments.”

“A lot of that has been exaggerated by the Russians,” insisted Eichmann. “Lies told by the Communists to justify their own crimes in Germany. To stop the rest of the world from feeling sorry for Germany. To give the Soviets carte blanche to do whatever they like with the German people.”

“It wasn’t all lies,” I said. “I’m afraid a lot of it was true, Ricardo. And even if you don’t believe it, the possibility that some of it might be true is what worries the government now. Which is why I’ve been charged to conduct this investigation. Look, Ricardo, I’m not after you. But I’m afraid I can’t regard some SS as old comrades.”

“We were at war,” said Eichmann. “We were killing an enemy who wanted to kill us. That can get pretty brutal. At a certain level, the human costs are immaterial. What mattered most was making sure that the job got done. Trouble-free deportations. That was my specialty. And believe me, I tried to make things as humane as I could. Gas was seen as the humane alternative to mass shootings. Yes, there were some, perhaps, who went too far, but look here, there’s always some bad barley in the beer. That’s inevitable in any organization. Especially one that achieved what was achieved. And during a war, too. Five million. Can you credit the scale of it? No, I don’t think you can. Either of you. Five million Jews. Liquidated in less than two years. And you’re quibbling about the morality of a few bad apples.”

“Not me,” I said. “The Argentine government.”

“What? You want a name, is that it? In return for my good-conduct pass? You want me to play Judas for you?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes.”

“I never liked you, Gunther,” said Eichmann, his nose wrinkled with distaste. He tore open the carton of cigarettes and then lit one, with the air of a man who hadn’t had a decent smoke in a long while. Then he sat down at a plain wooden table and studied the smoke from the tip, as if trying to divine guidance from the gods about what to say next.

“But perhaps there is such a man as you describe,” he said carefully. “Only I want your word that you won’t ever tell him that it was I who informed on him.”

“You have my word on it.”

“This man, he and I met by chance at a café in the center of Buenos Aires. Not long after we arrived. The ABC café. He told me he’s done very well for himself since he came here. Very well indeed.” Eichmann smiled thinly. “He offered me money. Me. A colonel in the SS, and him a mere captain. Can you imagine it? Patronizing bastard. Him, with all his connections and his family money. Living in the lap of luxury. And me, buried here, in this godforsaken hole.” Eichmann took a near-lethal drag at his cigarette, swallowed, and then shook his head. “He was a cruel man. Still is. I don’t know how he sleeps. I couldn’t. Not in his skin. I saw what he did. Once. A long time ago. It seems so long ago that I must have been a child when it happened. Well, perhaps I was, in a way. But I’ve never forgotten it. No one could. No one human. I first met him in 1942. In Berlin. How I miss Berlin. And then again in 1943. At Auschwitz.” He grinned bitterly. “I don’t miss that place at all.”

“This captain,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“He calls himself Gregor. Helmut Gregor.”

BERLIN, 1932

I
GOT OFF THE TRAIN from Berlin, walked to the end of the platform, handed over my ticket, and then looked around for Paul Herzefelde. There was no sign of him. So I bought some cigarettes and a newspaper and parked myself on a seat near my arrival platform to wait for him. I didn’t spend long with the paper. The election was only two weeks away, and this being Munich, the paper was full of stuff about how the Nazis were going to win. So was the station. Hitler’s stern, disapproving face was everywhere. After thirty minutes, I couldn’t take it any longer. I put the paper in the bin and went out into the fresh air.