A Quiet Flame (38 page)

I followed the colonel into the room beyond. Here, there was a long mahogany table against one wall. On it were three telephones and four vases of calla lilies. There was a gold-silk-covered sofa and three matching chairs, and four secretaries holding pads and pencils, or a telephone, or an envelope full of money. Evita herself stood next to the window, which was open to let out some of the smell of unwashed bodies. This was more noticeable than in the big antechamber, because it was a smaller room.

She was wearing a dove-gray robe-style dress with a tied waist. On her lapel was a brooch made of small sapphires and diamonds in the shape and colors of the Argentine national flag. I reflected it was probably fortunate that she wasn’t the wife of the president of Germany: there’s not much a jeweler can do with black, yellow, and red. On the ring finger of her left hand was a sea-anemone-sized diamond ring, with its brother and sister on her little ears. On her head was a rubystudded gray silk beret that was more Lucrezia Borgia than Holy Mother. She didn’t look particularly ill. Not nearly as ill as the skeletal woman and the skeletal child who were each kissing one of Evita’s ungloved hands. Evita handed the woman a folded wad of fifty-peso notes. If Otto Skorzeny was right, some Nazi loot had just found its way into the deserving hands of the Argentine poor, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. As a means of preventing the democratic overthrow of a government, this touching scene lacked the symbolism of setting fire to parliament, but on the surface, it looked every bit as effective. The apostles themselves could not have handled this kind of charity with any greater efficiency.

A photographer from a Perónist newspaper took a picture of the scene. And it seemed unlikely he would leave out of the frame the enormous painting of Christ washing the feet of his disciples that was behind Evita’s shoulder. Out of the corner of his blue eye, the carpenter seemed to be regarding his pupil and her good works with some approval. This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased. Don’t vote for anyone else.

Evita caught the colonel’s eye. Still full of effusive thanks, the skeletal woman and child were led outside. Evita turned smartly on her heel and went through a door at the back of the room. The colonel and I went after her. She closed the door behind us. We were in a room with a hand basin, a dressing table, a rail of clothes, and only one chair. Evita took it. Among the makeup and the many bottles of perfume and hairspray was a photograph of Perón. She picked it up and kissed it, which made me think that Otto Skorzeny was fooling himself if he thought this woman would ever risk having an affair with a scar-faced thug like him.

“Very impressive,” I said, jerking my head at the door behind me.

She sighed and shook her head. “It is nothing. Not nearly enough. We try, but the poor are always with us.”

I’d heard this somewhere before.

“All the same, your work must give you a lot of satisfaction.”

“Some, but I take no pride in it. I am nothing. A
grasa.
A common person. The work is its own reward. Besides, none of what I give is from me. It all belongs to Perón. He is the true saint, not me. You see, I don’t regard this as charity. Charity humiliates. What happens out there is social aid. A welfare state. Nothing more, nothing less. I handle its dispensation personally because I know what it’s like to be at the mercy of bureaucracy in this country. And I don’t trust anyone else to do it. There is too much corruption in our public institutions.” She tried to stifle a yawn. “So I come here, every night, and I do it myself. Especially important to me are the unmarried mothers of Argentina. Can you imagine why, Señor Gunther?”

I could easily imagine one reason why, but I hardly wanted to risk my new benefactor’s displeasure by mentioning her own husband’s efforts to procure abortions for all the underage girls he was having sex with. So I smiled patiently and shook my head.

“Because I was one myself. Before I met Perón. I was an actress then. I was not the
putita
my enemies like to paint me as. But, in 1936, when I was plain Eva Duarte and working in radio soap opera, I met a man and gave birth to his child. That man’s name was Kurt von Bader. That’s right,
señor.
Fabienne von Bader is my daughter.”

I glanced the colonel’s way. He nodded back at me by way of corroboration.

“When Fabienne was born, Kurt, who was married, agreed to bring her up. His wife could not have a child of her own. And at the time, I thought I would have more children myself. Sadly, for the president and myself both love children, that has not proved to be possible. Fabienne is my only child. And, as such, very precious to me.

“At first, Kurt and his wife were very generous and allowed me to see Fabienne whenever I wanted to, on condition that she was never told I was her real mother. More recently, however, all of that changed. Kurt von Bader is one of the custodians of a large sum of money deposited in Switzerland by the former government of Germany. It is my desire to use some of that money to help lift the poor out of their poverty. Not just here, in Argentina, but throughout the Roman Catholic world. Von Bader, who still entertains some hope of restoring a Nazi government in Germany, disagreed. He and I quarreled, violently. Much was said. Too much. Fabienne must have heard some of it and learned the truth about her origins. Soon after that, she ran away from home.”

Evita sighed and sat back in her chair, as if the effort of telling me all of this had been a strain. “There,” she said. “I have told you everything. Are you shocked, Herr Gunther?”

“No, ma’am. Not shocked. A little surprised, perhaps. And maybe a bit puzzled as to why you should choose to confide in me.”

“I want you to find her, of course. Is that so hard to understand?”

“No, not at all. But when you have a whole police force at your disposal, ma’am, it’s a little hard to understand why you should expect me to succeed where they have—”

“Failed,” she said, hearing me hesitate to complete the sentence. “Isn’t that right, Colonel? Your men have failed me, have they not?”

“So far we are without success,
señora
,” said the colonel.

“You hear that?” said Evita. She puffed out her cheeks in a scornful laugh. “He can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘failure.’ But that is what it amounts to. You, on the other hand. You are someone who has experience looking for missing persons, yes?”

“Some experience, yes. But in my own country.”

“Yes, you are a German. Like my daughter, who has been brought up as a German-Argentine.
Castellano
is her second language. Already you move easily among these people. And I am convinced that is where you will find her. Find her. Find my daughter. If you succeed, I will pay you fifty thousand dollars in cash.” She nodded with a smile. “Yes, I thought that would make your ears move.” Evita lifted her hand, as if taking an oath. “I’m no
chupacirios,
but I solemnly swear by the Holy Virgin that if you find her, the money is yours.”

The door opened briefly to admit one of her dogs. Evita greeted her as “Canela,” picked her up, and kissed her like a favorite child. “Well?” she asked me. “What do you say, German?”

“I’ll do my best, ma’am,” I said. “But I can’t promise anything. Not even for fifty thousand dollars. But I will do my best.”

“Yes. Yes, that is a good answer.” Once again, she looked accusingly at Colonel Montalbán. “You hear? He doesn’t say he will find her. He says he will try his best.” She nodded at me. “It’s said throughout the world that I am a selfish and ambitious woman. But this isn’t the case.”

She put down the dog and took my hand in hers. Her hands were cold, like those of a corpse. Her red fingernails were long and beautifully manicured, like the petals from some petrified flower. They were small hands but, oddly, full of power, as if in her veins was some strange electricity. It was the same with her eyes, which held me for a moment in their watery gaze. The effect was remarkable, and I was reminded of how people had once described the experience of meeting Hitler and how they had said there was something about his eyes, too. Then, without warning, she opened the front of her dress and placed my hand between her breasts, so that my palm was directly over her heart.

“I want you to feel this,” she said urgently. “I want you to feel the heart of an ordinary Argentine woman. And to know that everything I do, I do for the highest motives. Do you feel it, German? Do you feel Evita’s heart? Do you feel the truth of what I’m telling you?”

I wasn’t sure I felt anything very much other than the swell of her breasts on either side of my fingers and the cool silkiness of her perfumed flesh. I knew I had to move my hand only an inch or two to cup the whole bosom and to feel the nipple rubbing against the heel of my thumb. But of her heartbeat there was no sign. Instinctively, she pressed my hand harder against her breastbone.

“Do you feel it?” she asked insistently.

Her gaze was tearful now. And it was easy to see how she had once been such a success as an actress on the radio. The woman was the personification of high emotion and melodrama. If she’d been the Duport cello, she couldn’t have been more highly strung. It was a risk letting her go on. She might have burst into flames, levitated, or turned into a saucerful of ghee. I was getting a little excited myself. It’s not every day that the president’s wife forces your hand inside her brassiere. I decided to tell her what she wanted to hear. I was good at that. I’d had a lot of other women to practice on.

“Yes, Señora Perón, I can feel it,” I said, trying to keep the erection out of my voice.

She let go of my hand and, to my relief, she seemed to relax a little. Then she smiled and said, “Whenever you are ready, you can take your hand off my bosom, German.”

For a split second, I let it stay there. Long enough to meet her eye and let her know I liked my hand being just where it was. And then I took it away. I considered kissing my fingers, or maybe just smelling the perfume that was on them now, only that would have made me as melodramatic as she. So I put the hand in my pocket, saving it for later, like a choice cigar or a dirty postcard.

She adjusted her dress and then opened a drawer, from which she took out a photograph and handed it to me. It was the same photograph Kurt von Bader had given me. The reward he had mentioned was the same amount. I wondered whether, if I did manage to find Fabienne, each would pay or just one. Or neither. Neither seemed more likely. Usually when you found a missing child, the parents got angry, first with the child and then with you. Not that any of this seemed particularly relevant. They were asking me to look for her because they’d tried everything else. Since that had already failed, I figured I had next to no chance of turning up a lead on the kid. To succeed, I would have to think of something that hadn’t been thought of, which wasn’t a good bet on anyone’s
quinella.
Probably the kid was in Uruguay, or dead, and if she wasn’t, then there had to be an adult who was helping her stay below the radar.

“Do you think you can find her?” asked Evita.

“I was kind of wondering that myself,” I said. “Perhaps I might, if I had all the facts.”

“Forgive me, but isn’t that a detective’s job? To work without all the facts. I mean, if we had all the facts, then we could probably find her ourselves. We wouldn’t need you, German. And we certainly wouldn’t be offering a reward of fifty thousand dollars.”

She had a point, of course. Melodramatic she might have been. Stupid she wasn’t.

“What makes you think she’s still in the country?” I asked. “Could be she just got on the riverboat to Montevideo. Twenty-nine dollars. End of story.”

“For one thing,” said Evita, “I’m married to the president of Argentina. So, I know that she doesn’t have a passport. And even if she did have a passport, she doesn’t have a visa. We know because my husband asked Luis Berres. He’s the president of Uruguay. And before you ask, he also asked Presidents Videla, Chaves, and Odría.”

“Perhaps if I spoke to her parents again,” I said. Correcting myself, I added, “I mean to her father and her stepmother.”

“If you think it would do any good,” said Montalbán.

I didn’t. But I hardly knew what else to suggest. All of it was a dead end. I’d known that the first time I’d met von Bader. From everything I’d heard, his daughter and whomever she was with didn’t want to be found. For a detective, when people don’t want to be found, it’s like looking for the meaning of life. You’re not even sure that it exists. I hated taking on a job that promised so little chance of success. And normally, I might have turned it down. But normal didn’t even get to peek through the spy hole of this particular situation. Eva Perón wasn’t the kind of president’s wife you refused. Especially not soon after my trip to Caseros.

“Well?” she asked. “How will you go about it?”

I put a cigarette in my face and lit it. I didn’t want a cigarette, but it gave me time to think of something to say. Colonel Montalbán cleared his throat. It sounded like a lifebelt hitting the water above my head.

“As soon as we have something to report, we’ll be in touch, ma’am.”

When we were on the stairs outside the antechamber, I thanked him.

“For what?”

“For coming to my aid back there. That question she asked.”

“ ‘How will you go about it?’ ”

“That’s right.”

“And how
will
you go about it?” He grinned amiably and took a light off my cigarette.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll go and look for inspiration, probably. Stick a gun in its face. Slap it around a bit. See what happens. The forensic, judicial approach. On the other hand, I might just have to hope that I get lucky. That usually works for me. I may not look like it, Colonel, but I’m quite a lucky guy. This morning I was in prison. Five minutes ago, I had my hand inside the cleavage of the wife of the president of Argentina. Believe me, for a German that’s as lucky as luck can buy you these days.”