A Quiet Flame

SEVERAL WEEKS PASSED. I got my cédula and moved out of the safe house on Calle Monasterio into a nice little hotel called the San Martín, in the Florida district. The place was owned and managed by an English couple, the Lloyds, who treated me with such courtesy that it was hard to believe our two countries had ever been at war. It’s only after a war that you actually find out how much you have in common with your enemies. I discovered the English were just like us Germans, with one major advantage: they were not German.

The San Martín was full of Old World charm, with glass cupolas and comfortable furniture, and good home cooking if you enjoyed steak and chips. It was just around the corner from the more expensive Richmond Hotel, which had a café I liked enough to make it a regular port of call.

The Richmond was a clubby sort of place. There was a long room with wood panels and pillars and mirrored ceilings and English hunting prints and leather armchairs. A small orchestra played tangos and Mozart and, for all I knew, a few Mozart tangos. The smoke-filled basement was a home to men playing billiards, men playing dominoes, and, most important of all, men playing chess. Women were not welcome in the basement at the Richmond. Argentine men took women very seriously. Too seriously to have them around while they were playing billiards or chess. Either that or Argentine women were just very good at billiards and chess.

Back in Berlin, during the dog days of the Weimar Republic, I’d been a regular chess player at the Romanisches Café. Once or twice I had even had a lesson from the great Lasker, who was a regular there, too. It hadn’t made me a better player, just better able to appreciate being beaten by someone as good as Lasker.

It was in the Richmond basement that Colonel Montalbán found me, locked in an end game with a diminutive, rat-faced Scotsman called Melville. I might have forced a draw if I’d had the patience of a Philidor. But then Philidor never had to play chess under the eye of the secret police. Although he almost did. Luckily for Philidor, he was in England when the French Revolution took place. Wisely, he never went back. There are more important things to lose than a game of chess. Like your head. Colonel Montalbán didn’t have the cold eye of a Robespierre, but I felt it on me all the same. And instead of asking myself how I was going to exploit my extra pawn to best advantage, I started asking myself what the colonel could want with me. After that it was just a matter of time before I lost. I didn’t mind losing to the rat-faced Scotsman. He’d beaten me before. What I minded was the free tip that accompanied the clammy handshake.

“You should always put the rook behind the pawn,” he said in his lisping European Spanish, which sounds and smells very different from Latin American Spanish. “Except, of course, when it is the incorrect thing to do.”

If Melville had been Lasker, I would have welcomed the advice. But he was Melville, a barbed-wire sales agent from Glasgow, with bad breath and an unhealthy interest in young girls.

Montalbán followed me upstairs. “You play a good game,” he said.

“I do all right. At least I do until the cops turn up. It takes the edge off my concentration.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. I like you being sorry. It’s a load off my mind.”

“We’re not like that in Argentina,” he said. “It’s all right to criticize the government.”

“That’s not the way I heard it. And if you ask from whom, you’ll just prove me right.”

Colonel Montalbán shrugged and lit a cigarette. “There’s criticism and there’s criticism,” he said. “It’s my job to know the subtle difference.”

“I should think that’s easy enough when you have your oyentes?” The oyentes were the people porteños called Perón’s spies—people who eavesdropped on conversations in bars, on buses, and even on the telephone.

The colonel raised his eyebrows. “So, you already know about the oyentes. I’m impressed. Not that I should be, I suppose. Not from a famous Berlin detective like yourself.”

“I’m an exile, Colonel. It pays to keep your mouth shut and your ears open.”

“And what is it that you hear?”

“I did hear the one about the two river rats, one from Argentina and the other from Uruguay. The rat from Uruguay was starving, so it swam across the River Plate in the hope that it might find something to eat. Halfway across, it met an Argentine rat swimming in the opposite direction. The Uruguayan rat was surprised and asked why such a well-fed-looking rat was going to Uruguay when there was so much to eat in Argentina. And the Argentine rat told him—”

“ ‘I just want to squeak now and then.’ ” Colonel Montalbán smiled wearily. “It’s an old joke.”