A Quiet Flame

I took another good look at the map and told myself Colonel Montalbán would have been disappointed in me: I really wasn’t much of a detective. Who would ever have thought that Melville—the bore in the Richmond bar—might turn out to hold the key to the whole case? I was almost amused at the accidental way I had managed to obtain the clue to what Directive 12 was, and where it had been implemented. But Melville was wrong about one thing. Directive 12 had nothing to do with a secret nuclear facility, and everything to do with the empty file from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Anna and I had found in the old Hotel de Inmigrantes. I was certain of that.

20 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I TELEPHONED ANNA and told her to meet me for lunch at around two o’clock, at the Shorthorn Grill on Corrientes. Then I drove to the house in Arenales, where von Bader and the colonel were waiting for me. After what Isabel Pekerman had told me at the Club Seguro, I knew I was probably wasting my time, but I wanted to see how the two of them behaved without her. And how their story would sound in the light of what I now knew. Not that I knew anything very much for sure. That would have been too much to expect. I supposed that von Bader was planning to go to Switzerland and that Evita wasn’t about to let him go until the real baroness produced Fabienne.

There were a number of reasons why the real baroness might have disappeared with Evita’s daughter. Always supposing that Fabienne really was Evita’s daughter. Some of it was to do with the Reichsbank’s accounts in Zurich, but I couldn’t see how exactly. The bottom line of it was that I’d been led in a merry dance by Colonel Montalbán. I knew what his motives were for having me reopen a twenty-year-old murder investigation. He’d explained these to me quite clearly. But the only possible explanation for his not telling me that Fabienne had gone into hiding with her mother was that he knew for sure that they were hiding out with one of the old comrades. In any event, he had a reason for arranging the charade involving Isabel Pekerman. The colonel wasn’t the kind of man who did anything without a good reason.

“Won’t your wife be joining us?” I asked von Bader as he closed the door of the drawing room behind us.

“I’m afraid not,” he answered coolly. “She’s at our weekend house, in Pilar. I’m afraid this has all been a dreadful strain for her.”

“I’m sure it must have been,” I said. “Still. That makes it easier, I suppose.” Seeing his blank face, I added, “To talk about Fabienne’s real mother with you now.” I let him squirm for a moment and then said, “The president’s wife told me all about it.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, it does.”

“She said your daughter overheard the two of you arguing, and then ran away.”

“Yes. I’m sorry I had to mislead you a little, Herr Gunther,” said von Bader. He was wearing a different suit but the same look of easy affluence. His gray hair had been trimmed since last we’d met. His fingernails were shorter, too, but bitten rather than manicured. And bitten down to the quick. “But I was, still am, very worried that something might have happened to her.”

“Is Fabienne close to her stepmother, would you say?”

“Yes. Very. I mean she treats my wife like she’s her real mother. And to everyone who knows us, that’s the way it’s always been. Evita has had very little to do with her daughter until comparatively recently.”

I looked at Colonel Montalbán. “What made you think she might have chosen to hide out with a German family? And in case you didn’t recognize it, Colonel, that’s a straight question of the kind that deserves a straight answer.”

“I think I can answer that, Herr Gunther,” said von Bader. “Fabienne is a very sophisticated little girl. She knows a great deal about the war and what went on and how it is that so many Germans such as yourself have chosen to live here in Argentina. You might even say that Fabienne was a National Socialist. She herself would say that she was. My wife and I sometimes argued about that.

“The reason the colonel wanted you to search among our old comrades here in Argentina is really quite simple. Because it was Fabienne herself who had suggested she might run away and seek sanctuary with one of them. She was often threatening it after the discovery that Evita was her real mother. Fabienne could be cruel like that. She said who better to hide her than one who was himself in hiding. I know this seems a strange thing for a father to say about his own daughter, but Fabienne is a very charismatic sort of girl. Her photographs don’t do her justice. She is quintessentially Aryan and, among those who have met her, there is general consensus that the Führer himself would have been captivated by her. If you ever saw Leni Riefenstahl in The Blue Light, Herr Gunther, you’ll know the sort of thing.”

I’d seen the picture. An Alpine picture, they called it. The Alps had been the best thing in it.