A Quiet Flame

I could hardly have risked her disapproval again by telling her I didn’t believe in God any more than I had believed in Adolf Hitler. A Jew who was a Roman Catholic wasn’t someone who was likely to treat the matter of my atheism lightly. After what I’d just told her, I needed to win her favor back again. So I nodded and said, “Maybe I’ll do that.” And if there was a God, I figured He’d probably understand. After all, it’s easy to stop believing in God when you’ve stopped believing in anything else. When you’ve stopped believing in yourself.

21 TUCUMÁN, 1950

WE REACHED TUCUMÁN the following evening. Or just about. The train was late and it was almost midnight by the time it rumbled into the local station. The place looked better at night. Government House was lit up like a Christmas tree. Under the palm trees on the Plaza Independencia, couples were dancing the tango. Argentines seemed to need little or no excuse to tango. For all I knew, the dancers in the main square were really waiting for a bus. The station itself was full of children. None of them were interested in the submarine-shaped locomotive that was cooling down after our day-long journey. They wanted money. Kids were just like everyone else, in that respect. I shared out a handful of coins and then found us a taxi. I told the driver to take us to the Plaza.

“Why do you want to go there?” he asked.

“Because the last time I saw it, the Plaza was a hotel.”

“You should go to the Coventry. I could get you a rate there.”

“You and your brother, right?” I said, remembering the last time I’d been in Tucumán.

The driver laughed and looked around. “That’s right. You’d like my brother.”

“I’m sure I would. And I guess I couldn’t like him less than I liked the Coventry. Actually, I think they liked me there less than I liked them. Because I was covered in bites when I left. I don’t mind sharing my bed with anyone as long as they’ve got just two legs. When the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry in England, I figure they must have been thinking of the hotel here in Tucumán.”

We drove to the Plaza.

Like most good hotels in Argentina, it was trying to look like it was somewhere else. Madrid, probably. Or maybe London. There was the usual amount of oak panel on the walls and marble on the floors. I laid an arm on the front desk like I meant business and looked across at the clerk. He wore a dark suit that matched his mustache. His face and hair were shiny with the same stuff they used on the machinery of the little elevator cage that stood at right angles to the desk. He bobbed his head at me and showed me some teeth that were heavily stained with tobacco.

“We’d like a large room,” I told him. It sounded better than asking for a large bed, but that was what we really wanted. “With a bath. And what passes for a view in this city.”

“And not noisy, either,” Anna added. “We don’t like noise except when we make it ourselves.”

“There’s our bridal suite,” he said, firing a hungry-looking glance at Anna.

I was feeling kind of hungry myself. The clerk offered to show it to us. Anna asked to see the rate instead. Then she offered to pay about half of what he was asking, in cash. This would never have worked in Germany. But in Tucumán it was normal. In Tucumán, they haggled with the priest when he gave them a penance. Ten minutes later, we were in the room.

The bridal suite was adequate. There was a pair of French windows that opened onto a balcony with a view of the high Sierra and a strong smell of orange blossom that made a pleasant change from horses. There was a big bathroom with a view of the rest of the suite and a strong smell of soap that made a pleasant change from drains. Most important of all, there was a bed. The bed was the size of Mato Grosso. Before long, it had a view of Anna’s naked body and a strong smell of her perfume, which made a pleasant change from my own bachelor smell. We made a night of it. Every time I woke, I reached for her. And every time she woke, she reached for me. We certainly didn’t sleep very much. The bed was too hard for sleep, which was just fine by me. I certainly had not expected to enjoy Tucumán half as much as I did.

When morning finally came, I took a cold bath, which helped me wake up. Then I ordered us some breakfast. We were still eating it when Pedro Geller called up and said he was waiting for me downstairs in the hotel lobby. I met him alone. The fewer people knew about Anna’s involvement the better, I told myself. Geller and I went outside, to the spot where he’d left the jeep.