A Quiet Flame

“I want him to slay a dragon for me,” said Anna, with eyes widening. “In a manner of speaking.”

When dinner was over, we returned to the living room and found Skorzeny was gone, to everyone’s relief. A little after that, Mercedes went to bed, followed closely by her mother and then Anna, who mischievously blew me a kiss as she went up. I breathed a sigh of relief that we had managed to get through the evening without her shooting anyone. I said I needed some night air, and having taken one of the cigars offered me by my host, I went outside.

There’s nothing like staring at a night sky to make you feel a long way from home. Especially when that sky is in South America and home is in Germany. The sky above the Sierra was bigger than any I’d ever seen, which made me feel smaller than the smallest point of silvery light on that great black vault. Perhaps that was why it was there. To make us feel small. To stop us from thinking that any of us is at all important enough to be a member of a master race and nonsense like that.

After a moment, I heard a match scrape and, looking around, I saw Heinrich Grund lighting a cigarette. He stared up the heavens, took a deep drag on the cigarette, and said, “You’re a lucky fellow, Bernie. She’s really very lovely. And a bit of a handful, I imagine.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Do you ever think of that kid in Berlin? The crippled one who got herself murdered back in ’thirty-two? Anita Schwarz, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“And you remember the arguments we used to have? About her. Me saying it was all for the best that people like her died and you saying that mercy killing was wrong.” He shrugged. “Something like that, anyway. The fact is, Bernie, I really had no idea what I was talking about. No idea at all. It’s one thing saying it. But it’s quite another doing it.” He was silent for a while. Then he asked, “Do you think there’s a God, Bernie?”

“No. How could there be? If there was, you wouldn’t be here now. Neither of us would.”

Grund nodded. “I was glad when we lost the war,” he said. “I expect that surprises you. But I was glad it was all over. The killing, I mean. And when we came here, it seemed like a fresh start.” He shook his head sadly as if weighed down by something monumentally heavy. “Only it wasn’t.”

When he had been silent for almost a minute, I said, “Do you want to talk about it, Heinrich?”

He let out an unsteady, tremulous sort of breath and shook his head. “Words don’t help. They only seem to make it worse. For me, at any rate. I don’t have Kammler’s strength. His sense of absolute certainty.”

“I expect it helps having his family around,” I said, trying to change the subject. “How long have they been here?”

“I dunno. A few months, I suppose.” Grund clapped himself on the chest. “For him, Hitler still lives, in here. Always will, probably. For him and a lot of other Germans. But not me. Not anymore.”

There was nothing I could say to this. There was nothing I wanted to say. We had both made our choices and were living with the consequences of those, good or bad. I wasn’t sure I’d come off any better than Grund, but at least, thanks to Anna, I still had some hope for the future. Grund didn’t seem to have hope left in anything at all.

I left him on the terrace, with his thoughts and his fears and whatever else a man like him goes to bed with, impaled on the shards of his conscience.

Anna sat up in bed as I came through our bedroom door. The bedside light was on. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and started to unlace my shoes. I wanted to say something tender to her, but there was still something on her mind.

“Well?” she said. “Did you think of something? Some sort of punishment for that bastard Kammler?”

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”

“Something terrible?”

“Yes. I think it will be. For him.”

23 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

TWO DAYS LATER, we arrived back in Buenos Aires. Since it seemed unlikely that the colonel would have heard Kammler’s news—that his men had picked me up next to the secret camp at Dulce—with any equanimity, I told Anna I needed some time to straighten things out with him before we could count ourselves safe. For now, I told her, she should go home and stay indoors until I called her. Better still, she should go stay with a friend.

I had no way of knowing if Anna was likely to take my advice, since, for most of the journey back from Tucumán, she hadn’t really been speaking to me. She didn’t like my idea about what we were going to do about Hans Kammler. She didn’t think it was enough of a punishment, and told me that as far as she was concerned, our relationship was over.