A Quiet Flame

Maybe she meant that. And maybe she didn’t. There was no time to make sure. I was coming out of the Richmond when they picked me up a second time. It might have been the same three men, only it was a little hard to tell, with the dark glasses and the matching mustaches. The car was another black Ford sedan, but not the same one that had driven me to Caseros. This car had a cigarette burn on the rear seat and a large bloodstain on the carpet. Or it might have been coffee. It might have been molasses. But over the years, you get to recognize a bloodstain when you see one on a car floor. I tried to keep calm but this time it wasn’t working. Only I wasn’t worried for myself as much as I was worried for Anna.

This was the moment I realized I was in love with her. That’s usually the way, of course. It’s only when you have something taken away that you realize how important it was to you. I was worried about her because, after all, I’d been warned, and in no uncertain terms. Naturally, the colonel would have guessed what I was up to when Kammler telephoned him. That I was sticking my nose into Argentina’s biggest secret. Not the Pulqui II jet-fighter aircraft, not even an atom bomb, but the fate of several thousand illegal Jewish refugees. The puzzle was why the colonel hadn’t just told Kammler to kill us both. I guessed I was about to find out. Only this time we sped past Caseros.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” growled one of my chaperones.

“Mystery tour, huh? I like surprises.”

“You won’t like this one,” he said ominously. And the other two laughed.

“You know, I’ve been trying to get in touch with your boss, Colonel Montalbán. I called him several times last night. I need to speak with him very urgently. I have some important information for him. Will he be where we’re going?” I glanced out of the window and saw that we were driving southwest. “I know he’ll want to speak to me.”

I nodded, almost as if trying to convince myself of this. But struggling for the right Spanish vocabulary to find something else that would convince them of my need to see the colonel, I found myself unable to say anything much at all. There was a hole in the pit of my stomach the size of the football stadium at La Boca. My greatest worry was that this metaphorical hole might soon become a real one.

“Anyone got a Spanish dictionary?” I asked. No one answered. “How about a cigarette?”

One of the thugs sandwiching me shifted on his backside, squeezing me for a moment as he reached for a packet of smokes. I caught the smell of sweat on his jacket and the oil in his hair and saw a little blackjack poking out of his breast pocket. I hoped it was going to stay there. I’d been blackjacked before and I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. He turned back with the packet in his hands and pushed open the little cardboard drawer. My fingers reached for one. The cigarettes looked like little white heads tucked up in bed, which was where I wished I was now. I put the cigarette in my mouth and waited while he found his lighter.