A Quiet Flame

“The last time I looked, Herr Allgeier, Germany still has a system of criminal justice in which people are brought before the courts, tried, and, if found guilty, serve a prison sentence. After they’ve paid their debt to society, we let them go.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t let them go at all,” he said. “It might be best for the German people if these so-called known offenders were put back in prison as quickly as possible. Then this kind of lust murder might never happen.”

“Maybe. That’s not for me to say. But where do you get off thinking that someone like you can speak for the German people, Allgeier? You used to be a jack, in Moabit. A backstreet turk working the three-card trick. The German people might equally demand to know how you turned into a journalist.”

Several of the non-Nazi newspaper reporters thought this was very funny. I might have got away with it, too, if I’d left it there. But I didn’t. I was warming to my subject.

Germany had always had the death penalty for murder, but for several years, the newspapers—the non-Nazi newspapers—had waged a vigorous campaign against the guillotine. Lately, however, these same papers had bowed to Nazi influence and refrained from writing editorials urging the commutation of a murderer’s sentence. With the result that the state executioner, Johann Reichhart, was working once again. His most recent victim had been the mass murderer and cannibal Georg Haarmann. A lot of cops, myself included, didn’t much like the guillotine. More so since the senior investigating officer was called upon to attend the executions of murderers he had arrested.

“The plain fact of the matter is that we’ve always relied on known offenders to give us information,” I said. “There were even murderers serving sentences in prison who were once prepared to help us. Of course that was before we started executing them again. It’s hard to persuade a man to talk to you when you’ve chopped his head off.”

Weiss stood up and, smiling patiently, announced that the conference was over. On our way out, he said nothing. Just smiled sadly at me. Which was worse than a lashing from his tongue. Gennat said, “Nice work, Bernie. They’ll eat your eggs, son.”

“Just the fascist newspapers, surely.”

“All newspapers are fundamentally fascist, Bernie. In every country. All editors are dictators. All journalism is authoritarian. That’s why people line birdcages with it.”

Gennat was right, of course. He usually was. Only Berlin’s evening newspaper Tempo gave me a good press. It used a picture of me that looked like Luis Trenker in The Holy Mountain. Manfred George, Tempo’s editor, wrote a piece in which he described me as one of Berlin’s “finest detectives.” Maybe they liked my new tie. The rest of the republican papers were like a cat creeping around the milk: they didn’t dare say what they really thought for fear that their readers might not agree with them. I didn’t read Der Angriff. What was the point? But Hans Joachim Brandt in the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter referred to me as “a liberal, left-wing stooge.” Probably the truth lay halfway between the two.

7 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

THE VON BADERS LIVED in the residential part of the Barrio Norte, which is castellano for “people with money.” The Calle Florida, the commercial heart of the Barrio Norte, seemed to have come into being in order to make sure that people with money would not have to go too far out of their way to spend it. The house on Arenales was built in the best eighteenth-century French style. It looked more like a grand hotel than somewhere anyone could have called home. The façade was all relief Ionic columns and tall windows: even the air-conditioning units seemed elegant and in keeping with the urban Bourbon look. Inside, things were no less formally French, with high ceilings and pilasters, marble fireplaces, gilt mirrors, lots of eighteenth-century furniture, and expensive-looking art.

The von Baders and their small dog received the colonel and me sitting on an overstuffed red sofa. She was sitting in one corner of the sofa and he was sitting in the other. They were wearing their best clothes but in a way that left me thinking that they might wear the same clothes to do some gardening, always supposing they knew where the secateurs and the trowels were kept. The way they sat there, I wanted to take hold of the baroness’s chin and move her head slightly toward her husband before picking up my brushes and getting started on their portrait. She was statuesque and beautiful, with good skin and perfect teeth and hair like spun gold and a neck like Queen Nefertiti’s taller sister. He was just thin with glasses, and unlike me, the dog seemed to prefer him to her. She was holding a handkerchief and looked as though she had been crying. The way anxious mothers are supposed to look. He was holding a cigarillo and looked like he’d been making money. Rather a lot of it.