A Quiet Flame

BUENOS AIRES LOOKED and smelled like any European capital city before the war. As we drove through the busy streets, I wound down the window and took a deep, euphoric breath of exhaust fumes, cigar smoke, coffee, expensive cologne, cooked meat, fresh fruit, flowers, and money. It was like returning to earth after a journey into space. Germany, with its rationing and war damage and guilt and Allied tribunals, seemed a million miles away. In Buenos Aires there was lots of traffic because there was lots of petrol. The carefree people were well dressed and well fed, because the shops were full of clothes and food. Far from being a remote backwater, Buenos Aires was almost a Belle Époque throwback. Almost.

The safe house was at Calle Monasterio 1429 in the Florida district. Fuldner said Florida was the smartest part of Buenos Aires, but you wouldn’t have known it from the inside of the safe house. The outside was shielded by a carapace of overgrown pine trees, and it was called a safe house probably because, from the street, you wouldn’t have known it was there at all. Inside, you knew it was there but wished it weren’t. The kitchen was rustic. The ceiling fans were just rusty. The wallpaper in all the rooms was yellow, although not by design, and the furniture looked as if it was trying to return to nature. Poisonous, half decayed, vaguely fungal, it was the kind of house that belonged in a bottle of formaldehyde.

I was shown to a bedroom with a broken shutter, a threadbare rug, and a brass bed with a mattress as thin as a slice of rye bread and about as comfortable. Through the grimy, cobwebbed window I looked out onto a little garden overgrown with jasmine, ferns, and vines. There was a small fountain that hadn’t worked in a while: a cat had littered several kittens in it, right underneath a copper waterspout that was as green as the cat’s eyes. But it wasn’t all bad news. At least I had my own bathroom. The bathtub was full of old books, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a bath in it. I like to read when I’m in the bath.

Another German was already staying there. His face was red and puffy and there were bags under his eyes like a naval cook’s hammock. His hair was the color of straw and about as tidy, and his body was thin and scarred with what looked like bullet holes. These were easy to see, because he wore his malodorous remnant of a dressing gown off one shoulder, like a toga. On his legs were varicose veins as big as fossilized lizards. He seemed a stoic sort, who probably slept in a barrel, but for the pint of liquor in his dressing-gown pocket and the monocle in his eye, which added a jaunty, polished touch. It looked like a sprig of parsley on a cowpat.

Fuldner introduced him as Fernando Eifler but I didn’t suppose that was his real name. The three of us smiled politely but we were all possessed of the same thought: that if we stayed in the safe house long enough, we would end up like Fernando Eifler.

“I say, do any of you chaps have a cigarette?” asked Eifler. “I seem to have run out.”

Kuhlmann handed one over and helped him get it alight. Meanwhile Fuldner apologized for the poor quarters, saying it was only for a few days and explained that the only reason Eifler was still there was that he had turned down every job offered to him by the DAIE, the organization that had brought us to Argentina. He said this quite matter-of-factly, but our new housemate bristled noticeably.

“I didn’t come halfway around the world to work,” Eifler said sourly. “What do you take me for? I’m a German officer and a gentleman, not a bloody bank clerk. Really, Fuldner. It’s too much to expect. There was no talk of working for a living when we were back in Genoa. I’d never have come if I’d known you people expected me to earn my bread and butter. I mean it’s bad enough that one has to leave one’s family home in Germany without obliging one to accept the added humiliation of reporting regularly to an employer.”

“Perhaps you’d have preferred it if the Allies had hanged you, Herr Eifler?” said Eichmann.

“An American noose or an Argentinean halter,” said Eifler. “It’s not much of a choice for a man of my background. Frankly, I should prefer to have been shot by the Popovs than face a clerk’s desk at nine o’clock every morning. It’s uncivilized.” He smiled thinly at Kuhlmann. “Thank you for the cigarette. And by the way, welcome to Argentina. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.” He bowed stiffly, limped into his room, and closed the door behind him.

Fuldner shrugged and said, “Some find it harder to adjust than others. Especially aristocrats like Eifler.”

“I might have known,” sniffed Eichmann.

“I’ll leave you and Herr Geller to settle in,” Fuldner told Eichmann. Then he looked at me. “Herr Hausner. You have an appointment this morning.”

“Me?”