A Quiet Flame

She walked toward me, her high heels perforating the polished wooden air of the Richmond’s quiet basement like the slow beat of a tall clock. Expensive perfume tugged an edge of the air I was breathing. It made a very pleasant change from the smell of coffee and cigarettes and my own dyspeptic middle age.

As soon as she spoke to me, it was obvious she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. She spoke in castellano. I was pleased about that. It meant I had to pay extra attention to her lips and the way her small pink tongue rested on her gypsum-white teeth.

“Forgive me for interrupting your game, señor,” she said. “But are you Carlos Hausner, perhaps?”

“I am.”

“Might I sit down and talk to you for a moment?”

I looked around. Three tables away, the little Scotsman, Melville, was playing chess with a man whose leathery brown face belonged on the back of a horse. Two younger porteños with Cuban heels and silver-buckled belts were engaged in a rather vigorous game of billiards. They put as much vitality into their noisy cue shots as Furtwängler conducting the Kaim Orchestra. All of their eyes were on their respective games but their ears and their attention to the Richmond’s resolutely masculine traditions were on us.

I shook my head. “My opponent, the Invisible Man, gets a little irritated when people sit on his lap. We’d better go upstairs.”

I let her walk ahead of me. It was the polite thing to do and it gave me a chance to study the seams of her stockings. These were straight, as if someone had fixed them using a theodolite. Fortunately, her legs were anything but. They had better curves than the Mille Miglia and were probably just as challenging to negotiate. We found a quiet table near the window. I waved a waiter over. She ordered a coffee, and I ordered something I had no interest in drinking, so long as she was around. When you’re having a cup of coffee with the best-looking woman who’s spoken to you in months, there are better things to do than drink it. She took one of my cigarettes and let me light it for her. It was yet another excuse to pay close attention to her big, sensuous mouth. Sometimes I think that’s why men invented smoking.

“My name is Anna Yagubsky,” she said. “I live with my parents in Belgrano. My father used to be a musician in the orchestra at the Teatro Colón. My mother sells English ceramics from a shop on Bartolomé Mitre. Both of them are Russian immigrants. They came here before the Revolution, to escape the czar and his pogroms.”

“Do you speak Russian, Anna?”

“Yes. Fluently. Why?”

“Because my Russian is better than my Spanish.”

She smiled a little smile and we spoke in Russian.

“I am a legal officer,” she explained. “I work in an office next to the law courts on Calle Talcahuano. Someone—a friend of mine in the police, it doesn’t matter who—told me about you, Señor Hausner. He told me that before the war you were a famous detective, in Berlin.”

“That’s right.” I saw no advantage to myself in disagreeing with her. No advantage at all. I was keen to be someone who looked good in her eyes—not least because every time I saw myself in a mirror, my own eyes were telling me something different. And I’m not just talking about my appearance. I still had all my hair. There was even quite a bit of color left in it. But my face was hardly what it used to be, while my stomach was more than it had ever been. I was stiff when I awoke in the morning, in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons. And I had thyroid cancer. Apart from all that, I was just fine and dandy.

“You were a famous detective and now you’re working for the secret police.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a secret police if I admitted that was true, now would it?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said. “Nevertheless, you are working for them, aren’t you?”

I smiled my best enigmatic smile—the one that didn’t show my teeth. “What can I do for you, Señorita Yagubsky?”

“Please. Call me Anna. In case you hadn’t already guessed, I’m a Jew. That’s an important part of my story.”

“I rather supposed you were when you mentioned pogroms.”