A Quiet Flame

“I wonder. What was it that happened to you, Señor Hausner? Something. I don’t know. In your own personal history. That made you this way.”

“My history?” I grinned. “You make it sound like it’s something that’s over. Well, it’s not. In fact, it’s not even history. Not yet. And didn’t I tell you? Don’t ever ask me about it, angel.”

BEING SORT OF A SPY MYSELF, I swiftly came to the conclusion that what I needed most was the help of another spy. And there was only one person I could trust, almost, in the whole of Argentina, and that was Pedro Geller, who had come across on the boat from Genoa with Eichmann and me. He was working for Capri Construction in Tucumán, and since half of the ex-SS men in the country were also working for Capri, enlisting his help seemed like a way of swatting two flies with one newspaper. The only trouble was that Tucumán was more than seven hundred miles to the north of Buenos Aires. So, a couple of days after my meeting with Anna Yagubsky, I took the Mitre line from the city’s Retiro railway station. The train, which went via Córdoba and terminated in La Paz, Bolivia, was comfortable enough in first class. But the journey lasted twenty-three hours, so I took the advice of Colonel Montalbán and equipped myself with books and newspapers and plenty to eat and drink and smoke. Since the weather in Tucumán was likely to be warmer than in Buenos Aires, and much of the journey there took place at altitude, the doctor had also given me some tranquilizers in case my thyroid problem meant I had difficulty breathing. So far, I had been lucky. The only time I’d had difficulty breathing was when Anna Yagubsky had introduced herself to me.

The heating on the train failed soon after we left Retiro, and for most of the journey I was cold. Too cold to sleep. By the time we reached Tucumán, I was exhausted. I checked into the Coventry Hotel and went straight to bed. I slept for the next twelve hours, which was something I hadn’t done since before the war.

Tucumán was the most populous city in the north, with about two hundred thousand people. It sat on a plain in front of some spectacular mountains called the Sierra del Aconquija. There were lots of colonial-style buildings, a couple of nice parks, a government palace, a cathedral, and a statue of liberty. But New York it wasn’t. There was a prevailing smell of horse shit in the air of Tucumán. Tucumán wasn’t a one-horse town so much as a horseshit town. Even the soap in my hotel bathroom seemed to smell of it.

Pedro Geller worked at Capri’s technical office in El Cadillal, a small town about twenty miles outside Tucumán, but we met up in the city at the company’s main office on Río Portero. Given the nature of my mission, we didn’t stay there for very long. I asked him to let me take him to the best restaurant he could think of, and so we went to the Plaza Hotel, close to the cathedral. I made a mental note to stay there instead of the Coventry if ever I was unlucky enough to come to Tucumán again.

Geller, whom I knew better as Herbert Kuhlmann, was twenty-six years old and had been a captain with an SS-Panzer division. During the battle for France, in 1944, his unit had executed thirty-six captured Canadians. Geller’s commanding officer was now serving a life sentence in a Canadian jail and, fearing an arrest and a similar sentence, Geller had wisely fled to South America. He looked tanned and fit and seemed to be enjoying his new life.

“Actually, the work is rather interesting,” he explained over a glass of German beer. “The Dulce River runs for about three hundred miles through Córdoba Province and we’re building a dam on it. The Los Quiroga dam. It’ll be quite a sight when it’s finished, Bernie. Three hundred meters long, fifty meters high, with thirty-two floodgates. Of course, it’s not exactly popular with everyone. These things rarely are. A lot of local farms and villages will disappear forever under millions of gallons of flood water. But the dam is going to provide water and hydroelectric power for the whole province.”

“How’s our more famous friend?”

“Ricardo? He hates it here. He lives with some peasant girl in a small mountain village called La Cocha, about seventy miles south of here. He doesn’t come into Tucumán any more than he has to. Scared to show his face, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re both of us working for an old comrade, of course. They’re everywhere in Tucumán. He’s an Austrian professor by the name of Pelkhofer, Armin Pelkhofer. He’s a water engineer. He and Ricardo seem to know each other from the war, when he was called Armin Schoklitsch. But I have no idea what he did then that brought him here now.”

“Nothing good,” I said, “if he knew Ricardo.”