A Quiet Flame

“You mean the Nazi?” asked the baker.

Geller looked at me and grinned. “That’s him,” he said.

With a finger that was all knuckle and dirty nail, as if it belonged to an orangutan that was studying witchcraft, the baker pointed down the track, past a small auto-repair shop, to a two-story blockhouse with no visible windows. “He lives at the villa.”

We drove a short distance and pulled up between a line of washing and an outhouse, from which Eichmann emerged hurriedly, carrying a newspaper and buttoning his trousers. He was followed by a strong cloacal smell. It was evident he had been alarmed by the sound of the jeep, and the obvious relief he felt that we were not the Argentine military come to arrest and hand him over to a war-crimes tribunal quickly gave way to irritation.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, his lip curling in a way I now regarded as quite characteristic. It was strange, I thought, how one side of his face appeared to be quite normal, even pleasant, while the other side looked twisted and malevolent. It was like meeting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same moment.

“I was in Tucumán, so I thought I’d come and see how you are,” I said affably. I opened my bag and took out a carton of Senior Service. “I brought you some cigarettes. They’re English but I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

Eichmann grunted a thank-you and took the carton. “You’d better come into the villa,” he said grudgingly.

He pushed open a very tall wooden door that was in need of several licks of green paint, and we stepped inside. From the outside, things did not augur well. Calling that blockhouse a villa was a bit like calling a child’s sandcastle the Schloss Neuschwanstein. Inside, though, things were better. There was some plasterwork on top of the brickwork. The floors were level and covered with flagstones and some cheap Indian rugs. But the small barred windows gave the place a suitably penal atmosphere. Eichmann might have evaded Allied justice, but he was hardly living a life of luxury. A half-naked woman peered out from behind a door. Angrily, Eichmann jerked his head at her and she disappeared again.

I walked over to one of the windows and looked out at a largish, well-planted garden. There were some hutches containing several rabbits he must have kept for meat and beyond, an old black DeSoto with three wheels. A quick getaway did not seem to be on Eichmann’s mind.

He collected a large kettle off a cast-iron range and poured hot water into two hollow gourds. “¿Mate?” he asked us.

“Please,” I said. Since coming to Argentina, I hadn’t tasted the stuff. But everyone in the country drank it.

He put little metal straws in the gourds and then handed them to us.

There was sugar in it, but it still tasted bitter, like green tea with a froth on it. Akin to drinking water with a cigarette in it, I thought. But Geller seemed to like the stuff. And so did Eichmann. As soon as Geller had finished his gourd, he handed it over to our host, who added some more hot water and, without changing the straw, drank some himself.

“So what brings you all the way out here?” he said. “It can’t just be a social call.”

“I’m working for the SIDE,” I said. “The Perónist Intelligence Service?”

His eyelid flickered like an almost spent lightbulb. He tried not to let it show, but we all knew what he was thinking. Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel and close confidant of Reinhard Heydrich, had been reduced to performing hydrological surveys on the other side of nowhere, while I enjoyed a position of some power and influence in a field Eichmann might have considered his own. Gunther, the reluctant SS man and political adversary possessed of the very job that he, Eichmann, should have had. He said nothing. He took a shot at a smile. It looked more like something had got stuck under his bridge.

“I’m supposed to decide which of our old comrades is worthy of a good-conduct pass,” I said. “You need one to be able to apply for a passport in this country.”

“I should have expected that loyalty to your blood and your oath as an SS man would oblige you to treat the issue of any such documentation as a mere formality.” He spoke stiffly. Softening somewhat, he added, “After all, we’re all sitting on the same inkblot, are we not?” He finished the mate noisily, like a child sucking up the very last drop of a fizzy drink.

“On the face of it, that’s true,” I said. “However, the Perónist government is already under considerable pressure from the Americans—”

“From the Jews, more like,” he said.

“—to clean up its backyard. While there’s no question that any of us are about to be shown the door, nevertheless there are a few people in government who worry that some of us may be guilty of greater crimes than was originally suspected.” I shrugged and looked at Geller. “I mean, it’s one thing to kill men in the heat of battle. And it’s another to take pleasure in the murders of innocent women and children. Wouldn’t you agree?”