A Quiet Flame

The more I thought about it, the more I liked my theory. The man I had been looking for was a doctor, or some sort of medicine man, most probably from Munich. My first idea was the jelly doctor, Kassner, until I remembered checking out his alibi: on the day of Anita Schwarz’s murder, he’d been at a urologists’ conference in Hannover. And then I remembered his estranged wife’s young friend, the Gypsy-looking type with a little open-topped Opel, from Munich. Beppo. That was his name. A strange name for a German. Kassner had said he was a student at Munich University. A medical student, perhaps. But how many students could have afforded a new Opel? Unless, of course, he’d been supplementing his income by carrying out illegal abortions. Possibly in Kassner’s own apartment, when he wasn’t there. And if, like many students who came to sample Berlin’s world-famous nightlife, this Beppo had contracted a venereal disease, who better than Kassner to help him out with a course of protonsil, the new magic-bullet cure? It would certainly have explained why Kassner’s own address had appeared on the suspect list I’d made using KRIPO’s Devil’s Directory and the patient list copied in Kassner’s office. Beppo, then. The man I’d met outside Kassner’s own front door. Why not? In which case, if somehow he was here, in Argentina, I might easily recognize him again. Of course, if he was in Argentina, that would have to mean that he’d done something criminal to have left Germany in the first place. Something in the SS, perhaps. Not that he’d seemed like the ideal SS type. Not in 1932. Back then they’d liked them to look Aryan, blond and blue-eyed, like Heydrich. Like me. Beppo had certainly not been that.

I tried to picture him again in my mind’s eye. Medium height, good-looking, but swarthy with it. Yes, like a Gypsy. The Nazis had hated Gypsies almost as much as they had hated the Jews. Of course, he wouldn’t have been the first person to have joined the SS who wasn’t the perfect Aryan type. Himmler, for one. Eichmann, for another. But if Beppo had been possessed of a medical qualification, and had been able to prove that his family had been free of non-Aryan blood for four generations, he might easily have got himself into the medical corps of a Waffen-SS unit. I decided to ask Dr. Vaernet if he could remember such a man.

“Working late, I see.” It was Colonel Montalbán.

“Yes. I do my best thinking at night. When it’s quiet.”

“Me, I’m more of a morning person.”

“You surprise me. I thought you people liked to arrest people in the middle of the night.”

He smiled. “Actually, no. We prefer to arrest people first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

He came over to the window and pointed at the line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. “You see those people? On the other side of Irigoyen? They’re there to see Evita.”

“I thought it was a little late to be looking for a job.”

“She spends every evening and half the night in there,” he said. “Handing out money and favors to the country’s poor and sick and homeless.”

“Very noble. And during an election year, pragmatic, too.”

“That’s not why she does it. You’re a German. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Was it the Nazis who made you so cynical?”

“No. I’ve been cynical since March of 1915.”

“What happened then?”

“The Second Battle of Ypres.”

“Of course.”

“I sometimes think if we’d won that, we’d have won the war, which would have been better for everyone, in the long run. The British and the Germans would have agreed on a peace, and Hitler would have remained in well-deserved obscurity.”

“Luis Irigoyen, who was related to our president and was our ambassador in Germany—he’s the one this street is named after—he met Hitler many times and admired him enormously. He told me once that Hitler was the most fascinating man he ever met.”

This mention of Hitler prompted me to recall Anna Yagubsky and her missing relatives. And choosing my words carefully, I tried to bring up the subject of Argentine Jews with Montalbán.

“Is that why Argentina resisted Jewish emigration?”

He shrugged. “It was a very difficult time. There were so many who wanted to come here. It just wasn’t possible to accommodate them all. We’re not a big country like America or Canada.”

I avoided the temptation to remind the colonel that, according to my travel guide, Argentina was the eighth-largest country in the world.

“And was that how Directive Eleven came into existence?”

Montalbán’s eyes narrowed. “Directive Eleven is not a healthy thing to know about in Argentina. Who told you about it?”

“One hears things.”

“Yes, but from whom?”

“This is the Central State Intelligence Department,” I said. “Not Radio El Mundo. It would be surprising if one didn’t hear the odd secret in a place like this. Besides, my ability to speak castellano is improving all the time.”

“So I noticed.”

“I even heard that Martin Bormann is living in Argentina.”