A Quiet Flame

“That’s certainly what the Americans believe. Which is the best reason of all to know that it’s not true. Only do try to remember what I told you. In Argentina it is better to know everything than to know too much.”

“Tell me, Colonel. Have there been any other murders?”

“Murders?”

“You know. When one person kills another on purpose. In this case, a schoolgirl. Like the one you showed me at the police headquarters. The one missing her wedding trousseau.”

He shook his head.

“And the missing girl? Fabienne von Bader?”

“She is still missing.” He smiled sadly. “I had hoped you would have found her by now.”

“No. Not yet. But I may be close to discovering the true identity of the man who killed Anita Schwarz.”

For a moment, he looked puzzled.

“She was the girl who was murdered in Berlin, back in 1932. You know? The one you remembered reading about in the German newspapers when I was still your idea of a hero.”

“Yes, of course. Do you think he might be here, after all?”

“It’s a little early to say if he is. Especially as I’m still waiting to see that doctor you told me about. The one from New York? The specialist.”

“Dr. Pack? That’s exactly why I came to see you. To tell you. He’s here. In Buenos Aires. He arrived today. He can see you tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, depending on—”

“His other, more important patient. I know. I know. But not too much. Just everything. I won’t forget.”

“See that you don’t. For your own sake.” He nodded. “You’re an interesting man, señor. No doubt about it.”

“Yes. I know that, too. I’ve had an interesting life.”

I OUGHT TO HAVE PAID more attention to the warning the colonel had given me. But I always was a sucker for a pretty face. Especially a pretty face as beautiful as Anna Yagubsky’s.

My desk was on the second floor. On the floor below was the archivo where SIDE’s files were stored. I decided to look in on my way out. I was already in the habit of going in there. For each old comrade I interviewed, I added to his file a detailed record of who he was and what crimes he had committed. I didn’t think I would be risking very much by looking in some other, unrelated files. The only question was how this was to be achieved.

In Berlin, all known and suspected enemies of the Third Reich had been registered in the A Index, located in Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The A Index, also known as “the Office Index,” was the most modern criminal records system in the world. Or so Heydrich had once told me. The index comprised half a million cards on people the Gestapo considered to be worthy of attention. It was set on a huge, horizontally mounted, circular card carousel with an electric motor and a dedicated operator who could locate any one of those half a million cards in less than a minute. Heydrich, a firm believer in the old axiom that knowledge is power, called it his “wheel of fortune.” More than anyone, it was Heydrich who helped to revolutionize the old Prussian political police and made the SD one of the largest employers in Germany. By 1935, more than six hundred officials worked in the Gestapo’s Berlin records division alone.

Nothing so sophisticated or large existed in Buenos Aires, although the system worked well enough at the Casa Rosada. A staff of twenty worked around the clock in five shifts of four. Files were kept on opposition politicians, trade-union officials, Communists, left-wing intellectuals, members of parliament, disaffected army officers, homosexuals, and religious leaders. These files were stored in mobile shelving that was operated by a system of locking handwheels and referenced according to name and subject by a series of leather-bound ledgers called los libros marrones. Access to the files was controlled via a simple signature system, unless the file was deemed sensitive, in which case the entry in the libros marrones was written up in red.

The senior officer on duty in the archivo was known as the OR—the oficial registro—and he was supposed to supervise and authorize the acquisition and use of all written material. I knew at least two of these ORs reasonably well. To them I had confessed my former trade as a Berlin policeman and, in an effort to ingratiate myself, I had even regaled them with descriptions of the apparent omniscience of the Gestapo filing system. Most of what I told them, however, was based on the few months I had spent in KRIPO’s records division following my exit from Homicide, but sometimes I just made it up. Not that the ORs knew the difference. One of them, whom I knew only as Marcello, was keen to use the Gestapo filing system as a model for updating its SIDE counterpart, and I had promised to help him write a detailed memo for submission to the head of SIDE, Rodolfo Freude.