A Quiet Flame

She opened her bag to reveal a bicycle lamp and a little hand dynamo you had to keep squeezed to make it light. I took the bicycle lamp.

“Don’t switch on until we’re inside,” I told her. I opened the door and poked my muzzle inside the hotel. It wasn’t the one on my face. It was the one on my gun.

We went inside, our footsteps echoing on the cheap marble floor like those of two ghosts uncertain about which part of the building to go and haunt. There was a strong smell of mildew and damp. I switched on the bicycle lamp, illuminating a double-height hallway. There was no one about. I put away my gun.

“What are we looking for?” she whispered.

“Boxes. Packing cases. Filing cabinets. Anything that might contain records of immigration. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to dump them here when this place closed down.”

I offered Anna my hand, but she brushed it off and laughed.

“I stopped being afraid of the dark when I was seven,” she said. “These days I even manage to put myself to bed.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.

“It’s odd of me, I know. But somehow I feel safer that way.”

We walked the length of the building and found four large dormitories on the ground floor. One of these still had beds, and I counted two hundred fifty, which, if the upper floors were the same, meant that as many as five thousand people had once lived in the building.

“My poor parents,” said Anna. “I had no idea that it was like this.”

“It’s not so bad. Believe me, the German idea of resettlement was a lot worse than this.”

In the communal washrooms between the dormitories were sixteen square sinks as big as a car door. And beyond the farthest washroom was a locked door. The padlock, which was a new one, told me we were probably in the right place. Someone had felt obliged to secure what was on the other side of the door with a lock superior to the ones on the gate and on the front door. But new or not, this padlock yielded just as easily to my gaucho’s knife. I pushed the door open with the sole of my shoe and shone the light inside.

“I think we found what we’re looking for,” I said, although it was evident that the real work was only just beginning. There were dozens of filing cabinets—as many as a hundred—in five ranks, one in front of the other, like tightly dressed lines of soldiers, so that it was impossible to open one without moving the one in front of it.

“This is going to take hours,” said Anna.

“It looks as though we are going to spend the night together, after all.”

“Then you’d better make the most of it,” she said. She put the lamp down on the floor, faced the cabinet at the head of the first rank, and pointed at the cabinet heading the second. “Here, you look in that one and I’ll look in this one.”

I blew some dust off. A mistake. There was too much dust. It filled the air and made us cough. I pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet and started to riffle through names beginning with the letter Z. “Zhabotinsky, Zhukov, Zinoviev. These are all Z’s. You don’t suppose the one behind this one could be the Y cabinet, do you? Like Y for Yrigoyen, Youngblood, and Yagubsky?”

I slammed the drawer shut and we moved that cabinet out of the way of the one behind. Even before I had wrestled it completely clear, Anna had hauled the top drawer of the next cabinet open. There was more strength in her arm than she realized. Or possibly she was suddenly too excited to know her own strength. Either way, she managed to pull the entire drawer completely out of the cabinet and, narrowly missing her toes and mine, it thudded on the marble floor with the sound of a door closing in some deep pit of hell.

“Do you want to try that again?” I asked. “Only I don’t think they heard it in the Casa Rosada.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Let’s hope not.”

Anna was already kneeling in front of the fallen drawer and, with the light from the little hand dynamo she was holding, examining the contents. “You were right,” she cried excitedly. “These are the Y’s.”

I picked the bicycle lamp off the floor and trained the beam on her hands.

Then she said, “I don’t believe it,” and removed one thin file from the pack. “Yagubsky.”

Even in the semidarkness I could see the tears in her eyes. Her voice was choked, too.

“It seems that you can work miracles after all, Saint Bernhard.”

Then she opened the file.

It was empty.

ANNA STARED at the empty file for a long moment. Then she flung it aside angrily and, sinking back on her haunches, let out an enormous sigh. “So much for your miracle,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t want to be a saint, anyway.”

After a while, I went to find the empty file. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was empty, all right. But the file wasn’t without information. There was a date on the plain manila cover.

“When did you say they disappeared?”

“January 1947.”

“This file is dated March 1947. And look. Underneath their names are written the words ‘Judio’ and ‘Judia.’ Jew and Jewess. And there’s the small matter of a rubber stamp in red ink.”