A Quiet Flame

“That’s a relief,” I said. “Most of the nurses have been quite pretty up until now.”

He chuckled. “So I noticed. Maybe I should check in here myself. I’m still plagued with an old war wound I got in ’forty-one. I was blown up with a Katyusha rocket and buried alive for a while.”

“I hear that’s the best way, in the long run.”

He chuckled again. It sounded like a drain emptying.

“What can I do for you, Otto?” I called him Otto because all three buttons were done up on his jacket and there was something bulging under his right armpit. I didn’t think it was his thyroid.

“I heard you were asking questions about me.” He smiled, but it was more a way of stretching his face than anything pleasant.

“Oh?”

“At the Casa Rosada.”

“Maybe one or two.”

“That might not be a healthy thing to do, my friend. Especially for a man in your position.” He tapped the jaws of the pliers together meaningfully. “What are these things for, anyway?”

I thought it better not to tell him in any detail. “They’re surgical pliers.”

“You mean for pulling out ingrown toenails and things like that?”

“I imagine so.”

“I saw a man have all his fingernails pulled out by the Gestapo once. That was in Russia.”

“I’ve heard it’s a fascinating country.”

“Those bloody Russians can take pain like no one else,” he said with real admiration in his voice. “Once, I saw a Russian soldier, both of whose arms had been taken off at the elbow just an hour or two earlier, get up from his mattress and take himself to the latrine.”

“Must have been some pair of pliers.”

“Anyway, I’m here now. So what did you want to know? And don’t give me that phony passport story. A good-conduct pass, or whatever it is. What do you really want to know?”

“I’m looking for a killer.”

“Is that all?” Skorzeny shrugged. “We’re all of us that, I imagine.” He put out his cigarette in the ashtray on my bedside cabinet. “Otherwise we’d hardly be here, in Argentina.”

“True. But this man has killed children. Young girls, anyway. Gutted them like pigs. In the beginning, I thought one of our old comrades might have developed a taste for psychopathic murder. Now I know it’s something else altogether. Also there’s a missing girl who may or may not be connected with any of this. She might be dead. Or abducted.”

“And you thought I might have had something to do with all this?”

“Abduction used to be your main claim to fame, as I recall.”

“You mean Mussolini?” Skorzeny grinned. “That was a rescue mission. There’s a hell of a difference between pulling the Duce’s eggs out of the fire and kidnapping a bloody schoolgirl.”

“I know that. All the same, I felt obliged to look under every stone. Those are my orders, anyway.”

“Who’s giving them?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I like you, Hausner. You’ve got guts. Unlike most of our old comrades. Here I am, quietly intimidating you—”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“—and you refuse to be intimidated, damn you.”

“So far.”

“I could go to work on those clips with these pliers,” he said. “I bet that’s what they’re for, as a matter of fact. But it occurs to me that I’d rather have a man like you on my side. Allies, men you can rely on, are rather thin on the ground in this country.”

He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. From the look of him, and the reputation he had, it was probably the safest thing to do.

“Yes, I could use a good man on my side, in Argentina.”

“Sounds like you’re offering me a job, Otto.”

“Maybe I am, at that.”

“Everyone wants me to work for them. At this rate, I’ll make employee of the year.”

“So long as you stay alive you might.”

“Meaning?”

“I wouldn’t want you shooting off your mouth about my business,” he said. “If you did, I’d have to shoot off your mouth.”

He said it in a way that made me think he believed it sounded cute. Only I didn’t doubt that he was serious about it. From what I knew about Otto Skorzeny—Waffen-SS colonel, Knight’s Cross, hero of the eastern front, the man who rescued Mussolini from British custody—it would have been a grave mistake not to take him seriously. An unmarked-grave mistake.

“I can keep my mouth shut,” I said.

“Everyone can keep their mouths shut,” Skorzeny said. “The trick is to do it and stay alive at the same time.”

That was cute, too. The scars, the Knight’s Cross, the reputation for ruthlessness, all of it was starting to make a lot of sense. The man who put Otto Skorzeny’s nose out of joint wasn’t about to get the loan of his collection of pressed wildflowers. He was a killer. Maybe not the kind of killer who enjoyed killing for killing’s sake, but certainly the kind who killed without even the least idea of how anyone could lose any sleep over it.

“All right. I’ll help you out if I can, Otto. I’m not awful busy right now. So go ahead. Pretend I’m your priest or your doctor. Tell me something confidential.”

“I’m looking for some money.”

I tried to stifle a yawn. “Small world,” I said.

“Not that sort of money,” he snarled.

“There’s a kind I don’t know about?”

“Yeah. The kind you can’t count because there’s so bloody much of it. Serious money.”