A Quiet Flame

Ninety minutes passed before the door opened again. The man from the house followed the girl onto the veranda. He picked up the cat and showed it off to her. The girl stroked the cat’s head and put some candy in her mouth. The man put the cat down and they went down the steps. The girl was moving more slowly than before, coming down the steps as if each one were several feet high. I looked through the telescope again. Her head hung heavy on her shoulders but not as heavy as her eyelids. She looked like she’d been drugged. Several paces ahead of her, the man tapped the window of the police car and the cop sat bolt upright, as if something sharp had come through the bottom of his seat. The man opened the rear passenger door of the car and turned to see where the girl was and saw that she had stopped walking altogether, although she was hardly standing still. She resembled a tree that was about to topple. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed, and she was breathing deeply through her nose in an effort not to faint. The man went back to her and put his arm around her waist. The next thing, she bent forward and vomited into the gutter. The man looked around for the cop and said something sharply. The cop came over, collected the girl up in his arms, and laid her on the backseat of the car. He closed the door, took off his cap, wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and said something to the man, who bent forward, waved at the prostrate girl through the car window, and then stood back and waited. He looked around. He looked in my direction. I was about thirty yards up the street. I didn’t think he could see me. He didn’t. The police car started, the man waved again as it drove off, and then he turned and went back up to the house.

I folded away the telescope and returned it to the glove box. I swallowed a mouthful of cognac from the flask in my pocket and got out of the car. I collected a file and notepad off the passenger seat, shifted my shoulder holster a few inches, rubbed the still-tender scar on my collarbone, and walked up the steps. The dog started barking again. Sitting on the white balustrade, the cat, which was the size and shape of a feather duster, viewed me with vertical-eyed scrutiny. It was a minor demon, the familiar to its diabolic owner.

I hauled on the doorbell, heard a chime that sounded like something from a clock tower, and gazed back across the street. The woman in the pink dressing gown was getting dressed now. I was still watching when the door opened behind me.

“You certainly couldn’t miss the postman,” I said, speaking German. “Not with a bell like that. It lasts as long as a heavenly choir.” I showed him my ID. “I wonder if I might come in and ask you a few questions.”

A strong smell of ether hung in the air, underscoring the obvious inconvenience of my visit. But Helmut Gregor was a German, and a German knew better than to argue with credentials like mine. The Gestapo no longer existed, but the idea and influence of the Gestapo lived on in the minds of all Germans old enough to know the difference between wedding rings and a set of brass knuckles. Especially in Argentina.

“You’d better come in,” he said, standing politely to one side. “Herr . . . ?”

“Hausner,” I said. “Carlos Hausner.”

“A German working for Central State Intelligence. That’s rather unusual, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There was a time when we were quite good at this sort of thing.”

He smiled thinly and closed the door.

We were standing in a high-ceilinged hallway with a marble floor. I had a brief glimpse of what looked like a surgery at the far end of that hallway, before Gregor closed the frosted door in front of it.

He paused, as if half inclined to force me to ask my questions in the hallway, then he seemed to change his mind and led the way into an elegant sitting room. Beneath an ornate gilt mirror was an elegant stone fireplace and, in front of this, a hardwood Chinese tea table and a couple of handsome leather armchairs. He waved me to one of them.