A Quiet Flame (3 page)

“There’s a story why it’s pink,” said Fuldner.

“Don’t tell me. It’ll help me to relax if I can think of Perón as the kind of president who prefers pink. Believe me, Carlos, this is all very reassuring.”

“That reminds me. You were joking about being a red, weren’t you?”

“I was in a Soviet prison camp for almost two years, Carlos. What do you think?”

He drove around to a side entrance and waved a security pass at the guard on the barrier before carrying on through to a central courtyard. In front of an ornate marble stairway stood two grenadiers. With tall hats and drawn sabers, they looked like an illustration from an old fairy tale. I glanced up at the loggia-style upper gallery that overlooked the courtyard, half expecting to see Zorro show up for a fencing lesson. Instead I caught sight of a neat little blonde eyeing us with interest. She was wearing more diamonds than seemed decent at breakfast time and an elaborate baker’s loaf of a hairstyle. I thought I might borrow a saber and cut myself a slice of it if I got a bit peckish.

“That’s her,” said Fuldner. “Evita. The president’s wife.”

“Somehow I didn’t think she was the cleaning lady. Not with all the mints she’s wearing.”

We walked up the stairway into a richly furnished hall where several women were milling about. Despite the fact Perón’s was a military dictatorship, nobody up here was wearing a uniform. When I remarked on this, Fuldner told me that Perón didn’t care for uniforms, preferring a degree of informality that people sometimes found surprising. I might also have remarked that the women in the hall were very beautiful and that perhaps he preferred them to uglier ones, in which case he was a dictator after my own heart. The kind of dictator I would have been myself if a highly developed sense of social justice and democracy had not hindered my own will to power and autocracy.

Contrary to what Fuldner had told me, it seemed that the president had not yet arrived at his desk. And while we awaited his much anticipated arrival, one of the secretaries fetched us coffee on a little silver tray. Then we smoked. The secretaries smoked, too. Everyone in Buenos Aires smoked. For all I knew, even the cats and dogs had a twenty-a-day habit. Then, outside the high windows, I heard a noise like a lawn mower. I put down my coffee cup and went to take a look. I was just in time to see a tall man climbing off a motor scooter. It was the president, although I would hardly have known that from his modest means of transport or his casual appearance. I kept comparing Perón with Hitler and trying to imagine the Führer dressed for golf and riding a lime-green scooter down the Wilhelmstrasse.

The president parked the scooter and came up the stairs two at a time, his thick English brogues hitting the marble steps like the sound of someone working the heavy bag in the gym. He may have looked more like a golfer in his flat cap, tan-colored zip-up cardigan, brown plus-fours, and thick woolen socks, but he had a boxer’s grace and build. Not quite six feet tall, with dark hair brushed back on his head and a nose more Roman than the Colosseum, he reminded me of Primo Carnera, the Italian heavyweight. They would have been about the same age, too. I figured Perón to be in his early fifties. The dark hair looked as if it got blacked and polished every day when the grenadiers cleaned their riding boots.

One of the secretaries handed him some papers while another threw open the double doors of his office. In there, the look was more conventionally autocratic. There were lots of equestrian bronzes, oak paneling, portraits that were still wet, expensive rugs, and Corinthian columns. He waved us to a couple of leather armchairs, tossed the papers onto a desk the size of a trebuchet, and flung his cap and jacket to another secretary, who hugged them to her not-insubstantial bosom in a way that made me think she wished he was still wearing them.

Someone else brought him a little demitasse of coffee, a glass of water, a gold pen, and a gold holder with a cigarette already lit. He took a loud sip of coffee, put the holder in his mouth, picked up the pen, and started to add his signature to the documents presented earlier. I was close enough to pay attention to his signature style: the flourishing, egoistic capital
J
; the aggressive, showy final downward stroke of the
n
of “Perón.” On the basis of his handwriting, I made a quick psychological evaluation of the man and concluded that he was the neurotic, anal-retentive type who preferred people to be able to read what he had actually written. Not like a doctor at all, I told myself with relief.

Apologizing in almost fluent German for keeping us waiting, Perón carried a silver cigarette box to our fingers. Then we shook hands and I felt the heavy knob of bone at the base of his thumb that made me think yet again of him as a boxer. That and the broken veins under the thin skin that covered his high cheekbones, and the dental plate that was revealed by his easy smile. In a country where no one has a sense of humor, the smiling man is king. I smiled back, thanked him for his hospitality, and then complimented the president on his German, in Spanish.

“No, please,” Perón answered, in German. “I very much enjoy speaking German. It’s good practice for me. When I was a young cadet at our military school, all of our instructors were Germans. This was before the Great War, in 1911. We had to learn German because our weapons were German and all of our technical manuals were in German. We even learned to goose-step. Every day at six p.m., my grenadiers goose-step onto the Plaza de Mayo to take the flag down from the pole. The next time you visit, you must make sure it’s at that time so that you can see for yourself.”

“I will, sir.” I let him light my cigarette. “But I think my own goose-stepping days are over. These days it’s as much as I can do to climb a set of stairs without running out of breath.”

“Me, too.” Perón grinned. “But I try to keep fit. I like to ride and to ski when I have the chance. In 1939, I went skiing in the Alps. In Austria and Germany. Germany was wonderful then. A well-oiled machine. It was like being inside one of those great big Mercedes-Benz motorcars. Smooth and powerful and exciting. Yes, it was an important time in my life.”

“Yes, sir.” I kept on smiling at him, as though I agreed with every word he said. The fact was, I hated the sight of goose-stepping soldiers. To me it was one of the most unpleasant sights in the world; something both terrifying and ridiculous that defied you to laugh at it. And as for 1939, it had been an important time in everyone’s life. Especially if you happened to be Polish, or French, or British, or even German. Who in Europe would ever forget 1939?

“How are things in Germany right now?” he asked.

“For the ordinary fellow, they’re pretty tough,” I said. “But it really depends on whose zone you’re in. Worst of all is the Soviet zone of occupation. Things are hardest of all where the Ivans are in charge. Even for the Ivans. Most people just want to put the war behind them and get on with the reconstruction.”

“It’s amazing what has been achieved in such a short period of time,” said Perón.

“Oh, I don’t just mean reconstruction of our cities, sir. Although of course that is important. No, I mean the reconstruction of our most fundamental beliefs and institutions. Freedom, justice, democracy. A parliament. A fair-minded police force. An independent judiciary. Eventually, when all of that has been recovered, we might regain some self-respect.”

Perón’s eyes narrowed. “I must say you don’t sound very much like a Nazi,” he said.

“It has been five years, sir,” I said. “Since we lost the war. There’s no point in thinking about what’s gone. Germany needs to look to the future.”

“That’s what we need in Argentina,” said Perón. “Some forward thinking. A bit of the German can-do, eh, Fuldner?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“If you don’t mind me saying so, sir,” I said, “but from what I’ve seen so far, there’s nothing Germany can teach Argentina.”

“This is a very Catholic country, Dr. Hausner,” he told me. “It’s very set in its ways. We need modern thinking. We need scientists. Good managers. Technicians. Doctors like yourself.” He clapped me on the shoulder.

Two little poodles ambled in, accompanied by a strong smell of expensive perfume, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the blonde with the Ku-damm hairdo and the diamonds had entered the room. With her were two men. One was of medium height, with fair hair and a mustache, and a quiet, unassuming way about him. The other looked older, about forty, and was taller and physically more powerful; he was gray-haired and wore thick-framed, tinted glasses and a small beard and mustache. Something about him made me think he might be a cop.

“Will you practice medicine again?” Perón asked me. “I’m sure we can make that possible. Rodolfo?”

The younger man by the door unfolded his arms and pushed himself off the wall. He glanced at the man with the beard for a moment. “If the police have no objection?” His German was every bit as fluent as his master’s.

The man with the beard shook his head.

“I’ll ask Ramón Carrillo to look into it, shall I, sir?” said Rodolfo. From the pocket of his beautifully tailored pinstripe suit he took out a small leather notebook and made a note with a silver propelling pencil.

Perón nodded. “Please do,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder a second time.

In spite of his declared admiration for goose-stepping, I found myself liking the president. I liked him for his motor scooter and his ridiculous plus-fours. I liked him for his slugger’s paw and his stupid little dogs. I liked him for his warm welcome and the easy way he had about him. And—who knows?—maybe I liked him because I badly needed to like someone. Maybe that’s why he was president, I don’t know. But there was something about Juan Perón that made me want to take a gamble on him. Which is why after months of pretending to be someone else who was pretending to be Dr. Carlos Hausner, I decided to level with him about who and what I really was.

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I
PUT OUT my cigarette in an ashtray as big as a wheel hub, which lay on the president’s uncluttered desk. Next to the ashtray was a Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry box—the leather kind that looks like it would make a swell gift on its own. I figured the contents of that box were pinned to the little blonde’s lapel. She was fussing with the dogs as I started my noble-sounding monologue. It took only a minute to get her attention. I flatter myself that when the spirit moves me, I can make myself more interesting than any small dog. Besides, I guessed it wasn’t every day that someone in the president’s office tells him he’d made a mistake.

“Mr. President, sir,” I said. “I think there’s something I should tell you. Since this is a Catholic country, maybe you can call it confession.” Seeing all their faces blanch, I smiled. “It’s all right. I’m not about to tell you about all the terrible things I did during the war. There were some things I’m not happy about, sure. But I don’t have the lives of innocent men and women on my conscience. No, my confession is something much more ordinary. You see, I’m not a doctor at all, sir. There was a doctor back in Germany. A fellow named Gruen. He wanted to go and live in America, only he worried what might happen to him if they ever found out what he’d done during the war. So, to take the heat off himself, he decided to make it look like I was him. Then he told the Israelis and the Allied war-crimes people where to come and look for me. Anyway, he did such a good job of convincing everyone I was him that I was obliged to go on the run. Eventually I turned for help to the old comrades and the Delegation for Argentine Emigration in Europe. Carlos, here. Don’t get me wrong, sir, I’m very grateful to be here. I had a hard job convincing an Israeli death squad that I wasn’t Gruen and was obliged to leave a couple of them dead in the snow near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. So you see, I really am a fugitive. I’m just not the fugitive you might think I am. And in particular, I am not and never have been a doctor.”

“So who the hell are you? Really?” It was Carlos Fuldner, and he sounded annoyed.

“My real name is Bernhard Gunther. I was in the SD. Working for intelligence. I was captured by the Russians and was interned in a camp before escaping. But before the war I was a policeman. A detective with the Berlin police force.”

“Did you say a detective?” This was the man with the small beard and the tinted glasses. The one I’d marked down as a cop. “What kind of a detective?”

“I worked in Homicide, mostly.”

“What was your rank?” asked the cop.

“When war was declared in 1939, I was a KOK. A Kriminal Oberkommissar. A chief inspector.”

“Then you’ll remember Ernst Gennat.”

“Of course. He was my mentor. Taught me everything I know.”

“What was it that the newspapers used to call him?”

“The Full Ernst. On account of his bulk and fondness for cakes.”

“What happened to him? Do you know?”

“He was deputy chief of the criminal police until his death in 1939. He had a heart attack.”

“Too bad.”

“Too many cakes.”

“Gunther, Gunther,” he said, as though trying to shake a thought like an apple from a tree growing in the back of his head. “Yes, of course. I know you.”

“You do?”

“I was in Berlin. Before the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Studying jurisprudence at the university.”

The cop came closer, close enough for me to smell the coffee and the cigarettes on his breath, and took off his glasses. I guessed he smoked a lot. For one thing, there was a cigarette in his mouth, and for another, his voice sounded like a smoked herring. There were laugh lines around the gray iron filings that constituted his mustache and his beard, but the walnut of a frown knotted between his bloodshot blue eyes told me that maybe he’d got out of the habit of smiling. His eyes narrowed as he searched my face for more answers.

“You know, you were a hero of mine. Believe it or not, you’re one of the reasons I gave up the idea of being a lawyer and became a policeman instead.” He looked at Perón. “Sir, this man was a famous Berlin detective. When I first went there, in 1928, there was a notorious strangler. His name was Gormann. This is the man who caught him. At the time it was quite a cause célèbre.” He looked back at me. “I’m right, aren’t I? You are that Gunther.”