Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

I nodded. “You might certainly think that. What I meant is that truth is rarely the truth and the things you thought weren’t true often turn out not to be false. I realize that sounds confusing, and it was meant to be, because that’s the business I’m in. Although I don’t want to be in it, particularly. Not again. I thought I was finished with the whole dirty process of asking questions I don’t get straight answers to. That and putting myself in harm’s way just because someone asks me to look for his lost dog when really he’d lost his neighbor’s cat. I thought I was through with it, and I’m not, and when I say nothing’s for sure in this business, then I mean it, because generally I say exactly what I mean. And I’m right, too, because it’ll turn out that there was something you didn’t tell me that you should have told me, which would have made things clearer right from the start. So nothing’s for sure, Anna. Not when there are people involved. Not when they bring you their problems and ask for your help. Especially then. I’ve seen it a hundred times, angel. Nothing’s for sure. No, not even death when the dead turn out to be alive and well and living in Buenos Aires. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. If the dead people walking around this city all of a sudden really were dead, the undertakers wouldn’t be able to cope with the sudden rush of business.”

Her face had colored again. Her nostrils had flared. The isosceles of muscles between her chin and her collarbone had stiffened, like something metallic. If I’d had a little wand, I could have used it to tap out the part for triangle in the bridal chorus from Lohengrin.

“You think I’m lying?” She started gathering her gloves and handbag as if she was about to climb to the highest hills of Dudgeon. “You mean you think I’m a liar.”

“Are you?”

“And I thought we were going to be friends,” she said, her thighs pushing back at the chair underneath her bottom.

I grabbed her wrist.

“Easy on the floor polish,” I said. “I was just giving you my client speech. The one I use when there’s nothing in it for me. It takes a lot longer than a hard slap on the ear and a palm pressed on top of a Holy Bible but, in the end, it saves a lot of time. That way, if it does turn out that you’re lying, you won’t hold it against me when I have to warm your cheeks.”

“Are you always this cynical? Or is it just me?” Her bottom stayed on the chair, for now.

“I’m never cynical, Anna, except when I’m questioning the sincerity of human motives.”

“I wonder. What was it that happened to you, Senor Hausner? Something. I don’t know. In your own personal history. That made you this way.”

“My history?” I grinned. “You make it sound like it’s something that’s over. Well, it’s not. In fact, it’s not even history. Not yet. And didn’t I tell you? Don’t ever ask me about it, angel.”

BEING SORT OF A SPY MYSELF, I swiftly came to the conclusion that what I needed most was the help of another spy. And there was only one person I could trust, almost, in the whole of Argentina, and that was Pedro Geller, who had come across on the boat from Genoa with Eichmann and me. He was working for Capri Construction in Tucuman, and since half of the ex-SS men in the country were also working for Capri, enlisting his help seemed like a way of swatting two flies with one newspaper. The only trouble was that Tucuman was more than seven hundred miles to the north of Buenos Aires. So, a couple of days after my meeting with Anna Yagubsky, I took the Mitre line from the city’s Retiro railway station. The train, which went via Cordoba and terminated in La Paz, Bolivia, was comfortable enough in first class. But the journey lasted twenty-three hours, so I took the advice of Colonel Montalban and equipped myself with books and newspapers and plenty to eat and drink and smoke. Since the weather in Tucuman was likely to be warmer than in Buenos Aires, and much of the journey there took place at altitude, the doctor had also given me some tranquilizers in case my thyroid problem meant I had difficulty breathing. So far, I had been lucky. The only time I’d had difficulty breathing was when Anna Yagubsky had introduced herself to me.

The heating on the train failed soon after we left Retiro, and for most of the journey I was cold. Too cold to sleep. By the time we reached Tucuman, I was exhausted. I checked into the Coventry Hotel and went straight to bed. I slept for the next twelve hours, which was something I hadn’t done since before the war.

Tucuman was the most populous city in the north, with about two hundred thousand people. It sat on a plain in front of some spectacular mountains called the Sierra del Aconquija. There were lots of colonial-style buildings, a couple of nice parks, a government palace, a cathedral, and a statue of liberty. But New York it wasn’t. There was a prevailing smell of horse shit in the air of Tucuman. Tucuman wasn’t a one-horse town so much as a horseshit town. Even the soap in my hotel bathroom seemed to smell of it.

Pedro Geller worked at Capri’s technical office in El Cadillal, a small town about twenty miles outside Tucuman, but we met up in the city at the company’s main office on Rio Portero. Given the nature of my mission, we didn’t stay there for very long. I asked him to let me take him to the best restaurant he could think of, and so we went to the Plaza Hotel, close to the cathedral. I made a mental note to stay there instead of the Coventry if ever I was unlucky enough to come to Tucuman again.

Geller, whom I knew better as Herbert Kuhlmann, was twenty-six years old and had been a captain with an SS-Panzer division. During the battle for France, in 1944, his unit had executed thirty-six captured Canadians. Geller’s commanding officer was now serving a life sentence in a Canadian jail and, fearing an arrest and a similar sentence, Geller had wisely fled to South America. He looked tanned and fit and seemed to be enjoying his new life.

“Actually, the work is rather interesting,” he explained over a glass of German beer. “The Dulce River runs for about three hundred miles through Cordoba Province and we’re building a dam on it. The Los Quiroga dam. It’ll be quite a sight when it’s finished, Bernie. Three hundred meters long, fifty meters high, with thirty-two floodgates. Of course, it’s not exactly popular with everyone. These things rarely are. A lot of local farms and villages will disappear forever under millions of gallons of flood water. But the dam is going to provide water and hydroelectric power for the whole province.”

“How’s our more famous friend?”

“Ricardo? He hates it here. He lives with some peasant girl in a small mountain village called La Cocha, about seventy miles south of here. He doesn’t come into Tucuman any more than he has to. Scared to show his face, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re both of us working for an old comrade, of course. They’re everywhere in Tucuman. He’s an Austrian professor by the name of Pelkhofer, Armin Pelkhofer. He’s a water engineer. He and Ricardo seem to know each other from the war, when he was called Armin Schoklitsch. But I have no idea what he did then that brought him here now.”

“Nothing good,” I said, “if he knew Ricardo.”

“Quite so. Anyway, we carry out river survey reports for the prof. Hydrological analysis, that kind of thing. Not much to it, really. But I’m out in the fresh air a lot, which suits me after all those months of hiding out in lofts and basements. I shall miss this. Didn’t I tell you? After another six months here I shall transfer to Capri’s personnel department, in Buenos Aires.”

We ate some lunch. The steaks were good. The food was always good in Argentina. Just as long as you ordered steak.