Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“And talking of risk,” I told her sternly, “I meant what I said, angel. You’re to say nothing about what happened. Or to ask questions concerning what we found out about Directive Eleven.”

“I don’t know that we found out very much,” she said. “I’m not convinced you’re the great detective my friend said you are.”

“Well, that makes two of us. But either way, this is not something people in this country want anyone asking about, Anna. I’ve been in this business a long time and I know a big secret when I smell one. I didn’t tell you this before, but when I mentioned Directive Eleven to someone in SIDE, he started twitching like a divining rod. Promise me you won’t talk about it. Not even to your father and your mother and your rabbi confessor.”

“All right,” she said sulkily. “I promise. I won’t say anything about any of it. Not even in my prayers.”

“As soon as I’m out of here, we’ll put the wheels in motion again. See what we can find out. In the meantime, you can answer me this question. What are you? A Jewish Catholic? Or a Catholic Jew? I’m not sure I can tell the difference. Not without chucking you in the village pond, anyway.”

“My parents converted when they left Russia,” she said. “Because they wanted to fit in when they got here. My father said that being a Jew made you too noticeable. That it was best to keep a low profile and seem like everyone else.” She shook her head. “Why? Have you got something against Jewish Catholics?”

“On the contrary. If you go back far enough, you’ll find that all Catholics are Jewish. That’s the great thing about history. If you go back far enough, even Hitler’s Jewish.”

“I guess that explains everything,” she said, and kissed me tenderly.

“What was that for?”

“That was in lieu of some grapes. To help you get well soon.”

“It might just help, at that.”

“Then so should this: I’ve fallen for you. Don’t ask me why, because you’re too old for me, but I have.”

I HAD OTHER VISITORS, but none of them as lovely as Anna Yagubsky, and none who made me feel as good. The colonel looked in on me. So did Pedro Geller. And Melville from the Richmond Cafe. He was kind enough to beat me at chess. It all felt very civilian and commonplace, as if I were part of a community instead of a man in exile from his own country. With one very tall and scar-faced exception.

He was about six-feet-four, and two hundred fifty pounds. His hair was thick and dark and, brushed back from a broad, lumpy forehead, looked like a Frenchman’s beret. His ears were enormous, like an Indian elephant’s, and his left cheek was covered with the Schmissen beloved of German students for whom a dueling saber had been a more attractive diversion than a slim volume of poetry. He was wearing a light-brown sports jacket, a pair of very baggy flannel trousers, a white shirt, and a green silk tie. His shoes were very polished and stout and probably contained a tape-recording of a military parade ground. In his left hand was a cigarette. I guessed he was in his early forties, and when he spoke German, it was with a strong Viennese accent. “So, you’re awake,” he said.

I sat up in bed and nodded. “Who are you?”

He picked up in his huge mitts the surgical pliers-the ones that were supposed to open the clips on my neck in case anything went wrong with my windpipe-and started to play crab with them.

“Otto Skorzeny,” he said. His voice sounded almost as rough as my own, as if he gargled with battery acid.

“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.