Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

Evita sighed and sat back in her chair, as if the effort of telling me all of this had been a strain. “There,” she said. “I have told you everything. Are you shocked, Herr Gunther?”

“No, ma’am. Not shocked. A little surprised, perhaps. And maybe a bit puzzled as to why you should choose to confide in me.”

“I want you to find her, of course. Is that so hard to understand?”

“No, not at all. But when you have a whole police force at your disposal, ma’am, it’s a little hard to understand why you should expect me to succeed where they have-”

“Failed,” she said, hearing me hesitate to complete the sentence. “Isn’t that right, Colonel? Your men have failed me, have they not?”

“So far we are without success, senora ,” said the colonel.

“You hear that?” said Evita. She puffed out her cheeks in a scornful laugh. “He can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘failure.’ But that is what it amounts to. You, on the other hand. You are someone who has experience looking for missing persons, yes?”

“Some experience, yes. But in my own country.”

“Yes, you are a German. Like my daughter, who has been brought up as a German-Argentine. Castellano is her second language. Already you move easily among these people. And I am convinced that is where you will find her. Find her. Find my daughter. If you succeed, I will pay you fifty thousand dollars in cash.” She nodded with a smile. “Yes, I thought that would make your ears move.” Evita lifted her hand, as if taking an oath. “I’m no chupacirios, but I solemnly swear by the Holy Virgin that if you find her, the money is yours.”

The door opened briefly to admit one of her dogs. Evita greeted her as “Canela,” picked her up, and kissed her like a favorite child. “Well?” she asked me. “What do you say, German?”

“I’ll do my best, ma’am,” I said. “But I can’t promise anything. Not even for fifty thousand dollars. But I will do my best.”

“Yes. Yes, that is a good answer.” Once again, she looked accusingly at Colonel Montalban. “You hear? He doesn’t say he will find her. He says he will try his best.” She nodded at me. “It’s said throughout the world that I am a selfish and ambitious woman. But this isn’t the case.”

She put down the dog and took my hand in hers. Her hands were cold, like those of a corpse. Her red fingernails were long and beautifully manicured, like the petals from some petrified flower. They were small hands but, oddly, full of power, as if in her veins was some strange electricity. It was the same with her eyes, which held me for a moment in their watery gaze. The effect was remarkable, and I was reminded of how people had once described the experience of meeting Hitler and how they had said there was something about his eyes, too. Then, without warning, she opened the front of her dress and placed my hand between her breasts, so that my palm was directly over her heart.

“I want you to feel this,” she said urgently. “I want you to feel the heart of an ordinary Argentine woman. And to know that everything I do, I do for the highest motives. Do you feel it, German? Do you feel Evita’s heart? Do you feel the truth of what I’m telling you?”

I wasn’t sure I felt anything very much other than the swell of her breasts on either side of my fingers and the cool silkiness of her perfumed flesh. I knew I had to move my hand only an inch or two to cup the whole bosom and to feel the nipple rubbing against the heel of my thumb. But of her heartbeat there was no sign. Instinctively, she pressed my hand harder against her breastbone.

“Do you feel it?” she asked insistently.

Her gaze was tearful now. And it was easy to see how she had once been such a success as an actress on the radio. The woman was the personification of high emotion and melodrama. If she’d been the Duport cello, she couldn’t have been more highly strung. It was a risk letting her go on. She might have burst into flames, levitated, or turned into a saucerful of ghee. I was getting a little excited myself. It’s not every day that the president’s wife forces your hand inside her brassiere. I decided to tell her what she wanted to hear. I was good at that. I’d had a lot of other women to practice on.

“Yes, Senora Peron, I can feel it,” I said, trying to keep the erection out of my voice.

She let go of my hand and, to my relief, she seemed to relax a little. Then she smiled and said, “Whenever you are ready, you can take your hand off my bosom, German.”

For a split second, I let it stay there. Long enough to meet her eye and let her know I liked my hand being just where it was. And then I took it away. I considered kissing my fingers, or maybe just smelling the perfume that was on them now, only that would have made me as melodramatic as she. So I put the hand in my pocket, saving it for later, like a choice cigar or a dirty postcard.

She adjusted her dress and then opened a drawer, from which she took out a photograph and handed it to me. It was the same photograph Kurt von Bader had given me. The reward he had mentioned was the same amount. I wondered whether, if I did manage to find Fabienne, each would pay or just one. Or neither. Neither seemed more likely. Usually when you found a missing child, the parents got angry, first with the child and then with you. Not that any of this seemed particularly relevant. They were asking me to look for her because they’d tried everything else. Since that had already failed, I figured I had next to no chance of turning up a lead on the kid. To succeed, I would have to think of something that hadn’t been thought of, which wasn’t a good bet on anyone’s quinella. Probably the kid was in Uruguay, or dead, and if she wasn’t, then there had to be an adult who was helping her stay below the radar.

“Do you think you can find her?” asked Evita.

“I was kind of wondering that myself,” I said. “Perhaps I might, if I had all the facts.”

“Forgive me, but isn’t that a detective’s job? To work without all the facts. I mean, if we had all the facts, then we could probably find her ourselves. We wouldn’t need you, German. And we certainly wouldn’t be offering a reward of fifty thousand dollars.”

She had a point, of course. Melodramatic she might have been. Stupid she wasn’t.

“What makes you think she’s still in the country?” I asked. “Could be she just got on the riverboat to Montevideo. Twenty-nine dollars. End of story.”

“For one thing,” said Evita, “I’m married to the president of Argentina. So, I know that she doesn’t have a passport. And even if she did have a passport, she doesn’t have a visa. We know because my husband asked Luis Berres. He’s the president of Uruguay. And before you ask, he also asked Presidents Videla, Chaves, and Odria.”

“Perhaps if I spoke to her parents again,” I said. Correcting myself, I added, “I mean to her father and her stepmother.”

“If you think it would do any good,” said Montalban.

I didn’t. But I hardly knew what else to suggest. All of it was a dead end. I’d known that the first time I’d met von Bader. From everything I’d heard, his daughter and whomever she was with didn’t want to be found. For a detective, when people don’t want to be found, it’s like looking for the meaning of life. You’re not even sure that it exists. I hated taking on a job that promised so little chance of success. And normally, I might have turned it down. But normal didn’t even get to peek through the spy hole of this particular situation. Eva Peron wasn’t the kind of president’s wife you refused. Especially not soon after my trip to Caseros.

“Well?” she asked. “How will you go about it?”