Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

Melville couldn’t have been more than five-feet-three. Red-haired, bearded, with a wicked gap-toothed grin, he looked like something kept to amuse the Spanish royal family.

“Me, I need them much shorter,” he added. “And that generally means younger, too.”

I felt my ears prick up at this admission. “How much younger?”

“The age isn’t important,” he said. “Not for a short-arse like me. I have to take what I can get.”

“Yes, but there’s young and there’s too young, surely?”

“Is there?” He laughed. “I dunno.”

“Well, just how young is too young? You must have some idea.”

He thought for a moment and then shrugged silently.

“So what’s the youngest you’ve ever had?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m interested, that’s all. I mean, with some of these girls you meet these days, well, sometimes, it’s a little hard to tell how old they are.” I was hoping to draw him out on a subject Melville was already beginning to look evasive about. “The makeup they wear. The clothes. Some of them have experience way beyond their years. Back in Germany, for instance, I had a few close shaves, I can tell you. Of course I was a lot younger then myself. And Germany was Germany. Girls were naked in the clubs and naked in the parks. Before the Nazis, sun worship-naturism, they called it-it was all the rage. Like I say, that was Germany. Sex was our national pastime. Under the Weimar Republic, we were famous for it. But this. This is a Roman Catholic country. I’d have thought that things were a bit different here.”

“Then you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you?” Melville uttered his manic gargoyle’s laugh. “To tell the truth, this country’s a paradise for perverts like me. It’s one of the reasons I live here. All the unripe fruit. You only have to reach up and pick it off the tree.”

Again I felt my ears prick up. The Castilian phrase Melville used to describe young girls was fruta inmadura -the very same phrase the colonel had used to describe Peron’s similar predilection.

“I don’t know about Germany,” said Melville. “I’ve not actually been there. But it would have to be pretty bloody good to beat the Argentine for lecheras. ”

“Lecheras?”

“Milkmaids.”

I nodded. “Is it true, what I’ve heard? That the general likes them pretty young himself?”

Melville pursed his lips and looked evasive again.

“Maybe that’s why you can get away with it,” I said.

“You make it sound like a crime, Hausner.”

“Isn’t it? I don’t know.”

“These girls know what they’re doing, believe me.” He rolled an emaciated little cigarette and held the match up to his mouth. The roll-up crackled into flames like a tiny forest fire. With one chuckling puff he managed to consume almost a third of it.

“So where would I go?” I asked, affecting nonchalant curiosity. “If I was thinking of picking it off the tree, like you describe.”

“One of the pesar poco joints down at the portside in La Boca,” he said. “Of course you would have to be introduced by a member.” He lifted his whole mug in the air in a big self-satisfied grin. “Like me.”

Restraining my first impulse-to introduce his jaw to a short uppercut-I smiled and said, “That’s a date, then.”

“Mind you,” he said, “the fruta inmadura scene is not what it used to be. Immediately after the war, the country was flooded with underweight baggage. That’s what we used to call the really fragile fruit that was coming from Europe. Little Jewish virgins escaping to a better life, they imagined. All of them looking for the caballero blanco. A few found one. Some grew up and went on the game. The rest? Who knows?”

“Who knows, indeed? The way I hear it, some of those illegal Jews got themselves picked up by the secret police. And disappeared.”

Melville pulled a face and shook his head. “Everyone disappears at one time or another in Argentina. It’s a national bloody pastime. The portenos get depressed about all kinds of shit. And then they take off for a while. Sooner or later most of them turn up again, without a word of explanation. Like nothing happened. As for the Jews, well, it’s my own experience they’re an especially melancholy lot. Which, if you don’t mind me saying so, is largely the fault of your own countrymen, Hausner.”

I nodded, conceding the point, which was well made.

“Now, take Peron,” he said, warming to his theme. “He was vice president and secretary of war in the government of General Edelmiro Farrell. Then he disappeared. His colleagues had arrested him and put him in jail on Martin Garcia Island. Then Evita organizes some mass demonstrations of popular support, and a week later he’s back. Six months after that, he’s the president. He disappears. He comes back. It’s a very Argentine story.”

“Not everyone has an Evita,” I said. “And not everyone who disappears comes back, surely. You can’t deny that the jails are full of Peron’s political opponents.”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Besides, most of those people are Communists. Do you want to see this country handed over to the Communists like Poland and Hungary and East Germany? Like Bolivia?”

“No, not at all.”

“Well, then. You ask me, they’re doing the best they can. This is a fine country. Perhaps the finest country in the whole of South America. With excellent prospects for economic growth. And I’d much rather live in Argentina than in Britain. Even without the unripe fruit.”

Melville flicked the pungent roll-up into the street. It was something I’d dearly like to have done to him.

“What are you doing here anyway, Melville?” I asked, trying to conceal the exasperation I felt with him. “I mean, what is it that you do? Your work. Your job.”

“I told you before,” he said. “Obviously you weren’t listening.” He laughed. “But there’s no great mystery about what I do for a living. Unlike some I could mention.” He shot me a look as if to say he meant me. “I work for Glasgow Wire. We supply a range of stock fencing and wire products to cattle ranchers all over the Argentine.”

I tried to stifle a yawn and failed. He was right. He had told me before. It was just that I’d seen no reason to think it was something I ought to remember.

“It sounds boring, I know,” he said wryly. “But there wouldn’t be a beef industry in this country without galvanized-wire products. I sell it in fifty-meter rolls, by the pallet. The Argie cattlemen buy miles of the stuff. They can’t get enough of it. And not just the cattlemen. Wire is important to all sorts of people.”

“Really?” This time the yawn got the better of me.

Melville seemed to regard my apparent disinterest as a challenge.

“Oh, yes. Why, just a few years ago, one of your own countrymen awarded me quite a large contract. He was an engineer working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What was his name, now? Kammler. That’s right. Dr. Hans Kammler. Ever heard of him?”

The name itched a little, although I couldn’t think why.

“I had several meetings with your Mr. Kammler at the San Martin Palace, in Arenales. An interesting man. During the war he was a general in the SS. I expect you knew him.”

“All right. I was in the SS. Satisfied?”

Melville smacked his thigh with the flat of his hand. “I knew it,” he said triumphantly. “I just knew it. Course it doesn’t matter to me what you did. The war’s over now. And we’re going to need Germany if we’re to keep the Russians out of Europe.”

“What would the Ministry of Foreign Affairs need with a large quantity of wire fencing?” I asked.