Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“No, sir. The fact is, my castellano is fine in Buenos Aires. But out here it lets me down sometimes. The accent is a little difficult for me to understand.”

“Most of the people in this part of the world are of Guarani stock,” he said, speaking German at last. “They are an inferior Indian race, but on a ranch, they have their uses. Herding, branding, fence mending. ”

I nodded toward the barbed-wire fence. “Is this your fence, Herr General?”

“No,” he said. “But my men keep an eye on it. You see, this is a high-security area. Few people ever venture this far down the valley. Which leaves me with something of a dilemma.”

“Oh? What’s that, sir?”

“I should have thought that was obvious. If you didn’t cut the fence, then who did? You see my problem.”

“Yes, sir.” I shook my head awkwardly. “Well, we certainly haven’t seen anyone. Mind you, we haven’t been here that long.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

The horse lifted its tail and did what horses do. He didn’t seem to believe my story, either.

The general nodded sharply at the head gaucho. “You’d better bring them along.” He spoke in castellano, and it seemed evident that neither the head man nor the two Guarani spoke any German.

We walked back to where we’d left the jeep. Three horses were waiting patiently for their riders. The two Guarani mounted up and took the third horse’s bridle, while the head gaucho climbed in the back of the jeep. I noticed that his holster was unbuttoned, and decided he looked like the type who might be quick on the draw. Besides, under his belt was a knife as long as Chile.

“Just stick to the story,” I told Anna in Russian.

“All right. But I don’t think he believed it.”

She climbed into the passenger seat, lit a nervous-looking cigarette, and tried to ignore the head gaucho’s brown eyes on the back of her head. “Who was that Nazi, anyway?”

“I think he’s the Nazi who built that camp,” I said. “And many others like it.” I climbed into the driver’s seat, took the cigarette from her mouth, puffed it for a moment, and then put it back, only it didn’t stick. Her jaw was hanging down like the ramp on a truck. So I put the cigarette in my own mouth.

“You mean?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.” I started the jeep. “Which makes him extremely dangerous. So do exactly what I say and maybe we’ll live to know better than to tell the tale.”

The head gaucho tapped me impatiently on the shoulder. “Drive,” he said in castellano. He pointed farther up the road toward the three horsemen and the high Sierra.

I put the jeep in gear and drove slowly along the road.

“It’s just one man,” said Anna. “Why don’t you throw him out or something? We could easily escape three men on horses, couldn’t we?”

“For one thing, this man behind me is armed to the teeth. And for another, so are all his friends, and they know this country much better than me. Besides, I lost my gun back there in the trees.”

“That’s what you think,” she said. “It’s under my bra strap, between my shoulder blades.”

“Anna, listen to me. Promise you won’t do anything stupid. You don’t know what you’re up against. These men are professionals. They handle guns every day. So let me deal with it. I’m sure we can talk our way out of this.”

“That man, the general,” she said. “If he really did what you said he did, he deserves to be shot.”

“Sure he does. Only he’s not going to be shot, unless it’s by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

The head gaucho pushed his head between us. From the smell of his breath, I guessed he was a stranger to the toothbrush. “Shut up talking German and drive,” he said fiercely. For added emphasis, he produced his knife and pressed the tip under my ribs. I felt like a horse who had been pricked with a spur.

“I get the point,” I said, and put my foot down.

SITTING ON THE EDGE of a mountain slope with an excellent view of the valley below, it was more like a little piece of old Heidelberg than a ranch-tesserae of handsome wooden chalets, ivy-wrapped castle-style turrets, and a small chapel complete with a bell tower. Under the arch of the main building was a huge wooden tun that, from the bottles beside it, looked like it was filled with red wine. On the cobbled courtyard in front was an ornamental circular garden with a bronze fawn leaping through a facsimile cliff-edge waterfall, and I almost expected to see the Student Prince soaking his head under it after a night on the beer. My surprise at seeing a corner of Baden-Wurttemberg in Argentina was quickly overtaken by the sight of a familiar face. Walking toward me, his hand held out in front, was my old detective sergeant, Heinrich Grund. To my relief, he seemed pleased to see me.

“Bernie Gunther,” he said. “I thought it was you. What brings you up here?”

I pointed at the head gaucho with whom Grund had been speaking just a minute or two before. “Him,” I said.

Grund shook his head and laughed. “Same old Bernie. Always in trouble with the powers that be.”

Even after almost two decades, he looked like a boxer. A retired boxer. He was grayer than I remembered. There were deep lines in his face. And more of a stomach in front of him. But he still had a face like a welder’s mask, and a fist as big as a speedball.

“Is that what he is?”

“Gonzalez. Oh, yes. He’s the estate manager. Runs everything around here. He seems to think you might have been spying.”

“Spying? On what, exactly?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Grund’s eyes licked Anna up and down for a moment. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your lady friend?”

“Anna? This is Heinrich Grund. We were in the Berlin police together about a thousand years ago.”

“Is it that long?”

It certainly felt that long. I hadn’t seen Grund since the summer of 1938, when he was already a senior officer in the Gestapo and we’d been very much at arm’s length with each other. When last I’d heard of him, he was a major in an EG-a special action group-in the Crimea. I didn’t know what he’d done. I didn’t want to know. But it wasn’t difficult to imagine.

“Heinrich,” I said, continuing the formal introduction. “This is Anna Yagubsky. According to her, she’s my fiancee.”

“Then I certainly wouldn’t argue with her.” Grund took her hand and, smoother than I remembered him, bowed like a proper German officer. “Charmed, I’m sure.”

“I wish I could say the same,” said Anna. “I don’t know why we’ve been brought here. Really I don’t.”

“I’m afraid she’s not very happy with me,” I told Grund. “I promised her a nice drive from Tucuman and I managed to get us lost. The general and his men found us somewhere down in the valley. I’m not sure but I think it was somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.”

“Yes, Gonzalez told me he found you at Camp Dulce, down at the Sweet Lagoon. Now that’s a very secret place. And, by the way, we don’t call him ‘the general.’ We call him ‘the doctor.’ Whom you’ve met, of course. Anyway, he’s a close friend of Peron and takes all breaches of local security very seriously.”

I shrugged. “Occupational hazard, I suppose. I mean, we all of us have to take security very seriously.”

“Not like up here you don’t.” Grund turned and pointed at the tops of the Sierra behind us. “The other side of that is Chile. There’s a secret pass that was used by the Guarani Indians that only the doctor and Gonzalez know about. The least sniff of trouble, and we can all be off on our travels again.” Grund smiled. “This place is the perfect hideout.”