Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

I left him on the terrace, with his thoughts and his fears and whatever else a man like him goes to bed with, impaled on the shards of his conscience.

Anna sat up in bed as I came through our bedroom door. The bedside light was on. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and started to unlace my shoes. I wanted to say something tender to her, but there was still something on her mind.

“Well?” she said. “Did you think of something? Some sort of punishment for that bastard Kammler?”

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”

“Something terrible?”

“Yes. I think it will be. For him.”

TWO DAYS LATER, we arrived back in Buenos Aires. Since it seemed unlikely that the colonel would have heard Kammler’s news-that his men had picked me up next to the secret camp at Dulce-with any equanimity, I told Anna I needed some time to straighten things out with him before we could count ourselves safe. For now, I told her, she should go home and stay indoors until I called her. Better still, she should go stay with a friend.

I had no way of knowing if Anna was likely to take my advice, since, for most of the journey back from Tucuman, she hadn’t really been speaking to me. She didn’t like my idea about what we were going to do about Hans Kammler. She didn’t think it was enough of a punishment, and told me that as far as she was concerned, our relationship was over.

Maybe she meant that. And maybe she didn’t. There was no time to make sure. I was coming out of the Richmond when they picked me up a second time. It might have been the same three men, only it was a little hard to tell, with the dark glasses and the matching mustaches. The car was another black Ford sedan, but not the same one that had driven me to Caseros. This car had a cigarette burn on the rear seat and a large bloodstain on the carpet. Or it might have been coffee. It might have been molasses. But over the years, you get to recognize a bloodstain when you see one on a car floor. I tried to keep calm but this time it wasn’t working. Only I wasn’t worried for myself as much as I was worried for Anna.

This was the moment I realized I was in love with her. That’s usually the way, of course. It’s only when you have something taken away that you realize how important it was to you. I was worried about her because, after all, I’d been warned, and in no uncertain terms. Naturally, the colonel would have guessed what I was up to when Kammler telephoned him. That I was sticking my nose into Argentina’s biggest secret. Not the Pulqui II jet-fighter aircraft, not even an atom bomb, but the fate of several thousand illegal Jewish refugees. The puzzle was why the colonel hadn’t just told Kammler to kill us both. I guessed I was about to find out. Only this time we sped past Caseros.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” growled one of my chaperones.

“Mystery tour, huh? I like surprises.”

“You won’t like this one,” he said ominously. And the other two laughed.

“You know, I’ve been trying to get in touch with your boss, Colonel Montalban. I called him several times last night. I need to speak with him very urgently. I have some important information for him. Will he be where we’re going?” I glanced out of the window and saw that we were driving southwest. “I know he’ll want to speak to me.”

I nodded, almost as if trying to convince myself of this. But struggling for the right Spanish vocabulary to find something else that would convince them of my need to see the colonel, I found myself unable to say anything much at all. There was a hole in the pit of my stomach the size of the football stadium at La Boca. My greatest worry was that this metaphorical hole might soon become a real one.

“Anyone got a Spanish dictionary?” I asked. No one answered. “How about a cigarette?”

One of the thugs sandwiching me shifted on his backside, squeezing me for a moment as he reached for a packet of smokes. I caught the smell of sweat on his jacket and the oil in his hair and saw a little blackjack poking out of his breast pocket. I hoped it was going to stay there. I’d been blackjacked before and I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. He turned back with the packet in his hands and pushed open the little cardboard drawer. My fingers reached for one. The cigarettes looked like little white heads tucked up in bed, which was where I wished I was now. I put the cigarette in my mouth and waited while he found his lighter.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and bent my head down to the flame. Too late I remembered it had been an old Gestapo trick. Straight out of the unofficial manual. Part III. How to silence a talkative suspect in the back of a black car. One fist holds the lighter. The other comes across from the other side of the car as the suspect ducks down to the flame, and knocks him out cold. At least, that’s what I suppose must have happened. It was that, or the Argies really did have an atom bomb and, accidentally, someone had pressed the fire button instead of the bezel on a cigarette lighter. For me, the effect was pretty much the same, however. One minute it was a nice, sunny day. The next, darkness all over the land until the ninth hour. And the sensation that I was humming like a very sick bee, as if someone had just put twenty thousand volts through a metal cap and a brine-soaked sponge attached to my cranium. For a moment or two, I thought I heard laughter. The same kind of laughter you get when you’re a cat in a sack full of stones and someone drops you down a well. I hit the water without so much as a splash and disappeared below the surface. It was a deep well and the water was very cold. The laughter went away. I stopped mewing. That was the general idea. I was pacified, the way the Gestapo liked. For some reason, I remembered Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo. He only lasted until 1934, when Goering lost control of the Prussian police. He ended up as a local government official in Cologne or Hannover, and found himself dismissed altogether when he refused to arrest the city’s Jews. What happened to him after that? A sucker punch and a trip to a concentration camp, no doubt. Like poor Frieda Bamberger, who died in the middle of nowhere with rubber seals on the shower doors. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I felt like I was already under the earth. I felt my hand poking up through the ground. Reaching for life…

Someone wrestled my arms around behind my back and tied my wrists together. I was blindfolded now. I was standing up and leaning across the warm hood of the Ford. I could hear the sound of airplanes. We were at an airport. I thought it must be Ezeira.

Two men lifted me under the arms and dragged me across the tarmac. My feet weren’t coming with me. It didn’t seem to hinder our progress. The noise of the aircraft engine grew louder. A metallic, oily smell filled the air and I felt the wind of the propeller in my face. It seemed to revive me a little.

“I feel I should warn you,” I said. “I’m not a good air traveler.” They hauled me up a short flight of metal steps and then flung me down on a hard, metallic floor. There was something else on the floor besides me. The something else shifted and groaned, and I realized there were others in the same boat as me. Except that it wasn’t a boat. It might have been better if it had been. Either way, I had now guessed what lay ahead of us. A river trip. The River Plate. Perhaps it was better this way, after all. At least we wouldn’t drown. The fall would kill us.

The door closed and the aircraft began to move. Someone, a man a few feet away, was reciting a prayer. Someone else was retching with fear. There was a strong smell of vomit and human incontinence and gasoline.