A Quiet Flame

Mengele had gripped the underside of his chair. Still holding it tightly, he leaned forward and yelled at me: “I don’t know anything else about it! I don’t know anything else! I don’t know anything else!” Then his head fell onto his chest and he started to weep. “I don’t know anything else,” he sobbed. “I’ve told you all I know.”

I stood up, slightly horrified at this outburst and the way I’d suddenly reduced him to the level of a schoolboy. It was odd. I felt only disgust with him. But what was odder still was the disgust I now felt with myself. At the darkness that dwelt within me. At the darkness that dwells within us all.

16 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I GOT UP AT SIX, just like always, had a bath, and then ate some breakfast. The Lloyds served something called a “full English breakfast”: two fried eggs, two strips of bacon, a sausage, a tomato, some mushrooms, and toast. I certainly felt full by the time I’d finished. Every time I ate one, I came away with the same thought. It was hard to believe anyone could have fought a war on a breakfast like that.

I went outside to buy some cigarettes. I paid no attention to the car that overtook me until it stopped and two doors opened. It was a black Ford sedan with nothing to indicate that it was a police car, unless you counted the two men with dark glasses and matching mustaches, who sprang out and walked swiftly toward me. I’d seen them before. In Berlin. In Munich. And in Vienna. All over the world, they were always the same thickset men with thickset brains and thickset knuckles. And they had the same practical and dynamic manner, regarding me as if I were an embarrassing piece of furniture, to be moved as quickly as possible to the backseat of the black car. I’d been removed before. Many times. When I was a private detective in Berlin, it had been a kind of occupational hazard. The Gestapo never much liked private bulls, even though Himmler had once used a Munich firm to find out if his brother-in-law was cheating on his sister.

Instinctively, I turned to avoid them and came up against thickset number three. I was searched and inside the car before I drew my next nervous breath. Nobody said anything. Except me. It kept my mind off the road ahead and the speed at which we were now moving.

“You boys are good,” I said. “Look here, I don’t suppose it would do any good to mention that my SIDE credentials are in my breast pocket. No? I guess not.”

We headed south, toward San Telmo. I made a few more cracks in castellano, which got ignored, and after a while, I gave in to their thickset silence. The car turned west near the Ministry of War. At sixteen stories, with two separate wings, it was the thickest-set building in Buenos Aires and it dominated the surrounding area like the Great Pyramid of Cheops. From the look of it, things hardly augured well for neighboring countries like Chile and Uruguay. After a while, we came to a pleasant little park and, behind this, a castellated fortress that looked as if it had been there since Francisco Pizarro had come to South America. As we drove through the main wooden gate, I almost expected the car to be hit with boulders and boiling oil poured on us from the battlements. We parked, and I was hustled outside of the car and down some steps in the courtyard. At the end of a long, damp corridor, I was placed in a short damp cell, searched by a man who was almost as big as the thickset Ministry of War, and then left alone with a chair, a wooden bunk, and a chamber pot for company. The pot was half full or half empty, depending on the way you look at these things.

I sat on the floor, which looked more comfortable than the chair or the bunk, and waited. In some faraway, rat-infested tower, a man was laughing hysterically. Nearer to where I was being held, water was trickling noisily onto a floor, and not being particularly thirsty, I hardly minded the sound. But after several hours had elapsed, I started to feel differently about it.

It was dusk when the door finally opened again. Two men came into my cell. They had their sleeves rolled up as if they meant business. One was small and muscular, and the other was large and muscular. The smaller one held what looked like a walking stick made of metal, with a two-pin electric plug on the end. The larger one held me. I struggled against him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t see his face. It was somewhere above the cloud line. The smaller one had tiny blue eyes like semiprecious stones.

“Welcome to Caseros,” he said with mock politeness. “Outside there is a little monument to the victims of the 1871 yellow-fever outbreak. In the deepest dungeon of this fortress is a pit where the bodies were thrown. Every year there are more and more victims of the 1871 yellow-fever outbreak. Understand?”

“I think so.”

“You’ve been asking questions about Directive Eleven.”

“Have I?”

“I should like to know why that is. And what you think you know.”