A Quiet Flame

“A franchucha is what the porteños call a French prostitute. A gallina is what they call one from Russia. Wherever they come from, they usually always had one thing in common: they were Jewish. At one time, half the prostitutes in this city were Jewish. Not by choice. Most of them were sold into it. Like slaves. Then my husband ran away with what was left of my money and most of Anna’s. By the time he came back, he’d spent it all and I needed to make a living. So I am as you see me now. I do a little acting, some dancing. Sometimes a little bit more, when the man is nice. My new life had one major advantage, however. It allowed me to search for my sisters. And about two years ago, I discovered they’d been arrested the previous year, in a police raid on a casita. They were taken to San Miguel prison. But instead of appearing before the magistrates, they disappeared from prison altogether. Since then, I’ve heard nothing from them. Nobody has. It’s like they never existed.

“It was my ex-husband, Pablo, who introduced me to the colonel. And I really only took the job with Señor von Bader in the hope that I might find an opportunity to ask the colonel about my two sisters.”

“And did you?”

“No. For the simple reason that he and von Bader made some remarks about Jews. Anti-Semitic remarks. You remember?”

“I remember.”

“As a result, I didn’t think it likely he was going to be very sympathetic to my situation. Then I noticed how you didn’t seem comfortable with those remarks, either. And what kind eyes you seemed to have. And I decided to abandon my plan to speak to the colonel, and speak to you instead. Or at least to persuade Anna to speak to you about our situation. The rest you know. She’s broke, of course. But very beautiful. I hardly expected you would help us for nothing. I can assure you, nobody does anything for nothing in this country.”

“Don’t count on it happening a lot that way. I pay just as easily as the next man. Sometimes the halo slips and I get an appetite for all the usual vices and some of the unusual ones, too.”

“I’ll try to bear that in mind,” she said. “It’ll give me something to think about the next time I can’t get to sleep.”

“How old were your sisters when they got here?”

“Fourteen and sixteen.”

“Is there much of a white-slavery racket here in Buenos Aires?”

“Listen, there’s a racket in that sort of thing almost anywhere you go. Girls arrive somewhere that’s a long way from home. They’ve no money, no papers, and there’s no way back. They find they have to work to pay off the hidden costs of their passage. I’m just lucky the same thing didn’t happen to me. Whatever I do, I do by choice. More or less.”

“Who does the buying and the selling?”

“You mean of the baggage? The girls?”

I nodded.

“First of all, this doesn’t happen so much anymore. The supply of new girls has dwindled. The sellers were usually the same men who organized passage for these girls. Ship’s captains, first mates, all from places like Marseilles, Bilbao, Vigo, Oporto, Tenerife, and even Dakar. Younger girls like my sisters were ‘underweight.’ Older girls were ‘overweight.’ If they were really young, the girls were called ‘fragile’—too young ever to see daylight during the voyage. The trade was controlled by a Pole in Montevideo, called Mihanovich. Montevideo was where all the ships docked before coming on to Buenos Aires. Some stayed in Uruguay. But usually the girls were sent here, where more money was to be made from their sale. Mihanovich would make a deal with the men from the Center. That’s what we call organized crime in this city. It’s called the Center because it’s based in the area between Corrientes, Belgrano, the docks, and San Nicolás. A lot of it is run by two French families, one from Marseilles and the other from Paris. So the men from the Center would buy the girls from Mihanovich, scare the hell out of them when they got here, and put them to work in the casitas of Buenos Aires. You’re a sailor with a few days’ leave and a cockstand? This is the place to go. There are more casitas in this part of Buenos Aires than in the rest of Argentina. Even the cops go carefully around here. So you can imagine how I felt knowing my two teenage sisters were put to work there.” She shook her head bitterly. “This city is like something from the Last Judgment.”