A Quiet Flame

IT WAS A SHORT CONVALESCENCE. But not so short that I wasn’t able to lie in bed and do nothing but think. And after a while, I managed to put some of the bits together in my mind. Unfortunately, it was the kind of puzzle where the jigsaw was still moving, and if I wasn’t very careful, the narrow vertical blade might slice off my fingers while I was trying to arrange the interlocking pieces. Or worse than that. Living long enough to see the whole picture might prove to be difficult. Yet I could hardly just put it all down and walk away. I don’t care for a word like “retirement,” but that was what I wanted. I was tired of solving puzzles. Argentina was a beautiful country. I wanted to sit on the beach at Mar del Plata, to see the regattas at Tigre, or visit the lakes at Nahuel Hupi. Unfortunately, nobody wanted me to do what I wanted. What they wanted was for me to do what they wanted. And much as I wished things to be different, I couldn’t see a way around any of this. I did, however, decide to attend to things according to my own idea of precedence.

Contrary to what I’d told Colonel Montalbán, I did hate loose ends. It had always bothered me that I’d never arrested Anita Schwarz’s killer. Not just for the sake of my professional pride but for the sake of Paul Herzefelde’s professional pride, too. So the first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was drive to the house of Helmut Gregor. By now I had a pretty shrewd idea of who and what he was, but I wanted to make sure before I threw it back in the colonel’s face.

Helmut Gregor lived in the nicest part of Florida. The house, at Calle Arenales 2460, was a handsome, spacious, colonial-type white stucco mansion owned by a wealthy Argentine businessman called Gerard Malbranc. There was a pillared veranda out front and, chained to the balustrade, a medium-sized dog that was doing its best to ignore the tantalizing proximity of a long-haired cat that seemed to have the run of the place.

I staked out the house. I had a flask of coffee, some cognac, one or two newspapers, and several books in German from the Dürer Haus bookshop. I had even borrowed a small telescope. It was a nice, quiet street and, despite my best intentions, I left the books and the papers alone and slept, with one eye half open. One time I sat up and saw a rather handsome couple ride by on even more handsome horses. They wore normal clothes and used English saddles. Florida wasn’t the kind of neighborhood to see anything more picturesque. On Calle Arenales a gaucho would have looked about as inconspicuous as a football on a cathedral altar. Another time I looked up to see a van from Gath & Chaves delivering a bed to a woman wearing a pink silk dressing gown. From the way she was dressed, I had the idea she was probably planning to sleep on it the minute the two apes lifting it into her home were back in their van. I wouldn’t have minded joining her.

In the late afternoon, after I’d been there several hours, a police car showed up. A policeman and a girl of about fourteen got out of the car. The policeman looked old enough to be her grandfather. He might have been her caballero blanco, which was what porteños called a sugar daddy, but uniformed cops don’t usually make enough to spend it on anyone other than their fat wives and their ugly children. Of course, he might actually have been a father taking his stunningly attractive young daughter to an appointment with the family doctor. But for the fact that most fathers don’t usually put their daughters in handcuffs. Not unless they’ve been very bad indeed. The dog started to bark as they mounted the steps to the front door. The cop patted the dog’s head. It stopped barking.

Through the telescope I watched the polished black front door. It was opened by a man wearing a light-colored tweed suit. His hair was dark and he had a short, Errol Flynn-style mustache. He and the policeman seemed to know each other. The man from the house smiled to reveal a noticeable gap between the two front teeth on his upper jaw. Then he placed an avuncular hand on the girl’s shoulder and spoke kindly to her. The girl, who had seemed nervous until now, was reassured. The man pointed at the handcuffs, and the cop took them off. The girl rubbed her wrists and then put her thumbnail between her teeth. She had long brown hair and skin the color of honey. She was wearing a red corduroy dress and red-and-black stockings. Her knees touched when she talked, and when she smiled it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. The man from the house ushered the girl inside, looked at the cop, and pointed after her, as if inviting him in, too. The cop shook his head. The man went inside, the door closed, and the cop went to sit in the car, where he smoked a cigarette, tipped his cap forward, folded his arms, and went to sleep.

I glanced at my wristwatch. It was two o’clock.