“Only ten years ago, Germans thought they should rule the world. Now all they want to do is live quietly and be left alone. Is that what you want, Herr Gunther? To live quietly? To be left alone?”
It was the cop who came to my aid. “Please, ma’am,” he said. “He is just being modest. Take my word for it. Herr Gunther was a great detective.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“Take the compliment, Herr Gunther. If I can remember your name, after all these years, then surely you would have to agree that, in this case at least, modesty is misplaced.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I allowed.
“Well,” said Evita. “I must be going. I’ll leave Herr Gunther and Colonel Montalban to their mutual admiration.”
I watched her go. I was glad to see the back of her. More important, I was glad to see her behind. Even under the president’s eye it demanded attention. I didn’t know any Argentine tango tunes, but watching her closely sheathed tail as she stalked gracefully out of her husband’s office, I felt like humming one. In a different room and wearing a clean shirt, I might have tried slapping it. Some men liked slapping a guitar or a set of dominoes. With me it was a woman’s ass. It wasn’t exactly a hobby. But I was good at it. A man ought to be good at something.
When she was gone, the president climbed back into the front seat and took over the steering wheel. I wondered how much he would let her get away with before he slapped her himself. Quite a bit, probably. It’s a common failing with older dictators when they have younger wives.
In German, Peron said, “Don’t mind my wife, Herr Gunther. She doesn’t understand that you spoke from”-he slapped his stomach with the flat of his hand-“down here. You spoke as you felt you had to speak. And I’m flattered that you did so. We see something in each other, perhaps. Something important. Obeying other people is one thing. Any fool can do that. But obeying oneself, submitting oneself to the most rigid and implacable of disciplines, that is what is important. Is it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
Peron nodded. “So you are not a doctor. Therefore we cannot help you practice medicine. Is there anything else we can do for you?”
“There is one thing, sir,” I said. “Maybe I’m not much of a sailor. Or maybe I’m just getting old. But lately I’ve not been feeling myself, sir. I’d like to see a doctor, if I could. A real one. Find out if there’s anything actually wrong with me, or if I’m just homesick. Although right now that does seem a little unlikely.”
4
SEVERAL WEEKS PASSED. I got my cedula and moved out of the safe house on Calle Monasterio into a nice little hotel called the San Martin, in the Florida district. The place was owned and managed by an English couple, the Lloyds, who treated me with such courtesy that it was hard to believe our two countries had ever been at war. It’s only after a war that you actually find out how much you have in common with your enemies. I discovered the English were just like us Germans, with one major advantage: they were not German.
The San Martin was full of Old World charm, with glass cupolas and comfortable furniture, and good home cooking if you enjoyed steak and chips. It was just around the corner from the more expensive Richmond Hotel, which had a cafe I liked enough to make it a regular port of call.
The Richmond was a clubby sort of place. There was a long room with wood panels and pillars and mirrored ceilings and English hunting prints and leather armchairs. A small orchestra played tangos and Mozart and, for all I knew, a few Mozart tangos. The smoke-filled basement was a home to men playing billiards, men playing dominoes, and, most important of all, men playing chess. Women were not welcome in the basement at the Richmond. Argentine men took women very seriously. Too seriously to have them around while they were playing billiards or chess. Either that or Argentine women were just very good at billiards and chess.
Back in Berlin, during the dog days of the Weimar Republic, I’d been a regular chess player at the Romanisches Cafe. Once or twice I had even had a lesson from the great Lasker, who was a regular there, too. It hadn’t made me a better player, just better able to appreciate being beaten by someone as good as Lasker.
It was in the Richmond basement that Colonel Montalban found me, locked in an end game with a diminutive, rat-faced Scotsman called Melville. I might have forced a draw if I’d had the patience of a Philidor. But then Philidor never had to play chess under the eye of the secret police. Although he almost did. Luckily for Philidor, he was in England when the French Revolution took place. Wisely, he never went back. There are more important things to lose than a game of chess. Like your head. Colonel Montalban didn’t have the cold eye of a Robespierre, but I felt it on me all the same. And instead of asking myself how I was going to exploit my extra pawn to best advantage, I started asking myself what the colonel could want with me. After that it was just a matter of time before I lost. I didn’t mind losing to the rat-faced Scotsman. He’d beaten me before. What I minded was the free tip that accompanied the clammy handshake.
“You should always put the rook behind the pawn,” he said in his lisping European Spanish, which sounds and smells very different from Latin American Spanish. “Except, of course, when it is the incorrect thing to do.”
If Melville had been Lasker, I would have welcomed the advice. But he was Melville, a barbed-wire sales agent from Glasgow, with bad breath and an unhealthy interest in young girls.
Montalban followed me upstairs. “You play a good game,” he said.
“I do all right. At least I do until the cops turn up. It takes the edge off my concentration.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. I like you being sorry. It’s a load off my mind.”
“We’re not like that in Argentina,” he said. “It’s all right to criticize the government.”
“That’s not the way I heard it. And if you ask from whom, you’ll just prove me right.”
Colonel Montalban shrugged and lit a cigarette. “There’s criticism and there’s criticism,” he said. “It’s my job to know the subtle difference.”
“I should think that’s easy enough when you have your oyentes?” The oyentes were the people portenos called Peron’s spies-people who eavesdropped on conversations in bars, on buses, and even on the telephone.
The colonel raised his eyebrows. “So, you already know about the oyentes. I’m impressed. Not that I should be, I suppose. Not from a famous Berlin detective like yourself.”
“I’m an exile, Colonel. It pays to keep your mouth shut and your ears open.”
“And what is it that you hear?”
“I did hear the one about the two river rats, one from Argentina and the other from Uruguay. The rat from Uruguay was starving, so it swam across the River Plate in the hope that it might find something to eat. Halfway across, it met an Argentine rat swimming in the opposite direction. The Uruguayan rat was surprised and asked why such a well-fed-looking rat was going to Uruguay when there was so much to eat in Argentina. And the Argentine rat told him-”
“ ‘I just want to squeak now and then.’ ” Colonel Montalban smiled wearily. “It’s an old joke.”
I pointed at an empty table but the colonel shook his head and then nodded at the door. I followed him outside, onto Florida. The street was closed to traffic between the hours of eleven a.m. and four p.m. so that pedestrians could inspect the attractively dressed windows of big shops like Gath Chaves in comfort. But it could just as easily have been so that men could inspect the attractively dressed women. Of these there were plenty. After Munich and Vienna, Buenos Aires felt like a Paris catwalk.