“That’s what you think,” she said. “It’s under my bra strap, between my shoulder blades.”
“Anna, listen to me. Promise you won’t do anything stupid. You don’t know what you’re up against. These men are professionals. They handle guns every day. So let me deal with it. I’m sure we can talk our way out of this.”
“That man, the general,” she said. “If he really did what you said he did, he deserves to be shot.”
“Sure he does. Only he’s not going to be shot, unless it’s by someone who knows what they’re doing.”
The head gaucho pushed his head between us. From the smell of his breath, I guessed he was a stranger to the toothbrush. “Shut up talking German and drive,” he said fiercely. For added emphasis, he produced his knife and pressed the tip under my ribs. I felt like a horse who had been pricked with a spur.
“I get the point,” I said, and put my foot down.
SITTING ON THE EDGE of a mountain slope with an excellent view of the valley below, it was more like a little piece of old Heidelberg than a ranch-tesserae of handsome wooden chalets, ivy-wrapped castle-style turrets, and a small chapel complete with a bell tower. Under the arch of the main building was a huge wooden tun that, from the bottles beside it, looked like it was filled with red wine. On the cobbled courtyard in front was an ornamental circular garden with a bronze fawn leaping through a facsimile cliff-edge waterfall, and I almost expected to see the Student Prince soaking his head under it after a night on the beer. My surprise at seeing a corner of Baden-Wurttemberg in Argentina was quickly overtaken by the sight of a familiar face. Walking toward me, his hand held out in front, was my old detective sergeant, Heinrich Grund. To my relief, he seemed pleased to see me.
“Bernie Gunther,” he said. “I thought it was you. What brings you up here?”
I pointed at the head gaucho with whom Grund had been speaking just a minute or two before. “Him,” I said.
Grund shook his head and laughed. “Same old Bernie. Always in trouble with the powers that be.”
Even after almost two decades, he looked like a boxer. A retired boxer. He was grayer than I remembered. There were deep lines in his face. And more of a stomach in front of him. But he still had a face like a welder’s mask, and a fist as big as a speedball.
“Is that what he is?”
“Gonzalez. Oh, yes. He’s the estate manager. Runs everything around here. He seems to think you might have been spying.”
“Spying? On what, exactly?”
“Oh, I dunno.” Grund’s eyes licked Anna up and down for a moment. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your lady friend?”
“Anna? This is Heinrich Grund. We were in the Berlin police together about a thousand years ago.”
“Is it that long?”
It certainly felt that long. I hadn’t seen Grund since the summer of 1938, when he was already a senior officer in the Gestapo and we’d been very much at arm’s length with each other. When last I’d heard of him, he was a major in an EG-a special action group-in the Crimea. I didn’t know what he’d done. I didn’t want to know. But it wasn’t difficult to imagine.
“Heinrich,” I said, continuing the formal introduction. “This is Anna Yagubsky. According to her, she’s my fiancee.”
“Then I certainly wouldn’t argue with her.” Grund took her hand and, smoother than I remembered him, bowed like a proper German officer. “Charmed, I’m sure.”
“I wish I could say the same,” said Anna. “I don’t know why we’ve been brought here. Really I don’t.”
“I’m afraid she’s not very happy with me,” I told Grund. “I promised her a nice drive from Tucuman and I managed to get us lost. The general and his men found us somewhere down in the valley. I’m not sure but I think it was somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.”
“Yes, Gonzalez told me he found you at Camp Dulce, down at the Sweet Lagoon. Now that’s a very secret place. And, by the way, we don’t call him ‘the general.’ We call him ‘the doctor.’ Whom you’ve met, of course. Anyway, he’s a close friend of Peron and takes all breaches of local security very seriously.”
I shrugged. “Occupational hazard, I suppose. I mean, we all of us have to take security very seriously.”
“Not like up here you don’t.” Grund turned and pointed at the tops of the Sierra behind us. “The other side of that is Chile. There’s a secret pass that was used by the Guarani Indians that only the doctor and Gonzalez know about. The least sniff of trouble, and we can all be off on our travels again.” Grund smiled. “This place is the perfect hideout.”
“What is this place?” asked Anna. “It looks more town than village, I think.”
“It was built by a German. A fellow named Carlos Wiederhold, toward the end of the last century. But quite soon after finishing it, he found an even nicer spot, to the south of here. Place called Bariloche. So he went there and built a whole town in similar style. There are lots of old comrades down there. You should visit it sometime.”
“Perhaps I will,” I said. “Always supposing I can get a clean bill of health from the doctor.”
“Naturally, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Heinrich.”
Grund shook his head. “Only I’m still finding it kind of hard to believe. Bernie Gunther being here in Argentina, like the rest of us. I always had you pegged as a bit of a Commie. What the hell happened?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Isn’t it always?”
“But not right now, eh?”
“Sure.” Grund started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You, a fugitive war criminal. The same as me. The war made fools of us all, didn’t it?”
“That’s certainly been my experience.”
I heard the sound of horses and looked around to see Kammler and his men riding up the slope toward us. The SS general lifted his boots out of the stirrups and slipped off his horse like a jockey. Grund went over to speak to him. Anna was watching Kammler closely. I was watching Anna. I put my hand lightly on her back. The gun wasn’t there.
“Where is it?” I murmured.
“Under my belt,” she said. “Where I can reach it.”
“If you kill him-”
“What, and spoil your little Nazi reunion? I wouldn’t want to do that.”
There seemed no point in arguing that one. I said, “If you kill him, they’ll kill us both.”
“After what I’ve seen, do you really think I care?”
“Yes. And if you don’t, then you certainly ought to. You’re still a young woman. One day you might have children. Perhaps you ought to think about them.”
“I don’t think I want to bring children into a country like this.”
“Then pick another country. I did.”
“Yes, I should think you would feel quite at home here,” she said bitterly. “For you, this must seem like a real home away from home.”
“Anna, please be quiet. Be quiet and let me think.”
When Kammler had finished speaking to Grund, he approached us with a sort of smile on his lean face, taking his cap off, his arm extended toward us both in a show of avuncular hospitality. Now that he had dismounted, I was able to get a better look at him. He was well over six feet tall. His hair was invisibly short and gray at the sides, but longer and darker on the crown, so that it looked like a yarmulke. The skull on his sticklike neck had been taken from Easter Island, probably. The eyes were set in cavelike sockets so deep and shadowy they almost looked empty, as if the bird of prey that hatched him had pecked them out. His physique was very spare but strong, like something that had been unwound from one of Melville’s spools of Glasgow barbed wire. For a moment I couldn’t quite place his accent. And then I guessed he was Prussian-one of those Baltic-coast Prussians who eat herring for breakfast and keep griffins for sport.
“I’ve been talking to your old friend Grund,” he said, “and I’ve decided not to kill you.”