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.
The colonel had parked off Florida, on Tucuman, outside the Claridge Hotel. His car was a lime-colored Chevrolet convertible with polished wooden doors, whitewall tires, red leather seats, and, on the hood, an enormous spotlight, in case he needed to interrogate a parking attendant. When you sat in it, you felt like you should have been towing a water-skier.
“So this is what the polenta drives in B.A.,” I remarked, running my hand over the door. It had the height and feel of a bar top in a deluxe hotel. I suppose it made sense. A nice pink house for the president. A lime-colored convertible for his deputy head of security and intelligence. Fascism never looked so pretty. The firing squads probably wore tutus.
We drove west on Moreno with the top up. What was probably a cold winter’s day to the colonel felt pleasantly springlike to me. The temperature was in the mid-teens, but most portenos were walking around wearing hats and coats, as if it were Munich in January.
“Where are we going?”
“Police headquarters.”
“My favorite.”
“Relax,” he said, chuckling. “There’s something I want you to see.”
“I hope it’s your new summer uniforms. If so, I can save you a journey. I think they should be the same color as the Casa Rosada. To help make policemen in Argentina more popular. It’s hard not to like a cop when he’s wearing pink.”
“Do you always talk so much? What ever happened to keeping your mouth shut and your ears open?”
“After twelve years of Nazism it’s nice to squeak a little now and again.”
We drove through the entrance of a handsome nineteenth-century building that didn’t look much like a police station. I was beginning to understand a little of Argentine culture from a keen appreciation of its architecture. It was a very Catholic country. Even the police station looked like there was a basilica inside, one that was dedicated probably to Saint Michael, the patron of cops.
It might not have looked like a police station but it certainly smelled like one. All police stations smell of shit and fear.
Colonel Montalban led the way through a warren of marble-floored corridors. Cops carrying files climbed out of our way as we went along.
“I’m beginning to think you might be someone important,” I said.
We stopped outside a door where the air seemed more fetid. It made me think of visiting the aquarium at the Berlin Zoo when I was a child. Or perhaps the reptile house. Something wet and slimy and uncomfortable, anyway. The colonel took out a packet of Capstan Navy Cut, offered me one, and then lit us both. “Deodorants,” he said. “In here is the judicial mortuary.”
“Do you bring all your first dates here?”
“Just you, my friend.”
“I feel I should warn you that I’m the squeamish sort. I don’t like mortuaries. Especially when there are dead bodies in them.”
“Come, now. You worked in Homicide, didn’t you?”
“That was years ago. It’s the living I want to be with as I get older, Colonel. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to spend time with the dead when I’m dead myself.”
The colonel pushed open the door and waited. It seemed I didn’t have much choice but to go inside. The smell got worse. Like a dead alligator. Something wet and slimy and definitely dead. A man wearing white scrubs and bright green rubber gloves came to meet us. He was vaguely Indian-looking, dark-skinned with even darker rings under his eyes, one of which was milky, like an oyster. I had the idea he’d just crawled out of one of his body drawers. He and the colonel exchanged a silent mime of nods and head jerks, and then the green gloves went to work. Less than a minute later, I was looking at the naked body of an adolescent girl. At least I think it was a girl. What usually passed for clues in this department appeared to be missing. And not just the exterior parts, but quite a few of the internal ones, too. I’d seen more obviously fatal injuries, but only on the western front, in 1917. Everything south of her navel appeared to have been mislaid.
The colonel let me take a good look at her and then said, “I was wondering if she reminded you of anyone.”
“I don’t know. Someone dead?”
“Her name is Grete Wohlauf. A German-Argentine girl. She was found in the Barrio Norte about two weeks ago. We think she was strangled. More obviously, her womb and other reproductive organs had been removed. Probably by someone who knew what he was doing. This was not a frenzied attack. As you can see, there is a certain clinical efficiency about what has been done here.”
I kept the cigarette in my mouth so that the smoke acted as a screen between my sense of smell and the gutted cadaver that was laid out in front of us like something on an abattoir floor. Actually, the smell was mostly formaldehyde, but whenever I caught it in my nostrils, it dislodged memories of the many unpleasant things I’d seen in my time as a Berlin homicide detective. There were two things I remembered in particular, but I saw no reason to mention these to Colonel Montalban.
Whatever it was he wanted from me, I wanted no part of it. After a while, I turned away.
“And?” I said.
“I just wondered. If this might jog any memories.”
“Nothing that ought to be in my photograph album.”
“She was fifteen years old.”
“It’s too bad.”
“Yes,” he said. “I have a daughter myself. A little older than her. I don’t know what I’d do if something like this happened.” He shrugged. “Everything. Anything.”
I said nothing. I imagined he was coming to the point.
He walked me back to the mortuary door. “I told you before that I studied jurisprudence in Berlin,” he said. “Fichte, von Savigny, Ehrlich. My father wanted me to be a lawyer. And my mother, who is German, she wanted me to become a philosopher. I myself wanted to travel. To Europe. And after my law degree I was offered the opportunity to study in Germany. Everyone was happy. Me, most of all. I loved Berlin.”
He pushed open the door and we went back into the corridor outside.
“I had an apartment on the Ku-damm, near the Memorial Church and that club with the doorman who dressed up as the devil, and where the waiters dressed as angels.”
“The Heaven and Hell,” I said. “I remember it very well.”
“That’s right.” The colonel grinned. “Me a good Roman Catholic boy. I’d never seen so many naked women before. There was one show: ‘Twenty-five Scenes from the Life of the Marquis de Sade,’ it was called. And another called ‘The Naked Frenchwoman: Her Life Mirrored in Art.’ What a place. What a city. Is it really all gone?”
“Yes. Berlin itself is a ruin. Little more than a building site. You wouldn’t recognize it.”
“Too bad.”
He unlocked the door to a little room opposite the judicial mortuary. There was a cheap table, a few cheap chairs, and some cheap ash-trays. The colonel drew up a blind and opened a dirty window to let in some fresh air. Across the street I could see a church, and there were people going in the door who knew nothing about forensics and murder and whose nostrils were filled with something better than the smell of cigarettes and formaldehyde. I sighed and looked at my watch, hardly caring to conceal my impatience now. I hadn’t asked to see the body of a dead girl. I was irritated with him for that and for what I knew was surely coming.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m just getting to it now. What I wanted to talk to you about, Herr Gunther. You see, I’ve always been interested in the darker side of human behavior. That is why I became interested in you, Herr Gunther. You are one of the reasons I became a policeman rather than a lawyer. In a sense you helped to save me from a very dull life.”