A Quiet Flame Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 Montalbán 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.
    Montalbán 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 Montalbán 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 porteños called Perón’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 Montalbán 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.
    The colonel had parked off Florida, on Tucumán, 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