with an Argentine field producer who thinks we can get the story, with a little assistance from you."
"In Argentina, football-soccer, I think you say-is our national sport. I gather network TV plays that role in the States."
"You could say that." Anna rewarded him with a wide smile, and crossed her legs. "And I'm not at all putting down my colleagues at Dateline. But we both know what sort of story they'll do, because it'll be the same old tune. Argentina as a backward country that harbors these bad, bad people. They'll do something very exploitative, very cheap. We're not like that. What we have in mind is much more sophisticated and I think much more accurate. We want to capture the new Argentina. A place where people like yourself have been seeing that justice is done. A place with modern law enforcement, yet respect for democracy"-she wiggled a hand vaguely-"and like that." Another wide smile. "And certainly your efforts would be handsomely compensated with a consultant's fee. So, Mr. Peralta. Can we work together?"
Peralta's smile was thin. "Certainly if you have proof that Josef Strasser is living in Buenos Aires, you must only to tell me. Produce the evidence." He jabbed the air with a silver Cross pen to emphasize how simple it all was. "That is all."
"Mr. Peralta. Someone is going to do this story, whether it's my team or the competition." Anna's smile faded. "The only question is how the story will be done. Whether it's a story of one of your successes, or one of your failures. Come on, you must have a file of leads on Strasser some sort of indication that he's here," Anna said. "I mean, you don't doubt he's living in Buenos Aires, do you?"
Peralta leaned back in his chair, which squeaked. "Ms. Reyes," he said, his tone that of a man with a delicious piece of gossip to impart, "a few years ago my office received a credible tip from a woman living in Belgrano, one of our wealthiest suburbs. She had seen Alois Brunner, the SS Hauptsturmfuhrer, on the street, coming out of a neighboring house. Immediately we have a round-the-clock surveillance on this man's house. Indeed she was correct, the old man's face matched our file photos of Brunner. We moved in on the gentleman. Indignant, he produced his old German passport, you know, imprinted with the eagles of the Third Reich and a big J, for (ew. The man's name was Katz." Peralta came forward in his chair until he was upright again. "So how do you apologize to a man like this, who had been in the camps?"
"Yes," Anna agreed equably, "that must have been terribly embarrassing. But our intelligence on Strasser is solid. Dateline is filming their second-unit footage background shots even as we speak. They must be very confident."
"Dateline, 60 Minutes, 20/20 I am familiar with these investigative programs. If you people were so very sure Josef Strasser was, as you Americans like to say, alive and living in Argentina, you would have found him long ago, no?" His lizard eyes were fixed on her.
She could not tell him the truth that her interest was not in his Nazi past, but in what he may have been involved in when he parted company with his Fuhrer, and joined forces with the invisible architects of the postwar era. "Then where would you suggest I begin looking?"
"Impossible to answer! If we knew there was a war criminal living here, we would arrest him. But I must tell you, there are no more." He dropped his pen onto his desk definitively.
"Really." She made some meaningless marks on her yellow pad.
"Times have changed in Argentina. The bad old days, when a Josef Mengele could live openly here, under his own name, they are gone. The days of the Per6n dictatorship are over. Now Argentina is a democracy. Josef Schwammberger was extradited. Erich Priebke was extradited. I cannot even recall the last time we arrested a Nazi here."
She crossed out her doodle with a slash of her pen. "What about immigration records? Records of people who entered the country in the forties and fifties?"
He frowned. "Maybe there are records of entries, arrivals. The National Registry, the Migrations Department-it is index cards, everything entered by hand. But our coastline is thousands of kilometers long. Who knows how many tugboats and rowboats and fishing trawlers landed decades ago at one of the hundreds of estancias-the ranches-and were never detected? Hundreds of kilometers of