“If you’re politely asking if Willi speaks German, Karl,” Frade said. “Yes, he does.”
“Then we can chat in German,” Boltitz said.
“He got his the same way Hansel and El Jefe got their Spanish,” Frade said.
“How is that?” Boltitz asked a little uneasily.
“He had a sleeping dictionary,” Frade said. “And even more interesting, you have a mutual friend. Claus something. What was your friend’s last name, Willi?”
Fischer met his eyes for a moment.
“Von Stauffenberg,” Fischer said. “Claus, Graf von Stauffenberg.”
“I don’t place the name,” Boltitz said.
“Nor I,” von Wachtstein said.
“Sure you do, Hansel,” Frade said. “You told me you visited him in the hospital.”
Von Wachtstein looked at Frade as if Frade had lost his mind.
“I was with Claus the day before he was . . . injured,” Fischer said.
“Cletus, what the hell is going on here?” von Wachtstein snapped.
“Just remember that this is Wilhelm Fischer, of Durban, South Africa, whom Humberto arranged to come here to teach me how to grow better grapes,” Frade said. “None of us can afford to have anyone—especially El Bitcho—looking at him suspiciously.”
“Cletus,” Boltitz said very seriously, “Delgano is paid to be suspicious, he’s very good at being suspicious, and it looks as if he’s about to walk over here.”
“Not a problem. He already knows who Willi really is.”
“And who might that be?” von Wachtstein asked more than a little sarcastically.
“Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, late of the Afrikakorps, Herr Major,” Fischer said. “And more recently of the Senior German Officer Prisoner of War Detention Facility at Camp Clinton, Mississippi.”
He let that sink in a moment.
“I saw it as my duty as a German officer to give my parole to Major Frade in order to assist him in dealing with my parents. And to assist however I can in that other project you and our friend Claus are involved in.”
Neither von Wachtstein nor Boltitz could keep their surprise—even shock—off their faces.
“We’ll all have to get together, and soon, to have a little chat,” Frade said, then turned to face a short, muscular man of about forty with large dark eyes.
“Ah, Gonzalo!” he said. “Willi, this is Gonzalo Delgano, chief pilot of South American Airways. Gonzo, this is Mr. Wilhelm Fischer, who has come all the way from South Africa to teach me how to grow grapes.”
“How do you do, Mr. Fischer?” Delgano asked. “Welcome to Argentina.”
[TWO]
Estancia Santa Catalina
Near Pila
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
2320 13 August 1943
Cletus Frade was already annoyed when Father Welner came up to him in the library, where, over postdinner brandy and cigars, he was talking business with Humberto Duarte, Gonzalo Delgano, and Guillermo de Filippi, SAA’s chief of maintenance. Frade, at Delgano’s suggestion, had hired de Filippi away from Aeropostal, the Argentine airline, to work for SAA.
Like Delgano, de Filippi was a former officer of the Argentine army air service. According to Delgano, he had gone to Aeropostal after he had failed a flight physical and could medically retire. Frade wasn’t sure how true this story was. It was entirely possible that de Filippi, like Delgano, was actually working for the Bureau of Internal Security and that el Coronel Alejandro Bernardo Martín had ordered Delgano to get SAA to hire him as another means of keeping an eye on SAA.
But it wasn’t this that bothered Frade, who knew that Martín and BIS were going to watch SAA as a hawk watches a prairie dog. It was de Filippi himself. Behind his back, when talking to Delgano, he called de Filippi “Señor Mañana,” which made reference to de Filippi’s standard reply when asked when something he had been told to do would be done. Mañana was the Spanish word for “tomorrow.”
De Filippi had just told Frade that it would not be the day after mañana, but the day after the day after mañana before the Lodestar that Clete and Delgano had flown from Burbank would be ready to fly to Rosario, Córdoba, and Mendoza.
“May I see you a moment, Don Cletus?” the priest asked.
Frade held up a finger to ask Welner to wait, then turned to de Filippi.
“Tell you what we’re going to do, Guillermo,” Frade said. “Two things. One: It is now standard company policy that the absolute maximum turnaround time for any of our aircraft not requiring scheduled maintenance—like, for example, a one-hundred-hour overhaul—is twelve hours. Two: The day after mañana, since Gonzo and I are trying to get this airline off the ground sometime this year, SAA will rent my Lodestar for our trip. Any problem with that, Guillermo?”
He didn’t wait to hear Señor Mañana’s reply, if any, instead pushing himself somewhat awkwardly out of his chair—he had a large cigar in one hand and a large brandy snifter in the other—and motioned with his head toward a relatively unoccupied corner of the library.
When the priest had followed him there, Frade said unctuously, “Tell me how I may help you, my son.”
Welner, smiling, shook his head in resignation.
“I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that the way you jumped all over de Filippi might be counterproductive?”
“On the other hand, it might not. Mañana is not a good way to do business.”
“This is Argentina, Cletus. Not the U.S. Corps of Marines.”
“I’ve noticed. Your nickel, Padre.”
“Excuse me?”
“An Americanism. Since you dropped a nickel in the telephone to talk to me, the presumption is that you had something to say.”
“I never heard that before. What I wanted to ask, Cletus, is if I might stay at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo tonight.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I presumed I was invited on the bird shoot tomorrow.”
Oh, shit. I thought I’d gotten rid of him.
“If you would be so kind as to put me up,” Welner went on, “I wouldn’t have to get up in the wee hours to drive over there. And if I left here, some other of Claudia’s guests could spend the night.”
“You’re a bird shooter?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yeah, it does.”
“Did you notice the four Browning over-and-under shotguns in the gun cabinet to the left?”
“Yeah, I did. Two identical Diamond Grade .16s and two .28s. It made me curious.”
“One of each, thanks to your father’s generosity to a poor priest, are mine.”
Frade exhaled audibly.
“You know you’re always welcome in my house,” he said. “But tomorrow’s not such a good idea.”
“I thought you might have something in mind for tomorrow in addition to slaughtering innocent perdices, or maybe even instead of slaughtering them.”
“Not admitting anything, but would your feelings be hurt if I told you I don’t think you’d want to know what that might be?”
“You can’t hurt my feelings, Cletus. I would have thought you would know that by now. And you’re wrong. I do want to know. I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re up to.”
Frade didn’t reply.
After a moment, the priest said, “Maybe I can help in some way to keep Mr. Fischer’s parents alive. I would like to try.”
Frade met Welner’s eyes for a long moment.
“Tell you what, Padre,” he said. “Why don’t you spend the night at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo? That way you won’t have to get up in the middle of the night to drive over there.”
“What an excellent idea,” the priest said. “I should have thought of that myself.”
“Changing the subject: Are you familiar with that old English saying ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’?”
“Oh, yes,” Welner said.
Frade raised his brandy snifter.
&nb
sp; “Mud in your eye, Padre.”
[THREE]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo
Near Pila
Buenos Aires Province,
Argentina
0630 14 August 1943
While it was assumed that the peones of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo were completely trustworthy, Enrico pointed out that money talked, and that it was unlikely but possible that some of the technicians working on the place might be on the payroll of someone else.
They knew, for example, that Carlos Aguirre, the airframe and power plant mechanic el Coronel had hired to maintain his Beechcraft Staggerwing and the Piper Cubs, was an agent of the Bureau of Internal Security. They knew because Gonzalo Delgano told them. Delgano knew because, when he had been on the estancia’s payroll as the Beechcraft’s pilot and as el Coronel’s instructor pilot, he had all the time been an army officer attached to the BIS, charged with reporting on el Coronel Frade’s activities.
Against the remote—but nevertheless real—possibility that someone besides Carlos Aguirre was in the employ of BIS, or, for that matter, someone in the employ of the German Embassy, would report that when the group came to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo before sunrise, von Wachtstein, Boltitz, Father Welner, and Humberto Duarte had not gone bird hunting as announced, Clete Frade decided that they would in fact go bird hunting.
A fairly complicated hunting expedition was organized. A wrangler had horses waiting for all the men when they came out of the big house after a breakfast buffet. So was a horse-drawn wagon carrying shotguns, ammunition, and the makings of a midmorning snack break. A second horse-drawn wagon carried the dogs—eight Llewellyn setters—and three handlers for them.
Everyone mounted up. Then Clete—to the amusement of the dozen mounted peones who would go with them—had his usual difficulty with Julius Caesar. The large, high-spirited black stallion had never been ridden by anyone but el Coronel and manifested its resentment of its new master by trying very hard to throw Clete. When Frade finally got control of his mount, the party walked their horses through the formal gardens and out onto the pampas, with the wagons following.
Four kilometers or so from the big house, they dismounted and collected their weapons from the wagon. Clete’s father’s hunting equipment included something he had never seen before: a leather shell bag, which looked to him like a woman’s purse on an extra-long strap.
And he was again wearing more of his father’s clothing, in this instance boots and a Barbour jacket. He had never seen one of these before, and as Father Welner had seen him suspiciously eyeing and feeling the material, the priest said, “Not to worry, my son, the Queen has one just like it.”
“It looks greasy,” Clete said.
“They wax the thread before they weave the cloth.”
All four of the Diamond Grade Brownings had been brought along in a rack that looked as if it had been made for precisely that purpose. Clete saw the priest take the 28-bore rather than the 16.
Ah, we’re going to play King of the Mountain!
He took the other 28-bore from its rack.
“The way your father and I shot,” the priest said, “was by turns. You shoot until you miss, and then the other chap.”
“After you, Padre,” Clete said, grandly waving Welner ahead of him onto the grass of the plain.
The Llewellyns were both very good hunters and superbly trained. They picked up a scent within two minutes, found birds not quite a minute after that, and held the point perfectly until the birds took flight and the priest had fired.
Two perdices fell to the ground.
“Good shooting,” Clete said politely.
“Lucky,” the priest said politely.
He was lucky six times in a row before he missed.
“Tough luck,” Clete said politely as he fed two shells to his over-and-under shotgun.
“I think it was badly loaded shells,” the priest said. “You might take that into consideration should you have any difficulty.”
The eyes of Texas are upon you, Cletus, he thought as he started after the Llewellyns.
As well as those of the smug Jesuit.
And, of course, the eyes of the members of your private army, who are probably praying the Good Father makes a monkey of el patrón.
Don’t fuck up!
He dropped nineteen birds—eight of them in doubles—before missing. When he finally missed, he turned to Father Welner and said, “You must be right about the faulty shells. I usually shoot much better than this.”
By then it was quarter past ten, and they stopped the hunt for a break.
And to get down to the business of the day. Which was getting Frogger to trust Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and Karl Boltitz and vice versa.
As far as he was concerned regarding Frogger, Allen Dulles apparently knew enough about him to trust him. Clete had had no choice but to go along with that. Moreover, unprofessionally, he had the gut feeling that Frogger was one of the good guys.
And he, of course, knew that Boltitz and von Wachtstein could be trusted.
The problem was that they didn’t trust Frogger—they didn’t know him, or that he was what he said he was. And the reverse was true. Clete thought that if he were in any of their shoes, he would have felt the same way.
That had to be changed.
If their conversation—mutual interrogation—went sour, as it very possibly would, Clete had a hole card in his chest pocket. It was a letter from General von Wachtstein that Captain Dieter von und zu Aschenburg, at considerable personal risk, had carried to Hans-Peter von Wachtstein shortly after von Wachtstein had arrived in Argentina.
In the letter, General von Wachtstein told his son that he had belatedly realized it was his duty to do whatever he could to rid Germany of Adolf Hitler.
He had begun the letter: The greatest violation of the code of chivalry by which I, and you, and your brothers, and so many of the von Wachtsteins before us, have tried to live is, of course, regicide. I want you to know that before I decided that honor demands I contribute what I can to such a course of action, I considered all of the ramifications, both spiritual and worldly, and that I am at peace with my decision.
Clete’s father had read the letter. It had caused the tough old cavalryman to weep.
If things did not go the way Frade hoped they would—the way they had to go—Frade was going to show the letter to Frogger, even though this would enrage Peter, would make him feel that Frade had not only betrayed him but had sentenced his father to death by hanging from a butcher’s hook by piano wire.
Frade raised his arm over his head and, fist balled, made the U.S. Marine Corps hand signal for Gather on me by making a pumping motion.
Whether that was also a hand signal of the Húsares de Pueyrredón or not, Enrico Rodríguez, whom Clete was starting to think of as the wagon master leading the pioneers across the prairie, understood it. He and the wagons and horsemen, who had followed the hunters across the pampas, now headed for them.
“Leave the lunch wagon,” Clete ordered when Enrico rode up, “and then take everybody far enough away so they won’t be able to hear us talking.”
“Sí, señor.”
Frade turned to Welner and said, “Father, I have no problem with you hearing this, but it’s up to them, not me.”
Frogger, von Wachtstein, and Boltitz looked at them.
“For what it’s worth, I trust Father Welner with my life,” Clete said. “And he already knows a hell of a lot; just about everything.”
The three Germans looked among themselves.
“Father,” Boltitz finally said, “are you sure you want to know about this?”
“I wish I didn’t know any of it,” the priest said. “What I am sure of is that what I would like to do is keep your parents alive. The more I know, the better chance I will have to do that. If I have to say this, I swear before God that nothing I hear here today will go any further.”
The Germans looked at each other again. Finally,
von Wachtstein and then Frogger nodded.
“Please stay, Father,” Boltitz said. “And getting right to the point of this, what Peter and I have to do, with the lives of many people at stake, is determine that Oberstleutnant Frogger is who he and—no offense intended—Major Frade say he is.”
“And the reverse is true, Herr Kapitän zur See,” Frogger said stiffly. “The only person vouching for you is Major Frade. How do I know you are who you say you are?”
The irony of three traitors standing around a wagon in the middle of nowhere on the pampas drinking coffee and eating pastry while trying to determine that the others were also bona fide traitors was not lost on Frade. It would have been almost funny if so much, and so many lives, were not at stake.
It also made him consider treason and traitors. Until he came to Argentina, it had been simple: Anyone who is a traitor is a no-good sonofabitch. One beneath contempt.
But these three honorable men, these decent officers who actually tried to live by a code of chivalry that Frade thought was ridiculous in these times, were putting their lives on the line to be traitors. He admired them all, and doubted that he would have been able to handle being in their shoes.
Peter and I don’t belong in this. We should be at the controls of fighter planes. Philosophical introspection is not needed in a cockpit. You shoot the other guy down, or he shoots you down. Very simple.
The mutual investigation lasted for thirty-five minutes. Frade was impressed with Boltitz’s skill as an interrogator, and Frogger was nearly as good.
By comparison, Peter and I seem rank amateurs. Which, of course, we are.
“I pray to God that I am not wrong, Herr Kapitän zur See,” Frogger said finally. “But I believe that you are who you say are, personally, and further that you are allied with us in what we have undertaken.”
Boltitz gave Frogger his hand.
“Hey, what am I?” Peter asked.
“Claus vouched for you, Herr Major,” Frogger said. “He said if it was impossible to keep you out of our enterprise, then I could trust you with my life.”
The Honor of Spies Page 10