Death and Honor

by W. E. B Griffin

  Clete decided, with an audible sigh, that now he really could relax.

  Then he looked out the side cockpit window and saw that ground handlers were not the only people who had met the Lodestar. There were assorted uniformed police, Border Patrol officers, two Military Policemen, and several other men in business suits waiting to greet the visitors from Argentina.

  [THREE]

  The Chateau Marmont 8221 Sunset Boulevard Hollywood, California 1950 4 August 1943

  The convoy of three mostly identical 1942 Chevrolet Carryalls—truck-based vehicles that could be described as station wagons on steroids; one white, two black, and all bearing U.S. government license plates and with the legend FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY painted on their doors—was stopped in the eastbound lane of Sunset. The Carryalls waited until there was a break in the flow of traffic, then turned left and rolled up a steep side street, then immediately into a driveway and stopped.

  The passenger door of the lead truck, the white one, opened. A stocky man in a light brown military-type uniform, complete to Sam Browne belt and a holstered Colt .45 ACP revolver, got out. The epaulets on his uniform carried the twin silver bars of a captain. The patch on his shoulder was stitched: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BORDER PATROL.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” the Border Patrol captain said as he folded down the back of the front seat, “here we are.”

  Cletus H. Frade got out first. He was unshaven and he otherwise showed the effects of having spent most of the previous ninety-six hours flying across the South American continent, over Central America, and finally from Sonora to Burbank.

  Frade looked around the dark and cool brick parking area. “And where is here? What is here?”

  “This is where you’ll be staying until we get your status cleared up,” the captain said.

  “That sounds like we’re under arrest,” Clete challenged.

  “You’re being detained,” the captain said. “I told you that at the field. There’s a difference.”

  “What is it?”

  Delgano and two other pilots climbed out of the back of the Carryall.

  “If you leave the hotel grounds,” the Border Patrol captain explained, “you’ll be arrested and taken to the Los Angeles County Jail. It’s not nearly as comfortable as the Chateau Marmont.”

  “Chateau Marmont”? Frade thought.

  Christ, this is a high-dollar Hollywood starlet hotel.

  And either it’s my ears still ringing from the flight, or he mispronounced its name.

  He said it like it was that yellow-bellied groundhog, the marmot.

  But it’s built like a French manor, and pronounced, Chateau Mah-MO.

  What in hell are we doing here?

  Frade said, “What exactly has to be cleared up?”

  “I told you that, too, Mr. Frade. For these gentlemen, why they have no visas.”

  “And I told you, they’re aircrew, they don’t need visas.”

  “And you were told, Mr. Frade,” the Border Patrol captain went on, his voice suggesting he was about to lose his patience, “that for our purposes, aircrew are people actually involved in flying the airplane. Being able to fly the airplane doesn’t count.” He paused. “And in your case, Mr. Frade, you have to clear up why you don’t have a draft card, or a certificate of discharge from the Armed Forces, and why your passport doesn’t show when you left the United States. For all we know, you could have sneaked out of the U.S., probably via Mexico, and gone to Argentina to dodge the draft.”

  “Wait a damn minute . . .” Frade began, then stopped himself.

  I’m screwed. . . .

  I didn’t get my American passport stamped because I went down there on my Argentine passport.

  But I can’t tell you that because that would open the dual-citizenship can of worms.

  And I don’t have a draft card or a discharge because I am a serving officer of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  But I can’t tell you that, either, because Delgano and the other SAA pilots would hear me. And even if I did say it, you’d probably never look past this long-haired Argentine haircut that my wife so loves—and the last damn thing a Marine would have.

  And then there’s my OSS area commander’s badge. I can’t show you it because (a) you probably wouldn’t know what the hell it was and (b) I don’t want Delgano or anyone else to see it.

  So, all things considered, Clete ol’ boy, what you should do is just keep your mouth shut until you can get on a telephone and call Colonel Graham.

  If you weren’t so goddamned tired, you would have thought of that before you got into an argument with this guy.

  The Border Patrol captain looked at Frade, waiting for him to go on.

  “Do whatever it is you were about to do,” Frade said.

  “May I have your attention, please, gentlemen?” the Border Patrol captain said, raising his voice. “If you’ll gather around me, please?”

  He waited until they had done so, then said: “This is the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where for the next day or two you’ll be housed as the guests of the Lockheed Aircraft Company. You are not permitted to leave the hotel grounds, and you are not permitted to use the telephone or send a telegram or a letter. You will not be permitted visitors. If you violate any of these simple rules, you will lose your status as ‘detainees’ and be arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the Los Angeles County Jail for illegal crossing of the United States border.

  “My advice, gentlemen, is to enjoy Lockheed’s hospitality until your status can be cleared up. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Welcome to Los Angeles and the United States.”

  He waved them toward a wide, shallow, curving flight of stairs that apparently led to the hotel’s interior.

  [FOUR]

  The room to which Frade was taken was more like a small apartment—a real apartment, he thought, not a hotel apartment. It had a comfortable bedroom, a complete kitchen with a full-size refrigerator and gas stove, a dining table that could easily seat six, and a large, well-furnished living room—which made him wonder what the Chateau Marmont was really all about.

  The refrigerator held a half-dozen bottles of beer, and he grabbed one by the neck, opened it, and took a healthy swallow. Then he sat at the table.

  He realized that he was really exhausted and that that had caused him to almost lose his temper. Twice. Once, about being “detained,” and, the second time, when the customs officer had made the crack about him possibly being a draft dodger.

  Well, I didn’t, thank God.

  And I got everybody here from Buenos Aires.

  So, after I finish this beer, I’ll grab a shower, then get in the rack, and when I wake up, I’ll be full of piss and vinegar and able to decide rationally what to do next.

  I’m not really in trouble. And my ace-in-the-hole is Graham. I’d call him now if I wasn’t convinced the Border Patrol hadn’t cut off the phones.

  As he finished his beer, he glanced at the telephone beside the table and, just to be sure, put the phone to his ear. It was dead.

  He gave the finger in the direction of the front door, the Border Patrol captain being somewhere the other side of it, and then went into the bedroom, found his toilet kit, and went into the bath and took a long shower and then shaved.

  He decided that a second bottle of beer was in order, and wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There were three bottles of beer in it.

  I’d have sworn there were a half-dozen the first time I was in here.

  He took one of the remaining bottles and looked for the opener.

  Where did I put the goddamn bottle opener?

  He went to the stove to open the bottle using the edge of the stove. When he sort of squatted to see that he would open the bottle and not break its neck, the towel around his waist fell to the ground.

  He rather loudly uttered a lengthy vulgar and obscene curse in the Spanish language, then with the heel of his hand knocked the cap neatl
y off the bottle.

  He had just put the bottle to his lips when a familiar voice said, “Unless you knew better, you’d never guess that that sewer-mouthed, naked man in dire need of a haircut was a Marine officer, would you, Howard?”

  “Oh, I could,” another male voice said. “You can always tell a Naval Aviator by the tiny dick and huge wristwatch.”

  Frade snatched the towel from the floor, wrapped it around himself again, and went into the living room. There the mystery of the missing beer bottles was explained, as was the missing bottle opener.

  Colonel A. F. Graham, USMCR, was seated in an armchair and holding one of the bottles. Howard Hughes, sitting in a matching armchair across the coffee table from Graham, held another bottle. The opener was on the table between them.

  Hughes wore scuffed brown half-Wellington boots, stiffly starched khakis, a crisp white-collared shirt, and an aviator’s leather jacket. Even slumped in the armchair, it was clear that he was a commanding and confident figure: a tall— if somewhat sinewy—ruggedly handsome man with slicked-back black hair and deeply intelligent eyes.

  “How goes it, Clete?” Hughes said casually in a clearly obvious but not thick Texas accent. “Long time no see.”

  “Hello, Howard,” Frade said, then looked at Graham. “Good evening, sir.”

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Hughes said. “He’s so surprised he’s almost polite.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, Howard.”

  “With Alex, you mean?” Hughes asked.

  Clete nodded. “Or him, either.”

  “I’m the reason you’re here with him,” Hughes said.

  “What?”

  “Alex was out here about—what, Alex? A year ago?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen months,” Graham furnished.

  “Doing what?” Frade asked.

  “That’s none of your goddamn business, Clete,” Hughes said with a smile. “Particularly since that Border Patrol guy thinks you’re a draft dodger.”

  “You heard that?”

  “Alex and I were playing house detective in the lobby,” Hughes said, and mimed holding up a newspaper to hide his face. “Anyway, Alex was here a little over a year ago, and I told him I had just thought of something, and asked him if he remembered Cletus Marcus Howell from the trial. . . .”

  “I’m afraid to ask, but what trial?”

  “Right after my father died, my goddamn relatives were stealing me blind. I was a minor; they had themselves appointed my guardians, and they headed right for the Hughes Tool cash box. Your grandfather saw it, didn’t like it one bit, and neither did A. F. here. So I borrowed from your grandfather the money I needed for lawyers and we went to court. Your grandfather and A. F. told the judge what an all-around solid citizen I was, wise beyond my years, and got me liberated—”

  “Emancipated,” Graham corrected him. “Declared an adult.”

  “Right. Anyway, I saw your picture in the L.A. Times. You’d just made ace on Guadalcanal. It made me think, so I told Alex about your Argentine father, and since Alex was in the spy business—”

  “You know about that?” Clete blurted.

  “Yeah, I know about that. What did you think Alex was doing out here, chasing movie starlets?”

  “As a matter of fact . . .” Clete said.

  “Watch it, Major,” Graham said, but he was smiling.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Clete asked.

  “You look kind of beat, Clete,” Graham said. “You sure you want to do this now?”

  “I am beat. But as beat as I am, I know I’d never get any sleep not knowing . . .”

  “Okay. Your call.” Graham took a sip of his beer, clearly composing his thoughts, then went on: “Roosevelt has decided—and, for once, I agree with him—that the best way to deal with Operation Phoenix is not to try to stop it but, instead, to keep an eye on it and grab the money, et cetera, once the war is over.”

  Clete had just enough time to be surprised that Howard Hughes was privy to Operation Phoenix when Hughes confirmed it:

  “Otherwise,” Hughes said, “they’d just find some other way to get the money in. Nobody ever accused Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, and Company— or, for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt—of being stupid. Many other pejoratives apply, but not ‘stupid.’ ”

  Graham chuckled and went on: “And Allen Dulles thinks you—and the Froggers—are the key to doing that. He thinks the key to getting the Froggers to help, really help with Phoenix and more, is to go to Mississippi and turn their Afrikakorps son. More important, Allen thinks you’re our best hope to turn him.”

  “I don’t have any idea how I would do that,” Clete said.

  “So far,” Hughes offered, “you’ve turned one Kraut with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and another Kraut who works for Canaris. . . .”

  “You told him that?” Clete blurted angrily.

  Graham didn’t reply.

  Hughes added: “You’re obviously pretty good at turning Krauts. So why should turning the one in Mississippi be so difficult?”

  Frade looked at Graham, who went on: “So the problem was to get you to the States without raising any more suspicions in Colonel Martín’s fertile mind. And Allen said the way to do that was not to tell you anything was going on until you got here. He was betting that you would understand the only way to get around the problem of your pilots not having ATRs was to get them rated, and since the only place you could do that was here, you’d figure out some way to get them—and you—here without making anybody suspicious. And he was right. Again.”

  “Allen Dulles was behind Lloyd’s canceling our insurance?” Clete asked incredulously.

  Graham nodded.

  “I’ll be damned!” Clete said admiringly.

  “I don’t think I want to play poker with Dulles,” Hughes said.

  “What are the maps Dorotea was talking about?” Graham said. “And, incidentally, I sent her your love and told her that you arrived safely. A radiogram to South American Airways. She’ll get it, right?”

  “I have trouble picturing you as a happily married man,” Hughes said.

  “That’s because you haven’t seen her,” Clete said to Hughes, then looked at Graham. “Yeah, she’ll get it. Thanks.”

  “The maps?” Graham pursued.

  “God, I forgot about them. We went to my Granduncle Guillermo’s house to pick up a picture of my mother that my grandfather wants. Perón is staying there. He wasn’t there when we were, but Dorotea saw an Argentine army map case and took the maps from it. One shows the coastline south of Mar del Plata where U-405 ...” He looked at Hughes. “You know about that, too, Howard?”

  “I know everything,” Hughes said.

  “Of course,” Clete said, then picked up where he’d left off: “. . . where U-405 landed the special shipment, which means that Perón knew all about it.”

  “That surprised you?” Graham asked.

  “Yeah, a little. Even after I’ve had time to think about it.”

  “Dorotea said ‘maps,’ plural.”

  “The other one was from the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht. It shows South America ‘after the annexation.’ Paraguay and Uruguay are shown as provinces of Argentina.”

  “Zimmerman,” Graham said thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”

  “What?” Clete asked.

  “Stranger things have happened,” Graham said, as if to himself. Then he asked, “Where’s the film?”

  “In my toilet kit.”

  Graham said, “You have some place where it can be developed right now, Howard?”

  Hughes rose gracefully from his armchair, walked to a closet, unlocked it, reached inside, came out with a telephone, and, putting the phone to his ear, leaned on the doorjamb.

  “We need a little room service,” he announced into the telephone, then put it back, closed the door, and locked it.

  He saw the look on Frade’s face.

  “We couldn’t take the chance th
at one of your pals would catch you trying to get Alex on the phone,” Hughes explained. “And Alex was worried what kind of a hooker you’d get if you tried that.”

  Frade gave him the finger.

  A moment later, there was a knock at the door and someone called, “Room service.”

  Hughes opened the door to a stocky man wearing a white cotton waiter’s jacket, and motioned him into the room.

  The man looked expressionless but carefully at Frade.

  “Get your film, Clete,” Hughes ordered.

  “Is this guy room service or not?” Clete asked.

  “You’re hungry?” Graham asked.

  Frade nodded.

  “Tell them to start serving dinner,” Hughes ordered the man. “Bring three here. And then take a film cassette the gentleman in the towel is about to give you out to the studio. Have it souped. I want prints large enough to read. And I want them yesterday. Bring the film back with you. Got it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hughes,” the man said, and turned and looked at Frade again.

  Clete went to the bathroom, took the film cassette from his toilet kit, and started to return but changed his mind. He got dressed first, then went back to the living room. The “waiter” still stood where he had been standing.

  Clete handed him the film cassette.

  “And when you bring my dinner . . .” he began, then looked at Hughes. “Do I have any choices?”

  “The usual jailhouse fare,” Hughes said.

  Frade turned back to the waiter. “Bring a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a good bottle of merlot or pinot noir.”

  The man looked at Hughes for direction.

  “That,” Hughes added, “and a bottle of gin and some ice and a martini mixer, or shaker, or whatever they call it. Serve wine with the others’ meals, but no hard stuff. I don’t want anybody finding the liquid courage to start a jailbreak.”

  “Yes, Mr. Hughes.”

  “You heard me say I want those prints yesterday?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hughes.”

  The man turned and left the room.

  “What did you say before?” Clete asked Graham. “ ‘Zimmerman’?”

  Graham shook his head in exaggerated disappointment. “You were apparently asleep during Modern American History 101 at our alma mater. You really don’t know?”