“No, I really don’t know.”
“Neither do I, Alex,” Hughes said. “And I very nearly finished high school. What the hell are you talking about?”
“In 1917, the British had a cryptographic operation they called ‘Room 40.’ Big secret, because they had broken the Imperial German diplomatic code—”
Hughes interrupted: “Like the Navy has broken the Imperial Jap Navy Code?”
“You didn’t hear that, Clete,” Graham said furiously. “My God, Howard!”
“Well, you said we were going to tell him about Lindbergh and Yamamoto; he’d have heard that then,” Hughes said unrepentant.
Frade looked from Hughes to Graham and back again.
Lindbergh? Lucky Lindy?
And who? Yamamoto, the Jap admiral?
Graham shook his head and went on: “And one day in January 1917, Room 40 broke a message that Zimmerman, the German foreign minister, had sent to Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, with orders to forward it to the German ambassador in Mexico, a man named von Eckhardt.”
“What was in the message?” Frade asked.
“Two things. That Germany was going to resume unrestricted submarine warfare as of the first of the month. And that Eckhardt was to tell the president of Mexico that if Mexico declared war on the United States, after the war— which Germany would win, of course—Mexico could have Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” Hughes said.
“No, I’m not. You really never heard this before?”
“No, I haven’t. You, Clete?”
“This is all news to me.”
Graham shook his head in disbelief, then went on: “So the Brits, after thinking about it for a month, decided to tell us, even though they knew this would mean the Germans would know they had been reading their mail.”
“And what happened?” Clete said.
“Then President Wilson sat on the telegram for a week, before finally releasing it to the press on March first. The American people were furious, and a lot of them seemed more annoyed with Mexico, who hadn’t said a word to us about the telegram, than with the Germans. Anyway, a month after that we declared war on Germany.”
“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Hughes said indignantly. “Those goddamn Mexicans!”
Graham laughed. “See what I mean? ‘All’s fair in love and war,’ Howard. Write that down.”
“You think they’re trying to pull the same thing again, with Argentina?” Hughes asked.
“On the way up here,” Clete said, “I wondered if Tío Juan had really been careless, or whether he wanted me to find those maps.”
“Tío Juan? This Argentine colonel?” Hughes asked, and when Clete nodded, added, “Why would he do that?”
“It’s a long way up here from down there,” Clete said. “I thought of a lot of possibilities.”
There was a knock at the door and a new voice called, “Room service.”
This time there were two “waiters” who entered the room. They could have passed as brothers of the first “waiter.” They were pushing a food cart and a smaller cart holding an assortment of bottles, an ice bucket, an array of glasses, and a martini shaker.
Clete lifted one of the chrome domes over a plate and saw that it covered a hot turkey sandwich, which explained the very quick service.
“Everybody gets the same thing?” he asked.
Hughes nodded.
“That should be interesting,” Clete said. “They don’t have turkeys in Argentina. . . . Or cranberry sauce.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Graham said.
“Not a problem. If they’re as hungry as I am, it won’t make any difference.”
And then Clete’s brain went off on a tangent:
Maybe I could raise turkeys on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
They’re probably no harder to raise than chickens.
Build some pens.
Hell, let ’em run loose.
They hunt wild turkey in Alabama.
That might be fun.
Hell, why not get some pheasants, too?
What about foxes? Do we have foxes down there, some other predator that would eat my turkeys and pheasants?
What the hell am I doing?
Am I that tired, that my brain goes off the track?
Or is it shutting down?
“Are you going to eat that, Clete?” Howard Hughes inquired. “Or just stand there holding that chrome thing and looking at it?”
“I think I just fell asleep standing up.”
“You want to just forget talking, Clete?” Graham asked.
“Let’s see what a healthy jolt of Jack Daniel’s does for me,” Clete said, and reached for the bottle and a glass, then poured three fingers of whiskey.
Hughes jerked his thumb at the waiters, signaling them to leave. Both said, “Yes, Mr. Hughes.”
When they had left the room Clete said, making it a question: “You seem to be pretty well known around here, Howard.”
Hughes shrugged but didn’t reply.
“You were saying Colonel Perón wanted you to see those maps?” Graham said.
“I think that’s possible,” Clete said.
“Why would he want to do that?”
“All kinds of possibilities,” Clete said. “The bottom line to all my thinking on the way up is that my Tío Juan is a lot smarter than I’ve been giving him credit for being.”
Graham grunted. “I tried to make that point to you.”
Frade raised his glass in a gesture of a toast, took a long sip of the drink, and when he’d swallowed and exhaled, went on: “Too smart—knowing Dorotea and I were going to the house—to leave something incriminating just lying around where I was likely to find it. And I thought that he’s smart enough to have put a hair or something in the lid of the map case that would tell him it had been opened.”
“You’re right, Alex,” Hughes said. “Our little Cletus has developed a real feel for the spy business, hasn’t he?”
“Fuck you, Howard,” Clete said sharply, raising his glass in Hughes’s direction in another mock toast, and taking another drink.
Hughes looked at him coldly.
“What did you say?” he asked incredulously after a moment.
“You’re out of line, Howard,” Graham said. “Clete, when I told him what I think of you, what Allen Dulles thinks of you, it was complimentary. The phrase ‘Little Cletus’ never came up.”
Unrepentant, Hughes blurted: “I’ve known him since he was in short pants, for God’s sake!”
“That was a long fucking time ago, Howard,” Clete said. “I’m a big boy now. The next time you say something like that to me, I’ll knock your goddamn teeth down your throat.”
Hughes assumed a boxing position. “Just a precaution, Major Frade, sir, in case you don’t take this as a compliment.”
“What?”
Hughes moved his fists and his feet around like a boxer.
Clete fought off the temptation to smile.
Hughes went on: “Boy, he’s really the old man’s grandson, ain’t he, Colonel Graham, sir?”
“Oh, shit,” Clete said, and laughed.
“I would take that as both a compliment and an apology, Clete,” Graham said.
“Still, I think I’d rather whip his ass,” Clete said, but he was smiling.
Graham, also smiling, asked, “Can we now get back to the spy business?”
“I’d much rather whip Howard’s ass,” Clete said.
“Be that as it may, Major Frade,” Graham said, “you were about to tell us why you think Perón wanted you to see what he had in his map case.”
Frade sipped at his glass, shrugged, then said, “There’s a lot of possibilities, but as absurd as this may sound, I think he might be trying to turn me.”
“That’s interesting,” Graham said. “Why would he want to do that?”
“He’s got all of his ducks in a row but me,” Clete said.
“He’s the éminence grise behind the president now, and—”
“When I knew him he didn’t know what that meant,” Hughes said.
“God damn it, Howard!” Graham snapped. “Enough. And I mean it.”
Hughes threw up both hands in apology and surrender.
Clete looked at Hughes, shook his head, and went on, “—there’s no question in my mind that he wants to be president, and probably will be.”
“How much of a Nazi do you think he really is?” Hughes asked.
“I think he really believes that fascism, National Socialism, whatever, would bring some really needed efficiency to Argentina, but I don’t think he thinks the Germans are going to win the war any more than I do.”
“Really?” Graham asked softly.
“And I think the Germans have cut him in for a piece of the action in Operation Phoenix. I don’t know if he’s involved in the concentration camp inmate-ransoming operation or not. Or even if he knows about it.”
“Serious question, Clete,” Hughes said. “If you’re in his way, why doesn’t he take you out?”
“He’s my godfather. They take that seriously down there. That’s one reason. The second reason, probably, is that my father was very popular there, and if I were to get whacked, a lot of questions would be asked about who did it and why. Everybody knows the Germans had my father killed and had a shot at killing me. They’d be suspect. But if I had to bet, I’d bet on the godfather business. I think the sonofabitch really likes me.”
“But you don’t like him, right?” Hughes said. “ ‘The sonofabitch.’ Why?”
“For one thing, he’s a dirty old man.”
“How so?”
“He likes young girls.”
“So does Errol Flynn,” Hughes said. “He almost went to jail last year for diddling a couple of fifteen-year-olds. He’s still a good guy. What does it say in the Good Book? ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’?”
“Tío Juan likes them younger. Like thirteen.”
“That’s a dirty old man,” Hughes agreed.
“Is that really it, Clete?” Graham asked. “You disapprove of his morals?”
“That’s part of it, certainly. I just don’t like him.”
“Your father did. And I’m sure he knew of the colonel’s proclivities.”
“Yeah, he knew. Enrico told me. Maybe it’s because he likes me. That makes me uncomfortable. I met the sonofabitch for the first time when I first went down there, and he treats me like the beloved nephew.”
“Or maybe the son he never had?” Graham pursued.
Clete considered that a moment, then said, “Well, maybe. Can we get off this subject? Tell me about Lindbergh and Yamamoto.”
“Roosevelt hates Lindbergh,” Hughes said. “Which may be—probably is— why he wants you to start an airline.”
“I don’t understand that at all,” Clete said.
“You want to tell him, Alex?”
“You tell him,” Graham said.
“Okay,” Hughes said. “Lindbergh was big in the America First business. They didn’t think we should get involved in a European war or, for that matter, with the Japs.”
“So was my grandfather an America Firster,” Clete said. “And so was Senator Taft. And Colonel McCormick, and a lot of other people. So what?”
“But Roosevelt couldn’t get Senator Taft. Or your grandfather. Or Colonel McCormick. Or, for that matter, me. But Lindbergh left himself wide open when he went to Germany. Göring gave him a medal, and Lindbergh said the Germans had the best air force in the world.”
“You’re saying Roosevelt thinks Lindbergh is a Nazi?” Clete asked incredulously.
“No, I don’t think that,” Graham said. “What I think is that Roosevelt likes to get revenge on people he thinks have crossed him. And he can take it out on Lindbergh. America First went out of business when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”
“On December eighth,” Hughes said, “Charley Lindbergh—‘Lucky Lindy,’ America’s hero, whose wife’s father is a senator and who’s a colonel in the Army Reserve—volunteered for active duty. Never got the call. Roosevelt had told Hap Arnold that he was not to put Lindbergh back in uniform, period.”
“Easy, Howard,” Graham cautioned.
“Jesus Christ!” Clete exclaimed.
“Colonel McCormick was going to put this story on the front page of all his newspapers,” Hughes said. “Lindbergh asked him not to. He said it was personal between him and Roosevelt, and it wouldn’t help us win the war. He said he could make himself useful out of uniform.”
“How?”
“He went to work for Lockheed,” Hughes said.
“What’s your connection with Lockheed?” Clete said. “You own it?”
“I own TWA—which, by the way, I renamed from Trans-Continental and Western to Trans-World Airlines, to annoy Juan Trippe—and there’s a law that if you own an airline you can’t own an aircraft factory, so I don’t own Lockheed.”
“What’s the point of that?” Clete asked. “I never heard that before.”
“There are some critics of our commander in chief,” Hughes said, “who feel Roosevelt had that law passed to punish Juan Trippe, who had the bad judgment to hire Lindbergh after Lindbergh gave his professional opinion that the Luftwaffe was the best air force in the world. I mean, what the hell, compared to Roosevelt, what did somebody like Lindbergh know about the Luftwaffe?”
“I didn’t know Lindbergh worked for Trippe,” Clete said.
“In addition to being a hell of a nice guy, Charley is a hell of a pilot and a hell of an aeronautical engineer,” Hughes said. “He not only laid out most of Pan American’s routes in South America for Trippe, but worked with Sikorsky to increase the range of the flying boats. You didn’t know that?”
“I heard he’d been in South America,” Clete said. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Anyway, Trippe’s smart enough—particularly after Charley pointed it out to him—to understand that flying boats are not the wave of the future. So he wanted to take over Don Douglas’s Douglas Aircraft. Roosevelt heard about that and had the law passed. Trippe had the choice between owning Pan American and getting a monopoly on transoceanic flight or buying Douglas. He chose Pan American, and having got the message, fired Charley. Politely, of course, but fired him.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“I gave him a job at Lockheed—”
“I thought you don’t own Lockheed,” Clete interrupted.
Hughes ignored the interruption. “—where he went to work on increasing the range of the P-38. There are some people who suggest that I had something to do with the design of the P-38.”
“I heard you had a lot to do with the design of the Jap Zero,” Clete said. “I remembered that when I got shot down by one of them.”
Hughes ignored that, too, and went on: “Charley went to the Pacific, to Guadalcanal, as a Lockheed technical representative—”
“Lindbergh was on Guadalcanal?”
“Meanwhile, the Navy in Pearl Harbor, having broken the Jap Imperial Navy Code, was reading their mail. They knew—”
“Be careful here, Howard,” Graham said.
Hughes nodded his understanding. “They knew that Yamamoto made regular visits to Bougainville in a Betty—you know about Bettys, don’t you, ace? Two of your seven kills were of that not-at-all-bad Jap bomber—in what he thought was complete safety because Bougainville was out of range of our fighters.”
Graham made a Slow it down gesture, and Hughes nodded.
“Well, I just happened to overhear a rumor that the range of the P-38 was greater than anyone thought it was because of the efforts of a certain Lockheed tech rep on Guadalcanal. And I just happened to mention this to a mutual friend of ours, also a Texan, when he was out here chasing starlets.
“And, lo and behold, the next thing we hear is that on the eighteenth of April, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy,
was shot down—and killed—by Army Air Force P-38s operating out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.”
Hughes paused and looked at Graham.
“Did I say anything I wasn’t supposed to, Alex?”
“Not yet.”
“A couple of weeks after that,” Hughes went on, “I was in Washington and ran into an old pal of mine—”
“Whose name you are not at liberty to divulge,” Graham interrupted.
Hughes nodded. “—who has a lot of stars on his shoulders and I know personally admires Charley. And I asked him if he knew what Charley had done on Guadalcanal, and he said he didn’t want to talk about that, so I asked him what did he think would happen if I went to Colonel McCormick and told him what I knew.
“He said that after Yamamoto had been shot down, he’d tried to bring up the subject of Charley to—”
“Watch it, Howard,” Graham said.
“—to a man who lives in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue—”
“Oh, God, Howard!” Graham said, shaking his head.
“—and was, so to speak, shot down in flames. This unnamed man told him—and this is where it gets interesting—that he was going to tell him what he had told Juan Trippe no more than an hour before: ‘It would be ill-advised to ever raise Lindbergh’s name to me again.’
“ ‘Me,’ of course, meaning—”
“He knows who you mean, Howard,” Graham said with a sigh.
“So, cleverly assembling the facts, Alex and I concluded that Juan Trippe went to this unnamed man and told him, considering what Charley had done to knock the head Jap admiral out of the war, that it was time to forgive him. An hour later, Ha . . . my friend went there and offered the same argument. This man is not known to appreciate being shown where he has made an error in judgment.
“And the next day, or maybe the day after, he told Wild Bill Donovan to set up an airline in South America, no reason given,” Hughes concluded.
“Does General Donovan know about this?” Clete asked.
“General Donovan is very good at figuring things out,” Graham said.
“But he hasn’t said anything to you, right?” Hughes asked Graham.
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