by Blood
Damned well-trained horse. No wonder my father liked him. Did he train him himself? Is this a polo pony? Aren't they smaller than this?
I'm going to have to try polo, real polo. Why not? There's two polo fields here, and it can't be all that difficult. I don't care how small the ball is, I can probably learn to whack it with a little practice.
The polo Clete had played, on Big Foot Ranch outside Midland and at Col-lege Station, was played with brooms, a volleyball, and on cow ponies, and, every once in a while, on a well-trained quarter horse, just for the hell of it.
What the hell are you thinking about? Playing polo, or Christ's sake?
Without thinking about it, he touched the reins. Julius Caesar, who had been trying to push his nose ahead of Rudolpho's roan, obediently moved be-hind him.
"Rudolpho, is it safe to gallop here?" he called.
"S¡, Se¤or."
"Let's go, then," Clete said.
Rudolpho touched the roan with his spurs and shouted something to him Clete couldn't understand. The roan broke into a gallop. Julius Caesar's ears stood up. Clete touched his heels to him, and the animal broke into a gallop.
Julius Caesar was larger and faster than Rudolpho's roan, and a minute later, passed him. Clete saw that at a full gallop the only change in Rudolpho's seat was that he no longer supported the Mauser on his knee. Now he had it cra-dled in his arm, like a hunter. He looked as comfortable as someone sitting in his armchair.
Well, that shatters your foolish belief that you really know how to ride a horse about as well as anybody, doesn't it?
Five minutes later, now moving at a walk to cool the horses, Clete realized that he had no idea where he was. There was nothing from horizon to horizon but the rolling pampas, dotted with cattle and groves of eucalyptus and pine trees. No sign of a road, or even a power line or a fence.
He had a sobering thought: If I had come out here by myself, and damned fool that I am, that's exactly what I intended to do, I not only couldn't have found the station, but I would have been lost, and they would have had to send somebody to find me.
Twenty minutes later, they topped a small rise and Clete scanned the hori-zon. There was a glint of reflected light high in a stand of pine trees several hun-dred yards directly ahead. It disappeared, and then reappeared. He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked again. It was gone.
He looked again a minute or so later, and it was again visible. He had just decided it was white, and a couple of inches long-and thus probably man-made-when there was proof. There was a faint but unmistakable glint off cop-per wire.
A radio antenna. They were approaching the station.
It was only when they were no more than fifty yards from the thick trees that he could see through them far enough to pick out automobiles and trucks. Three of them-immaculately maintained Ford Model A pickup trucks-be-longed to the estancia. And there was a 1940 Chevrolet business coupe and a 1941 Studebaker sedan. Tony Pelosi's and Dave Ettinger's cars, he decided, al-though he didn't know which car belonged to which.
They entered the trees, and a hundred yards inside came to a small clearing that held three buildings made of reddish sandstone. A large, somewhat florid-faced man in a gaucho's Saturday-Night-Go-to-the-Cantina costume emerged from the largest building. His flat, wide-brimmed black gaucho's hat was at a suitably cocky angle. He wore a red bandanna rolled around his neck, a flowing white blouse, topped with a black, red-embroidered vest, billowing black trousers, and soft, thigh-high black boots. There was a menacing-looking, sil-ver-handled dagger in a leather sheath on his belt. And he held a silver Mate (An herbal tea, also favored by Arabians, who for well over a century have been the best export customers of the Argentine Mate plantations in Corrientes Province.) jar with a silver straw in his hand. He smiled at Clete.
"Buenos tardes, Se¤or."
He looks more like a gaucho than Rudolpho. The only thing he won't do is get on a horse.
Clete smiled at him, then touched his right hand to his temple in a crisp salute.
"Permission to come aboard, Chief?"
Chief Radioman Oscar J. Schultz, USN, returned the salute crisply.
"Permission granted, Sir," he said. "Welcome aboard."
Clete slid off Julius Caesar.
"I like the hat," Chief Schultz said, offering his hand.
"Thank you."
"If I'd had a little warning, I could have arranged for side boys," Chief Schultz said, and then, remembering, added soberly, "I'm sorry as hell about your father, Mr. Frade."
"Thank you. It's good to see you, Chief."
"You're just in time for lunch," Chief Schultz said, pointing inside the house. "Mr. Pelosi and Sergeant Ettinger are here. They told me you would be coming, but not when."
Tony and Dave Ettinger-a tall, dark-eyed, sharp-featured man in his late twenties, in his shirtsleeves-were seated at a wooden table. There were bowls of tomatoes, onions, and red and green peppers, and what looked like ten pounds of two-inch-thick New York strip steaks on a wooden platter.
They were being served by a dark-haired woman in her thirties, wearing a white blouse, a billowing black skirt, and what Clete thought of as gaucho boots. She smiled nervously at Clete and looked between him and Chief Schultz.
I wouldn't be at all surprised, Clete thought, if the lady keeps the Chief warm on cold pampas nights-at least when Tony and Ettinger aren't here.
The Chief attributed his near-perfect Spanish to the "sleeping dictionary" he had known during a tour at the Cavite Naval Base in the Philippines.
"Buenos tardes," Clete said, smiling at her.
"Buenos tardes, Patron," she said.
"That's Dorothea," Chief Schultz said.
Well, that's nice. I'll have to be careful to see the two ladies are not confused.
"She's helping you perfect your Spanish, Chief?" Clete said as he slipped into a chair and offered his hand to Ettinger.
"Yeah, and she's a not half-bad cook, too," Chief Schultz said.
"I'm sorry about your father, Major," Ettinger said.
"Thank you," Clete said. "And just for the record, I'm out of the Marine Corps."
"Tony was telling me something about that."
Dorothea extended the platter of New York strip steaks-called bife de chorizo-to Clete and he took one. Dorothea filled a second plate with toma-toes, onions, and pepper.
"Se¤orita," Clete began.
"Se¤ora," Chief Schultz corrected him. "She's a widow."
"And you're the answer to a widow's prayer, right?" Clete said in English, and then, in Spanish, went on, "Se¤ora, please find Rudolpho and tell him I said to come in and eat."
"S¡, Patron."
"Tony wasn't very clear about the nature of our relationship to Commander Delojo," Ettinger said.
"I thought I made it pretty clear, Tony," Clete said, "that I remain in com-mand of this team-and that includes you, Chief Schultz. That means you have no relationship to Commander Delojo except through me. That answer your question, Dave?"
"Not precisely," Ettinger said. "Tony said you met Mr. Leibermann." Clete nodded. "I've been passing some things I've developed to Leibermann. Shall I do the same sort of thing for Commander Delojo?"
Clete felt a surge of anger. Ettinger was a damned good man, but he seemed unable to grasp that he was in the military-he was in the Army Counterintelligence Corps, on 'detail' to the OSS-and that in the military one is not permit-ted to disobey orders that seem inconvenient or with which you disagree.
"What sort of things have you been passing to Leibermann, David?" Clete asked coldly.
"I've been working with the Jews here, the Argentine Jews and the refugees...."
"I know that. What I want to know is what you've been passing to Leibermann."
"Nothing that has any connection with anything we're doing. I know how you feel about that."
'Then what, for Christ's sake?"
"The Argentine Jews are deeply involved in the shipping business. They've been
giving me shipping manifests, sailing times, that sort of thing, for ships bound for Spain and Portugal, or allegedly bound for Spain and Portugal. Leibermann wants this sort of information, and-I don't mean to sound flip, but we are on the same side in this war-I can't see any harm in giving it to him."
Neither can I. And I would be wasting my breath to order Ettinger to stop.
"My orders-which are of course, your orders-are to have as little to do with the FBI as possible," Clete said.
"You're telling me to stop passing him this sort of information?"
"I'm telling you to have as little to do with the FBI as possible. And I would strongly suggest you do not, repeat not, ever let Commander Delojo become aware that you even know Leibermann."
"OK," Ettinger said. "That answers my question about what to tell him about Uruguay."
"Tell him what about Uruguay?"
"I'm just getting to the bottom of it," Ettinger said. "I haven't even told Tony about it."
That was my cue to sternly remind Ettinger that Tony is Lieutenant Pelosi, that in my absence Lieutenant Pelosi becomes Team Chief, and that Sergeant Ettinger is duty bound to tell Lieutenant Pelosi anything and everything of in-terest.
But that, too, would be a waste of breath. Ettinger long ago figured out that the only reason Tony is down here is because he knows a lot about explosives and demolition, and that everything he knows about espionage and intelligence gathering can be written with a grease pencil inside a matchbook. And the truth is, Ettinger would probably make better Team Chief than I am, and for that mat-ter, a better Station Chief than Delojo. The only reason he's not an officer is be-cause he's a Spanish national, and the U.S. Army is not commissioning Spanish nationals.
"Tell us now," Clete said.
"I can't prove this. I can't get anybody to come out and say this is being done-all I get is doors slammed in my face, conversations suddenly ended-"
"Prove what?" Clete asked in exasperation as he put another piece of bife de chorizo in his mouth.
"I think, if you have a relative in Sachsenhausen, or Belsen-probably any concentration camp, but those are the only names I've heard-" Ettinger said, "that, if you go to the right man in Uruguay, carrying with you a lot of dollars or Swiss francs, you can get him, her, the whole family out."
"I'll be damned," Clete said. "Are you sure about this?"
"No. Not in the sense that I can prove it. But I believe it."
"Who's the right man in Uruguay? Somebody at the German Embassy? Do you have a name?"
"No. No name. But I don't think it's someone at their Embassy. I think the connection is from the right man in the Jewish community here, to the right man in the Jewish community in Montevideo, or maybe Colonia, and from there to whoever they're dealing with in the German Embassy. Or, for that mat-ter, the Spanish Embassy or the Swedish Embassy. I told you, Clete. Nobody wants to talk about it."
"Not even to you?" Clete said. "Sorry, I had to ask that."
Ettinger's entire family had been taken into concentration camps in Ger-many... except for his mother, who had managed to escape from Germany with her son because they still had their Spanish passports. There had been of-ficial word from the SS that his grandfather and grandmother had "died of com-plications from pneumonia," but there had been no other word of anyone else.
"I picked up on this whole operation when an old man I knew in Berlin told me it was a pity I went to New York instead of here, 'where something might have been done.'"
"You think he meant you could have brought your family out?"
"This fellow was brought out," Ettinger said. "I saw the SS tattoo, the SS numbers, on his arm."
"And he won't tell you anything more?"
Ettinger shook his head, "no."
"The big mistake I made when we first came down here was telling Ernst Klausner, somebody else I knew in Berlin, that I was in the American Army; he's apparently spread the word. My feeling is that they have this system going, and they don't want anything to happen that will threaten it."
"Christ, don't they know we're fighting the goddamn Krauts?" Tony said.
"They don't want whatever is going on to be threatened," Ettinger repeated. "American interest in what's happened, is happening, to European Jews, Tony, is a relatively new thing."
"What happens to the people who get out of the concentration camps?" Clete wondered aloud.
"Apparently, they're provided with documents that take them out of Ger-many. To Sweden, maybe, or Spain. And then either to here or Uruguay. I don't know. The old man is here; he got out of a concentration camp, and then out of Germany somehow. He couldn't have done that without papers."
"Have you said anything to Leibermann at all about this?" Clete asked.
"No," Ettinger said, and added: "I was waiting for you to come back, and to find out more, if I can."
"I don't want you to say anything at all about this to Leibermann, David."
Ettinger nodded, accepting the order.
"I think we have to pass this to Colonel Graham," Clete said.
"I was afraid you'd say that," Ettinger said.
"That bothers you?"
"It's a moral problem for me," Ettinger said. "If there is a system, and peo-ple are getting out, I don't want to be the one responsible for shutting that sys-tem down."
"There may be, almost certainly is, something here that you and I don't know how to deal with," Clete said.
Ettinger, looking very unhappy, shrugged.
"What David just told us doesn't go anywhere," Clete said, looking at Tony and Chief Schultz in turn. Both nodded.
"There's something I have to tell you. I just got, from a source I trust-"
"Meaning you're not going to tell us who, of course?" Tony interrupted.
"No, I'm not," Clete said sharply. "And you know why. We operate on the premise that if any one of us is interrogated by a professional, sooner or later, and probably sooner, we'll tell him everything he wants to know. If you don't know something, you can't give it up, OK?"
"Sorry, Clete," Tony said, sounding genuinely remorseful.
"A German officer, an SS colonel named Goltz, came here on the Lufthansa flight the same day I did-"
"SS, or SS-SD?" Ettinger interrupted.
"SD. Does that mean something to you?"
"SD means Sicherheitsdienst. The Secret Police, so to speak. The real bas-tards."
"OK, this guy is SD. And we already have the proof that he's a bastard. This morning, this bastard issued orders to have you killed."
"No shit?" Tony asked. "Just Dave?"
"That would suggest, wouldn't it," Ettinger said, "that maybe I'm asking the right questions?"
"Just for the sake of argument, yes," Clete said. "And it would also suggest that this Colonel Goltz is connected with this business. He comes here, some-body tells him you're asking questions, and he says, 'eliminate him.'"
"I've been operating on the premise that such an order would be standard operating procedure. Eliminate anybody who's asking the wrong questions. Or stumbles onto something," Ettinger said. "The Sicherheitsdienst is ruthless, and killing someone to keep a secret like this would be normal routine. You think this is something new?"
"According to my source-who I think is reliable-the order to eliminate you was issued this morning, by this Colonel Goltz. Maybe it's a coincidence- they didn't know you were asking questions until just now-but I don't think so."
"No," Ettinger said after a moment, "neither do I."
"Dave, do you have a gun?" Clete asked.
Ettinger nodded.
"He's got a little.38," Chief Schultz said. "I tried to get him to carry a.45, but he says he can't shoot a.45."
"I can't," Ettinger argued. "And a.45 is hard to conceal."
"It's your neck, Dave," Clete said. "Do what you think you should."
Ettinger nodded.
"Are we on the air, Chief?" Clete asked.
"Five by five," Chief Schultz replied.
"David,
write down everything you know or suspect about this ransoming operation. Right now. Before I ride back to the estancia, I want to send this out."
Ettinger nodded his acceptance of the orders.
"Everything, David," Clete emphasized. "I want to tell Colonel Graham everything you know. And ask him if you should look deeper. For all we know, as far down on the totem pole as we are, they already know about this. They may just tell us to butt out."