by Jerold Last
"I know, I know," replied Juan. "It's OK. The reason I asked you to come tonight was so I could invite you to meet some of my friends who are the real power behind this movement. The leaders of the National Socialist Parties from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay are coming to Montevideo for an important meeting in two days. These are not the public leaders that everyone knows but are another group of leaders who work behind the scenes. They are most interested in meeting a couple of wealthy North Americans I have vouched for who believe in the same things we do. I was instructed to specifically invite you for dinner at my home Monday night to meet these people, at which time they will share their plans with you."
"We're honored," I lied as convincingly as I could.
Juan gave me directions to his home and invited us for dinner, which was to be preceded by an informal social gathering with tapas and drinks at 8 PM. This meeting was to be on German time, not Uruguayan, so we were expected to be there promptly at 8. It was going to be very informal, so we should dress casually.
Juan wished us a pleasant goodnight and we were dismissed.
We returned to our hotel, looking for any signs of Eduardo's surveillance team, but didn't see any. Of course, if they were any good I wouldn't see them. I made a mental note to ask Eduardo if they were in place yet.
We called Martin Gonzalez from the hotel, taking care to use my cell phone so the call could not be monitored through the hotel system. I told him about the meeting and about our invitation for Monday's dinner. He was pleased that we were still engaged with the local Nazis and reminded us to be very careful.
Next came my call to Eduardo.
"The meetings were long and dull. After the meeting Juan invited us to drinks and dinner at his home for Monday night at 8. We'll meet the top Nazi leadership from each of the Mercosur countries then. They're coming to town for another summit conference. These are the movers and shakers, not the Juan counterparts. It sounds like they have some very specific plans for us."
His reaction was the same as Martin's. "Be very careful."
"Have you assembled our security team yet? I haven't seen any sign of them."
Eduardo laughed. "They were there at tonight's meeting. I have a tape recording of the speeches. They're boring and repetitious."
He continued a little bit more seriously, "I checked your new colleague Carlos de Silva out as best as I could in a few hours. There's nothing in the Santa Caterina police records about him. He seems to be an upstanding citizen with some strange ideas about pagan religion. But there is one small thing. His grandfather who migrated to Brazil in 1945 was a high-ranking SS officer who would have been tried for war crimes in Poland if he hadn't escaped from Germany. The grandfather married into an established German family who'd been in Brazil since 1885. That doesn't mean much; half the population of western Santa Caterina has the same story."
We said goodnight. I filled Suzanne in on the two conversations and asked her "What did you think about Monday night's invitation?"
"We've got something they want. I haven't the slightest idea of what it is. As long as they want us for something I think we're pretty safe. After that, who knows?"
"Are you hungry?" I asked.
"Not especially."
"Let's make it an early night and go to bed then. We have a 5:30 wake-up call so we can catch the 7 AM bus to Colonia. I checked. They serve food here starting at 6, so we'll have time to grab a quick breakfast before we head for the bus station."
"Hey, Suzanne, did you hear about the poor guy who fell into a lens grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself?"
And so, we went to sleep.
Chapter12:A Day in Buenos Aires
An early morning cab ride from our hotel to Tres Cruces, the largest shopping mall in Montevideo, allowed us to catch the 7 AM bus for the 2-hour ride from Montevideo to Colonia del Sacramento. It greatly amused Suzanne to visit a town of the same name as her hometown, California’s Capital City, where she grew up. Colonia del Sacramento, the oldest city in Uruguay, was founded in 1680 by Portuguese settlers seeking a port on the Rio de la Plata for their colony of Brazil. It remained a Portuguese city until Uruguay's independence in 1825. The fortified city was the scene of several battles in the endless series of wars fought by the Spanish and Portuguese for dominance of the Rio de la Plata and its strategic ports.
We arrived in Colonia on time, which gave us an hour for tourism before we had to catch our 10:45 ferry the Buque Rapido named Atlantic III, to Buenos Aires. The fast ferry crosses the 65-mile wide Rio de la Plata in 1 hour and 5 minutes at a cost of about $55 per ticket. It's an interesting and popular alternative to flying to BA from Montevideo.
Colonia is a modern tourist destination with expensive hotels and restaurants, but the old historic city is carefully maintained as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Stone houses and cobblestoned streets are evocative of the distant past, and are an easy walk from where the bus discharges its passengers to the ferry terminus. The Barrio Historico is sited on a small peninsula that reaches out into the river at the harbor area. The layout of the old city is distinctly different from the Spanish Colonial design and resembles Lisbon 400 years ago. Streets are narrow and winding. There is no central square with church and government buildings. A lighthouse built in 1857 dominates the harbor scenery. We walked around the old town until it was time to get on the ferry. Following the crowd lined up for boarding, we showed our passports to Uruguayan immigration police to stamp us out of the country and boarded the ship.
The high-speed ferry is a hydrofoil design that can reach speeds of 65-70 miles per hour. The engines are huge, but are pretty quiet, and the ride is very smooth once the boat gets to speed and most of the hull is out of the water. Passengers must remain inside the enclosed part of the boat for safety reasons, but most of the boat's covering is clear transparent plastic, so the view of the crossing is great. Stabilizers on the large ferry eliminate seasickness except in the roughest weather, and the high-speed ferry is grounded in such weather because of safety concerns.
The ferry left the pier exactly on time and chugged slowly through the shallow water of the harbor for about a minute or two. Passengers crowded towards the back of the large cabin for a final look at Colonia de Sacramento. We cleared the harbor in less than two minutes. The ferry driver stepped on the gas and off we went, reaching cruising speed within another minute or two. Since Colonia is upstream of the major port of Montevideo, there is little or no boat traffic outside of the harbor and the ferry can travel at full speed almost immediately. There wasn't a lot to do besides watch the scenery or shop in the boat's duty-free store, which most of the other passengers were doing.
Passengers on the ferry had a great view of the Rio de la Plata as we sped across the width of the river to Buenos Aires. I’d never tried to look across a river that is 65 miles wide before. Argentina was too far away to be visible across the river even though it was a clear day. By contrast, the Mississippi is only about a mile wide at its largest and seeing from shore to shore is easy. All of the water we saw at Iguazu Falls, plus a lot more from other rivers that drain the huge watershed, ends up in the Rio de la Plata. A lot of trees, garbage, and other junk that falls into those rivers upstream of Colonia also end up in the river. Occasional uprooted trees, trunks and all, floated quickly by in the swift current. The smaller ones hit the ferry airfoils and bounced off. The larger ones were skillfully avoided by whoever was steering the boat.
“Do you realize that the network of rivers that flow into the Rio de la Plata make up the second largest watershed in the world, smaller only than the Amazon basin?" Suzanne asked. "There’s an enormous amount of rainfall into the tropical rainforests to the north of us in Brazil and Paraguay, which is where all that water comes from. It’s amazing that the driest place in the world is the west slope of the Andes across from Argentina in the Atacama Desert of Chile. At the same time all of that water is flowing out the Rio de la Plata to the Atlantic Ocean side of Arge
ntina and Uruguay.”
The ferry arrived in Buenos Aires harbor exactly on time. The procedures from an hour ago were reversed. Following the crowd down the gangplank to get off, we showed our passports to Argentine immigration police to stamp us into the country, and walked over to the nearest taxi stand to get a cab to the Botanical Garden.
The Botanical Garden is located in the well-to-do Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, several miles from the port. The garden dates back at least 100 years and sprawls over an area of about 7 hectares (14 acres). Suzanne and I visited the garden on our way home from Salta when we were investigating her father's murder, so we knew our way around it. Today we were interested in the tropical plant collection. After dodging the ubiquitous cats we walked over to the right section and asked for Senor Hernandez, the man Suzanne had contacted via the internet about buying plants when we were still in Los Angeles. He came out of the "employees only" section and greeted us warmly. Senor Hernandez was a slight, balding gentleman of indeterminate age with an infectious smile. He wore gold-rimmed "Granny" glasses and an old fashioned mustache liberally sprinkled with gray hair.
"I have all of your plants exactly as requested set aside," he told Suzanne. "Let's walk back to the employee area and I'll show them to you."
We followed him into a large crowded room containing several tables of plants.
"These are yours," he said, pointing to several dozen plants in individual 2-inch peat pots on the leftmost table.
"They are very beautiful," exclaimed Suzanne as she looked at each plant carefully. "You must be very proud of this facility."
After some discussion Suzanne paid for the plants and had them transferred to large individual zip-lock plastic bags containing potting soil and water for convenient transport. Each bag contained a card in Senor Hernandez's meticulous script with the common name, genus, and species of each plant and notes about its normal habitat. The bags fit in our backpacks so carrying them back to Montevideo would be easy.
The next stop was for lunch at a nice delicatessen style restaurant, where we had very good corned beef sandwiches. Corned beef was the major export from Argentina to Europe in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, when canning with peppercorns was the best way to preserve the better cuts of beef en route to Europe by ship. Much of the United Kingdom's craving for meat until the second half of the 20th century was satisfied with Argentine corned beef. Refrigeration and the emergence of fresh beef as a major export from Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada changed the eating habits of modern Great Britain.
Another taxicab took us back to the port so we could reverse our trip.
Our passports collected two more Customs and Immigration stamps before the day was over. The bus from Colonia returned us to Tres Cruces in Montevideo by 8. Yet another taxi got us back to our hotel. I called Eduardo en route and we arranged to have dinner with him at 9 at a restaurant he wanted to try near our hotel. We got to our room, carefully unpacked the plants so they could breathe, showered and went down to the lobby to meet Eduardo. A couple of sincere abrazos later we were on our way to dinner.
Most of the conversation over dinner revolved around discussions of strategy for Monday night's tapas and dinner with the Nazi leadership and Eduardo's theory of the case. Strategy was simple: show up on time and play it by ear. We were all totally in the dark about what was going on among the Nazis or why this new summit conference was called. Eduardo's theory of the case was also simple: Maria saw or heard something she shouldn't have at the Punta del Este meeting and was killed before she could report back to her case control officer in the Mossad. The only thing he told us that we hadn't heard before was that Maria had found a job as a maid at the hotel that was the meeting venue at Punta del Este.
It had been a long day and we were both tired. We said goodnight at the restaurant, returned to the hotel uneventfully, and went to bed at a decent hour for the second night in a row.
Suzanne looked up at me. "What's tonight's horrible pun?"
"A whale and a herring are inseparable friends. Wherever the whale goes, the herring goes. Wherever the herring is, there's the whale. One day a salmon is swimming along and he sees the herring. The whale is nowhere in sight. The salmon asks the herring where the whale is."
"How should I know?" replies the herring. "Am I my blubber's kipper?"
Chapter13.Dinner With the Nazis
Monday we got off to a late start. 9 A.M. was, however, an early start for the Facultad de Quimica professors. Suzanne repacked plants into backpacks. The #52 bus took us to the Palacio Legislativo and the campus. Twenty minutes later we were in Professora Colletti's office. The obligatory hugs and hellos were exchanged.
Suzanne got down to business. "I brought you a bunch of samples we bought yesterday from the BA Botanical Garden. Can you extract their DNA and mail the samples to me like we discussed, please?"
"Of course," replied Patricia Colletti. "You should have them in Los Angeles in a week or two."
They reviewed the extraction and mailing protocols. Suzanne reminded Patricia about the need for precise identification of each sample and scrupulous database management. She suggested that each sample should have a unique ID Number assigned to it, keyed to copies of the cards that Senor Hernandez at the Botanical Garden had written for each plant.
All was agreed upon and we were ready to go.
"What would you like to do now?" I asked Suzanne.
"You need all of the practice you can get on how to become more romantic," she responded pointedly. "How about visiting a romantic museum?"
So we went to the Museo Romántico, a restored 1830 merchant’s mansion on 25th of May Avenue. The mansion had been carefully restored to show how middle class merchants lived in Montevideo almost 200 years ago and what merchandise they sold. It was now a museum filled with period furniture, clothes, ladies’ fans, a random collection of portraits, and other miscellaneous objects from the time period. Visitors get a glimpse of the life style of wealthy colonists at the time Uruguay became an independent country. We recalled our visit the previous fall to a restored 19th century house from the same time period in Salta.
"They lived a lot better here in Montevideo than they did in Salta back then. That's for sure. There was a lot less religion here and a lot more material goods," I noted.
Suzanne agreed. "Living in the two major Spanish seaports on the Atlantic Coast, Montevideo or Buenos Aires, they got lots of stuff from Spain, France, and England in trade for their beef and silver. It was almost like being in Europe. Those poor guys in Salta were 1000 miles by wagon train from the Atlantic seaports and on the wrong side of the Andes for the Pacific ports, so they had to manufacture everything they needed for themselves."
By that time we were ready for lunch. We found a nice place for sandwiches and sat at a table to eat our Milanesas and drink agua con gas. Then it was back to the hotel.
"Have you thought any more about tonight, Suzanne?"
"Yes, but I don't have any new ideas. Do you?"
"I'm glad you asked. Are you up for trying a kind of quirky one, my little Goddess? It's a half-baked idea of mine I'd like to test out. If I'm right, it's possible that I've figured out why the Ambivalent Corpse was murdered and who did it."
"Your quirk is my demand," answered Suzanne bravely and perhaps a little foolishly. "What would you like me to do?"
"I'd like you to go to tonight's party in soaking wet Levis, as befits a Goddess. You can take a dip in one of Montevideo's many fountains or in the Rio de la Plata en route to dinner, or you can get dressed before you shower if you're worried about clean water."
"What are you thinking? What's your theory?"
"Be patient my dear. If I'm right, you'll be the first to know. But all the clues are there. See if you can figure it out for yourself. In the meantime we still have a whole afternoon to entertain ourselves. Have you any suggestions?"
"How about a movie? It'll give you a chance to improve your Spanish l
anguage skills. The theater next to the Plaza Chaganza directly across the street from the hotel is showing the new Harry Potter movie with English subtitles. How about it?"
"Let's go. It looks like there's a line in front so we've probably timed it right."
The timing was indeed right. The movie was good, and long enough to kill the remainder of the afternoon. We both needed a break both from being tourists and detectives. Harry Potter and Hogwarts were both in fine form and seemed to work in dubbed Spanish as well as English judging by the audience reaction. I learned a few new words.
After the movie, a shower, and a shave it was just about time for us to go for tapas and dinner. I called Lieutenant Gonzalez and asked whether his backtracking of Maria Fajao had turned up anything.
Surprisingly, the answer was, "Yes, I think we've identified the tool used to dismember the body. We checked out all the major factories on the Rio de la Plata coast between here and Punta del Este. There are several fish processing plants that are open seasonally. The equipment they use for slicing frozen fish into fillets includes an ultra-sharp thin band saw. The saws were tested on chunks of beef, and the cuts exactly match the slices on the corpse. We're testing all of the saws for residues of human blood of the correct type. If we get any hits we'll analyze the DNA."