W E B Griffin - Honor 1 - Honor Bound

by Honor Bound(Lit)

  Laying her hand on his arm to distract his attention from one of the cricket players' lengthy tribute to his teammates-and for no other purpose, Clete, get your imagination under control- Monica asked if he had found an apartment, or whether he was staying with his father.

  "My father has a guest house. I'm staying there."

  "On Avenida Libertador?"

  "Yes. You know the house?"

  "I know about it," she said. "The place one of the legendary Frades built with the master apartment on the top floor so he could watch the races at the Hipodromo without crossing the street?"

  And for other purposes.

  "That's the place."

  "I've always wanted to see it."

  "Anytime. It would be my pleasure."

  The cricket player finally finished his speech, there was unenthusiastic applause, and a short man with a bushy mustache stepped to the lectern to announce the conclusion of the evening's events. He told everyone he wished to thank them for coming, and especially the Banco de Boston for their generous support.

  People started rising to their feet, including Monica, who man-aged to brush her breasts against Clete's arm in the process.

  Nestor appeared.

  "About ready, Clete? I'd love to stay for the dancing, but I have an early-morning appointment."

  "Thank you, Se¤ora de Frade."

  "Oh, Monica, please."

  "Thank you, Monica, for the pleasure of your company."

  "Perhaps we'll see each other again," she said, giving him her hand.

  "When is Pablo due back, Monica?" Nestor asked.

  "The day after tomorrow."

  "It's always a pleasure to see you," Nestor said. "Clete?"

  Clete followed him to the door, where Ettinger was waiting.

  "Well, now that you and David have been introduced," Nestor said as he drove down Avenida Libertador, "it will seem perfectly natural that you meet for lunch or dinner. Two bachelors, so to speak, out on the town."

  "Yes," Clete agreed.

  "You seem to have made quite an impression on the de Frade woman, Clete," Nestor added. "Which might not be a bad thing."

  "I don't think I understand."

  "With her husband out of town as much as he is, hostesses are always looking for a suitable bachelor to be her escort at dinner. You really should be socially active."

  No way, thank you very much.

  "I volunteer," David said from the backseat.

  "She didn't seem nearly as interested in you, I'm afraid, Da-vid." Nestor laughed. "And they always ask the husband-less woman if the proposed dinner partner is satisfactory to her before they invite him."

  Se¤ora Pellano was waiting up for him in the foyer of the Guest House.

  "I thought perhaps you might like a little something to eat, Se¤or Cletus."

  "No. Thank you very much. And you don't have to wait up for me like this, Se¤ora Pellano."

  "It is my pleasure, Se¤or Cletus."

  "I'm going to turn in, Se¤ora Pellano. Good night."

  "Buenas noches, Se¤or Cletus."

  He started toward the elevator. The telephone rang.

  "A gentleman called before," she said. "Not an Argentine. His Spanish was not very good. He said he would call again. Perhaps that is him."

  Pelosi. I wonder what he wants.

  Clete waited for her to answer the telephone.

  "It is a lady, Se¤or Cletus," she said, and handed him the telephone.

  "¨Hola?"

  "Cletus, Monica. I wondered if you would really go home."

  "I really went home."

  "I'm still at the club. I stayed for the dancing. I'm bored."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Cletus, did you mean it when you said you would show me the Guest House?"

  "Of course."

  "You also said 'anytime.' I could be there in fifteen minutes."

  "Why don't you come over, Monica? I'll show you my etch-ings."

  "Oh, that sounds delightfully wicked. I'll be right there."

  Or maybe Granduncle Guillermo's dirty pictures.

  "I'm driving myself," Monica said. "And I'd really rather not drive home to drop the car off and look for a cab. Is there room in your garage?"

  There was only one car in the basement garage, which was large enough for four cars, a Fiat sedan used by Se¤ora Pellano.

  "Yes, there is."

  "Then be a dear and have it open when I get there, will you? We don't want people talking, do we? Or would you prefer that I take a taxi?"

  "I'll have the gates and the garage open."

  "Fifteen minutes," she said, and hung up.

  He hung up the telephone and turned to find Se¤ora Pellano looking at him.

  "I'm to have a guest," he began. "She wants to park her car in the garage."

  "I'll have Ernesto open it."

  "I can do that."

  "And I'll set out some agua mineral con gas and some ice in the reception room," she said. "Unless you would prefer it in the apartment? Se¤or Cletus?"

  "The reception room will be fine, thank you."

  "And then I will say good night, Se¤or Cletus."

  "Thank you, Se¤ora Pellano."

  "I hope you have a good alarm clock," Monica said, looking at him over the rim of the scotch and water he had made her. "I absolutely have to be home by seven. If I'm not, the children are liable to wake up and ask where Mommy is."

  Children? Of course, children. She's a married woman. Mar-ried women have children.

  This is not the smartest thing you have ever done, Clete. It may turn out to be the dumbest. But there doesn't seem to be any question that you are about to return to the ranks of the sexually active.

  Maybe that will put the Virgin Princess out of your mind.

  "I think there's one in the apartment. Shall we go have "a look?"

  "Splendid idea," Monica said. "And why don't I carry this tray along with us, so you won't have to wake the servants?"

  She picked up the tray with the ice and soda water on it, smiled at him, and waited for him to show her the way to the bedroom.

  [FOUR]

  4730 Avenida Libertador

  Buenos Aires

  1745 30 November 1942

  Cletus Howell Frade, First Lieutenant, USMCR, and Laird of the Manor, in T-shirt and khaki trousers, was sitting on a heavy wooden chair-so heavy it absolutely could not be tipped back on its rear legs, and he had really tried-on the balcony outside his bedroom. A liter bottle of Quilmes Cerveza (beer) rested on his abdomen. His feet, in battered boots he'd owned since before he went to College Station to join the corps of cadets at Texas A&M, rested on the masonry railing. And he was watching an exercise boy let a magnificent Arabian run at a full gallop at the racetrack across the street.

  "I wish I was up there with you, you lucky sonofabitch, who-ever you are," he announced to the world in general.

  And immediately regretted it. Every time he opened his mouth and a sound came out, even a cough, either Se¤ora Pellano or one of the maids appeared with a warm smile on her face and inquired,

  "S¡, Se¤or?"

  He glanced over his shoulder to see if one of them was headed his way. No one was coming through the bedroom-or Grand-uncle Guillermo's playroom, as he had come to think of it.

  He looked back toward the river and the racetrack. Thirty or forty sailboats were on the river, and there was activity at the racetrack, as if they were preparing for a race. He took another pull at the neck of the bottle of cerveza.

  Damned good beer. They really know how to eat and drink down here.

  He was not looking forward to the evening. He was going to dinner, where he would meet his aunt Beatrice and his uncle Humberto for the first time. Until three days before, he had been blissfully unaware that he had an Uncle Humberto or an Aunt Beatrice or a Cousin Jorge who got himself killed at Stalingrad.

  And whose death, his father said, left Aunt Beatrice shattered enough to need a psychiatrist's attention.


  There was of course no way to get out of going.

  "Beatrice will inevitably find out that you are in Buenos Aires," his father told him on the telephone, "and would be deeply hurt if you do not pay your respects."

  "I understand."

  "Beatrice and your mother were close, Cletus. They were brides together, and young first mothers. She held you as a baby."

  And now she'll want to know how come her baby is dead, and I'm alive.

  Shit.

  "I will try to make it an early evening. May I send a car for you at nine forty-five? They usually sit down to dinner at ten-thirty or eleven."

  An early dinner?

  "Thank you."

  He was also having troubling feelings about the events of the previous evening.

  After their first coupling-which took place no more than ninety seconds after they stepped off the elevator and walked into the playroom, and lasted about half that long-Monica confided to him that a combination of Pablo's diminishing sexual drive and the attention he was spending on his Mi¤a had combined to al-most entirely deny her the satisfactions of the connubial couch.

  Their initial coupling was followed by three others. The last two shattered the hope that his near-terMi¤al chastity was solely responsible for his carnal thoughts about the Virgin Princess, and that once that condition was cured, his shameful thoughts about her would disappear.

  That didn't happen. He managed to perform-although he wasn't too sure he could the last time Monica reached for it-in a manner that did not bring shame on the reputation of the com-missioned officer corps of the United States Marines. But clear images of the pert, yet ample virgin breasts of Se¤orita Dorotea Mallin kept flashing into his mind, even as he was somewhat feverishly attending to the business at hand.

  Which is what you get, you pervert, for looking down the front of her dress whenever you have the chance.

  At least I got out of her house before I made an ass of myself. I think Mallin was looking at me funny toward the end, which means that he caught me looking at her.

  On the other hand, there's no denying that I miss her something awful. Just seeing her, hearing her talk and laugh. Just having her look at me. The funny thing is that when I think about her- except when I'm banging a thirty-two-year-old mother of three- it's not her breasts, or even that absolutely perfect ass, but her eyes. Christ, she has beautiful eyes!

  Thank God, I got out of there before I made any kind of a pass at her.

  Or am I going to be a fool and call her up when the Buick comes and ask her if she'd like to go for a ride?

  In his mind he heard her voice: ' I have never been in a Buick droptop, Cletus. Will you take me for a ride when it arrives?"

  "Convertible, Princess. Convertible. Sure. Be happy to."

  "Se¤or Cletus, Se¤or Nestor wishes to see you," Se¤ora Pellano announced, startling him-he hadn't heard her come up.

  "He's here?"

  "S¡, Se¤or. In the reception."

  What the hell does he want?

  "Ask him to come up, please, Se¤ora Pellano," Clete said.

  When, a minute or so later, he heard the sound of the elevator door opening, he took his booted feet off the railing and stood up and smiled at Jasper C. Nestor. The Spymaster was wearing a seersucker suit, and he was carrying a soft-brimmed straw hat in one hand and a package in the other.

  "I'm glad I caught you at home, Clete," Nestor said, thrusting the package at him. "A little housewarming gift."

  The package gurgled. It was booze of some kind.

  "Thank you," Clete said. "I'm a little disappointed, though, frankly."

  "How's that?"

  "From Humphrey Bogart movies, I had the idea that spies met in an alley in the tough part of town at midnight, not at someplace like the Belgrano Athletic Club. And I certainly didn't expect the Spymaster to show up bearing a housewarming gift."

  He'd intended to be witty. From the strained smile on Nestor's face, Clete saw he hadn't been taken that way.

  I will henceforth go easy on the humor.

  "We're not spies, Clete," Nestor said after a moment. "We're gentlemen. The FBI are the spies."

  "And not gentlemen?"

  "Rarely, Clete, rarely. There is always an exception."

  Clete shook the package.

  "Would you like a little of whatever this is? Or something else?"

  "I would prefer one of those," Nestor replied, indicating Clete's beer. "If that would..."

  Clete pushed the call button. They were all over the house. Granduncle Guillermo knew how to live.

  Se¤ora Pellano appeared immediately.

  "Would you bring the Se¤or a beer, please? And a glass. Se¤or is a gentleman."

  "Actually, on a hot day, I rather like to drink from the bottle," Nestor said, smiling, and then turned and gestured off the balcony. "Beautiful view from here."

  "It's a beautiful house," Clete said.

  "And how kind of your father to make it available to you."

  "I thought so."

  "There are other advantages as well."

  "Such as?"

  "It establishes you as the beloved son of el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade," Nestor said. "That could prove very valua-ble."

  Clete nodded.

  "Have you thought about calling Se¤ora Frade? You seemed to be getting along splendidly with her last night. A-I almost said 'affair'-relationship with her might be valuable to us."

  "She called me," Clete said. "The phone rang the minute I walked in the door last night."

  "And will you see her?" Nestor asked, then caught the look on Clete's face. "Really? Good boy."

  "Is that why I was at the dinner? You wanted me to meet her?"

  "I wanted you to meet David in a credible situation," Nestor said. "Se¤ora Frade, so to speak, was an unexpected bonus. Let-ting it travel around town that she has added you to her list of admirers-her long list of admirers-will paint the sort of picture about you we want."

  Her long list of admirers? Incredible!

  "Inasmuch as you elected to ignore your instructions vis-a-vis your cover," Nestor went on, "that may prove quite valuable. More gossip-worthy, so to speak."

  "Sir, I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Your father proudly introduced you to a number of important officers as 'my son, late Teniente of the air service of the U.S. Marine Corps, who served at Guadalcanal.' "

  "How did you hear about that?" Clete asked, surprised.

  "I have a number of friends in the Argentine military. I pre-sume you had reason to ignore your instructions about your cover?"

  "I suppose I could tell you that it just slipped out. But the truth of the matter is, I was a little drunk at the time, and didn't want my father to think I was shirking my duty to God and country."

  "From what I hear, the both of you were three sheets to the wind. I'm sure meeting him was emotional for the both of you, but you might consider the ill-wisdom of excessive alcohol."

  "Yes, Sir."

  Se¤ora Pellano came onto the balcony with a bottle of cerveza and a glass on a tray.

  Nestor stopped her when she started to pour, took the bottle from her, and put it to his lips.

  Is he doing that because he really likes to, or to play "I'm just one of the boys" with me?

  "I hope I haven't disturbed anything?" Nestor asked.

  "No. Not a thing. I was sitting here catching the breeze and feeling sorry for myself."

  "Why sorry? Don't tell me Se¤ora Frade didn't turn out to be as advertised."

  "I miss flying. I even miss the goddamned Marine Corps. I'm a much better Naval Aviator than I am a saboteur."

  "Perhaps your father will let you fly his airplane. Or one of them."

  "I didn't know he had an airplane."

  "He has a Beechcraft biplane, and at least one Piper Cub."

  "You mean a stagger-wing Beechcraft?"

  "Your father's has the top wing behind the lower... yes, I suppose it wou
ld be a 'stagger-wing.' And as I say, at least one Piper Cub. The use-on the larger estancias-of small aircraft is quite common."