“I can’t believe you would do that,” Niedermeyer said drily.
“I asked General Martín to arrange for von Dattenberg to escape from Villa General Belgrano and he did so.”
Niedermeyer’s eyebrows rose. “Why? I mean why did you want him released? Or permitted to escape?”
“Which was it?” Frogger said.
Frade grunted. “As that ancient Chinaman said, ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ I got von Dattenberg out of Villa General Belgrano and am bringing him here because I don’t trust the sonofabitch. I want to keep an eye on him.”
“Sun Tzu?” Niedermeyer asked. “That Chinaman?”
“That’s the guy. Either him or Confucius.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Sun Tzu also say, ‘Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective’?”
“I think it was that other famous Chinese philosopher, One Hung Low, who said what you just said.”
Cronley laughed.
After a moment, Martín and Ashton shook their heads and chuckled, and Dorotea said, “My God, Cletus!”
“I was simply going to observe,” Niedermeyer said, smiling, “that most of us—all of us, come to think about it—have learned that is your very successful modus operandi.”
“Why don’t you trust Willi?” Dorotea challenged.
“I think he still feels bound by that damn oath of personal loyalty he took to Hitler,” Clete said. “When I first confronted him at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, he started talking only after he realized I wasn’t kidding when I told him his choice was either talk or get shot.”
“That’s all?”
“He started to talk, and I started to think he’d seen the light. But then that rendezvous point business came up. I’m having a hard time believing he didn’t know all along that he had it in his safe. It’s bullshit. He was captain—and he knew what he had in his safe.”
“Well, I think you’re wrong,” Dorotea said.
“Sweetheart, just because he and Hansel’s sister-in-law are holding hands and staring soulfully into each other’s eyes doesn’t make him a good guy.”
Cronley looked at Clete.
No, Jimmy thought, but it does make him probably Number Three Hundred and Seven on the list of Elsa the Great’s Lengthy List of Lovers.
And then Jimmy had a flood of disquieting thoughts:
Jesus, what if Marjie knew there was more between Elsa and me than me—what did she say?—“looking at her like a lovesick calf”?
Would she be angry, pissed, disgusted, jealous—what?
Do I care?
And what the hell am I doing with the Squirt?
So far nothing. At least nothing serious.
And that’s where it stops.
Marjie is too nice a girl to get involved with someone who fucked his brains out with someone like Elsa.
Not to mention doing the same thing with that Hungarian redhead in that whorehouse Sergeant Freddy Hessinger got us into in Munich.
And what did Tiny Dunwiddie have to say about that? That I obviously have a natural talent for that sort of recreation. . . .
You really ought to be ashamed of yourself, you oversexed whoremonger.
The Squirt is like a sister.
Even Mom was always saying the Squirt was the daughter she never had.
And—for Christ’s sake!—you used to go to Sunday school with her!
Well, it stops right here!
Cronley heard Niedermeyer as he said, “Clete, none of us”—he gestured around the table at Strübel, Frogger, and Ashton—“know what you’re talking about. What rendezvous points?”
Clete pointed to Jimmy.
“He found the point where we think U-234 made landfall. That’s what all this is about.”
“And Willi helped him find it,” Dorotea said. “You know that.”
“Willi helped only when he realized Jimmy didn’t need any help,” Clete countered.
“U-234 made it to Argentina?” Strübel asked, visibly surprised.
Frade nodded. He began: “This is where we are. . . .”
Frade was halfway through the briefing when the telephone rang. Dorotea answered it and reported that both aircraft had landed in Mendoza, and that all aboard were now headed for Casa Montagna.
[FOUR]
“The Officers’ Mess”
Estancia Don Guillermo
Km 40.4, Provincial Route 60
Mendoza Province, Argentina
0715 21 October 1945
When General de Brigada Martín lurched into the room on his crutches, Frade saw that it would not be necessary to ask his permission to seek the assistance of the Gendarmería Nacional. He had with him Inspector General Santiago Nervo, who commanded the Gendarmería Nacional, and his deputy, Subinspector General Pedro Nolasco.
And von Wachtstein and Boltitz and von Dattenberg.
Shit! I should have thought Hansel would bring von Dattenberg in here.
I don’t want him to learn any more about what’s going on than I have to.
But if I throw him out, he’ll know it’s because I don’t trust him.
“I know who you are, you ugly gringo!” General Nervo cried happily as he went to Frade. “I saw your picture on the front page of La Nacíon. You were standing on the balcony of the Casa Rosada beside our beloved Coronel Juan Domingo Perón as he waved at the idiots.”
He picked Frade off his feet in a bear hug.
“Have you been a good boy, Cletus, or are you fomenting revolution again?”
“What I want to know, Santiago, is why you shot Bernardo,” Frade said.
“I had no choice. He was saying unkind things about dear Juan Domingo,” Nervo said, as he finally let Frade loose. “I can only hope he’s learned his lesson.”
Frade then said: “Grandfather, this is Inspector General Santiago Nervo, of the Gendarmería Nacional. Santiago, Cletus Marcus Howell and Subteniente Cronley.”
“Why do I think you and my grandson, General, are a dangerous combination?” the old man asked.
“Perhaps Father Welner told you?” Nervo asked.
“Where is the wily Jesuit, by the way?” Frade said.
“He’ll be on the afternoon flight,” Martín said.
“Okay,” Nervo said, “enough of the social niceties. What’s going on here?”
“Well, to begin—” Frade began.
“No, Cletus,” Nervo interrupted. “In my classroom—I thought you knew this—you have to raise your hand and get my permission to speak.”
“Sorry,” Frade said, shaking his head and chuckling.
Nervo pointed to Cronley.
“If you raise your hand, Subteniente,” he said, “then I will call on you.”
“I’ll pass, thank you just the same,” Jimmy said.
“According to the cripple-on-crutches sitting there, Subteniente,” Nervo said, “you started all this. You’re the one responsible for getting him all excited. So you tell Pedro and me what’s going on. Either that, or go stand in the corner.”
Cronley smiled, then shrugged. “Okay. We think we have found where U-234, the sub with the uranium oxide, made landfall . . .”
—
“And that’s about it?” Nervo asked, when Cronley had finished.
“Except that Señor Niedermeyer says he thinks we’re being surveilled, probably by the Tenth Mountain Regiment or Division, or whatever it is.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Nervo said. “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, I’d like to say that General Martín has finally said something I now can agree with.”
“And what would that be?” Martín challenged.
“That Subteniente Cronley is sort of a junior version of Teniente Coronel Frade. In other words, he’s a lot smarter than he looks. I thought that was a pretty good summation. So, what I am going to do now is in no way a reflection on him.”
“What are you going to do now?” th
e old man asked.
“Be the devil’s advocate,” Nervo said. “When I say something negative, feel free to refute me. Okay? Remember to raise your hand and wait to be recognized.
“One. We think we know where this submarine U-234 may have landed. But we have no proof.”
Martín raised his hand.
Cronley was surprised. I thought Nervo was just being a smart-ass with that childish hand-raising business.
Nervo nodded at Martín, who said, “When Boltitz brought us the names of the two senior Nazis known to be aboard U-234—SS-Oberführer Horst Lang and SS-Brigadeführer Gerhard Körtig—I was familiar with the names. I knew the Interior Ministry had issued, at the request of former Teniente Coronel Rudy Nulder, libretas de enrolamiento to both of them, oddly enough in their own names. And I knew they were both living in Rosario, in apartments arranged for them by the Bishop of Rosario, Salvador Lombardi.
“So we know, Santiago, that U-234 did make landfall here. We don’t know that took place where Subteniente Cronley believes it did. But let me go on with this a moment, I believe it’s cogent.
“We know that Perón and Lombardi are close. But we don’t know if Perón knows these two came off U-234, or whether he thinks they came here by other means. What I’m saying is that Nulder may have arranged for the libretas as a routine courtesy to Lombardi and doesn’t know of the U-234 connection. That offers the possibility that Perón doesn’t know about U-234. The possibility that he doesn’t.
“Yesterday, both Lang and Körtig came to Buenos Aires to an apartment at 1044 Calle Talcahuan, near the Colón Opera House. The apartment . . .”
Frogger, recognizing the address, blurted, “My parents’ apartment?”
Martín nodded and went on: “. . . was owned by the German embassy. Señor Frogger and his wife were housed there. After they defected, the embassy retained ownership of course until the end of the war. Then something very interesting happened. Several weeks before the German surrender, the first secretary of the German embassy, Anton von Gradny-Sawz, offered to defect to the BIS. I wondered what he was up to and accepted the defection. I got nothing of value from him before the surrender occurred, but then I learned what he was up to.
“It seems—for reasons I admit I don’t understand—that the Allies are not treating Ostmark, the name the Germans gave to Austria after it was annexed, as still part of Germany. They have decided that Austria was liberated, not conquered, and is again a sovereign nation.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Frade said softly. “Some of the worst Nazis were Austrians. Allen Dulles told me that seventy to eighty percent of SS officers were Austrians.”
“That’s a little high, Cletus,” Alois Strübel said. “More than half, but not seventy to eighty percent.”
“I will defer to your greater knowledge of the subject, Herr SS-Obersturmbannführer,” Frade said, somewhat sarcastically.
Strübel replied with an American hand gesture he had learned from Frade. He held his balled fist, center finger extended, out to him.
“If I may continue?” Martín asked impatiently.
“Sorry,” Strübel and Frade said over one another.
“At the moment, there are two occupation authorities,” Martín went on. “One for Germany and, wholly separate from that, one for Austria. Gradny-Sawz got in touch with the British ambassador here, whom he knew. He told the ambassador that he had defected to the Argentines before the war ended and that he now would like to make himself again of service to the country of his birth, Austria.
“The British ambassador, who is not too bright, called me to see if Anton had in fact defected. When I told him he had, he contacted the British element of the Allied Occupational Authority in Vienna and told them he had found just the man to handle Austrian diplomatic affairs in Argentina until diplomats could be sent from Vienna.
“Then the ambassador went to the Foreign Ministry and asked them to release the apartment on Calle Talcahuano to Gradny-Sawz, who needed a place to live now that he was going to be handling Austrian affairs. They agreed.
“When I heard about this, I was curious, because I knew Gradny-Sawz was living in an apartment he owned in Belgrano. By then it was too late to install surveillance devices in the apartment on Talcahuano, but I kept an eye on it.
“The day after the apartment was turned over to Gradny-Sawz, a man we’d been keeping an eye on, one of the Nazis who’d come here on one of the first submarines, whom I knew to be SS-Sturmführer Erich Raschner, started to use the apartment to meet other people.
“Rudy Nulder had arranged a libreta for him in the name of Erich Richter. After seeing who went to the apartment to meet Richter, in particular Señor José Moreno of Banco Suisse Creditanstalt S.A., I started to believe that it was all connected with what these people called the ‘Special Fund.’
“I think everybody here knows this is the money they extorted from both our Jews and North American Jews to ransom their relatives out of the concentration camps in Germany. That operation differs from Operation Phoenix in that the beneficiaries of the latter are all senior SS officers. It has been in some disarray since SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg—after taking control of all its assets in Uruguay—met his untimely death in the men’s room of the Edelweiss Hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche.”
Cronley saw the look exchanged between Niedermeyer and Frade and wondered what it meant.
“I had to adjust my thinking, however,” Martín went on, “when another senior SS officer, Brigadeführer Ludwig Hoffmann . . .”
“Whom I brought here,” von Dattenberg offered.
Martín nodded and went on: “. . . for whom Rudy Nulder had arranged a libreta identifying him as Ludwig Mannhoffer, first showed up at the apartment. He was joined there yesterday by SS-Brigadeführer Gerhard Körtig and SS-Oberführer Horst Lang.
“Last night, Lang drove to Villa General Belgrano, from which at three A.M., in a hastily assembled convoy, he set out with Kapitän Schneider and members of the crew of U-234 for an unknown destination, which is more than likely either Estancia Condor or perhaps even the U-234 itself.
“Körtig has a reservation for a drawing room on the Bariloche Special, which is scheduled to depart the Retiro Station at six-fifty this morning.” He looked at his watch. “In other words, about fifteen minutes ago. He has a ticket all the way to San Carlos de Bariloche, but the train stops at San Martín de los Andes at five twenty-five before it gets to San Carlos.
“I confess I don’t know the significance of all this—the significance of any of this—as Cletus says, ‘Unless there’s an application for it, intelligence is useless’—but for the moment it’s all I have and I thought it might be useful and that I should put it on the table.”
For a moment, there was silence.
Doña Dorotea broke it.
“My God, Bernardo,” she said in awe. “It’s all you have?”
Then Niedermeyer said, “Might be useful? Amazing. Absolutely amazing!”
Then he began to applaud loudly and was quickly joined by the others.
“Bernardo, you’ve really been earning your pay, haven’t you?” Nervo said.
Martín flushed.
“That’s very kind,” he said. “But your applause should be directed to my staff, especially to Captain Garcia here. He and his men spent the long nights surveilling these people, not me.”
“Professed modesty will not work for you, Bernardo,” Frade said. “People of genius, such as you and me, simply cannot hide it.”
“Throw your crutch at him, Bernardo,” Dorotea said.
“Well, now that we know, thanks to Bernardo,” Nervo said, “just about everything about everything—where do we go from here?”
“To what we don’t know,” Frade said. “Who’s surveilling us?”
“Pedro,” Nervo ordered, “find out.”
Nolasco nodded, stood, mimed using a telephone, and was directed to one on a sideboard.
“Are we sure there’
s not a tap on that line?” Frade asked.
“I will use it knowing that’s a real possibility, Don Cletus.”
“No offense, Pedro.”
“None taken, Don Cletus. General, when I have these people, should I bring them here?”
“No. Take them to the gendarmerie barracks in Mendoza. Charge them with unlawful trespass. Have one of the people we brought with us—one of the smarter ones—conduct the interrogation. And get a description of the Nazi bastard on the train, and get it to both the station in San Martín and the station in Bariloche before the train gets there. I want to keep an eye on him.”
“I can do better than a description, General,” Niedermeyer said. “Cronley brought our dossier on him from Germany. With photos. Give me an hour and I can have prints made.”
“That would be helpful,” Nervo said. “May I ask a question?”
“Certainly.”
“Abwehr Ost maintained dossiers on people like this?”
“Abwehr Ost did not. General Gehlen did. Actually, his Number Two, Coronel Mannberg, and I did. General Gehlen said it was our duty to protect Germany from all of its enemies.”
“Interesting,” Nervo said, and then went on: “Now that we have a little more probably irrelevant intelligence from Bernardo, let me go back to being the devil’s advocate. I think we’re all agreed that U-234 did make a landing here. Now what’s most important about that?”
“The uranium oxide,” Frade said.
“And what’s the worst-case scenario involving the uranium oxide?”
“That the Russians get their hands on it,” Frade answered.
“And how would that happen?”
“The Russian NKVD guy from Mexico . . .” Frade began.
“Egorov,” Cronley furnished. “Pavel Egorov.”
“. . . comes here with a suitcase full of money and buys it from whoever has it. ‘Whoever’ just might include Juan Domingo Perón.”
“Egorov’s here,” Martín announced, “legally accredited to the Argentine Republic as the new chief of the Soviet Trade Mission, replacing Oleg Fedoseev, who is staying on for an indefinite period until Egorov has his feet on the ground. But no suitcase full of money.”
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