1942
FROM HOWELL PETROLEUM NEW ORLEANS
VIA MACKAY RADIO
ENRICO MALLIN
SMIPP
KAVANAGH BUILDING
CALLE FLORIDA 165
BUENOS AIRES ARGENTINA
FOR REASONS MY GRANDSON WILL EXPLAIN IN PERSON HOWELL VENEZUELA OPENING BUENOS AIRES OFFICE STOP CLETUS HOWELL FRADE AND ANTHONY J PELOSI COMMA TANK FARM ENGINEER COMMA DEPARTING MIAMI PANAMERICAN FLIGHT ONE SEVEN ONE NOVEMBER TWENTY STOP APPRECIATE YOUR ARRANGING HOTEL ETCETERA UNTIL PERMANENT ARRANGEMENTS CAN BE MADE STOP REGARDS CLETUS MARCUS HOWELL END
* * *
The old man is opening a Buenos Aires office? And sending his grandson down here to do it? What in the devil is that all about?
The first thing that came to his mind was that SMIPP had somehow failed to meet the old man’s expectations. Had something gone wrong?…He couldn’t imagine what…. But was he about to lose Howell Petroleum as a client?
Almost immediately, he realized that couldn’t possibly be the case. Their relatively simple business relationship had gone on long enough to work effortlessly; all the little problems that inevitably occur had been resolved.
In their own bottoms, or hired bottoms, Howell (Venezuela) shipped Venezuela crude to Buenos Aires. This was most often (and now almost always, with the war) off-loaded directly into the tanks of the refinery that was to process it. Since there was an import tax, the government determined precisely how much crude there was. The government inspectors were kept honest during off-loading by the presence of representatives of the refiner (who wanted to make sure the inspectors had not been paid by SMIPP to report a greater tonnage than was the case) and of SMIPP (who wanted to make sure the inspectors had not been paid off by the refiner to report the off-loading of a lesser amount of crude than was the case).
Within forty-eight hours of off-loading, the refiners paid SMIPP for the crude. And within twenty-four hours of receipt of their check, SMIPP paid into Howell (Venezuela)’s account at the Bank of Boston the amount they were due: gross receipts less taxes, stevedoring, and, of course, SMIPP’s commission.
Handling of Refined Products (cased motor oil and lubricants) from Howell Petroleum (which Mallín thought of as Howell USA) was a bit more complicated. But this was still done in much the same way. There was, of course, a greater problem with pilferage: Refined products were shipped as regular cargo aboard freighters that were not owned or controlled by Howell, and the crews of these freighters had discovered that oil products floated (even in cans and cases), and that some of the operators of boats on the River Plate would make gifts to seamen in proportion to the number of cases of refined products they found bobbing around in the river.
But over the years, even that problem had been minimized by the payment of bonuses to ship’s masters and crews for their special care of Howell Refined Products. It was impossible, of course, to keep a half-dozen cases of motor oil from falling over the side when a boat operated by one’s wife’s cousin showed up to wave hello. But large-scale theft was really a thing of the past.
After the Refined Products were counted by a government inspector to make sure the government took its tax bite, they were unloaded into bonded warehouses, with a SMIPP representative watching. And when they were sold by SMIPP, it was on a Collect On Delivery basis at the bonded warehouses. A SMIPP representative was there to collect the check before he authorized release of the merchandise. Within twenty-four hours, SMIPP deposited a check to Howell USA’s account at the Bank of Boston representing the total amount the wholesaler had paid, less taxes, stevedoring, SMIPP’s commission, and the value of goods spoiled in transport.
Mallín generally succeeded in keeping the value of goods spoiled in transport (including goods actually damaged, say, when a cargo net ripped; goods “fallen” overboard; and bonuses paid to ship’s crews) below one point five percent of net to Howell.
On reflection, Enrico could not imagine anything in his operation that could displease the old man.
So what is this all about? And why the grandson? He’s nothing but a boy!
Mallín had met the grandson. In 1938. He was then a student in New Orleans, a tall, rather well-set-up young man who suffered from acne. The old man, Mallín recalled, doted on him. The boy’s mother was dead, and the father had vanished when the boy was an infant (Mallín did not know the man’s name).
If the boy was then—what, seventeen, eighteen years old?—what is he now? Twenty-one or twenty-two; twenty-three at most. If you are dissatisfied with someone, you don’t send a twenty-odd-year-old to conduct an investigation.
Maybe that was why the other expert was coming. But if that was the case, why send the boy?
As a matter of courtesy to me? Highly unlikely. The old man is the antithesis of subtle.
Then the real reason flashed in his mind:
The war. The bloody damned war! If the boy is twenty-odd, he’s liable to be called up for service. Young men are killed in wars. Even Argentineans. And we’re not even in this war. Humberto Valdez Duarte’s boy was killed—it was in La Nación—at Stalingrad, of all places.
The old man dotes on the boy. The mother is dead and the father a scoundrel. So the boy had been raised by the old man, and an aunt and uncle in Texas.
That’s what this is all about. The old man doesn’t want him killed in the war. So he’s arranged to send him out of the country. He’s a powerful man; he’s arranged for him to be declared essential to Howell Petroleum. Sending him to Buenos Aires will keep him out of sight.
But who is the other fellow, Pelosi, coming with him?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
He walked back to his desk, picked up a pen, and scrawled a note to his secretary, asking her (a) to please make reservations for an American gentleman, Señor Pelosi, at either the Alvear Palace or the Plaza, for at least a week, starting November twenty-first (a small suite, to be billed to the SMIPP account); (b) to please remind him to inform his wife that they would be entertaining the young grandson of Cletus Marcus Howell for an indefinite period beginning November twenty-first; and (c) to please contact Schneider to ask if their meeting tomorrow could be rescheduled for later in the day; two-thirty or three, if possible, but no earlier than one-thirty.
[FIVE]
Aboard “The Ciudad de Rio de Janeiro”
(Pan American Airlines Flight 171)
1815 21 November 1942
One of the stewards (Clete Frade had serious doubts about his masculinity) came through the cabin, knelt in the aisle by each quartet of seats, and announced they were preparing to land in Buenos Aires. They should be on the ground—or, titter, on the water—in about fifteen minutes.
In fact, Clete’s aviator’s seat-of-the-pants instincts had already told him they’d been letting down slowly for about fifteen minutes. He had noticed a slight change in the roar of the Martin 156’s quadruple thousand-horsepower engines, and a just barely perceptible change in attitude. Without taking it out of Autopilot, the pilot had just touched the trim control, lowering the nose maybe half a degree.
Clete was slept out and bored, so he had been doing his own dead-reckoning navigation since they’d left Rio de Janeiro. He used his Marine Corps-issue Hamilton chronograph and several sheets of the notepaper engraved “In Flight—Pan American Airways.” Pan American had provided the paper—along with a good deal else—for the comfort of its passengers. He could only guess at the winds aloft, of course, but putting them at zero for his calculations, it was time to arrive in Buenos Aires.
He’d thought quite a bit about the watch, starting with the amusing notion that a diligent Marine Corps supply officer was almost certainly at this very moment trying to run down First Lieutenant Frade, USMCR, to make him either turn it back in or sign the appropriate form so the cost thereof could be deducted from his pay.
He got a strange feeling sitting in the softly upholstered seat of the Martin (every time they landed—first at Caracas, Venezuela, and
then at Belém and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil—the crisp linen head cloths of the seats were replaced, and the ashtrays emptied) computing time and distance with the same watch he’d used when he had to wonder if he had enough gas to bring his Grumman Wildcat back to Midway or Henderson. Same identical watch, except for the strap. He replaced the old, mold-soaked strap with a new leather band in New Orleans.
It occurred to him that in his new role as a spy/saboteur/secret agent, he probably should put the watch away and wear one more appropriate to an oil industry executive.
That man is obviously a secret agent. You can tell by his watch!
But he had a strange, strong emotional reluctance to take it off. In a sense, the Hamilton and the Half Wellington boots he was wearing were his last connection with VMF-229, with Henderson and Guadalcanal, with the Corps, with Francis Xavier Sullivan. It was a connection he didn’t want to break.
From the beginning in the hotel room in Los Angeles, he’d had doubts about the whole OSS operation. These had not only not diminished, they had grown more defined. He found it difficult to believe that the United States of America—faced with the problem that German submarines were being replenished by “neutral” freighters in Argentina—could not come up with a better solution than sending a fighter pilot, an immigrant electrical engineer, and a none-too-bright Italian boy from Chicago who was allegedly a demolitions expert to deal with it.
If General Frade had been in charge, he would have dispatched several Boeing B-17 bombers to Brazil with orders to bomb any suspicious-looking ship; and if the Argentineans didn’t like it, fuck ’em. What were they going to do, declare war on the United States and bomb Miami? If the OSS knew about the ship, they would certainly know where it was. And it shouldn’t be too hard to pass that information on to the bomber people.
On the other hand, it was also very true that the B-17s, the only aircraft Clete knew of with range enough to bomb Buenos Aires from a base in Brazil, weren’t the invincible flying fortresses the Army Air Corps was advertising. B-17s had bravely gone out day after day from Midway and Henderson and Espíritu Santo to bomb Japanese ships; and so far as Clete knew, they hadn’t been able to hit one of them.
They’d lost a bunch of B-17s—either to Japanese fighters, pilot (or navigator) error, or lousy maintenance. At least some of the Seventeen pilots must have known they were pissing into the wind, but they kept their mouths shut and tried to do what was asked of them, because that was the way things are in a war.
And that’s how he felt about blowing up “neutral” freighters in Argentina. He would give it a shot—and for that matter, even try to make friends with his father—because that was what he had been ordered to do. Phony discharge and draft card and civilian clothing aside, he was still a serving Marine Officer. He’d taken an oath to “faithfully execute the orders of those officers appointed him”; and simply because orders like these weren’t what he expected to get didn’t release him from that oath.
All he could do was hope that “faithfully executing” his orders wasn’t going to get himself—and Pelosi and Ettinger—killed in the process. And considering that the sum total of his knowledge about how to be a successful secret agent could be written inside a matchbook with a crayon—despite the mind-numbing, day-and-night, relentless efforts of the mentors in New Orleans—getting killed did not seem an unlikely possibility.
Ettinger seemed both smart and tough. Even telling his mother that he was going to Argentina now seemed less stupid than it did when Clete first heard it and ate him out about it. He had to tell her something, obviously, and in the absence of a furnished cover story—the OSS left things out, forgot things…this was obviously not a comforting thought—the one he came up with was a pretty good one. And someone who had lost his family to Hitler’s goons didn’t have to be reminded that the Germans were the bad guys.
Pelosi worried him more. Sure he knew his stuff, incredibly…. Lieutenant Greene, the Navy Salvage officer, gave Pelosi practice setting charges on a ship by giving him a to-be-scrapped World War One destroyer to blow up. Greene came back from Mississippi damned near glowing with tales of his expertise. But Pelosi was a Second Lieutenant, a kid, who thought war was like they showed it in Alan Ladd and Errol Flynn movies. Based on his own recent experience in the role, Clete considered himself an expert about the stupidíty of second lieutenants. And he was thus afraid that Pelosi would try to do something heroic—an excellent way to get yourself and the people with you killed.
When the opportunity presented itself—the mentors saw to it there was no time for that in New Orleans—he intended to have a long talk with Pelosi on the theme that discretion is often the better part of valor.
The mentors also ruined his plans to correct what was now a near-terminal case of Lackanookie. Finding a cure for that was the one thing he could reasonably expect to find in Buenos Aires. Three of their mentors had been there. They swore to a man that the women were both lovely and (sometimes) willing.
He remembered clearly very few of the nine million facts about Buenos Aires that they threw at him. But one of those few concerned Four Hour Hotels. Four Hour Hotels were set up for the express purpose of catering to unmarried people who wished to spend four hours alone together in a horizontal position without their clothes. That seemed to be a little too good to be true, but he was going to do his best to find out for himself.
Another steward came down the aisle, carrying a tray of glasses and a bottle of champagne wrapped in a napkin.
Clete nudged Pelosi, who was dozing in the seat beside him, waking him, and noting with surprise how his face was astonishingly dark with whiskers. Pan American had provided razors, but they both chose not to use them. Since it was unlikely either of them was going to be kissed on board, shaves could wait until they got to Buenos Aires.
Pelosi had a questioning look. And a hint of annoyance, as well.
“Champagne,” Clete said.
“What are we celebrating?”
“Our arrival.”
“Champagne, gentlemen?” the steward asked as he reached them.
“Thank you ever so much, and you can leave the bottle,” Clete said.
The Martin set down into choppy water with a series of crashes. Water sprayed over the windows, so the seaplane was nearly stopped before Clete could look past Pelosi and see outside. The water was dirty. Or at least brown.
The seaplane turned, and the pilot shut down its engines. Punctuated only by the clangs of cooling metal and the lapping of water against the hull, the quiet felt strange. Then a string of boats appeared: The first four were outsize motorboats, with brightly varnished woodwork. And after them, in line, came four work boats, to take off the luggage and cargo. Clete had seen them load mailbags aboard in Miami and in Rio de Janeiro.
He wondered idly if there was other cargo. It must cost a fortune to ship something air express, if that’s what it’s called. The bill for our tickets was more than the Marine Corps is paying me by the year as a first lieutenant on flight status.
There was a flurry in the cabin as the passengers—thirty-six of them, thirty-four of them male, he had counted—started getting ready to get off. Pelosi saw them too, and began to get up.
Clete waved him back into his seat, and pointed out the window. The first of the passenger boats was still far from the Martin. No one would be getting off in the next couple of minutes.
Finally, they opened the door, and there was the smell of fresh air. And it was warm. The temperature rose quickly. He was sweating by the time it was their turn to pass through the hatch and step onto what looked like a stubby second wing, and from that down to one of the powerboats.
The ride to shore cooled them off.
It’s no hotter here than it was in Miami, Clete decided. Maybe a little more humid.
Just inside the terminal building he spotted a tall, brown-haired man with a massive mustache. The other man spotted him at the same moment.
Enrico Mallín. I know him. I told the
old man I didn’t remember him, but now that I see him, I do.
I remember something else about you, too, you sonofabitch! You made a pass at—what the hell was her name? Beth Fogarty—when I took old stand-up nipples Beth by the old man’s house. What was that, the legendary hot-blooded Latin? If it wears a skirt, have a go at it, even if it’s half your age?
Mallín gently but unmistakably pushed a uniformed man—probably customs—aside and walked up to Clete.
“Cletus, my young friend, how good it is to see you again!” he said, shaking Clete’s hand and wrapping his arm around his shoulders.
“It’s good to see you too, Enrico.”
Clete sensed a certain stiffness at that, and realized that Enrico the Horny expected to be called “Mister.”
Fuck you, Enrico, Little Cletus has grown up.
“And your friend? Associate?” Mallín asked.
“A little of both, actually,” Clete said. “Tony Pelosi, this is Mr. Enrico Mallín.”
“Welcome to Argentina,” Mallín said as he shook their hands. “I am very pleased to meet you both. Shall we go?”
“What about the luggage?” Clete asked.
“My chauffeur is here with the wagon,” Mallín said. “He will take care of the luggage.”
“A wagon?” Tony blurted.
“A Ford,” Mallín said, smiling condescendingly. “By and large, we have very few horse-drawn wagons on the streets these days.”
That was a cheap shot, Enrico. What was that for? To pay me back for not calling you “Mister”?
“We can just walk out of here?” Clete asked. “What about Immigration?”
“Right this way,” Mallín said. “We’ll need your passports.”
He led them to an unmarked door, pushed it open without knocking, and waved them inside ahead of him.
A middle-aged man wearing a better-quality uniform than the man outside gave them a look of indignation—who the hell are you to barge into my office?—but then he noticed Mallín. He stood up, smiled, and offered his hand.
Honor Bound Page 18