Honor Bound

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Habanzo,” Martín corrected him.

  “…was standing there with a gun. I gave him the automatic. He tried to question me. I refused to answer until I had a lawyer, and we argued about that awhile, until the police came. I was then locked in the library and was there until just now.”

  “Do you know the men whom you shot?”

  Clete shook his head no.

  “Do you have any idea why they wanted to kill you?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you get that stolen .45 automatic pistol. Is it your father’s?”

  Clete was silent.

  “All right. Now I will tell you what I believe happened,” Martín said. “You returned from your uncle’s home, and did not raise the blinds because you thought there might be an attempt on your life. You believed this because you earlier met the German, el Capitán von Wachtstein, at the Alvear Palace Hotel. For reasons I cannot imagine, he warned you that the Germans would try to have you killed. That also explains why you went out on the servants’ balcony with a pistol.

  “When the attempt was made, you killed one of the men and wounded the other. You went looking for Señora Pellano, found her with her throat cut in the kitchen, lost your professional detachment, and returned here and shot the other man, who had by then dragged himself into the bathroom. The bullets ricocheted off the tile of the bathtub, which explains the blood on your body. And the human flesh, which I think is brain tissue.”

  Clete said nothing.

  “Killing the one and wounding the other was self-defense. Coming back here and killing the wounded man was murder…unless, should the matter reach trial, your lawyer pleads a crime of passion, based on your close personal affection for Señora Pellano.”

  “Those bastards didn’t have to kill her,” Clete heard himself saying. “She never hurt anybody in her life.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that,” Martín said. “Of course they had to kill her. It was at no cost to them. They were going to kill you, and they can only hang you once for murder. Killing her removed a potential witness against them.”

  “You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you?”

  “I am beginning to suspect that I have more experience in these matters than you do,” Martín said. “Professional judgment does not make me cold-blooded.”

  Clete exhaled audibly.

  “This is the story we will tell,” Martín said. “On your return from the Duarte mansion, you came to your apartment. You were surprised by armed robbers. You managed to put your hands on the old Colt and killed them both with it. Since the six-shooter was empty, you picked up the robbers’ gun, the automatic, went downstairs, and found Señora Pellano murdered in the kitchen. At that point, Comandante Habanzo knocked at the door. You let him in and gave him the robbers’ gun.”

  “There’s a couple of large holes in that story,” Clete said. “For one thing, the Colt has not been fired. And what about the automatic?”

  “Anything else?”

  “There’s a trail of blood on the floor, leading to the bathroom.”

  “That robber crawled in there during the gunfight,” Martín said. “Where he threatened you with the .45. So you killed him with the old revolver.”

  “The old revolver has not been fired.”

  Martín ignored him.

  “You are more seriously injured than you think you are,” he said. “You will require immediate emergency medical treatment. I am going to summon an ambulance from the Military Hospital, which is nearby. You will be treated and placed under protective custody. I doubt if the Policía Federal can gain entrance to you in the hospital, but if they somehow manage to—I really don’t know how cooperative el Coronel Savia-Gonzalez will be in this; he is not an admirer of your father—you will refuse to answer any of their questions without a lawyer.”

  “The .44-40 hasn’t been fired,” Clete repeated. “The bullets in the bodies are .45 ACP, not .44-40.”

  “Your professionalism, Teniente, is returning,” Martín said approvingly. He went to the desk and picked up both pistols. He went into the bathroom and pressed the .45 against the right hand of the man with the bullet hole in his forehead, then stood up. He took the Colt .44–40 revolver, fired two cartridges into the body, then went to the body of the man in the bedroom and fired two cartridges into his body. Finally he walked to the desk and fired two cartridges into the wall, one next to the bathroom door, the other through one of the closed blinds.

  Then he laid both pistols back on the table.

  “The revolver has less recoil than the automatic,” he observed calmly. “I would have thought the reverse.”

  A few seconds later, puffing from the exertion of running up the stairs, Comandante Habanzo rushed into the room with a .32 ACP Colt automatic in his hand.

  “What are you doing with that?” Martín asked.

  “I heard shots.”

  “You heard a car backfiring,” Martín said. “Habanzo, do you remember offhand the number of the Military Hospital?”

  “No, mi Coronel.”

  “Presumably, you have it written down somewhere?”

  “Sí, mi Coronel,” Habanzo said, more than a little awkwardly stuffing his small automatic back into its shoulder holster and then producing a notebook.

  [FOUR]

  Room 305

  Dr. Cosme Argerich Military Hospital

  Calle Luis María Campos

  Buenos Aires

  0205 20 December 1942

  Siren screaming, the ambulance, a 1937 Ford station wagon, pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The driver and his assistant jumped out, walked quickly to the rear, opened the doors, and pulled out the stretcher holding First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, under a thick wool blanket.

  He raised his head. A gurney was being hastily wheeled to the station wagon under the supervision of a very large and sternfaced nurse. He was moved, none too gently, from the stretcher onto the gurney. The wool blanket from the ambulance was jerked off and replaced by a thinner cotton cover.

  The gurney was then wheeled into the hospital, now accompanied by a man in a business suit, who made little effort to hide the .45 automatic he carried, riding high on his hip.

  The gurney was rolled onto an elevator. It rose (three floors, Clete guessed) and stopped. It was then rolled down a corridor and into an operating room, which made Clete more than a little nervous.

  He was transferred to an operating table. Its cold stainless steel was cool against his back and buttocks. A short, unpleasant-looking, mustachioed doctor in a white jacket bent over him, pried his eyelids apart, and shined a small flashlight in his eyes.

  “I’m all right, Doctor,” Clete said.

  The doctor ignored him. He made a sweeping gesture with his hands, and the nurse snatched the thin hospital blanket away and then pulled off his boxer shorts.

  Jesus Christ!

  As the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure collar around his arm, the doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and then his throat. She gave him a sharp shove so he would roll onto his side; and a moment later, he felt the annoying and humiliating insertion of an anal thermometer. He watched as someone dropped his bloody shorts into a stainless-steel tray.

  The anal thermometer was finally removed, his temperature announced orally, and then repeated by a woman in hospital whites holding a clipboard.

  He was moved back onto his back. His blood-pressure reading was announced orally, repeated by the woman with the clipboard, and then the large nurse inserted a needle in his left arm to draw blood.

  That completed, the doctor made another sweeping gesture with his hand. And the nurse, using what looked like a miniature spatula, began scraping his body.

  Martín said that was probably brain tissue.

  He felt slightly nauseous when she carefully scraped the brain tissue off the first spatula with a second one. The tissue was dropped into a second stainless-steel tray.

  He was then given two
sponge baths, first with water, then with alcohol. His face, chest, and legs stung uncomfortably. And when he moved his left leg, the large nurse firmly pushed it down against the operating table.

  His chest stung, and he put his hand to it. Her hand grabbed his.

  “I itch, goddamn it, take your hand off!”

  She did not. There was a test of arm strength.

  “Let him,” the doctor said.

  He scratched, and was sorry he did; he felt a sharp pain.

  A tray of instruments appeared. The doctor took a scalpel in one hand and a ferocious-looking set of tweezers in the other. Starting at Clete’s forehead, he began to remove tiny pieces of tile, dropping each piece into still another stainless-steel tray.

  There is a moral in this, Clete thought, wincing at the pain: When you shoot someone in the forehead, be sure of your backstop.

  He smiled at his own wit. The doctor smiled, very insincerely, back at him.

  Jesus Christ, you must be losing your marbles. You killed a man, and that’s nothing to smile about. Not only killed him, shot him in cold blood. Well, maybe not cold blood. You were pretty goddamned pissed after seeing what they did to Señora Pellano. But the bottom line is you killed a defenseless man.

  He closed his eyes and kept them closed until he sensed the doctor stand up after he finished working his way down his body with the scalpel and tweezers.

  The large nurse then appeared with a stainless-steel bowl and what looked like a small paintbrush. She carefully wiped each small wound with an alcohol towel—it stung painfully. And then she painted each wound with the purple substance that was in the stainless-steel bowl—it stung even more painfully.

  The doctor looked down at him once more.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Clete said.

  The doctor ignored him and disappeared.

  The large nurse nudged him again, and he slid off the operating table back onto the gurney. The thin cotton blanket was once more draped over him, and the gurney was wheeled out of the operating room and down the corridor.

  The man with the barely concealed .45 marched alongside.

  “Wait!” he ordered curtly.

  “I have inspected the room, Sir,” another man said.

  The man with the .45 grunted, and went into a room to conduct his own inspection. He came back out, carrying a telephone.

  “You inspected the room, did you?”

  The second man looked sheepish. The man with the .45 shook his head at him in tolerant disgust, then motioned for the gurney attendant to push Clete into the room.

  “In the bed, please, Señor,” the man with the .45 said.

  “I have to urinate,” Clete said.

  “Over there,” the man said.

  Clete walked naked to a small room equipped with a toilet, a bidet, and a shower.

  When he returned, the room was empty.

  It was also hot. The heavy vertical shutters had been lowered. When he went to them, he saw that the lowering belt had been padlocked. It could not now be moved.

  Shit!

  He went to the door. It was locked. He banged on it, and finally it was opened. There were two men, obviously armed, in the corridor. The man with the .45 who had been in the operating room was not there.

  “I want the window open,” Clete said. “It’s as hot as a furnace in there.”

  “Sorry, Señor,” the taller of the two men replied. “That is prohibited.”

  “By who?”

  The man shrugged.

  Clete went back inside, and as he walked to the bed, heard the door being locked.

  He lay down on the bed, put his hands under his head, and started to wonder about what was going to happen next. Then he heard the door being unlocked again. It opened, admitting a hospital attendant who handed him a small gray paper-wrapped package and left. The door was locked again.

  Clete opened the package and found it contained a tiny bar of soap, a tiny towel, shaving cream, a razor, toothbrush (no toothpaste), a glass, a hospital gown, and cotton slippers.

  “To hell with it,” he said aloud. “It’s too hot in here to put that on.”

  He lay down on the bed, and again began to wonder what would happen next.

  [FIVE]

  Clete woke up suddenly, and with a reflex action, he looked at his Hamilton. It was eight-fifteen in the morning. On the crystal of the chronograph he noticed a small piece of whitish substance, flaked with now darkened blood. The large, unpleasant nurse did not look for brain tissue on his watch.

  He left the bed, walked to the washbasin, and carefully scrubbed the watch clean. Then he glanced at himself in the mirror. His face was covered with violet patches—the disinfectant the nurse had painted him with—and so was the rest of his body.

  I look like a clown. I wonder what the hell that purple stuff is.

  He scrubbed at his face with no success, then tried a shower, which proved equally ineffective.

  Maybe alcohol will get it off.

  He went back to the bed and put on the hospital gown, then slipped his feet into the slippers. Another glance at the mirror confirmed his suspicion that his ass was hanging out.

  And he was hungry. And thirsty. He banged on the door again, and in a moment it was unlocked and opened. Two strange men were in the corridor, cast from the same mold as the previous two. Though both were standing, now they had chairs. One waved a forefinger at him as if he were a small child.

  “You must remain in your room.”

  “I’m hungry and thirsty.”

  Both men shrugged helplessly.

  He closed the door himself, heard it being locked, and then returned to the mirror to examine himself—with mingled shock and amusement. There came the sound of the door being unlocked again.

  Breakfast?

  The door opened. A little pale, but otherwise showing no signs of passing out drunk eight hours before, el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade entered the room, freshly shaven, perfectly dressed. He was trailed by Enrico, who was carrying a small leather suitcase.

  “Are you all right?” Clete’s father demanded. “You are not seriously injured?”

  “I’m pretty sick about what those bastards did to Señora Pellano.”

  His father nodded.

  “I will of course help you, Cletus, any way I can. But the time has come for you to tell me what you are really doing down here.”

  “I’m here to make sure that Howell Petro—”

  “Refuse to answer me, if you must. But don’t lie to me again,” his father interrupted him.

  Clete met his father’s eyes. His father nodded, as if he was satisfied that he had gotten through to Clete.

  “The Bureau of Internal Security believes you are an agent of the OSS,” he said.

  “Do they?” Clete said. And then he decided he didn’t want to lie to his father anymore. That did not mean telling him everything; but he wouldn’t lie about what he told him.

  “I’m a serving officer of the U.S. Marine Corps,” he said. “I’ll tell you that much.”

  El Coronel Frade nodded again, as if he thought he was making progress.

  “And you’re here to damage the German ship in Bahía Samborombón?” his father asked.

  “If I were, I couldn’t tell you that. You’re an officer, you know what it is to be under orders.”

  “Or to try to influence me?” He gave Clete a hard look. “Depending on who I talk to in the BIS, I am offered both possibilities.”

  “I’d like to influence you,” Clete said. “Your neutrality, your alleged neutrality, in this war makes me sick to my stomach.”

  “Does it indeed?” his father asked, his face tightening.

  “You—and the BIS—apparently know all about the Reine de la Mer. You even called it a German ship just now. And you close your eyes to it. If you were really neutral, you’d have done something about it.”

  “You seem to know a good deal about it yourself,” Frade challenged. “You know its name…very informative.�
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  “If you hadn’t closed your eyes to the Germans’ replenishing their submarines in your sacred neutral waters, it wouldn’t have been necessary for the U.S. government to send people down here to do something about it.”

  “Has it occurred to you that if the United States government had not sent you down here, Señora Pel—what happened to Señora Pellano would not have happened?”

  Clete felt anger welling up.

  “I’m as sorry as you are that Señora Pellano was killed. I was goddamned fond of her. She’ll be on my conscience, all right. But not because I’m here doing what I was sent here to do, but because I forgot for a moment that the Germans have no qualms about killing innocent people. They kill innocent people by the millions. What’s one more?”

  “In the First World War, Allied propaganda showed German soldiers bayoneting babies in Belgium. That Allied Declaration, if that’s what you’re talking about, is the same sort of thing.”

  “If you believe that, I feel sorry for you.” Clete said softly. He was aware that the flash of anger was replaced by a sad resignation, as if their roles were now reversed…as if he was now the parent talking to the child who would not accept the unpleasant truth.

  “International law…” Colonel Frade began, and stopped.

  “I should have protected her,” Clete said, his voice calm and sad, “and I didn’t. I’m ashamed of that. But I’m not ashamed of coming here to do what I was sent to do. If there’s any shame, you should feel it, because Argentina is too stupid or selfish to know or care what this war is all about.”

  His father’s face grew white. It was a moment before he spoke.

  “El Almirante de Montoya believes it will be best for you, under the circumstances, to remain here in the hospital for the next few days.”

  “Who? Admiral who?”

  “El Almirante de Montoya is Chief of the Bureau of Internal Security. He has assumed jurisdiction in your case. Fortunately, he and I are friends, because your fate is in his hands.”

  “And what exactly does that mean?”