Enrico, who had been sitting in a wicker chair in the shade of a tree twenty yards from the gazebo, got out of the chair and walked to where Frade was standing. He had his shotgun cradled in his arms.
“Binoculars, Enrico?” Clete asked.
Enrico went to the wicker chair and returned with a pair of leather-cased binoculars. Clete searched the sky and then put the binoculars to his eyes.
A moment later, Marjorie Howell, then the girls, and finally Mr. Howell and Father Welner joined the two men. They all looked skyward, where they saw a high-winged, single-engine monoplane flying in the general direction of Estancia Santo Catalina.
“May I please have those, Cletus?” Cletus Marcus Howell asked, and Clete handed him the binoculars. He started a moment. “What the hell is that, Cletus?” the Old Man asked.
“It’s an airplane, Grandfather.”
“With an iron cross on the body, and a Nazi—whatchamacallit?—swastika on the tail!” the old man announced.
“Really?” Clete asked innocently.
“Who was that, Clete?” Martha Howell asked.
“The Luftwaffe,” Clete said. “They come over regularly. And once a week, tit for tat, I buzz the German embassy.”
“What was that, Cletus?” the Old Man demanded.
Clete ignored him.
Martha Howell took the binoculars from her father-in-law and looked skyward. By the time she found the airplane, it was too far away to pick out what the Old Man had seen.
“I didn’t see any swastika, Dad,” she said.
The Old Man looked at his daughter-in-law. “You know what’s going on, don’t you?” he challenged.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad,” she said.
“The hell you don’t,” the Old Man said. “God damn it, Martha!”
“Hey!” Martha Howell said warningly.
“And I’m expected to believe the old guy’s carrying that shotgun to bag a few quail for dinner, right?”
“Dad, Enrico blames himself for what happened to Clete’s father,” Martha Howell said. “Clete doesn’t have the heart to run him off.”
His disbelief showed on his face. “And he had those binoculars handy in case Clete wanted to go bird-watching, right?”
“Let it go, Dad!” Martha Howell said, almost threateningly.
“I’m an old man, and in my lifetime I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but not one of them holds a candle to the one I made when I got suckered into getting my family involved in helping the goddamn OSS.”
“Since we’re telling all our family secrets, grandfather, why don’t you tell Father Welner those are stolen binoculars?” Clete said.
Welner looked surprised.
“You think he’s kidding, don’t you?” the Old Man said. “They are. They were stolen from the U.S. Navy, and Clete bought them, knowing damned well they were stolen, from a hockshop in New Orleans.”
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Clete said.
“The hell you don’t! You boasted about it!”
By then they had walked back to the gazebo. The empanadas had been replaced with the main course, a bife de chorizo (the Argentine version of a New York strip steak) on a bed of spinach and mushrooms.
“Oh, isn’t that attractive!” Martha Williamson Howell said.
The Old Man looked down suspiciously at his plate.
“What the hell is that? Spinach?” he asked.
“God, I hope so!” Clete said, which triggered giggles in the girls.
The Old Man looked at them indignantly.
He’s old, Martha thought. Very old. And when he’s gone, Clete will be the only man in the family.
“If you don’t like it, don’t eat it,” she said.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to eat it. But that’s a hell of a way to serve a steak. They’re really strange, these people down here.” He looked at Welner. “No offense, Father.”
“None taken, Mr. Howell,” Welner said.
V
[ONE]
Estancia Santo Catalina
Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province
1355 1 May 1943
Before landing, Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein made a low pass over the landing strip to make sure one or more five-hundred-kilo cows were not happily munching away on the runway. It was a necessary precaution in Argentina, where cattle roamed freely and landing strips were rarely protected by fences.
There were no cattle.
Three light aircraft were lined up beside the runway. Two were yellow Piper Cubs and the third was a Cessna C-34, a small four-seater. The Cessna, he knew, belonged to Estancia Santo Catalina, and probably the Pipers did, too, although Cletus Frade might have flown one over from his estancia.
He put the Fieseler Storch into a tight 180-degree turn, lined up with the runway, retarded the throttle, cranked down the flaps, and touched down smoothly at about forty knots.
While the Storch was not much of an airplane, compared to the Focke-Wulf 190 fighter he had flown in his last assignment (whose 1,600-horsepower engine propelled it to 418 mph), it was an interesting airplane. If the Piper Cub could be compared to an aerial bicycle, then the Storch was an aerial motorcycle, say a BMW four-cylinder opposed, shaft-driven motorcycle.
By the time he had finished his landing roll and taxied the Storch to park beside the Cessna, three people had come out from the house to greet him. His heart jumped a little when he saw that one of them was Señorita Alicia Carzino-Cormano, although he had in fact expected her to come to the landing strip once she saw the Storch overhead. He had a quick mental image of Alicia two days before, naked in his bed, staring down at him with her large dark eyes, and he was as quickly ashamed of himself.
The others were the Duartes, Señor Humberto and Señora Beatrice Frade de Duarte, both of whom he had more or less also expected. Once Señora de Duarte had learned of his weekend visit to the estancia, he had known she’d be waiting for him anxiously.
He opened the side door of the Storch and climbed out.
“I am so happy to see you, dear Peter…” Beatrice Duarte said, grabbing his arms, pulling him to her, and planting a hard, wet kiss of greeting on his cheek—as opposed to a pro forma smack of lips in the general vicinity of his face, “…and you’re just in time for lunch.”
“It is always a pleasure to see you, Señora,” he said in Spanish. His Spanish was perfect Castilian. He had learned Spanish in Spain when he was nineteen (a fact that he had passed on to Alicia). He had not told her that his instructress had been a twenty-five-year-old redheaded Madrileña, who had come to believe that a young blond German fighter pilot was the answer to her carnal frustration following the death of her husband, who had been killed in action in the Civil War.
He offered his hand to Humberto Duarte, a tall, slender, elegantly tailored man of forty-six years. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Peter,” Duarte said.
Peter turned to Alicia. “And an even greater pleasure to see you, Alicia.”
She blushed, gave him a formal kiss on the cheek, and quickly backed away.
Peter inclined his head barely perceptibly toward the Piper Cubs. Alicia moved her head just perceptibly, telling him, no, Clete was not flying one of them.
“You flew?” Humberto said.
“Yes, sir,” Peter said. “With the permission of the military attaché, I am making what they call a ‘proficiency flight.’ At the moment, I am the acting military attaché, so I gave myself permission.”
“Can you really do that?” Alicia asked. “Does the Ambassador know?”
“Actually, no,” Peter confessed said. “It’s a case of what the ambassador doesn’t know can’t upset him.”
“Oh
, you naughty boy, you!” Beatrice cried happily. “He’s just like Jorge, always doing something naughty, isn’t he, Humberto? Isn’t he so like Jorge?”
“Yes, dear,” Humberto said, “he is.”
She sounded as if Jorge, her son, was right around the corner and could be expected to appear at any minute. He was, in fact, dead.
El Captáin Jorge Alejandro Duarte, of the Húsares de Pueyrredón, had been serving with von Paulus’s Army at Stalingrad as an observer when he’d been shot down while making an unauthorized flight in a Storch.
After his death (though it was in fact a consequence of foolishness and not heroism), the Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop had realized that, if properly handled, the sad occasion might accrue to the public-relations benefit of the Third Reich. Captain Duarte’s corpse would be returned to Argentina accompanied by a suitable Luftwaffe officer. There Duarte would be posthumously decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. That could not fail to impress the Argentines: One of their own had laid down his life in their common battle against the anti-Christ Bolshevik Russians.
The commanding officer of Jagdstaffel (Fighter Squadron) 232, stationed on the outskirts of Berlin, met the requirements for a “suitable officer.” Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had not only received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from the hands of Adolf Hitler himself, but, as a result of his service with the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, he spoke Spanish fluently. Additionally, he was a Pomeranian aristocrat, whose father, Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein, was assigned to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.
Major von Wachtstein was summoned to Berlin, and there introduced to an Argentine officer, Colonel of Mountain Troops Juan Domingo Perón. Perón had been in Europe for several years, both as an observer attached to the German and Italian armies, and to study the social programs of Germany and Italy, with an eye to their adaptation in Argentina. He was known to be quite sympathetic to the Axis cause, and more important, was a lifelong friend of Hauptmann Duarte’s uncle, Oberst Jorge Guillermo Frade, who might very well be the next President of Argentina.
At this time, it was felt that Frade, too, was sympathetic to the Axis cause. Not only was he a graduate of the Kriegsschule, but his anti-American sentiments were well known (even if it was not generally known that his anti-Americanism was based on the Americans having forcibly denied him contact with his son).
Coronel Perón liked the young officer at first sight, and agreed that he was just the sort of man to escort the remains of Capitán Duarte to Argentina. This instant favor from such an important Argentine had long-lasting consequences for von Wachtstein. And in the office of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, he was told that after the funeral of Captain Duarte he would remain in Argentina as the Assistant Military Attaché for Air at the German Embassy. There his orders would of course be to do whatever the Military Attaché wanted him to do, but he was also expected to ingratiate himself as much as possible with the Duarte family, Oberst Jorge Guillermo Frade, and Oberst Juan Domingo Perón, whose return to Argentina was planned in the near future.
Before leaving for Buenos Aires, Peter met with his father on the family estate in Pomerania. There Generalleutnant von Wachtstein had words for his son that few Germans were speaking openly. There was a growing possibility, he told him, that Germany would lose the war. If that happened, he went on to explain, German currency would be worthless, and the von Wachtstein family could not meet its obligations to the people who lived on their estates and looked to them for protection, as they had for hundreds of years.
Neutral Argentina would be an ideal place to cache money (preferably exchanged for gold, Swiss francs, or American dollars). In fact, Peter’s father had already transferred a great deal of money into secret, numbered Swiss bank accounts—a very risky act, Peter knew. If it came to the attention of the authorities, the penalty would be a court-martial and a possible death sentence, as well as the forfeiture of all the Wachtstein estates.
Before father and son parted, Generalleutnant von Wachtstein gave Peter all the cash he could lay his hands on—nearly a hundred thousand dollars in Swiss, English, and United States currency—together with the numbers of the secret bank accounts. He would have to somehow transfer to Argentina what was in the Swiss accounts.
If the worst happened for Germany—as Peter’s father expected—this money could be the salvation of the von Wachtstein family and their estates.
Finally, and as a last resort, his father explained, there was a friend he might turn to, Manfred Alois Graf von Lutzenberger, the German Ambassador to Argentina.
On von Wachtstein’s first night in Buenos Aires, Beatrice Frade de Duarte had arranged for him to be put up in the Frade family guest house on Avenida del Libertador, either blissfully unaware—or simply not caring—that her brother had already turned the house over to his onetime USMC fighter pilot son, Cletus.
The encounter between officers of warring powers could easily have been awkward, but it turned out quite the other way. In the library of the guest house, over a bottle and a half of el Coronel Frade’s cognac, the two had quickly come to the conclusion that as fellow fighter pilots, intimately familiar with both the joys of flying and the horrors of war, they had far more in common with each other than they had with anyone else in Buenos Aires.
They knew, of course, that very few people indeed would understand this, and after Major von Wachtstein was provided with “more suitable” quarters, both officers discreetly kept their initial meeting—and their budding friendship—under wraps. And when they were formally introduced the next day at Capitán Duarte’s funeral, both showed to each other the icy courtesy expected of officers of belligerent powers meeting in a neutral country.
Two weeks later, Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, the military attaché of the German Embassy, decided to have Cletus Frade assassinated—information that came to von Wachtstein. After a good deal of painful thought, he concluded that an honorable officer could not stand idly by while such a murder was committed, and he warned Frade.
Frade was therefore ready for the assassins when they appeared at the guest house, and killed them, though not before they had killed Enrico Rodríguez’s sister, the housekeeper.
Cletus Frade, himself no stranger to honor (though the sense of formal chivalry that Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had sucked in with his mother’s milk was a little amusing to Frade), sought Peter out and announced that he was in his debt for his life. As far as he was concerned, von Wachtstein had a blank check on anything that was his to give.
Though Peter’s initial reaction to Clete’s offer was chilly (he had done what he had done, he explained, solely because his officer’s code of chivalry demanded it), the respect of the two men for each other had grown, and their friendship had been cemented.
And then a letter came from von Wachtstein’s father, carried, secretly and at great risk, to von Lutzenberger by the pilot of a Lufthansa Condor. The subject of the letter—in the very deepest sense—was chivalry and honor.
* * *
Schloss Wachtstein
Pomern
Hansel—
I have just learned that you have reached Argentina safely, and thus it is time for this letter.
The greatest violation of the code of chivalry by which I, and you, and your brothers and so many of the von Wachtsteins before us have tried to live is of course regicide. I want you to know that before I decided that honor demands that I contribute what I can to such a course of action, that I considered all of the rami cations, both spiritual and worldly, and that I am at peace with my decision.
A soldier’s duty is rsl to his God, and then to his honor, and then to his country. The Allies in recent weeks have accused the German state of the commission of atrocities on such a scale as to defy description. I must tell you that information has come to me that has convinced me that the accusatio
ns are not only based on fact, but are actually worse than alleged.
The of cer corps has failed its duty to Germany, not so much on the eld of battle but in pandering to the Austrian Corporal and his cohorts. In exchange for privilege and “honors” the of cer corps, myself included, has closed its eyes to obscene violations of the Rules of Land Warfare, the Code of Chivalry, and indeed most of God’s Ten Commandments. I accept my share of the responsibility for this shameful behavior.
We both know the war is lost. When it is nally over, the Allies will, with right, demand a terrible retribulion from Germany.
I see it as my duly as a soldier and a German to take whatever action is necessary to hasten the end of the war by the only possible means now available, eliminating the presenl head of the government. The soldiers who will die now, in battle or in Russian prisoner-of-war camps, will be as much victims of the of cer corps’ failure to act as are the people the Nazis are slaughtering in concentration camps.
I put it to you, Hansel, that your allegiance should be no longer to the Luftwaffe, or the German State, but to Germany, and to the family, and to the people who have lived on our lands for so long.
In this connection, your rst duty is to survive the war. Under no circumstances are you to return to Germany for any purpose until the war is over. Find now someplace where you can hide safely if you are ordered to return.
Your second duty is to transfer the family funds from Switzerland to Argentina as quickly as possible. You have by now made contact with our friend in Argentina, and he will probably be able to be of help. In any event, make sure the funds are in some safe place. It would be better if they could be wisely invested, but the primary concern is to have them someplace where they will be safe from the Sicherheitsdienst until the war is over.
Secret Honor Page 14