“It would suggest you are having financial difficulty…,” Welner said.
“Yes, it would, Cletus,” Claudia agreed. “Try to think of it as an advertising expense.”
“…and had to move into the guest house. That would almost certainly cause you business problems, Cletus.”
“He’s right, Cletus,” Claudia said.
And you really don’t want Juan Domingo Perón out of there, either.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“And I was right on the verge of saying, ‘You’re learning, Cletus’ when I heard you talking so nicely to Tío Juan on the phone just now.”
“What did Juan Domingo want?” Claudia asked.
“He wants Clete to go to the German reception tonight,” Welner said. “Are you going?”
“I don’t think I’m up to that,” Claudia said.
“And he’s coming here for lunch,” Welner said.
“Are you going, Cletus?” Claudia asked.
He nodded.
Their eyes met for a moment, and she looked as if she was going to say something but decided against it.
“There is something of yours I would be willing to buy,” Claudia said. It was an obvious change of subject.
“Really?”
“Your radio station. Radio Belgrano.”
“Why would you want to buy that?”
“Because I think there is a lot of money to be made in broadcasting.”
“If that’s so, why should I sell it? I mean, I have all these advertising expenses, you know.”
“I’m serious about this, Cletus,” she said. “If you want to sell it, I’d like to buy it.”
“If you want it, it’s yours,” he said.
“I don’t want it that way,” she said. “Don’t toss me a bone, Cletus!”
“Excuse me?”
“Have it appraised. Find out what it’s worth, then make an offer,” she said. “Your father and I did a lot of business together, but that’s what it was, business. I don’t want you doing me any favors.”
“Claudia…” Welner came to his defense. “There’s no reason to take offense.”
“OK, Claudia,” Clete said. “To hell with you. It’s not for sale. I’ve never even seen it. Or, for that matter, heard it.”
“God,” she said. “He’s as hard to deal with as his father.”
“I accept that as a compliment,” Clete said.
“Poor Dorotéa’s going to have her hands full with you!”
Clete had an immediate mental recall of Dorotéa’s hand, full, which had nothing to do with what Claudia was saying. This caused him to smile.
“You think it’s funny, do you?” Claudia snapped. “You’re just going to have to get along with people.”
Antonio came into the sitting. “Señora,” he said. “Your things have been packaged and put in your car.”
“Thank you, Antonio,” she said.
“Perhaps Señora would care to take a look around, to make sure I found everything.”
“That won’t be necessary, Antonio. Thank you.”
“Have another look yourself, Antonio,” Clete ordered. “If you have any question about anything, decide in favor of Señora Carzino-Cormano.”
“Sí, Señor.”
“Damn you, Cletus, now I’ll have to go with him,” Claudia said.
Clete waited until she had followed Antonio out of the room, then went to the Champagne cooler and refilled his glass. He held the bottle up to Father Welner.
“Of course,” Welner said.
“What the hell did I say that made her so mad?”
“She has a lot of memories of this house,” Welner said. “And of your father. Taking her things is painful for her. And then you were condescending to her…just as your father often was.”
“I didn’t mean to be.”
Welner shrugged.
The door began to open.
“That didn’t take long,” Clete said softly.
“Señora de Mallín and I arrived at exactly the same moment!” el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón announced.
He walked to Welner and shook his hand, and then walked to Cletus. “My boy!” he said, clasping Clete’s shoulder.
“Tío Juan,” Clete said. “It’s always a pleasure to see you.”
Like watching a dog get run over.
Pamela Holworth-Talley de Mallín, grandmother-to-be, walked to Clete and offered her cheek.
Good-looking woman, Clete thought, remembering what his uncle Jim had once told him: “When you really get serious about some female, Clete, take a good look at her mother. That’s what your beloved will look like in twenty, thirty years.”
Looking at Pamela, the prospect is not at all frightening.
“Is this the day you start calling me ‘Mother Mallín’?” Pamela asked.
“I don’t think so,” Clete said firmly. “But I must admit the prospect of watching my father-in-law squirm when I call him ‘Father Mallín’ has a certain appeal.”
“You’re terrible, Cletus,” Pamela said, laughing.
“Would you like a little Champagne?” Clete asked.
“It’s early, and I shouldn’t, but of course I will.”
Clete went to the cooler and poured her a glass of Champagne. “Ol’ Whatsername’s upstairs having a shower,” he said as he handed it to her.
“I know,” Pamela replied, giggling. “She called me, and asked me to go to Dr. Sarrario’s consulting with her. She said you didn’t want to go.”
“If there was a subtle tone of accusation in that, the question never came up. I wasn’t invited.”
“But you didn’t want to go, did you?” Pamela challenged. “Wives have a way of knowing what their husbands want and do not want.”
“Listen to Mother, darling,” Dorotéa said, coming into the room.
When Clete saw her, his heart jumped.
Goddamn it, she’s beautiful!
She came to him and kissed him on the cheek. He could smell her shampoo.
Clete tugged the bell cord again, and the housekeeper appeared.
“We need a little more Champagne in here, please,” Clete ordered. “And we can have lunch as soon as Antonio and Señora Carzino-Cormano finish their tour of the museum.”
Luncheon was served in the upstairs dining, whose bay windows overlooked the formal gardens in the rear of the mansion, and whose table could comfortably accommodate fourteen people. As master and mistress of the household, Clete and Dorotéa were seated at the head and foot of the table. El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón sat next to Clete, with Señora de Mallín across from him, and Father Welner was next to Dorotéa, with Señora Carzino-Cormano across from him.
At least four feet of highly polished wood separated the lace place mats of the diners. Antonio circled the table, filling wine and Champagne glasses as the housekeeper and one of the maids offered a choice of beef or Roquefort-and-ham empanadas as the appetizer.
I wonder, the master of the house thought, what the boys are having for an appetizer on the wooden-plank tables of the Fighter One officers’ mess on the ’Canal?
Maybe, if the mess sergeant is in a good mood, Spam chunks on toothpicks. Most likely, the Spam will be the entrée.
And I wonder what Claudia thinks, seeing Dorotéa sitting there, Mistress of the Mansion, on the day she’s removing the last of her personal possessions from a house that by all rights should be hers?
Father Welner rose to his feet and invoked, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the blessings of the Deity upon those about to partake of His bounty. After he sat down, both he and Clete reached for their glasses of Merlot. El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón rose to his feet.
Now what
? Clete wondered as he took his hand away from the glass.
“If I may,” Perón began. “As I looked around this table, I could not help but think that our beloved Jorge may well be looking down on us from Heaven at this moment. And if he is, I like to think he’s smiling.” He paused to let that sink in, then went on. “The time came to Jorge to leave this world for a better one…”
With a load of buckshot in his head, Clete thought.
“…as it will come to all of us,” Perón went on.
Clete saw that Claudia was looking at Perón incredulously.
“And all of us, myself included, thought his going on to a better place was the end,” Perón said.
Clete glanced down the long table at Dorotéa. She was looking at him with a look he recognized as a wifely imperative signal: NO!!!!!
She thought I was going to say something I shouldn’t.
I wasn’t.
Or was I? My mouth sometimes shifts into high gear all on its own.
He flashed Dorotéa a small, reassuring smile.
“But it was not the end, I submit, my dear friends, my dear family,” Perón continued solemnly.
Family? What the hell do you mean, family? That “Tío Juan” crap again? What the hell is that all really about, anyway? Are you playing with a full deck, “Tío Juan”?
“It was instead a change of the guard,” Perón intoned. “A beginning. God sent our beloved Jorge’s beloved son Cletus back to the land of his birth…”
If that’s so, then God is an OSS Tex-Mex full-bull Marine colonel named Alejandro Federico Graham.
“…so that Cletus could step, so to speak, into his father’s boots and assume the responsibility for the land and the people of the land, as Jorge had assumed it from his father.
“And, at the risk of indelicacy, my dear Dorotéa, God in his wisdom and generosity has seen fit to put a new life in your womb…”
That wasn’t God, Tío Juan, it was a Good Ol’ Midland, Texas Boy named Clete who done that.
“…to carry on the family, someone who, when the time comes, will take the burden of responsibility from your and Cletus’s shoulders and take it on his own.”
Does he believe this shit? He sounds like a West Texas Baptist preacher at the end of a four-day Come-to-Jesus-in-a-Tent revival.
Clete looked at Claudia. Her face was expressionless. He looked at Pamela. She looked as if she was about to cry. He looked at Dorotéa. Tears were running down both cheeks, and Clete saw her chest jump as she sobbed.
“So I think…” Perón went on, raising his eyes to the fourteen-foot ceiling of the upstairs dining, “…I believe with all my heart…that our beloved Jorge is looking down at this table and smiling. The guard has changed. What is past is past. This is the beginning!” He raised his glass. “Salud, mi amigo!” Perón said.
I’ll be damned, Clete thought as he realized he was on his feet with his glass raised toward the fourteen-foot ceiling.
And I’ll be twice damned—so is Father Welner.
Perón sat down.
Dorotéa came running down the side of the table, knelt beside Perón, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek.
I guess that makes me a cynical prick.
He glanced around the table again. Pamela de Mallín was dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. Claudia Carzino-Cormano, her face expressionless, met his eyes. And a moment later, so did the intelligent blue eyes of Father Kurt Welner.
What is that? Two cynical pricks and a cynical lady?
Dorotéa got to her feet and walked back to the foot of the table.
Claudia waited until Dorotéa was sitting down. “While Dorotéa and Pamela are at the doctor’s, Juan Domingo,” she said. “I’m going to take Cletus to Radio Belgrano.”
Is that what they call changing the subject, Claudia?
“Oh, really?”
To judge by the look on his face and the tone of his voice, that’s what Tío Juan thinks it is.
“I know how busy you are these days, but I thought you might like to come with us.”
“As a matter fact, Claudia…”
Thank you very much, but no thanks?
“…I’ve never seen it, and I’d like to. And I need a few minutes alone with Cletus. We could have our little chat as we drove over.”
Claudia couldn’t quite manage to conceal her surprise. “I’m trying to get Cletus to sell it me,” she said.
“Is that so?”
[THREE]
Radio Belgrano
1606 Arribeños
Belgrano, Buenos Aires
1535 11 May 1943
They had driven from the museum in Palermo to Radio Belgrano in three cars. Claudia’s 1940 Buick Roadmaster, carrying her and Father Welner, led the way. Clete followed in the Horch, with Juan Domingo Perón beside him and Enrico in the backseat. Perón’s official Ministry of War car, a 1941 Chevrolet driven by a sergeant, brought up the rear.
The owner of Radio Belgrano was not very impressed with his property the first time he saw it, although he was enormously relieved to get there. From the moment Perón had slid onto the seat beside Clete, he’d delivered a nonstop sales pitch about how happy he was that Clete was going to hear for himself how deeply Generalmajor Manfred von Deitzberg—speaking, of course, for the entire German officer corps—regretted losing control of an SS officer in Wehrmacht uniform, which had resulted in the death of Clete’s beloved father and his own beloved friend.
And how important it was that Clete—for his own personal peace, for the good of Argentina, indeed for the good of the new generation of the Frade family—be willing to put the tragic incident behind him.
Clete had managed to keep his mouth shut, but it had not been easy.
Radio Belgrano occupied a small, old, and run-down two-story masonry house. The house’s trim needed a paint job, and a not-very-impressive antenna rose from the faded tile roof. To Clete it looked as if it had been welded together of thin iron rods on the spot—far less substantial than the windmill water pumps that dotted the fields of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. What had been the lawn of the house was now a muddy gravel parking lot. Two somewhat battered automobiles, a Ford and a Citroen, were parked facing the house, leaving room for only two more.
Claudia’s driver pulled into one of the slots, and Clete drove in beside it. That left no room for the Army Chevrolet, and the sergeant simply stopped in the street, holding up traffic, until Perón ordered him to circle the block and find a place to park.
Claudia was by then at the door of the building, which was at the same moment pulled open by a mustachioed man in a business suit whose thinning hair was plastered against his skull. He kissed Claudia’s cheek, then smiled broadly at Clete as he and Perón walked up to the door.
“How nice to see you again, Señor Frade,” he said, enthusiastically pumping Clete’s hand, and confusing Clete—“see me again”?—until Clete realized that the man had probably been one of the long line of managers and other executives of El Coronel, Incorporated, who had shown up at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo for his father’s memorial service.
“It’s good to see you, too, Señor,” Clete said. “Do you know Coronel Perón?”
“Only by reputation,” the man said, and began to pump Perón’s hand. “It is a great privilege to have the Special Assistant to the Minister of War visit our little radio station, mi Coronel.”
Perón smiled at him.
The man bowed them into the building, where there was a variation of the King Comes Home ceremony they had gone through when Clete and Dorotéa had arrived at the museum.
The employees of Radio Belgrano were lined up in the inside foyer, waiting to be introduced to El Patrón. Among these was Eva Duarte, the blonde from the Alvear Palace Hotel.
They worked the
ir way down the line, with Claudia in the lead, shaking everyone’s hand.
“And this, Señor Frade,” the plump little man said, “is Señorita Evita Duarte, one of our dramatic artists.”
“I have the privilege of Don Frade’s acquaintance,” the blonde said. “How nice to see you again, Señor.”
“You know each other?” Perón asked, obviously surprised.
“We met at a social event at the Alvear…. It was the Alvear, wasn’t it, Don Frade?”
“I think so, yes,” Clete said.
“I am Juan Domingo Perón,” Perón said, taking her hand.
“Oh, I know who you are, mi Coronel,” the blonde gushed. “Everyone in Argentina knows who you are. I consider it a great privilege to make your acquaintance.”
“The privilege is mine, my dear young woman,” Perón said, beaming at her.
She’s a little old for you, isn’t she, Tío Juan? I’ll bet she’s the far side of twenty.
The procession moved into the manager’s office—it had obviously previously been the house’s dining—where a brass sign on his desk identified him as Manuel de la Paz, General Manager.
Clete was surprised that the blonde was one of the privileged few permitted to share a tiny cup of coffee with the visiting brass, and about as surprised to see that Tío Juan was charming the hell out of her.
That was followed by a tour of the station’s facilities: Administrative offices were on the first floor, and three studios, a record library, and a control room—once obviously bedrooms—were on the second. These were covered with squares of sound-deadening material, some of which were in the process of falling off the wall.
And then the procession moved downstairs and out into the parking lot.
If Claudia wants to buy this, she can have it.
Hands were shaken, Manuel de la Paz announced that he hoped to see more of Don Frade, and he informed Perón that his visit had been a great honor.
Perón and the blonde beamed at each other.
“Where are you headed, Claudia?” Clete asked.
“To Estancia Santo Catalina,” she said.
Secret Honor Page 45