He got out of the car and walked to the double doors of the Mallin mansion. Failing to find a doorbell, he raised the clapper and let it fall.
It sounds like somebody knocked over a garbage can.
A maid answered the door, but Dorotea came running past her.
"Hey, Princess!"
"Cletus, damn you, I've been frantic!"
"I'm sorry."
"Where have you been?" she demanded, then she saw the Rolls. "Where did you get that?"
"It's mine. It was the only thing available." He had a sudden thought. "Would you like to go for a ride? Before your parents learn I'm here and we get all involved with the wedding?"
"They're not here," she said. "Why should we go for a ride?"
"Because we have to talk," he said. "Where are your parents?"
"They went to dinner. I refused to go."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want to miss your call, if you called. I've been out of my mind, not knowing where you were, not that you give a damn."
"I'm sorry, Princess."
"A Colonel Mart?n called Daddy and told him that you were all right. All that did was convince Daddy that you were up to your ears in this damned revolution. Were you?"
"Yes."
"I don't think you should see Daddy tonight," she said. "He's furious with you."
"Why?"
"At the moment, because he thinks you went off and got yourself killed just so our baby won't have a name and he'll be embarrassed. When he finds out you're still alive, he'll think of something else. What do we have to talk about?"
"Excuse me?"
"You just said we have to talk."
"Well, I was thinking about Father Whatsisname . . ."
"Father Matthew, you mean?" Clete nodded. "What about him?"
"Well, I know how important"
"Don't lie to me, Cletus."
He looked at her helplessly, then blurted the truth: "Honey, I just want to be alone with you."
She threw herself into his arms, put her mouth to his ear, and whispered, "Me too."
He thought his heart was going to jump out of his chest.
"Can we go to your place on Libertador?" she asked, her mouth still at his ear.
"No."
"I don't want to go to the other house," she said, now pulling her face back so that she could look at him. "Why can't we go to Libertador?"
"You don't want to know," he said.
"Yes, I do," she said.
"Because Coronel Per?n is there with a lady friend," he said.
"A lady friend, or one of his little girls?"
"You know about that?" he asked incredulously.
"Everybody knows about that, silly," she said. "What about going to the estancia?"
"I suppose we could. I have some things I've got to do at the estancia . . ." He paused as reality interjected itself into his mental image of the last time she was in his bed at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo: "How the hell would you explain being with me at the estancia to your father?"
"I'll leave a note saying that I'm spending a few days with Claudia."
"Your father won't believe that," Clete argued.
"No. But he'll pretend he does. Mother will understand why I have to be with you."
"You're serious, aren't you?"
"Of course I'm serious. Give me a few minutes to throw some things in a bag," she said.
"I told you, I have some things to do at the estancia," Clete said. "I won't"
"Things you have to do tonight?"
"Not tonight. But in the morning . . ."
"Then we'll have tonight, at least," she said. "Before you showed up here, I had convinced myself that I was never going to see you again. I asked God to please, please let me see you just once more, just for a little while. . . ."
"Baby . . ."
She kissed him very gently on the lips.
"I'll only be a minute," she said. "And if you're not here when I come back down, I swear, I'll kill you!"
She turned and ran into the house and up the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
[ONE]
Puerto Magdalena
Samboromb?n Bay
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
2115 19 April 1943
The voyage of the good ship Coronel Gasparo from El Tigre to Magdalena took just over seven hours. They tied up at five minutes to six, as darkness was falling.
During the voyage, there was plenty of time for Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, holder of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, to consider the morality of what he was doing and of what he intended to do.
It was, of course, a question of honor. Intellectually, from the day he received the letter from his father, there was no question in his mind that he was honor bound, as an officer, as a von Wachtstein, to follow the path his father had decided honor required.
Germany was in the hands of a collection of unbelievably evil men. These men were not only guilty of unspeakable crimes against the Jews and other peopleincluding Germansbut were also prepared to see Germany itself destroyed. Clearly, a Christian nobleman of the officer class was honor bound to do whatever was required to take Germany back from the Nazis.
That was the intellectual argument, and he had no doubt that it was valid.
Emotionally, however, he had a good deal of trouble personally engaging in activity that was clearly treason, and would very likely cause the deaths of other Germans who were no more Nazis than he was.
It wasn't simply a question, either, of the Americans' moral justification of his friend Cletus Frade's, in particularin sinking the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico. By replenishing German U-boats in protected neutral waters, while flying the flag of neutral Spain, the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico had given up any claim to be other than what it was, a vessel in the service of a combatant power.
And when he helped the Americans sink the Oceano Pacifico, which they obviously intended to do, it would obviously hurt the German ability to wage war, and in some measure contribute to the ending of the war, and thus the Nazi regime.
Peter von Wachtstein intellectually understood this, and was intellectually prepared to accept the inevitable death of much of the Oceano Pacifico's crew.
On the other hand, the submarine crews bothered him. There were a dozen or more submarines somewhere in the South Atlantic who were depending on being refueled and resupplied by the Oceano Pacifico.
An hour or so out of El Tigre, as he steered the Coronel Gasparo through nasty choppy waters far enough offshore to avoid being clearly visible, a number of Untersee officers he knew came to mind. And oneKapitanleutnant Wilhelm von Dattenbergin particular.
He knew von Dattenberg at Philip's University in Marburg an der Lahn, and ran into him again in Berlin at the Adlon Bar after he himself had just returned from a tour on the Eastern Front. At that time he had the private belief that fighter pilots had seen as much of the horror of war as could be reasonably expected of any human being, including one whose family had been fighting Germany's wars for centuries.
Von Dattenberg quickly disabused him of that notion. From the moment he saw von Dattenberg's eyes, Peter knew that he had seen more than his fair share of horror. And Peter saw even deeper into that horror as they got drunk and von Dattenberg talked about service in U-boats.