"Sorry," Clete said, grossly embarrassed, and retreated into the bathroom for the terry-cloth robe.
Modestly covered, he returned to the bedroom.
"Antonio was not sure if you would prefer coffee, tea, or whiskey, Se?or Frade," the maid said, indicating the cart, which held silver coffee and tea pitchers, three bottles, and all the accessories.
"Coffee, please, and that will be all," Clete said, went to the bed for his underwear, and again retreated to the bathroom.
The maid was gone when he came out again. Coffee had been poured and was waiting for him on a small round table. He took a sip. grimaced at its strength, put the cup down, and went to the tray.
He picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel's, uncorked it, and took a healthy swallow from the neck.
Then he dressed quickly, returning a final time to the bathroom to tie the necktie and brush his hair.
The uniform caps of General Ramirez and the other officers were lined up in a row on a table in the foyer. He found the officers themselves sitting comfortably in the couches and armchairs of the downstairs reception room. They all rose to their feet when he walked in.
[TWO]
Ministry of Defense
Edificio Libertador
Avenida Paseo Colon
Buenos Aires
1845 9 April 1943
There were both ceremonial and functioning guards on the wide steps leading up to the entrance of the fifteen-story Edificio Libertador. The ceremonial troops were in a uniform (*White breeches, dark-blue coats, high black leather boots, and what resembles a silk top hat. The hat dates back even earlier, to 1806. when a volunteer force was recruited and led by thirty-year-old General Juan Mart?n Pueyrred?n to resist a British attempt to occupy Buenos Aires. Pueyrred?n seized a British merchantman in the harbor. Its cargo included top hats, which Pueyrred?n issued to his troopsprimarily gauchos from the Pampasas the only item of uniform he had available. Four years later, together with generals Manuel Belgrano and Jose de San Mart?n (revered as El Libertador), he led the war for liberation from Spain, which concluded with the July 19. 1816. Proclamation of the Congress of Tucum?n, declaring the United Provinces of La Plata to be free of Spain and to be the Argentine Republic.) that dated back to Argentina's War of Independence (1810-16). They were armed with rifles and sabers of the period and stood at rigid attention, seeing nothing, like the guards at Buckingham Palace. A dozen other soldiers, in present-day German-style uniforms and steel helmets and armed with Mauser rifles, were shepherding a long line of people into the building.
The Marine officer in Clete Howell Fraderemembering that the soldiers who march perpetually guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery allow absolutely nothing, not even the President of the United States, to disturb their ritualwondered if the ceremonial guards here would salute the Minister of War. They did not, but the sergeant in charge of the other detail scurried quickly both to salute Ramirez and to quickly open a door for them.
Clete followed Ramirez across the lobby of the building to a corridor to the right. The line of people he had seen outside was obviously headed in the same direction.
To my father's casket? Why does that bother me?
As Clete followed Ramirez past it, the shuffling line moved slowly through a corridor. The corridor was lined with foreign flags, their flagstaff's resting in heavy bronze, vaselike holders. The Stars and Stripes looked strange somehow, as just one flag among many. He spotted the German flag, with its swastika, and the Japanese, with its red-ball "rising sun," similarly lost among other flags and flags he could not remember seeing before. He smiled, remembering that the Air Group parachute riggers on Guadalcanal had made a very nice buck, indeed, turning out on their sewing machines Genuine Japanese Battle Flags for sale to gullible replacements and dogfaces.
They probably use this place for diplomatic receptions,he decided. If you show up, they haul your flag out of the corridor to make you feel welcome.
The corridor ended at another enormous set of double doors, also guarded by soldiers in ordinary uniforms. Only one of them was open, and as they approached, a sergeant stopped the shuffling line and motioned for Ramirez, Clete, and the officers trailing behind them to enter the room. In turn, Ramirez signaled for Clete to precede him.
He found himself in an enormous, marble-floored and marble-walled room that reminded him of photographs he had seen of Hitler's Reichs chancellery in Berlin. He started to walk across the room to the end of the shuffling line of people, but Ramirez stopped him with a gentle tug at his sleeve.
It took several minutes for the last people in the shuffling line to pass by the casket at the far end of the room, but finally Clete could see it. It was on what looked like a table draped in black velvet. Hanging from the ceiling above which must be fifty, sixty feet high, at least, Clete thoughtwas a huge Argentine flag three times as wide as the casket was long.
That has that golden-face-in-a-sunburst centered on the blue-white-blue stripes,Clete thought, which makes it a military flag. The ordinary flag has just the stripes.
Behind the casket were massed twenty or thirty normal-size Argentine military flags in holders placed so close together that the flags formed a blue and white mass.
At each corner of the casket, facing outward, head bent, his hands resting near the muzzle of a butt-on-the-floor Mauser cavalry carbine, stood a trooper of the Husares de Pueyrred?n, in full dress uniform. ( The dress uniform of the Husares de Pueyrred?nPampas horsemen turned cavalrymenfeatures a bearskin hat and a many-buttoned tunic bedecked with ornate embroidery clearly patterned after that of the Royal and Imperial Hungarian Hussars of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
Behind the casket was a Capitan of Husares, head bent, his hands resting on his unsheathed saber.
Ramirez touched Clete's arm, a signal that he was supposed to approach the casket. He walked alone, uncomfortably, down the one hundred feet or so toward it. When he was halfway there, he heard a faint order being given, and was surprised to see the troopers and the officers, in slow motion, raise their heads and then bring their weapons to Present Arms, the troopers with their carbines held at arm's length in front of them, the Capitan with his saber also held upright at arm's length.
He remembered his father, who'd had more than a couple of drinks at the time, telling him that he was not at all surprised that he had "done well" in the Corps, since the blood of Pueyrred?nof whom Clete had never heard before that moment"coursed through his veins."
That salute is as much for me, as the great-great-grandson, or whatever the hell I am, of Pueyrred?n, as it is for my father.
He felt his throat tighten, and his eyes watered.
For Christ's sake, control yourself. You 're a Marine officer, and Marine officers don't weep!
He reached the closed, beautifully carved solid cedar casket. An Argentine flag was draped over the lower half of it. His father's high-crowned, gold-encrusted uniform cap and a blue velvet pillow covered with medals rested on the upper portion.
Where the hell did you get all those medals, Dad? Argentina's never been in a war. So far as I know, you never heard a shot fired in anger.
Except one, of course. El Coronel-Medico Orrico said death came instantaneously.