Goltz could think of no tactful way to respond, and said nothing.
"I want you to clearly understand, Standartenf?hrer," Canaris went on, "that I view the property you will acquire as a long-term asset, not something which can be, so to speak, expended in the course of the repatriation operation. Do you understand that?"
"I understand, Herr Admiral."
"Good," Canaris said. He extended his hand. "That's all I have. Thank you for coming to see me. Good luck."
Goltz saw in Canaris's eyes that he had already been dismissed.
Chapter Two
[ONE]
Cafe Lafitte
Bourbon Street
New Orleans, Louisiana
1535 5 April 1943
The bar was crowded, smoke-filled, hot, noisy, and reeked of sweat and urine. Most of the patrons were servicemen, and most of these were sailors, sweating in their blue woolen winter uniforms. A pair of Shore Patrolmen stood just inside the door, each holding a billy club in one hand and a paper cup of soft drink in the other.
As the young man in a tieless white button-down collar shirt and a seersucker jacket elbowed his way toward the bar, he was aware that he was getting dirty looks from some of the sailors. He thought he knew why: Hey, what the hell are you doing out of uniform, when here I am, three weeks out of Great Lakes Naval Training Center and about to go out and save the world for democracy ?
The last thing in the world the young manwho was twenty-three years old, and whose name was Cletus Howell Fradewanted to do was find himself in a confrontation with a half-plastered nineteen-year-old swab jockey. It seemed to be the final proof that coming in here for a Sazerac cocktail was not the smartest thing he had done today.
He knew for a fact that the Cafe Lafitte made lousy Sazerac cocktails. But ten minutes before, when he first got the idea to have a symbolic farewell Sazerac, and in the Cafe Lafitte, which was supposed to have been in business since Christ was a corporal, it seemed a good idea.
The bartender, a corpulent forty-year old with a stained white apron around his waist, looked at him, his eyebrows signaling he was ready to accept an order.
"Sazerac, please."
"I got to see your draft card," the bartender said in what Clete recognized to be a New Orleans accent.
"What?"
"We're cooperating with the authorities," the bartender said. "Gotta see your draft card."
Clete took out his wallet and removed a plastic identification cardnot a draft cardand handed it to the bartender. The bartender examined it carefully and compared the face on the photograph with the face of the young man standing before him.
He did not seem wholly satisfied, but he handed the card back, said, "I thought you had to wear your uniform," and turned to make a Sazerac.
Clete was about to put the card back in his wallet when he felt a hand on his arm. He turned and saw one of the Shore Patrolmen standing beside him, and the second SP standing behind the first.
"Could I have a look at that, please?" the SP said politely, but it was a demand, not a request.
Clete nodded and handed it to him. The SP went through the business of comparing the photograph on the card with Clete's face, then held the card over his shoulder so the other SP could have a look.
"It looks, Sir," the SP said, "like you're out of uniform. Could I have a look at your orders, please, Sir?"
Clete reached into the inside pocket of the seersucker jacket and came out with a single sheet of mimeograph paper, folded twice. He handed this to the SP, who unfolded it.
"Paragraph seven authorizes me to wear civvies," he said.
The SP found Paragraph 7, read it, and then showed the orders to the SP standing behind him and stuck out his lower lip, registering surprise.
"I never saw orders like that, Sir," the SP said. "But I guess it's all right. Sorry to have troubled you, Sir."
Clete smiled and nodded, and put the orders back in his pocket. Then he turned back to the bar as his Sazerac was served.
He laid a five-dollar bill on the bar, then picked up his Sazerac and took a sip. It was a lousy Sazerac, as he was afraid it would be. When he was a student at Tulane he'd had enough of them to become a judge. And had painfully learned that the second would taste better than the first, the third better than the second, and the fourth would strike one treacherously in the back of the head, causing one so stupid as to drink that many to lose not only inhibitions but often consciousness and all memory of what happened subsequently.
Sazerac drinking had another facet, he thought, as he took a second sip. When fed to a well-bred young woman, taking care to administer the proper dosagean overdose usually produced a number of unpleasant side effects, ranging from nausea to unconsciousnessquite often produced both a diminishment of inhibitions and a concomitant urge to couple.
Get thee behind me, Satan!he thought, when he realized the direction his mental processes were taking him. That sort of thing is in your past. You are no longer free to nail any female you can entice into a horizontal position. Your watchword, like that of the goddamn U.S. Marine Crotch itself is now Semper Fidelis, always faithful.
He drained his glass, and felt the alcohol warm his veins. He picked up his change, shouldered his way back out of the Cafe Lafitte onto Bourbon Street, and headed toward Canal Street, where, he thought, with a little bit of luck he would find a taxi.
[TWO]
3470 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana
1905 5 April 1943
The taxi dropped Major Cletus Howell Frade off at the curb before a very large, very white, turn-of-the-century ornate, three-story frame mansion on St. Charles Avenue, the tree-lined main boundary of the section of New Orleans known as the Garden District.
He crossed the sidewalk, opened a gate in the cast-iron fence that separated an immaculate lawn from the street, and walked up the brick path onto the porch, fishing for keys in his pocket. Before he could put them in the lock, the leaded-window door swung inward.
A silver-haired, very light-skinned Negro butler wearing a gray linen jacket smiled at him.
"What were you doing, Jean-Jacques? Peeking through the curtains, waiting for me?"
"I just happened to be looking out the window, Mr. Cletus," Jean-Jacques replied. "Miss Martha's here, Mr. Cletus."
"Miss Martha," the former Martha Reed Williamson, was Clete's aunt and the widow of the late James Fitzhugh Howell. Her husband had died instantaneously of a cerebral hemorrhage en route from the bar to the men's room of the Midland Petroleum Club shortly after Clete had flown his Wildcat off the escort carrier USS Long Island onto Guadalcanal's Henderson Field.
"She is?" Clete asked, surprised. He had said goodbye to Martha in Midland three days before. "The girls?"
The girls were his cousins, Elizabeth (Beth), who was twenty-one and about to graduate from Rice, and Marjorie, who was nineteen and in her sophomore year at that institution. Miss Martha became pregnant with Beth shortly after she took into her bride's home the two-year old-son of her husband's sister, Eleanor Patricia Frade, deceased. She raised Clete as her own, and her daughters and her nephew always thought of themselves as brother and sisters.
Jean-Jacques shook his head, "no." Clete was disappointed. Marjorie and Beth seemed to be less a royal pain in the ass recently than earlier on.