“ ‘Howard’? You know him, Cletus?”
Frade nodded.
“Even better,” Humberto said.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“The first thing suspicious people—like Colonel Martín and Colonel Perón—would think when they heard that you—whom they suspect of having ties with the OSS—could get your hands on airplanes in the middle of the war was that you were getting them from the OSS.”
“You just finished saying Tío Juan Domingo has figured out I’m getting them from my grandfather’s pal, Howard Hughes.”
“I told him that the reason I told you getting permission would be impossible was because of the suspicions people like Colonel Martín would have that it was somehow connected with the OSS. To which, after thinking this over for perhaps two seconds, he replied, ‘There are ways to put such suspicions to rest.’ ”
“And did he tell you what they would be?”
“Having someone like himself on the board of directors, and making sure all the pilots, from the chief pilot downward, are Argentines. He even mentioned a Major Delgano for that position.”
“Well, Delgano does know how to fly a Lodestar,” Clete said.
“How do you know that?”
“I taught him.”
“Isn’t that the fellow who was your father’s pilot?”
Frade nodded.
“Maybe Tío Juan is smarter than I’m giving him credit for being,” he said.
“I would say that’s a given,” Duarte said.
“All the time that Capitán Delgano quote retired unquote was my father’s pilot he actually was working for Martín—the BIS. It was only when Martín decided that the coup was going to work, and enlisted in that noble enterprise, that that came out.”
“What do you mean?”
“When my father wrote Operation Blue, he made plans to avoid the firing squad in case they couldn’t pull it off. Delgano was to take his Beechcraft Staggerwing to Campo de Mayo and have it ready to fly my father, Rawson, and Ramírez to Paraguay. By the time they were ready to start Operation Blue, my father had been assassinated, and the Staggerwing was on the bottom of Samborombón Bay.
“Delgano came to me three days before they were to go, told me that he had been working for Martín all along, and that Martín wanted to use the Lodestar to get people out of the country. So I spent two days teaching him how to fly it, and then decided if my father had wanted to get rid of Castillo and his government so badly, I was obliged to put my two cents in. So I flew the Lodestar to Campo de Mayo.”
“I never heard any of this before.”
“My role in the coup became something like a state secret. Nobody, maybe especially me, wanted it to come out.”
“You sound as if you did more than fly the Lodestar to Campo de Mayo.”
“I flew General Rawson around in one of their Piper Cubs when the two rebel columns were headed for the Casa Rosada. They had lost their communication and were about to start shooting at each other.”
“And you kept that from happening?”
Clete nodded.
“Ramírez knows this?”
Clete nodded.
“Wouldn’t that tend to make him think you’re a patriotic Argentine, instead of an American OSS agent?”
“Well, maybe if Delgano hadn’t been in Santo Tomé when I flew the Lodestar in from Brazil, with an OSS team on it.”
“He saw them?”
“He saw them, and he knows that I flew them to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. And since the day after the coup Delgano was back in uniform—a newly promoted major working for BIS—I have to assume Colonel Martín has got a pretty good idea what everybody looks like.”
“Are you saying you don’t want this man looking over your shoulder in your airline?”
“Not at all. Let him look. I’m not going to be doing anything, now, that I don’t want him to see or Martín or anyone else to know about.”
“And later?”
“We’ll see about later. Why does Perón want to be on the board of directors? To keep an eye on me?”
“That, too, probably, but there would be an honorarium.”
“A generous one?”
“Since you are going to be the majority stockholder, that would be up to you. I would recommend a generous one.”
“And he does what to earn it?”
“He gets permission for you to have the airline.”
“In other words, I’m bribing him.”
“We lawyers don’t use terms like this here, Cletus. We recognize things for being the way they are.”
“Okay. What’s the next step?”
“We form the S.A.—Sociedad Anónima, literally translated, ‘Anonymous Society,’ like an American corporation—and everybody signs it, and then you come up with, say, two million two hundred thousand dollars.”
“What did you say? Two million two hundred thousand? Why do I think you just made that figure up?”
“The aircraft are in the neighborhood of a hundred twenty-three thousand dollars U.S. each,” Humberto said. “And you’re going to need at least a dozen to get started, and fourteen would be better. . . .”
Is he making that up, too? Where did he get all that?
“Fourteen of them comes to about one and three-quarter million. Doubling that—to provide for spares, salaries, operating capital, et cetera, in our preliminary planning—comes to a little less than three and a half million. Sixty percent of that, to ensure your control, comes to the two-million-two figure I mentioned.”
“Why fourteen airplanes?”
“Aeropostal has a dozen,” Duarte said.
“Where’s the other forty percent coming from?”
“Claudia and I will take twelve-point-five each, and the bank the remaining fifteen percent. As I said, my board of directors feels it’s a sound investment.”
“When did they decide that?”
“I should have said, ‘The board will feel that it’s a sound investment after I have a chance to tell them about it.’ ”
“And when is this all going to take place?”
“Claudia’s going to give a small, sort of family-only dinner tomorrow night, if Colonel Perón can find the time. If not, the next night. We can sign everything at the dinner.”
“I don’t know how long it’ll take me to come up with that kind of money.”
“The bank regards you as a good credit risk.”
“You’re amazing, Humberto.”
“How kind of you to say so. Shall we walk over to the Jockey Club?’
[THREE]
El Palomar Airfield Buenos Aires, Argentina 1605 12 July 1943
“El Palomar, Lufthansa Six Zero Two,” came over the speakers in the El Palomar tower.
The call was faint, and in German. The latter posed no problems—just about all the tower operators spoke German—but the faintness of the call did.
The operators hurriedly put on headsets. One of them went to the radio rack to see if he could better tune in the caller. Another leaned over a shelf and spoke—in German—into a microphone.
“Lufthansa Six Zero Two, this is El Palomar.”
There was no answer, so the operator tried again, and again got no answer.
There was another call to the tower.
“El Palomar, Lufthansa Six Zero Two. El Palomar, Lufthansa Six Zero Two.”
Everybody knew what was happening; it had happened several times before. The Siemens radio transmitters aboard the Lufthansa airplane had greater range than did the radios in the tower. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but that’s the way it was.
It produced mixed feelings in both of them, embarrassment that their tower had terribly mediocre communications equipment, and vicarious pride as Germano-Argentines in the really superb German equipment aboard the Lufthansa aircraft.
One of the operators picked up a telephone and dialed a number from memory.
It was answered, in Spanish, on the third ring.
“Embassy of the German Reich.”
“Let me speak to the duty officer, please,” the tower operator said in Spanish.