“Whenever they want us to have the beef at an outrageous price. They don’t really want the beef.”
“Then why do they bid on it?”
“To either keep us from getting it or to make us pay very dearly for it.”
“And they never take the beef? Win the auction?”
“Oh, yes, Herr Cranz. They take it frequently. Whenever we don’t top their bid.”
“And if they don’t want it, what do they do with it?”
“They—that is to say, Swift and Armour—corn it and tin it.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“The meat is treated with brine and then tinned. I’m sure you’ve seen the tins, Herr Cranz.” He gestured with his hands. “One end of the tins is larger than the other.”
“I’ve seen them,” Cranz said. “Let me see if I have this straight. If the Americans win the auction of frozen beef sides, they thaw the sides and then convert the entire side—steaks, roasts, everything—into tinned corned beef?”
“Precisely, Herr Cranz.”
“Doesn’t that make the tinned beef prohibitively expensive?”
“What I believe happens, Herr Cranz, is that the Americans—there is a man at the American embassy, a man named Delojo, who is actually a lieutenant commander in the American Navy and who is the American OSS chief in Argentina—”
“The OSS gets involved in these beef auctions?”
“And in the auctions for leather and wool, everything we want and they don’t want us to have. What he does in the case of the beef is compensate Swift and Armour for the difference between what the beef is worth and what they have paid for it. In other words, if the frozen sides are worth—”
“I get the picture,” Cranz interrupted. “And what do they do with all this tinned beef?”
“They ship it to the United States in neutral bottoms, some Argentine, and then transship the majority of it to England in their convoys.”
“How do you know all this?”
“From my experience, of course. I know about the American OSS man from the late Oberst Grüner. He kept a pretty close eye on the OSS, as you can imagine.”
“And the same sort of thing, you say, goes on with wool and leather?”
“And all foodstuffs,” Frogger said. “The details of the transactions are somewhat different, you will understand, but you will see that you will be kept rather busy.”
Cranz looked at his watch.
“Why don’t we see about lunch?” he asked. “We can continue this conversation while we eat. Is there somewhere close?”
“The ABC is near. At Lavalle 545.”
“And what is the ABC?”
“Probably the best German restaurant in Buenos Aires, Herr Cranz.”
“Sounds fine,” Cranz said. “Why don’t we go there?”
And the first thing I’m going to do when we get back is have Ambassador von Lutzenberger cable the foreign ministry and have the orders sending you home canceled.
I have a job of great importance to do here, and I can’t do it if I have to spend all my time in an auction bidding war against the goddamn OSS over tinned corned beef!
[FOUR]
Office of Ethical Standards, Bureau of Internal Security Ministry of Defense Edificio Libertador, Avenida Paseo Colón Capital Federal, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1220 13 July 1943
Major Gonzalo Delgano, Argentina Air Service, Retired, stood outside the office door of Colonel Alejandro Bernardo Martín, chief of the Office of Ethical Standards, and waited patiently until Martín sensed he was there and looked up at him.
Martín smiled and waved Delgano into his office.
“And how is the soon-to-be chief pilot of South American Airways doing this morning? Have you got time for lunch?”
“Not only do I have time, I need sustenance badly,” Delgano said. “I spent the morning marching around what is to be the airfield of South American Airways.”
“Really? And where is that?”
“In Morón, about seven kilometers from El Palomar.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely. No sooner had I hung up talking to you this morning than Frade was on the phone. He said he would meet me in half an hour at El Palomar, and wanted my opinion of what he called ‘the base.’ I thought he was going to show me some maps—”
“But?” Martín interrupted, smiling.
“When I got to El Palomar, one of his bodyguards—not Enrico Rodríguez . . . the other one?”
“Sargento Rodolfo Gómez, Retired?”
Delgano nodded. “ . . . Gómez was there, with a Ford station wagon. And a few minutes later, Frade landed in a Piper Cub.”
“And where was Sergeant Major, Retired, Rodríguez? In the Piper Cub?”
Delgano nodded again. “With his shotgun. Which I had the feeling he wanted to use on me. Anyway, Rodríguez got out of the airplane and I got in, and off we took. Five minutes later, we landed on what I later learned was the feeding field for Frade’s slaughterhouse. You know, where they hold the beef if too many show up at once?”
"I know the place.”
“There must have been five hundred heads on the field, being rounded up and loaded on trucks by his gauchos—I later learned it was for movement to another slaughterhouse he owns out by Pilar—plus a small army of surveyors, plus half a dozen pieces of engineering equipment—bulldozers, scrapers, that sort of thing—waiting for the surveyors to finish putting flags in the ground so they could get to work.”
“He’s building an airfield out there? Did he tell you why?”
“He did,” Delgano said, smiling. “He said he thought at first he’d build ‘the base’ on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo but had decided against it . . .” He stopped, shook his head, chuckled, then went on. “. . . because he wanted to spare you having to drive all the way out to the estancia all the time to make sure he wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t be.”
“He actually said that?” Martín asked, smiling.
Delgano nodded.
“And that he didn’t want to rent hangars and shops—or build them—at El Palomar because he thought they’d want too much rent. And he had been thinking of closing the Morón slaughterhouse anyway.”
“What we have here, Gonzalo, is another incident of Don Cletus telling us the truth but making us wonder what he’s not telling us.”
“Yes, sir, I think that’s the case.”
“But he’s right. We can keep an eye on South American Airways easier in Morón than we could at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. I’m presuming it is suitable for an airfield?”
“Ideal, actually. He can put in two runways without much leveling, and there’s a railroad siding. Where cattle have arrived until now, railway wagons of stone from Mendoza will soon start arriving to pave the runways. He’s got everything pretty well figured out.”
“That’s what worries me,” Martín said. “Can he finish his airfield by the time he gets airplanes?”
“Probably not,” Delgano said. “He said we ought to be hearing when the first Lodestar will be at Pôrto Alegre in the next couple of days.”
“You have to admire his self-confidence. He doesn’t have permission from the interior ministry to start his airline, and he’s already building an airfield for it, and buying airplanes.”
“Fourteen of them,” Delgano said. “Which poses the problem of getting the right kind of pilots for them.”
Martín didn’t respond directly.
“On the other hand, I can’t imagine the interior ministry dragging its feet, much less looking unfavorably upon a request for the necessary licenses presented to them by Colonel Perón.”
“That does seem unlikely, doesn’t it?” Delgano said dryly. “What are we going to do about pilots?”
“How many pilots are required for fourteen aircraft?”
“Don Cletus, when he told me my first job was to recruit pilots, said we’d best plan for four per aircraft at a minimum. That’s fifty-six. Call it sixty, at least.”