It was only after he had signed that Colonel Graham told him he was now in the Office of Strategic Services, and what the OSS expected of him was to go to Argentina and attempt to establish a relationship with his father.
Not sure if he was embarrassed or amused, Frade had explained to the colonel that that was probably going to be a little difficult, as he could not remember ever having seen his father, and had it on good authority that his father had absolutely no interest in seeing him.
“I know,” Graham said. “Your grandfather told me.”
“My grandfather?” Clete had blurted.
Graham nodded. “I saw him just before I flew out here to see you. The kindest words he used to describe el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade—”
“My father is a colonel?” Cletus Frade asked, astonished.
Graham nodded again, and handed him a photograph. It showed a large, tall, dark-skinned man with a full mustache. He wore a rather ornate, somewhat Germanic uniform, and was getting into the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz sedan. In the background, against a row of Doric columns, was a rank of soldiers armed with rifles standing at what the Marine Corps would call Parade Rest. Their uniforms, too, looked Germanic, and they were wearing German helmets.
“That was taken several months ago,” Graham said. “The day he retired from command of the Húsares de Pueyrredón, Argentina’s most prestigious cavalry regiment.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“You’re the product of an unfortunate infatuation, and a hasty, equally unfortunate marriage, right?”
Frade had looked at him but said nothing.
“I’ll take your silence as agreement,” Graham went on. “If I go wrong, stop me.”
Frade nodded at Graham coldly but said nothing.
“Your mother converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry your father, ” Graham continued. “Which ceremony was conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Cathedral of Saint Louis in Jackson Square, officiated by the Cardinal Archbishop of New Orleans. Your Aunt Martha was your mother’s matron of honor. Captain Juan Perón was your father’s best man.”
“You seem to know more about this than I do,” Frade had replied, more than a little sarcastically.
“ ‘Sir, with respect, you seem to know more about this than I do, sir,’ ” Graham said coldly. “Don’t let my charming smile and warm manner fool you. I’m a Marine colonel and you’re a first lieutenant. You have that straight in your mind, mister?”
“Yes, sir.”
Graham nodded.
“Yeah, now that you mention it, I probably do know more about this than you,” Graham went on conversationally. “Anyway, after a three-month honeymoon slash grand tour of Europe, during the last month of which your mother came to be with child, the newlywed couple went to Argentina, where a healthy boy—you—came into the world in the German Hospital in Buenos Aires. How’m I doing, Cletus?”
“Sir, from what I have heard before, that’s correct.”
“Shortly thereafter, your mother found herself in the family way again. There was some medical problem, and at her father’s insistence, she came home, so to speak, for better medical attention. She died in childbirth, as did the baby. Your father then returned to Argentina, leaving you in the care of your Aunt Martha and Uncle James Howell. You were raised on a ranch near Midland, Texas, then were a member of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M—as was I, coincidentally— but you resigned from the Corps so that you could become a tennis-playing jock at Tulane. You went from Tulane into the Marines, where you flew F4Fs, shot down seven Japanese, and then were returned to the States to sell war bonds and teach new pilots how to stay alive. That about it, Cletus?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you cannot remember ever having seen your father?”
“No, sir, I cannot.”
“Do you know how your grandfather feels about your father?”
“Yes, sir. He thinks he’s an unmitigated bastard and the less said about the no-good sonofabitch the better.”
Graham nodded.
“Maybe being an unmitigated bastard is the reason your father got to be a colonel. In the Ejército Argentino, that’s like being a major general in the Marine Corps.”
Frade looked at him but didn’t say anything.
“And—if the coup d’état he’s setting up works, and we think it probably will—he’s probably going to be the next president of Argentina.”
“Jesus Christ!” Frade had blurted.
“It would be in the interest of the United States, obviously, if the president of Argentina leaned toward the United States. Right now, the Argentines, including your father, are leaning the other way. You getting the picture, Lieutenant? ”
“What makes you think I can change his mind? For that matter, that he won’t be annoyed, really annoyed, rather than pleased, when I suddenly show up out of nowhere?”
“We don’t know,” Graham admitted. “All we know for sure is that it’s worth a try.”
Colonel Graham had been as good as his word. Frade never had to step on a stage again. Three hours after meeting Graham, he was sitting beside him in a Trans-Continental & Western Airlines DC-3 on his way to Washington, D.C.
Shortly after that, he was on a Pan American Grace Sikorsky four-engine seaplane on his way to Buenos Aires.
The day after meeting his father for the first time, and learning that he wasn’t quite the unmitigated sonofabitch Cletus Howell had taught Cletus Frade to believe, El Coronel turned over to his only son the Frade family’s guesthouse— a mansion overlooking the racetrack in Buenos Aires—for his use as long as he was in Buenos Aires.
Frade “went home” one evening to find another Spanish-speaking young man in the library. He was listening to Beethoven’s Third Symphony on the phonograph and was well into a bottle of the excellent Argentine brandy.
By the time that bottle was empty and the level in a second bottle pretty well lowered, Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade and Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had learned a good deal about each other.
It had quickly come out that both were fighter pilots, which had immediately established a bond between them, even though they were technically enemies.
And the reasons both were in Buenos Aires rather than in fighter cockpits were actually quite similar. The German government had decided they had something more important for von Wachtstein to do than trying to shoot down the enemies’ airplanes.
Von Wachtstein told him the German foreign ministry had decided that properly honoring Captain Jorge Alejandro Duarte, a socially prominent young Argentine officer who had died nobly in the Battle of Stalingrad, would be a marvelous way of reminding the Argentines that Adolf Hitler was at war with godless communism.
The young Argentine officer’s body had been flown out of Stalingrad just before von Paulus’s army fell to the Red Army. It would be returned to Argentina—in a lead-lined coffin—with a suitable escort, and then, after the posthumous award of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross at a suitable ceremony, Captain Duarte’s body would be interred in the family tomb in Buenos Aires’s Recoleta Cemetery.
The “suitable escort” is where von Wachtstein came in. He came from a distinguished military family and he himself had been personally decorated by Adolf Hitler with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his prowess as a fighter pilot. He had been ordered to Berlin from his fighter squadron to meet an Argentine officer, a Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, in order to see if Perón approved of him. Perón had found him suitable, and von Wachtstein had brought the body, by ship, to Buenos Aires.
The dead hero’s mother—Cletus’s aunt, and El Coronel’s sister—had graciously offered the family guesthouse to the young German officer for as long as he was in Argentina—either unaware or not caring that her brother had turned it over to Cletus Frade.