He wouldn’t if he knew I’m screwing his wife.
“… and your only option about our talking is when we do it.”
“Let’s get it over with.”
Clete tapped his glass to Jimmy’s.
“Okay. Bad news first. The Old Man’s had a heart attack.”
“Jesus!”
“That’s the reason I went to Midland. It was what Souers suggested in there, that it was another example of my tendency to act impulsively. I went only after I put everything on the scale and decided, fuck the OSS, they’ve just buried the Squirt, the Old Man had a heart attack, my family needs me. Making that decision took me all of two seconds.”
“How is he?”
“When your father called me… it was the usual lousy connection… he said that the Old Man had had a heart attack on his Connie on their way out there, and they diverted to Dallas and rushed him to Parkland Hospital. He said it didn’t look good, and that he would keep me posted.
“Hansel was with me. I told him to get out to Jorge Frade and get one of our Connies ready while I found our wives and told them why we would be out of town for a few days.
“That of course didn’t work. Argentine women are big on family. When we took off an hour later, my wife and kids and Hansel’s wife and kid were aboard. And so were two nannies, two hundred pounds of kiddy supplies, and Gonzalo Delgano—”
“Who?”
“You met him. He’s SAA’s chief pilot.”
Cronley shook his head indicating he didn’t remember.
“And another pilot, a radio operator/navigator, and a steward. Gonzo was not about to have the boss go flying in the fragile mental condition he was already in caused by the death of his sister, and further aggravated by the grave illness of his grandfather.
“Actually, I was pretty touched even though I wanted to go alone.
“About twenty-one hours later, we touched down at Midland — Gonzo graciously gave me the left seat for the final leg — and I looked out the window and there’s the Old Man leaning on the fender of his Town and Country — you know, that enormous station wagon?”
“I’ve seen one or two.”
“He was waiting for us. With Souers.”
“I thought you said he had a heart attack?”
“My grandfather, with a straight face, said he had a little too much to drink on the airplane. Dr. Neiberger, at the Squirt’s wake, or viewing, or whatever the hell they call it, told me he had had a ‘medium to severe’ heart attack probably brought on by stress. Aside from a daily aspirin — honest to God, an aspirin, to thin the blood — and avoiding stress, there wasn’t much else that could be done for him. Neiberger also said the only way to keep him in the hospital would have been by force, and that would cause precisely the kind of stress he should avoid.”
He paused, then said admiringly, “That Old Man is one tough sonofabitch.”
“Yes, he is.”
“I suppose you want to hear about the viewing and the interment.”
“No, I don’t.”
Clete did not miss a beat: “The Squirt had a lot of friends and they all showed up, including a delegation of her sorority sisters from Rice. You, surprisingly, have more friends than I would have guessed and they all showed up, including a delegation from A&M who served as Marjie’s pallbearers.”
Jimmy suddenly felt his chest heave in an enormous sob. His eyes began to water.
“All in all,” Clete said — and then his voice broke. After a moment, and with great difficulty, he was able to finish, “It was quite an event.”
He picked up the bottle of Dewar’s and added to both their glasses.
“She was buried at Big Foot, of course. On your side.”
“What does that mean, my side?”
“Really? I thought you knew. The cemetery, although it’s on Big Foot, is jointly owned by the Howells and the Cronleys. The Howells get buried on one side and the Cronleys on the other. They buried the late Mrs. Cronley with her husband’s family.”
Jimmy looked at him with tears running down his cheeks.
“Actually, as it turns out, Marjie’s about ten feet from her father,” Clete said. “I don’t know if Mom, or your mother, or your dad, set it up that way, but that’s where the Squirt’ll be from now on. Next to my Uncle Jim.”
Jimmy thought that he hadn’t really understood the convoluted family relations of Cletus Frade until he’d gone to Argentina, although he had wondered about them from the time he wore short pants. Starting with, he thought now, wondering why Jim and Martha Howell’s “son” was named Frade instead of Howell.
Gradually, he had been able to put some of the pieces together.
Clete’s “mom” wasn’t his mother but his aunt. Beth and Marjorie — the Squirt — were his cousins, not his sisters. Their father, James Howell, was Clete’s uncle. James was one of Cletus Marcus Howell’s — the Old Man’s — two children, the other being Clete’s mother. She had died when Clete was an infant.
Jimmy seldom had heard her name, but the Old Man made it clear that the reason she died was that she had married “a despicable Argentinian sonofabitch.” He knew this because that’s how Cletus Marcus Howell referred to him on those rare occasions when the subject came up in Jimmy’s hearing.
Jimmy had grown up thinking that Clete’s father was some sleazy Mexican-type greaseball Casanova who had somehow managed to seduce a wholesome Midland girl, gotten her with child, watched her die — probably of the drugs and alcohol to which he had introduced her — and then abandoned her and their infant offspring. The baby — Clete — had then been taken in by James Howell, his mother’s brother, and reared by him and his wife, Martha, as their own.
When Second Lieutenant Cronley had ordered one of Tiny’s Troopers to put a couple of rounds from the pedestal-mounted.50 caliber Browning machine gun on his jeep into the engine of Lieutenant Colonel Schumann’s staff car to convince the colonel that, IG or not, he was not going to be allowed into Kloster Grünau, he had been entirely within his rights to so.
Cronley had been authorized by Colonel Mattingly to take whatever action was necessary, including the taking of human life, to protect what was going on at Kloster Grünau from becoming known.
But there were ramifications to the shattered engine block. Colonel Schumann had gone to General Greene to report not only the assault upon his staff car, but to tell Greene that he was convinced the activity at the secluded monastery had a great deal to do with the rumor he had been chasing for some time — that renegade Americans were sneaking Nazis out of Germany to South America.
With great difficulty — as Mattingly had not been then authorized to tell Greene anything about Operation Ost — he had managed to dissuade Greene from sending the 18th Infantry Regiment to seize Kloster Grünau from whoever held it. But Mattingly knew that was a temporary solution at best, and that a very credible scenario was that Greene, after thinking it over, would send the 18th Infantry and tell him about it later.
If that happened, about seventy pounds, literally, of incriminating documents at Kloster Grünau would be seized. That simply could not be allowed to happen. Mattingly immediately collected the documents and Second Lieutenant Cronley from Kloster Grünau and took them to Rhine-Main airfield in Frankfurt.
There, after ordering Cronley to guard the documents with his life until he could place them in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Frade and no one else, he put both on an SAA Constellation bound for Buenos Aires. Then he put himself on a Military Air Transport Service C-54, which departed Rhine-Main for Washington.