“That despicable Argentinean sonofabitch?”
Clete grunted. “Yeah. So when my father said that he intended to have my mother buried in the family mausoleum in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, the Old Man talked him into leaving the baby — me — with Mom and Uncle Jim in New Orleans until after the funeral.
“When my father came back to the States to get me, they stopped him at the border. The Old Man had arranged to have him declared a ‘person of low moral character.’ And when my father sneaked into the States from Mexico, he was arrested and did ninety days on a Texas road gang, after which he was deported and told if he tried to get into the States again, he’d do five years.”
“Jesus…”
“Yeah. My father told me he had to give up, and decided that Mom and my Uncle Jim would do a better job of raising me than his sister Beatrice, who already showed signs of lunacy.”
“And you believed your father’s version?”
“Yeah. I did. Right from the start. I knew what a sonofabitch the Old Man can be. I love him, you know that, Jimmy. But he can be, and you know it, a three-star sonofabitch. And what my father told me the Old Man had done sounded just like what the Old Man would do.
“Anyway, I heard this while putting down all that booze, and then my father said, ‘The family has a guesthouse in town. Across from the racetrack on Avenida Libertador. It’s yours for as long as you’re here.’
“He wouldn’t take no for an answer. And since I knew Mallin didn’t want me in his house — he’d seen the way I looked at his Virgin Princess, and I’d seen his reaction to learning who my father was — I agreed to take a look at the house. He introduced me to the housekeeper, who was Enrico’s sister, and showed me around the place.
“In the master bedroom, he sat down and passed out. Enrico threw him over his shoulder and carried him home. Then I passed out.
“Three days later, after the guy running the OSS here — an absolute moron of a lieutenant commander — sent me on an idiot mission to Uruguay… But that’s another story.”
“Tell it.”
“Okay. Why not? This clown sent Tony Pelosi, my demolition guy — you met him, too, the assistant military attaché from the embassy?”
“Yeah. The major from Chicago.”
“Right. Well, Commander Jack Armstrong the All-American Asshole sent me and Tony — he was then a second lieutenant — to Uruguay. We went up near the Brazilian border and waited around in the middle of the night in a field until an airplane dropped us a package. The package had what looked like wooden boxes. The OSS in the States had cleverly molded explosives to look like wooden slats, then made the slats into boxes, and flew the boxes to the U.S. Air Force base at Puerto Allegre. After the exchange of many classified messages between the Air Force and Commander Asshole, who was the naval attaché at the embassy in Buenos Aires, an Air Force guy climbed into his plane. He then violated Uruguayan sovereignty and neutrality by flying into Uruguay and dropping the boxes to the OSS agents who were to use the explosives to blow up a Spanish freighter in Argentina. It was right out of an Errol Flynn — Alan Ladd movie.”
“You and Pelosi used the explosives on the ship?”
Clete shook his head. “On the boat on the way back from Montevideo to Buenos Aires that night, Tony told me there wasn’t enough explosive in the wooden slats to blow a hole in a medium-sized rowboat, but not to worry, he’d bought all the TNT we would need in a hardware store in downtown Buenos Aires.”
“Incredible!”
“It gets worse. The OSS geniuses who had come up with their blow-up-the-Spanish-ship plan hadn’t considered that the ship might have floodlights and machine guns in place to keep people from paddling up to her and attaching an explosive charge to her hull. When Tony and I finally found the ship, we knew we couldn’t get closer to her than five hundred yards.”
“So the ship didn’t get sunk?”
“Oh, it got sunk all right, but by a U.S. Navy submarine. Tony and I flew over it in my father’s Staggerwing Beechcraft, lit it up with flares, and the sub put two torpedoes in her. Which is, come to think of it, how come you were able to fly up here in my red Lodestar.”
“Why red? This I have to hear.”
“We heroes love nothing more than being able to tell of our exploits to appreciative and impressionable young men, so I’ll tell you.” He paused. “I’ll start with the night I came back from Uruguay…
“When I walked into Grand-uncle Guillermo’s house, I saw lights in the library and heard music — Beethoven — playing on the phonograph. I thought that it was probably my father, so I walked in. A young blond guy was sitting in an armchair, staring thoughtfully into a brandy snifter and waving his hand to the music.
“In my best Texican Spanish, I courteously asked who the hell he was.
“He jumped to his feet, bobbed his head, clicked his heels, and formally replied, ‘Major Hans-Peter Ritter von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe.’
“To which I naturally replied, ‘First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade of the United States Marine Corps at your service, sir.’”
“The enemy was in the library? You’re pulling my leg…”
“Absolutely not. Hansel said, in Spanish, ‘It would seem we are enemy officers who’ve met on neutral territory.’
“So I cleverly replied, ‘That’s sure what it looks like.’
“Hansel said, ‘I have no idea what we should do.’
“To which I replied, ‘Why don’t you start by telling me what you’re doing sitting in my father’s chair, drinking his cognac?’
“That got his attention. He said, ‘Herr Leutnant, please permit me to extend my condolences on the loss of your loved one, the late Hauptman Jorge Frade Duarte, whose remains I had the honor of escorting from Germany.’
“I suavely replied, ‘Before we get into that, Major, is there any more of that cognac? I’ve had a trying day.’”
“So that’s how you met Hansel!” Jimmy said, laughing.
Clete nodded. “An hour and a bottle and a half of cognac later, we were pals. What had happened was that my loony tune Aunt Beatrice, either not knowing or not caring that I was in the family guesthouse, sent Hansel there after he delivered Cousin Jorge’s lead-lined casket.”
“What was that all about? Sending the body home to Argentina?”
“Hansel told me the idea came from Josef Goebbels himself. Pure propaganda. The son of a prominent — very prominent — Argentine family gets killed in the holy war against the godless Communists. Germany and Argentina fight the holy war together.”
“And how did Hansel get involved?”
“He’s a legitimate German hero. He got the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from Hitler himself. And — an important ‘and’—his father, one of the German generals in from the beginning of the plot to assassinate Adolf, wanted to get the last of the von Wachtstein line out of Germany alive. Hansel’s two brothers had already died in the war.”
“And he told you all this the night you met him?”
“No, of course not. It came out later. That first night we just got smashed and agreed on a couple of things. For example, that fighter pilots are superior human beings and, unkindly, that Cousin Jorge not only didn’t deserve the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross Hansel was going to pin on his casket but was a goddamned fool for going to a war he didn’t have to go to.
“The next morning, they sent people from the German embassy to get Hansel out of the house. We had decided we wouldn’t mention to anyone that we’d met.
“The next time I saw him was the day of the funeral. He came to me at the Alvear hotel and told me to watch my back — the SS guy in the embassy had told him they were going to whack me.”