“Ahem,” Clete said theatrically. “Let me tell you how I got to be a good guy. The good guy. A hero of the revolution. Rawson had two columns headed for the Casa Rosada — the Argentine White House. Once they got there, the war would be over. But it didn’t look like they were going to get there anytime soon, if at all. Both column commanders had decided the other guys were the bad guys — and they were shooting at each other.
“Everybody in the Officers’ Casino, which was revolution headquarters, was running around like headless chickens. Rawson was in contact — by telephone, no radios worked — with one of the columns. He orders them to stop shooting at the other column.
“‘Not until they stop shooting at us!’
“Rawson could not reach the other column. ‘What am I supposed to do? I cannot go there personally and tell them to stop. It would take an hour and a half to get there — and everybody will have shot everybody else.’
“I politely volunteered: ‘General, if I may make a suggestion. There’s a soccer field at the Naval Engineering School. I can land one of your Piper Cubs there and you can personally tell them to stop shooting at the other good guys and resume shooting at the bad guys.’
“Rawson was desperate. He let me load him in the back of a Cub. He was terrified. It was his third flight in a Cub. Worse, knowing both columns had machine guns, I flew there on the deck. Around and in between the apartment and office buildings, instead of over them.
“All of which convinced Rawson, who became president, that not only was I the world’s best pilot, but at least as brave and willing to risk his life for Argentina as had been my great-great-grandfather Juan Martín de Pueyrredón.
“That paid off when we were starting up SAA and some bureaucrat discovered that I didn’t have an Argentine pilot’s license.”
“Tell me about that…” Jimmy said.
But somebody at Casa Montagna had come looking for Clete, and he never had the chance to tell that story.
“… that’s where the Squirt’ll be from now on. Next to my Uncle Jim,” Clete now said.
And then he drained his half-full glass of Dewar’s.
Jimmy held his glass out to be filled.
“You sure? You don’t want to be shit-faced when we dine with the Schumanns.”
“I’m sure.”
And then he changed his mind.
“No. You’re right. I want to be very careful around Colonel and Mrs. Schumann.”
PART VII
[ONE]
The huge dining room looked just about full. Officers in their pinks and greens and a surprising number in the rather spectacular Mess Dress uniform, and their ladies, filled just about every table.
“In my professional judgment,” Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Frade, USMCR, said to Captain James D. Cronley Jr., AUS, as they stood in the doorway waiting for the attention of the maître d’hotel, “there are enough light and full bull colonels in this place to form a reinforced company of infantry. And they all seem to have brought two wives with them.”
“And you’ve noticed, I suppose, that you and I are the only ones not wearing the prescribed uniform. You think they’ll let us in?”
Frade was wearing his forest green Marine uniform and Cronley his olive drab — OD — Ike jacket and trousers. Both were “service” uniforms.
“We’re about to find out,” Frade said as the maître d’ walked up to them.
“We are the guests of Colonel Schumann,” Frade told him.
The maître d’ consulted his clipboard, then led them to a table in a large alcove on the far side of the dining room.
Colonel Robert Mattingly was sitting alone at a table with place settings for ten people. He was wearing Dress Mess — an Army dinner jacket — with lots of gold braid stripes and loops and lapels showing the wearer’s rank and branch of service, which in Mattingly’s case was the yellow of Cavalry.
Mattingly stood as Frade and Cronley approached. He put out his hand to Frade.
“The Schumanns and General Greene and his wife should be here any moment.” He looked at Cronley. “I really wish you had brought pinks and greens.”
“Sir, you didn’t tell me to.” Then he added, “Sir, I’m obviously out of place here. Maybe it would be better if I left.”
“Actually, Cronley, maybe that would be…”
Cronley saw that Clete had picked up Mattingly’s quick acceptance of his offer to leave and didn’t seem to like it.
“Just sit down and try to use the right fork,” Frade said to Cronley, then looked at Mattingly. “Do these people always get dressed up like this, or is it some kind of holiday I’m missing?”
“I’d say what they’re doing, Colonel — half of them, anyway — is making up for the good times they missed.”
“I don’t understand,” Frade said.
“Well, Colonel…”
That’s the second time Mattingly’s called Clete “Colonel.”
With emphasis. What’s that all about?
Ah, he’s reminding Clete he’s a light bird talking to a full bull colonel and should have said “sir.”
I wonder why Clete didn’t?
“… two months ago many of the officers here tonight — even some of the wives — were behind barbed wire in Japanese POW camps.”
“Really?”
“The story I heard was that General George C. Marshall asked himself, ‘What do I do with officers who’ve been behind barbed wire since 1942 when they’re finally freed?’ And then came up with the answer. He sent many of the ones from the Philippines and Japan here, and many of the ones from German POW camps to Japan.
“They get a command appropriate to their rank — nothing too stressful, of course — in Military Government or Graves Registration — there will be permanent military cemeteries all over Europe — or on staff somewhere. If they need medical attention, and a lot of them do, there are good Army hospitals here and in Japan. They get requisitioned quarters much nicer than what they’d get at Fort Bragg or Fort Knox. With cheap servants, not that cheap matters, as most of them got three years of back pay as soon as they got off the planes that flew them to the States. And nice clubs, with very low, tax-free prices. Getting the picture?”
“Fascinating,” Frade said. “I never thought about what would happen to them after the ‘welcome home’ parade.”
“General Greene told me the story when I was ordered to give up this place — it was headquarters for OSS Forward — so they could turn it into a club for senior officers.”
Cronley looked around the room. He couldn’t tell, of course, which of the officers in their dress uniforms had been prisoners. But no one in the room looked anything like the hollow-eyed walking skeletons in rags he’d seen in the newsreels of prisoners being liberated.
Or even like Elsa.
He had first seen Elsa von Wachtstein not a month earlier, carrying a battered suitcase in a refugee line approaching a checkpoint three kilometers north of Marburg an der Lahn. She was emaciated, her face gray, her hair unkempt — a thirty-two-year-old who looked fifty. But she was the daughter of Generalmajor Ludwig Holz and daughter-in-law of Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein — both brutally killed for their roles in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in July 1944. Jimmy had last seen her in Buenos Aires, when she’d reunited with her brother-in-law — and now one of Clete Frade’s closest friends — Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein.