If she told them not only that I had gone to Washington, but why, she had her reasons. What the hell could they be?
“How the hell could they have helped?” Frade asked, more confused than annoyed or angry.
“Perhaps she had this in mind, Cletus,” the priest said, handing him an envelope. “There was no question in Dorotea’s mind that you would succeed.”
Clete opened the envelope. It held two booklets called libretas de enrolamiento. One was in the name of Kurt Boltitz and the other in that of Peter von Wachtstein, both of whom, according to the LE, had immigrated to Argentina in 1938.
“Karl,” Frade called out, “make Hansel stop forcing himself on that poor woman, and the both of you come over here.”
When they had, Clete handed them the identity documents.
“Say ‘thank you’ to Dorotea,” Clete said. “But not to either of these two, for I’m sure neither of them would break the—at least—ten laws of the Argentine Republic somebody had to break to get these.”
Boltitz and von Wachtstein had known Martín officially when they had been respectively the naval attaché and the assistant military attaché for air of the embassy of the German Reich.
Martín offered his hand to Boltitz and said, “Karl.”
Boltitz replied, “Alejandro.”
Martín then did the same thing to von Wachtstein.
Neither said “thank you,” but profound gratitude could be seen in the eyes of the Germans.
“How good are those, Alejandro?” Frade asked.
“They will withstand all but the most diligent scrutiny,” Martín said, and then added: “We’ll get into that when we talk.”
“Okay.”
“It would be better if we talked now,” the priest said.
Clete looked between the two Argentines and his wife.
“Here?”
“Why don’t we go to the house on Libertador San Martín?” Dorotea suggested. “The men could have a shower, and then we could talk over lunch. Everyone else can go to Doña Claudia’s house and we can all get together later.”
Clete looked at his wife and thought: Why do I think this has been the plan all along?
Beth Howell was visibly—and vocally—distressed at being separated from Boltitz. But aside from her exception, Dorotea’s plan went unchallenged.
The men, plus Dorotea, went to what Cletus thought of as “Uncle Willy’s house by the racetrack”—it was across Avenida Libertador General San Martín from the Hipódromo de Palermo—in a four-car convoy. Martín’s official Mercedes led the way, followed by Tony Pelosi’s U.S. Embassy 1941 Chevrolet, then by Father Welner’s 1940 Packard 280 convertible—a gift from el Coronel Jorge G. Frade—and finally by the enormous Horch touring car that had been el Coronel Frade’s joy in life and in which he had been assassinated.
Their route took them past the German Embassy on Avenida Córdoba, causing Clete to wonder if Martín had done so intentionally. There were two soldiers standing in front of the gate. They were wearing German-style steel helmets and German-style gray uniforms and were holding German 7mm Mauser rifles in what the Marine Corps would call the Parade Rest position.
But they were not Germans. They were Argentines. And flying from atop the pole just inside the fence was the blue and white flag of Argentina, not the red swastika-centered flag of Nazi Germany that had flown there for so long.
Clete wondered what Boltitz and von Wachtstein were thinking about that.
[TWO]
4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín Buenos Aires 1405 11 May 1945
When the parade of vehicles from the airport reached Uncle Guillermo’s turn-of-the-century mansion, Cletus saw proof that it had been no accident that everybody had come there for a talk over lunch. Dorotea indeed had set it up—and made sure they were expected.
The first suggestion of that was the 1940 Ford station wagon parked at the curb. A legend painted on its doors read FRIGORÍFICO MORÓN. That, Frade thought, could be considered disinformation—maybe even a cover—as the Frigorífico Morón—or Morón Slaughterhouse and Feeding Pens—no longer existed to process the cattle from his estancia. The property in Morón was now the site of Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade.
Two men were sitting in the Ford. Clete knew that they were armed with Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot shotguns, .45 ACP Thompson submachine guns, and Argentine versions of the U.S. 1911-A1 .45 ACP pistol. He was certain, too, that on the street behind the mansion there could be found another vehicle, maybe not another station wagon, but one also carrying the FRIGORÍFICO MORÓN legend on its doors, and also holding at least two well-armed men.
The armed men were all ex–troopers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón. And they had been born—as had their parents and their parents’ parents, as far back as anyone could remember—on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
Clete’s father had versed him well in their distinguished history, to which he now was deeply connected.
Back in 1806, Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo had been owned by Juan Martín de Pueyrredón. When the British occupied Buenos Aires, he escaped to the estancia, which encompassed some eighty-four thousand hectares, or a little more than three hundred twenty-five square miles. He turned several hundred of its gauchos—his gauchos—into a cavalry force, and returned to Buenos Aires and recaptured the city. Not overwhelmed with modesty, Pueyrredón named his force of ferocious cowboys the Húsares de Pueyrredón. The title was made official in 1810, and the regiment was the most senior unit of the Argentine army.
From the beginning, gauchos of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo had done their military service with the Húsares and then returned to the estancia, either after completion of their required national service or on their retirement.
As the estancia, under the Napoleonic Code, passed from one descendant of Juan Martín de Pueyrredón to another, many of the patrónes of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo—after starting their careers fresh from the military academy as subtenientes—in time became colonels commanding the Húsares de Pueyrredón. Two of the most recent colonels commanding, el Coronel Jorge G. Frade and his father, el Coronel Guillermo Alejandro Frade, had done so.
El Coronel Jorge G. Frade would have preferred that his only son, Cletus, follow in the footsteps of his ancestors. But he’d taken what solace he could from knowing that Cletus had served with great distinction in the United States Corps of Marines, which el Coronel Frade had considered to be a military organization very nearly as prestigious as the Húsares de Pueyrredón.
On el Coronel Frade’s assassination, the gauchos of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo—the ex–troopers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón—had no trouble at all passing their loyalty to the new patrón.
First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, had been more than a little discomfited to be crisply saluted by the estancia’s gauchos. More recently, he had been even more discomfited when Enrico Rodríguez spread the news all over the estancia of Clete’s promotion to lieutenant colonel—and the ex-troopers began addressing him as “mi coronel.”
But he had grown used to it, and had come to think, perhaps immodestly, of the gauchos/ex–Húsares de Pueyrredón troopers as his private army. They were deployed all over Argentina, protecting the vast properties that he’d inherited after his father’s murder. As here at Uncle Willy’s house, they stood guard over Clete’s immediate and extended families, as well as at the various places where he had, as he thought of it, stashed people who needed either protection or confinement.