For now at Casa Montagna, the Gehlen Nazis would remain in their comfortable imprisonment. Father Silva would continue his efforts to see that the wives and their children who didn’t wish to be eventually returned to Germany were absorbed into the society of Argentina. And Subinspector General Nolasco would continue to ensure that the Gehlen Nazis didn’t try to vanish into Argentine society.
Clete found himself at the bar with a glass of Don Guillermo Cabernet Sauvignon in hand, wondering about the moral implications of his having arranged for Beth to finally jump into bed with Karl Boltitz. And wondering what was going to happen to them.
It’s a given that they will get married, probably as soon as Cletus Marcus Howell can get down here from the States.
But then what?
Unlike Peter von Wachtstein, who had a marketable skill—he would go to work for SAA as a pilot—and had successfully moved to Argentina most of his family’s portable assets, Karl Boltitz had neither marketable skills nor a nest egg. Karl was a naval intelligence officer, and not only were the vessels of the Kriegsmarine—what was left of them—almost certainly going to be scuttled, but the Kriegsmarine no longer would need an intelligence officer.
Clete knew that, while Boltitz didn’t have a dime, money itself wasn’t a problem. Beth was independently wealthy, although he didn’t think her mother had told her just how wealthy.
The problem was Karl’s honor. He was a proud man. It had never entered Clete’s mind that Karl had considered Beth’s finances when making his first pass at her—or, perhaps more correctly, when she, which seemed entirely likely, had made her first pass at him. But he was entirely capable of being able to refuse to enter a marriage in his penniless status. And even if Beth could get him to the altar, Karl would feel ashamed.
While Boltitz was a very good intelligence officer, the only places where he could use those skills now would be in something like the Gehlen organization or the OSS. But the OSS was going down the toilet, very possibly taking the Gehlen organization with it.
Especially if Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau hears about the Gehlen organization.
Frade had just decided that about the only thing that could be done was for him to talk to Otto Körtig and see if he had any ideas when he became aware that Siggie Stein had joined him at the bar.
Stein came right to the point.
“Colonel, can I go to Germany with you?”
“Why the hell would you want to do that?” Frade said.
“I’ll tell you, sir. But it doesn’t make much sense, even to me.”
“Give it a shot, Siggie.”
“I started to think about Germany a couple of weeks ago, after I saw that picture of General Patton taking a leak in the Rhine.”
And now you want to take a piss in the Rhine?
Well, why the hell not?
You’re certainly entitled to a little revenge.
“And then Mother Superior told me a story about Nazis in Chile,” Stein said.
“Go over that again, Siggie?”
“Truth being stranger than fiction, we’ve become pretty close. She comes up here a couple of nights a week and we kill a couple of bottles of wine.”
“A couple of bottles of wine? In here?”
“Yeah, Colonel, a couple of bottles of wine. But not here in the bar; we go to the radio room. I moved in there . . .”
The radio room was a small apartment on the upper floor of the Big House.
Frade raised an eyebrow and said, “I didn’t know that you moved out of the BOQ.”
“I think the officers were glad when I did.”
“Polo included?”
Frade sipped his wine and thought, If he’s been looking down his commissioned officer’s nose at Stein, I’ll ream him a new asshole.
“No. Not Major Sawyer. When I moved out of the BOQ, he even asked me if I had a problem. I told him no, that I moved out because I wanted to.”
“Any Kraut officer in particular?”
“It’s not what you’re suggesting, Colonel. Nothing overt. They were just as uncomfortable as officers having me in there as I was at a sergeant being in the BOQ.”
Stein saw the angry look on Frade’s face.
“Let it go, Colonel, please,” he said.
“You were telling me about Mother Superior’s drinking problem,” Frade said.
Stein laughed. “Her problem is that she thinks it sets a bad example for the nuns if they see her having a couple of glasses of wine. So she’s been doing it alone in her room at the convent. Drinking alone is no fun.”
“The officers didn’t like drinking with you, either? Is that where you’re going, Siggie?”
“I didn’t like drinking with the officers, so I did most of my drinking in the radio room. Then, one time she came to see me and I was having a little sip. Nice polite Jewish boy that I am, I offered her one. She took it, then took another one. The next time she came to the radio room, she brought some cheese and salami. We had another couple of belts together. That’s the way it started.”
“You said she said something about Nazis in Chile?”
“According to her, she was working at the Little Sisters’ Hospital in Santiago when this happened.”
“When what happened?”
“They call it the Seguro Obrero Massacre,” Stein said. “That’s the building that houses the health insurance ministry, or something like that.”
“What kind of a massacre?” Frade asked as he pulled the cork from another bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
“Nazis.”
“Who did the Nazis massacre?”
“The Nazis got massacred. She said what happened was that a Chilean Nazi—they called themselves ‘Nazistas’—named Jorge González von Marées got a bunch of college kids, and people that age, all fired up about National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, and they tried to stage a putsch.”
“When did this happen?”
“In 1938. Mother Superior was there filling in as a doctor in the emergency room at the Little Sisters’ Hospital in Santiago. Same order of nuns as here.”
Frade nodded as he topped off his glass and then slid the bottle to Stein.
“So,” Siggie said as he poured himself a glass, “what happened when this Nazi zealot did that . . . Wait. ‘Zealot’ is a really bad choice of word. The Zealots were Jewish warriors in Judea trying to throw the Romans out in the first century; they killed a lot of Romans because they just wouldn’t give up.”
They tapped glasses and took sips.
“Really nice wine,” Stein said, and went on: “Anyway, what this Chilean Nazi idiot did was convince about sixty of these young guys that all they had to do was take over a building at the university and the Seguro Obrero building and the people would rush to support them and National Socialism would come to Chile.
“According to Mother Superior, they could have caused real trouble, but while they probably didn’t stand a chance of taking over the country, they would have become heroic martyrs.”
“Exactly what did these Chilean Nazi lunatics do?”
“About half of them took over a building at the university, and the other half took over the health insurance building. The cops—they call them ‘carabineros’; they carry carbines—surrounded both buildings. Then the army sent a couple of cannons to the university building and fired a couple of rounds.
“The lunatics at the university surrendered. The cops—or maybe the army—then told them that what was going to happen now was that the lunatics were going to go to the health insurance building and convince the lunatics there that what they should do is surrender before anybody else got hurt.