“Thank you,” Clete said politely.
I’m going to have to work with this guy, so the last thing I want to do is antagonize the sonofabitch.
Aragão ordered the headwaiter, the waiter, and the wine steward around so arrogantly that Clete thought they would probably bow and back away from the table and then spit in the soup they would serve them.
As soon as the wine was delivered—and Aragão had gone through the ritual of sniffing cork, then swirling wine around the glass and his mouth before nodding his reluctant approval—Aragão turned to Frade and announced, “Frankly, I expected a somewhat older man; I have a son your age.”
Frade’s anger flared. His mouth almost ran away with him. At the last instant, he stopped himself.
“Do you?” he asked politely.
“He’s a Marine. He was on Guadalcanal. Now he’s in the Naval Hospital in San Diego.”
Oh, shit!
“I flew with VMF-225 on Guadalcanal,” Clete said. “How badly was he hurt?”
“Rather badly, I’m afraid. But he’s alive. Colonel Graham didn’t mention your Marine service.”
“No reason he should have,” Clete said.
“I served with Graham in France in the First World War. We stayed in touch. And then, when the Corps said I was too old to put on a uniform, I’d heard rumors that Alex was up to something. I went to him and asked if there was anything I could do. And here I am.”
He looked at Frade. Smiling shyly, he said, “Semper Fi!”
“Semper Fi, Señor Aragão,” Clete replied with a grin.
Thank you, God, for putting that cork in my mouth!
In the next hour and a half, Clete learned a good deal more about the pudgy man with the pencil-line mustache and the slicked-back hair.
The briefcase contained all the paperwork for what the newly appointed Lisbon station chief of South American Airways had done, which included renting hangar space—“That may have been premature,” Aragão had said, “as the nose of that airplane you flew in obviously won’t fit in the hangar, much less the rest of it. Not to worry; I’ll deal with it”—office space, arranging for office personnel, the ticket counter at the airport, and personnel to staff that, too.
The list went on and on.
It was only when he finally had finished all that that Aragão, almost idly, said, “While it can wait, one of these days we’ll have to figure out how I’m to be repaid. This really came to a tidy amount.”
“You used your own money to pay for all this?” Clete asked.
“I wasn’t given much of a choice.”
“May I ask what you did before you . . .”
“I’m Portuguese. I’m a fisherman. Someone once calculated that we provide twenty percent of the fresh seafood served in the better restaurants between Boston and Washington. And then, too, we import foodstuffs—anchovies, for example, and olive oil, that sort of thing—into the United States. My grandfather founded that business. I was born here and spent a good deal of time here before the war; no eyebrows rose when I showed up and stayed.”
“Give me the account numbers and routing information, and as soon as I get to Buenos Aires, I’ll have the money cabled.”
Aragão smiled at him.
“Graham said he thought I’d like you.”
[FOUR]
Portela Airport
Lisbon, Portugal
2245 30 September 1943
Capitán Cletus Frade of South American Airways, trailed by a flight engineer and one of the backup pilots, took a little longer to perform his “walk-around” of the Ciudad de Rosario than he usually did, and he habitually performed a very thorough walk-around.
He had an ulterior motive: He wanted to have a good look at the passengers as they filed down a red carpet to the boarding ladder, and the best place from which he could do so was standing under the wing, ostensibly fascinated with Engine Number Four.
The passengers had just been served their dinner, but in the airport restaurant. That would keep the weight of their dinner and the Marmite containers and the rest of it off the Ciudad de Rosario. Once on board, they would be served hors d’oeuvres, champagne, and cocktails. Capitán Frade had made it very clear to the chief steward that every empty bottle, soiled napkin, and champagne stem was to be taken off the aircraft before the door was closed.
The headwind he expected over the Atlantic Ocean worried him. Depending on how strong it was, every ounce of weight might well count if they were to have enough fuel to make it back across. And if not, at least he could see nothing wrong with erring on the side of caution.
Frade paid particular attention to the clergy and religious as they mounted the ladder. There were four nuns escorting half a dozen children. He didn’t even try to guess which of them were the children of the two SS officers he was going to fly to Argentina. And any of the nuns could have been the children’s mothers, except for one, who looked as if she was well into her eighties.
All but one of the Jesuits were in business suits, looking like Welner; the exception was wearing a black ankle-length garment. The Franciscans were all wearing brown robes held together with what looked like rope. They all wore sandals, and most of them did not wear socks. Clete had no idea which of them usually wore a black uniform with a skull on the cap.
When the last passenger had gone up the stairway, Clete motioned for the people with him to get on board, and then he followed.
As Frade walked down the aisle to the cockpit, Father Welner caught his hand.
“No kiss-anything-good-bye jokes, all right?”
Ten minutes later, Clete eased back on the yoke.
“Retract the gear,” Clete ordered.
“Gear coming up,” the copilot responded.
“Set flaps at Zero.”
“Setting flaps at Zero,” the copilot responded. A moment later, he announced: “Gear up and locked. Flaps at Zero.”
“You’ve got it,” Capitán Frade said, lifting his hands from the yoke. “Take us to 7,500 meters. Engineer, set power for a long, slow, fuel-conserving ascent to 7,500.”
“Sí, Capitán.”
Ten minutes after that, there was nothing that could be seen out the windscreen.
“Passing through four thousand meters,” the copilot reported.
“Give the passengers the oxygen speech,” Clete said.
“Are we going to come across somebody up here, Capitán?”
“I decided I didn’t want to waste any fuel trying to meet up with the Americans,” Clete said. “And I’m hoping that if there are Germans up here, they won’t be able to find us—you’ll notice I have turned off our navigation lights—or if they do, we’ll be able to outrun them.”
“I agree, Capitán,” the copilot said.
Clete looked at him.
He was crossing himself and mumbling a prayer.
XI
[ONE]
2404 Calle Bernardo O’Higgins
Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina
0815 1 October 1943
SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, first deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, awoke sweat-soaked in the bedroom of his apartment in the petit-hotel at O’Higgins and José Hernández in the up-scale Belgrano neighborhood.
Worse, he knew that he was going to be sick to his stomach again. He padded quickly across the bedroom to the bathroom and just made it to the water closet before he threw up.
First, an amazing volume of foul-smelling green vomitus splashed into the water. This was followed moments later by a somewhat lesser volume of the green vomitus.
Von Deitzberg now desperately wished to flush the toilet but knew from painful past experience that this was not going to be immediately possible. For reasons known only to the gottverdammt Argentines, the water reservoir was mounted so high on the wall, with a flushing chain so short, it was damned near impossible to pull it when sitting on the toilet, and absolutely impossible to do so when one was on one’s knees hugging the t
oilet.
It would be out of reach until he managed to recover sufficiently to be able to get off his knees and stand up with a reasonable chance of not falling over; that, too, had happened.
The entire sequence had happened so often—this was the fourth day—that von Deitzberg knew exactly what to expect, and that happened now. There were two more eruptions—this varied; sometimes there were three or more—after which von Deitzberg somehow knew that was all there was going to be. Then he could very carefully get to his feet, stand for a moment to reach the gottverdammt flushing chain handle, and then quickly hoist the hem of his nightgown and even more quickly sit on the toilet seat in anticipation of the burst of vile-smelling, foul-looking contents of his bowels that most often followed the nausea.
Baron von Deitzberg was suffering from what August Müller, M.D., described as “a pretty bad cold, plus maybe a little something else.”
Doctor Müller was on the staff of the German Hospital. A Bavarian, he had been in Argentina for ten years. More important, he was a dedicated National Socialist, two of whose sons had returned to the Fatherland and were now serving in the SS.
For these reasons, Dr. Müller could be trusted to understand that there were reasons why SS-Brigadeführer von Deitzberg was secretly in Argentina under the name of Jorge Schenck and, of course, why von Deitzberg could not go to the German Hospital, where questions would certainly be asked.
Dr. Müller would treat the brigadeführer in his apartment and would tell no one he was doing so.
Von Deitzberg was not surprised he was ill. He was surprised that it took so long—until he was in his new apartment—for it to show up. He believed he had contracted some illness—probably more than one; Dr. Müller’s “a little something else”—on U-405 during that nightmare voyage.
And he knew where he had caught Dr. Müller’s “pretty bad cold.” Fifty meters from the shore of Samborombón Bay, the rubber boat in which von Deitzberg was being taken ashore had struck something on the bottom. Something sharp. There had been a whooshing sound as the rubber boat collapsed and sank into the water.
The water was not much more than a meter deep. There was no danger of anyone drowning, and—giving credit where credit was due—the U-405’s sailors quickly got von Deitzberg and his luggage ashore. By then, however, von Deitzberg was absolutely waterlogged and so were the two leather suitcases he’d bought on his last trip to Argentina, and of course their contents.
The result had been that von Deitzberg had been soaking wet during the four-hour trip in First Secretary Anton von Gradny-Sawz’s embassy car from the beach to his new apartment. There was simply nothing that could be done about it.
By the time they reached the apartment, von Deitzberg had been chilled and was sneezing. Von Gradny-Sawz obligingly arranged for an Old Hungarian Solution to the problem—a hot bath, then to bed after drinking a stiff hooker of brandy with three tablespoons of honey—and said when he returned in the morning he would have with him Dr. Müller. “To be sure things were under control,” he’d said.
Von Deitzberg almost refused the physician’s services—the more people who knew about him being in Buenos Aires, the greater the chances the secret would get out—but after von Gradny-Sawz had explained who Dr. Müller was, he agreed to have him come.
Dr. Müller was there at nine the next morning, oozing Bavarian gemuetlichkeit and medical assuredness. By then von Deitzberg’s eyes were running, his sinuses clogged, he was sneezing with astonishing frequency and strength, and he was running a fever. He was delighted to have the services of a German physician, even one who proudly proclaimed himself to be a “herbalist,” a term with which von Deitzberg was not familiar.
He soon found out what it meant.
As soon as von Gradny-Sawz had returned from the nearest pharmacy and greengrocer with the necessary ingredients, Dr. Müller showed one of the petit-hotel’s maids—actually, she was the daughter of one of the maids; he later learned she was fifteen and that her name was Maria—how to prepare a number of herbal remedies.
He started with showing Maria how to peel and chop four cloves of garlic and then put them in a cup of warm water, making a remedy that von Deitzberg was to take three times a day.
Dr. Müller then showed Maria how to chop ten grams of ginger into small pieces, which were then to be boiled in water and strained. Von Deitzberg was to drink the hot, strained mixture two times a day.
Maria and von Deitzberg were then introduced to the medicinal properties of okra. She was shown how to cut one hundred grams of the vegetable into small pieces, which were then to be boiled down in half a liter of water to make a thin paste. During the boiling process, von Deitzberg was to inhale the fumes from the pot. The boiled-down okra, when swallowed, Dr. Müller said, was certain to relieve von Deitzberg’s throat irritation and to help his dry cough.
And finally came turmeric: Half a teaspoon of fresh turmeric powder was to be mixed in a third of a liter of warm milk, and the mixture drunk twice daily.
This was von Deitzberg’s fourth day of following the herbal routine.
Dr. Müller further counseled von Deitzberg that, in order to keep his strength up, he was to eat heartily, even if he had to force himself to do so.
Von Deitzberg had little appetite from his first meal, and that hadn’t changed much either. The meals were delivered from a nearby restaurant. Breakfast was rolls and coffee. Lunch was a cup of soup and a postre, which was Spanish for “dessert.” Dinner was the only real meal he could force down, and he had trouble with that.
The appetizer was invariably an empanada, a meat-filled pastry. One bite of one of them was invariably quite enough. The first entrée had been a pink-in-the-middle filet of beef accompanied by what the Argentines called papas fritas. The second day had been baked chicken accompanied by mashed potatoes; and the third, a pork chop that came with papas fritas.
None of them seemed, in von Deitzberg’s judgment, to be the sort of thing someone in his delicate condition should be eating. But Dr. Müller’s orders were orders, and von Deitzberg tried hard to obey. He had to get well, and as quickly as possible. He had a great deal of work to do, and the sooner he got at that, the better.
The postres, however, were something else. They immediately reminded von Deitzberg of Demel, the world-famous pastry shop in Vienna to which his grandfather had taken him when he was a boy.
If anything, the pastry chef here in Argentina had used more fresh eggs and more butter and more confectioners’ sugar than even Demel would have used. There of course were very few confectioners’ fresh eggs, hardly any butter, and no confectioners’ sugar at all these days in Berlin, even in the mess of Reichsführer-SS Himmler.
On the first day, von Deitzberg had sent Maria back to the restaurant for an additional postre, and then, on second thought, told her to fetch two. Dr. Müller had told him he had to eat to keep up his strength. Maria had since routinely brought two postres with his lunch, and three for his dinner.
Many were new to him, and they were invariably really delicious. One became his favorite: pineapple slices with vanilla ice cream, the whole covered with chocolate syrup. He sometimes had this for both lunch and dinner.
On two of the four nights he had been in the apartment—the first night, he had simply collapsed and slept until von Gradny-Sawz showed up with Dr. Müller the next morning—something occurred that hadn’t happened to him in years: On both nights, following an incredibly realistic erotic dream, he awakened to find he had had an involuntary ejaculation.
His first reaction—annoyance and chagrin—was quickly replaced by what he perceived to be the reason. It was clearly a combination of his condition—whatever gottverdammt bug he had caught on the gottverdammt U-405—and Dr. Müller’s herbal medications to treat it.
And then his mind filled with both the details of the erotic dreams and the facts and memories on which the dreams were obviously based, and he allowed himself to wallow in them.
His carnal partner i
n the dreams had been Frau Ingeborg von Tresmarck, a tall slim blonde who was perhaps fifteen years younger than her husband—Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck—who was the security officer of the Embassy of the German Reich in Montevideo, Uruguay.
One of the things von Deitzberg thought he would probably have to do while in South America was eliminate Werner von Tresmarck, and possibly Inge as well, as painful as that might be for him in her case.
When the lucrative business of allowing Jews—primarily American Jews, but also some Canadian, English, and even some South American—to secure the release of their relatives by buying them out of the Konzentrationslagern to which they had been sent en route to the ovens—one of the problems had been to find someone to handle things in South America.
In August 1941, shortly after Adolf Hitler had personally promoted Reinhardt Heydrich—Himmler’s Number Two and the Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia, as the former Czechoslovakia was now known—to SS-OBERGRUPPENFÜHRER and von Deitzberg—newly appointed first deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler—to obersturmbannführer, von Deitzberg had confided to Heydrich that, although the promotion was satisfying for a number of reasons, it was most satisfying because he really needed the money.
Two days later, Heydrich handed him an envelope containing a great deal of cash.
“You told me a while ago you were having a little trouble keeping your financial head above water,” Heydrich said. “A lot of us have that problem. We work hard, right? We should play hard, right? And to do that, you need the wherewithal, right?”
“Yes, sir,” von Deitzberg said.
“Consider this a confidential allowance,” Heydrich said. “Spend it as you need to. It doesn’t have to be accounted for. It comes from a confidential special fund.”
And a week after that, Heydrich told him the source of the money in the confidential special fund.
“Has the real purpose of the concentration camps ever occurred to you, Manfred?” Heydrich asked.
The Honor of Spies Page 35
