W E B Griffin - Honor 1 - Honor Bound

by Honor Bound(Lit)

  "When are they sending Jorge home?" Beatrice asked.

  "I don't know that yet, Bea," Frade said gently. "I'm sure as soon as the details are known, you will be informed."

  "We can have a mass, a high requiem mass, at Our Lady of Pilar," Beatrice said. "I'll have to tell the Bishop."

  "There will be time for that, mi amor," Humberto said.

  "And Jorge, there are still those lovely cedar caskets at San Pedro y San Pablo? Aren't there?"

  Years and years before, their father somehow came onto a stock of cedar. He had a cabinet maker at the estancia turn it into cas-kets. It was not, Frade thought, the only odd thing the old man did after he turned sixty. But at least half a dozen cedar caskets remained stored in the rafters of the old carriage house. All that had to be done to them was to outfit the interior.

  "Yes, there are," Frade said.

  "That will make it nice," Beatrice said. "We will put Jorge in with the Duartes, but in a casket from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo."

  God, she's out of her mind. If she had had more than the one child, she would be far better off.

  "Yes," Frade agreed, "that would be nice."

  "I must talk to the Bishop and see what is involved," Beatrice said.

  "Beatrice, it'll wait until tomorrow," Humberto said.

  "Nonsense," she said. "I've known him since he went into the seMi¤ary. He'll have time for me."

  She walked out of the room.

  When he was sure she was out of earshot, Frade asked, "What is she taking?"

  Humberto shrugged helplessly.

  "I don't know. Something the doctor gives her."

  "She is not herself," Frade said.

  "Of course she's not herself," Humberto snapped. "She's lost her only child in a war he had no business being involved in."

  "That's not what I mean, Humberto," Frade said.

  "When she doesn't take her pills, she weeps. For hours, she weeps," Humberto said.

  "She is your wife," Frade said.

  "Meaning what?" Humberto snapped.

  "Meaning that while I am concerned to see her drugged that way, it is not really any of my business."

  "The doctor comes every day," Humberto said. "I can only presume he knows what he is doing. And of course it's your business. She's your sister. You love her."

  "I wept when I heard what happened to Jorge," Frade said. "I have some small idea of what you are going through."

  Tears welled in Humberto's eyes.

  "Why don't you make yourself a drink?" Frade asked.

  "Yes," Humberto agreed quickly. "Will you have another?"

  Frade shook his head no, and murmured, "No, gracias."

  When Duarte was at the chest-of-drawers bar, with his back to Frade, he said, "Jorge, I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you have done. I don't know how we would have managed without you."

  "I have done nothing," Frade said.

  "But you have, dear Jorge," Humberto said, turning and walk-ing to Frade and handing him a drink. "And we both know it."

  Frade put his arm around Humberto's shoulders and hugged him.

  "And what of your boy?" Humberto asked. "I realize I do not have the right to ask, but..."

  "My latest information is that he has entered the Marine Corps..."

  "The what?"

  "The Marine Corps. They are soldiers, an elite force. He will be trained as a pilot. Presumably, he will soon go to the war. As I understand it, the Marine Corps is fighting the Japanese in the Pacific."

  "I will pray for him," Humberto said. "Now, after what has happened to my Jorge, I will pray very hard for your boy."

  With a masterful effort, Colonel Jorge Guillermo Frade con-trolled his voice and replied, "Thank you, dear Humberto."

  [THREE]

  3470 St. Charles Avenue

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  1615 1 November 1942

  It was growing dark enough for people to turn their headlights on, and it was raining hard, the drops drumming on the con-vertible's roof. It hadn't been raining long enough, though, for the rain to clean the road grime from the windshield, and it was streaked. As he drove down St. Charles Avenue past the Tulane University campus, Clete noticed a couple walking slowly through the rain, sharing the man's raincoat. He had done that himself, more than a few times, when he was at Tulane.

  They're in love, he thought, or at least in lust.

  He'd noticed similar couples on the Rice University campus in Houston. And he'd admired a spectacular brunette in Bern's so-rority house, when he was taking tea with the house mother-a "ceremony" that gave Beth and Marjorie the chance to show off their brother, the Marine Aviator Hero fresh home from Guad-alcanal.

  He even went back to his hotel and put his uniform on for that. Protesting, of course, and telling himself at the time that he was doing it only to indulge Beth and Marjorie, who actually wept when they saw him standing in the foyer of the sorority house. They were going to miss their father at least as much as he did, he told himself then. And since there was little else he could do for them, putting on his uniform so they could display their Brother the Hero seemed not so much of a sacrifice.

  When the brunette proved to be fascinated with Marine Green and Wings of Gold, it seemed for a moment to be a case of casting bread upon the water. But he didn't pursue it. For one thing, he wanted to spend as much time alone with the girls as he could; and for another, they had enough trouble without being labeled as the sisters of that awful fellow who took Whatsername out and tried to jump Whatsemame's bones in the backseat of his Buick.

  Perhaps he'd have a chance in New Orleans to make a few telephone calls and do something about his celibacy. It was a very long time since he'd even been close to a woman. On the 'Canal, he thought a good bit about a nurse he'd "met" in San Diego... that is to say, he walked into the hospital cafeteria and the nurse who thirty minutes before had drawn his blood asked him to share her table. She was also a brunette, deeply tanned, and magnificently bosomed. Her uniform was very tightly fitted; and if you looked-and he had-you could see a heavenly swell at the V neck of her whites.

  There hadn't been time to pursue that-he'd boarded the Long Island the next morning.

  He hadn't even gotten close to a woman at Pearl Harbor.

  He switched on the turn signal, waited for a St. Charles Street trolley to clatter past in the opposite direction, and headed up St. Charles. Then he turned off the street onto the drive of a very large, very white, ornately decorated three-story frame mansion.

  No car was parked under the portico, which probably meant that his grandfather, Cletus Marcus Howell, was not yet home from the office. He glanced at his watch; he'd probably be home any minute. That meant he would be greatly annoyed when he drove up and found another car occupying the space where he intended to park the car and get into his house without getting rained upon.

  Clete stopped under the portico and stared unhappily at the garage, a hundred yards behind the house. The three doors of the former carriage house were closed. Unless things had changed, they were closed and locked. He couldn't get inside even if he drove there. All he would do was get wet.

  "To hell with it!" he said aloud, then turned off the key and opened the door. He reached across the seat and picked up his Stetson, put it on, and got out. He was wearing khaki trousers and boots and a faded, nearly white shirt frayed at the neck. The sheepskin coat was in the backseat. After a moment, he remem-bered that, and reached in and got it.

  The Buick would eventually go into the carriage house. Despite the best efforts of New Orleans' best exterMi¤ators, there were rats in there, and he didn't want them eating the jacket. Or gnaw-ing through the Buick's roof to get at the sheepskin.

  Was all that concern about the old man's convenience the nor-mal behavior of a Southern gentleman? Or am I still afraid of him?

  He was almost to the mahogany-and-beveled-glass door when it swung open to him.

  "Welcome home, Mr. Cletus," Jean-Jac
ques Jouvier greeted him enthusiastically. The old man's silver-haired, very-light-skinned Negro butler was wearing a gray linen jacket, which meant it was not yet five. At five, Jean-Jacques would change into a black jacket

  "J.J., it's good to see you," Clete said, and wrapped his arm around his shoulders. This seemed to make J.J. uncomfortable, which was surprising, until Clete looked past him into the down-stairs foyer and noticed Cletus Marcus Howell, Esquire, standing there with his hands locked together in front of him.

  "Welcome home, my boy," Cletus Marcus Howell said.

  Cletus Marcus Howell was tall, pale, slender, and sharp-featured. He wore a superbly tailored dark-blue, faintly pin-striped three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain looped across his stomach.

  "Let me have your things, Mr. Cletus," Jean-Jacques said. Clete handed the Stetson and the sheepskin jacket to him, then started toward his grandfather.

  "Grandfather," Clete said.

  "You could have telephoned," the old man said as Clete ap-proached.

  "I hoped to be here before you came home from the office."

  "I telephoned to Beth," the old man said. "She told me when you left Houston. I arranged to be here for your arrival."

  Clete put out his hand, and the old man took it. And then, in an unusual display of emotion, took it in both his hands.

  "You don't look as bad as Martha and Beth said you did," the old man said. "Both used the same term, 'cadaver.' "

  "How is your health, Grandfather?" Clete asked, aware that the old man was still holding on to his hand.

  "I am well, thank you," the old man said, and then, as if suddenly aware of his unseemly display of emotion, let Clete's hand go. "Why don't we go into the sitting room and ask Jean-Jacques to make us a drink."

  He didn't wait for a reply. He turned on his heel and marched across the foyer through an open double sliding door to the sitting room. It was a formal sitting room, furnished sometime before the War of Rebellion and unchanged since... with one exception: over the fireplace, the oil painting, from life, of Bartholomew Fitzhugh Howell (1805-1890), who had built the house in 1850, had been replaced by an oil painting of equal size, painted from a photograph, of Eleanor Patricia Howell Frade (1898-1922), who had been both born in the house and buried from it.

  Clete followed him. The old man walked to a cigar humidor on a marble-topped cherry table, opened it, and took from it a long, thin, nearly black cigar.

  "Will you have a cigar, Cletus?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  "Would you like me to clip it for you?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  The old man took from the table an old-fashioned cigar cut-ter-something like a pair of scissors-walked to the fireplace, carefully clipped the cigar's end, let the end drop into the ashes of the fire, and then walked to Clete and handed it to him.

  "You will excuse my fingers," he said.

  "Certainly."

  "It was cold, the radio said it was going to rain, and you always like a fire, so I asked Jean-Jacques to have the houseman lay one."

  "That was very thoughtful of you," Clete said.

  Jean-Jacques produced a flaming wooden match. Clete set his cigar alight while the old man repeated the end-clipping business over the fireplace with another cigar from the humidor. Jean-Jacques went to him and produced a fresh flaming match. When the old man's cigar was satisfactorily ignited, he asked,

  "What may I bring you gentlemen?"

  "Ask Mr. Cletus, Jean-Jacques," the old man replied. "He is the returning prodigal; we should indulge him."

  "Oh, I don't see how you could call Mr. Cletus a prodigal, Mr. Howell," Jean-Jacques said.

  "You have not been in contact with a certain Colonel Graham, Jean-Jacques," the old man said. "Prodigal is the word. You're familiar with the Scripture, Jean-Jacques?"

  " "There is more joy in heaven...'?"

  "Precisely," the old man said. "Cletus?"

  "What I really would like, J.J.-"

  "I wish you would not call him that," the old man interrupted. "It's disrespectful. I've told you that."

  "Mister Howell, Mister Cletus can call me anything he wants to call me, unless it's dirty."

  "Not under my roof he can't," the old man said.

  "Jean-Jacques, could you fix me a Sazerac?"

  "I certainly can, it will be my pleasure. And Mr. Howell, what for you?"

  "I'll have the same, please, Jean-Jacques."

  "And will you be taking dinner here, Mr. Howell?"

  "That has not been decided, Jean-Jacques," the old man said.

  "Yes, Sir," the butler said, nodded his head in what could have been a bow, turned, and walked out of the room.

  The old man watched him go, then turned to Clete.

  "One of your men is here," he said. "The Jew. I understand there is a certain secrecy involved, and I didn't want Jean-Jacques to hear me tell you."

  "His name is Ettinger, Grandfather. Staff Sergeant Ettinger. He lost most of his family to the Nazis."

  If Cletus Marcus Howell sensed reproof in Clete's voice, he gave no sign.

  "Then there should be no question in his mind, wouldn't you agree, about the morality of going down there and doing whatever Colonel Graham wants you to do to the Argentines?"

  "The Germans killed his family, Grandfather, not the Argen-tines."

  "The Argentines are allied, de facto if not de jure, with the Germans. Two peas from the same pod. Certainly, you must be aware of that."

  Clete didn't reply.

  "Anyway, Staff Sergeant Ettinger is in the Monteleone. He arrived yesterday, and telephoned. I told him you were due today or tomorrow, and would contact him. Then I called one of the Monteleones, Jerry, I think, and told him I would be obliged if he would see that Staff Sergeant Ettinger is made comfortable."

  "That was gracious of you, thank you."

  "Simple courtesy," the old man said. "I was going to suggest, now that you're here, that we take him to dinner. Would that be awkward? If it would, we could have him here."

  "Why would it be awkward?"

  "As I understand it, there is a line drawn between officers and enlisted men."

  "Well, I've never paid much attention to that line. And I would guess that Ettinger will be in civilian clothing."

  "We could take him to Arnaud's," the old man said. "It's right around the corner from the Monteleone, and it has a certain reputation."

  In other words, unless absolutely necessary, no Jews in the house. Not even Jews who are bound for Argentina to kill Ar-gentineans.

  "Arnaud's would be fine. It's been a long time."

  "When we have our drink, you can call him," the old man said. "Do I correctly infer that you are no longer wearing your uniform?''

  "Yes. I have a new draft card, identifying me as someone who has been honorably discharged for physical reasons."

  "Have you your uniform?"

  "It's in the car. They are in the car."

  "Your dress uniform among them?"

  "Yes."

  "And your decorations?"

  "Yes. Why do you ask?"

  "I thought I would have your portrait made," the old man said. "In uniform. I thought it could be hung in the upstairs sitting room beside that of your uncle James."

  "I'm not sure there would be time="

  "I don't mean to sit for a portrait," the old man said impa-tiently. "That's unnecessary. They can work from photographs. Your mother's portrait was prepared from snapshots."

  "Yes, I know."

  "When you know something of your schedule, we'll make time for a photographer. It will only take half an hour or so."

  "If you'd like."

  Jean-Jacques returned, carrying a silver tray on which were four squat glasses, two dark with Sazeracs, two of water, and two small silver bowls holding cashews and potato chips.

  Clete and the old man took the Sazeracs. Jean-Jacques set the tray down on a table.

  "Just a moment, please, Jean-Jacques," the old man said. T
hen he turned toward the oil portrait of the pretty young woman in a ball gown hanging over the fireplace.

  "If I may," Cletus Marcus Howell said, raising his glass to-ward the portrait. "To your mother. May her blessed, tortured soul rest in God's peace."

  "Mother," Clete said, raising his glass.

  "And may your father receive his just deserts here on earth," the old man added.