"The invitation is most gracious, mi Capitan, but just between us fighter pilots, Isabela Carzino-Cormano cannot be numbered among my legion of female admirers. In English we would say that my presence would piss on your parade. I'll pass, thank you, and in the morning you will be most grateful that I did."
"I would like to impose on your well-known good nature, and ask that you reconsider."
What the hell is going on? Oh, shit. He wants me to get El Bitcho off his hands; he has carnal desires for Alicia.
"Peter, I don't think you can separate them."
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."
"What if someone sees us together, Peter? I don't think that would look wise to that boss of yours."
"We are in a neutral country. I will simply be acting as an officer and a gentleman, asking you to join us when you happen to walk in and pass our table. We're in the lobby restaurant. You know it?"
"I'll be there in fifteen minutes. I hope you know what you're doing."
"So do I, Cletus."
[EIGHT]
As soon as he was out of the garage, Clete stopped the Buick and put the top down. His uncle Jim spent a good deal of time during Clete's last year at Tulane listing the many inconveniences of owning and driving a convertible. But you could sum up his entire list under one heading: the top. The mechanism was deli-cate, he told Clete fifty times; and once it was out of alignment it was almost impossible to repair. That meant the roof would leak, and that meant the floor pan would rust out. And it meant that the leather upholstery would rot, or else get stiff and crack.
And if the top was wet, and you put it down before it dried, it would shrink. So when you tried to put it up, the mechanism would not be up to the strain of stretching it and would pull itself out of alignment. Whereupon the roof would leak, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
"Only idiots own convertibles," Uncle Jim said. "Why any-body smart enough to graduate from college would even think of wanting one, I'll never know."
That lecture came the day Uncle Jim told him to get off his lazy ass and help Martha weed the tulips by the driveway. When he got there, he found the Buick Roadmaster convertible with a large yellow bow tied to the bull's-eye hood ornament.
Clete thought of Uncle Jim every time he put the roof up or down. Now he thought of Uncle Jim and the Virgin Princess. On the one hand, she was a kid who wanted a ride in the convertible. On the other hand, she was a perfectly gorgeous woman who mouthed "I love you" to him in the Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar. And pursed her lips at him as he walked out.
What the hell am I going to do about her?
A man was standing under a tree fifty yards from the Guest House, studiously looking the other way. Twenty yards farther down Avenida Libertador, the momentary glow as he took a drag on his cigarette revealed another man sitting at the wheel of a small Mercedes sedan parked with its lights out.
If those two guys are not cops-what do they call them, "In-ternal Security"?-watching me, then I'm the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
I will do nothing about the Virgin Princess, except ignore her like she has hoof-and-mouth disease. As long as Internal Security is interested in me, I have to stay away from her. I certainly can't let them get interested in her.
Jesus H. Christ, she was so beautiful in the church!
When the top was down, he turned up Avenida Libertador to-ward the two watchers. When he was parallel with the one under the tree, he blew "Shave and a Haircut Two Bits" on the Buick's loud horn, waved cheerfully, and called out, "Buenas noches, Se¤or!"
Then, impulsively, he floored the accelerator and roared down Avenida Libertador. In the rearview mirror, he saw the parking lights of the Mercedes come on, and the man under the tree run-ning toward it.
"Earn your money, fellows," he said aloud.
[NINE]
Alicia Carzino-Cormano was delighted to see Clete walking to-ward their table in the lobby restaurant of the Alvear Palace. Her sister was not.
"Well, what a pleasant coincidence," Clete said. "Alicia. Isabela. Mi Capitan."
"Teniente," Peter said, standing up, bowing, and clicking his heels. "Perhaps you would care to join us?"
"I would hate to intrude."
"Nonsense," Peter said. "I insist."
"Well, if you're sure it will be no imposition," Clete said, and pulled up a chair.
He met Alicia's eyes as he sat down and then winked at her.
She smiled back.
"You really should be at the Duartes'," Isabela said.
"Why?" Clete asked simply.
"Jorge was your cousin. It was unseemly of you not to be there with the family."
"Isabela, I never met the man. I didn't even know I had a Cousin Jorge until a couple of weeks ago."
"If you had been there, your father might not have gotten so drunk."
"Isabela!" Alicia protested.
"Well, he is," Isabela said. "Disgustingly drunk. Weeping drunk. Telling everyone who'll listen it's his fault that Jorge is dead. Making a spectacle of himself. Humiliating Mother."
"My father," Clete said, coldly angry, "buried his nephew today. He loved him very much. Maybe that's why he got drunk."
"He had no right to make a spectacle of himself. To humiliate my mother. Everyone important in Argentina was there."
Clete stared hard at her, then stood up and looked down at Peter. "I had the feeling I shouldn't have come here."
"Oh, Clete, you're not leaving. Please don't leave!" Alicia said.
"Alicia, it's always a pleasure to see you," he said, and smiled at her. Then he extended a hand to Peter. "Sorry, mi Capitan," he said.
"Please," Alicia pleaded. "Isabela, say you're sorry!" Clete nodded at Peter and started down the corridor toward the lobby. As he reached the center of the lobby, Peter caught up
with him and touched his arm.
"Cletus, my friend, listen carefully to me. An attempt will be made on your life, probably tonight."
"What?" Clete asked incredulously.
"Don't go back to the Guest House tonight. Better yet, go to your father's estancia."
Clete looked into Peter's eyes.
"Jesus Christ! You're serious."
"On my word of honor."
Peter touched Clete's arm, then turned and walked back toward the restaurant in the corridor.
Chapter Seventeen
[ONE]
Bureau of Internal Security
Ministry of Defense
Edificio Libertador
Avenida Paseo Colon
Buenos Aires
2230 19 December 1942
Comandante Habanzo delivered the preliminary visual and com-munications surveillance reports ten minutes late, at 2210 hours. While he leafed through the five-inch-tall stack of papers, el Teniente Coronel Bernardo Martin kept Habanzo standing in front of his desk.
He wondered if he was doing this because Habanzo was late, or because he simply did not like the man. He decided it was the latter. He had often warned his agents that it was far better to turn in a report late than to turn it in inaccurate-but obviously not often enough, to judge by the quality of the visual surveillance reports in front of him.
The question then changed to why he disliked his deputy. First of all, obviously, because Habanzo was stupid. Stupid people did not belong in internal security. How Habanzo wound up there was one of the great mysteries of life. For a long time, he simply assumed that he never completely trusted the information Ha-banzo gave him because the man was so devastatingly stupid. But now vague, uncomfortable tickles in the back of his mind were suggesting other reasons as well.
Could Habanzo be taking small gifts-or large ones, for that matter-from some interested party or other? Could he be passing items of interest to them?
Could the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, for example, have him on their payroll? The answer came swiftly: Not likely. Habanzo's limited mental abilities would be immediately apparent to the G.O.U. And they would be afraid of him, too; for they would see
him as the loose cannon that he is. He was perfectly capable of having a sudden attack of conscience and confessing, for instance. Or of selling out to a higher bidder.
On the other hand, in the counterintelligence business, one was expected to consider the unlikely-even the absurdly unlikely- as a possibility.
The communications surveillance preliminary reports were typewritten. Almost all of the wiretappers came from Army and Navy Signals, where they'd been radio operators. Radio operators were trained to sit before a typewriter and almost subconsciously transcribe Morse Code signals. Now they sat before a typewriter in a basement somewhere, or in an office off the Main Telephone Frame Room in the Ministry of Communications, and pecked out a transcript of someone's telephone calls. Aside from minor cor-rections, and the elimination of abbreviations, their final reports would not be much different from what Martin had in front of him.
The visual surveillance preliminary reports were something else: They were handwritten, compiled from notes discreetly taken on site. And predictably, the syntax in these reports was often highly imaginative. More important, they were liberally sprinkled with question marks. This was done in the interest of fairness, so that El Coronel A's words would not become a matter of official record when the agent was not absolutely positive that it was El Coronel A who spoke them, or that these were his exact words. The idea was that questionable items would be verified in the final reports: that it was not El Coronel A, but in fact El Coronel B, and that he said he was not going to Cordoba, rather than that he was going to Cordoba.
By the time the preliminary reports were finalized, about ninety-five percent of the information verified was no longer of any interest whatever. It was a terrible system. But-as Winston Churchill said about democracy-el Teniente Coronel Martin could not think of a better one.
Nothing in the reports before him was especially interesting. That was not surprising. Just about all of the members of the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos attended el Capitan Duarte's funeral, but they were all far too intelligent to reveal anything worth pay-ing attention to anywhere they might be overheard.
And though el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade solaced the loss of his nephew with a liter or so of Johnnie Walker, this did not yield useful information... unless irreverent remarks about the funeral ceremony could be considered useful.
Visual surveillance of young Frade was a little more interesting. He did not follow the casket to Recoleta Cemetery, but instead returned to the Frade Guest House on Avenida Libertador, where two American men were waiting for him.
One of them, Pelosi, Anthony J., was ostensibly an oil-industry technical expert who came to Argentina with young Frade. The other, Ettinger, David, was a newly arrived employee of the Banco de Boston.
If one accepted the theory that young Frade was an OSS agent... and Habanzo is strongly convinced of this; I wonder why... then Ettinger would likely be the third member of a three-man team. But on the other hand, none of these three look like men any intelligence agency in its right mind would send anywhere. Which, of course, might be precisely what the OSS hopes some-one like me will think.
Martin would have liked very much to know exactly what they talked about, but that was out of the question. At the same time, Martin was sure that his decision not to install listening devices in the house was correct. Tapping a telephone was relatively sim-ple, and difficult to detect. Listening devices were the opposite, difficult to install and easy to detect. They were also very expen-sive and hard to come by. He had a budget to consider. If el Coronel Frade or his son came across a listening device-and they more than likely would-they would simply smash it. And a good deal of money, time, and effort would go down the toilet. All a listening device would accomplish would be to remind Frade and his son that they were under surveillance.
There was one anomaly in the reports, which of course Ha-banzo's summaries offered little to explain: Shortly after young Frade met with the two other Americans, he returned to the Duarte mansion. On the way there, he stopped for a time at the lobby restaurant in the Alvear Palace Hotel. There he encountered the young German Luftwaffe officer and the two Carzino-Cormano girls.
Habanzo did not have a man on the young German officer, pleading a shortage of available agents. And "technical difficul-ties" created a ten-minute loss of phone coverage at the Guest House-which meant the man tapping the Guest House line had gone either to relieve himself or to have a little snack. During that time there could possibly have been a telephone call in con-nection with the meeting between young Frade and the German.
According to the visual agent's report, young Frade suddenly left the Frade Guest House garage and then drove at "a high rate of speed" to the Alvear Palace. By the time the agent caught up with him, Frade was in a confrontation with the older of the Carzino-Cormano girls, Isabela. This was followed by an apparent confrontation with the young German officer, as Frade "walked angrily" out of the hotel.
Since it was reasonable to presume that the young German officer was not involved with young Frade's mission for the OSS (if indeed young Frade was actually working for the OSS), it seemed reasonably safe to presume that the confrontation had something to do with the Carzino-Cormano girl. Isabela was a beautiful young woman, and both the German and the American could easily be romantically interested in her.
Thus, a likely scenario: Young Frade slipped away from the funeral and the post-funeral reception for a meeting with his men, then telephoned the Duarte mansion (during the period of "tech-nical difficulties" with the telephone surveillance), somehow managed to get through, and was informed that the Se¤orita had left with the German officer.
Thirty-two incoming calls came to the Duarte mansion during the afternoon; four of them asked for Se¤orita Isabela Carzino-Cormano.
Masculine ego outraged, he went looking for them in one of the very few public places where a young woman of her position could be seen, found her with the German, expressed his displeas-ure, and "walked angrily" out of the hotel.
He next went to the Duarte mansion and stayed there for sev-eral hours, presumably helping Se¤ora Carzino-Cormano deal with his father, who was by then very deeply in his cups.
"And where, Habanzo, is young Frade now?"
"At the Guest House, mi Coronel."
"You're sure of that?"
"S¡, mi Coronel."
"And the agents on duty are prepared to deal with the situation if he suddenly erupts again from the garage and drives away at a high rate of speed? They will not, to rephrase the question, lose him again?"
"No, mi Coronel."
"And may we expect further 'technical difficulties' with com-munications surveillance of the Guest House line?"
"I have been assured, mi Coronel, that the equipment is now working perfectly. But on the other hand, mi Coronel..."
"I don't wish to hear about 'on the other hand,' Habanzo."
"No, mi Coronel."
"I want enough people on the communications surveillance, and enough visual people watching the house, so that tomorrow morning I will know if there were telephone calls to him, and what was said. And I want to know who comes to visit him."
"S¡, mi Coronel."
"And if he leaves the Guest House by car-even at a 'high rate of speed'-I want to know where he goes, who he sees, and with a little bit of luck, what he says."
"S¡, mi Coronel."
"That will be all, Habanzo. I will see you here, with tonight's preliminary reports, at nine in the morning. And if there is any unforeseen problem, I expect you to telephone me at my home."
"S¡, mi Coronel. I understand."
"I devoutly hope so, Habanzo."
[TWO]
4730 Avenida Libertador
Buenos Aires
0015 20 December 1942
"I wonder," Clete Howell said aloud as he pulled off the avenue onto the driveway and stopped, "if I can get this big sonofabitch through that narrow gate."
He was driving his father's Horche, with Se¤ora Pella
no sitting next to him. He had the Horche because he took his father home from the Duartes' in it, and he needed a way back to the Guest House.
An hour earlier, though he seemed to have passed out for the evening in a leather armchair in the Duartes' upstairs sitting room, El Coronel suddenly stood up and announced that he was tired and going home.
"You are not going to drive," Se¤ora Carzino-Cormano said.
"You're drunk." "Don't be absurd."
"Dad, you've had a couple," Clete said.
"He's had a liter!" Se¤ora Carzino-Cormano said.
"I have never been drunk in my life."
W E B Griffin - Honor 1 - Honor Bound Page 51
