Blood and Honor

by W. E. B Griffin

  Clete waited until the last of them had left, then got back in the Ford and returned to Avenida del Libertador.

  He wondered if Enrico had been able to get out of the hospital to go to the Edificio Libertador.

  He hoped so, but it was too late to do anything about it if there was a hitch in that plan.

  I’ll make damned sure he’s at the funeral tomorrow, if I have to go to the hospital and get him myself.

  [FIVE]

  As he drove back past The Horse—which he now thought of as The Fish—on Avenida del Libertador, he had a sudden thought:

  There’s a secret compartment in Uncle Willy’s desk. Did my father know about it? Would he hide Peter’s father’s letters and the records Peter was talking about in there?

  It was an uncomfortable thought. He had discovered the secret compartment by accident when he lived in Uncle Willy’s house. It held some of Uncle Willy’s secrets: a large collection of glass slides showing a number of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen—the ladies were a bit over-plump, and the gentlemen were wearing nothing but mustaches and black socks—performing various obscene sexual acts on one another.

  On the one hand, the chances that his father even knew about the secret compartment were remote. And even if he did, would he use the secret compartment to conceal important documents? But on the other hand, it might be just the place his father would choose to use, because it was so unlikely. And the secret compartment was certainly large enough.

  What the hell, I’m practically right in front of the place. It will only take me a minute to look. And Peter is obviously scared shitless, with reason, that somebody will find his father’s letter.

  Directly across Libertador from the racetrack, he stopped before the cast-iron gates of a large, turn-of-the-century masonry house. The gates carried both the house number— 4730—and the crest of the Frade family. He blew the horn, and thirty seconds after that there was a glow of light as the basement garage door opened. A moment later, without question, a stocky, middle-aged man started to pull the gates inward.

  What Clete thought of as ‘‘Uncle Willy’s house’’ had been built by his granduncle Guillermo, a bachelor and near-legendary ladies’ man. Uncle Willy’s apartment on the top floor was actually one very large room stretching the full width and length of the building.

  It was designed with two objects in mind: Wide windows opening on Avenida del Libertador provided Granduncle Guillermo with what amounted to a comfortable private box for watching the horse racing at the Hipódromo across the street. And when the curtains were drawn, he had comfortable quarters for entertaining lady guests. According to Clete’s father, there were an awesome number of these.

  Clete’s connection with the building went back to his birth. According to his father, his mother flatly refused to live in ‘‘The Museum,’’ the Frade mansion on Avenida Coronel Díaz, and moved into Uncle Willy’s house. When her time came, she left Uncle Willy’s house for the hospital, where she was delivered of a male infant named Cletus Howell—after her father—Frade.

  He drove the Ford down a steep ramp into the basement garage, thinking, Just as soon as I can, I’m getting out of the Museum and coming back here.

  A second stocky man walked up to the car. Clete almost didn’t see him, his attention having been caught by two cars already in the garage. One of them—a 1941 Buick convertible coupe—was his. It was as glistening as it had been in the showroom of Davis Chevrolet-Buick in Midland, Texas, the day Uncle Jim had made it plain to him that only fools drove convertibles, and the best he could expect for a graduation present was something sensible, like a Chevy business coupe.

  The second car was his father’s Horche convertible touring sedan, the joy of his life. El Coronel’s extraordinary attachment to his Horche was well-known, and a source of amusement to his friends.

  Enrico had told Clete that from the moment el Coronel— ‘‘as nervous as a first-time father’’—watched the massive automobile being lowered to the dock from the Dresden of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, only three people were ever behind its wheel, el Coronel himself, Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez, and Cletus Howell Frade.

  Clete thereafter made a point of asking to drive the car whenever they rode in it, and then of driving it in a manner to cause his father to hang on with white knuckles.

  I really should have buried him in that, Clete thought. He really loved that car, and he died in it.

  Even in the dim light, Clete could see the shattered windshield, and the bullet holes in the massive hood and doors.

  ‘‘Enrico, mi Teniente,’’ the stocky man said, ‘‘will be here shortly. He rode with el Coronel to Our Lady of Pilar. ’’

  ‘‘He rode?’’

  "Sí, mi Teniente.’’

  Jesus Christ, his wounds are still bleeding!

  ‘‘I just came from there. El Coronel is safely inside the church.’’

  The man nodded.

  ‘‘I wish to see Enrico when he comes,’’ Clete said.

  And then I will take the stupid sonofabitch back to the hospital, where, with a little luck, they’ll be able to fix the damage he did to himself by getting on a horse in his condition. Jesus, I hope I can get him out again for the funeral!

  As he walked to the interior stairs that led to the kitchen, he saw where the stocky men had been sitting, in armchairs obviously moved to the garage from somewhere upstairs, and that beside the armchairs were two double-barreled shotguns.

  Three women were in the kitchen when he pushed open the door. One of them was middle-aged, and the other two were younger. The two younger ones were in maid’s uniforms.

  Christ, with nobody living here, why do we need two maids and a housekeeper?

  Oh, yeah, El Coronel told me he used this place as a guest house before I showed up. It’s probably full of people here for the funeral.

  The kitchen was clean and cheerful, and the tiles on the floor were spotless.

  Clete had a sudden, sickeningly clear mental image of the tiles by the kitchen table, thick and slippery with the blood of Enrico’s sister, Señora Marianna Maria Dolores Rodríguez de Pellano, who had been the housekeeper.

  ‘‘Her murder was unnecessary,’’ el Teniente Coronel Alejandro Bernardo Martín explained at the time. (He’d come to the murder scene to see how it affected Argentine security, not to investigate the crime.)

  ‘‘But on the other hand,’’ Martín added, ‘‘from the viewpoint of the would-be assassins, it was the correct thing to do. The dead make terrible witnesses, and the government can only execute murderers once.’’

  A voice interrupted these thoughts.

  ‘‘I am Señora Lopez, Señor Frade. The housekeeper. Can I get you anything?’’

  ‘‘No, thank you. I’m going to go upstairs for a minute, and then I’m going to wait for Enrico in the sitting.’’

  ‘‘I have laid out some things in the sitting for our guest, Señor Frade. If there is something else you would like, just ring. And there is whiskey and ice and soda.’’

  ‘‘Thank you,’’ Clete said, and smiled at her.

  Did she say ‘‘our guest,’’ singular? That’s surprising. I would have thought this place would be full of people for the funeral.

  He rode the elevator to Uncle Willy’s apartment on the top floor. There was evidence that somebody was staying in the room, and it made him a little uncomfortable to be an intruder.

  Screw it. All I’m going to do is check the secret compartment in the desk.

  He walked across the room to the massive desk, and opened the secret compartment without difficulty. There was nothing in it at all.

  Not even Uncle Willy’s naughty pictures.

  Somebody’s been in there. Who? When? And did they find just the dirty slides? Or, presuming it was here, Peter’s father’s letter?

  Damn!

  He got back on the elevator and rode it back to the foyer. When he entered the sitting, he saw that a plate of sandwiches and other finger food h
ad been laid out on a table beside a coffee service and half a dozen bottles of hard liquor.

  He made himself a scotch and soda, looked for and found a cigar in a humidor, and then slipped into an armchair. He looked around the room. There was a change since he had left: The oil portrait of a Thoroughbred was no longer hanging over the fireplace. (Granduncle Guillermo had raised the horse from a colt, and had won a great deal of money on it.) In its place hung a large oil portrait of a beautiful young woman in an evening dress with an infant in her arms. The woman was Señora Elizabeth Ann Howell de Frade, and the infant was her firstborn, Cletus Howell Frade.

  Clete had last seen it hanging in his father’s private library at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

  I wonder why he brought it here?

  Well, it means he came here when I was in the States, which suggests that goddamned letter may be here—or was here—after all.

  He found a match, and was in the slow process of correctly lighting the cigar when the door opened.

  It was Enrico, in a Húsares uniform.

  The bandage on his head is leaking blood. Christ only knows what he looks like under that Student Prince Graustarkian uniform jacket.

  ‘‘Mi Teniente . . .’’

  ‘‘I asked you not to call me that,’’ Clete snapped.

  ‘‘Señor Clete . . .’’

  ‘‘What in the name of God were you thinking riding a horse in your condition?’’

  ‘‘I rode with your father in the cavalry all our lives, Señor Clete. It was my duty to ride with him tonight.’’

  ‘‘And what are you going to do, for Christ’s sake, when I die? Follow me to the cemetery in an airplane?’’

  Not only could Enrico not immediately counter the logic of that remark, but there was a chuckle of appreciation from a previously unseen spectator.

  Clete raised his eyes from his still not fully and properly ignited cigar and saw a tall man in uniform. Not of the Húsares. He didn’t recognize anything about this one except the epaulets, which carried the insignia of a coronel.

  Clete stood up.

  ‘‘According to Enrico, you are quite a soldier yourself, Señor Frade. Therefore, you should know that arguing with a determined Suboficial Mayor is a waste of time and breath. One has the choice of giving in or having him shot.’’

  ‘‘I’m tempted to do the latter,’’ Clete said. ‘‘Or at least to chain him to his bed.’’

  The tall colonel walked to him and put out his hand. ‘‘Perhaps levity is out of place,’’ he said. ‘‘But on the other hand, I’ve heard that laughter often occurs spontaneously when pain is at the point of being unbearable.’’

  ‘‘You have the advantage of me, mi Coronel,’’ Clete said.

  ‘‘Forgive me. But I have heard so much of you over the years, and tonight, from Enrico, that I feel I know you. Your father was my best friend, from our first day at the military academy. My name is Perón, Juan Domingo Per ón.’’

  ‘‘How do you do?’’

  ‘‘I have just, with great embarrassment, realized that I find myself an uninvited guest in your home, Señor Frade.’’

  ‘‘My father’s best friend will always be my honored guest,’’ Clete heard himself say.

  Where the hell is this flowery language coming from? It just pops into my mouth. And not, I don’t think, because I’m speaking Spanish, and not English. I have never been a charmer in either language.

  He turned to Enrico.

  ‘‘Take off your jacket and sit down,’’ he ordered, pointing to a chair.

  ‘‘Señor Clete?’’

  ‘‘You heard me,’’ Clete said. He walked to the pull cord and jerked on it. When the housekeeper appeared a moment later, Enrico, with some difficulty, was still in the process of taking off his tunic.

  She sucked in her breath when she saw Enrico’s blood-stained undershirt.

  ‘‘I’m going to need bandages, and tape, and cotton wool, and alcohol, or some other antiseptic,’’ Clete said.

  "Sí, Señor,’’ she said, and quickly left the room.

  ‘‘What I should do, Enrico, is call for an ambulance and send you back to the hospital.’’

  ‘‘I am all right, Señor Clete.’’

  Clete looked at him, felt a wave of emotion for Enrico’s dedication to his father, and went to the whiskey bottles, poured an inch and a half in a glass, and handed it to him.

  ‘‘With a little luck, you’ll choke to death on this, and I won’t have to worry about you anymore,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Gracias, Señor Clete,’’ Enrico said, and added: ‘‘I saw you outside Our Lady of Pilar.’’

  ‘‘You’re lucky I didn’t see you,’’ Clete said.

  The housekeeper and one of the maids appeared with what Clete had asked for.

  Clete unwrapped the bandage on Enrico’s head. Dried blood had glued it to his skin. After some thought, Clete decided it would hurt him less to jerk it off than to pull it. He did so. Enrico winced but made no sound.

  He winced again as Clete mopped at the blood with alcohol-soaked cotton wool. It wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be. The stitches sewing the wound together had not pulled loose. The wound itself, as Enrico had told him in the hospital, was actually a half-inch-wide, two-inch-long canal gouged out of his flesh. He washed it carefully, then applied a fresh bandage.

  ‘‘You have done that before,’’ el Coronel Perón said as Clete was applying the fresh bandage.

  ‘‘Once or twice,’’ Clete said. ‘‘This is one of those famous wounds—‘another half an inch, and that’s all she wrote, Charley!’ ’’

  ‘‘Excuse me?’’ Perón said.

  ‘‘He’s lucky he’s alive,’’ Clete said. ‘‘Another half an inch, another quarter of an inch . . .’’

  He bent over and looked for a fingerhold on one of the bandages on Enrico’s upper chest. ‘‘On the other hand,’’ he went on, ‘‘the head wound probably kept him alive. It knocked him out, and with all the blood, those murdering bastards thought he was already dead and not worth a round of 00-buck.’’

  He jerked the bandage off. Enrico grunted.

  ‘‘At least the banditos who did this soon paid for it,’’ Perón said. ‘‘Saving yourself and the rest of the family the pain of a trial, and the government the expense.’’

  ‘‘Banditos, my ass,’’ Clete flared, aware that he was now sounding more like himself. ‘‘Assassins is the word, mi Coronel. The fucking Krauts couldn’t get me, so they went after my father and Enrico. And got my father.’’

  There was no reply for a long moment, long enough for Clete to finish washing Enrico’s wound and to turn to find a fresh bandage.

  ‘‘By ‘Krauts’ I presume you mean Germans?’’ Perón asked, somewhat stiffly.

  ‘‘That’s right.’’

  ‘‘Enrico told me that was his belief,’’ Perón said. ‘‘But I am frankly surprised that you give credence to something like that.’’

  ‘‘I believe it because it’s true,’’ Clete said evenly. ‘‘And the reason the bastards are dead, mi Coronel, is because dead people can’t testify about who hired them.’’

  ‘‘Argentina has long been plagued with banditos,’’ Perón said.

  ‘‘These bastards may have been banditos, but they were working for the Germans.’’

  ‘‘Your father was a friend of Germany, Señor Frade. He had many German friends. He was a graduate of the Kriegsschule. ’’

  ‘‘Yeah, well, one of his German friends ordered his assassination. Another of them—or maybe the same sonofabitch —ordered my assassination. That time they got Enrico’s sister, Señora Pellano.’’

  ‘‘In that tragic incident, as I understand it, you killed both of the burglars. Did you do that so they would not be able to testify in court?’’

  What the hell’s the matter with you? You don’t like hearing the truth? Well, fuck you, Colonel!

  Watch your temper, Clete!

  ‘‘I
had to kill one of them,’’ Clete said evenly. ‘‘The second, I am ashamed say, I shot because I lost control of myself when I saw what they had done to Señora Pellano. I now regret that very much. If I hadn’t lost my temper, we could have made the sonofabitch tell us who paid him.’’

  There was another long silence. Perón said nothing at all until Clete had finished replacing all of Enrico’s bandages.

  ‘‘Obviously, Señor Frade,’’ he said finally, ‘‘you believe what you have said. I find it difficult—impossible—to accept. But I will look into the matter, and put the question to rest for all time.’’

  Watch what you say, Clete! Not only was this guy your father’s best friend, but pissing him off isn’t going to accomplish anything.

  ‘‘I would be grateful if you would, mi Coronel,’’ Clete said. ‘‘And I have another service to ask of you.’’

  ‘‘Anything within my power, Señor Frade.’’

  ‘‘Would you see that Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez gets to Our Lady of Pilar tomorrow? By automobile? I will see to it that there are seats with the family for my father’s best friends.’’

  ‘‘Of course.’’

  ‘‘You go to bed, Enrico, and try not to do anything else stupid between now and tomorrow.’’

  "Sí, mi Teniente. Gracias, mi Teniente.’’

  ‘‘If I can’t get you to call me by my name, at least get the rank right,’’ Clete said. ‘‘I was discharged from the Marine Corps as a major.’’

  Clete saw Perón’s eyes light up with that announcement.

  Is that why I said that? So Perón won’t dismiss me as just one more young, and stupid, lieutenant?

  ‘‘You’re very young to have been a mayor,’’ Perón said.

  ‘‘Yeah, well, we were in a war. Promotions come quickly when there’s a war. Enrico, is my Buick drivable?’’

  ‘‘Yes, of course, mi Mayor.’’

  ‘‘I think I’ll take it with me,’’ Clete said. ‘‘I took a Ford station wagon from my father’s house. Do you think one of the men downstairs could drive it back for me? They may need it tomorrow.’’