“That’s a thought,” Clete said.
“And the other is wait until Garcia and Rodríguez return from San Martín de los Andes—the Tenth’s barracks—and hear what they have to say. I am open to suggestion, Don Cletus.”
“I leave the entire matter in your capable hands, General,” Clete said.
“You’re only saying that because you don’t have any better ideas.”
“True. And now my friends and I will return to Casa Montagna and pull some corks. We have earned that. You’re coming for dinner?”
“I promised our Jesuit to meet his plane and take him up there.”
“Then we’ll see you later.”
[FOUR]
The Emergency Room
The Hospital of the Little Sisters of Saint Pilar
Mendoza, Mendoza Province, Argentina
1635 21 October 1945
Mother Superior came into the reception area. The white coat she wore over her habit was heavily bloodstained and so was the surgical mask hanging loosely around her neck.
“I don’t know if it was your intention, Cletus, but they’re all dead,” she announced.
She turned to Second Lieutenant James D. Cronley Jr., pointed to the Thompson he held with the butt resting on his hip, and said, “You can put that down, young man. You’re not going to need it here.”
“All dead?” Cletus repeated.
“All of those nine men . . . the ones in the black overalls,” she amplified. “Plus one of your Húsares.”
“And the others?”
“Your German friend—Dieter? I think you said Dieter was his name—as you saw, he was hit twice, once in the side.” She demonstrated by stabbing at her body with a finger. “And again in the upper right leg.” She demonstrated that again with her finger. “There is considerable muscle damage, but he will live. The second of your Húsares did considerable damage—compound fractures in both areas—to his right arm and wrist when, according to him, he was getting out of his station wagon and slipped.”
“Can I see Dieter?” Frade asked.
“If you want to wait several hours until he recovers from the anesthesia,” Mother Superior said. “But I suggest you go to Casa Montagna and show Dorotea you’re all right. I don’t think she believed me when I told her that you were.”
“Why did you tell her anything, for Christ’s sake?”
“Spare me your blasphemy, please. To answer your question: because I knew word of this would quickly reach the estancia, and I didn’t want her to come down here.”
She turned to Cronley again.
“I asked you to put that down.”
“Sling the Thompson, Jimmy,” Frade ordered. “It’s over.”
“Sorry,” Cronley said.
He turned the submachine gun so that he could check that the safety was on. Because the Thompson fired from an open bolt, he could see that there was a round in the drum magazine, waiting for the bolt to be rammed into the chamber, whereupon the fixed firing pin on the bolt would strike the primer in the cartridge case. This would cause the weapon not only to fire, but to continue firing as long as the trigger was depressed and there were cartridges in the fifty-round drum magazine.
He saw that the little arrow on the side of the receiver pointed to “F”—for Fire—which meant the safety was not on. The Thompson had been ready to fire all along.
What the hell is the matter with me?
I know better than that.
He removed the fifty-round drum magazine from the Thompson, eased the bolt forward onto the empty chamber, reinstalled the magazine, and then slung the weapon on his shoulder.
—
I’m dazed, that’s what’s the matter with me.
What the hell happened?
The last thing I remember was being on my knees in the backseat, so that I could rest my arms on the back of the front seat.
I remember seeing Kilometer Marker 29, and that I was listening to Clete and Dieter talking.
About what? What the hell were they talking about?
And then the windshield blew up.
Windshields. Both of them. The one in front of Clete and the one in front of Dieter.
And Dieter grunted.
And Clete said, “Oh, shit!”
And he slammed on the brakes and started to turn hard left.
Then the station wagon with Clete’s guys slammed into our rear end, spinning us around.
And then we stopped moving, and I realized we were half on our side in a ditch.
And I grabbed the Thompson and opened the door and got out and fell in the ditch.
And then I was running through some kind of a field—a cornfield.
How did I get into that field?
Where did I think I was going?
And then I saw the truck and the bad guys—four, five, six of them—in black coveralls running to it.
And they saw me and shot at me.
With Schmeisser submachine guns.
And I shot back.
Somehow I remembered what that old sergeant had taught me at Fort Knox: Just tap the trigger to get off two or three rounds; if you squeeze the trigger, you won’t be able to hold your aim, and the muzzle will climb and you’ll be shooting at the clouds.
He made me practice until I could do it automatically.
So either I remembered, or it was a Pavlovian reflex or something.
I took down four of the bastards who were shooting at me.
I remember counting the shots, feeling the recoil, hearing the rounds go off.
One Two. One Two Three. One Two. One Two Three.
And I was about to take down another of the bastards but all of a sudden he stopped running and fell forward on his face. And so did the guy next to him.
And then I saw the Húsares, three of them, and realized they had taken down the last two.
Then the truck started to move and two of the Húsares ran to it and fired into the cab and the truck stopped.
One of the Húsares jumped on the running board and pulled the driver out onto the ground. He had to be dead; I could see into his skull.
Clete came running up, his .45 in his hand.
“No wonder I couldn’t find my goddamn Thompson!” he yelled at me.
“Mi Coronel,” another Húsare said, “your brother killed four of the Nazi bastards with the Thompson.”
Clete looked at me and said, “Does that truck run?”
Not “Good for you!” or “Good job!”
Just “Does that truck run?”
“Sí, Don Cletus,” the Húsare said.
“You stay here,” Clete then said, pointing at two of the Húsares. “Search the bodies, collect weapons. Antonio broke his arm. We have to get him and my German friend to the hospital.” He pointed to a third Húsare. “You get in the back of the truck. You can bring it back out here. Keep your eyes open. There may be more of the bastards out there.”
Then he turned to me.
“Get in the truck. In the front.”
I remember that there was blood all over the inside of the truck cab, and some bloody white stuff stuck to the windshield that had to be brain tissue.
I remember that I had to press against the door so that I wouldn’t be sitting in the pool of blood on the seat.
And I remember that the Húsare with the broken arm screamed with pain when they loaded him in the truck.
And that Dieter’s face was white, that he was unconscious, and I thought maybe he was dead—until he groaned.
And I remember starting down the road . . . but that’s all I remember until just now when this nun, or whatever she is—Mother Superior? The head nun?—walked out here.
—
“Thank you, Mother,” Clete said.
“This is how God wants me to spend my life, Cletus. No thanks is required. Now get out of here.”
She went back into the interior of the hospital.
“The question now becomes, Jimmy,” Frade said, “how do we go home? We d
on’t have any wheels.”
“While you were taking a leak, a gendarmerie sergeant came in here. He said whenever we’re ready, he’ll take us to Casa Montagna.”
When they went outside, three gendarmerie pickup trucks—loaded with gendarmes—and General Nervo’s 1942 Buick Roadmaster were waiting for them.
“Sergeant, we can ride in one of the trucks,” Clete said to Nervo’s driver. “Send General Nervo’s car back to him with my respects.”
“With respect, Don Cletus,” the sergeant replied, “General Nervo said that if you give me any trouble about using his car, I am to cut off your fingers with this.”
He held up a massive bolt cutter.
Clete and Jimmy got in the backseat of the Buick.
When they passed Kilometer Marker 29, there was no sign of the shot-up and wrecked station wagons nor any other sign that anything extraordinary had happened there.
[FIVE]
Estancia Don Guillermo
Km 40.4, Provincial Route 60
Mendoza Province, Argentina
1805 21 October 1945
A large delegation of people was waiting for them when the Buick pulled up to Casa Montagna.
“The Family”—Doña Dorotea, holding Master Jorge Howell Frade by the hand; Martha Howell, holding Cletus Howell Frade Jr. in her arms; Beth and Marjorie Howell; and patriarch Cletus Marcus Howell—stood in front. Perhaps twenty Germans, Argentines, and Americans stood in a half circle behind them.
Clete climbed out of the backseat of the Buick, then Jimmy followed.
“Good evening,” Clete said.
“Is that all you have to say, my darling?” Doña Dorotea asked, somewhat coldly.
“Well, Jimmy and I were sort of expecting a brass band. You know, playing”—he sang—“‘the eyes of Texas are upon you . . .’”
“Oh, damn you, Cletus,” Doña Dorotea said as she went to her husband. They embraced.
Martha Howell handed the baby to Marjie and went to Jimmy.
“You get a hug, too, sweetheart,” she said, and embraced him. “You all right?”
“I’m fine, thank you, Miz Howell,” he said.
Marjie, holding the baby, was looking at him.
Not at me. Into me.
“The other hero and I require liquid sustenance,” Clete then announced. “Why don’t we all go in the bar?”
—
“So we took Dieter and Antonio to the hospital,” Clete said, finishing his after-action report as he held up an empty bottle of Don Guillermo Cabernet Sauvignon ’40 to indicate another was required. “Mother Superior says they’re both going to be all right, but neither—especially Dieter—is going to get out of bed for a while.”
“I should have been with you, Don Cletus,” Enrico said.
“We could have used your riot gun, that’s for sure,” Clete said. “What did you learn in San Martín de los Andes?”
“Excuse me,” Cletus Marcus Howell said. “Where was Jimmy when all this was going on? I must have missed something.”
Jimmy shook his head at Clete to ask—tell—him to leave his role out of the narrative.
The request was denied.
“By the time I was able to crawl out of the station wagon,” Clete answered, “Jimmy had stolen my Thompson and was chasing the bad guys through a cornfield. By the time we caught up with them, he’d put four of the bad guys down.”
“By himself?” Marjie asked.
“Yeah, Squirt, by himself,” Clete said. “He really gets a gold star to take home to Mommy.”
“Speaking of that,” Jimmy said, aware that Marjie’s eyes were again looking at him. Into him. “There’s no reason my mother has to hear any of this, is there?”
“Well, I certainly won’t tell her,” Martha said. “And neither will Beth and Marjie.”
“That won’t work, Martha,” the old man said. “Not only do Jimmy’s folks have a right to know something like this happened, but not telling them is tantamount to lying, and I won’t be party to that.”
Martha considered that for a moment.
“You’re right, Dad. And it would eventually come out anyway.” She turned to Jimmy. “And your dad is entitled to be proud of you, sweetheart.”
“Getting back to what you learned in San Martín, Enrico?” Clete asked.
“Suboficial Martinez told me something interesting, Don Cletus,” the old soldier reported. “He said the worst Nazi in the Tenth Mountain is an Irisher.”
“An Irishman,” Colonel Garcia corrected him. “Captain Guillermo O’Reilley . . .”
“Now that is interesting,” Frade said.
“. . . who hates all things British and, by extension, American,” Garcia finished. He then asked, “Why interesting, Cletus?”
“I saw Captain O’Reilley earlier today,” Clete replied. “Nolasco had him handcuffed to a table in the gendarmerie barracks asking him why he and his men were so interested in Estancia Guillermo and the people going back and forth to it.”
“Presumably, that was before you were attacked?” General Martín asked.
Frade nodded.
“After Rodríguez told me what his friend told him about O’Reilley,” Colonel Garcia said, “I asked to see him. El Coronel Klausberger told me that O’Reilley was on a training exercise in the Andes and would not be back until Sunday, if then.”
“That raises the question: Did Klausberger know what O’Reilley was up to?” Martín said. “Or was O’Reilley working on his own? Or for someone else? If so, who?”
“Bernardo,” Frade said, “Nervo thinks O’Reilley—who kept insisting that the gendarmes had no authority over him and his men, and demanded that they be released—is confident that someone with power is covering his ass. He refused to answer Nolasco’s questions.”
“What’s Nervo going to do with him? And where is Nervo, by the way?”
“The last I heard he was going to see if whoever sent O’Reilley snooping was going to send someone looking for him,” Frade said. “When we left them, he said that after he picked up Father Welner, he would come up here for dinner. Welner was at the hospital, deciding what to do with the bodies.”
“No identification on them, I presume?” Martín asked.
“None,” Frade replied. “The coveralls they were wearing were Argentine. They all had Schmeissers, but that doesn’t prove they were SS. It doesn’t even prove they were German.”
Martín went off on a tangent: “When do you expect to hear from the convoy you sent to Estancia Condor?”
“Not until they get there. Making en route reports would involve stopping to set up the Collins and the SIGABA—that’d take an hour, at least—and the information we need is that they’re at Estancia Condor, not where they are on a road in Patagonia.”
“So when do you expect to hear from them?”
“Probably not until the morning, if then.”
“So we have to wait for that.”
“Everything depends on that,” Frade said. “By morning, too, with a little luck, Dieter—von und zu Aschenburg—should be awake enough to make sense of what Grüner has learned about landing airplanes down there.”
“So we have to wait,” Martín repeated. “It has been my experience over the years that Inspector General Nervo does not take kindly to suggestions from me. Nevertheless, I’m going to make one: that as soon as he gets his car back, he put the Irish Nazi into it and bring him here. Maybe Captain O’Reilley will answer questions put to him by an Ejército Argentino general de brigada.” He turned to Garcia. “See if you can get him on the phone.”
—
Two minutes later, Coronel Garcia put the handset of the telephone back in the base, and with a smile reported on his conversation with Inspector General Nervo.
“The general tells me he is, as usual, two steps in front of General Martín. At the moment, Captain O’Reilley is being given a tour of Mendoza in a gendarmerie convoy, with their sirens screaming and lights flashing. He is sitting strapped to a
chair in the bed of a gendarmerie pickup truck. General Nervo wants to make sure that whoever Klausberger has in Mendoza reporting to him learns that the gendarmerie has O’Reilley. When the tour of the city is over, the convoy will pick up Nervo and Nolasco and bring them here—with O’Reilley still strapped in the chair in the back of the truck in case Klausberger has other people watching Route 60.”
“Nervo seems pretty sure that Klausberger is the villain,” Frade said.
“So am I,” Martín said. “What I would really like to do is get Captain O’Reilley to admit (a) that he knew about the shooters who tried to kill our Cletus, (b) that he knew they were SS, and (c)—or maybe (c) and (d)—that not only did Klausberger know, but he issued the order. We could go to President Farrell and el Coronel Perón with that.
“The attempt on our Cletus’s life is going to infuriate Perón, as he will see it as an attack—another attack—on him. And while Farrell and Perón are dealing with el Coronel Klausberger, we can quietly deal with what has to be done in the South.”
“Yeah,” Clete said thoughtfully.
“I think I could be of service in that regard,” von Dattenberg said. “If there was some way I could get down there.”
“Oddly enough,” Frade said, “I was just thinking about that.”
“And?”
“When I make up my mind, you’ll be the first to know. Or maybe the second. Or third . . .”
There was laughter.
“. . . But right now,” Frade went on, “having just had a whiff of myself, I’m going to have a shower.”
[SIX]
Jimmy Cronley had been in his room not quite a minute—just enough time for him to take off his jacket—when Cletus Frade came in without knocking.
“I decided I might as well tell you this now,” Clete said, “to give you time to get used to it.”
“Used to what?”
“Dieter obviously can’t fly, so you’re probably going to have to.”
“No.”
“Yeah, Jimmy.”
“Fly what?”
“Maybe the Cub down south. Maybe one of the Lodestars. It depends on how this develops.”
Empire and Honor Page 49
