Honor Bound

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Something is wrong?” his father asked.

  “I need the fire extinguisher, Dad,” Clete said. “I’m about to start it up. What happened to el Capitán Delgano?”

  “That is the first time you have ever called me that,” his father said.

  Christ, he looks as if he’s going to cry again!

  He was touched by his father’s emotion, and felt tightness in his throat. And his own eyes grew moist. Jesus.

  As if the display of emotion embarrassed him, Frade looked around for Delgano.

  “He probably had to relieve himself,” he announced, and then indignantly, “He should have waited for you.”

  “No problem, Dad. All you have to do is stand there while I start the engine, and give it a shot if it catches fire.”

  It was immediately evident that el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade had no idea where he was to stand, or for that matter, how to operate the extinguisher.

  Clete conducted a quick course in fire-extinguisher operation during aircraft engine start, then climbed back into the Beechcraft, strapped himself in, and slid the pilot’s window open.

  “Clear!”

  “Clear!” his father responded, with obviously no idea what he was saying.

  Clete turned on the MAIN switch, then pushed ENGINE PRIME, and finally ENGINE START.

  The engine coughed to life on the first try, and he saw his father smile triumphantly at Claudia, who had come to the airstrip from the house to watch him. Clete looked at her and gave her a thumbs-up. She crossed herself but smiled, making it a joke.

  As the needles came off the peg, he removed the brakes, checked the wind sock, and began to taxi to the gravel strip, then down it. By the time he had turned it around, everything was in the green.

  “Engage brain before beginning takeoff roll,” he said aloud, and shoved the throttle forward.

  At just about the moment the airspeed indicator began operating, indicating forty, he felt life come into the wheel. The tail wheel lifted off. He held it on the ground, deciding it would take off at sixty or seventy. At sixty, it lifted into the air of its own accord. He eased back on the wheel and saw the ground drop away.

  Claudia was waving cheerfully at him.

  He put it into a shallow climb to the north, in the direction of Estancia Santa Catharina and Samborombón Bay. When he reached 4,000 feet, he played with it a little—more than he felt he could do with Delgano sitting beside him—to see how it flew. It wasn’t a Wildcat, but it was a damned nice little airplane.

  He found Claudia’s estancia and landing strip without trouble. Giving in to the impulse, he made a low-level pass over it, rocking the wings as he did so. So far as he could tell, this dazzling display of airmanship went wholly unnoticed.

  He looked at the elapsed time function on his Hamilton, and saw that it had taken him fifteen minutes to reach the estancia.

  If I’m gone more than an hour, they will start shitting bricks. So I have to be back in forty-five minutes. Half of forty-five is twenty-two thirty. I can fly over the Bay for twenty-two thirty. If I can’t find the Reine de la Mer in twenty-two thirty, I’ll have to quit.

  Eighteen minutes later, ten minutes after crossing the coastline, all alone on a vast expanse of bay, he spotted a ship dead in the water. He put the Beechcraft in a shallow descent from 5,000 feet, taking it right down to the waves. He retarded the throttle—watch it, Clete, you don’t want to stall it into the drink—and approached her from the stern. Her sternboard had a legend, which at first he couldn’t see.

  He flew closer.

  Don’t run into the sonofabitch!

  A flag was on her stern pole. The wind was such that it was flapping, fully extended. Surprising him, he recognized it as Portuguese from one of the briefings Adams had given them in New Orleans.

  And then the letters on her sternboard came into focus: REINE DE LA MER—LISBOA.

  There you are, you sonofabitch!

  He banked sharply to pass her on her port side, and waved cheerfully as he flew past.

  Twenty crewmen waved cheerfully back, most of them standing beside canvas-draped objects that he strongly suspected were searchlights and machine-gun mounts.

  He put the Beechcraft into a shallow turning climb until he was on a heading for Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

  No wonder those other guys got themselves killed. There is no way to approach a ship like that, at anchor twenty miles off shore, without being detected. Certainly not in the daytime. And even at night if you rowed out there, so they wouldn’t hear the sound of your engines, if that captain knows shit from shinola, he’s going to use his searchlights every couple of minutes to see what else is floating around out there.

  So how do we fix explosives to her hull?

  It can’t be done, not the way we’ve planned. I’ll have to come up with something else.

  What? Find some excuse to bring a boat alongside and have Tony fix his charges while I go on board and…

  And what?

  The last team was probably eliminated trying something just like that.

  By air?

  Not with this airplane, certainly. Not even with a Wildcat. You can’t take out something that large with .50-caliber machine guns. I know that for a fact. And that ship has more antiaircraft weaponry on it than any Jap freighter I ever strafed.

  What the hell do I do now?

  [TWO]

  Estancia Santa Catharina

  Buenos Aires Province

  1425 15 December 1942

  “Take a good look, my darlings,” Claudia said to the two very beautiful, black-haired, stylishly dressed young women who came out to the Beechcraft as Clete was tying it down, “this is Cletus. El Coronel has decided that Cletus will marry one of you. Which of you will have him?”

  “I said nothing of the kind,” el Coronel protested as the girls gave him their cheeks to be kissed.

  The younger girl—she looked about twenty—blushed, giggled, and smiled. The other girl, who looked several years older, was obviously not amused.

  “How do you do?” she said in English. “I have seen your pictures, of course. I am Isabela Carzino-Cormano. I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  It sure doesn’t sound like it.

  “I am overwhelmed,” Clete said. “How soon do you think we can schedule the wedding?”

  “I see that you take after Uncle…your father,” Alicia, the younger one, said with a giggle.

  Isabela treated both of them to an icy smile.

  They started to walk toward the ranch house.

  “Somehow, I don’t think she intended that as a compliment,” Claudia said. “You may have to settle for Alicia.”

  “Can’t I have both?”

  “That’s an idea,” el Coronel said. “That is an American custom. The Mormons in Utah can have as many wives as they wish.”

  “Really?” Alicia asked. “That’s terrible!”

  “A man must be prepared to make many sacrifices in life,” el Coronel said. “Two wives, four, six…whatever duty requires.”

  “Now, I am not amused,” Claudia said. “Jorge, you always go too far!”

  She said that because she’s pissed that he hasn’t proposed marriage to her. Why not? I have no idea.

  The faces of Claudia’s daughters showed that they had made the same interpretation.

  “I saw you, Cletus,” Alicia changed the subject quickly, “at the English Tennis Club, playing with Dorotea Mallín.”

  “If you two play hard to get,” el Coronel said, “I am sure that Dorotea would be happy to have him.”

  “She’s only a kid, Dad,” Clete blurted.

  “She’s what, eighteen, nineteen years old,” his father said. “That’s old enough.”

  “And she looked at him as if he gives milk,” Alicia said. “Everybody at the English was talking.”

  “That is quite enough!” Claudia Carzino-Cormano flared. “You’re embarrassing Cletus. That includes you, Jorge!”

&nb
sp; El Coronel did not seem at all repentant, but he moved to another subject.

  “We have decided, your mother and I, about the travel arrangements for tomorrow,” he announced to the girls, then stopped. “Why don’t we go into the house? I don’t suppose that you have any champagne chilled, Claudia?”

  “You can have coffee. You have had quite enough champagne.”

  “A few glasses…”

  “Most of two bottles. You convinced yourself that Cletus wrecked the airplane, and that it was your fault. Coffee!”

  “As you wish,” Frade said, and marched across the verandah as if he owned it, to sit in a leather armchair. To judge by the cigar humidor and ashtray on a table beside it, he had used the chair before. He opened the humidor, extended it to Clete, who took one of the large black cigars inside.

  “I was not at all concerned with Cletus’s ability to fly the airplane. I thought perhaps he had mechanical difficulties, or ran out of fuel.”

  “Or became lost, or the wings or the engine fell off. You have an active imagination, precioso, and it was running at full speed.”

  “I was speaking of the travel arrangements for tomorrow,” el Coronel said, changing the subject. Again he addressed Isabela and Alicia. “This afternoon, Enrico will come here in the station wagon for the luggage. He and Señora Pellano will carry it to my house, where she will arrange things for your stay. In the morning, your mother and I will drive to Buenos Aires in my Horche, and you will go with Cletus in his Buick. You will have to direct him to my house, as he does not know the way.”

  “Is he going to the funeral?” Isabela asked, surprised. Unpleasantly surprised, it was immediately clear.

  “Of course he is,” Claudia Carzino-Cormano said quickly, and a little sharply. “Jorge was his cousin.”

  “If I have a choice in the matter, I would prefer to drive into Buenos Aires this afternoon with Enrico in the station wagon,” Isabela said.

  What did I ever do to you, honey? As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to go to the goddamned funeral in the first place, and so far as I’m concerned, you can walk to Buenos Aires.

  “You will not go with Enrico and Señora Pellano in the station wagon,” her mother said flatly. “It would be unseemly for Cletus and Alicia to travel alone.”

  “And it won’t be unseemly for him to be at the funeral?”

  “You are excused, Isabela,” Claudia Carzino-Cormano said furiously.

  Claudia waited until the sound of Isabela’s high heels on the tile floor of the house had died.

  “I’m am so sorry, Cletus,” she said. “I apologize.”

  “Did I somehow give offense?”

  “She was close to Jorge,” Claudia said.

  “Not really,” Alicia added. “But now that he’s dead, she’s convinced herself she was in love with him.”

  Her mother looked angrily at her.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “It’s true. She’d wear widow’s black if she thought she could get away with it. It draws attention to her.”

  Claudia glowered at her, then shrugged her shoulders and let the remark go unchallenged.

  “I always thought that Isabela and Jorge…” el Coronel said, leaving the rest unsaid. “But that certainly doesn’t give her the right to treat Cletus as if…as if he’s an enemy officer.”

  “Jorge, she wasn’t doing that at all!” Claudia said.

  “Why else would she feel it was unseemly for Cletus to be at Jorge’s funeral?”

  “Because she is a fool, Uncle Jorge,” Alicia said.

  “Alicia, that’s the last word I want to hear from you,” Claudia said angrily, and turned to el Coronel. “Honey,” she said almost plaintively, “I’ll speak to her. I’ll make sure she understands that it was the anti-Christ communists who killed Jorge, not the Americans.”

  While he was flying an airplane for the Germans, who are murdering hundreds of thousands of women and children.

  “Please do,” Frade said, not pleasantly. “I think an apology to Cletus is in order.”

  That was not a suggestion from a visitor. Obviously, my father has the same kind of authority in this house as Claudia does in his. I wonder why he never married her. He said she was a widow.

  “No apology is necessary,” Clete said. “Except from me. I’m sorry to be a source of unpleasantness, Claudia.”

  “Oh, honey, you’re not,” Claudia said, and kissed him. “You’re a source of joy.”

  “Speak to her,” el Coronel Frade said.

  “You mean right now?” Claudia asked.

  “Yes, I mean right now,” el Coronel said. There was a tone of command in his voice, and Claudia reacted to it.

  “Excuse me, please, Cletus,” she said, and went in the house.

  “Alicia,” el Coronel Frade ordered, “would you have someone bring us some champagne?”

  “Do I get any of it?”

  “If you can drink it before your mother comes back,” Frade said with a smile.

  “Sounds fair enough,” Alicia said, and went quickly into the house.

  Now that was a father talking to his daughter, and vice versa. What the hell is their relationship?

  “I’m sorry about this, Cletus,” el Coronel said.

  “No problem, Dad. I was raised with Uncle Jim’s girls. They drove both of us crazy, too.”

  [THREE]

  The Plaza Hotel Bar

  Buenos Aires

  1710 15 December 1942

  Señor Enrico Mallín, with Señorita Maria-Teresa Alberghoni on his arm, entered the bar via the street entrance rather than through the lobby. They had just come from her apartment.

  In her apartment earlier, watching her postcoital ablutions through the glass wall of her shower, and then watching her dress, he told himself she was not only an exquisitely lovely young woman, but a sweet and gentle one as well, worth every peso she cost him.

  It was not impossible, he also told himself, that she was beginning to love him for himself—she certainly acted like it in bed. Perhaps she was not submitting to his attentions solely because of the allowance he gave her, and the apartment, and his guarantee of her father’s loan at the Anglo-Argentinean Bank. He was flattered by such thoughts, of course, but he was at the same time aware that they were not without a certain risk…if she let her emotions get out of control, for example.

  An arrangement was an arrangement. And its obligations and limitations had to be mutually understood between the parties. She would never become more than his Miña, and he would never be more than her good friend, her protector. She was expected to be absolutely faithful to her good friend—the very idea of another man touching Maria-Teresa, those exquisite breasts, those soft, splendid thighs, was distasteful. And he was expected to be faithful to her. Excepting of course, vis-à-vis his wife.

  The relationship was an old—he hesitated to use the word “sacred”—Buenos Aires custom. His father had a Miña; his grandfather had a Miña; and most of the gentlemen of his professional and social acquaintance had Miñas. When he was a young man, his father explained to him the roots of the custom: It first developed in the olden days, when marriages were arranged with land and property, not love, as the deciding factor, and a man could not be expected to find sexual satisfaction with a woman who might have brought 50,000 hectares as her dowry but was as ugly as a horse.

  In the olden days, a gentleman was expected to provide for the fruit of any such arrangement. And he was ostracized from polite society if he failed to do so. Some of the affluent Buenos Aires families (those who were perhaps a little vague about their lineage) could often trace their good fortune back to a greatgrandmother or a great-great-grandmother who had an arrangement with a gentleman of wealth and position.

  Just before the turn of the century, when Queen Victoria was on the British throne, the custom was buttressed by Queen Victoria’s notion—shamelessly aped by Argentine society, as were other things British in those days—that ladies could ha
ve no interest in the sexual act save reproduction. A man, a real man, needed more than a woman who offered him her body only infrequently and with absurd limitations on what he might do with it.

  In exchange for certain considerations, a Miña well understood her sexual role.

  In more recent times, the necessity for permanence in the relationship between a Miña and her good friend died out. This was because the efficacy of modern birth-control methods obviated the problem of children. On more than one occasion, however, Enrico Mallín considered giving Maria-Teresa a child. He loved his own children, of course, but they had inherited their mother’s English paleness. He thought it might be nice to have a child or two with Maria-Teresa—a child who would have his olive skin and dark eyes, his Spanish blood.

  Of course, on reflection, he realized the foolishness of this notion, and ascribed it to his fascination with her olive skin and dark eyes.

  Because a Miña was not a whore or a prostitute, it would be ungentlemanly to conclude an arrangement with her in such fashion that she was forced into one of those professions afterward. Hence the allowance, at least a part of which the girl was expected to save for a dowry—which she could use after the arrangement came to an end. And hence the note at the Anglo-Argentinean Bank which Enrico had guaranteed for her father’s business. When a Miña had enough money to wish to begin her married future, it was usually time for her good friend to wonder whether the grass might be greener elsewhere.

  Maria-Teresa Alberghoni was Enrico Mallín’s third Miña, and she had been with him for four years. While he couldn’t imagine replacing her, in the back of his mind it seemed to him that their arrangement would doubtless come to an end in another two or three years…though in truth, he didn’t really want to do without Maria-Teresa. The grass is rarely greener than where you are standing.

  Although one of the best in Buenos Aires, the Plaza Hotel is, after all, nothing more than a hotel. A hotel accommodates travelers…or sometimes a man and a woman not married to each other who require a bed behind a locked door.

  Appearances are important. Unless it is for some specific function—such as a ball, or a wedding reception that their husbands are unable to attend—ladies should not risk gossip by being seen in a hotel without their husbands. Specifically, a lady would not think of entering the bar at the Plaza Hotel without her husband; and gentlemen of Enrico Mallín’s social and professional circle had an unspoken agreement never to take their wives to the bar at the Plaza under any circumstances.