Secret Honor

by W. E. B Griffin

  “You’re at the end of the corridor to the right,” Inge said, gesturing up the stairs.

  “Thank you,” he said, and extended the Chevrolet keys to her.

  She put them in her purse, then pointed to a door. “In there,” she said.

  It was the sitting. On a heavy wooden table against one wall was an array of bottles.

  “What’s your pleasure, Señor?” Inge said in her terrible Spanish. “We have English—scotch—and German, and native, and even some American. The local brandy’s not at all bad.”

  “Sounds fine,” Peter said.

  “Then that’s what we’ll have,” she said, and poured stiff drinks into short, squarish glasses. She handed him his drink and tapped her glass against it. “Prosit, Schatzie,” she said.

  “Prosit, Inge,” he said, and took a swallow.

  “Don’t look so worried,” she said, switching to German, when she had taken a healthy swallow. “I’m calm. OK?”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened on that beach? I’ve tried to get Werner to tell me, but he says he doesn’t really know. I don’t know whether he really doesn’t know, or considers it a state secret.”

  “I have the feeling he knows,” Peter said. “Ambassador Schulker knows, in some detail.”

  “So tell me. I want to know what he’s facing.”

  “A little later,” Peter said. “What I need right now is the toilet, and then a shower.”

  She looked into his eyes, then nodded. “I was in there this morning,” she said. “So I know there’s soap and towels.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and drained his glass. She did the same thing, then turned to the table to pour herself another.

  When he reached his room, the maid had just finished unpacking his satchel; she then informed him that, with his permission, she would touch up his uniform with an iron.

  He thanked her, then waited for her to leave.

  He locked the door after her, then undressed and took a shower. When he came out of the bathroom, naked, toweling his hair, to fetch his change of linens, Inge was in the bedroom, wearing a blue dressing gown.

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that what we’re going to do? Play ‘You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine’? I loved playing that when I was a little girl.”

  She pulled her dressing gown open and then closed it, but not before he saw that she was naked under it.

  “This is not smart, Inge,” Peter said, quickly wrapping the towel around his waist. “What if he comes home?”

  “First he’s going to do whatever he has to do at the embassy, and then he’s going to go weep on his lover’s manly chest,” she said. “He won’t be home until very late. Not before ten or eleven, anyway. Maybe he won’t come home at all. He knows how to find Brazil, too.”

  “I can’t believe you’re serious.”

  “Whatever Werner is, he’s not stupid,” she said. “One of his options is to obey his orders and go to Berlin. His problem there is that Goltz is dead, which means he doesn’t know who now has his Kripo dossier”—Kriminalpolizei, the Criminal Police division of the Gestapo—“the one with all those pictures of him cavorting naked with handsome boys. If that’s in the wrong hands, he’s liable to be arrested the moment he steps off the plane. And that’s even before they get around to asking what happened in Argentina. His other option is to empty the ‘special’ bank account—and the last time I looked, there was almost a quarter of a million American dollars in it—and put that money somewhere safe, go to Brazil, turn himself in to the Brazilians, or maybe even the Americans, and declare that he is now, after prayerful thought, really opposed to that terrible Adolf Hitler.”

  Christ, that possibility never entered my mind!

  “You think that’s possible, Inge?”

  “Yes, of course it’s possible. You are really terribly naïve, Peter.”

  “I suppose I am,” he said.

  “On the other hand, among his other vices, he’s both a gambler and greedy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s going to be a lot more money in that special account, and he knows it. The more there is, the larger his share. If he went to Brazil, he would have to worry for the rest of his life that the SS would come after him. He may decide to gamble on going to Germany and chancing that his dossier didn’t fall into the wrong hands, and that he can credibly deny knowledge of what went wrong in Argentina. Do you think he had anything to do with what happened there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The problem with that, of course, is that if he loses, I lose too. On the other hand, I have access to the special account, and can probably make it to Brazil—certainly, if you fly us there in your airplane—and be an even more convincing anti-Nazi than he would.”

  “I had nothing to do with what happened on the beach—” Peter said.

  “Which brings us back to ‘what did happen on the beach?’” she interrupted.

  “—and if I took you to Brazil, my father would wind up in Sachsenhausen. I can’t do that, Inge.”

  “No, of course not,” she said sarcastically. “I keep forgetting you are a gentleman of honor.”

  “Your husband is too valuable to this ransom operation for anyone to decide he has to go, without damned good reason,” Peter said. “And if he doesn’t know anything about what happened on the beach, there is no good reason.”

  “Possibly,” she said.

  “I think your going to Brazil would be a mistake—at least until you know for certain he’s in some sort of trouble.”

  “How would I know if he was in trouble, with him in Berlin and me here?”

  “If someone tried to take control of the special account, or if you were told to come home.”

  “Home? I don’t have a home, or a family, Peter, thanks to the Eighth United States Air Force,” she said.

  “You can always go to Brazil later,” he said.

  “This profound conversation is not what I had in mind when I climbed from my balcony to yours,” she said.

  “It’s not? Well, what was on your mind, Inge?” he asked innocently.

  She chuckled deep in her throat and walked to him. “You have no idea?” she asked.

  “Not the foggiest.”

  She put her hand under the towel around his waist. “The hell you don’t,” she cried triumphantly. “Or are you going to try to tell me it’s always in that condition?”

  “Of course. I’m a Luftwaffe fighter pilot.”

  She jerked the towel loose and let it fall to the floor. Then, shrugging out of the blue dressing gown, she dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth.

  Peter had a sudden mental image of Alicia, and with a massive effort forced it from his mind.

  If Inge even suspected someone like Alicia was in my life, she would already be in Brazil. As far as she’s concerned, I am the only friend she has in South America. And I probably am. If she went to Brazil, that would be the end of the only window we have onto this obscene ransoming operation. I have to keep her here.

  What that means is that I am betraying two women at the same time.

  Oh, you’re really an officer and a gentleman, Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein!

  “Ouch!”

  Inge looked up at him. “Sorry, darling,” she said. “The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt him, at least before he’s done his duty.”

  IX

  [ONE]

  Restaurant Bernardo

  La Rambla

  Montevideo, Uruguay

  2210 2 May 1943

  During the course of their long and exhausting—though pleasurable—afternoon together, Peter had many occasions to wonder, somewhat unkindly, if Inge was one of those ins
atiable females young men who don’t know any better dream of finding. After actually finding one himself in Spain—or rather, after she had found him—he came to realize the error behind that fantasy. Two weeks into the relationship he actually began to dread her apartment (after two nights he had unwisely moved in, or she had moved him)—knowing that before he could even take a drink, or a cup of coffee, he was expected to prove yet again the legendary virility of Luftwaffe fighter pilots.

  Inge was not quite in that league, he had to admit. It was in fact likely that she was simply taking advantage of the opportunity his presence presented. Her husband was totally uninterested in the gentle sex, and Inge had normal female hungers. And it was also possible that her enthusiasm was at least partially feigned and intended to keep him in line. Inge knew all about using sex to get what she wanted from men.

  Peter and Inge had first met in Berlin during a five-day leave after service in France and before assuming command of Jagdstaffel 232, which was stationed outside Berlin. Inge herself had been stationed in the lobby bar in the Hotel am Zoo, one of those women who seemed to regard taking to bed senior officers or dashing young Luftwaffe fighter pilots as their contribution to the war effort. They were not technically prostitutes, but if there were presents, or “loans,” so much the better.

  When he saw Inge back then looking at him over the edge of her Champagne glass, he decided that the long-legged blond beauty was going to be God’s reward to a very tired fighter pilot who had done his duty for the Fatherland.

  Two hours later, they were in a suite overlooking the lake in the Hotel am Wansee. And for two days they left the bed only to eat room-service meals, meet calls of nature, and shower.

  Sometime during their licentious bacchanalia, she offered her hard-luck story—her family home destroyed in an air raid, the determination of the authorities to employ her in a war industry—a ghastly plan, yet one she might be forced into, unless she could find an apartment in Berlin, which was a difficult proposition—by which she meant expensive—because she didn’t have permission to reside in Berlin, and would have to find a place on the black market.

  At the time, Peter was reasonably convinced that he was running out of his allotted time in this world. The day before arriving in Berlin, he’d encountered a P-51 Mustang over the English Channel whose pilot was just as good as he was. At the time, he was too busy to be afraid, and fortunately, the dogfight ended in a draw: When Peter came out of the cloud where he’d sought a few seconds’ refuge, the Mustang was nowhere in sight.

  But afterward, in the air, and that night, and on the train to Berlin, he had been forced to conclude that a number of Allied pilots were just as good as he was, and flying aircraft just as good as his Messerschmitt or the Focke-Wulf he would be flying in his new squadron. It was only a matter of time before he ran into a better pilot, or made a mistake, or was just unlucky, and it would be Sorry, your number came up. You lasted longer than most, but sooner or later, everybody’s number comes up. Auf Wiedersehen, Hans-Peter von Wachtstein!

  Inge’s hard-luck story was in fact better than most—there was neither a sick mother nor a crippled little sister involved—and she had certainly been splendid in bed, so he wrote her a check. “A little loan,” he said.

  “I will repay you as soon as I can,” she said.

  And when their four days was over, he promptly forgot Inge, the loan, and even her name, although her incredible legs and the smell of her fresh from a shower remained for some time in his mind.

  The next time he saw her was in Uruguay.

  Peter had flown SS-Standartenführer Josef Luther Goltz there in the Storch to see his man von Tresmarck in Montevideo on behalf of his secret mission to provide an “insurance” refuge for high-ranking Nazis; and Inge, now Frau Sturmbannführer von Tresmarck, had been at the airport to meet them.

  She was predictably glad to see him, and proved it that same night by coming to his room in the Casino Hotel in Carrasco. There she told him the story of her recent life since their four days together:

  She had married a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer named Erich Kolbermann, and was widowed when he was killed at Stalingrad. She had then married von Tresmarck, of the Sicherheitsdienst.

  “He needed a wife, and I would have married a gorilla to get out of Berlin,” Inge reported matter-of-factly.

  “He needed a wife?”

  “Didn’t Goltz tell you? You mean you couldn’t tell the way he looked at you? It was either marry me or pink triangles and Sachsenhausen. That’s how Goltz knows he can trust him.”

  “I knew there was someone like that here,” Peter lied quickly. “But I didn’t think he’d be married to you.”

  Five minutes later, Inge blurted out Goltz’s other and far more secret mission in Argentina and Uruguay (under the presumption that Peter was as concerned with self-preservation as she herself was, that he had cleverly managed to get himself out of Germany, and that because he was now traveling around with Goltz, he was part of it). For a price, she explained, a stiff price, paid to von Tresmarck in Montevideo, a group of SS officers led by Goltz would arrange the release of Jews from certain concentration camps, and their safe passage though Spain to Argentina and Uruguay.

  Peter reacted to Inge’s revelation with shocked disbelief, for it was the first he’d heard about the ransom operation. And this terrified her. At which point she explained—and he believed—that if this came to the attention of the wrong people in Germany, Goltz, her husband, and everyone else in the know (e.g. Inge herself) would almost surely be shot or sent to a concentration camp.

  Under these circumstances, Goltz and von Tresmarck were perfectly willing to kill anyone suspected of threatening the operation, or even of knowing too much about it. That, she pointed out, included him.

  He promised her his silence.

  Shortly afterward, Cletus Frade told Peter that one of his OSS agents had been brutally murdered in Montevideo. The man’s name was Ettinger, a German Jew. While nosing around the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, he had picked up information about some kind of ransoming operation involving concentration-camp inmates. Though he himself did not give the story much credence, Frade had nevertheless reported it to Washington, where there was immediate, almost excited, interest. Ettinger had then gone to Montevideo to see what else he could find out, and had been murdered there.

  When Clete then asked Peter if he knew anything about a ransom operation involving the German Embassy in Montevideo, Peter felt no compunction about telling him everything he’d learned from Inge, as well as everything else he had guessed about the operation. He also agreed to see what more he could find out. There was no question of treason here, no question of honor. Goltz and his ilk had no idea what honor was. And if the OSS had learned of the operation through their own sources, Inge could credibly deny leaking the secret.

  He had not, of course, told Inge anything about his relationship with Cletus Frade. That made it entirely possible that her enthusiasm in bed was to insure his keeping his mouth shut.

  For all of these reasons, but most of all because he needed a rest, Peter insisted—over Inge’s objections—on dinner out. And so there they were at the Restaurant Bernardo.

  “That’s a lovely suit,” Inge said, pausing while the tail-coated waiter refilled her wineglass. “New, isn’t it? You got it here? In Buenos Aires?”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Yes, it’s new. I found a very nice tailor.”

  “And nice wool. And no ration coupon, right? They have so much wool here, they practically give it away.”

  “And the same can be said for the beef,” he said, putting his knife to a large, perfectly broiled Bife lomo. “I was thinking a moment ago how much a meal like this costs in Berlin.”

  “A fortune,” she said matter-of-factly. “But that won’t bother you, will it? You’re rich.”

  “Wha
tever gave you that idea?”

  “You remember Oscar, the bartender at the am Zoo?”

  He shook his head, “no.”

  “Tiny little man, with a head as bald as a baby’s bottom?”

  He vaguely remembered a very small, bald bartender. “What about him?”

  “I asked him about you,” she said. “When I first saw you.”

  “And?”

  “He told me who you are,” she said. “A von Wachtstein. More important, the only son of Generalleutnant Graf von Wachtstein, who will one day be the Graf, and come into the von Wachtstein estates in Pomerania, including Schloss Wachtstein, one of the nicest castles in Pomerania.”

  “He knew me?”

  “That’s his business,” she said. “He’s a terrible snob.”

  “And until this moment,” Peter said, “I thought it was love at first sight.”

  “That, too.” She giggled. “But it’s good for a girl to know who she’s meeting before she meets him. You can understand that.”

  “And how did you meet your late husband—what was his name?”

  “Erich.” she said. “Obersturmbannführer der Waffen-SS Erich Kolbermann. You would have liked him, Peter.”

  “You met him in the am Zoo? The bartender told you who he was?”

  “Actually, it was the Adlon,” she said, either not catching the sarcasm or choosing to ignore it. “Heine, the bartender there, told me that poor Erich—whose family owns a shipyard in Bremen—had arrived from the Eastern front on home leave two days after his wife and children were killed in an air raid.”

  “The poor bastard!”

  “And I thought the least I could do was offer him what solace I could,” she said.

  “Like marrying him?”

  “That was, honestly, darling, his idea.”

  “And when he proposed, it took you all of ten seconds to make up your mind, right?”

  “Closer to fifteen,” she said, chuckling. “I didn’t want to appear too eager.”