Hazardous Duty - PA 8 Page 11

  “And then those friends, without warning, suddenly appeared,” the archbishop said. “And here we are, with the problem solved.”

  The archbishop helped himself to a little more wine, and then said, “What I’m curious about now is your mission here, Colonel Torine. While we eat, could you tell me about that, or does Carlos think that’s none of my business?”

  “I’d like to hear that, too,” Svetlana said.

  “Go ahead, Jake,” Castillo said. “You’re going to have to tell Sweaty sooner or later, and with His Eminence here, you’re probably safe from her otxokee mecto nanara.”

  —

  About three minutes into his explanation, Jake looked at the archbishop and stopped.

  The archbishop’s head was bent over. His eyes were closed, and he was snoring softly.

  “What do I do?” Torine asked.

  “Eat your dinner, my son,” the archimandrite said. “If His Eminence wakes, resume. If he doesn’t, you can tell us at breakfast.”

  The archbishop was still soundly asleep in his chair when the dessert—strawberries in a cream and cognac sauce—was served and consumed.

  After that, everyone but Archimandrite Boris quietly left the room and went to bed.

  IV

  [ONE]

  La Casa en el Bosque

  San Carlos de Bariloche

  Río Negro Province, Argentina

  0600 7 June 2007

  Sweaty woke up, sat up, and shook Charley’s shoulder.

  When he looked up at her, she ordered, “You better go, and quietly, down the corridor to your room.”

  “Like a thief in the night?” Charley responded.

  “I don’t want His Eminence to suspect we’re sleeping together,” she said.

  “His Eminence either suspects we have been sharing this prenuptial couch for some time or is about to proclaim ‘Hallelujah! A second immaculate conception.’”

  “God will punish you for your blasphemy,” Sweaty announced, and, when that triggered something else on her mind, went on: “And don’t try to tell me you didn’t tell His Eminence to go fu—”

  “You heard what he said, my love,” Charley argued.

  “His Eminence said he ‘would remember if you said something like that.’ Not that you didn’t say it. He remembers it all right!”

  “Try to remember that you’re a bride-to-be and an expectant mother, and no longer an SVR podpolkovnik, my love.”

  At that point, Sweaty literally kicked him out of the bed.

  Then, with Max, his 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres, trailing along after him, he went down the corridor to “his room.”

  Charley had “his room” in La Casa en el Bosque from his first visit, which was to say long before Sweaty. Originally, it had then been “the Blue Room,” the one from which he had just been expelled. After Sweaty, in consideration of “what the girls”—Alek’s and Dmitri’s daughters—would think of illicit cohabitation, the Blue Room had become Svetlana’s room, and the not-nearly-as-nice room he walked into now, his.

  “The trouble with getting kicked out of bed at oh-six-hundred, Max,” Charley said as the dog met his eyes and turned his head, “is that I can never get back to sleep. Is it that way with you?”

  There was no question in Charley’s mind that Max understood everything he said to him.

  Without realizing that he was doing so, he had spoken in Hungarian. Max had been born and raised in Budapest, where he had lived with Eric Kocian, publisher of the Budapest edition of the Tages Zeitung.

  Max cocked his head the other way, and then moved it again in what might well have been a nod, signaling that he, too, had trouble getting back to sleep after having been kicked out of bed.

  Eric Kocian had been an eighteen-year-old unteroffizier—corporal—in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Wounded, he had sought shelter in the basement of a ruined building, where he found a seriously wounded oberst—colonel—who he knew would die unless he immediately received medical attention.

  At considerable risk to his own life, Kocian had carried the officer, Oberst Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, through heavy fire to an aid station. While doing so, he was again wounded.

  At the aid station, doctors decided that the Herr Oberst be loaded onto a Junkers JU-88 for shipment out of Stalingrad. And done so immediately, as the Russians were about to take the airfield, after which there would be no more evacuation flights.

  At the airstrip, Oberst von und zu Gossinger refused to allow himself to be loaded aboard “the Aunty Ju” unless Unteroffizier Kocian was allowed to go with him. There was literally no time to argue, and the young unteroffizier, dripping blood from his last wound, was hoisted aboard.

  The aircraft—the last to leave Stalingrad—took off.

  Surprising the medics, Oberst von und zu Gossinger lived and had recovered to the point where he was on active duty when the surrender came. Having found his name on an SS “Exterminate” list, his American captors quickly released him from the POW camp in which he and Kocian—now his orderly—were confined.

  The oberst returned to the rubble of his home and business in Fulda, and Kocian went to Vienna, where he learned his family had been killed in an air raid. Kocian then went to Fulda.

  It became a legend within the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., organization that the type for the first postwar edition of any of the Tages Zeitung newspapers had been set on a Mergenthaler Linotype machine “the Colonel” and “Billy Kocian” had themselves assembled from parts salvaged from machines destroyed in the war.

  Billy Kocian began to resurrect other Tages Zeitung newspapers—starting in Vienna—as the Colonel gave his attention to resurrecting the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., empire in other areas.

  After deciding he had all the Viennese gemütlichkeit he could stomach, Kocian moved to Budapest as soon as the Communists were gone, where he devoted his time to needling the Soviet Union and bureaucrats of all stripes on the pages of the Budapester Tages Zeitung, holding the editors of the seven other Tages Zeitung newspapers to his own high standards, and playing with his Bouvier des Flandres dog, Max.

  Max was really Max IV, the fourth of his line. Billy had acquired Max I after checking into—and finding credible—the legend that a Bouvier des Flandres had bitten off one of Adolf Hitler’s testicles while Der Führer was serving in Belgium during the First World War.

  Max II and Max III had appeared when their predecessors had, for one reason or another, gone to that great fireplug in the sky. Max IV was something special. It was quickly said that Billy Kocian was so enamored of Max IV that the animal could have anything it wanted.

  What Max IV wanted became painfully obvious when the dog scandalized the guests of the luxurious and very proper Danubius Hotel Gellért—where he and Billy lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Danube—by pursuing a German shepherd bitch through the dining room, the lobby, and down into the Roman baths below the hotel, where he worked his lustful way on her for more than two hours.

  As soon as he could, Billy procured suitable female companionship for Max. She was a ninety-something-pound Bouvier, one he named Madchen.

  The Max–Madchen honeymoon lasted until Madchen realized she was in the family way and sensed that Max IV was responsible. Thereafter, she made her desire to painfully terminate his life by castration quite clear whenever Max IV came within twenty feet of her.

  So, what to do? Billy dearly loved Max IV, but he had come to love Madchen, too, and couldn’t find it in his heart to banish her, after what Max IV had done to her.

  The answer came quickly: give Max IV to Karlchen.

  Karlchen was the Colonel’s grandson.

  Karlchen had played with Max I as an infant; they had loved each other at first sight. When Max II had come along, sam
e thing. It was only because of Karlchen’s mother’s awful sickness, her arguments that with the Colonel and her brother gone, and her being sick, she couldn’t care for the dog, that he hadn’t given Max II to Karlchen right then, to take his mind off things.

  But Billy had taken Max II to Rhine-Main airfield to see Karlchen off to the United States just before his mother died. When Billy saw how the boy, crying, had wrapped his arms around the dog, he decided that Max II should go with him.

  That had resulted in a front-page headline by the bastards at the Frankfurter Rundshau: “Tages Zeitung Publishing Empire Chief Jailed for Punching Pan-American Airlines Station Chief Who Refused Passage for Fifty-Kilo Dog.”

  Things were different when Madchen banished Max IV from the canine connubial bed. Karlchen was now not only a man, but in the Colonel’s footsteps, an oberstleutnant in the American Army himself. He denied being an intelligence officer, but Billy had been around armies long enough to know better than that. Run-of-the-mill lieutenant colonels don’t fly themselves around the world in Gulfstream III airplanes.

  The next time Karlchen—now known as Charley—appeared in Budapest, Uncle Billy explained the Max IV–Madchen problem to him. Charley had understood.

  “Let’s see what he does when I tell him to get on the airplane. I’m not going to force him to go.”

  He stood inside the door of the Gulfstream.

  “Hey, Max,” he called in Hungarian. “You want to go to Argentina with me?”

  Max looked at Billy for a moment, then trotted to the airplane and took the stair-door steps three at a time.

  Billy Kocian went back to the penthouse in the Danubius Hotel Gellért and shared three bottles of the local grape—known as Bull’s Blood—with Sándor Tor. Tor, after doing hitches in the Wehrmacht, the French Foreign Legion, and the Budapest Police Department, was now chief of security for Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., and Billy’s best friend.

  During their conversation, Billy told Sándor that he now knew what his father must have felt like “when, wagging my tail like Max just now, I left home to go in the goddamn Wehrmacht.”

  “Let me get a quick shower and then I’ll get dressed, and we’ll go for a walk,” Castillo now said to Max IV. “I just can’t go back to sleep.”

  Max leapt with amazing agility and grace for his size onto the bed, put his head between his paws, and closed his eyes, as if saying, “Okay, you have your shower and I’ll take a little nap while I’m waiting.”

  —

  Charley came out of the bathroom and asked, “Ready?”

  Max got gracefully off the bed, walked to the French doors, and waited for Charley to open it. When he had, Max went through it, walked to a five-foot-tall marble statue of Saint Igor II of Kiev, who had been Grand Prince of Kiev before becoming a monk, which stood in the center of the patio, and raised his right rear leg.

  “You know what’ll happen if Sweaty sees you pissing on her favorite saint again.”

  Max ignored him, finished his business at hand, and then walked to the opening in the patio wall leading to the walkway and waited for Charley to join him.

  The walkway led toward the shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi. When Charley went through the opening, lights along the path automatically came on.

  Nothing of La Casa en el Bosque or its outbuildings was visible from the lake, or from the Llao Llao Hotel, which was across the lake, but the reverse was not true. At four places along the nearly half-mile shoreline there were, just about entirely concealed by huge pine and hardwood trees, four patio-like areas from which just about all of the lake, and the hotel, was visible.

  To a soldier’s eye, and Charley was a soldier, the patios appeared to have been designed and installed by someone familiar with the finer points of observation posts and machine-gun emplacements. While he had never seen a machine gun or a mortar tube in any of them, he would not have been surprised if such could be installed in minutes.

  He didn’t know if the patios and the neat little buildings that might be holding machine guns and mortars had been there when Aleksandr Pevsner had bought the place—that it was a clone of Hermann Göring’s Karin Hall was very interesting—or whether Aleksandr Pevsner had put them in.

  Just that they were there, and manned around the clock.

  And being a soldier, Charley knew that when he and Max got to the patio now, they had arrived as the corporal of the guard, so to speak, was about to post the new guard.

  There were five men on the patio, four sturdy, good-looking men with Uzi submachine guns hanging from their shoulders and a huge man, a Hungarian by the name of Janos Kodály, who had been in the Államvédelmi Hatóság before becoming Aleksandr Pevsner’s bodyguard, and was now in charge of his security.

  They all came to attention—Castillo was not surprised, as he knew the four men were all ex-Spetsnaz, the Russian equivalent of Special Forces, and what to do when an officer appeared was a Pavlovian reaction for them—when Charley and Max walked onto the patio.

  “Cтоять вольно,” Charley ordered in Russian, and the men stood “at ease” in response to Charley’s Pavlovian reaction. Then he switched to Hungarian and said, “Janos, aren’t you a little long in the tooth to be playing Corporal of the Guard at this hour?”

  Two of the ex-Spetsnaz apparently spoke—or at least understood—Hungarian, because they smiled.

  Janos didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “My Colonel, there is a thermos of tea.”

  “Great,” Charley said.

  —

  When he was five, Charley’s great-aunt Erzsebet Cséfalzvik, his grandfather’s sister, had decided to teach him how to speak Hungarian. His response had been amazing. Within a week, he was chattering away fluently with the old woman, which greatly annoyed his mother, who did not speak Hungarian.

  By the time he left for the United States, Aunt Erzsebet had died, but he had heard some of her story, and later learned the rest.

  She was considerably older than her brother. As a very young woman she had married a Hungarian nobleman whom she had met while he was a student at Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn. That explained why Karlchen’s mother had sometimes derisively referred to her as “the Countess.”

  There was some kind of bad blood between her and the Gossingers—Charley later learned his great-grandfather had been violently opposed to her marriage—and she never returned to Germany until after World War II. Then she showed up at her brother’s house in Fulda, destitute and starving. She had been evicted from “the estates” by the Communists, and had nowhere else, no one else, to turn to.

  She earned her keep when Charley’s grandmother died soon after his mother was born. Aunt Erzsebet had raised his mother.

  As long as she lived, the old woman regaled Karlchen with tales of life in Hungary during “the Good Times.” He regarded them as being something like the story of King Arthur in Camelot, nice, but unbelievable.

  When he was six, Karlchen was enrolled in Saint Johan’s School, which was experimenting with the notion that a good way to teach a foreign language to the young was to start when they were young. Karlchen was enrolled in the English program, and was old enough to understand this had caused problems between his mother and his grandfather. Something to do with his mysteriously missing father.

  Two weeks into that program, Charley’s teacher asked him, “I didn’t think you spoke any English at all.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “And all of a sudden you do?”

  “I guess I got that from Allan,” he had truthfully replied, in English, making reference to his new buddy, an American boy by the name of Allan Naylor. “I started to talk to him, and pretty soon it got easy.”

  By the time Karlchen went to the United States as Carlos Guillermo Castillo, he spoke Hungarian, Russian, French, Slovak, and Ita
lian, in addition, of course, to German and English.

  And he was also smart enough to know that his unusual facility with languages caused people to look upon him as some sort of freak, so he kept his mouth shut about it.

  When two weeks of conversation with his newfound cousin Fernando Lopez had him speaking Spanish as well as Fernando, whose mother tongue it was, he kept that under his hat until his newfound abuela commented on it.

  He started to lie to her, to tell her he had studied Spanish in Saint Johan’s School, but when he saw his grandmother’s eyes on him, he realized he couldn’t lie to her, and told her the truth.

  His abuela told him that she thought it would be a good idea if he didn’t tell people about that gift from God; they probably wouldn’t understand.

  Later, when the Army sent him as a young lieutenant to the Language School at Monterey for the basic course in Cantonese Chinese, he was rated as having “native fluency” in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese, when given those tests.

  At this point another mentor, this one Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab, offered advice much like that offered by his grandmother.

  “What we are going to do, Hotshot, is lose this report from the Language School. If those chair warmers in Washington learn about this, God only knows what they’ll come up with for you to do. They took a superb officer, Lieutenant General Vernon E. Walters, who has the same affliction you do—he hears a language and then can speak it—out of uniform and made the poor bastard ambassador to the goddamned United Nations.”

  There had been one final contact with Karlchen’s first language instructor. In 1990, the newly independent government of Hungary had returned to their rightful owners all properties of the Hungarian nobility that had been seized on one pretense or another—or simply seized—by Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian regent; the Nazis, who replaced the admiral; and the Communists, who replaced the Nazis.