Empire and Honor Page 14
“Sí, mi General,” the old soldier said, and pushed the door open and looked out. He pulled his head back in and reported, “Not quite, mi General.”
Martín nodded.
—
A line of people, mostly adults, many of the latter in the religious garb of nuns, priests, and brothers, were moving slowly but steadily down the stairway at the rear door of the Constellation. At the foot of the stairs, their documents were examined by immigration officers. Some of the arriving passengers were directed to the Leyland bus, but some of the people in clerical garb and all the children were escorted to one of the Mercedes buses by priests and nuns.
It was clear that everybody knew what had to be done and how to do it efficiently.
Which also made it clear that this was not the first time passengers like these had been off-loaded from an SAA flight originating in Berlin.
—
“They are finished, mi General,” Enrico reported.
“Let me go first,” Father Welner said.
He went down the stairway and walked to the Horch.
“Your three minutes were up long ago,” Doña Dorotea said. “What’s going on?”
“Alicia,” the priest said, “your husband and General Martín are about to come down with a beautiful young woman. As they walk to General Martín’s car, I suggest you smile and wave at them.”
“Why the hell should she do that?” Doña Dorotea demanded.
“Because she’s Alicia’s sister-in-law,” the priest said.
“Oh, my God!” both young women said, almost in unison.
[FIVE]
4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín
Buenos Aires
1055 10 October 1945
The five-story turn-of-the-century mansion sat behind a twelve-foot-tall cast-iron fence across Avenida Libertador from the Hipódromo de Palermo.
A 1940 Ford station wagon was parked at the curb. A legend painted on its doors read FRIGORIFICO MORÓN. The Frigorifico Morón—Morón Slaughterhouse and Feeding Pens—no longer existed to process cattle from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. The 1,500-hectare property in Morón was now the site of Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade.
When Martín’s Mercedes turned off Avenida Libertador and stopped before the double gates in the fence, two burly men got quickly out of the Ford and walked to the Mercedes. One held a Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot gun parallel to his trouser seam. The other had his hand under his suit jacket on the butt of a Ballester-Molina .45 ACP pistol, the Argentina-manufactured version of the Colt Model 1911-A1.
The two men were part of what had come to be known—if not in public—as Frade’s Private Army. Like the others in it, they had been born, as had their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. They had left it to do their military service and returned to it either after their conscription period, or after retiring from twenty-five years of service with the Húsares de Pueyrredón.
There was nothing mocking or pejorative in references to Frade’s Private Army. For one thing, there was nothing amateurish about it. And for another, everyone recognized he needed one.
El Coronel Jorge G. Frade had been assassinated on his Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, and there had subsequently been five attempts to assassinate his son, Cletus. While the threat of future attempts to assassinate him, or members of his family, had diminished with the surrender of Germany, it had by no means disappeared.
The threat of assassination also applied to Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and his family. The SS in Argentina—Peter only half-jokingly said that there were more SS in Argentina now than there ever had been at the SS-Junkerschule in Bad Tölz—had been furious when Major von Wachtstein, then the assistant military attaché for air of the German embassy, had disappeared following the monstrously cruel execution of his father for his father’s role in the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
The rage intensified when they learned that Major von Wachtstein—the recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from the hands of the Führer himself—had been spirited out of the country by Cletus Frade because von Wachtstein had been a traitor to the Third Reich, working all along for Frade and the OSS.
—
When one of the ex-Húsares saw who the Mercedes held, he saluted. The other signaled impatiently toward the house. The huge gates began to creak open. When they were fully open, the Mercedes drove through them to a ramp leading to the mansion’s basement garage, whereupon the gates immediately began to close.
They were almost closed when the rest of the convoy appeared. First, the Horch, with Enrico at the wheel, Doña Dorotea beside him, and Cletus Frade in the back with the nanny holding his sons. Then came Father Welner’s enormous Packard, with Alicia, her son, and the nanny in it, and finally her Packard, now carrying former sargentos of the Húsares de Pueyrredón Rodolfo Gómez and Manuel Lopez, bodyguards to Doña Dorotea and Alicia respectively.
The gates creaked back open and the cars went through them and disappeared down the ramp to the basement.
There they found Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and Elsa von Wachtstein standing beside Martín’s Mercedes.
Alicia got out of Welner’s Packard and trotted to her husband and Elsa.
“Frau von Wachtstein, say hello to Frau von Wachtstein,” Hansel tried to wisecrack, but his voice was broken.
Tears were now running down the cheeks of both women. They embraced.
“You’ll have to excuse Alicia, Elsa,” Hansel said. “She’s an Argentine, and they tend to get quite emotional.”
Doña Dorotea was by then out of the Horch and had walked up to them.
“Shut up, Hansel,” she snapped. “You’re as bad as Cletus not knowing when to keep quiet!” Then she turned to Elsa. “I’m the other big mouth’s wife. Do I get to give you a welcoming hug?”
Elsa and Alicia parted wide enough to admit Dorotea to their embrace.
That embrace lasted a full sixty seconds, and then the three women, Elsa in the center, walked first to the Horch, where they collected the children, and then toward the stairs leading from the basement.
Hans-Peter von Wachtstein met Martín’s eyes.
“Thank you,” von Wachtstein said.
Martín shrugged.
“And now shall we go find a telephone so we can get started on the libreta de enrolamiento?” Frade asked.
Martín nodded.
“And after that,” he said, “Father Kurt and I have to talk to you. Both of you.”
—
The men went to the library off the foyer. Enrico Rodríguez and the other bodyguards arranged themselves, without being told, in armchairs from which they could cover the front door, the stairs leading to the upper floors, and of course the library.
Once the men were inside the library, a distinguished-looking elderly man wearing a gray butler’s jacket appeared almost immediately. Antonio Lavalle had been el Coronel Jorge Frade’s butler. Now he was head of all of Dorotea’s crews of servants at all of the Frades’ homes, running everything for her everywhere.
“Welcome home, Don Cletus,” he said.
“Thank you, Antonio. What happened to the ladies?”
“They went upstairs, Don Cletus.”
Antonio looked at Martín, the priest, and von Wachtstein. “Gentlemen,” he said with a nod.
“Upstairs for what?” Frade asked.
“I would hazard the guess, Cletus, that they are going to get Frau von Wachtstein out of that uniform,” Father Welner said.
“You’re going to tell me about that uniform, right?” Martín asked. “It’s what your women soldiers wear, yes?”
“Our women officers,” Frade said.
“Women should not wear uniforms,” Martín proclaimed.
“You better get used to it, it’s the wave of the future,” Frade said. “Antonio, while General Martín uses the phone, those of us not on duty would like a little something to drink. Are you on duty, Your Eminence
?”
“Haig & Haig, please, Antonio,” the priest said. “Not too much ice.” Then he smiled and added, turning to Cletus, “By now you should understand, my heathen son, I am not going to let you provoke me.”
“My little brother told me Elsa walked all the way across Germany from Pomerania,” Frade began.
“Your little brother?” the priest said. “That’s the first I’ve heard—”
“He’s the closest I have to one. He lived next door to me in Midland. He didn’t have a big brother, and I didn’t have a little one, so we adopted one another.”
“And where did he encounter Frau von Wachtstein?” Martín asked, from where he was speaking on the telephone. “The new Frau von Wachtstein. That’s going to cause confusion. Would she be offended if I called her ‘Frau Elsa’?”
“If you get her that libreta de enrolamiento,” Peter said, “I’m sure she’ll be happy to let you call her anything you want.”
“If you come over here, Peter, and give me her personal data, I’ll get her a libreta de enrolamiento,” Martín said, then added, “You were saying, Cletus, where your little brother—what’s his name, by the way?—encountered Frau Elsa?”
“If I didn’t know better, Bernardo, I’d suspect you were gathering data for a dossier on the lady,” Frade said.
“That’s because you have a suspicious nature,” Martín said. “Probably something you acquired in the OSS.” He handed the telephone to von Wachtstein. “I don’t see any reason you can’t tell Major Careres what he needs to know about Frau Elsa.”
Antonio Lavalle had by then opened the library bar and, with the skill of a master bartender, had just about finished preparing the drinks.
Martín walked to the bar, raised his hand to decline a large, squat glass dark with scotch whisky and instead picked up a glass of soda water. He raised it in toast.
“I give you Don Cletus’s previously unknown little brother,” he said. “What did you say his name was, Cletus?”
Frade laughed.
“His name is James D. Cronley Junior,” he said. “Want me to spell it for you?”
“Cronley with a ‘C’ or a ‘K’?” Martín asked, unabashed.
“‘C,’” Frade said. “And now that I think about it, you’d probably like him. You’re both in the counterintelligence business. We call ours the CIC.”
“And your CIC was looking for Frau Elsa? What were they going to charge her with?”
“For being the daughter of Generalmajor Ludwig Holz,” Frade said, “who was hung with piano wire from a butcher’s hook for being involved in the July 1944 bomb plot.”
“Jesus Christ!” Martín said. “I’m sorry. Peter, I deeply apologize.”
“It’s okay,” von Wachtstein said.
“No, it’s not,” Martín said. “That was stupid and cruel of me.”
“Forget it,” von Wachtstein said.
“We were looking for her,” Frade said. “As we’re still looking for Karl’s father.”
“‘We’ being the OSS, you mean?” Martín asked.
This time Frade did not pretend not to know even what OSS stood for.
“What they did,” he said, “was add the names of people we wanted to help, if possible, Karl’s father, for example . . .”
—
Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz had been the naval attaché of the German embassy. His father, Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had been deeply involved in the bomb plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Canaris had been immediately arrested and placed in the Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Bavaria. When the 97th Infantry Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated Flossenberg, they found Admiral Canaris’s naked, torture-scarred, decomposing body hanging from a gallows.
Admiral Boltitz, like his son a submariner, had been in Norway, at the German submarine pens in Narvik, when his arrest order had gone out. He disappeared before the SS could find him. It was not known whether he had tried—was still trying—to hide in Norway or had decided that jumping into the frigid Norwegian waters was preferable to arrest, torture, and certain execution.
Frade had gotten both von Wachtstein and Boltitz out of Argentina and to the secret POW camp for senior enemy officers at Fort Hunt in Virginia as much for their services to the United States as for their friendship.
—
“. . . and people like Elsa to the list of Nazi officials and SS officers we—our Military Police—were looking for,” Frade continued. “Elsa turned up at an MP checkpoint in Hesse. Lieutenant Cronley—did I mention my little brother is a second lieutenant, Bernardo? You wouldn’t want to leave that out of your dossier—was sitting there in his jeep.
“He notified the OSS. The OSS was waiting when we landed in Frankfurt on our way back from Berlin.”
“And they knew the connection between Peter and Frau Elsa?” Martín asked.
Frade nodded. “So we went to Marburg—it’s about sixty miles north of Frankfurt—and got her. I didn’t know Jimmy was involved—or even in the Army, or in Germany—until we got there.”
“Jimmy wanted to know why Clete was wearing that Mexican bus driver’s uniform,” von Wachtstein furnished as he pointed. “Clete had no answer.”
“Then we loaded Elsa onto the Ciudad de Rosario and brought her here,” Frade said. “End of story.”
“Frau von Wachtstein,” Martín said. “What about her husband? Where’s he?”
“My brother was killed in Russia,” Hansel said.
“My condolences, Peter,” Martín said.
Von Wachtstein shrugged. “He was a good man and a fine officer.”
“Does that complete your dossier, Bernardo?” Frade asked.
“Just about, thank you,” Martín said. “Which permits the conversation to turn to why Father Kurt and I went to the airfield to meet you.”
“Which is?”
“President Farrell sent us,” Martín said.
“Now you have my attention, Bernardo,” Frade said.
“El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón has been arrested at President Farrell’s order,” Martín said.
“And how did my Tío Juan offend el Presidente? I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Perhaps Bernardo should have said, ‘has been taken into custody,’” Father Welner said.
“Well, which was it? And what’s the difference?”
“For his own protection,” the priest said. “He’s done nothing wrong.”
“You know better than that, Your Eminence,” Frade said.
“I went to the president with credible intelligence that a group of officers is planning to assassinate Juan Domingo,” Martín said.
“Maybe you should have kept your mouth shut,” Frade said.
“Cletus, Juan Domingo is your godfather!” the priest said.
“And you know better than that,” Martín said. “My duty required that I inform the president of something like that. El Coronel Perón is the vice president—”
“And the minister for War and the secretary of Labor and Welfare,” the priest added.
“What happened when you told Farrell that some people want to blow Juan Domingo away?” Frade asked.
“It took him some time to accept it,” Martín said. “And the first thing he thought was that it had something to do with Señorita Duarte.”
“No!” Frade said, in sarcastic surprise. “I can’t imagine the officer corps being at all offended that the minister for War is running around with a semi-pro hooker half his age. Every senior colonel should have a blond tootsie like Evita to help him pass his idle hours.”
“You don’t know that for a fact,” the priest said, “that she’s a semi—”
“If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, et cetera,” Frade interrupted.
“You’re repeating gossip,” the priest said disparagingly.
“You remember when our Hansel was ordered back to the fatherland?” Frade asked. “Well, let me tell you what happened that night at the Alvear Palace.”
“Clete, let that lie,” von Wachtstein said.
Frade considered the request.
“Okay, Hansel,” he said.
“What happened that night at the Alvear?” Martín asked.
“Hansel wants it forgotten—it’s forgotten,” Frade said seriously, and then smiled. “Suffice it to say, mi General, on that memorable night I saw Señorita Evita waddling and going ‘quack, quack.’ It went over Hansel’s head. But not mine.”
Martín raised his eyebrows, then went on: “General Ramos and I went to see el Coronel Perón, and—”
“You went to see him or the president sent you to see him?” Frade interrupted.
“President Farrell suggested to General Ramos and me that it might be helpful if we had a talk with el Coronel Perón,” Martín said.
“About his blond tootsie?” Frade asked.
“To tell him that there was credible information about talk in certain factions within the officer corps about assassinating him—”
“Is there?” Frade again interrupted. “You believe it?”
Martín nodded. “For conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, bringing disgrace upon the officer corps.”
“The unbecoming conduct meaning his cohabitation with Señorita Evita?” Frade said. “Parading all around town with her on his arm? Or did that include his younger—much younger—other lady friends?”
“That came up,” Martín said. “But there’s more.”
“What more?”
“The officers in question know about the passports Rodolfo Nulder took to Germany.”
“I can’t say that breaks my heart,” Frade said. “But I didn’t tell them. I’ve been scrupulously neutral in the trouble the officer corps has been having with my beloved Tío Juan.”
Martín ignored the response.
“The officers we’re talking about are the ones who had to keep their mouths shut before we declared war on Germany,” Martín said. “Now they feel free to criticize not only the Nazis, but also—maybe especially—those officers who leaned toward Germany. And Perón certainly heads that list.”
“So you and Ramos said, ‘Get rid of the blonde, Juan Domingo, and the girls of doll-carrying age, and your Nazi sympathizer pals like Nulder—or you’re likely going to get shot’?”