The Honor of Spies Read online

  Until weeks before, Wilhelm Frogger had been the commercial attaché of the German Embassy in Buenos Aires. On the fourth of July, he had then appeared at the apartment of Milton Leibermann, a “legal attaché” of the U.S. Embassy, and offered to exchange his knowledge of German Embassy secrets for sanctuary in Brazil.

  Leibermann was de facto the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s man in Argentina. He had no place to hide the German defectors from either the Germans or the Argentine authorities—who, he knew, would be told the Froggers had been kidnapped—nor any means to get the defectors out of Argentina. So he had turned them over to someone he thought could do both.

  He knew that Don Cletus Frade, patrón of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, was in fact a U.S. Marine Corps major and the de facto head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in Argentina. He also knew that having any dealings at all with anyone connected with the spies of the OSS had been absolutely forbidden by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and for that reason Leibermann had not reported to the FBI that the Froggers had come to him, or what he had done with them.

  Frade was interested in the Froggers because he knew more of the secret activities of the German Embassy than Frogger thought he could possibly know, most importantly about something the Germans called “Operation Phoenix.”

  Frogger steadfastly denied any knowledge of Operation Phoenix, which convinced Frade he was a liar. It had also become almost immediately apparent that Frau Else Frogger was an unrepentant National Socialist who not only had decided that defecting had been a mistake but that if they could only get away from Frade and his gottverdammt Jude—“Major” Stein—all would be forgiven at the German Embassy.

  Frade, however, knew enough about the SS officers in the German Embassy to know that before or after the Froggers were returned to Germany to enter a concentration camp they would be thoroughly interrogated about Leibermann and about Frade’s operation. And the Froggers had seen too much to let that happen.

  Letting them go was not an option.

  Frade had no immediate means of getting them even to Brazil without taking unjustifiable risks. So while they were, so to speak, in limbo, he was hiding them on a small farm that his father had used for romantic interludes in the country.

  There was a chance that Siggie Stein could break down one of them—or both—and get them to reveal what they knew about Operation Phoenix. Not much of a chance, though, for Stein was a demolitions man turned communications /cryptography expert, not a trained interrogator. Still, on the other hand, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and had some relatives who’d not been able to escape and had perished in concentration camps.

  The massive Argentine woman, who was known as “The Other Dorotea”—Don Cletus Frade’s Anglo-Argentine wife was Doña Dorotea Mallín de Frade—listened to the telephone and then reported, “It is Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez.”

  Stein rose from his chair, picking up the Thompson.

  “Watch them,” he said to the peon with the rifle, then turned to Herr Frogger and said, “Keep at it,” and then walked out of the room and onto the verandah to wait for Rodríguez.

  The incline in front of Casa Chica was very steep, and between the house and the road and gate, but not visible from either, a landing strip had been carved out of the hillside. Frade had told Stein his father had used it to fly his lady love into the house in one of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo’s fleet of Piper Cubs.

  The car and the truck appeared a moment later, moving slowly in low gear, and turned onto the landing strip. When they stopped, Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez—who had been Cavalry, Ejército Argentino, and had retired with the late Coronel Jorge Frade from the Húsares de Pueyrredón, Argentina’s most prestigious cavalry regiment—got out of the car and started toward the house, going up the stairs carved into the hillside. He carried a Remington Model 11 self-loading twelve-gauge riot shotgun in his hand.

  The driver of the refrigerator truck got out from behind the wheel, went to the rear doors, and pulled them open. A dozen peones, all armed with Mauser rifles, began to pile out of the truck and then to unload from it equipment, including ammunition cans, blankets, food containers, and finally a Browning Automatic Rifle.

  Rodríguez put his arm around Stein’s shoulders and pounded his back affectionately, but did not speak.

  “What’s going on, Sergeant Major?” Stein asked in Spanish.

  Their relationship was delicate. Rodríguez had a long service history and had held the senior enlisted rank for ten years of it. He knew that Stein had just been promoted to staff sergeant yet had been in the army not even two years.

  On the other hand, Don Cletus Frade had made it clear to Rodríguez that Stein was in charge of the Froggers and Casa Chica.

  “I have had a telephone call from an old friend,” Enrico Rodríguez said. “There are two trucks of Mountain Troops on their way here. They have with them a half-dozen Nazi soldiers—the ones who came off the submarine? The ones with the skulls on their caps?”

  Stein nodded his understanding.

  “What makes you think they’re coming here?”

  “My friend, he is also of the Húsares, heard the Nazi officer tell his men they were going after traitors to the Führer.”

  He mispronounced the title, and without thinking about it, Stein corrected him and then asked, “How would they know we have the Froggers here?”

  Rodríguez shrugged.

  “We will defend them,” Rodríguez said seriously.

  “That’s what those guys are for?” Stein asked, nodding down the stairs toward the peones now milling around on the landing strip.

  “There are twelve, all old Húsares,” Rodríguez said.

  “Sergeant Major, with the twelve we have here, that’s two dozen. Against how many soldiers on two trucks?”

  “Probably forty, forty-two,” Rodríguez said. “What I have been thinking is that they are coming in such strength thinking we have only the dozen men, and they can make us give them the Froggers without a fight. If they see we are so many, they may decide that there will be a fight, and they know that if there is a fight against us, there would be many casualties. How would they explain the deaths of ten or fifteen Mountain Troops so far from their base?”

  “Sergeant Major, I think it would be best if there were no confrontation,” Stein said carefully.

  “You mean just turn the Froggers over to them?”

  “No. I mean get the Froggers out of here, back to someplace on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.”

  “Don Cletus said they were to be kept here in Casa Chica,” Rodríguez said.

  “That was before he knew about this,” Stein argued.

  After a pause, the old soldier said, “True.”

  Stein had to suppress a smile, both at the old soldier and at the Christian scripture that had for some inexplicable reason popped into his Jewish head: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

  Ninety seconds ago, he reminded himself, I was asking myself whether I had the balls to shoot both of those goddamn Nazis rather than see them freed, and decided that I did.

  “You have some place to take them?” Stein pursued.

  “I will tell the driver where to take you,” Rodríguez said. “And then later meet you there.”

  “You’re not going to take them?”

  “I am going to stay here and see what these bastards are up to,” Rodríguez said.

  “And so will I,” Stein said, somewhat astonished to hear himself say it.

  Rodríguez was visibly unhappy to hear this.

  “Do you have a saying in the U.S. Army that there can only be one commander?”

  “Sergeant Major, I recognize that your experience in matters like these is much greater than mine.” Which is practically nonexistent. “I am at your orders.”

  “We will send six of the men, plus the driver, with the Froggers,” Rodríguez ordered as he assumed command. “You tell The Other Dorotea to prepare the N
azis to be moved. Tell her I said I want them tied and blindfolded.”

  Stein managed to keep himself from saying, Yes, sir.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “And while you’re doing that, I will have the Ford car and your vehicles moved over there,” he said, pointing to a line of hills that began a quarter of a mile the other side of the road. “There’s a dirt road. I want nothing in the house when they get here.”

  Why? What’s that all about?

  “Good idea.”

  “And I will set up my command post there,” Rodríguez said, pointing. “Just below the military crest of the hill.”

  What the hell is “the military crest of the hill”?

  Stein nodded.

  “And you have the little German camera Don Cletus brought from Brazil?”

  “The Leica,” Stein said. “It’s in the house.”

  “We will need photos of everything that happens here to show Don Cletus when he returns. You would be useful doing that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll send two men with you down there,” Rodríguez said, pointing to a roof-less, windowless old building on the edge of the road about a hundred meters from the gate. “I think you will be able to see both the house and the approaches, as well as the road, from the upper story.” He paused and chuckled. “If there still is a second story. If not, you’ll have to do as best you can from the ground floor.”

  “Understood.”

  While I am trying to take their pictures from the ground floor of a decrepit old building in the middle of Argentina, I am going to be shot to death by the SS.

  Jesus Christ!

  Thirty minutes later, on the second floor of the old building, Staff Sergeant Stein sat patiently while one of the two old Húsares with him carefully painted his face, his hands, and whatever shiny parts of the Leica Ic camera with a mixture of dust from the building and axle grease. They took extra care with the camera so as not to render it useless.

  When they had finished that, they draped Stein in a sort of shroud made from burlap potato bags, which covered his head and his body to his ankles. Then, very carefully, they stuck a great deal of dead leafy vegetable matter into the burlap shroud.

  While he had been undergoing the transformation, the other old Húsar took apart an Argentine copy of a U.S. Army EE-8 field telephone, disconnected the bells that would ring when another EE-8 was cranked, and then carefully put the phone back together.

  Then he communicated with four other old Húsares, plus Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez, who had apparently stationed themselves in places Stein could not see, although he tried very hard.

  And finally, they painted each other’s faces with the axle grease and dust compound, put on potato sack shrouds, and adorned these with dead leafy vegetation. One of them had a Mauser army rifle with a telescopic sight, and the other a Thompson submachine gun like Stein’s. They wrapped them with burlap, looked around, and then wrapped Stein’s Thompson in burlap.

  Twenty minutes after that, the man who had camouflaged Stein had a conversation over the telephone, which surprised Stein since he had not heard it ring, although he was no more than four feet from it. Then he remembered watching the man disconnect the bell.

  “Ten minutes, give or take,” the old Húsar said conversationally.

  The first vehicle to appear, five or six minutes later, was not the army truck Stein expected from the west but a glistening, if olive-drab, Mercedes-Benz convertible sedan. And it came down the road from the east.

  It slowed almost to a stop at the intersection of the road to Casa Chica. Stein saw that Colonel Juan D. Perón was in the front passenger seat, but did not think to record this photographically for posterity until after the Mercedes had suddenly sped down the road and it was too late to do so.

  Both of the old Húsares looked askance at Stein.

  Ten minutes after that the Mercedes came back down the road, now leading an olive-drab 1940 Chevrolet sedan and two two-ton 1940 Ford trucks, also painted olive drab, and with canvas-covered stake bodies.

  Stein was ready with the Leica when Colonel Perón got out of his car and exchanged salutes with two officers in field uniforms who got out of the Chevrolet. While to Stein the sound of the shutter clicking and then the film advancing sounded like the dropping of an anvil into a fifty-five-gallon metal drum, followed by a lengthy burst of machine-gun fire, none of the people on the road apparently heard it.

  Troops began getting off the trucks. One of them—probably a sergeant, Stein decided—started shouting orders. Some of the troops began to trot toward the gate, where one of them cut the chain with an enormous bolt-cutter. The gate was pushed open, and the troops spread out facing the Casa Chica hill on both sides of the road.

  The sergeant looked at the old house, shouted an order, and two soldiers armed with submachine guns trotted toward it.

  Stein’s heart began thumping. The old Húsares rolled onto their backs and trained their weapons at the head of the staircase. More accurately, where stairs had once led to the second floor. When Stein and the others had come to the building, they had found that the stairs were just about rotted away. They had climbed onto the second floor from the outside, using one another as human ladders.

  Stein could hear movement on the lower floor, and watched the stairwell opening for a head to pop up. None came.

  “Nobody’s been in here in years,” a voice said in German.

  A moment later, Stein rolled back onto his stomach and saw that the soldiers were trotting back to the trucks and to the sergeant. He tried and finally got a shot of that.

  And then he saw that something else was being off-loaded from the trucks.

  I know what that is. That’s a Maxim Maschinengewehr. Poppa showed me one in the Krieg museum in Kassel. He told me that he’d been an ammunition bearer for a Maxim in France.

  My God, there’s two of them! And there’s the ammunition bearers!

  Four soldiers trotted through the gate carrying a heavy water-cooled machine gun mounted on a sort of sled. The sled had handles like a stretcher. They were followed by two soldiers, each carrying two oblong olive-drab metal cans looking very much like those used by the U.S. Army.

  There’s probably two hundred rounds in each can.

  But they’re in a cloth belt, not metal-linked, like ours.

  What the hell are they going to do with all that ammo?

  And then another Maxim crew ran through the gate with another machine gun on its sled, followed by two more ammo bearers.

  Who the hell do they think is in Casa Chica? The 40th Infantry Division?

  No. If they knew where to look for us, then they’d know there’s no more than a dozen men. What they are going to do with this show of force is make the point that they’re irresistible, get us to surrender without a fight.

  And aren’t they going to be surprised when they go in the house and find there’s nobody there at all.

  Stein had trouble with the film-advance mechanism and looked at the Leica and saw why. He’d used all of the twenty-four frames in the film cartridge.

  I will be damned! I was not paralyzed by fear!

  When he had changed film—which required great care so that he did not get any dust-grease inside—and rolled back into place again, he saw something else had happened. The Maxims were set up and ready to fire, but they were now each manned by a two-man crew. The four men who had carried the weapons into place and the two ammo bearers for each were now trotting back to the trucks. As Stein watched—and took their picture—they took rifles from the trucks and formed loosely into ranks.

  Ah-ha. The reserve. To be thrown into the breach when the 40th Infantry valiantly refuses to surrender.

  Not to worry, guys. There’s nobody in that house to surrender, much less shoot back at you.

  The sergeant now trotted up to Colonel Perón and the two officers, came to attention, and saluted.

  They had a brief conversation, duly recorded on film, and
then saluted one another. One of them gave a crisp straight-armed Nazi salute.

  Click.

  Got you, you Nazi sonofabitch!

  The Nazi sonofabitch now trotted through the gate, past the machine guns, and started up the hill.

  Click.

  Colonel Perón went to his staff car and leaned on the fender. The other officer and the sergeant went to the Chevrolet and leaned against its side.

  Click.

  The Nazi sonofabitch was no longer in sight as he made his way up the hill.

  Shouldn’t you be holding up a white flag of truce?

  For three minutes, which seemed much longer, Stein tried in vain to see the man moving up the hill.

  There came the sound of a shot.

  Oh, shit! Rodríguez couldn’t resist the temptation!

  I should have thought about that, and tried to talk him out of it. Not that it would have done any good.

  But that wasn’t loud enough for a shotgun; it was a different sound, like a pistol.

  What the hell? And what happens now?

  The answer to that came immediately, as Stein looked at Colonel Perón to see what, if anything, he was going to do.

  First one of the Maxims and then the other began to fire.

  Colonel Perón screamed something but was drowned out by the sound of the firing weapons. He ran to the officer leaning on the Chevrolet. Almost immediately, the sergeant ran—not trotted—toward the firing machine guns.

  Perón walked very quickly—almost ran—back to his Mercedes.

  Click.

  Perón got in and the car, wheels screeching, started heading east.

  Click.

  Stein saw—click, click, click—the walls and windows of Casa Chica literally disintegrate as the machine-gun fire struck.

  The sergeant was now at the closest Maxim. He was excitedly waving his arms, obviously trying to make them stop firing. They didn’t.

  Click.

  And then, as suddenly as it had started, the firing stopped.

  The crews of both machine guns stood up and pulled something from their ears. Then the crew of one shook hands.