Death and Honor Read online

  “Mein Gott!” Boltitz exclaimed dutifully. He thought: Why the hell is he so cheerful?

  Boltitz now noticed something else. There was a large open convertible— he couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a Horch—parked in the shade of the hangar. A blond young woman was sitting on the hood, looking up at them.

  Boltitz found his microphone.

  “There’s a blond woman looking up at us,” he said, then asked, “Is that a Horch?”

  “Señora Dorotea Mallín de Frade,” von Wachtstein replied. “Mistress of all she can see. That is indeed a Horch. A 930V. One of the last to leave the factory. It belonged to Oberst Frade.”

  As von Wachtstein banked the plane, Boltitz got a better look at the car. It was enormous but graceful. It had black fenders and hood, and the body was painted in red nearly as bright as the airliner.

  Boltitz remembered his father, in one of the rare times he said anything that could be in any way interpreted as critical of Adolf Hitler, telling him that Der Führer had really “killed the Horch.”

  “It’s actually a better car than the Mercedes,” Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz had said. “But since the Führer and his entourage ride around in Mercedeses, everyone with enough money to buy a car of that class naturally wants to be like our Führer.”

  Boltitz thought: My God, I should have paid attention to what my father wasn’t saying. He told me to pay attention not to what Admiral Canaris was saying, but what he was not saying. I should have been smart enough to apply that to my father, too.

  “And where Doña Dorotea is,” von Wachtstein went on cheerfully, “one can usually find Don Cletus. We got lucky.”

  Fully aware that both his office and apartment telephones were tapped by the Sicherheitsdienst—the “security” branch of the SS—attached to the German embassy, von Wachtstein had not telephoned to tell either Doña Dorotea or her husband they were coming, or even to ascertain that either was at the estancia. He had to take the chance that one or the other was.

  “Did we, von Wachtstein?” Boltitz asked sarcastically. “Did we ‘get lucky’?”

  Von Wachtstein didn’t reply. He was concentrating on setting the Storch down on the four-thousand-foot-long gravel landing strip.

  Not that he was going to need much of the runway. The Storch—its long, fixed, landing gear and large, high wing made it look like a stork; hence the name—could land practically anywhere and do it so slowly that it could come to a stop within a hundred feet of touchdown. Large slats fixed to the leading edge of the wing and enormous flaps gave it that ability, and the ability to take off at twenty-five miles per hour in about two hundred feet.

  Without thinking of the circumstances of their coming to the estancia, von Wachtstein was showing off the flight characteristics of the Luftwaffe’s “ground cooperation” airplane and his own skill to Cletus Frade, himself a pilot.

  He realized this when he was on the ground and taxiing the Storch to park it beside the three Piper Cubs.

  That wasn’t too smart, he thought. But under the circumstances, I’m entitled to be a little crazy.

  He considered that, then corrected himself: Crazy, but not careless.

  The young blond woman slid off the enormous hood of the Horch, exposing more leg than she realized, and started walking toward the Storch.

  On her heels came a large and burly middle-aged man with an enormous mustache. He was wearing a business suit that didn’t quite fit. He cradled a 12-gauge Remington Model 11 semiautomatic shotgun in his arms. Around his neck was a leather bandolier of brass-cased double-aught buckshot shells.

  “Sergeant Major Enrico Rodríguez, Retired,” von Wachtstein said against the noise of the shutting-down Argus 10C engine. “Where Don Cletus is, Enrico can always be found. I think I should tell you Enrico’s not fond of Germans. He suspects, correctly, that people we hired wound up slitting his sister’s throat while they were trying to assassinate Don Cletus, and ambushed Don Cletus’s father, Oberst Frade, in that Horch. El Coronel died. The assassins thought Enrico was dead, too. He was full of buckshot, but he wasn’t dead.”

  “Mein Gott!” Boltitz muttered.

  Von Wachtstein waved at Doña Dorotea, loosened his seat belt, then started to unfasten the fold-down doors on the Storch.

  Boltitz saw someone jump down from the fuselage door of the Lodestar and start to walk toward them. He was a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man wearing khaki trousers, cowboy boots, and a fur-collared leather zipper jacket.

  That looks, Boltitz thought, like some kind of a flier’s jacket.

  When the young man came closer, he saw that it was: Sewn to the breast was a gold-stamped identification badge. It carried the wings of a Naval Aviator and the legend C.H. FRADE, 1LT USMCR.

  “Hola, Peter,” Señora Frade greeted him with a wave and a smile as he crawled out of the airplane. “An unexpected pleasure.”

  “Dorotea, may I present Korvettenkapitän Boltitz?” von Wachtstein said. “Dorotea is my wife’s oldest friend.”

  Boltitz clicked his heels and bowed.

  “Enchanted,” he said in Spanish.

  “What can we do for you, von Wachtstein?” Cletus Frade asked in Spanish. His hostile tone of voice made it clear that he was displeased as well as surprised to see the German.

  The surprise was genuine. The hostility was feigned. It was difficult to dislike someone who had saved your life. More than that: Frade was both genuinely fond of von Wachtstein and admired him. Maybe even loved him.

  Cletus H. Frade had given his relationship with Hans-Peter von Wachtstein a good deal of thought.

  We’re pawns on this crazy chessboard, he had originally thought, and the people moving us around are perfectly willing to sacrifice either of us to advance their game.

  He’d changed that original assessment slightly: Well, maybe not pawns, maybe knights. But certainly not bishops, who by definition are supposed to promote good works and practice decency and honesty.

  They had met six months before, in December of 1942, as the result of what he had politely thought of at the time as an almost funny misunderstanding between his father and his aunt—his father’s sister, Beatrice Frade de Duarte— but what he now thought of, far less kindly, as a typical Argentine fuckup.

  Two months before they met, both had been serving officers. Frade had been flying a Grumman F4F Wildcat of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211 off Fighter One on Guadalcanal, and von Wachtstein a Focke-Wulf 190 of Jagdstaffel 232 defending Berlin against what was becoming a daily bombardment by the Allied heavy bombers.

  That had a lot to do with what happened, Cletus Frade had decided, perhaps immodestly. We’re both fighter pilots. Fighter pilots are special people. Only another fighter pilot knows what being a fighter pilot is all about. It has nothing to do with what side of the war you’re on.

  Cletus Frade had been returned to the United States from Guadalcanal to perform two duties the brass considered more important than his shooting down any more Japanese aircraft or strafing Japanese infantry.

  The first was to be exhibited—with half a dozen other pilots with five or more kills—on various platforms and theater stages on the West Coast. Seeing real-life aces, the brass reasoned, was almost certain to encourage people to buy war bonds.

  The second purpose—for the combat-experienced pilots to serve as instructor pilots to pass on the lessons they had learned to new pilots—Frade thought was probably going to be more dangerous than taking on some Japanese pilot. A new Navy or Marine aviator trying to prove he was worthy of being sent off to do aerial battle was very likely to be as dangerous to his instructor pilot as a fourteen-year-old riding his first motorcycle in front of his girlfriend.

  Frade therefore had been very receptive to the offer made to him in a San Francisco hotel room as he reluctantly was getting dressed to go on display again.

  It had come from a stocky, well-dressed, mustachioed, middle-aged man who said his name was Graham. He had shown Frade his identification card, that
of a Marine Corps colonel, and then said that if Frade would volunteer to undertake an unspecified “mission outside the United States involving great risk to his life” he could get off the war bond tour—right then, that night—and would not be assigned as an IP when the war bond tour was over.

  Frade had already decided to do something outrageous to get himself relieved of his instructor pilot duties, but that almost certainly would have meant getting shipped back to the Pacific, which would also certainly involve great risk to his life. So, figuring that he didn’t have much to lose, he signed a vow-of-secrecy document promising all sorts of punishments for even talking about his new duties.

  It was only after he had signed that Colonel Graham told him he was now in the Office of Strategic Services, and what the OSS expected of him was to go to Argentina and attempt to establish a relationship with his father.

  Not sure if he was embarrassed or amused, Frade had explained to the colonel that that was probably going to be a little difficult, as he could not remember ever having seen his father, and had it on good authority that his father had absolutely no interest in seeing him.

  “I know,” Graham said. “Your grandfather told me.”

  “My grandfather?” Clete had blurted.

  Graham nodded. “I saw him just before I flew out here to see you. The kindest words he used to describe el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade—”

  “My father is a colonel?” Cletus Frade asked, astonished.

  Graham nodded again, and handed him a photograph. It showed a large, tall, dark-skinned man with a full mustache. He wore a rather ornate, somewhat Germanic uniform, and was getting into the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz sedan. In the background, against a row of Doric columns, was a rank of soldiers armed with rifles standing at what the Marine Corps would call Parade Rest. Their uniforms, too, looked Germanic, and they were wearing German helmets.

  “That was taken several months ago,” Graham said. “The day he retired from command of the Húsares de Pueyrredón, Argentina’s most prestigious cavalry regiment.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “You’re the product of an unfortunate infatuation, and a hasty, equally unfortunate marriage, right?”

  Frade had looked at him but said nothing.

  “I’ll take your silence as agreement,” Graham went on. “If I go wrong, stop me.”

  Frade nodded at Graham coldly but said nothing.

  “Your mother converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry your father, ” Graham continued. “Which ceremony was conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Cathedral of Saint Louis in Jackson Square, officiated by the Cardinal Archbishop of New Orleans. Your Aunt Martha was your mother’s matron of honor. Captain Juan Perón was your father’s best man.”

  “You seem to know more about this than I do,” Frade had replied, more than a little sarcastically.

  “ ‘Sir, with respect, you seem to know more about this than I do, sir,’ ” Graham said coldly. “Don’t let my charming smile and warm manner fool you. I’m a Marine colonel and you’re a first lieutenant. You have that straight in your mind, mister?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Graham nodded.

  “Yeah, now that you mention it, I probably do know more about this than you,” Graham went on conversationally. “Anyway, after a three-month honeymoon slash grand tour of Europe, during the last month of which your mother came to be with child, the newlywed couple went to Argentina, where a healthy boy—you—came into the world in the German Hospital in Buenos Aires. How’m I doing, Cletus?”

  “Sir, from what I have heard before, that’s correct.”

  “Shortly thereafter, your mother found herself in the family way again. There was some medical problem, and at her father’s insistence, she came home, so to speak, for better medical attention. She died in childbirth, as did the baby. Your father then returned to Argentina, leaving you in the care of your Aunt Martha and Uncle James Howell. You were raised on a ranch near Midland, Texas, then were a member of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M—as was I, coincidentally— but you resigned from the Corps so that you could become a tennis-playing jock at Tulane. You went from Tulane into the Marines, where you flew F4Fs, shot down seven Japanese, and then were returned to the States to sell war bonds and teach new pilots how to stay alive. That about it, Cletus?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you cannot remember ever having seen your father?”

  “No, sir, I cannot.”

  “Do you know how your grandfather feels about your father?”

  “Yes, sir. He thinks he’s an unmitigated bastard and the less said about the no-good sonofabitch the better.”

  Graham nodded.

  “Maybe being an unmitigated bastard is the reason your father got to be a colonel. In the Ejército Argentino, that’s like being a major general in the Marine Corps.”

  Frade looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  “And—if the coup d’état he’s setting up works, and we think it probably will—he’s probably going to be the next president of Argentina.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Frade had blurted.

  “It would be in the interest of the United States, obviously, if the president of Argentina leaned toward the United States. Right now, the Argentines, including your father, are leaning the other way. You getting the picture, Lieutenant? ”

  “What makes you think I can change his mind? For that matter, that he won’t be annoyed, really annoyed, rather than pleased, when I suddenly show up out of nowhere?”

  “We don’t know,” Graham admitted. “All we know for sure is that it’s worth a try.”

  Colonel Graham had been as good as his word. Frade never had to step on a stage again. Three hours after meeting Graham, he was sitting beside him in a Trans-Continental & Western Airlines DC-3 on his way to Washington, D.C.

  Shortly after that, he was on a Pan American Grace Sikorsky four-engine seaplane on his way to Buenos Aires.

  The day after meeting his father for the first time, and learning that he wasn’t quite the unmitigated sonofabitch Cletus Howell had taught Cletus Frade to believe, El Coronel turned over to his only son the Frade family’s guesthouse— a mansion overlooking the racetrack in Buenos Aires—for his use as long as he was in Buenos Aires.

  Frade “went home” one evening to find another Spanish-speaking young man in the library. He was listening to Beethoven’s Third Symphony on the phonograph and was well into a bottle of the excellent Argentine brandy.

  By the time that bottle was empty and the level in a second bottle pretty well lowered, Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade and Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had learned a good deal about each other.

  It had quickly come out that both were fighter pilots, which had immediately established a bond between them, even though they were technically enemies.

  And the reasons both were in Buenos Aires rather than in fighter cockpits were actually quite similar. The German government had decided they had something more important for von Wachtstein to do than trying to shoot down the enemies’ airplanes.

  Von Wachtstein told him the German foreign ministry had decided that properly honoring Captain Jorge Alejandro Duarte, a socially prominent young Argentine officer who had died nobly in the Battle of Stalingrad, would be a marvelous way of reminding the Argentines that Adolf Hitler was at war with godless communism.

  The young Argentine officer’s body had been flown out of Stalingrad just before von Paulus’s army fell to the Red Army. It would be returned to Argentina—in a lead-lined coffin—with a suitable escort, and then, after the posthumous award of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross at a suitable ceremony, Captain Duarte’s body would be interred in the family tomb in Buenos Aires’s Recoleta Cemetery.

  The “suitable escort” is where von Wachtstein came in. He came from a distinguished military family and he himself had been personally decorated by Adolf Hitler with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his prowess as
a fighter pilot. He had been ordered to Berlin from his fighter squadron to meet an Argentine officer, a Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, in order to see if Perón approved of him. Perón had found him suitable, and von Wachtstein had brought the body, by ship, to Buenos Aires.

  The dead hero’s mother—Cletus’s aunt, and El Coronel’s sister—had graciously offered the family guesthouse to the young German officer for as long as he was in Argentina—either unaware or not caring that her brother had turned it over to Cletus Frade.

  By the time both young fighter pilots had staggered off to bed, they had agreed that (a) fighter pilots are special people; (b) Captain Duarte’s flying around in a Storch directing artillery was a pretty dumb fucking thing for a neutral observer to be doing; (c) fighter pilots understand things beyond the ken of bomber and transport drivers; (d) getting shot down doing something really dumb doesn’t deserve a medal, especially one of the better ones, like the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, even if (e) just about every medal on a fighter pilot’s chest really should have gone to some other fighter pilot who really deserved it; (f) fighter pilots are special people, and after this dumb fucking war is over, we’ll have to get together and do this again.

  The bureaucrats at the German embassy, who had finally learned that von Wachtstein had been sent to the Frade guesthouse even though El Coronel Frade’s American son was already resident there, sent an officer to retrieve von Wachtstein early the next morning.

  Both thought that they would probably never see the other again.

  That didn’t happen, either.

  When Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein learned that it was intended to have Cletus Frade assassinated as a lesson to Cletus’s father, to the officer corps of the Ejército Argentino—and, incidentally, also because it was suspected that young Frade was a secret agent of the Office of Strategic Services—von Wachtstein decided that his officer’s honor would not permit him to look the other way. He warned him what was coming.

  Thus Cletus Frade was prepared for the assassins when they came after him. He killed both of them, but not before they had cut the throat of Señora Mariana María Dolores Rodríguez de Pellano, the guesthouse housekeeper and the sister of Enrico Rodríguez, sergeant major retired.