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Ignoring the reference again, Frade went on: “Just think what that would mean, Humberto, if you went out to El Palomar to catch a plane to Pôrto Alegre and instead of getting a Brazilian airplane, you could get on one with the flag of Argentina painted proudly on the vertical stabilizer? Wouldn’t that make your heart beat proudly?”
Duarte shook his head but didn’t reply.
“Or you wanted to fly to Mendoza, where I know you do business, and there at El Palomar was a shiny new Lodestar with—what? ‘Argentine Air Lines’ has a nice ring to it—painted on the sides of the fuselage to fly you there in comfort and safety, instead of one of Aeropostal’s junkers?”
“Now that I know you’re serious about this, may I suggest we have our lunch and afterward continue this conversation while I show you around the hipódromo? ”
“That’s probably a very good idea. I may be paranoid, of course, but I feel curious eyes burning holes in the back of my head.”’
“You’re not paranoid,” Duarte said. “Some of those looking at you curiously were wondering who you were, at first sitting here all by yourself with no member having you as his guest. The others, having asked Señor Estano and been told, are naturally curious to see what El Coronel Frade’s long-lost American son looks like.”
“How do they know I’m an American? You just told me I look like my great-grandfather. ”
“Cletus, you are slumped in your chair with your legs stretched out in front of you, something that’s not often seen in here, and on your feet are boots of a type never seen here and certainly not in the Jockey Club.”
“If I had known everybody was going to be so curious about me, I’d be working on a chaw of Red Man.”
“ ‘Red Man’?”
“Chewing tobacco. That’d give them something to talk about when I spit.”
He mimed the act.
“Oh, God, Cletus! For a moment I thought you were serious.”
“What makes you think I’m not?”
Duarte shook his head and waved his hand over his head to summon a waiter.
Frade pointed to a family crest engraved in a two-foot square of pink marble set in the wall beside what was the entrance to a long, vine-covered stable.
“This mine, too?”
Duarte nodded and smiled.
“Your grandfather used to say he made a lot of money breeding thoroughbreds for the family while his brother—your Granduncle Guillermo—lost even more betting on them.”
“Not only money,” Clete said. “My father told me he bet on a slow horse and lost the guesthouse across from the downtown racetrack.”
“Your grandfather bought it back, and your granduncle was banished to Mendoza. When your grandfather died, your father and Beatrice stopped racing altogether. Your father said there was enough of a gamble in just breeding and dealing in horses. You’re still pretty heavily invested in that. I was hoping you were going to become involved yourself. You know horses.”
When my grandfather died, Frade thought, his property, under the Napoleonic Code of Inheritance, was equally divided between his two children.
My father then bought out his sister’s share; that money became her dowry for when she married Humberto.
And now, when Beatrice and Humberto die, since Cousin Jorge went for a ride he shouldn’t have taken in a Storch at Stalingrad and there being no closer blood relative, everything will come to me.
Jesus Christ, what a screwed-up law!
Even my father thought so.
When he explained it to me, he used as an example a family with two children, a son and a daughter. The son takes off for Paris and spends his life chasing women, boozing it up, never even sending a postcard. The daughter spends her life caring for their parents, and can’t even get married.
Yet, when the parents die, the Napoleonic Code splits everything fifty-fifty.
“Instead of doing what El Colonel Martín suspects I’m doing, you mean?” Frade asked.
Duarte nodded.
