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“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.
“We were headed for Santa Catalina,” Hans-Peter von Wachtstein lied to Cletus Frade. “The hydraulic pressure warning light came on. I thought I’d better sit it down and check it out.”
Frade nodded but said nothing.
“Don Cletus, may I present Korvettenkapitän Boltitz? Herr Korvettenkapitän, this is Don Cletus Frade.”
Frade examined Boltitz coldly, said “Mucho gusto” with absolutely no gusto, and did not offer his hand.
Boltitz clicked his heels and bowed. “Señor Frade.”
“I’ll have a mechanic look at your aircraft,” Frade said. “And now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Cletus,” von Wachtstein said. “He knows.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He knows, Cletus. Just about everything. That’s why I brought him here.”
“Oh, my God!” Dorotea said, horrified, and looked at her husband.
