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“How did Peter come to ‘forget it’ the last time he was here?” Dulles asked.
“Well,” Frade said by way of explanation, “Peter can’t be accused of being a military genius, but he did set up an emergency get-out-of-Dodge plan. Which worked.”
“When we got word,” von Wachtstein furnished, “Ambassador von Lutzenberger called me at four A.M. with the joyous news that God had saved our beloved Führer from Claus’s bomb at Wolfsschanze. I then picked up Karl Boltitz at his apartment, went out to El Palomar Airfield, filed a flight plan to Montevideo, and, as soon as it was light, took off in the Storch. And flew here. Cletus then flew us—no flight plan—to Canoas in the Red Lodestar. Thirty-six hours later, Karl and I were officially POWs at Fort Hunt.”
“Von Lutzenberger,” Dulles said, “the German ambassador in Buenos Aires?”
Von Wachtstein nodded.
“He knew what you were doing?” Dulles pursued.
Von Wachtstein nodded again, then looked at Frade and said, “What happened to him after the unconditional surrender?”
“I don’t know,” Frade said. “I should have asked Martín.”
“I did ask General Martín,” Dorotea said. “The ambassador and his wife are either in Villa General Belgrano or will be shortly. Just about everybody else from the embassy was taken to the Club Hotel de la Ventana in the south of Buenos Aires Province.”
“What’s that, a house?” Major Ashton asked. “‘Villa General Belgrano’?”
“It’s actually a place,” von Wachtstein said, “a little village in Córdoba. It looks like it’s in Bavaria. It was started by German immigrants, and when the Argentine government had to put the interned survivors of the Graf Spee somewhere, the most dedicated Nazis were sent there. I used to fly that”—he pointed to the Storch—“up there once a month with the payroll and their mail.”
“And the less dedicated Nazis?” Dulles asked.
“Some of them went to an Argentine army base near Rosario,” Boltitz chimed in, “and the rest to the Ventana Club Hotel.”
“I used to go there, too,” von Wachtstein said. “Usually, I had a message or a package for the Bishop of Rosario, a man named Salvador Lombardi. You know what they say about converts to Catholicism becoming more Catholic than the Pope? Well, that sonofabitch was a convert to National Socialism and was more of a Nazi than Hitler. He told me one time that anyone who opposed Der Führer would suffer eternal damnation. And he meant it.”
“I believe the bishop is a close friend of my Tío Juan,” Frade said. “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me.”
There were many reasons for Frade’s deep distrust of el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón—his godfather, “Uncle” Juan—who was vice president, secretary of War, and secretary of Labor and Welfare of the Argentine Republic. Chief among them was that Perón, very sympathetic to Germany’s socialist political ideals, was too friendly with the Nazis in Argentina. And, Frade had discovered, Perón’s ultimate ambition wasn’t to become president of Argentina—he instead aspired to be ruler of a Greater Argentina that the Nazis had intended to create by combining Uruguay, Paraguay, and even parts of Chile and Brazil.
All of which supported Frade’s strong suspicion that Perón had been complicit in the Nazis’ ordering the assassination of el Coronel Jorge Frade and the attempted assassination of Cletus Frade.
And when Clete—who embraced Sun Tzu’s philosophy of keeping one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer—finally ordered his Tío Juan to move out of Uncle Willy’s Avenida Libertador mansion— calling him a degenerate sonofabitch for his lust for thirteen-year-old girls—Perón had actually pulled a pistol on him. It had taken Frade considerable restraint not to let Enrico’s riot shotgun accidentally discharge double-ought buckshot in Perón’s direction.
“Some of those messages for Bishop Lombardi were from Perón,” von Wachtstein confirmed.
Allen Dulles suddenly put in: “Getting off the subject of Colonel Perón and with the caveat that there’s never a good time to say something like this, Peter and Karl, I want you to know both personally and on behalf of the OSS how very sorry we are about what Hitler did to Admiral Boltitz and General von Wachtstein.”
“Thank you,” von Wachtstein said simply.
“Thank you,” Boltitz said, then added: “But I have to tell you—fully aware that this is probably what we sailors call ‘pissing into the wind’—that I haven’t completely given up hope about my father. One of the later arrivals at Fort Hunt told me he had heard that when the word came that the bomb at Wolfsschanze failed to kill Hitler, my father, who was in Norway, in Narvik, simply disappeared.”
Frade had a sudden cold-blooded thought: He knew what was going to happen to any of the conspirators.
Jumping into those icy waters was preferable to what the SS would do to him—starting with torture and ending by getting hung from a butcher’s hook—if they got their hands on him.
“It’s possible, of course, that he took his own life,” Boltitz went on.
Jesus, he’s reading my mind!
“But I don’t think he would do that. He had Norwegian friends.”
/> Sorry, Karl, but I’m afraid you really are pissing into the wind.
“I’ll see if I can find out anything for you,” Dulles said.
“Thank you.”
