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“‘Used to be a friend’? Now you’re warring with Graham?”
Howell didn’t have time to answer the question before Antonio Lavalle opened the door and announced, “Don Cletus, your guests have arrived. May I show them in?”
Clete didn’t have time to answer that question, either, before Doña Claudia Carzino-Cormano pushed past the butler and entered the library.
“Antonio told me you were having a cocktail in the library,” she announced indignantly. “At half past ten in the morning . . .”
She stopped when she saw Cletus Marcus Howell.
“Well, look who’s here,” the old man said. “Will you join us, Claudia? The more the merrier, I always say.”
“Señor Howell,” she said. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
She didn’t sound very sincere.
“I thought we were on a first-name basis,” the old man said. “Have I done something to offend?”
Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and Wilhelm von Dattenberg came into the room. Through the open door, Clete saw Alicia von Wachtstein and Elsa von Wachtstein in the foyer.
“Did I hear the word ‘cocktail’?” Peter asked.
“You’ll have to ask your mother-in-law if you can have one,” Clete said
.
Claudia snorted and walked out of the library.
“Hansel, you’ve never met my grandfather, have you?” Clete said. “Grandfather, this is Peter von Wachtstein.”
“I’ve heard a good deal about you, sir,” Peter said.
“And I’ve heard a good deal about you, too,” the old man said. “From my chauffeur.”
“Uh-oh,” Clete said.
“Do you realize, Cletus, that it took Alex Graham—”
“Your fat Mexican former friend?” Clete interrupted. “That Alex Graham?”
“—and both of my senators to get Tom out of that mess you put him in?”
“What mess was that?” Clete asked innocently.
“You spirited your friends here out of that Top Secret POW camp in Virginia and then left poor old Tom to face the music. The FBI wanted to charge him with aiding and abetting a prison break, and the Army wanted to add high treason,” the old man said, then realizing Clete was pulling his leg, and concluded, “As you goddamn well know.”
“I told Tom to tell the FBI that I held a gun on him,” Clete said. “He said he hadn’t had so much fun since driving you around dodging revenuers during Prohibition.”
The old man ignored that and turned on von Dattenberg.
“You’re the other one, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“The other German my grandson helped to escape from Fort Hunt. The one trying to take advantage of my granddaughter.”
Clete laughed out loud. Von Wachtstein chuckled and smiled.
“It’s not funny, goddamn it, Cletus!” von Dattenberg said.
