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Martín was inside a small room apparently used as someone’s—maybe the maître d’?—office. Martín was in uniform, which was unusual, and far more unusual than that, he was armed. A Ballester-Molina .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol was in a shoulder holster.
“Sorry to interrupt your lunch,” Martín said.
“Bernardo, what’s with all the guns?” Clete asked.
“Clete, where’s the Storch?”
“At Jorge Frade. Why?”
“God, I hope you didn’t drink your lunch,” Martín said. “Have you?”
Jesus Christ! I knew I should be sober, but what the hell is this all about?
“What’s all this sudden interest in my sobriety and airplane?”
“They’ve put the plan to assassinate el Coronel Juan Perón into play,” Martín announced.
“Who’s ‘they,’ and how do you know?”
“I told him, Cletus,” Father Welner said.
“Who told you?”
“I can’t tell you that,” the priest said.
“I have to take it on faith, right?”
“Yes, you do, remembering that I’m a priest.”
“How do you know? I mean, how do you know it’s not just the boys sitting around the Circulo Militar, or the Officers’ Casino at Campo de Mayo, drinking too many martinis?”
“Because Phase A of the outline calls for the assassination of General Martín,” the priest said.
“That’s what all the guns are for? You don’t really think they’re going to come into the Jockey Club and try to whack Bernardo, do you?”
“Whack?” the priest asked.
“Shoot, kill, assassinate,” Clete said, somewhat impatiently.
“Phase A called for the assassination of Bernardo as he left his home to try to stop this,” Father Welner said. “They regard him as their greatest obstacle to carrying this out.”
“Well, don’t go home, Bernardo,” Frade said.
“I warned him,” the priest said.
“And now what?”
“It was necessary to take the lives of three of the plotters,” Martín said. “Two other men have been taken to Cosme Argerich. They are not expected to live.”
And then he clarified, “The Central Military Hospital Dr. Cosme Argerich.”
“I know what it is, Bernardo,” Frade said softly. “You put me in there the night they tried to whack me and killed Enrico’s sister.”
“That’s right. I’d forgotten.”
What I think it is, General, is that for the first time in your life you’ve been on the receiving end of someone shooting at you. Before this, it was other people getting shot at.
Don’t be self-righteous, Cletus, Old Veteran: Remember your first time. When you got back to Fighter One and saw all those holes in your Wildcat, you threw up.
