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“After Rodríguez told me what his friend told him about O’Reilley,” Colonel Garcia said, “I asked to see him. El Coronel Klausberger told me that O’Reilley was on a training exercise in the Andes and would not be back until Sunday, if then.”
“That raises the question: Did Klausberger know what O’Reilley was up to?” Martín said. “Or was O’Reilley working on his own? Or for someone else? If so, who?”
“Bernardo,” Frade said, “Nervo thinks O’Reilley—who kept insisting that the gendarmes had no authority over him and his men, and demanded that they be released—is confident that someone with power is covering his ass. He refused to answer Nolasco’s questions.”
“What’s Nervo going to do with him? And where is Nervo, by the way?”
“The last I heard he was going to see if whoever sent O’Reilley snooping was going to send someone looking for him,” Frade said. “When we left them, he said that after he picked up Father Welner, he would come up here for dinner. Welner was at the hospital, deciding what to do with the bodies.”
“No identification on them, I presume?” Martín asked.
“None,” Frade replied. “The coveralls they were wearing were Argentine. They all had Schmeissers, but that doesn’t prove they were SS. It doesn’t even prove they were German.”
Martín went off on a tangent: “When do you expect to hear from the convoy you sent to Estancia Condor?”
“Not until they get there. Making en route reports would involve stopping to set up the Collins and the SIGABA—that’d take an hour, at least—and the information we need is that they’re at Estancia Condor, not where they are on a road in Patagonia.”
“So when do you expect to hear from them?”
“Probably not until the morning, if then.”
“So we have to wait for that.”
“Everything depends on that,” Frade said. “By morning, too, with a little luck, Dieter—von und zu Aschenburg—should be awake enough to make sense of what Grüner has learned about landing airplanes down there.”
“So we have to wait,” Martín repeated. “It has been my experience over the years that Inspector General Nervo does not take kindly to suggestions from me. Nevertheless, I’m going to make one: that as soon as he gets his car back, he put the Irish Nazi into it and bring him here. Maybe Captain O’Reilley will answer questions put to him by an Ejército Argentino general de brigada.” He turned to Garcia. “See if you can get him on the phone.”
—
Two minutes later, Coronel Garcia put the handset of the telephone back in the base, and with a smile reported on his conversation with Inspector General Nervo.
“The general tells me he is, as usual, two steps in front of General Martín. At the moment, Captain O’Reilley is being given a tour of Mendoza in a gendarmerie convoy, with their sirens screaming and lights flashing. He is sitting strapped to a
chair in the bed of a gendarmerie pickup truck. General Nervo wants to make sure that whoever Klausberger has in Mendoza reporting to him learns that the gendarmerie has O’Reilley. When the tour of the city is over, the convoy will pick up Nervo and Nolasco and bring them here—with O’Reilley still strapped in the chair in the back of the truck in case Klausberger has other people watching Route 60.”
“Nervo seems pretty sure that Klausberger is the villain,” Frade said.
“So am I,” Martín said. “What I would really like to do is get Captain O’Reilley to admit (a) that he knew about the shooters who tried to kill our Cletus, (b) that he knew they were SS, and (c)—or maybe (c) and (d)—that not only did Klausberger know, but he issued the order. We could go to President Farrell and el Coronel Perón with that.
“The attempt on our Cletus’s life is going to infuriate Perón, as he will see it as an attack—another attack—on him. And while Farrell and Perón are dealing with el Coronel Klausberger, we can quietly deal with what has to be done in the South.”
“Yeah,” Clete said thoughtfully.
“I think I could be of service in that regard,” von Dattenberg said. “If there was some way I could get down there.”
“Oddly enough,” Frade said, “I was just thinking about that.”
“And?”
“When I make up my mind, you’ll be the first to know. Or maybe the second. Or third . . .”
There was laughter.
“. . . But right now,” Frade went on, “having just had a whiff of myself, I’m going to have a shower.”
[SIX]
Jimmy Cronley had been in his room not quite a minute—just enough time for him to take off his jacket—when Cletus Frade came in without knocking.
