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“Haig & Haig, please, Antonio,” the priest said. “Not too much ice.” Then he smiled and added, turning to Cletus, “By now you should understa
nd, my heathen son, I am not going to let you provoke me.”
“My little brother told me Elsa walked all the way across Germany from Pomerania,” Frade began.
“Your little brother?” the priest said. “That’s the first I’ve heard—”
“He’s the closest I have to one. He lived next door to me in Midland. He didn’t have a big brother, and I didn’t have a little one, so we adopted one another.”
“And where did he encounter Frau von Wachtstein?” Martín asked, from where he was speaking on the telephone. “The new Frau von Wachtstein. That’s going to cause confusion. Would she be offended if I called her ‘Frau Elsa’?”
“If you get her that libreta de enrolamiento,” Peter said, “I’m sure she’ll be happy to let you call her anything you want.”
“If you come over here, Peter, and give me her personal data, I’ll get her a libreta de enrolamiento,” Martín said, then added, “You were saying, Cletus, where your little brother—what’s his name, by the way?—encountered Frau Elsa?”
“If I didn’t know better, Bernardo, I’d suspect you were gathering data for a dossier on the lady,” Frade said.
“That’s because you have a suspicious nature,” Martín said. “Probably something you acquired in the OSS.” He handed the telephone to von Wachtstein. “I don’t see any reason you can’t tell Major Careres what he needs to know about Frau Elsa.”
Antonio Lavalle had by then opened the library bar and, with the skill of a master bartender, had just about finished preparing the drinks.
Martín walked to the bar, raised his hand to decline a large, squat glass dark with scotch whisky and instead picked up a glass of soda water. He raised it in toast.
“I give you Don Cletus’s previously unknown little brother,” he said. “What did you say his name was, Cletus?”
Frade laughed.
“His name is James D. Cronley Junior,” he said. “Want me to spell it for you?”
“Cronley with a ‘C’ or a ‘K’?” Martín asked, unabashed.
“‘C,’” Frade said. “And now that I think about it, you’d probably like him. You’re both in the counterintelligence business. We call ours the CIC.”
“And your CIC was looking for Frau Elsa? What were they going to charge her with?”
“For being the daughter of Generalmajor Ludwig Holz,” Frade said, “who was hung with piano wire from a butcher’s hook for being involved in the July 1944 bomb plot.”
“Jesus Christ!” Martín said. “I’m sorry. Peter, I deeply apologize.”
“It’s okay,” von Wachtstein said.
“No, it’s not,” Martín said. “That was stupid and cruel of me.”
“Forget it,” von Wachtstein said.
“We were looking for her,” Frade said. “As we’re still looking for Karl’s father.”
“‘We’ being the OSS, you mean?” Martín asked.
This time Frade did not pretend not to know even what OSS stood for.
“What they did,” he said, “was add the names of people we wanted to help, if possible, Karl’s father, for example . . .”
—
Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz had been the naval attaché of the German embassy. His father, Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had been deeply involved in the bomb plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Canaris had been immediately arrested and placed in the Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Bavaria. When the 97th Infantry Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated Flossenberg, they found Admiral Canaris’s naked, torture-scarred, decomposing body hanging from a gallows.
Admiral Boltitz, like his son a submariner, had been in Norway, at the German submarine pens in Narvik, when his arrest order had gone out. He disappeared before the SS could find him. It was not known whether he had tried—was still trying—to hide in Norway or had decided that jumping into the frigid Norwegian waters was preferable to arrest, torture, and certain execution.
