AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You already have a priest,” Dunwiddie said evenly.
“What priest? Wait . . . you mean Father Welner? You’re suggesting I bring Welner here from Argentina to deal with Orlovsky?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jesus, Clete!” Jimmy blurted. “That would work.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Frade said. “That’s preposterous.” He stopped. “On the other hand, it just might work.”
“That’s what Sergeant Dunwiddie and I concluded, Colonel,” Gehlen said. “The question then becomes: Will Father Welner be willing to participate?”
“General, the question our wily Jesuit friend will ask himself is: ‘What’s in this for me?’ ‘Me’ being defined as the Society of Jesus. And from what I’ve seen of them—and Welner—he will regard this as a heaven-sent opportunity. They get no-cost-to-them access to a senior NKGB officer and they get an ‘I owe you’ from both me and you. And probably from General Martín as well. That’s the only downside I see, Martín being brought into this.”
“What I was asking was: Isn’t Father Welner likely to consider the moral implications of him being used to turn Major Orlovsky? The first thing we want from Orlovsky is the names of my people he—the NKGB—has turned. And Father Welner knows what will happen to them when we know who they are.”
“When Father Welner was explaining to me how things were in Argentina, and God knows I needed an explanation—”
“Otto Niedermeyer told me that you were very close to Father Welner, but never offered an explanation of how that came to happen,” Gehlen interrupted.
Frade correctly interpreted it to be more of a question than a statement.
“He was my father’s confessor and best friend,” Frade said. “Because my father was about as religious as I am, and had good reason to hate the Church—”
“‘Hate the Church’?” Gehlen parroted in surprise.
Frade paused before deciding to answer the question.
“My mother was a convert to Roman Catholicism,” he said finally. “After having been warned that a second pregnancy would be very dangerous, she dutifully obeyed the Catholic rules forbidding contraception and died in childbirth. After her funeral, the next time he entered a church was at his own funeral. You heard he was assassinated?”
“At the orders of the SS,” Gehlen said. “Otto told me. I’m very sorry.”
“On the day of my father’s funeral, Welner came to me. He said that whether or not I liked it, he considered himself my priest, my confessor, and hoped that he and I could become as close as he and my father had been.
“I didn’t know what his motives were, whether he was trying to put me in his pocket for the good of the Church or whether it really was because of the personal relationship he said he had with my father. I suppressed the urge to tell him to get lost. Over time, I have come to believe that it was probably a little of both. He and my father had been very close. And now I was sitting on the throne of my father’s kingdom. Jesuits like to get close to the guy on the throne. Anyway, truth being stranger than fiction, the wily Jesuit and I became, we are, good friends.
“When he was explaining to me how Argentina worked, he said the primary reason Argentina tilted heavily toward the Axis had less to do with their admiration for Adolf Hitler and National Socialism than it did with what they had seen in the Spanish Civil War. That had been a war, they believed, between the Christian forces of Franco and the godless Republicans, read Communists. The Germans made sure the Argentines knew the Republicans had murdered four thousand–odd priests—”
“And thirteen bishops,” Gehlen said.
“So you think that’s true, that the Republicans murdered priests and nuns out of hand?” Frade asked.
“And bishops. I saw evidence of one such sacrilege one beautiful spring day in 1937.”
“You saw it?” Cronley blurted.
Gehlen nodded.
“I think I missed the actual sacrilege by an hour. Maybe two. My team—I was then a brand-new major—and I were driving down a road near Seville. As we approached a picturesque little village, there was a priest hanging from every other telephone pole. And then when we got to the center of the little village, we found, lying in a massive pool of blood in front of the burned-out church, a dozen nuns who had obviously been violated before they were murdered. And a bishop tied to a chair. He had been shot in the back of the head. Our sergeant theorized that he had been forced to watch the raping of the nuns, but there is of course no way we could know that for sure.”
“Jesus Christ!” Cronley exclaimed.
“Captain Cronley gets the prize for today’s most inappropriate blasphemy,” Frade said darkly.
“I think that was an expression of disgust, rather than blasphemy,” Gehlen said.
“Possibly,” Frade said. “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Before we got off the subject, I was about to say that I don’t think Father Welner will have any moral problems helping us turn an NKGB officer. I suspect he feels—for that matter, the Catholic Church feels—much the same way about Communists as General Philip Sheridan felt about the Indians on our Western plains.”
“Excuse me?”
