Death and Honor

[TWO]

Office of the Managing Director Banco de Inglaterra y Argentina Bartolomé Mitre 300 Buenos Aires, Argentina 1205 10 July 1943

“Come in, Cletus,” Humberto Duarte said as he opened one of the pair of heavy wooden doors to his office.

Frade and Duarte embraced in the Argentine fashion, then they walked into the office, trailed by Enrico Rodríguez.

“Very nice,” Clete said, looking around the luxuriously furnished office. “I guess foreclosing on widows and orphans pays you bankers pretty good, huh? No offense.”

“None taken. And would you be offended—either of you—if I said you are splendidly turned out? Good morning, Enrico.”

Enrico nodded.

“Blame my wife,” Frade said. “She’s responsible.”

Duarte’s eyebrows rose in question as he waved Frade into a chair in front of his enormous, ornately carved desk. Enrico took a chair near the door and rested on the floor the butt of the shotgun that he concealed in his top coat.

“Our suits were my father’s,” Clete said. “In what is now my bedroom, he had a closet full of them. Right after Dorotea and I married, I showed them to her and said we really ought to give them to somebody who could use them. Most looked like he’d never worn them. She said she knew just the people who could really use them, so I told her to have at it. Two days later, an Englishman showed up, a tailor—”

“An Englishman or an Anglo-Argentine?”

“I’d guess an Anglo-Argentine. He talks like my father-in-law . . . or you. His name is Halsey.”

“I know him well,” Duarte said. “And let me guess, he stood you on a stool and took out his tape measure and a piece of chalk?”

Clete smiled and nodded. “And now Enrico and I look like advertisements in Esquire. All he had to do was take them in a little for me, and let them out a little for Enrico.”

“Has Claudia seen you wearing one?” Duarte asked.

Clete shook his head.

“Well, be sure to wear one when she invites you to dinner, which will probably be the day after tomorrow. She’ll be pleased.”

“Why, twice? Why will she be pleased, and why is she going to invite me to dinner?”

“She will be pleased because whenever she could drag your father into Halsey’s place of business, she ordered suits for him. Most of which he hung in his closet and he never wore. And Claudia is going to have you to dinner because of what I want to talk to you about now. After which, we’ll walk over to the Jockey Club and have lunch.”

“I just had one of my better ideas,” Clete said. “Why don’t we walk over to the Jockey Club now and talk about whatever you want to talk about while we eat? Enrico and I were up at dawn moving bulls. I’m starved. I was starved before Dorotea came after us and told me you were going to buy us lunch here, and I had to get dressed and in the airplane right now. ”

“You flew in?”

“It’s the only way to travel. I thought I told you that. It took us longer to drive here from El Palomar than it did to fly in from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo in the Piper Cub.”

“Well, I’m sorry to tell you you’re going to have to live with your starvation a little longer. The rules of the Jockey Club forbid talking business in the dining room.”

“Why?”

“That’s just the way it is, Cletus.”

“If my grandfather and his pals couldn’t talk business in the dining room of the Petroleum Club in Dallas, hardly a hole would’ve been drilled.”

“This is Buenos Aires, Cletus. Try to keep that in mind.”

“Okay. But before we get into what you’re going to try to sell me, which we can’t talk about over lunch, since this is Buenos Aires, what about my airlines idea? Have you given that any solemn thought?”

Duarte, smiling, shook his head.

“What’s funny?”

“You’ll never guess who else has been thinking about an airline for Argentina, ” Duarte said.

“I give up.”

“President Ramírez.”

“And what the hell does that mean? I can’t start one because this is Argentina and the president doesn’t like competition?”

“Just about the opposite,” Duarte said. “Your Tío Juan Domingo came to see me yesterday. He told me that Ramírez had called him in, said that it was embarrassing for Argentina not to have an airline with modern transport aircraft like Varig. And since he didn’t think the Americans would sell airplanes to Argentina, what about the Germans? And since Perón had such close ties with the Germans, why didn’t Perón look into it?”

"And? ” Frade said, not believing his ears.

“And he did. And Ambassador Lutzenberger told him that just as soon as there was final victory, Germany would be delighted to help Argentina with the most modern aircraft in the world, probably even the Condor. But at the moment, there had been small reverses on the battlefields, and he didn’t think any aircraft would be available right now.”

Frade shook his head in disgust. “Ramírez actually believed that the Germans would sell him airplanes? I thought he was smarter than that.”

“Your Tío Juan Domingo was both surprised and disappointed,” Duarte said. “He admitted as much when he came to me and asked if the Banco de Inglaterra y Argentina could induce the British to sell us some transport aircraft.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“So with Juan Domingo sitting right there”—he gestured at Frade—“where you are, I called the British ambassador and asked him if he thought the English were in a position to sell some transport planes to Argentina. He said he didn’t think so, but to ask him again after the war.”

“All of which leaves me where?” Clete said.

“I then told him that you had come to me, said you thought you could get your hands on some Lockheed passenger airships, and then you asked if I thought you could get permission to start an airline, and that I told you that I thought getting permission would be just about impossible.”

“Why did you tell him that?”

“Because in addition to being a good banker, I’m a good lawyer, and all good lawyers are devious. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

“And what was his reaction to that?”

“He asked—he’s actually very clever, Cletus, something you should keep in mind—if your grandfather was involved, to which I replied, I didn’t know, but I thought it was likely, because of his relationship with Howard Hughes. To which Colonel Perón replied, ‘I thought it was probably something like that.’ Does Mr. Howell know Mr. Hughes, Cletus?”

“Very well, as a matter of fact. Hughes’s father was in the oil business. He invented a tool that goes on the end of the string.”

“Explain that, please.”

“When you put down a hole—that is, drill an oil well—there’s a string of pipes screwed together—‘the string’—that goes into the ground. At the end of the string, there’s a cutting tool.”

He held his hands, fingers extended, about eight inches apart, indicating the size of the ball-shaped tool, then went on, “Some really tough steel cutters— they look like meshing gears—chew up the dirt and rock, which gets washed out of the way. Hughes’s father came up with a hell of an improvement of the tool and, more important, was smart enough to bury it with patents. He started the Hughes Tool Company, and the Hughes Tool Company made him a very rich man. And Howard inherited the whole thing. That’s where he got the money to go into the movie business and to buy Lockheed.”

“ ‘Howard’? You know him, Cletus?”

Frade nodded.

“Even better,” Humberto said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“The first thing suspicious people—like Colonel Martín and Colonel Perón—would think when they heard that you—whom they suspect of having ties with the OSS—could get your hands on airplanes in the middle of the war was that you were getting them from the OSS.”

“You just finished saying Tío Juan Domingo has figured out I’m getting them from my grandfather’s pal, Howard Hughes.”

“I told him that the reason I told you getting permission would be impossible was because of the suspicions people like Colonel Martín would have that it was somehow connected with the OSS. To which, after thinking this over for perhaps two seconds, he replied, ‘There are ways to put such suspicions to rest.’ ”

“And did he tell you what they would be?”

“Having someone like himself on the board of directors, and making sure all the pilots, from the chief pilot downward, are Argentines. He even mentioned a Major Delgano for that position.”

“Well, Delgano does know how to fly a Lodestar,” Clete said.

“How do you know that?”

“I taught him.”

“Isn’t that the fellow who was your father’s pilot?”

Frade nodded.

“Maybe Tío Juan is smarter than I’m giving him credit for being,” he said.

“I would say that’s a given,” Duarte said.

“All the time that Capitán Delgano quote retired unquote was my father’s pilot he actually was working for Martín—the BIS. It was only when Martín decided that the coup was going to work, and enlisted in that noble enterprise, that that came out.”

“What do you mean?”

“When my father wrote Operation Blue, he made plans to avoid the firing squad in case they couldn’t pull it off. Delgano was to take his Beechcraft Staggerwing to Campo de Mayo and have it ready to fly my father, Rawson, and Ramírez to Paraguay. By the time they were ready to start Operation Blue, my father had been assassinated, and the Staggerwing was on the bottom of Samborombón Bay.

“Delgano came to me three days before they were to go, told me that he had been working for Martín all along, and that Martín wanted to use the Lodestar to get people out of the country. So I spent two days teaching him how to fly it, and then decided if my father had wanted to get rid of Castillo and his government so badly, I was obliged to put my two cents in. So I flew the Lodestar to Campo de Mayo.”

“I never heard any of this before.”

“My role in the coup became something like a state secret. Nobody, maybe especially me, wanted it to come out.”

“You sound as if you did more than fly the Lodestar to Campo de Mayo.”

“I flew General Rawson around in one of their Piper Cubs when the two rebel columns were headed for the Casa Rosada. They had lost their communication and were about to start shooting at each other.”

“And you kept that from happening?”

Clete nodded.

“Ramírez knows this?”

Clete nodded.

“Wouldn’t that tend to make him think you’re a patriotic Argentine, instead of an American OSS agent?”

“Well, maybe if Delgano hadn’t been in Santo Tomé when I flew the Lodestar in from Brazil, with an OSS team on it.”

“He saw them?”

“He saw them, and he knows that I flew them to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. And since the day after the coup Delgano was back in uniform—a newly promoted major working for BIS—I have to assume Colonel Martín has got a pretty good idea what everybody looks like.”

“Are you saying you don’t want this man looking over your shoulder in your airline?”

“Not at all. Let him look. I’m not going to be doing anything, now, that I don’t want him to see or Martín or anyone else to know about.”

“And later?”

“We’ll see about later. Why does Perón want to be on the board of directors? To keep an eye on me?”

“That, too, probably, but there would be an honorarium.”

“A generous one?”

“Since you are going to be the majority stockholder, that would be up to you. I would recommend a generous one.”

“And he does what to earn it?”

“He gets permission for you to have the airline.”

“In other words, I’m bribing him.”

“We lawyers don’t use terms like this here, Cletus. We recognize things for being the way they are.”

“Okay. What’s the next step?”

“We form the S.A.—Sociedad Anónima, literally translated, ‘Anonymous Society,’ like an American corporation—and everybody signs it, and then you come up with, say, two million two hundred thousand dollars.”

“What did you say? Two million two hundred thousand? Why do I think you just made that figure up?”

“The aircraft are in the neighborhood of a hundred twenty-three thousand dollars U.S. each,” Humberto said. “And you’re going to need at least a dozen to get started, and fourteen would be better. . . .”

Is he making that up, too? Where did he get all that?

“Fourteen of them comes to about one and three-quarter million. Doubling that—to provide for spares, salaries, operating capital, et cetera, in our preliminary planning—comes to a little less than three and a half million. Sixty percent of that, to ensure your control, comes to the two-million-two figure I mentioned.”

“Why fourteen airplanes?”

“Aeropostal has a dozen,” Duarte said.

“Where’s the other forty percent coming from?”

“Claudia and I will take twelve-point-five each, and the bank the remaining fifteen percent. As I said, my board of directors feels it’s a sound investment.”

“When did they decide that?”

“I should have said, ‘The board will feel that it’s a sound investment after I have a chance to tell them about it.’ ”

“And when is this all going to take place?”

“Claudia’s going to give a small, sort of family-only dinner tomorrow night, if Colonel Perón can find the time. If not, the next night. We can sign everything at the dinner.”

“I don’t know how long it’ll take me to come up with that kind of money.”

“The bank regards you as a good credit risk.”

“You’re amazing, Humberto.”

“How kind of you to say so. Shall we walk over to the Jockey Club?’