Death and Honor

[ONE]

Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo Near Pila Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1130 22 June 1943

The Fieseler Storch, a small, high-wing, single-engine aircraft, flew at one thousand feet over the verdant Argentine pampas.

The pampas—from the Indian word for “level plain”—runs from the Atlantic Ocean just south of Buenos Aires to the Andes Mountains. The flat, fertile plains cover 300,000 square miles, an area roughly half the size of Alaska, a little larger than Texas, and just about twice as big as California. The pampas has been accurately described as incredibly vast, incredibly fertile, and incredibly silent.

The Storch was freshly painted in the Luftwaffe “Spring and Summer Camouflage Scheme.” The two sergeants who had accompanied the plane to Argentina had dutifully complied with the appropriate Luftwaffe maintenance regulation, even though June in Argentina was winter.

The original idea the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office had had was to send the airplane to Argentina and, after demonstrating its extraordinary capabilities to as many Argentine officers as possible, to give it to the Ejército Argentino as a gesture of friendship and solidarity.

Manfred Alois Graf von Lutzenberger, the slight, very thin, career diplomat who was ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the German Reich to the Republic of Argentina, had seen how useful the airplane had been in moving around the country—and especially between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay—and somehow the gift had never been made.

The sergeants had done a good job. The random shaped patches in three shades of green and two of brown had been faultlessly applied. The black crosses identifying a German military aircraft had been painted flawlessly on both sides of the fuselage aft of the cockpit, and the red Hakenkruez of Nazi Germany had been painted in white circles on the vertical stabilizer.

There were two men in the Storch, both wearing Luftwaffe flight suits, a sort of brown coverall with many pockets. The pilot, Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, was serving as the acting military attaché of the embassy until an officer of suitable rank for the position could be selected and sent to Buenos Aires to replace the attaché who had been killed.

The passenger, sitting behind von Wachtstein in the narrow fuselage, was Korvettenkapitän Karl Boltitz. Korvettenkapitän is the German naval rank equivalent to a Luftwaffe major—and to that of a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and Army/Marine Corps major.

Both officers were tall, blond, well-set-up young men. Under their flight suits they wore nearly brand-new well-tailored woolen suits. Clothing was strictly rationed in Germany, but there was no clothing ration in Argentina— for that matter, no rationing at all—and both had taken the opportunity immediately on their arrival to buy complete wardrobes, from fine fur felt hats down to finely crafted shoes of the best Argentine leather.

On the endless rolling grass plain beneath the aircraft, von Wachtstein scanned the literally countless cattle spread as far as the eye could see. He thought their low-level flight over the pampas could have turned into a chasing of the cattle—except not one of the cows paid the slightest attention to the airplane.

Von Wachtstein switched his left hand to the stick of the Storch and gestured at the ground with his right.

Boltitz, who had been carefully studying the ground from the left window, now directed his look out the right side. He saw a sprawling, white-painted stone mansion sitting with its outbuildings in an enormous manicured garden, all set within a windbreak of a triple row of tall cedars. He nodded.

He saw, too, that there was an airstrip. He corrected himself. It was a small airfield. There was a fairly large curved-roof hangar. The tail of a light airplane protruded from the hangar’s door, and there were three more small airplanes— after a moment, he identified them as American-made Piper Cubs—parked on a paved tarmac. There was even a fuel truck.

Parked with its nose into the hangar was a large, sleek, twin-engine passenger aircraft painted a brilliant high-gloss red. It took Boltitz a moment to identify it as an American Lockheed Lodestar transport, and then another moment to call from his memory something about it. It was smaller than the standard American airliner, the Douglas DC-3, which carried twenty-one passengers—the Lodestar carried fourteen—but it was considerably faster and had a longer range.

That Lodestar, Boltitz thought, is as out of place in this setting as is the Storch. The Storch belongs on a battlefield and the Lodestar on an airport.

Von Wachtstein took the stick in his right hand again and picked up the intercom microphone.

“This is Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo,” he announced. “It takes in a few more than eight hundred eighty square kilometers.”

Boltitz had trouble believing that.

“That’s the size of Berlin,” he challenged.

“Yes, it is,” von Wachtstein said. “And more than twice the size of Vienna, and more than three times the size of Munich. I checked it in the embassy library.”

“Fantastic!”

“And my mother-in-law’s estancia, Santa Catalina,” von Wachtstein went on, “which starts a couple of kilometers to our right, is nearly as big, eight hundred and five square kilometers, more or less.”

“Mein Gott!” Boltitz exclaimed dutifully. He thought: Why the hell is he so cheerful?

Boltitz now noticed something else. There was a large open convertible— he couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a Horch—parked in the shade of the hangar. A blond young woman was sitting on the hood, looking up at them.

Boltitz found his microphone.

“There’s a blond woman looking up at us,” he said, then asked, “Is that a Horch?”

“Señora Dorotea Mallín de Frade,” von Wachtstein replied. “Mistress of all she can see. That is indeed a Horch. A 930V. One of the last to leave the factory. It belonged to Oberst Frade.”

As von Wachtstein banked the plane, Boltitz got a better look at the car. It was enormous but graceful. It had black fenders and hood, and the body was painted in red nearly as bright as the airliner.

Boltitz remembered his father, in one of the rare times he said anything that could be in any way interpreted as critical of Adolf Hitler, telling him that Der Führer had really “killed the Horch.”

“It’s actually a better car than the Mercedes,” Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz had said. “But since the Führer and his entourage ride around in Mercedeses, everyone with enough money to buy a car of that class naturally wants to be like our Führer.”

Boltitz thought: My God, I should have paid attention to what my father wasn’t saying. He told me to pay attention not to what Admiral Canaris was saying, but what he was not saying. I should have been smart enough to apply that to my father, too.

“And where Doña Dorotea is,” von Wachtstein went on cheerfully, “one can usually find Don Cletus. We got lucky.”

Fully aware that both his office and apartment telephones were tapped by the Sicherheitsdienst—the “security” branch of the SS—attached to the German embassy, von Wachtstein had not telephoned to tell either Doña Dorotea or her husband they were coming, or even to ascertain that either was at the estancia. He had to take the chance that one or the other was.

“Did we, von Wachtstein?” Boltitz asked sarcastically. “Did we ‘get lucky’?”

Von Wachtstein didn’t reply. He was concentrating on setting the Storch down on the four-thousand-foot-long gravel landing strip.

Not that he was going to need much of the runway. The Storch—its long, fixed, landing gear and large, high wing made it look like a stork; hence the name—could land practically anywhere and do it so slowly that it could come to a stop within a hundred feet of touchdown. Large slats fixed to the leading edge of the wing and enormous flaps gave it that ability, and the ability to take off at twenty-five miles per hour in about two hundred feet.

Without thinking of the circumstances of their coming to the estancia, von Wachtstein was showing off the flight characteristics of the Luftwaffe’s “ground cooperation” airplane and his own skill to Cletus Frade, himself a pilot.

He realized this when he was on the ground and taxiing the Storch to park it beside the three Piper Cubs.

That wasn’t too smart, he thought. But under the circumstances, I’m entitled to be a little crazy.

He considered that, then corrected himself: Crazy, but not careless.

The young blond woman slid off the enormous hood of the Horch, exposing more leg than she realized, and started walking toward the Storch.

On her heels came a large and burly middle-aged man with an enormous mustache. He was wearing a business suit that didn’t quite fit. He cradled a 12-gauge Remington Model 11 semiautomatic shotgun in his arms. Around his neck was a leather bandolier of brass-cased double-aught buckshot shells.

“Sergeant Major Enrico Rodríguez, Retired,” von Wachtstein said against the noise of the shutting-down Argus 10C engine. “Where Don Cletus is, Enrico can always be found. I think I should tell you Enrico’s not fond of Germans. He suspects, correctly, that people we hired wound up slitting his sister’s throat while they were trying to assassinate Don Cletus, and ambushed Don Cletus’s father, Oberst Frade, in that Horch. El Coronel died. The assassins thought Enrico was dead, too. He was full of buckshot, but he wasn’t dead.”

“Mein Gott!” Boltitz muttered.

Von Wachtstein waved at Doña Dorotea, loosened his seat belt, then started to unfasten the fold-down doors on the Storch.

Boltitz saw someone jump down from the fuselage door of the Lodestar and start to walk toward them. He was a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man wearing khaki trousers, cowboy boots, and a fur-collared leather zipper jacket.

That looks, Boltitz thought, like some kind of a flier’s jacket.

When the young man came closer, he saw that it was: Sewn to the breast was a gold-stamped identification badge. It carried the wings of a Naval Aviator and the legend C.H. FRADE, 1LT USMCR.

“Hola, Peter,” Señora Frade greeted him with a wave and a smile as he crawled out of the airplane. “An unexpected pleasure.”

“Dorotea, may I present Korvettenkapitän Boltitz?” von Wachtstein said. “Dorotea is my wife’s oldest friend.”

Boltitz clicked his heels and bowed.

“Enchanted,” he said in Spanish.

“What can we do for you, von Wachtstein?” Cletus Frade asked in Spanish. His hostile tone of voice made it clear that he was displeased as well as surprised to see the German.

The surprise was genuine. The hostility was feigned. It was difficult to dislike someone who had saved your life. More than that: Frade was both genuinely fond of von Wachtstein and admired him. Maybe even loved him.

Cletus H. Frade had given his relationship with Hans-Peter von Wachtstein a good deal of thought.

We’re pawns on this crazy chessboard, he had originally thought, and the people moving us around are perfectly willing to sacrifice either of us to advance their game.

He’d changed that original assessment slightly: Well, maybe not pawns, maybe knights. But certainly not bishops, who by definition are supposed to promote good works and practice decency and honesty.

They had met six months before, in December of 1942, as the result of what he had politely thought of at the time as an almost funny misunderstanding between his father and his aunt—his father’s sister, Beatrice Frade de Duarte— but what he now thought of, far less kindly, as a typical Argentine fuckup.

Two months before they met, both had been serving officers. Frade had been flying a Grumman F4F Wildcat of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211 off Fighter One on Guadalcanal, and von Wachtstein a Focke-Wulf 190 of Jagdstaffel 232 defending Berlin against what was becoming a daily bombardment by the Allied heavy bombers.

That had a lot to do with what happened, Cletus Frade had decided, perhaps immodestly. We’re both fighter pilots. Fighter pilots are special people. Only another fighter pilot knows what being a fighter pilot is all about. It has nothing to do with what side of the war you’re on.

Cletus Frade had been returned to the United States from Guadalcanal to perform two duties the brass considered more important than his shooting down any more Japanese aircraft or strafing Japanese infantry.

The first was to be exhibited—with half a dozen other pilots with five or more kills—on various platforms and theater stages on the West Coast. Seeing real-life aces, the brass reasoned, was almost certain to encourage people to buy war bonds.

The second purpose—for the combat-experienced pilots to serve as instructor pilots to pass on the lessons they had learned to new pilots—Frade thought was probably going to be more dangerous than taking on some Japanese pilot. A new Navy or Marine aviator trying to prove he was worthy of being sent off to do aerial battle was very likely to be as dangerous to his instructor pilot as a fourteen-year-old riding his first motorcycle in front of his girlfriend.

Frade therefore had been very receptive to the offer made to him in a San Francisco hotel room as he reluctantly was getting dressed to go on display again.

It had come from a stocky, well-dressed, mustachioed, middle-aged man who said his name was Graham. He had shown Frade his identification card, that of a Marine Corps colonel, and then said that if Frade would volunteer to undertake an unspecified “mission outside the United States involving great risk to his life” he could get off the war bond tour—right then, that night—and would not be assigned as an IP when the war bond tour was over.

Frade had already decided to do something outrageous to get himself relieved of his instructor pilot duties, but that almost certainly would have meant getting shipped back to the Pacific, which would also certainly involve great risk to his life. So, figuring that he didn’t have much to lose, he signed a vow-of-secrecy document promising all sorts of punishments for even talking about his new duties.

It was only after he had signed that Colonel Graham told him he was now in the Office of Strategic Services, and what the OSS expected of him was to go to Argentina and attempt to establish a relationship with his father.

Not sure if he was embarrassed or amused, Frade had explained to the colonel that that was probably going to be a little difficult, as he could not remember ever having seen his father, and had it on good authority that his father had absolutely no interest in seeing him.

“I know,” Graham said. “Your grandfather told me.”

“My grandfather?” Clete had blurted.

Graham nodded. “I saw him just before I flew out here to see you. The kindest words he used to describe el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade—”

“My father is a colonel?” Cletus Frade asked, astonished.

Graham nodded again, and handed him a photograph. It showed a large, tall, dark-skinned man with a full mustache. He wore a rather ornate, somewhat Germanic uniform, and was getting into the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz sedan. In the background, against a row of Doric columns, was a rank of soldiers armed with rifles standing at what the Marine Corps would call Parade Rest. Their uniforms, too, looked Germanic, and they were wearing German helmets.

“That was taken several months ago,” Graham said. “The day he retired from command of the Húsares de Pueyrredón, Argentina’s most prestigious cavalry regiment.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“You’re the product of an unfortunate infatuation, and a hasty, equally unfortunate marriage, right?”

Frade had looked at him but said nothing.

“I’ll take your silence as agreement,” Graham went on. “If I go wrong, stop me.”

Frade nodded at Graham coldly but said nothing.

“Your mother converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry your father, ” Graham continued. “Which ceremony was conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Cathedral of Saint Louis in Jackson Square, officiated by the Cardinal Archbishop of New Orleans. Your Aunt Martha was your mother’s matron of honor. Captain Juan Perón was your father’s best man.”

“You seem to know more about this than I do,” Frade had replied, more than a little sarcastically.

“ ‘Sir, with respect, you seem to know more about this than I do, sir,’ ” Graham said coldly. “Don’t let my charming smile and warm manner fool you. I’m a Marine colonel and you’re a first lieutenant. You have that straight in your mind, mister?”

“Yes, sir.”

Graham nodded.

“Yeah, now that you mention it, I probably do know more about this than you,” Graham went on conversationally. “Anyway, after a three-month honeymoon slash grand tour of Europe, during the last month of which your mother came to be with child, the newlywed couple went to Argentina, where a healthy boy—you—came into the world in the German Hospital in Buenos Aires. How’m I doing, Cletus?”

“Sir, from what I have heard before, that’s correct.”

“Shortly thereafter, your mother found herself in the family way again. There was some medical problem, and at her father’s insistence, she came home, so to speak, for better medical attention. She died in childbirth, as did the baby. Your father then returned to Argentina, leaving you in the care of your Aunt Martha and Uncle James Howell. You were raised on a ranch near Midland, Texas, then were a member of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M—as was I, coincidentally— but you resigned from the Corps so that you could become a tennis-playing jock at Tulane. You went from Tulane into the Marines, where you flew F4Fs, shot down seven Japanese, and then were returned to the States to sell war bonds and teach new pilots how to stay alive. That about it, Cletus?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you cannot remember ever having seen your father?”

“No, sir, I cannot.”

“Do you know how your grandfather feels about your father?”

“Yes, sir. He thinks he’s an unmitigated bastard and the less said about the no-good sonofabitch the better.”

Graham nodded.

“Maybe being an unmitigated bastard is the reason your father got to be a colonel. In the Ejército Argentino, that’s like being a major general in the Marine Corps.”

Frade looked at him but didn’t say anything.

“And—if the coup d’état he’s setting up works, and we think it probably will—he’s probably going to be the next president of Argentina.”

“Jesus Christ!” Frade had blurted.

“It would be in the interest of the United States, obviously, if the president of Argentina leaned toward the United States. Right now, the Argentines, including your father, are leaning the other way. You getting the picture, Lieutenant? ”

“What makes you think I can change his mind? For that matter, that he won’t be annoyed, really annoyed, rather than pleased, when I suddenly show up out of nowhere?”

“We don’t know,” Graham admitted. “All we know for sure is that it’s worth a try.”

Colonel Graham had been as good as his word. Frade never had to step on a stage again. Three hours after meeting Graham, he was sitting beside him in a Trans-Continental & Western Airlines DC-3 on his way to Washington, D.C.

Shortly after that, he was on a Pan American Grace Sikorsky four-engine seaplane on his way to Buenos Aires.

The day after meeting his father for the first time, and learning that he wasn’t quite the unmitigated sonofabitch Cletus Howell had taught Cletus Frade to believe, El Coronel turned over to his only son the Frade family’s guesthouse— a mansion overlooking the racetrack in Buenos Aires—for his use as long as he was in Buenos Aires.

Frade “went home” one evening to find another Spanish-speaking young man in the library. He was listening to Beethoven’s Third Symphony on the phonograph and was well into a bottle of the excellent Argentine brandy.

By the time that bottle was empty and the level in a second bottle pretty well lowered, Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade and Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had learned a good deal about each other.

It had quickly come out that both were fighter pilots, which had immediately established a bond between them, even though they were technically enemies.

And the reasons both were in Buenos Aires rather than in fighter cockpits were actually quite similar. The German government had decided they had something more important for von Wachtstein to do than trying to shoot down the enemies’ airplanes.

Von Wachtstein told him the German foreign ministry had decided that properly honoring Captain Jorge Alejandro Duarte, a socially prominent young Argentine officer who had died nobly in the Battle of Stalingrad, would be a marvelous way of reminding the Argentines that Adolf Hitler was at war with godless communism.

The young Argentine officer’s body had been flown out of Stalingrad just before von Paulus’s army fell to the Red Army. It would be returned to Argentina—in a lead-lined coffin—with a suitable escort, and then, after the posthumous award of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross at a suitable ceremony, Captain Duarte’s body would be interred in the family tomb in Buenos Aires’s Recoleta Cemetery.

The “suitable escort” is where von Wachtstein came in. He came from a distinguished military family and he himself had been personally decorated by Adolf Hitler with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his prowess as a fighter pilot. He had been ordered to Berlin from his fighter squadron to meet an Argentine officer, a Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, in order to see if Perón approved of him. Perón had found him suitable, and von Wachtstein had brought the body, by ship, to Buenos Aires.

The dead hero’s mother—Cletus’s aunt, and El Coronel’s sister—had graciously offered the family guesthouse to the young German officer for as long as he was in Argentina—either unaware or not caring that her brother had turned it over to Cletus Frade.

By the time both young fighter pilots had staggered off to bed, they had agreed that (a) fighter pilots are special people; (b) Captain Duarte’s flying around in a Storch directing artillery was a pretty dumb fucking thing for a neutral observer to be doing; (c) fighter pilots understand things beyond the ken of bomber and transport drivers; (d) getting shot down doing something really dumb doesn’t deserve a medal, especially one of the better ones, like the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, even if (e) just about every medal on a fighter pilot’s chest really should have gone to some other fighter pilot who really deserved it; (f) fighter pilots are special people, and after this dumb fucking war is over, we’ll have to get together and do this again.

The bureaucrats at the German embassy, who had finally learned that von Wachtstein had been sent to the Frade guesthouse even though El Coronel Frade’s American son was already resident there, sent an officer to retrieve von Wachtstein early the next morning.

Both thought that they would probably never see the other again.

That didn’t happen, either.

When Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein learned that it was intended to have Cletus Frade assassinated as a lesson to Cletus’s father, to the officer corps of the Ejército Argentino—and, incidentally, also because it was suspected that young Frade was a secret agent of the Office of Strategic Services—von Wachtstein decided that his officer’s honor would not permit him to look the other way. He warned him what was coming.

Thus Cletus Frade was prepared for the assassins when they came after him. He killed both of them, but not before they had cut the throat of Señora Mariana María Dolores Rodríguez de Pellano, the guesthouse housekeeper and the sister of Enrico Rodríguez, sergeant major retired.

“We were headed for Santa Catalina,” Hans-Peter von Wachtstein lied to Cletus Frade. “The hydraulic pressure warning light came on. I thought I’d better sit it down and check it out.”

Frade nodded but said nothing.

“Don Cletus, may I present Korvettenkapitän Boltitz? Herr Korvettenkapitän, this is Don Cletus Frade.”

Frade examined Boltitz coldly, said “Mucho gusto” with absolutely no gusto, and did not offer his hand.

Boltitz clicked his heels and bowed. “Señor Frade.”

“I’ll have a mechanic look at your aircraft,” Frade said. “And now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

“Cletus,” von Wachtstein said. “He knows.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He knows, Cletus. Just about everything. That’s why I brought him here.”

“Oh, my God!” Dorotea said, horrified, and looked at her husband.

What the hell does that mean? Boltitz thought. That she knows what “just about everything” means?

And if she knows, how many other people know what von Wachtstein has been up to?

“Shit!” Frade said bitterly, and met Boltitz’s eyes. “Do you speak English, Captain?”

“Yes, I do,” Boltitz replied in English.

“Then you just heard how I feel about Peter’s announcement,” Frade said. Then anger overwhelmed him. “Jesus H. Fucking Christ, Peter! What did you do, lose your mind? Why the hell did you tell him anything, much less everything?”

“Clete!” Dorotea said warningly.

“Señor Frade,” Boltitz said. “Major von Wachtstein did not betray your confidence. I was sent here to uncover the traitor in our embassy, and I did so.”

Frade examined him, his eyes revealing his incredulity.

“I don’t pretend to understand you Germans,” he said. “But do you have any idea at all how close I am to telling Enrico to take you out on the pampas and make really sure you can’t tell anyone what Wachtstein has told you about anything?”

“Clete, my God!” Dorotea exclaimed. “You can’t mean that!”

“Put a round in the chamber, Enrico,” Frade ordered. “And don’t take your eyes off him.”

Enrico said, "Sí, señor,” and pushed the button on the side of the shotgun’s receiver. There was a metallic clacking as a shell was fed to the chamber.

Boltitz had two chilling thoughts:

If Frade tells that tough old soldier to shoot me, he will.

Frade is entirely capable of giving that order.

“I suggest we go into the study,” Dorotea said. She inclined her head toward the Lodestar. A man wearing mechanic’s coveralls was examining something in the right engine nacelle. This placed him in a position where he could overhear the conversation.

Yes, she knows, Boltitz thought.

What the hell is the matter with Frade, making his wife party to business like this? His five-months-or-so pregnant wife?

Boltitz felt Frade’s unfriendly eyes on him.

“Does the name El Coronel Alejandro Martín mean anything to you, Captain? ” Frade asked.

Boltitz nodded.

Martín was chief of the Ethical Standards Office of the Bureau of Internal Security of the Argentine Ministry of Defense. He was the most powerful man in Argentine intelligence and counterintelligence.

“Just as soon as that guy with his head in my engine can get to a phone,” Frade went on, “good ol’ Alejandro will be wondering what the two of you were doing here.”

He raised his voice. “Carlos!”

He had to call three times before Carlos admitted to having heard him and came trotting over to them.

“Carlos, this is Major von Wachtstein of the German embassy,” Frade said. “He has some trouble with his hydraulic pressure. Would you please do what you can to make it right?”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

“May I offer you gentlemen a coffee?” Frade said. “Carlos will come to the house when he knows something.”

“That’s very kind of you, Señor Frade,” von Wachtstein said.

Frade gestured toward the Horch.

Boltitz was surprised when Dorotea Frade got behind the wheel. Her husband got in beside her and turned on the seat as von Wachtstein, Boltitz, and Enrico got in. He looked at Boltitz.

“Captain, I don’t like to kill people unless I have to,” he said, almost conversationally. “Don’t push your luck by doing something stupid.”

“I fully understood that I would be putting my life in your hands when I came here, Major Frade,” Boltitz said.

"’Major’ ?” Frade parroted, disgustedly. “Jesus Christ, Peter, you really had diarrhea of the mouth, didn’t you?”

He turned away from the backseat as the Horch began to move slowly, first making a wide turn on the tarmac, then turning onto a road lined with eucalyptus trees. There was grass between the trees. It was being patiently mowed by workmen swinging scythes. As the car passed them, they stopped and took off their hats in deference to Don Cletus, his lady, and their guests.

Frade replied with a casual wave of his hand and sometimes by calling out a workman’s name, as if greeting a friend.

The tree-lined road was almost a kilometer long. Then it opened onto the manicured garden surrounding the house Boltitz had seen from the air. From the ground, the house was larger than it appeared from above.

As Señora Frade pulled the Horch up before the door of the house— beside a Buick convertible—the door opened and a middle-aged man in a crisp white jacket came out. He walked quickly—but too late—to open Señora Frade’s door.

“Antonio,” Frade ordered. “Have coffee brought to the study, then see that we’re not disturbed.”

"Sí, señor.”

Frade added: “And when the mechanic comes here, keep him waiting on the porch.”

He waved his wife ahead of him into the house, and started to follow her, gesturing for Boltitz and von Wachtstein to follow them.