Death and Honor

[FOUR]

The room to which Frade was taken was more like a small apartment—a real apartment, he thought, not a hotel apartment. It had a comfortable bedroom, a complete kitchen with a full-size refrigerator and gas stove, a dining table that could easily seat six, and a large, well-furnished living room—which made him wonder what the Chateau Marmont was really all about.

The refrigerator held a half-dozen bottles of beer, and he grabbed one by the neck, opened it, and took a healthy swallow. Then he sat at the table.

He realized that he was really exhausted and that that had caused him to almost lose his temper. Twice. Once, about being “detained,” and, the second time, when the customs officer had made the crack about him possibly being a draft dodger.

Well, I didn’t, thank God.

And I got everybody here from Buenos Aires.

So, after I finish this beer, I’ll grab a shower, then get in the rack, and when I wake up, I’ll be full of piss and vinegar and able to decide rationally what to do next.

I’m not really in trouble. And my ace-in-the-hole is Graham. I’d call him now if I wasn’t convinced the Border Patrol hadn’t cut off the phones.

As he finished his beer, he glanced at the telephone beside the table and, just to be sure, put the phone to his ear. It was dead.

He gave the finger in the direction of the front door, the Border Patrol captain being somewhere the other side of it, and then went into the bedroom, found his toilet kit, and went into the bath and took a long shower and then shaved.

He decided that a second bottle of beer was in order, and wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There were three bottles of beer in it.

I’d have sworn there were a half-dozen the first time I was in here.

He took one of the remaining bottles and looked for the opener.

Where did I put the goddamn bottle opener?

He went to the stove to open the bottle using the edge of the stove. When he sort of squatted to see that he would open the bottle and not break its neck, the towel around his waist fell to the ground.

He rather loudly uttered a lengthy vulgar and obscene curse in the Spanish language, then with the heel of his hand knocked the cap neatly off the bottle.

He had just put the bottle to his lips when a familiar voice said, “Unless you knew better, you’d never guess that that sewer-mouthed, naked man in dire need of a haircut was a Marine officer, would you, Howard?”

“Oh, I could,” another male voice said. “You can always tell a Naval Aviator by the tiny dick and huge wristwatch.”

Frade snatched the towel from the floor, wrapped it around himself again, and went into the living room. There the mystery of the missing beer bottles was explained, as was the missing bottle opener.

Colonel A. F. Graham, USMCR, was seated in an armchair and holding one of the bottles. Howard Hughes, sitting in a matching armchair across the coffee table from Graham, held another bottle. The opener was on the table between them.

Hughes wore scuffed brown half-Wellington boots, stiffly starched khakis, a crisp white-collared shirt, and an aviator’s leather jacket. Even slumped in the armchair, it was clear that he was a commanding and confident figure: a tall— if somewhat sinewy—ruggedly handsome man with slicked-back black hair and deeply intelligent eyes.

“How goes it, Clete?” Hughes said casually in a clearly obvious but not thick Texas accent. “Long time no see.”

“Hello, Howard,” Frade said, then looked at Graham. “Good evening, sir.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Hughes said. “He’s so surprised he’s almost polite.”

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Howard.”

“With Alex, you mean?” Hughes asked.

Clete nodded. “Or him, either.”

“I’m the reason you’re here with him,” Hughes said.

“What?”

“Alex was out here about—what, Alex? A year ago?”

“Fourteen, fifteen months,” Graham furnished.

“Doing what?” Frade asked.

“That’s none of your goddamn business, Clete,” Hughes said with a smile. “Particularly since that Border Patrol guy thinks you’re a draft dodger.”

“You heard that?”

“Alex and I were playing house detective in the lobby,” Hughes said, and mimed holding up a newspaper to hide his face. “Anyway, Alex was here a little over a year ago, and I told him I had just thought of something, and asked him if he remembered Cletus Marcus Howell from the trial. . . .”

“I’m afraid to ask, but what trial?”

“Right after my father died, my goddamn relatives were stealing me blind. I was a minor; they had themselves appointed my guardians, and they headed right for the Hughes Tool cash box. Your grandfather saw it, didn’t like it one bit, and neither did A. F. here. So I borrowed from your grandfather the money I needed for lawyers and we went to court. Your grandfather and A. F. told the judge what an all-around solid citizen I was, wise beyond my years, and got me liberated—”

“Emancipated,” Graham corrected him. “Declared an adult.”

“Right. Anyway, I saw your picture in the L.A. Times. You’d just made ace on Guadalcanal. It made me think, so I told Alex about your Argentine father, and since Alex was in the spy business—”

“You know about that?” Clete blurted.

“Yeah, I know about that. What did you think Alex was doing out here, chasing movie starlets?”

“As a matter of fact . . .” Clete said.

“Watch it, Major,” Graham said, but he was smiling.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Clete asked.

“You look kind of beat, Clete,” Graham said. “You sure you want to do this now?”

“I am beat. But as beat as I am, I know I’d never get any sleep not knowing . . .”

“Okay. Your call.” Graham took a sip of his beer, clearly composing his thoughts, then went on: “Roosevelt has decided—and, for once, I agree with him—that the best way to deal with Operation Phoenix is not to try to stop it but, instead, to keep an eye on it and grab the money, et cetera, once the war is over.”

Clete had just enough time to be surprised that Howard Hughes was privy to Operation Phoenix when Hughes confirmed it:

“Otherwise,” Hughes said, “they’d just find some other way to get the money in. Nobody ever accused Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, and Company— or, for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt—of being stupid. Many other pejoratives apply, but not ‘stupid.’ ”

Graham chuckled and went on: “And Allen Dulles thinks you—and the Froggers—are the key to doing that. He thinks the key to getting the Froggers to help, really help with Phoenix and more, is to go to Mississippi and turn their Afrikakorps son. More important, Allen thinks you’re our best hope to turn him.”

“I don’t have any idea how I would do that,” Clete said.

“So far,” Hughes offered, “you’ve turned one Kraut with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and another Kraut who works for Canaris. . . .”

“You told him that?” Clete blurted angrily.

Graham didn’t reply.

Hughes added: “You’re obviously pretty good at turning Krauts. So why should turning the one in Mississippi be so difficult?”

Frade looked at Graham, who went on: “So the problem was to get you to the States without raising any more suspicions in Colonel Martín’s fertile mind. And Allen said the way to do that was not to tell you anything was going on until you got here. He was betting that you would understand the only way to get around the problem of your pilots not having ATRs was to get them rated, and since the only place you could do that was here, you’d figure out some way to get them—and you—here without making anybody suspicious. And he was right. Again.”

“Allen Dulles was behind Lloyd’s canceling our insurance?” Clete asked incredulously.

Graham nodded.

“I’ll be damned!” Clete said admiringly.

“I don’t think I want to play poker with Dulles,” Hughes said.

“What are the maps Dorotea was talking about?” Graham said. “And, incidentally, I sent her your love and told her that you arrived safely. A radiogram to South American Airways. She’ll get it, right?”

“I have trouble picturing you as a happily married man,” Hughes said.

“That’s because you haven’t seen her,” Clete said to Hughes, then looked at Graham. “Yeah, she’ll get it. Thanks.”

“The maps?” Graham pursued.

“God, I forgot about them. We went to my Granduncle Guillermo’s house to pick up a picture of my mother that my grandfather wants. Perón is staying there. He wasn’t there when we were, but Dorotea saw an Argentine army map case and took the maps from it. One shows the coastline south of Mar del Plata where U-405 ...” He looked at Hughes. “You know about that, too, Howard?”

“I know everything,” Hughes said.

“Of course,” Clete said, then picked up where he’d left off: “. . . where U-405 landed the special shipment, which means that Perón knew all about it.”

“That surprised you?” Graham asked.

“Yeah, a little. Even after I’ve had time to think about it.”

“Dorotea said ‘maps,’ plural.”

“The other one was from the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht. It shows South America ‘after the annexation.’ Paraguay and Uruguay are shown as provinces of Argentina.”

“Zimmerman,” Graham said thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”

“What?” Clete asked.

“Stranger things have happened,” Graham said, as if to himself. Then he asked, “Where’s the film?”

“In my toilet kit.”

Graham said, “You have some place where it can be developed right now, Howard?”

Hughes rose gracefully from his armchair, walked to a closet, unlocked it, reached inside, came out with a telephone, and, putting the phone to his ear, leaned on the doorjamb.

“We need a little room service,” he announced into the telephone, then put it back, closed the door, and locked it.

He saw the look on Frade’s face.

“We couldn’t take the chance that one of your pals would catch you trying to get Alex on the phone,” Hughes explained. “And Alex was worried what kind of a hooker you’d get if you tried that.”

Frade gave him the finger.

A moment later, there was a knock at the door and someone called, “Room service.”

Hughes opened the door to a stocky man wearing a white cotton waiter’s jacket, and motioned him into the room.

The man looked expressionless but carefully at Frade.

“Get your film, Clete,” Hughes ordered.

“Is this guy room service or not?” Clete asked.

“You’re hungry?” Graham asked.

Frade nodded.

“Tell them to start serving dinner,” Hughes ordered the man. “Bring three here. And then take a film cassette the gentleman in the towel is about to give you out to the studio. Have it souped. I want prints large enough to read. And I want them yesterday. Bring the film back with you. Got it?”

“Yes, Mr. Hughes,” the man said, and turned and looked at Frade again.

Clete went to the bathroom, took the film cassette from his toilet kit, and started to return but changed his mind. He got dressed first, then went back to the living room. The “waiter” still stood where he had been standing.

Clete handed him the film cassette.

“And when you bring my dinner . . .” he began, then looked at Hughes. “Do I have any choices?”

“The usual jailhouse fare,” Hughes said.

Frade turned back to the waiter. “Bring a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a good bottle of merlot or pinot noir.”

The man looked at Hughes for direction.

“That,” Hughes added, “and a bottle of gin and some ice and a martini mixer, or shaker, or whatever they call it. Serve wine with the others’ meals, but no hard stuff. I don’t want anybody finding the liquid courage to start a jailbreak.”

“Yes, Mr. Hughes.”

“You heard me say I want those prints yesterday?”

“Yes, Mr. Hughes.”

The man turned and left the room.

“What did you say before?” Clete asked Graham. “ ‘Zimmerman’?”

Graham shook his head in exaggerated disappointment. “You were apparently asleep during Modern American History 101 at our alma mater. You really don’t know?”

“No, I really don’t know.”

“Neither do I, Alex,” Hughes said. “And I very nearly finished high school. What the hell are you talking about?”

“In 1917, the British had a cryptographic operation they called ‘Room 40.’ Big secret, because they had broken the Imperial German diplomatic code—”

Hughes interrupted: “Like the Navy has broken the Imperial Jap Navy Code?”

“You didn’t hear that, Clete,” Graham said furiously. “My God, Howard!”

“Well, you said we were going to tell him about Lindbergh and Yamamoto; he’d have heard that then,” Hughes said unrepentant.

Frade looked from Hughes to Graham and back again.

Lindbergh? Lucky Lindy?

And who? Yamamoto, the Jap admiral?

Graham shook his head and went on: “And one day in January 1917, Room 40 broke a message that Zimmerman, the German foreign minister, had sent to Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, with orders to forward it to the German ambassador in Mexico, a man named von Eckhardt.”

“What was in the message?” Frade asked.

“Two things. That Germany was going to resume unrestricted submarine warfare as of the first of the month. And that Eckhardt was to tell the president of Mexico that if Mexico declared war on the United States, after the war— which Germany would win, of course—Mexico could have Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” Hughes said.

“No, I’m not. You really never heard this before?”

“No, I haven’t. You, Clete?”

“This is all news to me.”

Graham shook his head in disbelief, then went on: “So the Brits, after thinking about it for a month, decided to tell us, even though they knew this would mean the Germans would know they had been reading their mail.”

“And what happened?” Clete said.

“Then President Wilson sat on the telegram for a week, before finally releasing it to the press on March first. The American people were furious, and a lot of them seemed more annoyed with Mexico, who hadn’t said a word to us about the telegram, than with the Germans. Anyway, a month after that we declared war on Germany.”

“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Hughes said indignantly. “Those goddamn Mexicans!”

Graham laughed. “See what I mean? ‘All’s fair in love and war,’ Howard. Write that down.”

“You think they’re trying to pull the same thing again, with Argentina?” Hughes asked.

“On the way up here,” Clete said, “I wondered if Tío Juan had really been careless, or whether he wanted me to find those maps.”

“Tío Juan? This Argentine colonel?” Hughes asked, and when Clete nodded, added, “Why would he do that?”

“It’s a long way up here from down there,” Clete said. “I thought of a lot of possibilities.”

There was a knock at the door and a new voice called, “Room service.”

This time there were two “waiters” who entered the room. They could have passed as brothers of the first “waiter.” They were pushing a food cart and a smaller cart holding an assortment of bottles, an ice bucket, an array of glasses, and a martini shaker.

Clete lifted one of the chrome domes over a plate and saw that it covered a hot turkey sandwich, which explained the very quick service.

“Everybody gets the same thing?” he asked.

Hughes nodded.

“That should be interesting,” Clete said. “They don’t have turkeys in Argentina. . . . Or cranberry sauce.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Graham said.

“Not a problem. If they’re as hungry as I am, it won’t make any difference.”

And then Clete’s brain went off on a tangent:

Maybe I could raise turkeys on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

They’re probably no harder to raise than chickens.

Build some pens.

Hell, let ’em run loose.

They hunt wild turkey in Alabama.

That might be fun.

Hell, why not get some pheasants, too?

What about foxes? Do we have foxes down there, some other predator that would eat my turkeys and pheasants?

What the hell am I doing?

Am I that tired, that my brain goes off the track?

Or is it shutting down?

“Are you going to eat that, Clete?” Howard Hughes inquired. “Or just stand there holding that chrome thing and looking at it?”

“I think I just fell asleep standing up.”

“You want to just forget talking, Clete?” Graham asked.

“Let’s see what a healthy jolt of Jack Daniel’s does for me,” Clete said, and reached for the bottle and a glass, then poured three fingers of whiskey.

Hughes jerked his thumb at the waiters, signaling them to leave. Both said, “Yes, Mr. Hughes.”

When they had left the room Clete said, making it a question: “You seem to be pretty well known around here, Howard.”

Hughes shrugged but didn’t reply.

“You were saying Colonel Perón wanted you to see those maps?” Graham said.

“I think that’s possible,” Clete said.

“Why would he want to do that?”

“All kinds of possibilities,” Clete said. “The bottom line to all my thinking on the way up is that my Tío Juan is a lot smarter than I’ve been giving him credit for being.”

Graham grunted. “I tried to make that point to you.”

Frade raised his glass in a gesture of a toast, took a long sip of the drink, and when he’d swallowed and exhaled, went on: “Too smart—knowing Dorotea and I were going to the house—to leave something incriminating just lying around where I was likely to find it. And I thought that he’s smart enough to have put a hair or something in the lid of the map case that would tell him it had been opened.”

“You’re right, Alex,” Hughes said. “Our little Cletus has developed a real feel for the spy business, hasn’t he?”

“Fuck you, Howard,” Clete said sharply, raising his glass in Hughes’s direction in another mock toast, and taking another drink.

Hughes looked at him coldly.

“What did you say?” he asked incredulously after a moment.

“You’re out of line, Howard,” Graham said. “Clete, when I told him what I think of you, what Allen Dulles thinks of you, it was complimentary. The phrase ‘Little Cletus’ never came up.”

Unrepentant, Hughes blurted: “I’ve known him since he was in short pants, for God’s sake!”

“That was a long fucking time ago, Howard,” Clete said. “I’m a big boy now. The next time you say something like that to me, I’ll knock your goddamn teeth down your throat.”

Hughes assumed a boxing position. “Just a precaution, Major Frade, sir, in case you don’t take this as a compliment.”

“What?”

Hughes moved his fists and his feet around like a boxer.

Clete fought off the temptation to smile.

Hughes went on: “Boy, he’s really the old man’s grandson, ain’t he, Colonel Graham, sir?”

“Oh, shit,” Clete said, and laughed.

“I would take that as both a compliment and an apology, Clete,” Graham said.

“Still, I think I’d rather whip his ass,” Clete said, but he was smiling.

Graham, also smiling, asked, “Can we now get back to the spy business?”

“I’d much rather whip Howard’s ass,” Clete said.

“Be that as it may, Major Frade,” Graham said, “you were about to tell us why you think Perón wanted you to see what he had in his map case.”

Frade sipped at his glass, shrugged, then said, “There’s a lot of possibilities, but as absurd as this may sound, I think he might be trying to turn me.”

“That’s interesting,” Graham said. “Why would he want to do that?”

“He’s got all of his ducks in a row but me,” Clete said. “He’s the éminence grise behind the president now, and—”

“When I knew him he didn’t know what that meant,” Hughes said.

“God damn it, Howard!” Graham snapped. “Enough. And I mean it.”

Hughes threw up both hands in apology and surrender.

Clete looked at Hughes, shook his head, and went on, “—there’s no question in my mind that he wants to be president, and probably will be.”

“How much of a Nazi do you think he really is?” Hughes asked.

“I think he really believes that fascism, National Socialism, whatever, would bring some really needed efficiency to Argentina, but I don’t think he thinks the Germans are going to win the war any more than I do.”

“Really?” Graham asked softly.

“And I think the Germans have cut him in for a piece of the action in Operation Phoenix. I don’t know if he’s involved in the concentration camp inmate-ransoming operation or not. Or even if he knows about it.”

“Serious question, Clete,” Hughes said. “If you’re in his way, why doesn’t he take you out?”

“He’s my godfather. They take that seriously down there. That’s one reason. The second reason, probably, is that my father was very popular there, and if I were to get whacked, a lot of questions would be asked about who did it and why. Everybody knows the Germans had my father killed and had a shot at killing me. They’d be suspect. But if I had to bet, I’d bet on the godfather business. I think the sonofabitch really likes me.”

“But you don’t like him, right?” Hughes said. “ ‘The sonofabitch.’ Why?”

“For one thing, he’s a dirty old man.”

“How so?”

“He likes young girls.”

“So does Errol Flynn,” Hughes said. “He almost went to jail last year for diddling a couple of fifteen-year-olds. He’s still a good guy. What does it say in the Good Book? ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’?”

“Tío Juan likes them younger. Like thirteen.”

“That’s a dirty old man,” Hughes agreed.

“Is that really it, Clete?” Graham asked. “You disapprove of his morals?”

“That’s part of it, certainly. I just don’t like him.”

“Your father did. And I’m sure he knew of the colonel’s proclivities.”

“Yeah, he knew. Enrico told me. Maybe it’s because he likes me. That makes me uncomfortable. I met the sonofabitch for the first time when I first went down there, and he treats me like the beloved nephew.”

“Or maybe the son he never had?” Graham pursued.

Clete considered that a moment, then said, “Well, maybe. Can we get off this subject? Tell me about Lindbergh and Yamamoto.”

“Roosevelt hates Lindbergh,” Hughes said. “Which may be—probably is— why he wants you to start an airline.”

“I don’t understand that at all,” Clete said.

“You want to tell him, Alex?”

“You tell him,” Graham said.

“Okay,” Hughes said. “Lindbergh was big in the America First business. They didn’t think we should get involved in a European war or, for that matter, with the Japs.”

“So was my grandfather an America Firster,” Clete said. “And so was Senator Taft. And Colonel McCormick, and a lot of other people. So what?”

“But Roosevelt couldn’t get Senator Taft. Or your grandfather. Or Colonel McCormick. Or, for that matter, me. But Lindbergh left himself wide open when he went to Germany. Göring gave him a medal, and Lindbergh said the Germans had the best air force in the world.”

“You’re saying Roosevelt thinks Lindbergh is a Nazi?” Clete asked incredulously.

“No, I don’t think that,” Graham said. “What I think is that Roosevelt likes to get revenge on people he thinks have crossed him. And he can take it out on Lindbergh. America First went out of business when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”

“On December eighth,” Hughes said, “Charley Lindbergh—‘Lucky Lindy,’ America’s hero, whose wife’s father is a senator and who’s a colonel in the Army Reserve—volunteered for active duty. Never got the call. Roosevelt had told Hap Arnold that he was not to put Lindbergh back in uniform, period.”

“Easy, Howard,” Graham cautioned.

“Jesus Christ!” Clete exclaimed.

“Colonel McCormick was going to put this story on the front page of all his newspapers,” Hughes said. “Lindbergh asked him not to. He said it was personal between him and Roosevelt, and it wouldn’t help us win the war. He said he could make himself useful out of uniform.”

“How?”

“He went to work for Lockheed,” Hughes said.

“What’s your connection with Lockheed?” Clete said. “You own it?”

“I own TWA—which, by the way, I renamed from Trans-Continental and Western to Trans-World Airlines, to annoy Juan Trippe—and there’s a law that if you own an airline you can’t own an aircraft factory, so I don’t own Lockheed.”

“What’s the point of that?” Clete asked. “I never heard that before.”

“There are some critics of our commander in chief,” Hughes said, “who feel Roosevelt had that law passed to punish Juan Trippe, who had the bad judgment to hire Lindbergh after Lindbergh gave his professional opinion that the Luftwaffe was the best air force in the world. I mean, what the hell, compared to Roosevelt, what did somebody like Lindbergh know about the Luftwaffe?”

“I didn’t know Lindbergh worked for Trippe,” Clete said.

“In addition to being a hell of a nice guy, Charley is a hell of a pilot and a hell of an aeronautical engineer,” Hughes said. “He not only laid out most of Pan American’s routes in South America for Trippe, but worked with Sikorsky to increase the range of the flying boats. You didn’t know that?”

“I heard he’d been in South America,” Clete said. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Anyway, Trippe’s smart enough—particularly after Charley pointed it out to him—to understand that flying boats are not the wave of the future. So he wanted to take over Don Douglas’s Douglas Aircraft. Roosevelt heard about that and had the law passed. Trippe had the choice between owning Pan American and getting a monopoly on transoceanic flight or buying Douglas. He chose Pan American, and having got the message, fired Charley. Politely, of course, but fired him.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“I gave him a job at Lockheed—”

“I thought you don’t own Lockheed,” Clete interrupted.

Hughes ignored the interruption. “—where he went to work on increasing the range of the P-38. There are some people who suggest that I had something to do with the design of the P-38.”

“I heard you had a lot to do with the design of the Jap Zero,” Clete said. “I remembered that when I got shot down by one of them.”

Hughes ignored that, too, and went on: “Charley went to the Pacific, to Guadalcanal, as a Lockheed technical representative—”

“Lindbergh was on Guadalcanal?”

“Meanwhile, the Navy in Pearl Harbor, having broken the Jap Imperial Navy Code, was reading their mail. They knew—”

“Be careful here, Howard,” Graham said.

Hughes nodded his understanding. “They knew that Yamamoto made regular visits to Bougainville in a Betty—you know about Bettys, don’t you, ace? Two of your seven kills were of that not-at-all-bad Jap bomber—in what he thought was complete safety because Bougainville was out of range of our fighters.”

Graham made a Slow it down gesture, and Hughes nodded.

“Well, I just happened to overhear a rumor that the range of the P-38 was greater than anyone thought it was because of the efforts of a certain Lockheed tech rep on Guadalcanal. And I just happened to mention this to a mutual friend of ours, also a Texan, when he was out here chasing starlets.

“And, lo and behold, the next thing we hear is that on the eighteenth of April, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was shot down—and killed—by Army Air Force P-38s operating out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.”

Hughes paused and looked at Graham.

“Did I say anything I wasn’t supposed to, Alex?”

“Not yet.”

“A couple of weeks after that,” Hughes went on, “I was in Washington and ran into an old pal of mine—”

“Whose name you are not at liberty to divulge,” Graham interrupted.

Hughes nodded. “—who has a lot of stars on his shoulders and I know personally admires Charley. And I asked him if he knew what Charley had done on Guadalcanal, and he said he didn’t want to talk about that, so I asked him what did he think would happen if I went to Colonel McCormick and told him what I knew.

“He said that after Yamamoto had been shot down, he’d tried to bring up the subject of Charley to—”

“Watch it, Howard,” Graham said.

“—to a man who lives in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue—”

“Oh, God, Howard!” Graham said, shaking his head.

“—and was, so to speak, shot down in flames. This unnamed man told him—and this is where it gets interesting—that he was going to tell him what he had told Juan Trippe no more than an hour before: ‘It would be ill-advised to ever raise Lindbergh’s name to me again.’

“ ‘Me,’ of course, meaning—”

“He knows who you mean, Howard,” Graham said with a sigh.

“So, cleverly assembling the facts, Alex and I concluded that Juan Trippe went to this unnamed man and told him, considering what Charley had done to knock the head Jap admiral out of the war, that it was time to forgive him. An hour later, Ha . . . my friend went there and offered the same argument. This man is not known to appreciate being shown where he has made an error in judgment.

“And the next day, or maybe the day after, he told Wild Bill Donovan to set up an airline in South America, no reason given,” Hughes concluded.

“Does General Donovan know about this?” Clete asked.

“General Donovan is very good at figuring things out,” Graham said.

“But he hasn’t said anything to you, right?” Hughes asked Graham.

“He probably knows that Juan annoyed FDR and is being punished with South American Airways,” Graham said, “but I don’t know if he knows Hap— oh, hell, the cow’s out of the barn—if he knows Hap Arnold also went to Roosevelt. And he hasn’t told me because I would be liable to tell Howard—Wild Bill refers to Howard as my Loose Cannon Number One—”

“Guess who’s A. F.’s Loose Cannon Number Two, Clete,” Hughes interrupted, laughing.

Graham finished: “—who would be capable of going—even likely to go— to Colonel McCormick and telling him (a) what Lindbergh did vis-à-vis Yamamoto and (b) what FDR did in grateful appreciation.”

“What I’d like to do is go whisper in Alphonso’s ear,” Hughes said.

"God damn it, don’t even joke about something like that,” Graham said furiously.

“ ‘Alphonso’?” Clete asked.

“The A in Senator Robert A. Taft’s name stands for Alphonso,” Hughes said. “That’s a secret right up there with Leslie Groves’s superbomb.”

Graham looked at Hughes almost in horror, then his eyes darted to Clete.

Clete said, “I don’t know who—what did you say, ‘Leslie Groves’?—I don’t know who she is, but I know about the superbomb.”

“Who she is?” Hughes said, laughing. “Clete, the guy who runs the Manhattan Project is a barrel-chested gray-haired major general named Leslie Groves.”

“Allen Dulles told you about the Manhattan Project?” Graham asked.

Clete nodded.

“He somehow neglected to mention that to me,” Graham said.

“Maybe he thinks you’re a loose cannon,” Hughes said.

Graham flashed him an angry look.

“He also told me about some German ex-Nazi in the Hotel Washington,” Clete said. “Tell me about him.”

“He did tell you how secret the Manahattan Project is, I hope,” Graham said.

Clete nodded, then said, “Tell me about the German in the Hotel Washington. ”

Graham said, “You’re thinking he might be useful in turning Colonel Frogger?”

“I don’t know. It looks to me as if I need all the help I can get. What about him?”

“I’m somewhat embarrassed that I never thought about this at all,” Graham said. “What did Allen Dulles tell you about Hanfstaengl?”

“That he was an early supporter of National Socialism,” Clete said, “and became a pal of Hitler, a member of the inner circle. Then he got on the wrong side of Martin Bormann or Goebbels or Göring or Himmler—or all four—who didn’t want him close to Hitler. Somebody warned him that one of the above— or maybe Hitler himself—was going to have him whacked, and he got out of Germany just before that was going to happen, and came here and looked up his college chum, FDR, who installed him in the Hotel Washington, where he tells Roosevelt what Hitler and friends are probably thinking.”

Graham nodded and said, “That’s the story.”

“You sound like you don’t believe it,” Hughes said.

“I have trouble believing people who change sides,” Graham said.

“If Clete thinks he’d be useful, and he probably would be,” Hughes said, “we could pick up ol’ Putzi in Washington and take him with us to Mississippi. Or take the Kraut with the funny name to Washington to see Putzi.”

“Ol’ Putzi would probably be useful”?

Howard knows about this guy?

Not only knows about him, but sounds as if he knows him.

“We could pick up ol’ Putzi and take him with us to Mississippi”?

“Who is ‘we’ and ‘us’?” Clete asked. “As in ‘we could pick up ol’ Putzi and take him with us to Mississippi’?”

Graham started to reply, then stopped.

“I don’t have the Need to Know, right?” Clete said.

“What’s going to happen now, Major Frade,” Graham said, “is that you’re going to bed before you fall asleep standing up again. You will be awakened at eight, and informed that the Immigration Service people will pick you up in the driveway at nine and return you to Burbank.”

“And what’s going to happen when we return to Burbank?”

“That’s what I’ll decide before you return to Burbank,” Graham said.

“Why can’t you tell him now?” Hughes protested.

“Tell either one of you now?” Graham asked, and then answered his own question. “Because I just realized that both of my loose cannons would probably approve of what I’m thinking, and when that happens I want to really be careful.”

He stood.

“Good evening, Major Frade,” he said. “Try to get a good night’s sleep. Whatever ultimately happens tomorrow, I suspect it will be a busy, busy day.” He turned to Hughes. “Let’s go, Howard. And if you’re even thinking about sending somebody to keep Clete company, don’t.”

He walked to the door. Hughes pushed himself out of his chair and walked after him.