The Honor of Spies Read online

  The crews of both machine guns stood up and pulled something from their ears. Then the crew of one shook hands.

  Click.

  When the crew of the other saw this, they shook hands.

  Click.

  The officer who had gone up the hill now came down it, apparently unhurt.

  Click.

  The soldiers who had been fanned out on both sides of the road were now summoned to the guns. Some of them picked up the sleds and ran with them to the trucks. Others began picking up the fired cartridge cases and putting them into the now empty ammunition cans. When the cans were full, the soldiers started stuffing their pockets with the empties that didn’t fit in the cans.

  Click.

  Casa Chica did not seem to be on fire, but what looked like smoke was coming out of where the windows had been and from the holes in the tile roof.

  The soldiers who had manned the Maxims came to attention and rendered the Nazi salute when the officer who had come down the hill walked up to them.

  Click.

  He returned the salute and then offered them cigarettes from a silver case and finally shook hands with each of them.

  Click.

  The officer who had been at the Chevrolet came up to them and again salutes were exchanged.

  Click.

  The officer went to one of the soldiers picking up brass and said something to him, whereupon the soldier and another soldier ran to the trucks. They ran back a moment later, this time carrying Schmeisser MP38 machine pistols, which they gave to the soldiers who had manned the Maxims.

  Click.

  The sergeant and others were now urging all the soldiers to move more quickly back to the road and onto the trucks. This was accomplished in a very short time, and then the trucks and the Chevrolet started to drive away.

  Click.

  This left the officer, the four men who had manned the Maxims, and another man who had appeared from somewhere standing alone by the side of the road.

  Click.

  Now what?

  They started walking up the hill and soon disappeared from sight.

  Stein changed film, just to be sure.

  Five minutes later, there came the sound of more gunfire. Not much. A ragged burst of shots, as if weapons had been fired simultaneously on command, and one or two of the shooters had been a little late in complying. And then another shot, and a moment later, another.

  “We go now,” one of the old Húsares said.

  They lowered Stein first out the window to the ground, one on each arm, and then used his shoulders as a ladder to climb down themselves.

  They walked toward the gate. They were almost there when the gray Ford with the Frigorífico Morón corporate insignia on its doors appeared.

  That’s right, I forgot. Rodríguez told them to hide it across the street.

  They got in that and rode up the hill.

  Four bodies were sprawled close together in just about the center of the la nding strip. Two were on their stomachs, one on his back, and the fourth on his side. A fifth body was on its stomach halfway up the stairs leading to the verandah of Casa Chica, and the sixth on his stomach on the runway twenty meters from the others, as if he had been shot in the back trying to run away.

  There was a great deal of blood. At least three of the bodies had suffered head wounds.

  Stein got out of the Ford.

  Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez was kneeling by one of the bodies. Stein waited for him to get out of the picture.

  Rodríguez walked over to him and handed him a stapled-together document.

  “Identity document?” he asked. “I just took it off that one.”

  Stein took it. He flipped through it. He was surprised at the wave of emotion that suddenly came over him. His hand was shaking.

  “This is the SS ausweis—identity card—of Wilhelm Heitz,” he read softly, “who was an obersturmführer—lieutenant—in the headquarters company of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler of the Schutzstaffeln of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”

  “You think we ought to keep it?” Rodríguez asked.

  “I think we ought to do more than that with it,” Stein said. He walked to the corpse. The eyes were open.

  He laid the identity card on the blood-soaked chest.

  Click. Click.

  He picked up the ausweis, now dripping blood, shook as much off it as he could, then held it somewhat delicately with his thumb and index fingers.

  Rodríguez took it from him and placed it in a canvas bag.

  “And then I think we should do the same with the other bodies. And then, I respectfully suggest, Sergeant Major, that we get the hell out of here.”

  [TWO]

  4730 Avenida Libertador

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  1605 5 August 1943 (six days previously)

  The black Mercedes-Benz with Corps Diplomatique license plates drove north on Avenida Libertador, passed the Ejército Argentino polo field on the left, then, on the right, started to drive past the Hipódromo until the Mercedes and all the cars behind it were stopped by a traffic policeman.

  The passenger, Karl Cranz—a well-dressed, blond, fair-skinned, thirty-five-year-old who was accredited to the Republic of Argentina as “commercial attaché” of the embassy of the German Reich—looked out the window and saw on his left his destination, a four-story mansion behind a tall, cast-iron fence and gate.

  “There it is, Günther,” he said to the driver. “Make a U-turn.”

  Making a U-turn across the heavy traffic on the eight-lane Avenida Libertador was illegal. But if one had diplomatic status, and one was being driven in a vehicle with diplomatic license plates, one was immune to traffic regulations.

  “Jawohl, Mein Herr,” Günther Loche said. He put his arm out the window, signaling that he was about to turn.

  Loche was twenty-four years old, tall, muscular, and handsome. Cranz often joked that he was going to send Loche’s photograph to Germany, where it could be used on recruiting posters enticing young men to apply for the Schutzstaffel. He was a perfect example of the “Nordic Type.”

  Loche, however, was not eligible for the SS, as membership in it was understandably limited to German citizens. He was an Argentine citizen, an “ethnic German” born in Argentina to German parents who had immigrated to Argentina after the First World War and prospered in the sausage business. He was a civilian employee of the German Embassy, known as a “local hire.” He originally had been taken on as a driver, but now, under Cranz, had been given other, more “responsible” duties.

  Like his parents, Loche believed that National Socialism was God’s answer to godless Communism, and that Adolf Hitler was God’s latter-day prophet—if not quite at the level of Jesus Christ, then not far below it.

  “Let me out in front of the house,” Cranz ordered. “I’ll have someone open the gate for you so that you can park in the basement. Then go upstairs and wait for me in the foyer. I may need you.”

  “Jawohl, Mein Herr.”

  El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón, a large, tall man with a full head of shiny black hair, who was the secretary of state for labor and welfare in the government of General Arturo Rawson, received Cranz in the mansion library.

  He was in civilian clothing, but Cranz nevertheless greeted him in almost a military manner.

  “Mi coronel,” Cranz said, and gave Perón a somewhat sloppy version of the Nazi salute; he raised his hand from the elbow, palm out, rather than fully extending his arm.

  “It is always good to see you, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” Perón said, and then offered his hand.

  “Oh, how I miss being called that,” Cranz said.

  Perón waved Cranz into one of two matching armchairs facing a small, low table.

  A maid appeared.

  “Coffee?” Perón offered. “Or something a little stronger? Whiskey, perhaps?”

  “I think a little whiskey would go down well,” Cranz said. “You are most kind.”


  Perón told the maid to bring ice and soda, then rose from his chair and went to a section of the bookcases that lined the walls of the room. He pulled it open, and a row of bottles and glasses was revealed.

  “American or English?” Perón asked.

  “As another secret between us, I have come to really like the sour mash whiskey,” Cranz said.

  Perón took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, carried it to the table, and set it down.

  “Whatever secrets we have to talk about,” Perón said, “I think we had best wait until after she brings the ice and then leaves. I don’t know who she reports to—el Coronel Martín, Father Welner, or Cletus Frade—but to one of them, I’m sure.”

  “Or all three,” Cranz said jocularly.

  El Coronel Alejandro Martín was chief of the Ethical Standards Office of the Bureau of Internal Security at the Ministry of Defense. While he officially reported to the minister, both Cranz and Perón knew that he also reported, officially or unofficially, directly to President Rawson.

  At great risk to his own life, and for the good of Argentina, not for personal gain, Martín, then a teniente coronel, had chosen to support the coup d’état being planned and to be led by el Coronel Jorge Frade against President Ramón S. Castillo. When Frade had been assassinated in April 1943, before “Operation Blue” could be put into play, Martín had transferred his allegiance to General Rawson, who became president when the coup was successful.

  Martín’s services had been so valuable that Rawson proposed waiving promotion standards and making Martín chief of military intelligence as a General de Brigada, maybe even a General de División.

  Martín had declined promotion beyond coronel, knowing that taking a general’s stars would make him hated by officers over whom he had been jumped.

  But not taking the stars in no way diminished his power. Both Cranz and Perón regarded Martín as a very dangerous man.

  Father Kurt Welner, S.J., had been el Coronel Frade’s best friend, and served—if unofficially—as family priest to the late Coronel Frade, to his sister, and to his brother-in-law, el Señor Humberto Duarte, managing director of the Anglo-Argentine Bank, and to la Señora Claudia Carzino-Cormano, who was one of the wealthiest women in Argentina and who for decades had lived—until his death—in a state of carnal sin with the late Coronel Frade.

  Both Cranz and Perón regarded Father Welner as a very dangerous man.

  But it was the third man, twenty-four-year-old Cletus Frade, whom Cranz and Perón regarded as the most dangerous of all.

  Born in Argentina to an American mother, Cletus, el Coronel’s only son, had been estranged from his father since infancy. After his mother a year later had died giving birth in the U.S., Frade’s American grandfather, a wealthy and powerful oilman, had successfully exerted his power to keep year-old Cletus from leaving America, and to keep Jorge Frade out of the United States.

  Frade had been raised in Texas by his mother’s brother and his wife. He had grown to manhood accepting his grandfather’s often-pronounced opinion that Jorge Guillermo Frade was an unmitigated wife-murdering three-star sonofabitch.

  Cletus Frade entered the United States Marine Corps and became a fighter pilot. Flying F4F Wildcats off “Fighter One” on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific, he became, by shooting down four Japanese Zero fighters and three Betty Bombers, an “Ace Plus Two.”

  That was enough for the Marine Corps to send him home, ultimately to pass on his fighter pilot’s skill to fledgling fighter pilots, but first to participate in a War Bond Tour during which real live heroes from the war would be put on a stage to encourage the public to do their part by buying War Bonds Until It Hurt.

  The first leg of the tour had found the war hero in California:

  Frade was in his room in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel taking on a little liquid courage for his first appearance on stage when a well-dressed, neatly mustached man appeared at his door and inquired in Spanish if Frade happened to know an aviator and motion picture producer by the name of Howard Hughes.

  “Who wants to know?” Frade said.

  “Colonel Alejandro Frederico Graham, USMCR, wants to know, Mr. Frade. And stand to attention when you’re talking to him.”

  There had been something about the civilian’s tone of voice that caused Frade to stand to attention.

  Colonel Graham pushed past Frade, entered his room, and closed the door.

  “The question was, ‘Are you acquainted with Howard Hughes?’ You may answer ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir.’”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Hughes told me you are the son of Jorge Guillermo Frade. You have the same answer options, Mr. Frade.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  “Sir, permission to speak, sir?”

  “Granted. You may stand at Parade Rest.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, did Howard tell you I wouldn’t know the sonofabitch if I fell over him?”

  “He did mention something along those lines. Tell me, Mr. Frade, are you looking forward to the War Bond Tour? And teaching people how to fly?”

  “No, sir.”

  “If I could get you out of both, would you accept a top-secret overseas assignment involving great risk to your life?”

  “What kind of an assignment?”

  “What part of ‘top secret’ didn’t you understand, Mr. Frade?” Graham said.

  Then he handed Frade a photograph of a man wearing what looked like a German uniform, including the steel helmet, standing and saluting in the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz.

  “That’s what your father looks like. I don’t want you falling over the sonofabitch without knowing who he is.”

  “Colonel, what’s this all about?”

  “I’ll answer that, Mr. Frade, but it’s the last question you get. What I want you to do is go down to Argentina and persuade your loving daddy to tilt the other way. Right now he’s tilted toward Berlin.”

  He handed Frade a sheet of paper. The letterhead read: OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, WASHINGTON, D.C. Clete had never heard of it.

  “Sign that at the bottom. It’s a formality. What it is is your acknowledgment that you fully understand all the awful things your government will do to you if you run off at the mouth.”

  There was too much small print to read. Frade looked at Graham.

  “Or don’t sign it, Mr. Frade. Your call. But I’m on a Transcontinental and Western flight to Washington in ninety minutes. With you or without you.”

  He extended a pen to Frade, who took it and scrawled his signature.

  Graham then folded the sheet of paper and put it in his suit coat’s inside pocket.

  “Welcome to the OSS, Mr. Frade,” Graham said. “And I bring greetings from your grandfather. If you’re a good boy, I’ll try to get you a couple of days with him before we put you on the Panagra flight to Buenos Aires.”

  “You know my grandfather?”

  “He doesn’t like your father very much, does he?” He did not wait for a reply, and nodded toward the bedroom. “Now, you’d better pack.”

  “That will be all, Amelia,” el Colonel Perón said. “No calls, no visitors.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  Cranz waited until the maid had closed the double doors to the library.

  “Juan Domingo,” Cranz began, “you were right about Tandil. I’m almost positive Frade has the Froggers there.”

  Perón nodded just perceptibly.

  “Cletus Frade has arrived in Los Angeles,” he said. “At the Lockheed airplane factory. There was a Mackay radiogram. De Filippi called me yesterday.”

  Guillermo de Filippi was chief of maintenance of South American Airways.

  Cranz did not regard that as especially good news; a great many of his problems would have been solved if the Lockheed Lodestar that Frade was flying had lost an engine—preferably both—and gone down somewhere—anywhere—during the hazardous six-thousand-mile flight from Buenos Aires, never to b
e heard from again.

  But unfortunately, the airplane was brand new, his copilot was the very experienced chief SAA pilot Gonzalo Delgano, and Frade himself was both a superb pilot and someone who apparently had more lives than the nine of the legendary cat.

  Cranz’s predecessor as the senior SS-SD officer in Argentina had not only botched a very expensive attempt to remove Cletus Frade from the equation, but had shortly thereafter died when a rifle bullet fired by one of Frade’s men—or perhaps by Frade himself—had caused his skull to explode on the beach of Samborombón Bay.

  Cranz had taken great care to make sure that his arrangements to eliminate Frade would not fail this time.

  “Juan Domingo, something has to be done about the Froggers,” Cranz said.

  Perón didn’t reply.

  “And we both know that Cletus Frade has them.”

  Cranz felt sure he knew (a) why Frogger, the German Embassy’s commercial attaché, and his wife had disappeared, and (b) why Frade had them.

  Frogger was privy to many details of Operation Phoenix, the plan conceived by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler; Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German Military Intelligence; and other very senior members of the Nazi hierarchy, who understood that the war was lost and had no intention of facing Allied vengeance.

  Cranz knew all about Operation Phoenix: Hundreds of millions of dollars were to be spent to purchase South American sanctuary for high-ranking members of the Nazi establishment—probably including Der Führer, Adolf Hitler, himself, although Cranz wasn’t sure about this—from which, after some time passed, National Socialism could rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich.

  Cranz had been sent to Argentina to make sure nothing went wrong with the plan—after something had gone terribly wrong.

  An attempt had been made at Samborombón Bay, on the River Plate, to smuggle ashore a half-dozen crates stuffed with English pounds, American dollars, Swiss francs, gold coins and bars, and thirty-odd leather bags heavy with diamonds. The transfer was made on boats from the Comerciante del Océano Pacífico, a Spanish-registered freighter. But someone had been waiting. Cranz suspected Cletus Frade and members of his OSS team, though he wasn’t absolutely sure of this; it could have been Argentines.