Griffin W.E.B. - Honor Bound 01 - Honor Bound

"Of course."

"You also said 'anytime.' I could be there in fifteen minutes."

"Why don't you come over, Monica? I'll show you my etchings."

"Oh, that sounds delightfully wicked. I'll be right there."

Or maybe Granduncle Guillermo's dirty pictures.

"I'm driving myself," Monica said. "And I'd really rather not drive home to drop the car off and look for a cab. Is there room in your garage?"

There was only one car in the basement garage, which was large enough for four cars, a Fiat sedan used by Se?ora Pellano.

"Yes, there is."

"Then be a dear and have it open when I get there, will you? We don't want people talking, do we? Or would you prefer that I take a taxi?"

"I'll have the gates and the garage open."

"Fifteen minutes," she said, and hung up.

He hung up the telephone and turned to find Se?ora Pellano looking at him.

"I'm to have a guest," he began. "She wants to park her car in the garage."

"I'll have Ernesto open it."

"I can do that."

"And I'll set out some agua mineral con gas and some ice in the reception room," she said. "Unless you would prefer it in the apartment? Se?or Cletus?"

"The reception room will be fine, thank you."

"And then I will say good night, Se?or Cletus."

"Thank you, Se?ora Pellano."

"I hope you have a good alarm clock," Monica said, looking at him over the rim of the scotch and water he had made her. "I absolutely have to be home by seven. If I'm not, the children are liable to wake up and ask where Mommy is."

Children? Of course, children. She's a married woman. Married women have children.

This is not the smartest thing you have ever done, Clete. It may turn out to be the dumbest. But there doesn't seem to be any question that you are about to return to the ranks of the sexually active.

Maybe that will put the Virgin Princess out of your mind.

"I think there's one in the apartment. Shall we go have "a look?"

"Splendid idea," Monica said. "And why don't I carry this tray along with us, so you won't have to wake the servants?"

She picked up the tray with the ice and soda water on it, smiled at him, and waited for him to show her the way to the bedroom.

[FOUR]

4730 Avenida Libertador

Buenos Aires

1745 30 November 1942

Cletus Howell Frade, First Lieutenant, USMCR, and Laird of the Manor, in T-shirt and khaki trousers, was sitting on a heavy wooden chair—so heavy it absolutely could not be tipped back on its rear legs, and he had really tried—on the balcony outside his bedroom. A liter bottle of Quilmes Cerveza (beer) rested on his abdomen. His feet, in battered boots he'd owned since before he went to College Station to join the corps of cadets at Texas AandM, rested on the masonry railing. And he was watching an exercise boy let a magnificent Arabian run at a full gallop at the racetrack across the street.

"I wish I was up there with you, you lucky sonofabitch, whoever you are," he announced to the world in general.

And immediately regretted it. Every time he opened his mouth and a sound came out, even a cough, either Se?ora Pellano or one of the maids appeared with a warm smile on her face and inquired,

"S?, Se?or?"

He glanced over his shoulder to see if one of them was headed his way. No one was coming through the bedroom—or Grand-uncle Guillermo's playroom, as he had come to think of it.

He looked back toward the river and the racetrack. Thirty or forty sailboats were on the river, and there was activity at the racetrack, as if they were preparing for a race. He took another pull at the neck of the bottle of cerveza.

Damned good beer. They really know how to eat and drink down here.

He was not looking forward to the evening. He was going to dinner, where he would meet his aunt Beatrice and his uncle Humberto for the first time. Until three days before, he had been blissfully unaware that he had an Uncle Humberto or an Aunt Beatrice or a Cousin Jorge who got himself killed at Stalingrad.

And whose death, his father said, left Aunt Beatrice shattered enough to need a psychiatrist's attention.

There was of course no way to get out of going.

"Beatrice will inevitably find out that you are in Buenos Aires," his father told him on the telephone, "and would be deeply hurt if you do not pay your respects."

"I understand."

"Beatrice and your mother were close, Cletus. They were brides together, and young first mothers. She held you as a baby."

And now she'll want to know how come her baby is dead, and I'm alive.

Shit.

"I will try to make it an early evening. May I send a car for you at nine forty-five? They usually sit down to dinner at ten-thirty or eleven."

Anearly dinner?

"Thank you."

He was also having troubling feelings about the events of the previous evening.

After their first coupling—which took place no more than ninety seconds after they stepped off the elevator and walked into the playroom, and lasted about half that long—Monica confided to him that a combination of Pablo's diminishing sexual drive and the attention he was spending on his Mi?a had combined to almost entirely deny her the satisfactions of the connubial couch.

Their initial coupling was followed by three others. The last two shattered the hope that his near-terMi?al chastity was solely responsible for his carnal thoughts about the Virgin Princess, and that once that condition was cured, his shameful thoughts about her would disappear.

That didn't happen. He managed to perform—although he wasn't too sure he could the last time Monica reached for it—in a manner that did not bring shame on the reputation of the commissioned officer corps of the United States Marines. But clear images of the pert, yet ample virgin breasts of Se?orita Dorotea Mallin kept flashing into his mind, even as he was somewhat feverishly attending to the business at hand.

Which is what you get, you pervert, for looking down the front of her dress whenever you have the chance.

At least I got out of her house before I made an ass of myself. I think Mallin was looking at me funny toward the end, which means that he caught me looking at her.

On the other hand, there's no denying that I miss her something awful. Just seeing her, hearing her talk and laugh. Just having her look at me. The funny thing is that when I think about her— except when I'm banging a thirty-two-year-old mother of three — it's not her breasts, or even that absolutely perfect ass, but her eyes. Christ, she has beautiful eyes!

Thank God, I got out of there before I made any kind of a pass at her.

Or am I going to be a fool and call her up when the Buick comes and ask her if she'd like to go for a ride?

In his mind he heard her voice: ' I have never been in a Buick droptop, Cletus. Will you take me for a ride when it arrives?"

“Convertible, Princess. Convertible. Sure. Be happy to.”

"Se?or Cletus, Se?or Nestor wishes to see you," Se?ora Pellano announced, startling him—he hadn't heard her come up.

"He's here?"

"S?, Se?or. In the reception."

What the hell does he want?

"Ask him to come up, please, Se?ora Pellano," Clete said.

When, a minute or so later, he heard the sound of the elevator door opening, he took his booted feet off the railing and stood up and smiled at Jasper C. Nestor. The Spymaster was wearing a seersucker suit, and he was carrying a soft-brimmed straw hat in one hand and a package in the other.

"I'm glad I caught you at home, Clete," Nestor said, thrusting the package at him. "A little housewarming gift."

The package gurgled. It was booze of some kind.

"Thank you," Clete said. "I'm a little disappointed, though, frankly."

"How's that?"

"From Humphrey Bogart movies, I had the idea that spies met in an alley in the tough part of town at midnight, not at someplace like the Belgrano Athletic Club. And I certainly didn't expect the Spymaster to show up bearing a housewarming gift."