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

"You can have coffee. You have had quite enough champagne."

"A few glasses..."

"Most of two bottles. You convinced yourself that Cletus wrecked the airplane, and that it was your fault. Coffee!"

"As you wish," Frade said, and marched across the verandah as if he owned it, to sit in a leather armchair. To judge by the cigar humidor and ashtray on a table beside it, he had used the chair before. He opened the humidor, extended it to Clete, who took one of the large black cigars inside.

"I was not at all concerned with Cletus's ability to fly the airplane. I thought perhaps he had mechanical difficulties, or ran out of fuel."

“Or became lost, or the wings or the engine fell off. You have an active imagination, precioso, and it was running at full speed."

"I was speaking of the travel arrangements for tomorrow," el Coronel said, changing the subject. Again he addressed Isabela and Alicia. "This afternoon, Enrico will come here in the station wagon for the luggage. He and Se?ora Pellano will carry it to my house, where she will arrange things for your stay. In the morning, your mother and I will drive to Buenos Aires in my Horche, and you will go with Cletus in his Buick. You will have to direct him to my house, as he does not know the way."

"Is he going to the funeral?" Isabela asked, surprised. Unpleasantly surprised, it was immediately clear.

"Of course he is," Claudia Carzino-Cormano said quickly, and a little sharply. "Jorge was his cousin."

“If I have a choice in the matter, I would prefer to drive into Buenos Aires this afternoon with Enrico in the station wagon," Isabela said.

What did I ever do to you, honey? As far as I'm concerned, I don't want to go to the goddamned funeral in the first place, and so far as I'm concerned, you can walk to Buenos Aires.

"You will not go with Enrico and Se?ora Pellano in the station wagon," her mother said flatly. "It would be unseemly for Cletus and Alicia to travel alone."

"And it won't be unseemly for him to be at the funeral?"

"You are excused, Isabela," Claudia Carzino-Cormano said furiously.

Claudia waited until the sound of Isabela's high heels on the tile floor of the house had died.

"I'm am so sorry, Cletus," she said. "I apologize."

"Did I somehow give offense?"

"She was close to Jorge," Claudia said.

"Not really," Alicia added. "But now that he's dead, she's convinced herself she was in love with him."

Her mother looked angrily at her.

"That's a terrible thing to say!"

"It's true. She'd wear widow's black if she thought she could get away with it. It draws attention to her."

Claudia glowered at her, then shrugged her shoulders and let the remark go unchallenged.

"I always thought that Isabela and Jorge ..." el Coronel said, leaving the rest unsaid. "But that certainly doesn't give her the right to treat Cletus as if... as if he's an enemy officer."

"Jorge, she wasn't doing that at all!" Claudia said.

“Why else would she feel it was unseemly for Cletus to be at Jorge's funeral?"

"Because she is a fool, Uncle Jorge," Alicia said.

"Alicia, that's the last word I want to hear from you," Claudia said angrily, and turned to el Coronel. "Honey," she said almost plaintively, "I'll speak to her. I'll make sure she understands that it was the anti-Christ communists who killed Jorge, not the Americans."

While he was flying an airplane for the Germans, who are murdering hundreds of thousands of women and children.

"Please do," Frade said, not pleasantly. "I think an apology to Cletus is in order."

That was not a suggestion from a visitor. Obviously, my father has the same kind of authority in this house as Claudia does in his. I wonder why he never married her. He said she was a widow.

"No apology is necessary," Clete said. "Except from me. I'm sorry to be a source of unpleasantness, Claudia."

"Oh, honey, you're not," Claudia said, and kissed him. "You're a source of joy."

"Speak to her," el Coronel Frade said.

"You mean right now?" Claudia asked.

"Yes, I mean right now," el Coronel said. There was a tone of command in his voice, and Claudia reacted to it.

"Excuse me, please, Cletus," she said, and went in the house.

"Alicia," el Coronel Frade ordered, "would you have someone bring us some champagne?"

"Do I get any of it?"

"If you can drink it before your mother comes back," Frade said with a smile.

"Sounds fair enough," Alicia said, and went quickly into the house.

Now that was a father talking to his daughter, and vice versa. What the hell is their relationship?

"I'm sorry about this, Cletus," el Coronel said.

"No problem, Dad. I was raised with Uncle Jim's girls. They drove both of us crazy, too."

[THREE]

The Plaza Hotel Bar

Buenos Aires

1710 15 December 1942

Se?or Enrico Mallin, with Se?orita Maria-Teresa Alberghoni on his arm, entered the bar via the street entrance rather than through the lobby. They had just come from her apartment.

In her apartment earlier, watching her postcoital ablutions through the glass wall of her shower, and then watching her dress, he told himself she was not only an exquisitely lovely young woman, but a sweet and gentle one as well, worth every peso she cost him.

It was not impossible, he also told himself, that she was beginning to love him for himself—she certainly acted like it in bed. Perhaps she was not submitting to his attentions solely because of the allowance he gave her, and the apartment, and his guarantee of her father's loan at the Anglo-Argentinean Bank. He was flattered by such thoughts, of course, but he was at the same time aware that they were not without a certain risk ... if she let her emotions get out of control, for example.

An arrangement was an arrangement. And its obligations and limitations had to be mutually understood between the parties. She would never become more than his Mi?a, and he would never be more than her good friend, her protector. She was expected to be absolutely faithful to her good friend—the very idea of another man touching Maria-Teresa, those exquisite breasts, those soft, splendid thighs, was distasteful. And he was expected to be faithful to her. Excepting of course, vis-a-vis his wife.

The relationship was an old—he hesitated to use the word "sacred"—Buenos Aires custom. His father had a Mi?a; his grandfather had a Mi?a; and most of the gentlemen of his professional and social acquaintance had Mi?as. When he was a young man, his father explained to him the roots of the custom: It first developed in the olden days, when marriages were arranged with land and property, not love, as the deciding factor, and a man could not be expected to find sexual satisfaction with a woman who might have brought 50,000 hectares as her dowry but was as ugly as a horse.

In the olden days, a gentleman was expected to provide for the fruit of any such arrangement. And he was ostracized from polite society if he failed to do so. Some of the affluent Buenos Aires families (those who were perhaps a little vague about their lineage) could often trace their good fortune back to a great-grandmother or a great-great-grandmother who had an arrangement with a gentleman of wealth and position.

Just before the turn of the century, when Queen Victoria was on the British throne, the custom was buttressed by Queen Victoria's notion—shamelessly aped by Argentine society, as were other things British in those days—that ladies could have no interest in the sexual act save reproduction. A man, a real man, needed more than a woman who offered him her body only infrequently and with absurd limitations on what he might do "with it.

In exchange for certain considerations, a Mi?a well understood her sexual role.

In more recent times, the necessity for permanence in the relationship between a Mi?a and her good friend died out. This was because the efficacy of modern birth-control methods obviated the problem of children. On more than one occasion, however, Enrico Mallin considered giving Maria-Teresa a child. He loved his own children, of course, but they had inherited their mother's English paleness. He thought it might be nice to have a child or two with Maria-Teresa—a child who would have his olive skin and dark eyes, his Spanish blood.