W. IV: Honor Bound 05 - The Honor of Spies

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 Rodriguez was kneeling by one of the bodies. Stein waited for him to get out of the picture.

Rodriguez 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 obersturmfuhrer--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?" Rodriguez 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.

Rodriguez 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 Ejercito Argentino polo field on the left, then, on the right, started to drive past the Hipodromo 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 attache" 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, Gunther," 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," Gunther 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 Peron, 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 Peron 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 Obersturmbannfuhrer," Peron said, and then offered his hand.

"Oh, how I miss being called that," Cranz said.

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

A maid appeared.

"Coffee?" Peron offered. "Or something a little stronger? Whiskey, perhaps?"

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

Peron 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?" Peron asked.

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

Peron 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," Peron 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 Martin, Father Welner, or Cletus Frade--but to one of them, I'm sure."

"Or all three," Cranz said jocularly.

El Coronel Alejandro Martin 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 Peron 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, Martin, then a teniente coronel, had chosen to support the coup d'etat being planned and to be led by el Coronel Jorge Frade against President Ramon S. Castillo. When Frade had been assassinated in April 1943, before "Operation Blue" could be put into play, Martin had transferred his allegiance to General Rawson, who became president when the coup was successful.

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

Martin 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 Peron regarded Martin 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 Senor Humberto Duarte, managing director of the Anglo-Argentine Bank, and to la Senora 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 Peron regarded Father Welner as a very dangerous man.

But it was the third man, twenty-four-year-old Cletus Frade, whom Cranz and Peron 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.