Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

Clete handed the redhead the money. She opened a drawer in her desk and took from it a small metal box. It was unlocked. She put the money in a tray, then removed the tray. From the bottom of the box she took a rubber stamp and a stamp pad, and with great care stamped each of the passports. As she finished she handed them to Galle, who signed the visas with a flourish.

Then he returned the passports to Clete.

“Have a nice voyage. When did you say you were leaving?”

“In the next several days. Whenever we can get seats on Pan American.”

“One final bit of advice,” Galle said. “Take summer clothing. Our seasons are reversed, you know. It is now summer in Buenos Aires, and sometimes the weather, the humidity, you understand, is not very pleasant.”

“Thank you,” Clete said, putting out his hand. “Thank you for your courtesy and the advice.”

“Have a good time in Buenos Aires,” Galle said. “I wish I was going with you. You’re not married, I gather?”

“No, Sir.”

“I think what I miss most, here, are the women of Buenos Aires,” Galle said, smiled, added, “Bon voyage,” and walked away.

Thirty minutes later, Galle left his office, walked out of the business district and across Canal Street into the Vieux Carré, then went on to a building on St. Peter’s Street. He let himself into a small apartment

which he had rented at an exorbitant price under a name that was not his own. The landlord believed he was a Mexican-American named López from San Antonio who visited New Orleans frequently on business—and to see a woman. Once a month, at least, Galle took pains to see that the landlord noticed him entering the apartment with a woman.

Galle doubted that the FBI or the New Orleans police were even aware of the apartment. And if they were, he doubted that they either tapped the telephone or intercepted his mail. To make sure, however, he sent mail to the apartment. When it arrived, he saw no indication that it was tampered with.

He had the operator connect him, station-to-station, with a number in Silver Spring, Maryland. He doubted the FBI knew of the existence of that apartment or that telephone number either, and he thought the odds were remote indeed that they had tapped that line.

He gave the woman who answered the names of Cletus Howell Frade and Anthony J. Pelosi, and asked her to inform the appropriate functionary that he had just issued visas for their residence in Argentina and that in his judgment they should be watched on their arrival to make sure they were indeed in Buenos Aires to open a local office of Howell Petroleum (Venezuela). As an after-thought, he asked the woman to add that Cletus Howell Frade had been born in Argentina, and that the security forces might be interested to learn who were his relatives, if any, in Argentina.

[FOUR]

Office of the Managing Director

Sociedad Mercantil de Importación de Productos

Petrolíferos

21st Floor, Edificio Kavanagh

Calle Florida 1065

Buenos Aires, Argentina

0930 18 November 1942

Enrico Mallín, the Managing Director of SMIPP (pronounced “smeep”), was six feet two inches tall, weighed one hundred ninety-five pounds, had a full head of dark-brown hair, a full, immaculately trimmed mustache, and was forty-two years old. He was educated at the Belgrano Day School, operated by two English expatriate brothers named Green; the University of Buenos Aires; and the London School of Economics. After that, he embarked on what he referred to as “postgraduate schooling” in the United States. In 1938 he spent six months in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas learning what he could about the operation of the American petroleum industry. There was no question in his mind that the Americans knew more about doing business imaginatively, efficiently, and profitably than anyone else, including the Dutch Shell people and British Petroleum, who were supposed to be the best in the world.

He spent a month actually working as a roughneck on a rig in East Texas, and wound up in Tulsa, learning something about seismological data. Argentina wasn’t quite ready to develop its own production…. Although there was certainly oil in the country, it was not now economically feasible to search for it, much less produce it. But someday these things would change, and when they did, Mallín would be ready.

He also returned from the United States with a number of “barbaric Yankee habits,” as his wife (née Pamela Holworth-Talley, whom he met at the Victoria & Albert Hall in London when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two) only half jokingly referred to them. In the States, for instance, he acquired a taste for sour-mash bourbon whiskey, jalapeño peppers, chili con carne (which he insisted on not only making himself, but forcing upon civilized people), and the really outrageous habit of rising in the middle of the night to go to work.

In the middle of the night—which, so far as Pamela was concerned, was somewhere between five-thirty and quarter to six in the morning—Enrico (whom Pamela called “Henry”) would rise quietly from their bed in the master’s suite of the large, Italian-style mansion on the corner of Calle Arcos and Virrey del Piño in Belgrano. He would then have a quick shower and a shave, dress, back his Rolls-Royce drop-head coupe out of the garage, exchange an early-morning wave with the policeman on guard at the Mexican Ambassador’s house across the street, and drive downtown to the Edificio Kavanagh. The Kavanagh Building, built in 1937 (in the style now called Art Deco), was in 1942 Buenos Aires’ first and only skyscraper.

Sometimes, if he was hungry, or for other good reasons, he would drive the drop-head Rolls into the courtyard of the apartment building at 2910 Avenue Canning in Palermo, where he maintained an apartment (4D; two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen with a nice view of the gardens) for Teresa, his twenty-one-year-old mistress. Teresa could be counted on to provide him with coffee or whatever else he needed. But most of the time he drove directly downtown to the Edificio Kavanagh.

There he would turn into the driveway to the underground parking garage, sound the horn, and wait until the uniformed attendant emerged from his cubicle and opened the gate. He would roll down the window and hand the attendant a coin. The attendant would touch the brim of his cap, smile, and murmur, “Gracias, Señor Mallín.”

Enrico would have much preferred to deal with the attendant on a monthly basis. That way he would find the gate already open when he arrived, and his secretary could deliver an envelope to the attendant once a month. The arrangement would save him at least a minute a day, but this was Argentina.

He would then park the Rolls in space number one of the seven reserved near the elevator for employees of Sociedad Mercantil de Importación de Productos Petrolíferos, enter the elevator, exchange greetings with the operator, and ride to the twenty-first floor. Although office hours did not begin until nine, and the first employees would not begin to arrive until half past eight, once he reached his offices, one of the ornately carved mahogany double doors would be open, waiting for him.