“And he is staying at the Alvear Palace?”
“No, mi Coronel. He was taken to Señor Mallín’s home by Señor Mallín. There are photos…”
“You recognized Señor Mallín, did you, Habanzo?” Martín interrupted again.
“Of course, mi Coronel.”
Martín found the entry of Enrico Mallín into the puzzle fascinating.
“Thank you, Habanzo,” Martín said. “Please give my compliments to whoever took these. They will doubtless prove very useful.”
Habanzo beamed at the compliment.
“That will be all, Habanzo. Thank you,” Martín said.
“Con permiso, mi Coronel,” Habanzo said, came to attention, did an about-face, and marched out of the room.
Martín examined the photographs again. If one looked for it, one could see a strong family resemblance on young Frade’s face. Martín had looked at enough photographs of el Coronel Frade to know his almost as well as his own.
Well, he’s here, and he’s his father’s son. Now I’ll have to bring The Admiral in on this, especially with the introduction of Mallín into the puzzle.
The Admiral was el Almirante Francisco de Montoya, the Chief of the Bureau of Internal Security of the Ministry of National Defense, to whom el Teniente Coronel Martín reported directly. Martín’s most important responsibility (as Chief of the innocuously named Ethical Standards Office) was to keep an eye on the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, which was strongly suspected of planning a coup d’état against the president.
The commonly accepted motive for a coup d’état was El Almirante’s strong suspicion—shared by Martín—that President Ramón S. Castilló, who had pronounced pro-Axis sympathies, intended to remain in office no matter what was the result of the next election, and that the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos was determined to see that this did not happen.
Keeping an eye on the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos meant keeping an eye on el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade, who was both the brains and the money behind them.
The imminent arrival of young Frade had first been brought to Martín’s attention a week earlier by a captain who worked with Immigration. He set up an appointment, explaining to Martín’s sergeant that he had information, unspecified, that el Coronel Martín would be interested in. He showed up, in uniform, at the appointed time, and then spent the better part of an hour telling, in great detail, what he knew.
Martín was by nature an impatient man, but he learned long ago to listen. More often than not, a careful listener could pick out a valuable gem of information hidden somewhere in a haystack of verbosity and minutiae. He heard the captain out:
A cable had been received from the Argentinean Embassy in Washington, D.C., stating that extended residence visas had been granted by the Consulate in New Orleans to two Americans, one of whom, Cletus Howell Frade, was born in Argentina. The cable had suggested that it might be of interest to look into Frade’s relations in Argentina. Clearly, the Consul in Buenos Aires had smelled something not quite in order about the two Americans.
A routine investigation into Cletus Howell Frade was discreetly initiated. Since Frade was not an uncommon name in Argentina, there was no reason whatever for the Immigration Section to suspect that the best-known Frade of all had an American citizen for a son.
The investigation quickly determined that Cletus Howell Frade was born in the hospital of the University of Buenos Aires to one Elizabeth-Ann Howell de Frade, Citizen of the U.S. of America, and her husband, one Jorge Guillermo Frade, Citizen of Argentina, resident in Pila, Province of Buenos Aires. Jorge—George—and Guillermo—William—were even more common Christian names in Argentina than the surname Frade.
Beyond that, there was very little information in government files concerning Cletus Howell Frade. There was no record bearing his name in the files of the Ministries of Defense, Education, or Immigration. The files were linked. The Ministry of Education provided the Ministry of Defense annually with a list of physically fit sixteen-year-old males. This gave the Ministry of Defense a list to compare against the list of nineteen-year-old physically fit males who had registered for National Service under the Organic Military Statute of 1901 (according to which, without exception, one year’s active military service was required of all physically fit males turning twenty years, followed by reserve service until age forty-five). If a boy’s name was on the sixteen-year-old list and not on the nineteen-year-old list, why not? Where was he? One possibility was that he left the country. This could be ascertained by checking the list of sixteen-to-twenty-year-old males who had either left or reentered the country. The Ministry of Immigration furnished this list on a monthly basis.
Cletus Howell Frade’s name was not on any of the lists, which suggested that he left the country before his sixteenth birthday and did not return. It was impossible to determine exactly when he left, because records more than five years old were routinely destroyed.
Thorough to a fault, the Immigration Section of BIS’s investigators had searched the appropriate files for information on the parents. They could find nothing whatever about Elizabeth-Ann Howell de Frade, the mother. Which meant that she was not resident in Argentina, and, by inference, had last left the country more than five years before, since there was no record of her departure in that period. The records of the boy’s father were, however, found in the files of Buenos Aires Province.
They indicated that he was still in Argentina, and still a legal resident of Pila, a small town about 150 kilometers from the City of Buenos Aires in the Province of Buenos Aires.
Further investigation revealed that he had good reason to live in Pila. The town was almost entirely surrounded by Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, whose 84,205—more or less—hectares (one hectare equals about two acres) had been in the Frade family for more than a century and a half. On the death of their father, the estancia had passed to Jorge Guillermo Frade and his sister (now Beatrice Frade de Duarte, whose husband was Humberto Valdez Duarte, Managing Director of the Anglo-Argentinian Bank). Records of the Province of Buenos Aires revealed that shortly after her marriage, Señora de Duarte had sold her interest in Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo to her brother for an undisclosed sum.
At that point, the investigators realized they might be dealing not with a Jorge Guillermo Frade, but with the Jorge Guillermo Frade. Confirmation came from the records of the Ministry of Defense, which showed that el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade, formerly Colonel Commanding the Husares de Pueyrredón Cavalry Regiment,* one of Argentina’s most prestigious units, had upon his retirement eighteen months before listed his official address as Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, Pila, Province of Buenos Aires.
And that changed the entire complexion of the investigation. The investigator in charge brought the matter to his captain’s attention; and the captain immediately sought an audience with el
Teniente Colonel Martín. He brought with him all the information the investigation had developed.
“Thank you, Capitán,” el Teniente Coronel Martín said politely. “I will send a memo to el Coronel de Darre expressing my appreciation for your diligence and professionalism in this matter. And, of course, I’ll take over this investigation from this point.”
From that moment, Martín knew that at some point he would have to bring the problem to the attention of el Almirante. He had put off doing so, however, because of his sure and certain knowledge that once he was apprised of the problem, the Chief of the Bureau of Internal Security of the Ministry of National Defense would rise from his desk, lock his hands behind his back, stare for a moment out his window at the Río de la Plata, and then turn around and order him to do what he thought should be done under the circumstances.
In other words, nothing; he didn’t think he would get any guidance, much less specific orders. El Almirante had no better idea than Martín if the likely coup d’état would be successful. If it was, it would obviously be better to have aligned oneself with the dissidents before the attempt. If it failed, it would obviously be better to have manifested some sign of loyalty to the pre-existing regime.