Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“Only when about to confront a great confrontation,” Clete said. “What about you?”

God, he’s insolent! No one talks to me like that! Now watch what you say!

“Actually,” Frade said, “it’s not you. I just had an unpleasant confrontation with my sister. Your aunt Beatrice.”

“I didn’t know I had an Aunt Beatrice,” Clete said quietly, and then asked flippantly, “And Aunt Beatrice drove you to drink whiskey at the noon hour?”

I’d like to slap his face! I’d like to punch him square in the nose! How dare he talk in that manner about Beatrice?

And again the words came out of control.

“She’s ill, Cletus. Emotionally disturbed,” Frade heard himself say. “She’s on something, God only knows what, that her psychiatrist prescribed.”

“I’m sorry,” Clete said. “I didn’t know…”

“You had no way of knowing. You didn’t even know she exists,” Frade said.

“No, Sir, I didn’t.”

“Beatrice lost her son, her only son, your cousin Jorge,” Frade heard himself saying.

“I’m sorry,” Clete said.

“He was killed at Stalingrad. Beatrice has…been disturbed since.”

I had a cousin in the German Army? Clete thought. Jesus H. Christ! The Old Man was right. They’re all Nazis down here!

“Stalingrad? What was he doing at Stalingrad?”

“He was assigned as an observer,” Frade said. “He was not supposed to be at Stalingrad, much less involved in anything that would place him in danger. He gave me his word to that effect before I agreed to his assignment.”

Well, there were for sure no Argentine “observers” on Guadalcanal. What did he say? “Before I agreed to his assignment”?

“Before you agreed to his assignment?”

Frade met his son’s eyes.

“I have a certain influence within the Argentinean Army,” he said. “Jorge would not have been given that assignment without my approval.”

“And now you’re blaming yourself because he was killed?”

“Obviously, to a certain degree, I feel responsible.”

“What was he? What rank?”

“A captain.”

“People get killed in wars. If he didn’t know that, he shouldn’t have been a captain.”

Frade looked at Clete, thinking: That’s damned cold-blooded. When I told myself the same thing, I was ashamed of myself.

“How was he killed?”

“As I understand it, he was flying a Storch on a reconnaissance mission, and was shot down.”

He was a pilot? Clete thought.

“He was flying a what?”