Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“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

Señor Enrico Mallín, with Señorita 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 Miña, 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-à-vis his wife.

The relationship was an old—he hesitated to use the word “sacred”—Buenos Aires custom. His father had a Miña; his grandfather had a Miña; and most of the gentlemen of his professional and social acquaintance had Miñas. 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.