Clete shrugged helplessly.
“It will be no problem,” he said. “Your uncle Humberto is managing director of the Anglo-Argentine Bank. You and I will go to the library now and have a quiet word with him. And he and I will take personal pleasure in frustrating this man’s ungentlemanly behavior. The mortgage will be paid in full by tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure,” el Coronel said. “And now, to restore my relationship with Señora Carzino-Cormano, may I suggest we go see her?”
“Restore your relationship?”
“Señora Carzino-Cormano told me that unless I made my peace with you before you left today, she would never forgive me. I think she meant it.”
“Your relationship with Claudia is important to you?”
“Obviously.”
“Then why don’t you marry her?”
“Why I don’t marry her is none of your business. How dare you ask a question like that?”
“Because I’m concerned with your welfare,” Clete said.
“Are you indeed?” el Coronel replied, and marched out of the room.
XIX
[ONE]
4730 Avenida Libertador
Buenos Aires
1330 24 December 1942
A thunderstorm that threatened most of the way on the drive to Buenos Aires struck minutes before Clete and Enrico arrived at Uncle Guillermo’s house. The rain drummed on the Buick’s canvas roof and almost overwhelmed the windshield wipers; the thunder and lightning were as awesome as they were in West Texas.
Attired in undershorts and Sullivan’s boots, Clete lay with his back propped up against the elaborately carved headboard of Granduncle Guillermo’s bed. As he watched the lightning flash on the River Plate, he sipped an early Christmas Eve beer, or a pre-luncheon beer, whatever you want to call it.
He remembered that he also had had a Christmas Eve, pre-luncheon beer the year before, aboard USS Saratoga. It had also been raining heavily, he recalled, a sudden rain squall that had come up quickly, and from which he had found shelter under the wing of one of the F2A-3 Brewster Buffaloes lashed to the Saratoga’s flight deck.
Schultz, Second Lieutenant Charles A., USMCR, inevitably called “Dutch,” had suddenly appeared beside him, his khakis drenched by the rain. He was clutching something lumpy wrapped in a flight suit to his chest, and happily proclaimed, “Who says there’s no Santa Claus?”
The lumps turned out to be two quart bottles of Budweiser beer, smuggled aboard at Pearl Harbor in defiance of Navy regulations.
“Merry Christmas, Clete,” Dutch had said, handing him one of the bottles. They had pried the tops off on the undercarriage of the Buffalo.
But it was beer, and even warm, proof that there was indeed a Santa Claus, for those who really believed.
“Next year,” Dutch had said, raising his bottle in a toast, “Cold beer, at home!”
It didn’t turn out that way, did it, Dutch?
The next day, Christmas Day, we flew those outdated goddamned Buffaloes off the Saratoga onto Midway Island. And then we flew them against the Japs. A Buffalo was no match against a Zero. Every goddamned one of us was shot down.
You never will get to go home, will you, Dutch? I got picked up, and you didn’t. THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY REGRETS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON, SECOND LIEUTENANT CHARLES A. SCHULTZ, USMCR…
And the circumstances under which I am “at home” are not quite the ones we had in mind when we had that fantasy, are they, Dutch?
But this beer is cold, and this is a marvelously comfortable bed with clean sheets, and when, in the inevitable course of human events, I will have to let the beer out, it will be into a porcelain fixture in a marble floored bathroom, not into a foul smelling opening in a stinking compartment labelled, probably with unintentional humor, “Officer’s Head.”