Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

Martín nodded.

“Go to hell, Bernardo,” she said. “Wives go to the head of the line.”

She indicated the woman sitting behind her, twenty-two-year-old Señora Alicia Carzino-Cormano de von Wachtstein. Alicia was the Spanish-Italian version of Doña Dorotea. She had glowing olive skin, lustrous black hair, and dark eyes.

The two had been friends since infancy.

“Dorotea,” the Reverend Kurt Welner, S.J., asked, smiling, “why can’t you ever be as sweet as you look?”

Father Welner liked to refer to himself as a simple priest, but that was some distance from reality. He was recognized to be the Éminence Grise behind the thrones of both the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the Papal Nuncio to Argentina. He was confessor to President Farrell and many other very prominent Argentines.

“And you can go to hell with Bernardo,” Doña Dorotea said.

“This is important, Dorotea,” Martín said.

“I really don’t understand why you keep doing this,” Doña Dorotea said. “You know damned well that the moment I finally get to see my husband, he’s going to tell me everything you said.”

“But you won’t have heard it from us,” Martín said.

She threw up her hands in a mocking gesture of surrender.

“You can have three minutes with him,” she said. “After which Alicia and I will appear at the foot of the steps with our weeping children in our arms.”

The children to whom she referred were in the backseat of the Horch under the care of a nanny.

“Fair enough,” Martín said, chuckling and smiling. “Thank you.”

—

The Ciudad de Rosario touched down smoothly. Immediately came the roar of its four eighteen-cylinder radial Wright R-3350 engines as the propellers were moved into reverse pitch.

The aircraft slowed, not quite quickly enough to make the first turn off the runway, but enough to easily make the second. It taxied toward the passenger terminal and the cars and trucks on the tarmac.

This triggered a series of actions. Two Ford pickup trucks—one with a flight of stairs and the second with a conveyor belt mounted in their beds—came onto the tarmac and waited for the Constellation to park. A second set of stairs, much narrower and mounted on wheels, was pushed onto the tarmac by ground handlers.

Four officers of the Immigration Service of the Argentine Republic got out of the Leyland bus, and a priest and two nuns got out of each Mercedes bus.

As soon as the Ciudad de Rosario stopped and the engines began the shutdown procedure, the truck-mounted wheels and conveyor belt were put against the rear passenger door and the smaller stairs against the door behind the cockpit.

General Martín and Father Welner started up the narrow stairs. They were about halfway up when the door behind the cockpit opened. Enrico Rodríguez stood in it, and turned to announce their presence, whereupon the door was slammed closed.

The cockpit door was not opened for some time, and not until after Martín had hammered on it with his fist.

In the Horch, Doña Alicia laughed, then said, “Good for you, my darling!”

—

Father Welner entered the airplane first.

Hans-Peter von Wachtstein was still in the co-pilot’s seat. Cletus Frade was standing in the area behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats doing some sort of administrative work with two other men in SAA pilot’s uniforms—there were two complete crews on each flight; it was a long way between Berlin and Buenos Aires—and Father Welner waited until he had finished before speaking.

“Let us all thank the Lord for another safe flight,” he said.

“Thank Hansel, Your Holy Eminence,” Frade said, not very pleasantly. “The only thing God provided was a lot of turbulence and one hell of a headwind.”

The priest did not seem offended.

“Bernardo,” he said, “I suspect our Cletus woke up on the wrong side of his airplane.”