“De nada,” Martín said. “Enrico, open the door and see if they’re finished out there.”
“Sí, mi General,” the old soldier said, and pushed the door open and looked out. He pulled his head back in and reported, “Not quite, mi General.”
Martín nodded.
—
A line of people, mostly adults, many of the latter in the religious garb of nuns, priests, and brothers, were moving slowly but steadily down the stairway at the rear door of the Constellation. At the foot of the stairs, their documents were examined by immigration officers. Some of the arriving passengers were directed to the Leyland bus, but some of the people in clerical garb and all the children were escorted to one of the Mercedes buses by priests and nuns.
It was clear that everybody knew what had to be done and how to do it efficiently.
Which also made it clear that this was not the first time passengers like these had been off-loaded from an SAA flight originating in Berlin.
—
“They are finished, mi General,” Enrico reported.
“Let me go first,” Father Welner said.
He went down the stairway and walked to the Horch.
“Your three minutes were up long ago,” Doña Dorotea said. “What’s going on?”
“Alicia,” the priest said, “your husband and General Martín are about to come down with a beautiful young woman. As they walk to General Martín’s car, I suggest you smile and wave at them.”
“Why the hell should she do that?” Doña Dorotea demanded.
“Because she’s Alicia’s sister-in-law,” the priest said.
“Oh, my God!” both young women said, almost in unison.
[FIVE]
4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín
Buenos Aires
1055 10 October 1945
The five-story turn-of-the-century mansion sat behind a twelve-foot-tall cast-iron fence across Avenida Libertador from the Hipódromo de Palermo.
A 1940 Ford station wagon was parked at the curb. A legend painted on its doors read FRIGORIFICO MORÓN. The Frigorifico Morón—Morón Slaughterhouse and Feeding Pens—no longer existed to process cattle from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. The 1,500-hectare property in Morón was now the site of Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade.
When Martín’s Mercedes turned off Avenida Libertador and stopped before the double gates in the fence, two burly men got quickly out of the Ford and walked to the Mercedes. One held a Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot gun parallel to his trouser seam. The other had his hand under his suit jacket on the butt of a Ballester-Molina .45 ACP pistol, the Argentina-manufactured version of the Colt Model 1911-A1.
The two men were part of what had come to be known—if not in public—as Frade’s Private Army. Like the others in it, they had been born, as had their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. They had left it to do their military service and returned to it either after their conscription period, or after retiring from twenty-five years of service with the Húsares de Pueyrredón.
There was nothing mocking or pejorative in references to Frade’s Private Army. For one thing, there was nothing amateurish about it. And for another, everyone recognized he needed one.
El Coronel Jorge G. Frade had been assassinated on his Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, and there had subsequently been five attempts to assassinate his son, Cletus. While the threat of future attempts to assassinate him, or members of his family, had diminished with the surrender of Germany, it had by no means disappeared.
The threat of assassination also applied to Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and his family. The SS in Argentina—Peter only half-jokingly said that there were more SS in Argentina now than there ever had been at the SS-Junkerschule in Bad Tölz—had been furious when Major von Wachtstein, then the assistant military attaché for air of the German embassy, had disappeared following the monstrously cruel execution of his father for his father’s role in the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
The rage intensified when they learned that Major von Wachtstein—the recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from the hands of the Führer himself—had been spirited out of the country by Cletus Frade because von Wachtstein had been a traitor to the Third Reich, working all along for Frade and the OSS.
—
When one of the ex-Húsares saw who the Mercedes held, he saluted. The other signaled impatiently toward the house. The huge gates began to creak open. When they were fully open, the Mercedes drove through them to a ramp leading to the mansion’s basement garage, whereupon the gates immediately began to close.