“True,” Wechsler agreed. “In any event, we have to bring this to Brigadeführer Hoffmann’s attention. And we can’t use the telephone to do that. So you’ll have to drive to San Carlos de Bariloche.”
[SIX]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo
Near Pila
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1910 13 October 1945
“Well, we won’t have to go all the way to Estancia Santa Catalina,” Peter von Wachtstein’s voice announced in Fregattenkapitän von Dattenberg’s headset over the Storch’s intercom. “There they are.”
Von Wachtstein pointed out the left window.
Von Dattenberg looked where he pointed.
A very large convertible sedan, roof down, was speeding along a macadam road that cut through the grassland of the Pampas. At first they couldn’t see it very well, but that quickly changed as the Storch sort of dived at it.
“What is that, a Rolls-Royce?” von Dattenberg asked.
“My mother-in-law’s,” von Wachtstein confirmed. “Apparently, they’re already on their way to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.”
“How can you tell they’re going there?”
“That’s the only place the road goes, Willi.”
They were now much closer to the ground—dangerously close, in the non-professional opinion of von Dattenberg—and moving very slowly. It was possible to see the occupants of the vehicle. There was a woman in the front seat beside the driver, and two younge
r women in the backseat.
One of the younger women in the back waved as the plane passed.
“That’s my wife, Willi. The woman beside her is my sister-in-law, Elsa. You knew her, right? Karl’s widow? She just got here.”
Von Wachtstein stood the Storch on its wing, made a 180-degree turn, and flew over the Rolls again, this time approaching it from the rear.
The woman in the front seat stood and, holding on to the windshield that was between the front and rear seats, shook her fist at the Storch.
“And the formidable one is Claudia, my mother-in-law,” von Wachtstein said, laughing. “She doesn’t like to be buzzed. When we get to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, I’ll tell her you were flying.”
He retracted the flaps, added several hundred feet of altitude, and flew down the road.
—
Doña Claudia Carzino-Cormano, a svelte woman in her late fifties who wore her luxuriant gray-flecked black hair pulled tight on her skull, had just about regained control of her temper in the fifteen minutes it took the Rolls to drive to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo from where it had been intercepted on the road.
She descended graciously—even regally—from the front seat of the Rolls and advanced on the party waiting for her, embracing first Doña Dorotea Mallín de Frade and then Doña Dorotea’s husband.
“Just like your father, Cletus, always showing off,” Doña Claudia said. “Even when you’re endangering your life and those of others.”
“With God and Dorotea as my witness, Claudia,” Frade, smiling broadly, replied, “that was not me in the Storch. It was our Hansel.”
“And you know he hates being called Hansel,” Doña Claudia said.
She turned to Peter, giving him first her hand and then her cheek to kiss.
“I don’t believe for a moment that was you, darling,” she said.