Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

He called it forth from memory: “AB.”

“Well, that’s one problem solved,” she said.

“For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to take him to the hospital,” Clete said. “No one must know he’s here. And in that condition.”

“Really?” she said sarcastically, then looked at Perón. “Put your head between your knees, Juan Domingo. We don’t want you passing out.”

She backed out of the cab.

“Don’t just stand there, Enrico,” she ordered. “Get back in there!”

She turned to Clete. “Take Juan Domingo to Casa Montagna. Put him in a bed in the infirmary. Cover him with blankets. See if you can get some liquid in him. I’ll get my bag and be there as soon as I can.”

“You can’t come with us?”

“I’m too old, Cletus, to ride in the bed of a truck. Now get going!”

[SEVEN]

Casa Montagna

Estancia Don Guillermo

Kilometer 40.4, Provincial Route 60

Mendoza Province, Argentina

0115 17 October 1945

About ten kilometers down Provincial Route 60, which was deserted at this time of morning, Clete saw unusually bright headlights. A vehicle was coming down the road in the direction of Mendoza at a high rate of speed.

That’s probably Ashton.

Confirmation of the guess came a moment later when an unusual automobile flashed past the pickup. It was a 1940 Lincoln Continental, unusual in its own right, but in this case more unusual because it was custom bodied.

—

The Lincoln had been shipped from the States as a birthday present from Clete’s uncle, Humberto Duarte, to his wife, Beatrice, who was Clete’s father’s sister. At the time of course Clete had never laid eyes on el Coronel Jorge G. Frade and had no idea he had an aunt and an uncle and a cousin his own age named Jorge.

He learned of this only when he first went to Argentina and coincidentally arrived just before his cousin Jorge returned to his homeland in a lead-lined casket from Stalingrad. Jorge had been an Ejército Argentino captain serving as an observer when the Russians shot down the Storch he was in.

For this act of heroism—Clete thought that voluntarily exposing oneself to enemy fire was absolute stupidity—it was decided at the highest levels of the Thousand-Year Reich to award the fallen Argentine the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, a decoration on a par with the American Distinguished Service Cross. Doing so, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, had successfully argued, would remind the Argentines that Germany was fighting the godless Communists who had killed Captain Jorge Duarte.

By the time the body of Jorge arrived—accompanied by a bona fide German hero, Captain Hans-Peter Ritter von Wachtstein, who had received his Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from the hands of Adolf Hitler himself for his service as a fighter pilot—Clete’s Aunt Beatrice had been literally driven out of her mind by the death of her son.

She clearly belonged in a mental institution. But she was a Frade, married to a Duarte, and Clete learned that Argentines of that class simply are not carted off to a funny farm just because they were as bonkers as a March hare.

To solve the problem, el Coronel Frade had turned over his Estancia Don Guillermo to his brother-in-law. He had not returned to the place since the last time he had been there with his wife, Clete’s mother, shortly before she had died in childbirth.

Following a generous donation to the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar, which permitted them to add a wing to their Mendoza hospital, the nursing order took over the care of Beatrice Frade de Duarte with the understanding they would do so for the rest of her life. A sort of one-room psychiatric hospital was constructed for her in a wing of Casa Montagna. She was driven there in her Lincoln.

Aunt Beatrice surprised everyone by regaining enough of her mental health to the point where, suitably drugged, she could resume her role in society and return to Buenos Aires. The Lincoln stayed in Mendoza. It triggered unpleasant memories for Aunt Beatrice.

Clete had known nothing of Estancia Don Guillermo, even after his father had been murdered and it—and everything else his father had owned—became his. It was brought to his attention when he needed a place to hide the Froggers, after Herr Frogger deserted his post in the German embassy. Enrico had matter-of-factly suggested that since “the Nazi woman was crazy,” housing her at Casa Montagna would solve that problem. Clete then learned that his father had charged the old soldier with keeping an eye on the place after he had left it for the last time.

When Clete and Dorotea visited Casa Montagna, they became the first to be in the master suite since the day Clete’s mother and father had left there. No one, in fact, had been in the house at all, save for the period during which his Aunt Beatrice was being nursed in what was euphemistically called “the Infirmary” by the nuns of the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar.

In a room off the master bedroom, Dorotea found a bassinet, baby powder, a stack of diapers, and a stuffed toy tiger waiting for a baby. She wept when she realized a moment later that that baby was now her husband.