Palermo, Buenos Aires
1730 9 April 1943
A 1940 Ford Fordor sedan was parked at the curb before the massive cast-iron fence. Two men were sitting in it.
More cops? Clete wondered. Or Martin's men?
The enormous bronze lights beside the double doors to the mansion were draped in black, and black wreaths were fixed to the wrought-bronze metalwork that protected each of the double doors.
A dignified, silver-haired man in his sixties, dressed in a gray frock coat with a black mourning band around the sleeve, opened the door to them. Anto-nio had been el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade's butler for longer than Clete was old.
"Se¤or Cletus, my prayers that you would arrive in time to say farewell to your father have been answered," he said.
"I am here, Antonio," he said "Would you offer General Ramirez and the other gentlemen something to drink-coffee, whiskey, whatever-while I change? My luggage is here?"
"You have been unpacked, Se¤or Cletus," Antonio said.
"Where did you put me?" Clete asked.
"In the master suite, of course, Se¤or Cletus," Antonio said. "Should I show you the way?"
"I know where it is," Clete said. "Please take care of my guests." He turned to General Ramirez. "I won't be long, mi General."
"Take whatever time you need," Ramirez said.
As Clete crossed the marble-floored foyer and went up to the second floor on the left branch of the curving double stairway, he remembered two descrip-tions of the mansion. His father had told him that his mother referred to the place as "The Museum" and refused to live there. And his father himself had described it as "my money sewer on Avenida Coronel Diaz."
It was like a museum, both in its dimensions and in the plethora of artwork, huge oil paintings and statuary that covered the walls and open spaces. The first time he saw the building, and the artwork, he had the somewhat irreverent thought that two subjects seemed to capture the fascination of Argentine artists and sculptors: the prairie-here called La Pampa-at dusk, during a rainstorm; and women dressed in what looked like wet sheets that generally left exposed at least one large and well-formed breast.
He really wished that Antonio had put him in one of the guest rooms- there were certainly enough of them-instead of in his father's suite. Its four rooms spread across the rear of the house, with windows opening on a formal, English-style garden surrounded by a wall.
> When he reached the double doors to his father's suite, he stopped, his hand actually raised to knock.
"That's no longer necessary, is it?" he asked aloud, and pushed down on the bronze lever that opened the right door.
Inside was a living room, one of the few places in the house that seem to have been furnished with anyone's comfort in mind. To the right was a book-lined office. Straight ahead was the bedroom, with a dressing room to one side and a bath to the other. The furniture everywhere was heavy, and the couches and armchairs seemed to him to be constructed lower to the floor than such fur-niture in the States.
He took off his jacket and tossed it on the bed, then went into the dressing room.
"I wonder where they hid my stuff?" he asked aloud.
He slid open the first of a line of doors along the right side of the dressing room.
"I'll be damned," he said.
The closet held the three suits and three sports coats he had brought with him, and on separate hangers half a dozen pair of trousers. He took from a hanger a brand-new, nearly black, faintly pin-striped suit-one he had dubbed, when he bought it in Washington, "my diplomat's uniform"-carried it back into the bedroom, and tossed it on the bed.
It got through to him that his entire clothing wardrobe looked very lonely in the large closet.
He went back into the dressing room and slid open the adjacent door. That closet was absolutely empty, and so was the one next to it. On the other side of the room, a closet with shelves for God Only Knows how many shirts now held only the dozen new shirts he had purchased-like two of the suits-for his diplomatic assignment, along with half a dozen other shirts. The closet next to that held the three sweaters he had brought with him-on shelves that would accommodate fifty. The final closet held his dozen sets of shorts and skivvy shirts, plus his shoes and boots-including his favorite, battered, ancient pair of cowboy boots, which someone had already made a determined, if unsuccessful, effort to shine-and his half-dozen neckties and two pairs of sus-penders.
The last time he saw the dressing room, the closets were crowded with his father's clothing. El Coronel Frade was something of a clothes horse. Now it was all gone. He wondered where.
He picked out a necktie and linen, and suspenders-the salesman in Wash-ington had insisted on calling them "braces"-and after a moment's indecision, his new pair of "dress boots," and carried everything into the bedroom, where he tossed it all on the bed.
The enormous bathroom, marble-floored and -walled, as large as Clete's bedroom in the old man's house on St. Charles Avenue, was even worse. His battered Gillette safety razor, comb, brush, toothbrush, toothpaste, and half-empty bottle of Mennen's After Shave lotion were laid out to the left of the washbasin, a depression two feet across in a twenty-foot slab of marble. On the other side of the basin was arrayed an obviously new sterling silver version of the Gillette in a silver case, and in the event that wasn't acceptable, a set of seven ivory-handled straight razors. There was a shaving brush and a wooden tub of English shaving soap; two different kinds of bath soap; an array of bot-tles of what he presumed were after shave and cologne; a matched set of hair-brushes and a tortoiseshell comb that looked large and sturdy enough to do a horse's mane.
A thick terry-cloth bathrobe was laid out farther down the marble slab. And a chrome stand near the glass door to the shower held four towels and a wash-cloth.