Clete stripped, picked up one of the bars of soap and his Gillette, and opened the shower door. He showered quickly and shaved, using the bath soap, a time-saving device he had learned in his first year at Texas A&M, where cadets were allotted about five minutes each morning for their personal toilette.
He came out of the shower and took a towel-a warm towel; the chrome stand was obviously a heating device-and dried himself. He looked at the terry-cloth robe, decided there was no time for that luxury, and walked naked out of the bath into the living room to get his underwear.
A uniformed maid was standing there, a young woman with her hair drawn back severely under a lace cap, who had pushed a serving tray into the room. When she saw him, she flushed and modestly averted her eyes.
"Sorry," Clete said, grossly embarrassed, and retreated into the bathroom for the terry-cloth robe.
Modestly covered, he returned to the bedroom.
"Antonio was not sure if you would prefer coffee, tea, or whiskey, Se¤or Frade," the maid said, indicating the cart, which held silver coffee and tea pitch-ers, three bottles, and all the accessories.
"Coffee, please, and that will be all," Clete said, went to the bed for his un-derwear, and again retreated to the bathroom.
The maid was gone when he came out again. Coffee had been poured and was waiting for him on a small round table. He took a sip. grimaced at its strength, put the cup down, and went to the tray.
He picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel's, uncorked it, and took a healthy swallow from the neck.
Then he dressed quickly, returning a final time to the bathroom to tie the necktie and brush his hair.
The uniform caps of General Ramirez and the other officers were lined up in a row on a table in the foyer. He found the officers themselves sitting com-fortably in the couches and armchairs of the downstairs reception room. They all rose to their feet when he walked in.
[TWO]
Ministry of Defense
Edificio Libertador
Avenida Paseo Colon
Buenos Aires
1845 9 April 1943
There were both ceremonial and functioning guards on the wide steps leading up to the entrance of the fifteen-story Edificio Libertador. The ceremonial troops were in a uniform (*White breeches, dark-blue coats, high black leather boots, and what resembles a silk top hat. The hat dates back even earlier, to 1806. when a volunteer force was recruited and led by thirty-year-old General Juan Mart¡n Pueyrred¢n to resist a British attempt to occupy Buenos Aires. Pueyrred¢n seized a British merchantman in the harbor. Its cargo included top hats, which Pueyrred¢n issued to his troops-primar-ily gauchos from the Pampas-as the only item of uniform he had available. Four years later, together with generals Manuel Belgrano and Jose de San Mart¡n (revered as El Libertador), he led the war for lib-eration from Spain, which concluded with the July 19. 1816. Proclamation of the Congress of Tucum n, declaring the United Provinces of La Plata to be free of Spain and to be the Argentine Republic.) that dated back to Argentina's War of Independence (1810-16). They were armed with rifles and sabers of the period and stood at rigid attention, seeing nothing, like the guards at Buckingham Palace. A dozen other soldiers, in present-day German-style uniforms and steel helmets and armed with Mauser rifles, were shepherding a long line of people into the build-ing.
The Marine officer in Clete Howell Frade-remembering that the soldiers who march perpetually guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arling-ton Cemetery allow absolutely nothing, not even the President of the United States, to disturb their ritual-wondered if the ceremonial guards here would salute the Minister of War. They did not, but the sergeant in charge of the other detail scurried quickly both to salute Ramirez and to quickly open a door for them.
Clete followed Ramirez across the lobby of the building to a corridor to the right. The line of people he had seen outside was obviously headed in the same direction.
To my father's casket? Why does that bother me?
As Clete followed Ramirez past it, the shuffling line moved slowly through a corridor. The corridor was lined with foreign flags, their flagstaff's resting in heavy bronze, vaselike holders. The Stars and Stripes looked strange somehow, as just one flag among many. He spotted the German flag, with its swastika, and the Japanese, with its red-ball "rising sun," similarly lost among other flags and flags he could not remember seeing before. He smiled, remembering that the Air Group parachute riggers on Guadalcanal had made a very nice buck, in-deed, turning out on their sewing machines Genuine Japanese Battle Flags for sale to gullible replacements and dogfaces.
They probably use thi
s place for diplomatic receptions, he decided. If you show up, they haul your flag out of the corridor to make you feel welcome.
The corridor ended at another enormous set of double doors, also guarded by soldiers in ordinary uniforms. Only one of them was open, and as they ap-proached, a sergeant stopped the shuffling line and motioned for Ramirez, Clete, and the officers trailing behind them to enter the room. In turn, Ramirez signaled for Clete to precede him.
He found himself in an enormous, marble-floored and marble-walled room that reminded him of photographs he had seen of Hitler's Reichs chancellery in Berlin. He started to walk across the room to the end of the shuffling line of people, but Ramirez stopped him with a gentle tug at his sleeve.
It took several minutes for the last people in the shuffling line to pass by the casket at the far end of the room, but finally Clete could see it. It was on what looked like a table draped in black velvet. Hanging from the ceiling above- which must be fifty, sixty feet high, at least, Clete thought-was a huge Argen-tine flag three times as wide as the casket was long.
That has that golden-face-in-a-sunburst centered on the blue-white-blue stripes, Clete thought, which makes it a military flag. The ordinary flag has just the stripes.
Behind the casket were massed twenty or thirty normal-size Argentine mil-itary flags in holders placed so close together that the flags formed a blue and white mass.
At each corner of the casket, facing outward, head bent, his hands resting near the muzzle of a butt-on-the-floor Mauser cavalry carbine, stood a trooper of the Husares de Pueyrred¢n, in full dress uniform. (The dress uniform of the Husares de Pueyrred¢n-Pampas horsemen turned cavalrymen-features a bearskin hat and a many-buttoned tunic bedecked with ornate embroidery clearly patterned after that of the Royal & Imperial Hungarian Hussars of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)