"S¡, Se¤or," she said, and quickly left the room.
"What I should do, Enrico, is call for an ambulance and send you back to the hospital."
"I am all right, Se¤or Clete."
Clete looked at him, felt a wave of emotion for Enrico's dedication to his father, and went to the whiskey bottles, poured an inch and a half in a glass, and handed it to him.
"With a little luck, you'll choke to death on this, and I won't have to worry about you anymore," he said.
"Gracias, Se¤or Clete," Enrico said, and added: "I saw you outside Our Lady of Pilar."
"You're lucky I didn't see you," Clete said.
The housekeeper and one of the maids appeared with what Clete had asked for.
Clete unwrapped the bandage on Enrico's head. Dried blood had glued it to his skin. After some thought, Clete decided it would hurt him less to jerk it off than to pull it. He did so. Enrico winced but made no sound.
He winced again as Clete mopped at the blood with alcohol-soaked cotton wool. It wasn't as bad as he thought it might be. The stitches sewing the wound together had not pulled loose. The wound itself, as Enrico had told him in the hospital, was actually a half-inch-wide, two-inch-long canal gouged out of his flesh. He washed it carefully, then applied a fresh bandage.
"You have done that before," el Coronel Per¢n said as Clete was applying the fresh bandage.
"Once or twice," Clete said. "This is one of those famous wounds-'an-other half an inch, and that's all she wrote, Charley!'"
"Excuse me?" Per¢n said.
"He's lucky he's alive," Clete said. "Another half an inch, another quarter of an inch..."
He bent over and looked for a fingerhold on one of the bandages on En-rico's upper chest. "On the other hand," he went on, "the head wound probably kept him alive. It knocked him out, and with all the blood, those murdering bas-tards thought he was already dead and not worth a round of 00-buck."
He jerked the bandage off. Enrico grunted.
"At least the banditos who did this soon paid for it," Per¢n said. "Saving yourself and the rest of the family the pain of a trial, and the government the ex-pense."
"Banditos, my ass," Clete flared, aware that he was now sounding more like himself. "Assassins is the word, mi Coronel. The fucking Krauts couldn't get me, so they went after my father and Enrico. And got my father."
There was no reply for a long moment, long enough for Clete to finish washing Enrico's wound and to turn to find a fresh bandage.
'"By "Krauts' I presume you mean Germans?" Per¢n asked, somewhat stiffly.
"That's right."
"Enrico told me that was his belief," Per¢n said. "But I am frankly sur-prised that you give credence to something like that."
"I believe it because it's true," Clete said evenly. "And the reason the bas-tards are dead, mi Coronel, is because dead people can't testify about who hired them."
"Argentina has long been plagued with banditos," Per¢n said.
"These bastards may have been banditos, but they were working for the Germans."
"Your father was a friend of Germany, Se¤or Frade. He had many German friends. He was a graduate of the Kriegsschule."
"Yeah, well, one of his German friends ordered his assassination. Another of them-or maybe the same sonofabitch-ordered my assassination. That time they got Enrico's sister, Se¤ora Pellano."
"In that tragic incident, as I understand it, you killed both of the burglars. Did you do that so they would not be able to testify in court?"
What the hell's the matter with you? You don't like hearing the truth? Well, fuck you, Colonel!
Watch your temper, Clete!