"My orders-which are of course, your orders-are to have as little to do with the FBI as possible," Clete said.
"You're telling me to stop passing him this sort of information?"
"I'm telling you to have as little to do with the FBI as possible. And I would strongly suggest you do not, repeat not, ever let Commander Delojo become aware that you even know Leibermann."
"OK," Ettinger said. "That answers my question about what to tell him about Uruguay."
"Tell him what about Uruguay?"
"I'm just getting to the bottom of it," Ettinger said. "I haven't even told Tony about it."
That was my cue to sternly remind Ettinger that Tony is Lieutenant Pelosi, that in my absence Lieutenant Pelosi becomes Team Chief, and that Sergeant Ettinger is duty bound to tell Lieutenant Pelosi anything and everything of in-terest.
But that, too, would be a waste of breath. Ettinger long ago figured out that the only reason Tony is down here is because he knows a lot about explosives and demolition, and that everything he knows about espionage and intelligence gathering can be written with a grease pencil inside a matchbook. And the truth is, Ettinger would probably make better Team Chief than I am, and for that mat-ter, a better Station Chief than Delojo. The only reason he's not an officer is be-cause he's a Spanish national, and the U.S. Army is not commissioning Spanish nationals.
"Tell us now," Clete said.
"I can't prove this. I can't get anybody to come out and say this is being done-all I get is doors slammed in my face, conversations suddenly ended-"
"Prove what?" Clete asked in exasperation as he put another piece of bife de chorizo in his mouth.
"I think, if you have a relative in Sachsenhausen, or Belsen-probably any concentration camp, but those are the only names I've heard-" Ettinger said, "that, if you go to the right man in Uruguay, carrying with you a lot of dollars or Swiss francs, you can get him, her, the whole family out."
"I'll be damned," Clete said. "Are you sure about this?"
"No. Not in the sense that I can prove it. But I believe it."
"Who's the right man in Uruguay? Somebody at the German Embassy? Do you have a name?"
"No. No name. But I don't think it's someone at their Embassy. I think the connection is from the right man in the Jewish community here, to the right man in the Jewish community in Montevideo, or maybe Colonia, and from there to whoever they're dealing with in the German Embassy. Or, for that mat-ter, the Spanish Embassy or the Swedish Embassy. I told you, Clete. Nobody wants to talk about it."
"Not even to you?" Clete said. "Sorry, I had to ask that."
Ettinger's entire family had been taken into concentration camps in Ger-many... except for his mother, who had managed to escape from Germany with her son because they still had their Spanish passports. There had been of-ficial word from the SS that his grandfather and grandmother had "died of com-plications from pneumonia," but there had been no other word of anyone else.
"I picked up on this whole operation when an old man I knew in Berlin told me it was a pity I went to New York instead of here, 'where something might have been done.'"
"You think he meant you could have brought your family out?"
"This fellow was brought out," Ettinger said. "I saw the SS tattoo, the SS numbers, on his arm."
"And he won't tell you anything more?"
Ettinger shook his head, "no."
"The big mistake I made when we first came down here was telling Ernst Klausner, somebody else I knew in Berlin, that I was in the American Army; he's apparently spread the word. My feeling is that they have this system going, and they don't want anything to happen that will threaten it."
"Christ, don't they know we're fighting the goddamn Krauts?" Tony said.
"They don't want whatever is going on to be threatened," Ettinger repeated. "American interest in what's happened, is happening, to European Jews, Tony, is a relatively new thing."
"What happens to the people who get out of the concentration camps?" Clete wondered aloud.
"Apparently, they're provided with documents that take them out of Ger-many. To Sweden, maybe, or Spain. And then either to here or Uruguay. I don't know. The old man is here; he got out of a concentration camp, and then out of Germany somehow. He couldn't have done that without papers."
"Have you said anything to Leibermann at all about this?" Clete asked.
"No," Ettinger said, and added: "I was waiting for you to come back, and to find out more, if I can."