Clete felt his throat constrict.
Damn it! He would’ve been so proud.
Doña Dorotea Mallín de Frade stood beside him as they watched her mother, la Señora Pamela Holworth-Talley de Mallín, formerly of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and Clete’s “mother,” Mrs. Martha Howell of Midland, Texas. The two grandmothers were playing with Dorotea and Clete’s sons—Jorge Howell Frade, eighteen months old, and five-month-old Cletus Howell Frade Jr.
Also watching them were Miss Beth Howell and Miss Marjorie Howell, and Clete suspected his “sisters” were daydreaming of adding offspring to the family.
Clete looked over at the svelte woman in her fifties with gray-flecked hair who was standing near the girls. She was Doña Claudia Carzino-Cormano, who was one of Argentina’s wealthiest women and who had lived for decades with el Coronel Jorge Frade until he’d been assassinated. She held a small child on her hip. He was known as Karlchen, which meant “Little Karl” in German—and not as Carlito, which meant the same thing in Spanish. His mother—Countess Alicia von Wachtstein, the former Señorita Alicia Carzino-Cormano—had insisted on that.
As General Gehlen had so graphically described, Karlchen’s grandfather and namesake, Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein, had died in July of 1944 after hanging for twenty-three minutes from a meat hook by piano wire wrapped around his neck.
Allen W. Dulles had agreed to get Clete a copy of the motion pictures SS photographers had made of the executions of those involved in the failed 1944 bomb plot so that Adolf Hitler could watch them over and over.
Clete had intended to give von Wachtstein the films.
But not now. Not ever.
His mind went off at a tangent: I suppose now that his father is dead, Hansel is the Graf von Wachtstein, Gretel is the Gräfin, and Karlchen is the baron.
I wonder why I never thought of that before?
Then Karl Friedrich Baron von Wachtstein made a face and threw up on the neck and bosom of his grandmother.
“Oh, Karlchen!” his mother said, and rushed to take the child.
Holding the infant at arm’s length—Karlchen now was screaming—she ordered that towels and water be brought to clean up the mess.
After everyone was cleansed of Karlchen’s present, Alicia announced, “Mother, shouldn’t we be getting back so we can prepare for your cocktail?” She scanned the crowd and said, “Everybody is coming, right? Everyone except, of course, my missing husband.”
“And me,” Cletus said.
“Cletus, are you sure you don’t want to come? You’ll be missed.”
“Not if my Tío Juan and Señor Rodolfo Nulder are there,” Clete said
. “I’ll pass, thank you.”
“What am I supposed to say when people ask about Peter? And they will.”
“When all else fails, Alicia, tell the truth. Peter stayed in Germany to take care of some family business.”
Alicia nodded. Then she went to Dorotea, who had Karlchen on her lap, took him, kissed Dorotea and Clete, and walked out of the library.
Dorotea walked to the window and looked out to see that Alicia actually got into her mother’s Rolls-Royce.
Then she walked to where her husband was sitting in a red leather armchair and holding a glass dark with Chivas Regal. She sat in the matching armchair.
“It is now truth time, my darling.”
“You sure you want to hear this?”
“I’m sure I want to hear everything.”
Clete took a healthy swallow of the Chivas Regal.
“We had dinner, with General Gehlen, in a castle belonging to the Prince of Hesse. General Gehlen told Peter—in great detail—how his father had died. Peter said he wanted to go to Schloss Wachtstein in Pomerania. General Gehlen told him that if the Russians caught him, they would nail him to the wall and skin him alive.
“We then went to Berlin, where we met, among other people, two women who had been repeatedly raped for days by the Russians—actually, some kind of Asiatics in the Red Army; they use them as assault troops—and a fourteen-year-old boy named Heinrich who had killed a Russian tank with a rocket grenade and then wet his pants.