“Mi coronel,” Cranz said, and gave Perón a somewhat sloppy version of the Nazi salute; he raised his hand from the elbow, palm out, rather than fully extending his arm.
“It is always good to see you, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” Perón said, and then offered his hand.
“Oh, how I miss being called that,” Cranz said.
Perón waved Cranz into one of two matching armchairs facing a small, low table.
A maid appeared.
“Coffee?” Perón offered. “Or something a little stronger? Whiskey, perhaps?”
“I think a little whiskey would go down well,” Cranz said. “You are most kind.”
Perón told the maid to bring ice and soda, then rose from his chair and went to a section of the bookcases that lined the walls of the room. He pulled it open, and a row of bottles and glasses was revealed.
“American or English?” Perón asked.
“As another secret between us, I have come to really like the sour mash whiskey,” Cranz said.
Perón took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, carried it to the table, and set it down.
“Whatever secrets we have to talk about,” Perón said, “I think we had best wait until after she brings the ice and then leaves. I don’t know who she reports to—el Coronel Martín, Father Welner, or Cletus Frade—but to one of them, I’m sure.”
“Or all three,” Cranz said jocularly.
El Coronel Alejandro Martín was chief of the Ethical Standards Office of the Bureau of Internal Security at the Ministry of Defense. While he officially reported to the minister, both Cranz and Perón knew that he also reported, officially or unofficially, directly to President Rawson.
At great risk to his own life, and for the good of Argentina, not for personal gain, Martín, then a teniente coronel, had chosen to support the coup d’état being planned and to be led by el Coronel Jorge Frade against President Ramón S. Castillo. When Frade had been assassinated in April 1943, before “Operation Blue” could be put into play, Martín had transferred his allegiance to General Rawson, who became president when the coup was successful.
Martín’s services had been so valuable that Rawson proposed waiving promotion standards and making Martín chief of military intelligence as a General de Brigada, maybe even a General de División.
Martín had declined promotion beyond coronel, knowing that taking a general’s stars would make him hated by officers over whom he had been jumped.
But not taking the stars in no way diminished his power. Both Cranz and Perón regarded Martín as a very dangerous man.
Father Kurt Welner, S.J., had been el Coronel Frade’s best friend, and served—if unofficially—as family priest to the late Coronel Frade, to his sister, and to his brother-in-law, el Señor Humberto Duarte, managing director of the Anglo-Argentine Bank, and to la Señora Claudia Carzino-Cormano, who was one of the wealthiest women in Argentina and who for decades had lived—until his death—in a state of carnal sin with the late Coronel Frade.
Both Cranz and Perón regarded Father Welner as a very dangerous man.
But it was the third man, twenty-four-year-old Cletus Frade, whom Cranz and Perón regarded as the most dangerous of all.
Born in Argentina to an American mother, Cletus, el Coronel’s only son, had been estranged from his father since infancy. After his mother a year later had died giving birth in the U.S., Frade’s American grandfather, a wealthy and powerful oilman, had successfully exerted his power to keep year-old Cletus from leaving America, and to keep Jorge Frade out of the United States.
Frade had been raised in Texas by his mother’s brother and his wife. He had grown to manhood accepting his grandfather’s often-pronounced opinion that Jorge Guillermo Frade was an unmitigated wife-murdering three-star sonofabitch.
Cletus Frade entered the United States Marine Corps and became a fighter pilot. Flying F4F Wildcats off “Fighter One” on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific, he became, by shooting down four Japanese Zero fighters and three Betty Bombers, an “Ace Plus Two.”
That was enough for the Marine Corps to send him home, ultimately to pass on his fighter pilot’s skill to fledgling fighter pilots, but first to participate in a War Bond Tour during which real live heroes from the war would be put on a stage to encourage the public to do their part by buying War Bonds Until It Hurt.
The first leg of the tour had found the war hero in California:
Frade was in his room in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel taking on a little liquid courage for his first appearance on stage when a well-dressed, neatly mustached man appeared at his door and inquired in Spanish if Frade happened to know an aviator and motion picture producer by the name of Howard Hughes.
“Who wants to know?” Frade said.
“Colonel Alejandro Frederico Graham, USMCR, wants to know, Mr. Frade. And stand to attention when you’re talking to him.”
There had been something about the civilian’s tone of voice that caused Frade to stand to attention.