“I don’t want Dorotea to see it,” Frade said.
Rodríguez made a deprecating shrug and extended the pistol to Frade.
“I don’t think I’ll need that in the shower, Enrico.”
“You are the one who taught me, Don Cletus, that one never needs a weapon until one needs one badly.”
“Point taken, my friend,” Frade said, and took the pistol.
[FIVE]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo
Near Pila
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
2055 12 August 1943
The “old Buick” Enrico thought he would find in the basement garage of the mansion had been there. It was a black 1940 Buick Limited four-door “touring sedan.” In other words, a convertible. It had a second windshield for the rear seat, spare tires mounted in the fenders, and enormous extra headlights on the bumper. It had been el Coronel’s pride and joy until he had acquired a Horch—an even larger car—in Germany. Once that had been taken off the ship in Buenos Aires, he had never driven the Buick again. But he hadn’t wanted anyone else driving the Buick, so it had been, so to speak, put to pasture in the mansion basement until he could decide what to do with it.
The black Buick was the only vehicle on the two-lane macadam road crossing the pampas. There were 300,000 square miles of the pampas—an area roughly half the size of Alaska, a little larger than Texas, and just about twice as big as California—which ran from the Atlantic Ocean just south of Buenos Aires to the foothills of the Andes Mountains. The name came from the Indian word for “level plain.”
The road was straight as an arrow, but as the speedometer hovered between seventy and eighty miles an hour, the headlights illuminated nothing but the road itself and a line of telephone poles marching at hundred-meter intervals beside it.
Enrico Rodríguez was driving. His shotgun was propped between the door and the dashboard. His pistol and the bandolier of shells were on the seat beside him. Cletus Frade sat in the front passenger seat, asleep, his head resting against his window.
Rodríguez took his right hand from the steering wheel, leaned across the front seat, and almost tenderly pushed Frade’s shoulder.
It took several more pushes of growing force before Frade wakened. But when he did so, he was instantly wide awake, looking quickly around as if he expected something to be going wrong.
“We are nearly home, Don Cletus,” Enrico said.
Frade looked out the windows, then said what he was thinking: “How the hell can you tell?”
All that could be seen out the Buick’s windows were the road and the telephone poles. There was nothing whatever to indicate where they were on the more than eight-hundred-square-kilometer Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, or, for that matter, where they had been or were going.
“I know, Don Cletus,” Enrico said. “In ten, eleven minutes, we will be home.”
“Then why didn’t you wake me in ten, eleven minutes?”
“I thought you might wish to use the shaving machine, Don Cletus,” Enrico said. “There should be one in the glove box. Your father believed a gentleman should always be shaved.”
And yet another comparison I have failed with my father, Frade thought as he felt his chin.
And Enrico’s right. I need a shave. I should have shaved when I showered. Maybe I had other things on my mind, like the look on that poor bastard’s face when he took the load of double-aught buck in his chest.
Frade was uncomfortable using the Remington electric shaver; it had been his father’s. But finally, after a moment’s hesitation, he took it out and plugged it into the cigar lighter hole and, as the razor’s blades hummed, started rubbing it against his face.
Two minutes after he started, Enrico slowed the Buick to a crawl, crossed himself, and muttered a prayer.
Now Frade knew where they were and why Enrico was praying—they were passing the spot where Frade’s father had died. He didn’t like to think about that.
Six minutes later, the three-row-thick stand of enormous poplars that surrounded the casa grande—“the big house”—protecting it from the winds of the pampas, appeared on the horizon.
A minute after that, the estancia airfield began to come into focus. A twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar, painted a brilliant red, was sitting in front of the hangar, dwarfing the four Piper Cubs parked beside it. Two peones on horseback sat watching it. When the Buick came closer still, Frade saw that they were cradling rifles in their arms and that a large fire extinguisher on wheels was beside the left engine of the Lodestar.
The plane was, as he had ordered it to be, ready to go at a moment’s notice.