“Thank you,” Martín said sincerely. And then he chuckled. “I was just thinking, honestly, that ‘with Don Cletus’s private army out there, it should be completely safe.’ How many of your men are out there, anyway?”
“Mi coronel, I told Gómez to bring at least thirty,” Enrico Rodríguez answered for him. “And I told him that if anything happened to Doña Dorotea or Don Cletus, I would kill him.”
He pushed the bolt-release button on the side of the Remington Model 11. With a loud metallic chunk, it fed a brass-cased round of double-ought buckshot into the chamber.
Then Enrico stood up and walked down the aisle of the passenger compartment to the door.
[TWO]
Suite 308
Hotel Casino de Carrasco
Montevideo, Uruguay
1745 1 October 1943
SS-Brigadeführer Manfred von Deitzberg was a little surprised that everything so far had gone as smoothly as von Gradny-Sawz had said it would. Neither the immigration officers in Buenos Aires nor those here had questioned his Jorge Schenck passport.
Halfway across the River Plate, it occurred to von Deitzberg that the South American Airways Lockheed Lodestar was far more comfortable than the last transport aircraft he had flown in—the Heinkel, which had taken him from Berlin to the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire.
That had triggered several thoughts, the first that he didn’t care what he had to do to avoid it, he was not going to return to Germany aboard a gottverdammt U-boat. That had been immediately followed by the realization that he probably would not be returning to Germany by any means.
The conversation he had had with von Gradny-Sawz had brought that out in the open. Von Deitzberg had known it all along, of course, but even privately thinking that the war was lost had, until now, seemed treasonous.
How can the truth be treasonous?
Von Paulus had lost 100,000 men defending Stalingrad and had taken the 70,000 still alive into Russian captivity when he finally had to surrender.
Doenitz has had to call off the submarine interdiction of the supply convoys from the United States and South America because of his losses.
Africa has been lost. And Sicily has been lost.
The English and the Americans are in half of Italy, and when they have captured the rest of it, they would start planning the cross-Channel invasion of France, from England. Which would succeed.
How is facing facts with a military professional’s eye treasonous?
I will, of course, continue to honorably perform my duty as a German officer as long as that is possible.
But my duty is not to throw my life away by throwing myself under the tracks of a Russian tank rolling down the Unter der Linden—as they will sooner or later.
Rather, my duty is to carry out my orders to establish a sanctuary here in South America from which the leaders of National Socialism can rise, indeed, phoenixlike from the ashes.
I am not being treasonous; I am being professionally realistic.
A taxi took von Deitzberg from the airport to the Hotel Casino de Carrasco on the shore of the River Plate. He was shown to a comfortable small suite on the third floor, from which he could see the beach.
On the SAA Lodestar, he had planned his first move. He would call von Tresmarck’s home. If he was home, he would tell him first that no one was to know he was in Uruguay, and then to come to the casino hotel and to his suite. If he wasn’t home, he would tell Inge—calling her “Frau von Tresmarck”; he was here on duty—to call her husband at the embassy, and tell him the same thing.
She will learn I’m here, and certainly hasn’t forgotten what happened the last time I was. She will wonder if it’s going to happen again. But since I didn’t greet her charmingly, she will wonder if “Frau von Tresmarck” is in some kind of trouble. There is a certain appeal in making Inge a bit uneasy.
That plan fell apart from the start. There was no listing in the telephone book for the von Tresmarck residence. He knew it was in the neighborhood of Carrasco. He’d been there, but he wasn’t sure exactly where it was, and he didn’t want to get in a taxi and ride up and down streets looking for it.
There was nothing to do but call the
German Embassy. The possibility existed that either the Uruguayan authorities or the gottverdammt OSS—or both—had tapped the embassy lines. But after thinking it over, von Deitzberg realized he had no choice.
A female answered the telephone.