About halfway, Cletus touched Martín’s arm, a signal for him to stop.
Martín looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“Are you going to tell us why you’re flying a Jesuit priest around?” Nervo asked.
“Well, he’s getting me National Identity booklets for two SS men and their wives and children, and the sooner he can do that, the better.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s your odd sense of humor at work,” Martín said.
“So that’s who was in that Little Sisters of the Poor bus,” Nervo said. “What’s this all about? Who are these people? Where did they come from?”
I can’t—I don’t want to, and I can’t—play any more games with these two. It is now truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth time.
“They were on the plane from Lisbon,” Clete said.
“And you knew about that?” Martín said.
“I knew they were probably going to be on the plane. I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t know who they were, until Father Welner brought them to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.”
“Who are they?” Nervo asked.
“One of them is an SS major, the other an SS sergeant major. . . .”
“Traveling as priests, nuns, and orphans on Vatican passports,” Nervo said bitterly. “Sonofabitch! I knew something smelled when I saw the Papal Nuncio at the airport!”
“What’s this all about, Cletus?” Martín asked.
Clete had a clear mental image of himself and Colonel A. F. Graham in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel the day he met Graham and heard for the first time of the United States Office of Strategic Services.
Graham, whom he had never seen before, came to Clete’s room in civilian clothing, showed him his Marine Corps identification, and came right to the point: “Are you willing to undertake a mission involving great personal risk outside the continental limits of the United States?”
When, after thinking it all over for perhaps twenty seconds, Clete—who
was literally willing to do anything to get off what he was doing, which was a Heroes on Display War Bond Tour to be followed by a tour as a basic flying instructor—said that he would, Graham handed him a sheet of paper and said, “Read it and then sign it.”
He had signed it, and only then asked, “What’s the ‘Office of Strategic Services’?”
Clete looked between Martín and Nervo, and began: “The OSS has made a deal with a German intelligence officer named Gehlen . . .”
“And the goddamn Vatican is involved in this up to the Pope’s eyeballs,” Nervo said when Clete had finished.
“What are you supposed to do with these people, Cletus?” Martín asked.
“Nobody told me this,” Clete replied, “but I have the feeling that this is step one.”
“What is ‘this’?” Martín asked.
“Getting the officers out of Russia and their families out of Germany, then into Italy, then to Portugal, and finally established here. . . .”
“Established here?” Nervo repeated.
“I am supposed to set them up to disappear in Argentina.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know. We have agreed to provide money. I suppose Welner will help. . . .”
“Let me give you a little friendly advice, my OSS friend,” Nervo said. “Never put yourself in debt to Holy Mother Church, especially when it’s being represented by a Jesuit, and especially, especially when that Jesuit is the beloved Father Kurt Welner, S.J.”