“Hey, pal, you speak any English?”
Clete nodded, and said, “Frade.”
“Oh, shit,” the MP said. “Major Frade, U.S. Marine Corps?”
Clete nodded. “But I’d rather people didn’t know that.”
“You got some ID, sir?”
I have a very fancy gold badge identifying me as an OSS area commander. Even has a photo ID.
But I left it in my safe, as I am here
masquerading as an Argentine.
Besides, I don’t think I’m supposed to show it to anyone anyway.
But next time, I’ll bring it. It would have solved this problem.
Clete shook his head.
“Just a minute, please, sir,” the MP said, and went into the guard shack.
In about sixty seconds, the MP came back out of the shack and repeated, “Just a minute, please, sir.”
Three minutes after that, the headlights of a 1942 Ford sedan appeared as it raced up to the guard shack. Frade saw that it had a covered plate on the front bumper, and a chrome pole on the right fender, covered with an oilcloth sleeve. He had just put everything together and concluded that this was the personal auto of a general officer when the proof came: Out jumped a young Air Forces captain wearing wings, a fur felt cap with a crushed crown, and the aiguillette of an aide-de-camp.
He looked at Frade, almost visibly decided the man in the rather elegant suit whose hair now covered the collar and most of his ears could not possibly be a major of Marines, looked at the MP, then back at Frade after the MP pointed to him.
“Major Frade?”
Clete nodded.
“You have some identification, sir?”
Clete shook his head.
It clearly was not the answer the captain hoped for.
“Sir, I’m General Wallace’s aide . . .”
“He got promoted, did he?”
“Sir, if you’ll come with me, please?”
He held open the Ford’s rear door.
Three minutes later, the Ford pulled into the driveway of a pleasant-looking Mediterranean-style cottage with a red tile roof. A neat little sign on the neatly trimmed lawn read: BRIG. GEN. J. B. WALLACE, U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES.
“If you’ll come with me, Major?” the aide asked, and led him into the house, then to a closed interior door, on which he knocked.
“Come in, please,” a male voice, somewhat nasal, called.
“Right in there, sir,” the aide said, opened the door, then closed it after Frade had passed through.
Frade expected General Wallace. He got instead a white-haired civilian of about fifty who had a somewhat baggy suit, a bow tie, and a mustache that would have been Hitlerian had it not been almost white. He looked very much like the Reverend Richard Cobbs Lacey, headmaster of Saint Mark’s of Texas, an Episcopal preparatory school in Dallas at which a fourteen-year-old Clete had had a brief—five months—and ultimately disastrous association.
“Ah,” the man said. “Major Frade. I have just helped myself to some of the general’s whiskey. May I offer you one?”