Donovan laughed out loud and waved the message.
“Can I have this?”
“You’re the boss.”
“I’m going to put it in the safe under ‘Documents of Historical Interest’ and let some historian try to figure it out fifty, sixty years from now.”
Graham laughed, pushed himself off the couch, and extended his hand to Donovan with the first and index fingers crossed.
“What’s that for?” Donovan asked.
“Crossed fingers. Let’s hope those pictures are usable.”
They shook hands; then Graham walked out of Donovan’s office.
XI
[ONE]
Office of the Commercial Attaché Embassy of the German Reich Avenida Córdoba Buenos Aires, Argentina 0910 23 July 1943
“You wished to see me, Herr Cranz?” Fregattenkapitän Karl Boltitz asked at the door of SS-Standartenführer Karl Cranz’s office.
Cranz, who was wearing one of his new suits in the guise of commercial attaché, gestured for Boltitz to come in.
“I asked to see you and von Wachtstein,” Cranz said, his tone making it a question.
“I believe he went quite early to El Palomar airfield, Herr Cranz. I had the impression you wanted him to fly to Uruguay.” His tone, too, made it a question.
“Is that what he told you?” Cranz asked, indicating that Boltitz should come around his desk to look at something he had laid out on it.
“What he said, Herr Standart . . . Sorry, sir.”
Cranz made a it doesn’t matter gesture, then smiled and said, “Actually, Karl, today I feel more like a standartenführer than a bidder for frozen cubed beef.”
“I doubt the Standartenführer ever feels like a natural bidder for frozen cubed beef,” Boltitz said.
“I can hear one day my nephew asking, ‘And what was your most painful experience in the war, Oncle Karl?’ And I can hear me replying, ‘Standing in a freezing warehouse on the docks in Buenos Aires, leibling, trying to buy frozen cubed beef.’ ”
Boltitz chuckled dutifully.
“Did von Wachtstein tell you I wanted to go to Uruguay in the Storch?” Cranz asked.
“Yes, sir, I did,” Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein said from the office door. “If I had known you wanted to see me, sir, I would have tried—”
“No matter, von Wachtstein,” Cranz interrupted him. “You’re here. Is the Storch
flyable?”
“Yes, sir. And if we leave in the next hour, we can arrive in Montevideo in time for a nice lunch at the casino in Carrasco.”
“We’re not going to Uruguay,” Cranz said.
“I had the impression, sir—”
“Impressions are often wrong, von Wachtstein.”
“Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true.”