Peter was at first at a loss about how to accomplish his father’s directives. He could not, he was all too aware, succeed on his own. Yet whom could he go to for help? Whom could he trust? Having nowhere else to go, and remembering Cletus’s pledge, Peter brought the letter to Cletus Frade.
Since neither spoke the other’s language, their conversation was in Spanish.
Cletus said, “I don’t know what you want me to do. For one thing, I can’t read German. So the letter won’t mean a thing to me. For another, I don’t know how I can do you any good. Secretly transferring money between countries is not one of my regular accomplishments.”
“Forgive me for wasting your time, Señor Frade,” Peter answered frostily.
“Don’t get a corncob up your ass, Fritz,” Cletus said. “My father speaks German, and I think he would consider my debts his. And I owe you.”
He saw the surprise and concern on von Wachtstein’s face, and added, “I also suspect he’s into this chivalry and honor shit, too.”
When el Coronel Frade did in fact translate the letter for Clete (he was doing it aloud), the tears running down his cheeks and the tightness in his throat made it hard for him to make it through to the end.
Though he, too, had to admit that he was at a personal loss about handling Peter’s problem, he knew who could handle it: “My sister’s husband, Humberto Duarte, is Managing Director of the Anglo-Argentine Bank.”
“You think he will help, mi Coronel?” von Wachtstein asked.
“Of course he will,” el Coronel Frade said. “And not only because he is Cletus’s uncle, and Cletus’s debt to you is a family debt, but also because he has believed for years all the terrible things people have been saying about your Führer and the Nazi party.”
Humberto Duarte not only proved to be willing to help, but more important, he knew all the tricks necessary to transfer funds in absolute secrecy from numbered Swiss bank accounts to accounts in Argentina.
Peter’s relief was, however, short-lived. His father was not the only German who had been thinking about survival should Germany lose the war.
The very next Lufthansa Condor flight from Berlin to Buenos Aires had aboard—in addition to el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón, who had returned to take part in the coup d’état against President Castillo—Standartenführer-SS-SD Josef Luther Goltz.
Both Ambassador von Lutzenberger and Peter von Wachtstein thought the SS officer had been sent to find out what he could about the sinking of the Reine de la Mer, but that was not his purpose.
His orders had much more to do with the various missions associated with the soon-to-be-arriving “neutral” Spanish vessel Comerciante del Océano Pacífico—the repatriation of the interned officers from the Graf Spee; the replacement of the Reine de la Mer as a replenishment vessel for U-boats; and finally—and most secretly—the transfer of funds to be used for the implementing of Operation Phoenix.
Standartenführer Goltz presented this information to Ambassador von Lutzenberger and his old friend First Secretary Anton von Gradny-Sawz.
Ambassador von Lutzenberger, recognizing the threat Operation Phoenix posed to what he and Peter were doing with the von Wachtstein money—and other money entrusted to him by other friends—decided that Peter had to know, and told him everything.
The next day, Peter had flown Standartenführer Goltz to Montevideo in the Fieseler Storch, where Goltz met with Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck, the SS-SD man at the German Embassy in Uruguay.
Von Tresmarck’s wife, whom Peter had known in Berlin, presumed he knew what was going on and revealed to him the source of the Operation Phoenix funds available in Uruguay. It came from the families and friends of Jews in concentration camps in Germany. For a price, the SS would arrange for the release of Jews from the death camps and their travel to Uruguay and Argentina.
Peter had then been faced with another moral decision. On one hand, his stomach turned at yet another proof of the incredible moral bankruptcy of the Nazi hierarchy generally and the SS specifically.
On the other, to reveal this state secret, and what he knew about the Océano Pacífico, to a man he knew was an agent of the OSS was not only treason, pure and simple, but also personally painful.
The Kapitänleutnant of one of the submarines with empty fuel tanks in the South Atlantic was a close friend from college days, a wholly decent human being. Furthermore, if his treason ever became known, it would mean not only not being able to carry out the responsibility his father had given him to care for the people who depended on the von Wachtsteins, but would also be tantamount to signing an execution order for his father.
In the end, Cletus Frade gave him his word that he would never reveal the source of his information, and so Peter told him. Frade then told Peter that one of his agents, David Ettinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, had heard the stories about the ransoming of Jews from concentration camps, and had been investigating them. Ettinger’s obscenely mutilated corpse had been found a few days before, on the beach at Carrasco, outside Montevideo. The severed penis in Ettinger’s mouth, Clete said, had been a message to the Jews who knew about the ransoming operation.
Standartenführer Goltz—who had not himself told Peter any more than he felt he absolutely had to know about Operation Phoenix—had been forced to press him into service when the Océano Pacífico arrived in Argentina.
Peter had managed to get word to Cletus Frade about where and when the “special cargo” would be unloaded, and Operation Phoenix and the other missions of the Océano Pacífico had been aborted on the beach at Puerto Magdalena.
Afterward, there was no reason, Peter knew, for anyone to suspect that he was in any way responsible for tipping the OSS off about the attempted landing operation, or that he was now a traitor to the oath he had taken, pledging loyalty unto death to the person of the Führer of the German people, Adolf Hitler.
But he knew that did not mean he was not under suspicion.
“Would you like to freshen up before coming to the table?” Señorita Alicia de Carzino-Cormano asked.
“Yes, thank you, I really would,” Major von Wachtstein replied, exhibiting greasy hands as proof of the necessity.
“You take dear Peter to our room, Alicia,” Señora Frade de Duarte ordered. “And I will see that there is a place set for him.”