“You being an OSS agent?
“Yeah.”
“But I want to be. I insist that I be.”
“For Christ’s sake, why?”
“For someone as smart as you are, you are sometimes really stupid,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“I want to share your life, Cletus. That means what you do, what you’re going to do. I want to help.”
“How the hell could you help? For Christ’s sake, you’re carrying our baby! I don’t want you in a cell someplace. Or worse.”
“And I don’t want to stand around not knowing what’s going on, wondering what in the bloody hell you’re up to, wondering if I couldn’t help if only you’d let me. In that way, I realized, I’m lucky.”
What the hell does she mean by that?
“I don’t understand that.”
“I know a dozen girls, women, here, whose husbands, whose boyfriends, got on ships and went wherever the Royal Navy or the RAF or whatever sent them. All they get is the odd letter saying ‘sorry, I can’t tell you where I am, or what I’m doing, but keep a stiff upper lip, old girl, and someday I’ll be back.’ At least you’ll be fighting your war here, and—I admit I haven’t a clue how, but I know that somehow I’ll be able to—I can help, and at least we’ll be together.”
“Jesus, baby!”
“Unless you’re too stupid to see this, to—”
“I’m sneaking Max Ashton out of the country.”
“Just him? Not the others?”
“No, and I suspect that he’ll be back here in a week or ten days, with a diplomatic passport.”
“With the Lockheed?”
“If they don’t know we’re going beforehand—and the telephone line here will go out just before we take off from here, and stay out until I clear El Palomar—”
“‘Clear El Palomar’?”
“Go through customs and immigration.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting through El Palomar. And Humberto is arranging for people to meet us in Montevideo—my estancia managers and somebody from a bank.”
“And with the girls along it will look even more innocent, right? Was that your idea?”
“Humberto’s.”
“Do your sisters know?”
“No. And they’re not my sisters, they’re my cousins. Martha knows.”
“They’re your sisters,” she said. “I will take them to a place I know down by the port. Really marvelous leather goods. How long will your business take?”
“Aside from putting Max in touch with the OSS guy in our embassy in Montevideo, I don’t have any business.”
“But Humberto will arrange a lunch or something to make it look like you do,” she said. “And we’ll all be somebody’s houseguests.”