Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

[FOUR]

1728 Avenida Coronel Díaz

Palermo, Buenos Aires

1150 6 May 1943

Unnecessarily, for Clete had already noticed it, Enrico touched his arm and then jerked his thumb toward a gray 1939 Dodge sedan parked across the street from the massive mansion. Two men were sitting in it.

“The clowns are here,” Enrico said. He held the agents of both the Bureau of Internal Security and of the Policía Federal in equal contempt; he called both “the clowns.”

“They’re probably following Ashton,” Clete said. “He’s here.” He pointed to a 1941 Chevrolet sedan with Corps Diplomatique license tags parked directly in front of the mansion.

Hell, that’s almost certainly Milton Leibermann’s car. As the “legal attaché,” he gets CD plates. That’s what this is all about. Leibermann wants to see me. He’s the “we” Ashton meant.

As he drove the Buick across the sidewalk to the left of the mansion’s two twelve-foot-high wrought-iron gates, one of the double doors to the mansion opened and a short, squat maid—who obviously had been watching from behind the curtains for Señor Frade to arrive—trotted to the gates and pulled them open. Clete pulled into the curved cobblestone drive, stopped in front of the mansion, and got out and started up the stairs.

A dignified, silver-haired man in his sixties, dressed in a gray frock coat, opened the door as Clete reached it. Antonio had been the butler in the Frade family’s Coronel Díaz mansion for longer than Clete’s lifetime. “Señor Frade,” Antonio said. “Your guests are here. I put them in the downstairs sitting.”

The downstairs sitting in this place is about as warm and comfortable as the room in a funeral home where they put the casket on display. Maybe less warm and comfortable.

“Thank you, Antonio,” Clete said. “How are you?”

“Very well, thank you, Sir.”

“Can we feed these people?”

“If I had had more time, Señor…”

“But we can feed them, right?”

“Of course, Señor.”

As Clete walked across the marble-floored foyer past the curving double stairways leading to the second floor (the steps were marble; the railings were cast bronze), he remembered his father telling him that his mother had refused to live there (she was the one who’d given it its name, “The Museum”). His father himself had described it as “my money sewer on Avenida Coronel Díaz.”

It was like a museum, both in its dimensions and in the plethora of artwork, huge oil paintings and statuary that covered the walls and open spaces. He always had the somewhat irreverent thought that two subjects seemed to fascinate Argentine artists and sculptors: La Pampa, at dusk, during a rainstorm; and buxom women dressed in what looked like wet sheets that generally left exposed at least one large and well-formed breast.

He was far more comfortable in the guest house on Libertador; but, as he had told Max on the phone, there was a guest there. He had an unkind thought as he pushed open the door to the downstairs sitting: If I hadn’t let that damned Jesuit con artist sweet-talk me into having Perón at my wedding, Perón would have been insulted. Maybe then the sonofabitch would move out of my guest house. I am really pissed at the thought of that bastard doing whatever the hell he does with young girls in my house.

The first person he saw was Milton Leibermann, sitting on one of the half-dozen unbelievably uncomfortable straight-backed, brocade-upholstered, two-seater couches. They were set so close to the floor that Leibermann’s knees were higher than his waist.

Milton looks ridiculous.

There was a tiny porcelain coffee set on a silver tray on a small table in front of the couch, and an identical set on a small table before the matching chair where Captain Maxwell Ashton sat. He had two more unkind thoughts: Max is so short, he fits in that chair. And where did he get that awful suit? He looks like a Mexican sharpie in Matamores. “You want pesos, señor? I give you best deal. Or how about a sixteen-year-old virgin?”

And then he saw a third man in the room.

Well, that explains the “we arrived last night” remark, doesn’t it?

Colonel A. J. Graham, USMCR, was standing by the heavily draped windows overlooking Avenida Coronel Díaz. He was in uniform, complete to ribbons and a thick gold cord hanging from his epaulet that Clete recognized, from his aborted assignment as Naval Attaché, as the insignia of an attaché.

He really looks like a Marine colonel. Starchy, and mean as a junkyard dog.

“Well, look who’s here!” Clete said. “How long are you going to be here? Can you stay for the wedding?”

Graham was not smiling, and he did not reply for a long moment. “Tell me, Frade,” he said finally, “you do understand, don’t you, that you are a serving officer of the United States Marine Corps?”

“Well, this is hardly Quantico, is it?” Clete replied without thinking. “But sure.”