She looked into his eyes, then nodded her head.
She trusts me. Goddamn it!
“We’ll go back to the house,” Dorotéa said. “So you can wash your face. Cletus will come up with something.”
Is she saying that to make Alicia feel good? Or is she, too, placing faith in me that’s absolutely misplaced?
He stood up.
Alicia raised herself out of the seat. “Thank you, Cletus,” she said, and then turned and walked down the aisle.
Dorotéa stood up and met his eyes for a moment but said nothing, then followed Alicia down the aisle.
Clete followed them to the door, watched them walk away from the Lockheed, and then flipped the switch that activated the electrical motor for the stairs. They began to retract, with the funny noise again, but finally came in place. He exhaled audibly and jumped to the ground.
“Shit!” he said.
[THREE]
Gendarmeria Nacional Post 1088
Route Nacionale No. 2
Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province
1530 18 May 1943
Sargento Manuel Lascano abruptly braked the blue 1939 Dodge sedan. This act awakened el Coronel Bernardo Martín, who had been dozing in the front seat beside him. Martín looked out the window.
Fifty meters down Route 2 was a Gendarmeria Nacional Post. The two-lane highway divided around an island on which sat a guard shack. On the right of the road was a two-story administrative building. Martín knew the plan; he’d been inside many such buildings. Offices and a detention cell occupied the first floor, and the second was a barracks for the dozen or so men who manned the post.
There were three gendarmeros on the island. A sargento was signaling the Dodge to stop with a somewhat imperiously raised palm. This could mean any number of things. It could mean, for example, that the Gendarmeria Nacional sargento was bored and was stopping them for something to do. Or else he had had a fight with his wife and was looking for someone on whom to vent his unhappiness.
But probably it meant that Lascano had been caught speeding. The Gendarmeria Nacional sometimes hid men in roadside ditches a kilometer apart, who timed how long it took a car or truck to cover the kilometer. Speeders were reported to the next post, where offenders were pulled over and issued citations.
There were two kinds of speeding. Manuel could have been going like hell, say 120–130 kph (75–80 mph), which was really a bit much for Route 2 in this area, or he could have been going just a few kilometers over the absurd posted speed limit of 75 kph (45 mph).
Gendarmeria Nacional road checkpoints were all over the country; this was the third they’d passed since leaving Buenos Aires. El Coronel Martín regarded not only the checkpoints but indeed the Gendarmeria Nacional itself as a monumental waste of effort and money.
Though organized on military lines, the Gendarmeria was a law-enforcement agency. They were policemen, in other words, who dressed like soldiers. But they were not very good policemen. On one hand, they didn’t have the requisite training. On the other, they felt they were far too good to stop a man who was beating his wife, for example, or who was selling farmers tickets in a nonexistent raffle.
Manuel stopped the Dodge and rolled the window down.
The Gendarmeria Nacional sargento saluted. “Buenas tardes,” he said. “Documents, please.”
The saluting also annoyed Coronel Martín—as it did many other Army and Navy officers—who felt the salute was a greeting of mutual recognition between warriors, and should not be rendered by a policeman to a civilian who was about to be cited for a traffic violation.
Perhaps for that reason, though he usually displayed his BIS credentials reluctantly, Martín found himself reaching into the breast pocket of his well-tailored, faintly plaided suit for his papers. Agents of the Bureau of Internal Security were immune to arrest by any law-enforcement or military agency.
He leaned across Sargento Lascano.
This earned him another salute from the Gendarmeria Nacional sargento—a much crisper salute than the first. “If you will be so good as to wait a moment, Señor,” the sargento said, and trotted across the road to the Administration Building.
Lascano looked at Martín, who held his hands up helplessly.
Martín was tempted to tell Lascano to just drive off, but there might be a reason why they’d been stopped.
That appeared a moment later.