“This is new,” Welner said, indicating the green chair.
“Dorotéa put it in here.”
“How does Dorotéa feel about this?” Welner asked, waving his hand around the room that had been described as Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade’s Shrine To His Son.
“I don’t know,” Clete said. “So far she hasn’t suggested we turn it into a nursery.”
“And you?”
Clete met his eyes. “I don’t know. Sometimes I’m…what? Embarrassed…and sometimes it makes me a little sad, thinking of all the hours my father spent in here because my grandfather was such a sonofabitch.”
“Maybe it would be more useful as a nursery,” Welner said.
“On the other hand, it’s the only room on the estancia where I know nobody’s going to come through the door.”
“Your father made it rather plain this was his, period.”
“Did he let you in?”
“Not often. Usually when you had done something that made him proud of you. He’d show it to me before he had it framed, or put it into one of the scrapbooks.”
They looked at each other.
“I suppose it’s too
much to hope that I am being allowed into the sanctum sanctorum to hear your confession—”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Clete chuckled.
“—but something is on your mind.”
“Oh, yeah,” Clete said. “Tell me about this business of what I tell you as a priest—”
“As your priest, Cletus.”
“—going no further. Does it apply if I tell you something about somebody else?”
“That would depend,” Welner said.
“I was afraid you would say something like that. Yes or no, Padre?”
“I can give you my word as a man, as your friend. You have it.”
“Alicia is with child,” Clete said.
Welner shook his head sadly. “The German?” he asked.
Clete nodded.
“How far is she along?”
“She thinks it happened that night in my apartment in the Alvear.”
“When you played Cupid?”
“You really know how to go for the nuts, don’t you?”
“I take your meaning, even if I never heard it phrased so graphically before. ‘Go for the nuts.’ I’ll have to remember that one.”