Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

“How? Prurient curiosity overwhelms me.”

“One pours cognac in a wide-mouthed jar, or a measuring cup, something on that order. Then it is placed in a freezer for however long it takes to bring the temperature of the cognac below zero. The cognac does not freeze because of the alcohol, you see. Then you drop a chip of ice into the jar. The water in the alcohol/water mixture is attracted to the chip of ice and adheres to it. The ice chip is then removed. This is done several times. Eventually, the remaining liquid has a much higher percentage of alcohol. One drink equals two or three.”

“And you can’t taste the difference?” Himmler asked.

“If one’s first drink is ordinary cognac, one might notice a slight change….”

“You obviously have put this to a personal test, have you, Karl?”

“In the line of duty, of course, Herr Reichsprotektor. After the first drink of the special cognac, one cannot tell the difference.”

“And what did Trudi learn from von Wachtstein?”

“That he was very upset by the injuries suffered by Graf von Stauffenberg, and that he had been present when Oberst Grüner was killed.”

“Huh,” Himmler said.

“And also that even great amounts of alcohol in his system did not adversely affect his…romantic capabilities. I got the impression Trudi rather liked him.”

“And what did we learn about Gradny-Sawz?”

“That he had a lockbox in the Credit Anstalt bank in Vienna we had not previously known about, in whi

ch he apparently kept what was left of the family jewels. He apparently plans to take them with him to Buenos Aires. If he returns to Buenos Aires.”

“Nothing else?”

“The same sort of thing he does in Buenos Aires, ladies of the evening. Nothing extraordinary.”

“And von Tresmarck?”

“Although temptation was placed in his path, he went to bed with neither male nor female. Neither did he drink to excess at any time—hardly at all, as a matter of fact.”

“From which you infer?”

“I don’t know what to infer, Herr Reichsprotektor. Von Tresmarck is SS, so he would assume that he’s being watched. That doesn’t necessarily mean he sold out to the Americans. And doing so, I think, would be illogical. He is not in a concentration camp with a pink triangle on his jacket; he is making money. And from what we have heard from Montevideo, he has his friends there.”

“Keep on,” Himmler said.

“I think we can assume that von Wachtstein didn’t know the details of the landing. Goltz said so. And he is a junior officer, so I think Goltz would not have told him. Gradny-Sawz, on the other hand, is the number two in the Buenos Aires Embassy. Though he says he didn’t, he could have known the details of the landing. Even more likely, I think, is that Goltz did confide the details to von Tresmarck, perhaps accidentally. Von Tresmarck’s position is that he knew nothing about the special shipment except that it was coming. And I get back to why would selling out be in his best interests?”

“To guarantee him refuge should we lose the war,” Himmler said. “Men like that are dangerous.” He chuckled. “They think like women.”

“The same thing would apply to Gradny-Sawz, and we know he is willing to turn traitor,” Cranz said. “He’s done it once, why not again?”

Himmler grunted, thinking that over, and then asked, “Presumably you have compared notes with Canaris’s man?”

“I think he agrees just about completely with me.”

“Unless he has other theories to be shared only with Canaris?”

“That’s possible, Herr Reichsprotektor, but I think unlikely,” Cranz said, and then: “Would it be valuable for me to know what Oberführer von Deitzberg has learned in Buenos Aires and Montevideo?”

“Ambassador von Lutzenberger confirms that Goltz did not tell von Wachtstein the details of the landing, and that he himself didn’t know the position, only the time and general area. It is also his opinion that the Argentines, who have a patrol and surveillance capability, were keeping an eye on the Océano Pacífico. Von Lutzenberger offers as a possible scenario that there would be a relatively senior officer—an oberst, for example—in charge of the surveillance. That such an officer would certainly have known Oberst Frade, and might well have been a close friend, and that when he saw Oberst Grüner and Standartenführer Goltz—whom the Argentine officer corps blames for the death of Oberst Frade—landing from the ship, he simply behaved like a Latin and ordered them shot. Knowing, of course, that we could not protest whatever happened to them without getting into what they were doing.”

“Interesting. If that’s true, there would be no traitor.”

“I don’t think we can take that as any more than a possibility. Although when I think of Oberst Juan Domingo Perón, I am tempted to believe an Argentine officer might behave that way.”