“What does that mean, my side?”
“Really? I thought you knew. The cemetery, although it’s on Big Foot, is jointly owned by the Howells and the Cronleys. The Howells get buried on one side and the Cronleys on the other. They buried the late Mrs. Cronley with her husband’s family.”
Jimmy looked at him with tears running down his cheeks.
“Actually, as it turns out, Marjie’s about ten feet from her father,” Clete said. “I don’t know if Mom, or your mother, or your dad, set it up that way, but that’s where the Squirt’ll be from now on. Next to my Uncle Jim.”
—
Jimmy thought that he hadn’t really understood the convoluted family relations of Cletus Frade until he’d gone to Argentina, although he had wondered about them from the time he wore short pants. Starting with, he thought now, wondering why Jim and Martha Howell’s “son” was named Frade instead of Howell.
Gradually, he had been able to put some of the pieces together.
Clete’s “mom” wasn’t his mother but his aunt. Beth and Marjorie—the Squirt—were his cousins, not his sisters. Their father, James Howell, was Clete’s uncle. James was one of Cletus Marcus Howell’s—the Old Man’s—two children, the other being Clete’s mother. She had died when Clete was an infant.
Jimmy seldom had heard her name, but the Old Man made it clear that the reason she died was that she had married “a despicable Argentinian sonofabitch.” He knew this because that’s how Cletus Marcus Howell referred to him on those rare occasions when the subject came up in Jimmy’s hearing.
Jimmy had grown up thinking that Clete’s father was some sleazy Mexican-type greaseball Casanova who had somehow managed to seduce a wholesome Midland girl, gotten her with child, watched her die—probably of the drugs and alcohol to which he had introduced her—and then abandoned her and their infant offspring. The baby—Clete—had then been taken in by James Howell, his mother’s brother, and reared by him and his wife, Martha, as their own.
When Second Lieutenant Cronley had ordered one of Tiny’s Troopers to put a couple of rounds from the pedestal-mounted .50 caliber Browning machine gun on his jeep into the engine of Lieutenant Colonel Schumann’s staff car to convince the colonel that, IG or not, he was not going to be allowed into Kloster Grünau, he had been entirely within his rights to so.
Cronley had been authorized by Colonel Mattingly to take whatever action was necessary, including the taking of human life, to protect what was going on at Kloster Grünau from becoming known.
But there were ramifications to the shattered engine block. Colonel Schumann had gone to General Greene to report not only the assault upon his staff car, but to tell Greene that he was convinced the activity at the secluded monastery had a great deal to do with the rumor he had been chasing for some time—that renegade Americans were sneaking Nazis out of Germany to South America.
With great difficulty—as Mattingly had not been then authorized to tell Greene anything about Operation Ost—he had managed to dissuade Greene from sending the 18th Infantry Regiment to seize Kloster Grünau from whoever held it. But Mattingly knew that was a temporary solution at best, and that a very credible scenario was that Greene, after thinking it over, would send the 18th Infantry and tell him about it later.
If that happened, about seventy pounds, literally, of incriminating documents at Kloster Grünau would be seized. That simply could not be allowed to happen. Mattingly immediately collected the documents and Second Lieutenant Cronley from Kloster Grünau and took them to Rhine-Main airfield in Frankfurt.
There, after ordering Cronley to guard the documents with his life until he could place them in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Frade and no one else, he put both on an SAA Constellation bound for Buenos Aires. Then he put himself on a Military Air Transport Service C-54, which departed Rhine-Main for Washington.
He had to convince Admiral Souers, who was presiding over the burial of the OSS, that General Greene and others had to be told of Operation Ost and ordered to support it. Otherwise Operation Ost was going to blow up in everybody’s face, and those faces included President Harry S Truman’s and General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower’s.
Mattingly’s orders to Cronley were that once the documents were safely in Frade’s hands, he was to catch the next Germany-bound SAA flight and return to Kloster Grünau, where he was to keep his mouth shut, and, if the 18th Infantry showed up, to stall them as long as possible before surrendering.
Cronley had not been able to comply with his orders.
—
Cletus Frade had met Jimmy Cronley’s SAA aircraft at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade. He was driving a Horch automobile—very much like Colonel Mattingly’s—and had with him his wife, a long-legged blond with a flawless complexion who spoke English like the King.
What Jimmy hoped was discreet questioning produced the information that the airport was named “Frade” because Clete had dedicated it to his father—that despicable Argentinian sonofabitch?—and that the Horch—“Nice car. Where’d you get it?”—had been his father’s.
They drove into Buenos Aires, a city that didn’t look like anything Mexican, and stopped at a mansion overlooking a horse racetrack. Clete had told him the mansion, built by his Grand-uncle Guillermo, was where Clete and his wife and kids lived because Dorotea thought the “big house” was about as comfortable as a museum.
When they went inside, things immediately became even more complicated.
The Old Man was there. And Martha and Beth and Marjie Howell.
All the Howell women kissed Cronley, which he sort of expected. What he didn’t expect was the way the Squirt kissed him. Clete’s baby sister wasn’t supposed to kiss him that way, and he absolutely wasn’t supposed to have the instant physical reaction to it that he did. All he could do was hope that no one happened to be glancing six inches below his belt buckle.
But even that went into the background when Cronley, almost casually, mentioned to Clete that he had been talking with some of Gehlen’s people at Kloster Grünau about where a missing submarine, U-234, might have made landfall in Argentina, and they had come up with a very likely answer.
“Jesus Christ, didn’t Mattingly tell you?” Clete said.
“What?”
“Apropos of nothing whatever, my last orders from General Donovan were to keep two things going at all costs—Operation Ost and the search for U-234. So tell me, what did you and the boys in the monastery come up with?”