Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“My shoes are too small.”

“Well, then, we better stop on the way to the hotel and find you some that fit,” Clete said. “Our mentors, who got here at seven this morning, are already convinced that David and I are retarded; if you showed up in bare feet, that would be too much for them.”

Ettinger laughed.

Tony Pelosi had no idea what a “mentor” was, but he was goddamned if he was going to ask.

[THREE]

The Franco-Spanish Border

1525 3 November 1942

Train Number 1218 of the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (Paris-Barcelona-Madrid) would be late crossing the border, but there was nothing the officials of the French National Railroad could do about it. It had been requested of them by the representative of the German Rail Coordination Bureau: (a) that a goods wagon then sitting in Paris (number furnished herewith), a Grande Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits sleeping car with crew, and a first-class passenger car be attached to Number 1218; and (b) that Number 1218’s schedule be “adjusted” to permit a fifteen- to thirty-minute ceremony at the Spanish border; and (c) that officials of the Spanish National Railroad be informed of the change of schedule.

At 1455, fifteen minutes before Number 1218 was due, the gate (an arrangement of timbers and barbed wire) across the tracks on the Spanish side of the border was moved aside by Spanish Border Police. A moment later a tiny yard engine pushed a passenger car of the Spanish National Railroad across what everybody called “No-Man’s-Land” to the similar gate across the tracks on the French side of the border.

After a minute’s conversation between French and Spanish officials, the French gate was opened and the yard engine pushed the Spanish passenger car approximately 300 meters farther into the Border Station, where it stopped. About forty rifle-armed members of the Guardia Nacional, all wearing their distinctive stiff black leather hats, debarked from the passenger car and formed two ranks on the platform. A moment after that, two officers of the Guardia Nacional came down from the passenger car, together with four more enlisted men, two of whom carried flags on poles.

One of the flags was that of Spain. The other was unusual. But it was finally identified by one of the French customs officials as the flag of Argentina. The men carrying the flags arranged themselves before the members of the Guardia Nacional, and the two Guardia Nacional enlisted men who had gotten off the train last took up places beside them.

At 1505, five minutes early, Number 1218 moved into the station, on a track parallel to the one where the Spanish National Railways car had stopped. The members of a small Luftwaffe band, equipped primarily with trumpets and drums, descended from the passenger car and formed up quickly under the direction of their bandmaster. They were followed by a mixed detachment of Luftwaffe, Waffen-SS, and Wehrmacht troops, three of each under the command of a Luftwaffe captain. They formed up and were marched back to the goods wagon, from which four of their number removed two sawhorses.

They set up the sawhorses on the platform between the Guardia Nacional and the band. The sawhorses were then covered with a pleated black material which concealed them. They then returned to the goods wagon, from which they removed a very heavy casket, across which the flag of Argentina was draped diagonally. The flag had three broad stripes running horizontally, first light blue, then white, then again light blue. In the center of the white central stripe was the face of maybe the sun-god. It was golden and smiling. Radiating from it were red streaks, which were probably intended to represent sunbeams.

In the opinion of most of the French Railway officials, it was not a very civilized flag. Perhaps the sort of thing one might expect of some far-off former colony which now imagined itself to be a nation, but not civilized. Provincial people like that never knew when to stop; they could be counted on, so to speak, to try to gild the lily.

The casket-carrying detachment arranged themselves around the casket, four men to a side, one man at the head. The Luftwaffe captain placed himself at the foot of the casket, ordered “Vorwärts!” and somewhat awkwardly (it was extraordinarily heavy), the casket was carried down the platform and installed on the sawhorses.

As soon as this was accomplished, officers and enlisted personnel of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS began to debark from the passenger and Wagons-Lits cars—enlisted and officers from the former, and from the latter officers only, including a Luftwaffe Oberst, an Oberstleutnant from the Wehrmacht, a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer (the Waffen-SS equivalent of an Oberstleutnant, or lieutenant colonel), a Luftwaffe Hauptmann, and then a tall, thin, olive-skinned man wearing a uniform no one could recall ever seeing before.

It was decided that he must have something to do with the casket covered with the smiling sun-god flag, and that he therefore must be an Argentinean. It was also noticed that the Luftwaffe Hauptmann in his dress uniform had the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross hanging around his neck. One didn’t see too many of those.

The officers and men who had debarked from the passenger car formed a double rank facing the Guardia Nacional. Two photographers in Wehrmacht uniforms, one still and one motion picture, and a Wehrmacht lieutenant armed with a clipboard now appeared.

At this point, two more uniformed officers descended from the Spanish National Railways car that had been pushed backward into the border station. One was a coronel, the other a teniente. They were photographed and filmed as they walked across the platform and exchanged military salutes and then handshakes with the German officers and with the one who was probably an Argentinean.

All the officers then formed in a line, facing the flag-covered casket. The Luftwaffe colonel looked at the officer commanding the mixed detachment of German Armed Forces personnel. He in turn looked at the bandmaster, who raised his drum major’s baton.

“Achtung!” the officer commanding the mixed detachment barked, and everybody came to attention, including the members of the Guardia Nacional.

The bandleader moved his drum major’s baton downward in a violent motion. The strains of “Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles” erupted from the band. The officers in the rank, except the Wehrmacht Oberstleutnant and the Luftwaffe captain with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, extended their arms in the locked-elbow, fingers-together, flat salute of the Third Reich. The Oberstleutnant and the Hauptmann rendered the old-fashioned hand salute.

The German national anthem was followed by those of Spain and Argentina. And most of the French Railway officials agreed that the Argentinean anthem, like the sun-god flag, was a bit overdone.

When the music was finished, the casket was carried back to the goods wagon and placed aboard, with the photographers recording the event for posterity. The Spanish personnel returned to their passenger car and boarded it, and it immediately moved back across the border.

The German military personnel, except the officers, reboarded the first-class car. The officers entered the railroad station, where refreshments had been laid out for them. Number 1218 then backed out of the station to the yard, where the first-class passenger car was detached for subsequent attachment to Number 1219 (Madrid-Barcelona-Paris), which was due at the border crossing at 1615. Number 1218 then returned to the place where it had originally stopped, and the word was given first to the Feldgendarmerie and then to the French Immigration et Douane and Sûreté Nationale personnel that they might now commence their routine immigration, customs, and security checks of Number 1218’s passengers.

A few minutes later, the Luftwaffe captain with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross came out of the station alone. He had with him not only his cognac snifter, but a bottle of cognac. He boarded the Wagons-Lits car.

At 1550, only twenty-five minutes behind schedule, the conductor signaled Number 1218’s engineer that he could proceed through No-Man’s-Land to Spanish customs. They were only five minutes behind the regular schedule. The ceremony had not taken as long as they had planned for. They probably wouldn’t have been late at all, perhaps even a few minutes early, had not the Sûreté Nationale grown suspicious of some travel documents and checked them out. They discovered four more Jews trying to reach Spain on forged travel documents and passports.

[FOUR]

So far as he could recall, el Coronel Alejandro Manuel Portez-Halle of the Office of Liaison of the Royal Army to the Foreign Ministry had never heard the name of el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón of the Argentinean Army, until three days before when this rather absurd business of the Germans sending a body home to Argentina came up.

This was both surprising and rather embarrassing—he had spent enough time in Argentina over the years to learn at least the names of the more important Argentinean officers. On the other hand, the Foreign Ministry seemed to know a great deal about el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón, including the fact that he was quite close to el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade. Portez-Halle had come to know Frade rather well when he’d been in Argentina. He’d even spent some time on Frade’s estancia, San Pedro y San Pablo, shooting partridge and wood pigeon. In the evenings, over cigars and surprisingly first-rate Argentinean brandy, they’d shared stories of their days as junior officers.