Death and Honor

Without thinking of the circumstances of their coming to the estancia, von Wachtstein was showing off the flight characteristics of the Luftwaffe’s “ground cooperation” airplane and his own skill to Cletus Frade, himself a pilot.

He realized this when he was on the ground and taxiing the Storch to park it beside the three Piper Cubs.

That wasn’t too smart, he thought. But under the circumstances, I’m entitled to be a little crazy.

He considered that, then corrected himself: Crazy, but not careless.

The young blond woman slid off the enormous hood of the Horch, exposing more leg than she realized, and started walking toward the Storch.

On her heels came a large and burly middle-aged man with an enormous mustache. He was wearing a business suit that didn’t quite fit. He cradled a 12-gauge Remington Model 11 semiautomatic shotgun in his arms. Around his neck was a leather bandolier of brass-cased double-aught buckshot shells.

“Sergeant Major Enrico Rodríguez, Retired,” von Wachtstein said against the noise of the shutting-down Argus 10C engine. “Where Don Cletus is, Enrico can always be found. I think I should tell you Enrico’s not fond of Germans. He suspects, correctly, that people we hired wound up slitting his sister’s throat while they were trying to assassinate Don Cletus, and ambushed Don Cletus’s father, Oberst Frade, in that Horch. El Coronel died. The assassins thought Enrico was dead, too. He was full of buckshot, but he wasn’t dead.”

“Mein Gott!” Boltitz muttered.

Von Wachtstein waved at Doña Dorotea, loosened his seat belt, then started to unfasten the fold-down doors on the Storch.

Boltitz saw someone jump down from the fuselage door of the Lodestar and start to walk toward them. He was a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man wearing khaki trousers, cowboy boots, and a fur-collared leather zipper jacket.

That looks, Boltitz thought, like some kind of a flier’s jacket.

When the young man came closer, he saw that it was: Sewn to the breast was a gold-stamped identification badge. It carried the wings of a Naval Aviator and the legend C.H. FRADE, 1LT USMCR.

“Hola, Peter,” Señora Frade greeted him with a wave and a smile as he crawled out of the airplane. “An unexpected pleasure.”

“Dorotea, may I present Korvettenkapitän Boltitz?” von Wachtstein said. “Dorotea is my wife’s oldest friend.”

Boltitz clicked his heels and bowed.

“Enchanted,” he said in Spanish.

“What can we do for you, von Wachtstein?” Cletus Frade asked in Spanish. His hostile tone of voice made it clear that he was displeased as well as surprised to see the German.

The surprise was genuine. The hostility was feigned. It was difficult to dislike someone who had saved your life. More than that: Frade was both genuinely fond of von Wachtstein and admired him. Maybe even loved him.

Cletus H. Frade had given his relationship with Hans-Peter von Wachtstein a good deal of thought.

We’re pawns on this crazy chessboard, he had originally thought, and the people moving us around are perfectly willing to sacrifice either of us to advance their game.

He’d changed that original assessment slightly: Well, maybe not pawns, maybe knights. But certainly not bishops, who by definition are supposed to promote good works and practice decency and honesty.

They had met six months before, in December of 1942, as the result of what he had politely thought of at the time as an almost funny misunderstanding between his father and his aunt—his father’s sister, Beatrice Frade de Duarte— but what he now thought of, far less kindly, as a typical Argentine fuckup.

Two months before they met, both had been serving officers. Frade had been flying a Grumman F4F Wildcat of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211 off Fighter One on Guadalcanal, and von Wachtstein a Focke-Wulf 190 of Jagdstaffel 232 defending Berlin against what was becoming a daily bombardment by the Allied heavy bombers.

That had a lot to do with what happened, Cletus Frade had decided, perhaps immodestly. We’re both fighter pilots. Fighter pilots are special people. Only another fighter pilot knows what being a fighter pilot is all about. It has nothing to do with what side of the war you’re on.