Death and Honor

GETS DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS.

I shall have to keep in mind that Señor Frade has a very large ego.

Then Boltitz took a closer look at a large oil portrait. It showed a blond woman holding an infant in her arms.

What next? A statue? Maybe a painted ceiling, like the Sistine Chapel? Showing him being taken bodily into heaven?

Wait a minute . . .

That’s not Señora Frade. At least not the one in here now.

My God, that’s Frade’s mother! He’s the babe in arms.

Which means—why the hell didn’t I figure this out sooner?—this is not his study.

This is—was—Oberst Frade’s study. His father made this—this what? shrine?— to his son!

“That’ll do it. Thank you very much,” Frade said, and the maids quickly left the room. Frade got very quickly out of his chair, went to the door, and threw a dead-bolt lock. Then he went back behind his desk.

“Okay, Peter,” he said, not at all pleasantly. “Take it from the top.”

“Excuse me?”

“From the beginning,” Frade clarified.

“I don’t know where . . .” von Wachtstein said.

“Perhaps, Major Frade, I might be able . . .”

“Okay. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, Captain,” Frade said.

Boltitz nodded. “I went to Major von Wachtstein’s apartment two days ago—”

“That would be the twentieth?” Frade interrupted.

“Correct,” Boltitz said. “I had determined that Major von Wachtstein had informed someone—I surmised, correctly, I was to learn, that he informed you, Major Frade—of the time and place where the Océano Pacífico would attempt to land certain matériel near Puerto Magdalena on Samborombón Bay.”

Frade’s face remained expressionless. His wife’s eyes showed concern, even pain.

“As you know, when the Océano Pacífico’s longboats came ashore, they were brought under fire, which resulted in the deaths of two senior German officers, Standartenführer Goltz of the SS and Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, the military attaché of the German embassy here.”

Again there was no expression on Frade’s face. His wife’s face was now pale.

“I thought you were going to tell me why you went to Wachtstein’s apartment, ” Frade said evenly.

“It was a matter of honor among officers,” Boltitz said.

“Honor among officers?” Frade asked. There was a faint but unmistakable tone of incredulity in his voice.

“Certainly, as an officer, the son of an officer . . .”

“I’m supposed to understand, is that what you’re suggesting?” Frade said.

“Yes, sir. It is.”

Frade shook his head in disbelief.

“Go on, Captain,” he said.

“Clete,” von Wachtstein said, “what he did, what he came to offer, was what he thought was an honorable solution to the problem.”

Frade looked sharply at him but said nothing for a moment.

Then, his voice dripping with sarcasm, he said, “Let me guess. He was going to confront you with your sins against your officer’s honor, and then leave you alone in a room with a pistol and one cartridge, right? So you could put a bullet up your nose, then get on a white horse, and ride off to Valhalla?”

“I had hoped you would understand,” Boltitz said.

“It wasn’t a pistol the korvettenkapitän offered, Clete,” von Wachtstein said. “My suicide would have implicated my father. He would have been sent to a concentration camp, if not hung with piano wire from a butcher’s hook.”

“So what did he offer?” Frade asked.

“I was to crash on landing when I came back from Montevideo,” von Wachtstein said.

Frade looked at Boltitz.

“And if he flew into the ground, you were going to keep your mouth shut about your suspicions about him?” he asked.

Boltitz nodded.

“So why aren’t we scraping you off the runway at El Palomar, Peter?”

“Clete!” Dorotea Frade said, either in shock or as warning.

“I reported the korvettenkapitän’s visit to Ambassador Lutzenberger,” von Wachtstein said.

“How much had you told Lutzenberger about what you thought Wachtstein had done?” Frade asked Boltitz. “Before you went to his apartment, I mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“I considered it possible that the ambassador was—”

“The traitor the Sicherheitsdienst was looking for?” Frade interrupted.

Well, Boltitz thought, he knows enough about his enemy to make that distinction. Most people would have simply said “SS,” thinking there was no difference between the SS and the SD; that all in the SS were Secret Police.