Don't try to see Peter tonight, obviously.
Shit.
But then the doorbells caught his eye. The doorbell system was mounted on a marble pillar outside the lobby-Clete had never seen anything like it any-where but in Buenos Aires. There were buttons for each apartment, and an in-tercom. You pushed the proper apartment number, identified yourself, and if the person called wanted to let you in, he pushed a button operating the solenoid-controlled lock on the plate-glass door leading into the lobby.
The question is, Clete decided, can Sleepy in the lobby see who's pushing the bells if he wakes up? He looked. He can, if he wakes up. But even if he does, he won't know what button I've pushed. I can at least talk to Peter, if not go up to his apartment. Tell him to call me, or something.
He parked the Ford around the corner and walked back to the apartment building. The doorman was still asleep.
It took three long pushes at button number 10 before there was an annoyed, even angry, "Hola?"
"Clete."
There was just a moment's hesitation.
"Go around the corner, to your right," Peter's metallic-sounding voice said.
Clete turned from the doorbell system on the marble pillar and walked away. The doorman was still asleep. To the right was in the opposite direction from where he had parked the Ford.
He turned on his heel, went to the Ford, and started driving around the block. No pedestrians were on the sidewalk, and so far as he could tell, no one was sitting in any of the automobiles parked along the curb on Avenida Pueyrred¢n. On his second pass past the apartment building, he saw Peter walk-ing quickly toward the corner.
He drove by him, flicked his headlights, and pulled to the curb. Peter jumped in the front seat, and Clete drove off.
"See if anyone's following," Peter ordered.
There were no headlights in the rearview mirror.
"Nobody," Clete said. "Where should we go?"
"There's a bar on Libertador that's usually crowded this time of night," Pe-ter said. "Just past the American Ambassador's residence, by the railroad bridge. It's called 'The Horse.'"
"How are you, my friend?" Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe said to Major Cletus Howell Frade of the U.S. Marine Corps.
"How do you think?" Clete replied, raising his glass of Johnny Walker to touch Peter's.
They were sitting at a small table on a balcony overlooking the ground-floor bar and restaurant of The Horse. When they started up the balcony stairs, they got an odd look from the waiter, who could not understand why two young men would go to the nearly deserted balcony when at least a half-dozen attrac-tive, and unattached, women were sitting at the bar.
The two had met the previous December. When Clete first came to Argentina, his father turned the Guest House over to him-"Uncle Willy's House" across from the racetrack on Avenida del Libertador. After a trip to Uruguay, where he had acquired explosives to blow up the Reine de la Mer-never used, as it turned out-Clete returned to the house to find Peter sitting in the sitting room, sipping his fourth glass of cognac as he listened to Beethoven's Third Sym-phony on the phonograph.
Either because she didn't know that Clete was staying in the house, or be-cause she was so detached from reality that she did not consider that a Luft-waffe officer and a U.S. Marine Corps officer were officially enemies, Beatrice Frade de Duarte had ordered von Wachtstein to be put up in the guest house.
It was then well after midnight, and there was nothing the two young offi-cers could do but declare that a temporary truce existed between them. They sealed the truce with a glass of cognac, and then another. And several more.
And then it became apparent that they really had a great deal in common. Both were fighter pilots, which provided an immediate bond between them. Pe-ter had heard of the exploits of the greatly outnumbered Marine fighter pilots on Guadalcanal, and had an understandable fellow fighter pilot's professional ad-miration for someone who had been one of them. And Clete had heard of the fe-rocious valor of German fighter pilots defending Berlin from waves of B-17 bombers and had a fellow fighter pilot's professional admiration for someone who had been one of them.
By the time they staggered off to bed, they were friends.
But this truce ended very early the next morning when an Argentine officer, learning that the two enemies were under the same roof on Libertador, appeared to remove von Wachtstein from the difficult situation before one tried to kill the other.
Later, when von Wachtstein learned that it was Oberst Gainer's intention to "eliminate" Cletus Howell Frade-by then identified as an OSS agent-von Wachtstein, after a painful moral battle with himself, decided he could not stand silently by and watch it happen. He warned Clete that an attempt would be made on his life.
Clete, forewarned, was able to deal with the assassins when they came to the Libertador house. The equation, so far as Clete was concerned, was simple. He owed von Wachtstein his life, and told him so.
Shortly afterward, Peter received from his father the letter in which he told him that he was required by honor to join the small group of German officers who saw it as their duty to kill Adolf Hitler, and that he had done so. From the tone of the letter, it was clear that Generalleutnant von Wachtstein fully ex-pected to lose his life and was prepared for that.
Peter was not surprised. He had by then already smuggled into Argentina the equivalent of half a million dollars in Swiss francs, English pounds, United States dollars, and Swedish kroner. His father had given him this money to safeguard in Argentina until the war was over. When his father did this, he ex-plained that "a friend" in Argentina would not only help him invest the money, but would also receive more money from other sources to be safeguarded.
The friend turned out to be Ambassador Manfred Alois Graf von Lutzenberger. Soon after he was so identified, the Ambassador informed Peter that get-ting money to Argentina was only the beginning of the problems they faced. Protecting the money and investing it was very risky. All over Argentina there were Nazi sympathizers who would quickly report anything suspicious to Gr?ner and his operatives. In Nazi Germany, illegal foreign financial transactions were considered treason. The penalty for treason was the execution of the traitor, all members of his immediate family, and the confiscation of all lands and property of whatever kind.