"I took it for three years at CCNY, but most of what I have I picked up in Spanish Harlem. My father had a dry-cleaning store on 119th Street. Your Spanish is pretty good, too."
"I got mine from a Mexican lady who kept house for us in Midland, Texas," Clete said.
"Surprising. You could pass for an Argentine," Leibermann said. "Anyway, I got a form letter telling me I was being considered for a foreign assignment. I figured that would happen the next time it snowed in Miami on the Fourth of July, and didn't pay any attention to it."
"I don't understand," Clete confessed.
"Quote, legal Attach‚, unquote, jobs in places like Buenos Aires usually went-still do-to nice young WASPs from Princeton, nice Mormon boys from Brigham Young, and once in a while, maybe even an Irisher from Notre Dame, but almost never to Jewish accountants from CCNY."
"You're here," Clete argued.
"The SAC here... You know what I mean?"
Clete shook his head, "no."
"The Special Agent in Charge. The Argentines caught him doing some-thing he shouldn't have been doing and persona non grata-ed him. Their BIS... You know what that means, of course?"
Clete nodded.
"... is pretty good," Leibermann went on. "OK, so they made the ASAC, which means Assistant Special Agent in Charge, the SAC. He fired off a cable saying he absolutely had to have a Spanish-speaking ASAC as of yesterday. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, guess who they send down here as ASAC?"
"Leibermann, Milton," Clete said, chuckling.
"Right. I was here two weeks when guess who else got himself persona non grata-ed?"
"The SAC?" Clete said, chuckling again.
"And to make it three in a row, can you guess who they made, temporarily, the new SAC?"
"His last name begins with L?"
"Right. I figured that would last for as long as it would take to get a real SAC on the Panagra flight out of Miami, but that didn't happen. I don't know why. Nobody ever came down to replace me, and about six months ago, about the time you came down here the first time, they made the appointment offi-cial."
"Maybe somebody decided you're doing a good job," Clete said.
"I try. I figure that the FBI is supposed to be down here developing infor-mation, not, for example, blowing up boats and things like that."
"People blow up ships down here, do they?"
"So the story goes. A lot of people-Colonel Mart¡n of the BIS, for exam-ple-think that the OSS is down here to do things like that... things that vio-late Argentine neutrality."
"I've met el Teniente Coronel Martin," Clete said. "He has a suspicious na-ture."
"He's a nice fellow," Leibermann said. "We have an understanding. I make sure the FBI doesn't go around trying to blow ships up, and we tell each other things. Like, he called me the night you shot the, quote, burglars, unquote, in your house on Libertador."
"That was nice of him."
"And when somebody blew up that Portuguese ship-what was it called?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Clete said.
"The Reine de la Mer" Leibermann said. "It was called the Reine de la Mer I called him and gave him my word I had no idea that was going to happen."
"Why should you?"
"Right. I shouldn't. I didn't. And if anything like that happens again, I don't want to know about that either."
"That shouldn't be any problem for either of us," Clete said.