“When do we eat?” Frade asked.
“Half an hour, Don Cletus.”
“Which I will spend writing the after-action report for Colonel Graham.”
“Do you have to do that tonight?” Dorotea asked.
“Yeah, baby, I do.”
Sending the report was a three-stage process. First, Clete wrote it on a typewriter. Then he edited what he had written, using a pencil. Dorotea then took this and re typed it on the keyboard of the SIGABA device. This caused a strip of perforated paper, which now held the encrypted report, to stream out of the SIGABA. Siggie Stein, after making sure that the SIGABA device at Vint Hill Farms Station was ready to receive, fed the strip of paper to the Collins transceiver.
Not quite a minute later, Stein reported that the message had been received in Virginia.
Frade nodded. “Good. Now, let’s eat.”
Clete had the same uncomfortable feeling—one of intrusion—as he entered the master suite—now his—of Casa Montagna that he had felt the first time he had moved into his father’s bedroom in the big house on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
But now it was worse.
There had been nothing of his mother’s in the master suite at the estancia.
Here, before a mirrored dressing table, were vials of perfume, jars of cosmetics, a comb, and a hairbrush with blond hair still on it.
And that got worse.
He pulled open a drawer in a chest of drawers and found himself looking at underwear that had to be his mother’s.
He slammed the drawer closed.
Dorotea came out of the bathroom in a negligee.
“There’s a set of straight razors in there, and a mug of shaving soap,” she announced. “All dried out, of course, but I put water in it. That might make it usable. Who knows?”
Clete didn’t reply.
“It looks as if they expected to come back,” Dorotea said.
“Yeah.”
“I wonder what’s in here?” Dorotea said, pulled open a door, and gasped. “Oh, God! Clete, look at this!”
He went to the door and looked in.
There was a crib, and infant’s toys, and a table—he had no idea what they called it—where an infant could be washed and dried and have diapers changed. And shelves, with stacks of folded cotton diapers and a large can of Johnson’s baby powder.
“Jesus Christ!” he said, almost under his breath.
“I wondered what she was talking about,” Dorotea said.
“What who was talking about?”
“Mother Superior, when she said you were really coming home. That this house has really been expecting you, is prepared for you.”
He looked at her but said nothing.
“She should have said for us,” Dorotea said. “For us and our baby.”
She saw the look on his face.