Death and Honor полностью

“This mine, too?”

Duarte nodded and smiled.

“Your grandfather used to say he made a lot of money breeding thoroughbreds for the family while his brother—your Granduncle Guillermo—lost even more betting on them.”

“Not only money,” Clete said. “My father told me he bet on a slow horse and lost the guesthouse across from the downtown racetrack.”

“Your grandfather bought it back, and your granduncle was banished to Mendoza. When your grandfather died, your father and Beatrice stopped racing altogether. Your father said there was enough of a gamble in just breeding and dealing in horses. You’re still pretty heavily invested in that. I was hoping you were going to become involved yourself. You know horses.”

When my grandfather died, Frade thought, his property, under the Napoleonic Code of Inheritance, was equally divided between his two children.

My father then bought out his sister’s share; that money became her dowry for when she married Humberto.

And now, when Beatrice and Humberto die, since Cousin Jorge went for a ride he shouldn’t have taken in a Storch at Stalingrad and there being no closer blood relative, everything will come to me.

Jesus Christ, what a screwed-up law!

Even my father thought so.

When he explained it to me, he used as an example a family with two children, a son and a daughter. The son takes off for Paris and spends his life chasing women, boozing it up, never even sending a postcard. The daughter spends her life caring for their parents, and can’t even get married.

Yet, when the parents die, the Napoleonic Code splits everything fifty-fifty.

“Instead of doing what El Colonel Martín suspects I’m doing, you mean?” Frade asked.

Duarte nodded.

“Let’s go find ourselves a clean stall in here and talk about that,” Frade said.

“I really believe, Humberto, that El Colonel Martín and I have reached an accommodation, ” Frade said, his arms crossed and leaning with his back against the wooden wall of an empty stall.

“How so?”

“This is my opinion, okay? Backed up by what’s happened, or hasn’t happened.”

“Understood.”

“I was sent down here—Martín has figured this out—to stop the Germans from replenishing their submarines from quote neutral unquote ships in the Río de la Plata. I’ve done that. The Reine de la Mer was sunk by an American submarine. Martín—and everybody else, including General Ramírez—knows that, and that I had something to do with it.

“Sinking the Reine de la Mer proved that we know what they were doing, know the identity of the ships that are violating Argentine neutrality, and are prepared to send submarines—or whatever else it takes—into the Río de la Plata to stop it. Argentineans, no matter how much they dislike Americans or love Der Führer, do not want naval battles in the Río de la Plata. Somebody high up in the government has told the Germans to do their submarine replenishment somewhere else. And that’s what they’re doing. They send supply U-boats from Europe and they rendezvous on the high seas.”

He waited a moment, and after Duarte nodded his understanding, went on: “I know—but they don’t know I know—that my aircraft mechanic, his name is Carlos Olivo, works for Martín. So Martín knows that every time our radar picks up something interesting, a ship we don’t know about, I get in the Lodestar and fly out over the muddy waters of the Río de la Plata and have a look at it. If it’s suspicious, Martín gets an ‘anonymous’ call. Martín knows where it comes from. I keep my people on the estancia, and Martín doesn’t come onto the estancia looking for them or the radar, or ask where I’ve been in the Lodestar.”

“You seem pretty sure of all this,” Duarte said.

“I am. Now, while I have no idea why President Roosevelt wants an airline down here—”

“Roosevelt? That’s where this idea comes from?”

Frade nodded. “There’s all sorts of possibilities, one being that he wants to stick it to Juan Trippe of Panagra, but I just don’t know. Anyway, it has nothing to do with what I’m doing for the OSS. I’ll see to that.