“El Coronel would be very embarrassed to remember himself as he is now, mi Teniente. It would be a kindness if he were not reminded of it.”
“OK.”
“Gracias, mi Teniente.”
“What was the occasion today?”
“You were, mi Teniente,” Enrico said. “Con permiso, mi Teniente?”
Clete nodded.
Enrico bent over the inert body of el Coronel, wrapped his arms around him, and with a heave and a grunt hoisted him to his feet. Then, with an ease that showed he had done this sort of thing before, he stooped and allowed Frade’s body to fall over his shoulder. Then, grunting again, he stood erect. He was now carrying Clete’s father in the “Fireman’s Carry.”
He carried him to the elevator. Señora Pellano entered with him, and the door slid closed.
Powerful man, Clete thought. My father is a large man, and he was really out. Took a lot of muscle to carry him that way.
And since he was really out, what does that mean?
Enrico said, and I don’t think he was lying, that he doesn’t often pass out drunk.
So what does that do to your theory that he was pretending to drink so that you would get drunk and start running off at the mouth?
Christ, I don’t know what to think!
X
[ONE]
Calle Agüero
Barrio Norte
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1515 28 November 1942
David G. Ettinger was sure he had the right number, but he checked again, taking from the breast pocket of his seersucker suit the slip of paper with “Ernst Klausner, calle Agüero 1585” written on it. He crossed the cobblestones of calle Agüero and stopped before Number 1585. The house number looked European—blue numbers on a white background, a porcelain medallion mounted to a brass plate.
T
he houses along both sides of the street were built up to the wide concrete sidewalks. Every twenty yards or so the thick trunks of elm trees pierced the sidewalk, their branches almost touching, shading the street and the sidewalks. The exterior walls of Number 1585 were of exposed aggregate concrete, and the windows had roll-down shutters in place, possibly because of the afternoon sun, or maybe because no one was at home.
The whole neighborhood looks European. Buenos Aires looks European. This could be a street in Madrid; for that matter in Berlin—say Tegel, or Wilhelmsdorf. In Berlin, the walls would be of concrete, carefully smoothed and marked to suggest stone blocks, but that’s the only real difference.
Except in Germany, a Jew would live in a Jewish neighborhood.
This neighborhood had no national flavor. He’d ridden several times on his bus rides through a section of town that could have been a suburb of London, and was in fact where many British lived. Pelosi had told him he had found an Italian section. Presumably there would be other neighborhoods with some kind of national identity, but this wasn’t one of them. This section of town looked—Argentinean.
First without realizing he was doing so, and then quite intentionally, he had looked for some outward sign—a kosher butcher shop, something like that—which would announce, “Here Live the Jews.” He’d seen signs for kosher meats two or three times, but not today, and not in this neighborhood.
And realized, The six pointed Jewish stars on the butcher shops here, as in the United States, are printed in gold, to attract the business of those who keep a kosher kitchen. This isn’t like Germany, where they are painted crudely in white on the plate glass, in compliance with provisions of the Racial Purity Act of 1933, to warn innocent Aryans they are about to risk contamination by entering the business premises of a Gottverdammte Jude.
Ettinger realized that he was feeling very powerful emotions now. There were probably several thousand people named Ernst Klausner in Germany…or there once were. But he had a strange feeling that this was the Ernst Klausner he knew. Ernst Klausner, of Heinrich Klausner und Sohn, G.m.b.H. The firm had been wholesale paper merchants, with their headquarters in Berlin, and branches all over Germany. They had lived in a villa in Berlin-Lichterfelde.
Ettinger walked up three shallow steps to the door of Agüero 1585, found the doorbell, and pressed it. He could not hear a sound from inside, and had just about decided that no one was home, when the door opened. A girl of about twelve or thirteen, her blond hair—Inge Klausner had been blond!—done up in rolled braids. She smiled a bit nervously and asked, “¿Señor?”
“Guten Tag, Fräulein,” Ettinger began, and saw relief in the girl’s eyes that she did not have to cope with Spanish. “My name is Ettinger. Is your mother or father at home?”