Finally, they were through, just outside the cemetery’s main gate. Grüner made Peter recite, in detail, his role in the funeral of Hauptmann Duarte.
I expected this. Sound military practice. You tell someone what you’re going to teach him. You teach him what you want him to know. And then you make him tell you what he has just been taught.
“So, this is done,” Grüner said. “And what do you suppose we should do now?”
“I have no idea, Herr Oberst,” Peter replied.
“What do all soldiers, from private soldiers to Feldmarschalls, do when they have finished their assigned duties and there is no superior officer around?”
“Look for a woman?” Peter blurted.
Grüner chuckled. “Close, but I was thinking of finding a beer,” he said. “Fortunately, we are close to a place where we can do just that. And who knows, there just might be someone there who catches your eye.”
XV
[ONE]
Restaurant Bavaria
Recoleta Plaza
Buenos Aires
1905 17 December 1942
With Peter moving in step beside him, Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner marched across Recoleta Plaza to a restaurant. A brass sign mounted on the wall identified it as Restaurant Bavaria. Peter stepped ahead of Grüner and opened the plate-glass door.
A heavyset, barrel-bellied man in his fifties approached them the moment they were inside. He was wearing a stiffly starched shirt and a suit that looked too tight, and he was immaculately shaved, except for a Hitler-style mustache on his lip.
“Guten Tag, Herr Oberst,” he said, with a snap-of-his-neck bow. “What a great pleasure it is to see you.”
Grüner nodded somewhat imperiously.
“Herr Krantz,” he said, “I have told this young gentleman that the imitation schnapps in this pathetic copy of a gasthaus is sometimes drinkable.”
“I like to think it is decent.”
“This young gentleman is my new assistant, Hauptmann Freiherr von Wachtstein, of the Luftwaffe,” Grüner said, waited until Krantz had made his little bow, and then added, “holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.”
Krantz snapped his head again.
“A great honor, Sir,” he said.
It is apparently true, Peter thought. The Knight’s Cross and a Reichsmark will sometimes get you a glass of schnapps.
“Herr Krantz,” he said.
Peter looked around the restaurant. It not only had solid, Germanic-appearing furniture, but the walls were decorated with the crests of the German states and some of the larger cities, and with horned rehbock skulls and mounted boar heads. It looked truly German; it could have been in Munich or Frankfurt am Main or Berlin.
“Would the Herr Oberst and the Herr Freiherr prefer a table by the window, or…”
“One of the rooms upstairs, Krantz, overlooking the Recoleta, would be preferable,” Grüner said. “I have told the Freiherr that some of the prettiest women in Buenos Aires march past your windows at this hour. And we are going to have a little private chat.”
Krantz led them to
the rear of the restaurant and up a flight of stairs, then down a corridor and into a small room with windows overlooking the Recoleta.
“Would this be satisfactory to the Herr Oberst?”