“That’s very gracious, but unnecessary, Sir.”
“It would be my pleasure.”
And, Portez-Halle had a sudden pleasant inspiration, I will send a letter with you to Jorge Guillermo Frade. You will meet him, of course; but he would be likely to dismiss you as unimportant. I will write dear old Jorge that our mutual friend el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón considers von Wachtstein to be a charming young officer—and I agree—and that he was chosen to accompany the remains both because of his distinguished war record and because his father is a major general.
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Frade will like that. And it will let him know that I did my best to pay our most sincere respects to the late Captain Duarte—both personally and as the special representative of El Caudillo.
“Well then, Sir, thank you very much.”
VI
[ONE]
The Office of the Ambassador
The Embassy of the German Reich
Avenida Córdoba
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1615 7 November 1942
Ambassador von Lutzenberger would have been hard-pressed to decide which of the two men now standing before his desk he disliked more. One of them at a time was pressing enough, and the two of them together would almost certainly ruin his dinner.
Anton von Gradny-Sawz, First Secretary of the Embassy of the German Reich to the Republic of Argentina, was a tall, almost handsome, somewhat overweight forty-five-year-old with a full head of luxuriant reddish-brown hair. He was sure he owed this to his Hungarian heritage. As he sometimes put it, flashing one of his charming smiles, he was a German with roots in Hungary who happened to be born in Ostmark—as Austria was called after it was absorbed into Germany after the Anschluss of 1938. He would often add that a Gradny-Sawz had been nervously treading the marble-floored corridors of one embassy or another for almost two hundred years.
Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, the Military Attaché, was a tall, ascetic-looking man who appeared older than his thirty-nine years…and who loathed Gradny-Sawz both personally and professionally. Die grosse Wienerwurst (the Big Vienna Sausage), as he and von Lutzenberger both thought of him, not only had an exaggerated opinion of his own professional skill and importance but also tended to interfere with Oberst Grüner’s sub rosa function in the Embassy as the representative of the Abwehr—the Intelligence Department of the German Armed Forces High Command.
His Excellency, Manfred Alois Graf von Lutzenberger, Ambassador of the German Reich to the Republic of Argentina, was a slight, very thin, fifty-three-year-old who wore what was left of his thinning hair plastered across his skull. Von Lutzenbergers, he often thought when he had to deal with Gradny-Sawz, had been treading without nervousness the marble-floored corridors of one embassy or another since 1660, when Friedrich Graf von Lutzenberger had arranged Prussia’s full independence from Polish suzerainty for Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector. That was nearly three hundred years ago. When, in other words, Gradny-Sawz’s ancestors in Hungary were just learning how to ride horses using saddles, and Grüner’s antecedents were sleeping with their milch cows in some stone-and-thatch cottage in a remote meadow in the Bavarian Alps.
“Your Excellency, there has been a cable from the Foreign Ministry vis-à-vis the Duarte remains,” Gradny-Sawz began. “I thought Oberst Grüner should be brought into this as soon as possible.”
“That’s the Argentinean boy who was killed at Stalingrad?” von Lutzenberger asked.
“Yes. His remains are to be placed aboard the General Belgrano of the Líneas Marítimos de Argentina y Europa at Lisbon. They are being accompanied by a Hauptmann von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe. The Belgrano is scheduled to sail from Lisbon for Buenos Aires at 0700, Lisbon time, November 8.”
“Have you a first name on von Wachtstein?”
“I have it here somewhere,” Gradny-Sawz said, and began to search in his pockets for a notebook.
“I don’t have his first name at hand, Sir,” Grüner said. “But he is the son of Generalmajor Graf von Wachtstein.”
“How did you come by that information?”
“In a cable informing me that he is being assigned to me as my Deputy for Air,” Grüner said.
“Hans-Peter are his Christian names, Your Excellency,” Gradny-Sawz announced, reading from his leather-bound notebook. “He has been awarded, personally, from the hands of the Führer, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.”
“How interesting,” the ambassador said. “I’m sure there is a reason why it was impossible to consult with me—or, for that matter, you, Grüner—before this gentleman was assigned to us.”
Both Grüner and Gradny-Sawz smiled uneasily, but said nothing. Ambassador von Lutzenberger frequently complained that the Foreign Ministry did not consult with him as often as was necessary.
Well, they swallowed that whole, von Lutzenberger thought, a trifle smugly. I asked who von Wachtstein was; when told, I was annoyed that no one informed me about his assignment here. Therefore, they don’t have any idea that his father and I are connected.
“There is a question of protocol, Your Excellency, that I thought you should resolve,” Gradny-Sawz said.