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“Yes, sir,” Ashton said, and did so.

Okay, now what?

I guess I’d better tell him everything. I don’t see any other option.

“As to what we are doing here,” Clete began, “shortly before the German surrender, when General Reinhard Gehlen, who ran Abwehr Ost, realized that defeat was inevitable . . .”

—

Telling that story took just over half an hour, during which Perón asked a number of pertinent questions. They reminded Clete that while Juan Domingo Perón was a three-star asshole, he didn’t get to be a colonel, much less simultaneously vice president, secretary of War, and secretary of Labor and Welfare of the Argentine Republic, by being stupid.

“I have always regarded the Bolsheviks as a monstrous danger to Christian society,” Perón announced. “It was for that reason that I supported National Socialism, even after I learned of the horrible things the Nazis were doing.”

Well, here comes the bullshit.

What did I expect?

“And I’m proud, deeply proud, that my god

son, the son of the best friend I have ever had, is fighting this menace. What I can’t understand—what hurts me deeply—is why I have been kept in the dark about this.”

“You think you can handle the answer, Tío Juan, if I tell you why?”

“I would be grateful if you would.”

“No one trusts you. Not only is there good reason for people—your brother officers—to believe that you are getting rich getting Nazis out of Germany to escape getting hung, but your personal life—specifically your sex life—including your refusal to get rid of that pervert Nulder—does not tend to make people think well of you.”

Clete expected an explosion—What the hell, get it over with—but it didn’t come.

“As far as profiting,” Perón replied calmly, “if you wish to call it that, from the current problems senior members of the former German Reich are experiencing is concerned—guilty as charged. But there are two reasons, one of which I’m more than a little ashamed of. That is, my personal finances. I have been a poor man all of my life.”

He patted the quilted robe.

“I’ve never been able to say, ‘I’ll take all you have.’ I’ve never been able to take a two-minute look at an automobile on the Kurfürstendamm and then tell them to ship it to Argentina, the way your father did with his beloved Horch.

“But getting personally rich from the Nazis, as you put it, was not my motive when I decided to part them from their money. That came later. When this started, and it started in 1942, not six months ago, my intention was to accumulate the funds to enter politics. You cannot seek public office without access to vast sums of money. Which I did not have. When I realized it was my fate to lead Argentina, indeed, South America, in the postwar years . . .”

Does he expect me to believe this horseshit?

Does he believe it himself?

I’ll be goddamned if I know.

“. . . I knew I would need a fortune and I went after getting one in the only way I knew how. And is it so terrible to turn dirty money toward a good purpose?

“I confess—and it is shaming—that I have diverted some of these funds, a very small percentage of the total, to my own use. I am not a perfect man.

“And as far as Rudy Nulder is concerned: Politics is a dirty business, Cletus, perhaps especially in Argentina. Sometimes—for good reasons—unpleasant things have to be done. I needed—I need—someone to do them for me. Nulder fills that role. I’m not proud of that, either, but that’s the way things are.

“Now, as far as my personal life is concerned, my sex life, as you put it, I’ve never been married. I knew if I was to rise in the army, I could not afford a wife and a family. It’s been a lonely life, Cletus.”

Which you dealt with by taking thirteen-year-old girls into your bed.

“I’m not proud of some of the things I did to satisfy the natural lusts of a healthy man. But that’s all in the past. I now have Evita.”

“A hooker half your age!” Clete exploded. “Jesus Christ, how do you justify that?”

“They said the same thing about Wallis Warfield Simpson. They said that she was a woman of questionable morals, and very possibly she was. Nevertheless—”