Page 238

Didn’t know that before, did you, my friend?

Why the hell didn’t I think of that until just now?

Goebbels is absolutely right: The bigger the lie, the more people who’ll believe it.

[FOUR]

Casa Montagna

Estancia Don Guillermo

Km 40.4, Provincial Route 60

Mendoza Province, Argentina

1300 7 October 1943

Don Cletus Frade, who with his wife was sitting on the verandah of Casa Montagna sipping wine as they watched the fifth chukker of the game between the Ramapo Valley Aces and the Mountain Húsares, did not pay much attention to the dark green 1939 Ford Tudor when it first appeared.

For one thing, the appearance of Gendarmería vehicles—he had come to think of their color as “Gendarmería Green”—was routine, and for another, it was a good match. A dozen new mallets, two dozen new wooden polo balls, and a supply of red-and-blue polo shirts—real polo shirts, with the players’ position numbers on their chests and backs—had arrived on a training flight of an SAA Lodestar, and there were now four players properly identified on each side.

And everybody on the field knew how to play the game. Captain Sawyer had once told Major Frade, with pride, that he’d been rated as a four-goal player. Captain Sawyer was by no means the best player on the field today.

Frade didn’t even pay much attention to the Ford until it drove up to the verandah. There was a sort of motor pool beside one of the outbuildings, and he expected the Ford would go there. And then the driver of the Ford jumped out, ran around the front of the car, and opened the rear door. Two men in civilian clothing got out. One was Inspector General Santiago Nervo of the Gendarmería and the other was el Coronel Alejandro Bernardo Martín of the Bureau of Internal Security.

Both officers walked directly to Doña Dorotea and kissed her, and then—Nervo first—turned to Don Cletus, who stood up and then asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Our duty, Major,” Nervo said as he wrapped his arm around Frade’s shoulders. “I hope we’re not too late for lunch.”

“How the hell did you get here?”

El Coronel Martín first embraced Frade, then answered the question.

“With the polo mallets,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“We were on hand to meet the Ciudad de Buenos Aires when it returned from Lisbon,” Martín said. “I asked your chief pilot, Gonzalo Delgano, if there was any way at all he could think of to get us to San Martín de los Andes in a hurry, and he was kind enough to say he would look into it . . .”

“That was nice of him,” Clete said dryly.

“. . . and he asked a few questions, and learned that a training flight was scheduled for one of your Lodestars; that, among other things, it was dropping off polo mallets and some other equipment for you at Mendoza; and he could see no reason why it couldn’t drop us off at San Martín on the way back.”

“Why not?” Clete said. “SAA always tries to cooperate with the BIS.”

“So Capitán Delgano . . .”

“I thought he was a major,” Clete said.

Nervo chuckled.

“He was a major,” Martín said. “Now he’s retired.”

“Oh,” Clete said. “I didn’t know that.”

Nervo, smiling, shook his head.

“So he not only arranged for us to go along with the Polo Mallets Training Flight—until just now, when we drove in, I wondered about those mallets—but flew the plane himself.”