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“I think one of the gentle mounts, please. I really would prefer to wait for a Valkyrie maiden to carry me to Valhalla than get there—after having come all this way—by breaking my neck falling off a horse here.”

He smiled shyly at Frade, and a hint of a smile crossed Frade’s lips.

[SIX]

The Embassy of the German Reich

Avenida Córdoba

Buenos Aires, Argentina

0845 13 August 1943

Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz had been told by Fräulein Hässell that the meeting had been called by Manfred Alois Graf von Lutzenberger. Lutzenberger was a small, very thin, slight, balding—he wore what was left of his hair plastered to his skull—fifty-three-year-old who served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the German Reich to the Republic of Argentina. But the moment Boltitz walked into the ambassador’s elegantly furnished office and saw “Commercial Attaché” Karl Cranz, he knew the meeting had been called by Cranz.

Boltitz, a tall, rather good-looking blond man of thirty-two, was the embassy’s naval attaché.

“I am so glad that you could find time in your busy schedule for us, Herr Kapitän zur See,” Cranz greeted him, smiling.

“Am I the last to arrive?”

“Rather obviously, wouldn’t you say?” a man’s voice asked just on the edge of nastily.

Boltitz turned toward the voice and saw Anton von Gradny-Sawz. A tall, almost handsome, somewhat overweight forty-five-year-old with a full head of luxuriant reddish-brown hair, von Gradny-Sawz was the embassy’s first secretary. Boltitz considered him the typical Austrian: charming to superiors, condescendingly arrogant to those lower on the ladder. Boltitz also privately thought of him as “Die Grosse Wienerwurst.”

“Mr. Ambassador,” Boltitz said, looking back at Lutzenberger, “I am truly sorry to be late. I didn’t know of the meeting until I came in, on time for my nine o’clock appointment with you.”

Lutzenberger smiled—barely—but said nothing directly in reply.

“This meeting has been called at the request of our commercial attaché,” von Lutzenberger said, and gestured toward Cranz.

“This is going to be one of those meetings that never happened,” Cranz said with a smile.

This got the expected and dutiful polite laughter.

“Everyone is, of course, aware that our distinguished co-worker, Foreign Service Officer Grade 15 Wilhelm Frogger, and the charming Frau Frogger are among the missing,” Cranz began. “There are a number of theories about this, to which we will turn in a moment, but before that, I’m afraid that I must inform you that we must add Obersturmführer Wilhelm Heitz and five of his fine men to the list of the missing.”

“What happened to them?” von Gradny-Sawz asked in great surprise.

“The good news is they were

not guarding those things placed into their hands when they went missing, and that those things are, as of—as of when, Raschner?”

“Oh eight fifteen, Mein Herr,” Erich Raschner, a short, squat, phlegmatic Hessian, replied.

Boltitz thought that Raschner, at forty-five, was the second-oldest and second-most-dangerous man in the room—second in longevity to Ambassador von Lutzenberger and second in capacity for ruthless cruelty and cold-blooded murder only to Cranz.

And between those two, it’s almost a tie.

“The special shipment was safe as of quarter past eight this morning,” Cranz continued.

“I don’t understand,” von Gradny-Sawz said.

“That’s the purpose of this meeting, Anton,” Cranz said softly. “To, as well as I am able to do so, make you understand. May I continue?”

Von Gradny-Sawz flushed but didn’t reply.

“This situation involves our good friend Oberst Juan Domingo Perón,” Cranz went on. “To whom I went to see if he could be of some help in locating Herr and Frau Frogger for us.