Before then--before the Anschluss had incorporated Austria into the German Reich as Ostmark--von Gradny-Sawz had been in the Austrian Foreign Service. The ancestors he so proudly spoke of had served the Austro-Hungarian Empire for hundreds of years.
Having seen the handwriting on the wall before 1938, von Gradny-Sawz had become a devout Nazi, made some contribution to the Anschluss itself, and been taken into the Foreign Service of the German Reich.
Ambassador von Lutzenberger, who understood how sacred the canape-and-cocktails circuit was to the diplomatic corps, had arranged for von Gradny-Sawz's assignment as his first secretary. Von Gradny-Sawz could charm the diplomatic corps while he attended to business.
The secret reports on von Gradny-Sawz that Schneider gave to Gruner showed that the first secretary divided his off-duty time about equally between two different sets of friends. The largest group was of deposed titled Eastern European blue bloods, a surprising number of whom had made it to Argentina with not only their lives but most of their crown jewels. The second, smaller group consisted of young, long-legged Argentine beauties whom von Gradny-Sawz squired around town, either unaware or not caring that he looked more than a little ridiculous.
SS-Oberst Gruner was now gone, lying in what Schneider thought of as a hero's grave in Germany beside his deputy, SS-Standartenfuhrer Josef Luther Goltz. They had been laid to eternal rest with all the panoply the SS could muster, after they had given their lives for the Fuhrer and the Fatherland on the beach of Samborombon Bay while trying to secretly bring ashore a "special shipment" from a Spanish-registered ship in the service of the Reich.
Specifically, both had been shot in the head by parties unknown, although there was little doubt in anyone's mind that Cletus Frade of the American OSS had at least ordered the killings, and more than likely had pulled the trigger himself.
Schneider had gone first to Ambassador von Lutzenberger and then, when SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl Cranz had arrived in Buenos Aires to replace Gruner, to Cranz offering to personally eliminate Frade, even if this meant giving his own life to do so.
Both told him, in effect, that while his zeal to seek vengeance for the murders of Gruner and Goltz was commendable and in keeping with the highest traditions of SS honor, the situation unfortunately required that everyone wait until the time was right to eliminate Frade.
They told him the greatest contribution he could make to the Final Victory of the Fatherland was to continue what he was doing with regard to handling the classified files, the dispatch and receipt of the diplomatic pouches, and the decryption of the coded messages the embassy received from the Ministry of Communications after they had received them from the Mackay Cable Corporation.
Neither told him that was sort of a game everyone played. The Mackay Corporation was an American-owned enterprise. They pretended that they did not--either in Lisbon, Portugal, or Berne, Switzerland--make copies of all German traffic and pass them to either the OSS or the U.S. Embassy. And the Germans pretended not to suspect this was going on.
Important messages from or to Berlin were transmitted by "officer courier," which most often meant the pilot, copilot, or flight engineer on the Lufthansa Condor flights between the German and Argentine capitals.
And when these messages reached the Buenos Aires embassy, they were decoded personally by Ambassador von Lutzenberger or Commercial Attache Cranz, not Schneider. Schneider had no good reason--any reason at all--to know the content of the messages.
Cranz picked up the message and read it: Cranz looked at von Lutzenberger.
"You said Schneider had this waiting for you when you came in this morning?"
Von Lutzenberger nodded.
"A Condor arrived in the wee hours," he said. "Our Johann met it, and the courier gave him that."
"When did you start letting 'Our Johann' decode messages like this?"
"It came that way," von Lutzenberger said, and handed Cranz two envelopes. "The outer one is addressed to 'The Ambassador'; the inner one said 'Sole and Personal Attention of Ambassador von Lutzenberger.' "
"Interesting," Cranz said as he very carefully examined both envelopes.
"It could be that they were preparing to send it as a cable, and then for some reason decided to send it on the Condor," von Lutzenberger suggested.
Cranz considered that for a long moment.
"If a Condor was coming, that would keep it out of the hands of Mackay," Cranz said, and then wondered aloud, "Not encrypted?"
Von Lutzenberger shrugged.
"Maybe there wasn't time; the Condor may have been leaving right then. And that brings us to the question: 'What the hell is this all about?' "
"Questions," von Lutzenberger corrected him. " 'Who is this senior officer?' 'What is he going to do once he gets here?' And most important: 'What are we going to do about this?' "
Cranz nodded, signifying he agreed there was more than one question.
"Was there anybody interesting on the Condor?"
"Businessmen, two doctors for the German Hospital. No one interesting."
"Which means the Condor could have been held at Tempelhof."
"Unless that might have delayed the Condor a day, and they wanted to get this to us as soon as possible."
"Which brings us back to: 'What are we going to do about it?' " Cranz said.
"Unless you have some objection, or better suggestion, what I'm going to do is tell Schneider that he is to tell no one anything about the message for me. Then I'm going to call Gradny-Sawz in here as soon as he comes to work, show him this, and tell him that he is to tell no one about it, and that he is responsible for getting the identity card, the driver's license, et cetera, and the apartment."
"And not bring Boltitz and von Wachtstein in on this?"
"And not bring anyone else in on this, anyone else. Then, if it gets out, we will know from whom it came."
Cranz considered that for a long moment, then nodded.
"Raschner?" he asked.
"That's up to you, of course. But I can see no reason why he has to be told about this now."
After a moment, Cranz nodded again.
[FOUR].
Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade
Moron, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1545 30 August 1943
First Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, Corps of Engineers, AUS, who was an assistant military attache of the United States Embassy, stood outside the door of Base Operations and watched as a South American Airways Lodestar turned on final, dropped its landing gear, and touched smoothly down on the runway.
Pelosi was in uniform and could have posed for a U.S. Army recruiting poster. He wore "pinks and greens," as the Class "A" uniform of green tunic and pink trousers was known. The thick silver cord aiguillette of an attache hung from one of his epaulettes. His sharply creased trousers were "bloused" around his gleaming paratrooper boots.
Silver parachutist's wings were pinned to the tunic. Below the wings were his medals--not the striped ribbons ordinarily worn in lieu thereof. There were just three medals: the Silver Star, the National Defense Service Medal, and the medal signifying service in the American Theatre of Operations.
Pelosi was one of the very few officers--perhaps the only one--to have been awarded the nation's third-highest medal for valor in combat in the American Theatre of Operations. There was virtually no combat action in the American Theatre of Operations. The citation for the medal was rather vague. It said he had performed with valor above and beyond the call of duty at great risk to his life in a classified combat action against enemies of the United States, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself, the United States Army, the United States of America, and the State of Illinois.
He could not discuss--especially in Argentina--what he had done to earn the Silver Star.
Pelosi had earned the medal while flying in a Beechcraft Staggerwing aircraft piloted by then-First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR. What they had done--getting shot down in the process--was illuminate with flares a Spanish-registered merchant vessel then at anchor in Samborombon Bay.
Illuminating the ship, which was then in the process of replenishing the fuel and food supplies of a German submarine, had permitted the U.S. submarine Devil Fish to cause both the submarine and the ship to disappear in a spectacular series of explosions.
All of this naval activity--German, Spanish, and American--was in gross violation of the neutrality of the Republic of Argentina. Samborombon Bay, on the River Plate, was well within Argentine waters. After some lengthy consideration, the government of Argentina decided the wisest course of action was to pretend the engagement had never happened.
But of course the story had gotten out. The officers with whom Lieutenant Pelosi had shared an official lunch for military and naval attaches of the various embassies at the Officers' Casino at Campo de Mayo--the reason he was wearing his uniform--knew not only the story but also of Pelosi's role in it.
No one had mentioned it, of course, but it sort of hung in the air. Pelosi had been understandably invisible to the German naval attache, Kapitan zur See Boltitz; the German assistant military attache for air, Major Hans-Peter Baron von Wachtstein; and to their Japanese counterparts.
Peter von Wachtstein had managed to discreetly acknowledge Tony Pelosi while they were standing at adjacent urinals, and some Argentine officers--all naval officers but one--had been quite cordial, as had the Italian naval and military attaches. That, Tony reasoned, was probably because King Victor Emmanuel had bounced Il Duce and had the bastard locked up someplace.
South American Airways Lodestar tail number 007 was wanded into a parking spot beside almost a dozen of its identical brothers.
The rear door opened and Sergeant Major Enrico Rodriguez (Ret'd) came down the stairs, carrying his shotgun. When he saw Pelosi, he smiled.
"Don Cletus will be out in a minute," he announced. "I have to find a truck."
Pelosi asked with hand gestures if he could go into the aircraft. Enrico replied with a thumbs-up gesture, and as he walked away, Pelosi marched toward the aircraft and went inside.
The chief pilot of South American Airways, Gonzalo Delgano, and the managing director of the airline, Cletus Frade, were in the passenger compartment. Pelosi saw that all but two of the seats had been removed. There were two enormous aluminum boxes strapped in place.
Delgano was in uniform: The uniform prescribed for SAA captains was a woolen powder blue tunic with four gold stripes on the sleeves, darker blue trousers with a golden stripe down the seam, a white shirt with powder blue necktie, and a leather brimmed cap with a huge crown. On the tunic's breast were outsized golden wings, in the center of which, superimposed on the Argentine sunburst, were the letters SAA.
Chief Pilot Delgano, as was probably to be expected, had five golden stripes on his tunic sleeves and the band around his brimmed cap was of gold cloth.
The managing director of SAA, who was bent over one of the aluminum crates, was wearing khaki trousers, battered Western boots, and a fur-collared leather jacket that had once been the property of the United States Marine Corps.
Cletus Frade came out of the box holding a lobster by its tail. Pelosi decided the lobster had to weigh five pounds, maybe more.
"You're still alive, you great big ugly sonofabitch!" Frade proclaimed happily. "God rewards the virtuous. Remember that, Gonzo."
Delgano shook his head.
Frade spotted Pelosi.
"And, by God, we're safe! The 82nd Airborne is here!"
"Where'd you get the lobster?" Pelosi inquired.
"Santiago, Chile, from which Delgano and I have flown in three hours and thirteen minutes. At an average speed of approximately 228 miles per hour, while attaining an altitude of nearly 24,000 feet in the process. We had to go on oxygen over most of the Andes, and it was as cold as a witch's teat up there. But neither seems to have affected my friend here, despite the dire predictions of my chief pilot."
"I thought the cold and/or lack of oxygen would kill them," Delgano said.
"What are you going to do with it?" Pelosi asked.
"Well, at first I thought I'd organize a lobster race, but now I think I'll eat him. And at least some of his buddies in the tank. If you promise to behave, Tony, you are invited to a clambake this very evening at the museum. You may even bring your abused wife."
Tony knew that the museum was the Frade mansion--which indeed resembled, both internally and externally, a museum--on Avenida Coronel Diaz in Palermo.
"You've got clams?"
"Clams, oysters, and lobster. Santiago is a virtual paradise of seafood."
"Don Cletus thinks we can make money flying it in," Delgano explained.
"Trust me, Gonzo," Frade said. "And now curiosity is about to overwhelm me: What are you doing here, dressed up like some general's dog-robber?"
"Curiosity just overwhelmed me," Delgano said. " 'Dog-robber'?"
"Aides-de-camp, who must be shameless enough to snatch food from the mouths of starving dogs to feed their general, are known as dog-robbers," Frade explained.
Delgano shook his head.
Pelosi said: "I was at a reception for foreign attaches at Campo de Mayo. You had to go in uniform with medals."
"And was Major Baron von Wachtstein there, dazzling everybody with his Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross?"
Pelosi nodded.
"Good. That means he's in town and can come."
"So was el Coronel Peron."
"He can't."
"And there's a package for you."
"Yeah?"
"From Room 1012, National Institutes of Health Building, Washington, D.C. It was in the pouch. My boss said to get it to you, and to get a receipt."
The headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services was in the National Institutes of Health Building.
Pelosi's boss, the military attache of the U.S. Embassy, was not fond of either Pelosi or Frade. He had received a teletype message from the vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army directing him not to assign Lieutenant Pelosi any duties that could possibly interfere in any way with his other duties. The other duties were unspecified. The military attache knew that Pelosi was the OSS man in the embassy and worked for Cletus Frade.
"He didn't happen to open it before he gave it to you to give to me, did he?"
Pelosi shook his head.
"Where is it?"
"In my car."