The Honor of Spies

That's the first time he's called me by my first name.

Does that mean he's starting to like me?

Or just a slip of the tongue?

"What all of us in this room are doing is trying to prevent a civil war," Nervo said. "None of us wants what happened in Spain to happen here. Brother killed brother. A half-million people died. Her cities lie in ruins. The Communists took the national treasury to Russia to protect it--then kept it. Priests were shot in the street. Nuns raped. Need I go on?"

"No, sir. I'm aware of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War."

Nervo nodded, then went on: "The reason I looked away when your father--and of course Edmundo--were setting up Operation Blue was that I knew your father would not permit that to happen here. With him in the Casa Rosada and Ramirez as minister of war, there would be no civil war. Nor would Argentina become involved in the war itself. At the time, I thought the war was not Argentina's business.

"Things changed, of course, when your father was assassinated. I assumed that General Ramirez would step into your father's shoes and become president. That didn't happen. Ramirez decided that as minister of war he could keep a tighter grip on things--I'm talking about the armed forces, of course--than he could from the Casa Rosada. He put General Rawson into the Casa Rosada. I now believe that was the right decision.

"What I should have seen and didn't--Martin did; Wattersly did; others did; I didn't--was that as it becomes apparent to the German leadership that they have lost the war, they are becoming increasingly desperate. Desperate is the wrong word. Irrational? Insane? Insane. That's the word.

"I should have seen that when they tried to assassinate you. The first time. Trying to assassinate the son of the man who was about to become president of the nation was insanity! And I certainly should have seen it when they assassinated your father. But I didn't.

"It was only when el Coronel Martin brought to me proof of Operation Phoenix and then this other unbelievable operation of ransoming Jews out of concentration camps that my eyes were really opened.

"Do they really believe the Americans are going to stand idly by while Hitler and Himmler and the rest of the Nazis--thousands of them--thumb their noses at them from their refuge in neutral Argentina?

"What the Americans would do is sail a half-dozen battleships up the River Plate and tell us to hand over the bastards. At which point proud and patriotic Argentines would set out to do battle with our pathetic little fleet of old de stroyers! I don't want the Edificio Libertador taken down by sixteen-inch naval cannon.

"Unfortunately, this is life, not a movie. A bugle is not going to sound and the cavalry will not charge across the pampas to set everything right overnight.

"I would estimate that from sixty to seventy percent of the officer corps of the army think all those stories about concentration camps and the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in them are propaganda in the newspapers, which are all controlled by Jews. They believe it is only a matter of time before the godless Communists are driven back into Russia, and the American and British are driven out of Italy and North Africa by the Germans, who have secret weapons they will unleash on the forces of the Antichrist, if not tomorrow, then next week."

He stopped.

"Sorry, I got a little carried away." He passed his whisky glass to La Valle. "May I have some more of Don Cletus's scotch, please, La Valle?"

"You're doing fine, General," Clete said.

"Hear, hear," Wattersly said.

Nervo didn't reply. He just looked between Frade, Martin, and Wattersly as he took several deep swallows from a whisky glass that La Valle had handed him so quickly that Clete decided La Valle must have had it waiting.

Finally, Nervo took a last sip, signaled La Valle for another, and went on, his voice now very calm.

"Within the officer corps of the Armada Argentina, I would estimate twenty- or twenty-five percent are German sympathizers. What that translates to mean, come the civil war, is that the navy--after the Nazis are hung, or forced to walk the plank, or simply shot--will be firmly in the hands of the pro-British forces, which means they will be able to bring the Casa Rosada, the Retiro train station, and Plaza San Martin under naval gunfire.

"At those locations, proud and patriotic soldiers--after standing the anti-Germans in the officer corps against a wall and shooting them for treason--will engage the Armada Argentina with field artillery.

"I'm not sure if you know this, Cletus, but everybody else in your library knows that this has happened before in the history of the Argentine Republic. I don't intend to let it happen again," Nervo said softly, then took another sip of his fresh drink.

"None of us do," Martin said.