But over the years, even that problem had been minimized by the payment of bonuses to ship's masters and crews for their special care of Howell Refined Products. It was impossible, of course, to keep a half-dozen cases of motor oil from falling over the side when a boat operated by one's wife's cousin showed up - to wave hello. But large-scale theft was really a thing of the past.
After the Refined Products were counted by a government inspector to make sure the government took its tax bite, they were unloaded into bonded warehouses, with a SMIPP representative watching. And when they were sold by SMIPP, it was on a Collect On Delivery basis at the bonded warehouses. A SMIPP representative was there to collect the check before he authorized release of the merchandise. Within twenty-four hours, SMIPP deposited a check to Howell USA's account at the Bank of Boston representing the total amount the wholesaler had paid, less taxes, stevedoring, SMIPP's commission, and the value of goods spoiled in transport.
Mallin generally succeeded in keeping the value of goods spoiled in transport (including goods actually damaged, say, when a cargo net ripped; goods "fallen" overboard; and bonuses paid to ship's crews) below one point five percent of net to Howell.
On reflection, Enrico could not imagine anything in his operation that could displease the old man.
So what is this all about? And why the grandson? He's nothing but a boy!
Mallin had met the grandson. In 1938. He was then a student in New Orleans, a tall, rather well-set-up young man who suffered from acne. The old man, Mallin recalled, doted on him. The boy's mother was dead, and the father had vanished when the boy was an infant (Mallin did not know the man's name).
If the boy was then what, seventeen, eighteen years old? what is he now? Twenty-one or twenty-two; twenty-three at most. If you are dissatisfied with someone, you don't send a twenty-odd-year-old to conduct an investigation.
Maybe that was why the other expert was coming. But if that was the case, why send the boy?
As a matter of courtesy to me? Highly unlikely. The old man is the antithesis of subtle.
Then the real reason flashed in his mind:
The war. The bloody damned war.' If the boy is twenty-odd, he's liable to be called up for service. Young men are killed in wars. Even Argentineans. And we're not even in this war. Humberto Valdez Duarte's boy was killed it was inLa Naci?n at Stalingrad, of all places.
The old man dotes on the boy. The mother is dead and the father a scoundrel. So the boy had been raised by the old man, and an aunt and uncle in Texas.
That's what this is all about. The old man doesn't want him killed in the war. So he's arranged to send him out of the country. He's a powerful man; he's arranged for him to be declared essential to Howell Petroleum. Sending him to Buenos Aires will keep him out of sight.
But who is the other fellow, Pelosi, coming with him?
We'll just have to wait and see.
He walked back to his desk, picked up a pen, and scrawled a note to his secretary, asking her (a) to please make reservations for an American gentleman, Se?or Pelosi, at either the Alvear Palace or the Plaza, for at least a week, starting November twenty-first (a small suite, to be billed to the SMIPP account); (b) to please remind him to inform his wife that they would be entertaining the young grandson of Cletus Marcus Howell for an indefinite period beginning November twenty-first; and (c) to please contact Schneider to ask if their meeting tomorrow could be rescheduled for later in the day; two-thirty or three, if possible, but no earlier than one-thirty.
[FIVE]
Aboard "The Ciudad de Rio de Janeiro"
(Pan American Airlines Flight 171)
1815 21 November 1942
One of the stewards (Clete Frade had serious doubts about his masculinity) came through the cabin, knelt in the aisle by each quartet of seats, and announced they were preparing to land in Buenos Aires. They should be on the groundor, titter, on the waterin about fifteen minutes.
In fact, Clete's aviator's seat-of-the-pants instincts had already told him they'd been letting down slowly for about fifteen minutes. He had noticed a slight change in the roar of the Martin 156's quadruple thousand-horsepower engines, and a just barely perceptible change in attitude. Without taking it out of Autopilot, the pilot had just touched the trim control, lowering the nose maybe half a degree.
Clete was slept out and bored, so he had been doing his own dead-reckoning navigation since they'd left Rio de Janeiro. He used his Marine Corps-issue Hamilton chronograph and several sheets of the notepaper engraved "In FlightPan American Airways." Pan American had provided the paperalong with a good deal elsefor the comfort of its passengers. He could only guess at the winds aloft, of course, but putting them at zero for his calculations, it was time to arrive in Buenos Aires.
He'd thought quite a bit about the watch, starting with the amusing notion that a diligent Marine Corps supply officer was almost certainly at this very moment trying to run down First Lieutenant Frade, USMCR, to make him either turn it back in or sign the appropriate form so the cost thereof could be deducted from his pay.
He got a strange feeling sitting in the softly upholstered seat of the Martin (every time they landedfirst at Caracas, Venezuela, and then at Belem and Rio de Janeiro in Brazilthe crisp linen head cloths of the seats were replaced, and the ashtrays emptied) computing time and distance with the same watch he'd used when he had to wonder if he had enough gas to bring his Grumman Wildcat back to Midway or Henderson. Same identical watch, except for the strap. He replaced the old, mold-soaked strap with a new leather band in New Orleans.
It occurred to him that in his new role as a spy/saboteur/secret agent, he probably should put the watch away and wear one more appropriate to an oil industry executive.
That man is obviously a secret agent. You can tell by his watch!
But he had a strange, strong emotional reluctance to take it off. In a sense, the Hamilton and the Half Wellington boots he was wearing were his last connection with VMF-229, with Henderson and Guadalcanal, with the Corps, with Francis Xavier Sullivan. It was a connection he didn't want to break.
From the beginning in the hotel room in Los Angeles, he'd had doubts about the whole OSS operation. These had not only not diminished, they had grown more defined. He found it difficult to believe that the United States of Americafaced with the problem that German submarines were being replenished by "neutral" freighters in Argentinacould not come up with a better solution than sending a fighter pilot, an immigrant electrical engineer, and a none-too-bright Italian boy from Chicago who was allegedly a demolitions expert to deal with it.
If General Frade had been in charge, he would have dispatched several Boeing B-17 bombers to Brazil with orders to bomb any suspicious-looking ship; and if the Argentineans didn't like it, fuck 'em. What were they going to do, declare war on the United States and bomb Miami? If the OSS knew about the ship, they would certainly know where it was. And it shouldn't be too hard to pass that information on to the bomber people.
On the other hand, it was also very true that the B-17s, the only aircraft Clete knew of with range enough to bomb Buenos Aires from a base in Brazil, weren't the invincible flying fortresses the Army Air Corps was advertising. B-17s had bravely gone out day after day from Midway and Henderson and Espiritu Santo to bomb Japanese ships; and so far as Clete knew, they hadn't been able to hit one of them.