Victory and Honor

Well, why the hell not?

You’re certainly entitled to a little revenge.

“And then Mother Superior told me a story about Nazis in Chile,” Stein said.

“Go over that again, Siggie?”

“Truth being stranger than fiction, we’ve become pretty close. She comes up here a couple of nights a week and we kill a couple of bottles of wine.”

“A couple of bottles of wine? In here?”

“Yeah, Colonel, a couple of bottles of wine. But not here in the bar; we go to the radio room. I moved in there . . .”

The radio room was a small apartment on the upper floor of the Big House.

Frade raised an eyebrow and said, “I didn’t know that you moved out of the BOQ.”

“I think the officers were glad when I did.”

“Polo included?”

Frade sipped his wine and thought, If he’s been looking down his commissioned officer’s nose at Stein, I’ll ream him a new asshole.

“No. Not Major Sawyer. When I moved out of the BOQ, he even asked me if I had a problem. I told him no, that I moved out because I wanted to.”

“Any Kraut officer in particular?”

“It’s not what you’re suggesting, Colonel. Nothing overt. They were just as uncomfortable as officers having me in there as I was at a sergeant being in the BOQ.”

Stein saw the angry look on Frade’s face.

“Let it go, Colonel, please,” he said.

“You were telling me about Mother Superior’s drinking problem,” Frade said.

Stein laughed. “Her problem is that she thinks it sets a bad example for the nuns if they see her having a couple of glasses of wine. So she’s been doing it alone in her room at the convent. Drinking alone is no fun.”

“The officers didn’t like drinking with you, either? Is that where you’re going, Siggie?”

“I didn’t like drinking with the officers, so I did most of my drinking in the radio room. Then, one time she came to see me and I was having a little sip. Nice polite Jewish boy that I am, I offered her one. She took it, then took another one. The next time she came to the radio room, she brought some cheese and salami. We had another couple of belts together. That’s the way it started.”

“You said she said something about Nazis in Chile?”

“According to her, she was working at the Little Sisters’ Hospital in Santiago when this happened.”

“When what happened?”

“They call it the Seguro Obrero Massacre,” Stein said. “That’s the building that houses the health insurance ministry, or something like that.”

“What kind of a massacre?” Frade asked as he pulled the cork from another bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

“Nazis.”

“Who did the Nazis massacre?”

“The Nazis got massacred. She said what happened was that a Chilean Nazi—they called themselves ‘Nazistas’—named Jorge Gonzalez von Marees got a bunch of college kids, and people that age, all fired up about National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, and they tried to stage a putsch.”

“When did this happen?”

“In 1938. Mother Superior was there filling in as a doctor in the emergency room at the Little Sisters’ Hospital in Santiago. Same order of nuns as here.”

Frade nodded as he topped off his glass and then slid the bottle to Stein.

“So,” Siggie said as he poured himself a glass, “what happened when this Nazi zealot did that . . . Wait. ‘Zealot’ is a really bad choice of word. The Zealots were Jewish warriors in Judea trying to throw the Romans out in the first century; they killed a lot of Romans because they just wouldn’t give up.”

They tapped glasses and took sips.

“Really nice wine,” Stein said, and went on: “Anyway, what this Chilean Nazi idiot did was convince about sixty of these young guys that all they had to do was take over a building at the university and the Seguro Obrero building and the people would rush to support them and National Socialism would come to Chile.

“According to Mother Superior, they could have caused real trouble, but while they probably didn’t stand a chance of taking over the country, they would have become heroic martyrs.”

“Exactly what did these Chilean Nazi lunatics do?”

“About half of them took over a building at the university, and the other half took over the health insurance building. The cops—they call them ‘carabineros’; they carry carbines—surrounded both buildings. Then the army sent a couple of cannons to the university building and fired a couple of rounds.

“The lunatics at the university surrendered. The cops—or maybe the army—then told them that what was going to happen now was that the lunatics were going to go to the health insurance building and convince the lunatics there that what they should do is surrender before anybody else got hurt.

“This made sense to the lunatics—they could see themselves being marched off to the slam while people cheered them, where they would be tried, jailed for a couple of months, and then be remembered all their lives as the heroes who brought Nazism to Chile with their bravery.

“So off they went to the health insurance building, where they talked the other lunatics into surrendering. When the others put down their weapons, the lunatics from the university were marched into the building, chased up the stairways, and then shot and/or bayoneted.”

“All of them?”

“Mother Superior was there with the ambulances from the hospital. She saw officers going around making sure they were all dead.” Stein mimed someone holding a pistol. “Pop. You’re dead.”

“After they surrendered, they were killed?” Frade said.

“Somebody with power—I’d like to think it was a Jew, but there’s no telling—thought, ‘Now, wait a minute. If we just arrest these people, they’ll be back. On the other hand, if they resist and they all die, that would be unfortunate, but that would mean they won’t be causing any more trouble.’”

“Mother Superior agrees with that theory?”

“She knows that’s what happened. What she can’t understand is why I think it was a good idea.”

“Neither can I. That sounds like cold-blooded murder.”

“Colonel, what were you thinking when you turned your Thompson on Colonel—whatsisname? Schmidt?—and his officers?”

“I was thinking if any one of them managed to get their pistols out, they were going to shoot me.”

“That’s all?”

“Look, later, when I was trying to justify to myself shooting Schmidt, I managed to convince myself that I had also saved General Farrell’s life, and Pedro Nolasco’s.”

“And that’s all?” Stein pursued.

It took Frade a moment to reply.

“Okay, Siggie. I’m apparently very good when it comes to justifying what I’ve done that I’m not especially proud of. I told myself that I was responsible for turning the Tenth Mountain Regiment around, which meant they would not get into a firefight with the Husares de Pueyrredon and that meant a lot of Schmidt’s troops and a lot of Husares would not get killed. And that—I just said I’m really good at coming up with justifications—there wouldn’t be a civil war where a lot of innocent people would get killed. By the time I was finished, I had just about convinced myself that I was really Saint George and Schmidt was the evil dragon.”

Stein nodded. “Don’t be hard on yourself, Colonel. You did the right thing, and so did whoever ordered that the Chilean Nazis be killed. That stopped the Nazi movement in its tracks in Chile. God knows how many people would have been killed if the Nazis had taken over the country.”

“Why does this massacre make you want to go to Germany?”

“I told you, Colonel, I don’t understand it, but it does.”

“You’re not thinking of doing something more than pissing in the Rhine?”