Clete had no ideas at all. It would take more than twenty minutes for Peter to travel back and forth from the Alvear Palace Hotel to the Museum; and if he himself went to the hotel, they would be seen together.
“Call me back when you get to the Alvear,” Clete said. “I’ll think of something.”
“Right,” Peter said, and the line went dead.
Clete looked around for Enrico and found him asleep in an armchair in the small foyer of the master suite. He touched his shoulder.
“Señor Clete?” Enrico asked, suddenly wide awake.
“Mayor von Wachtstein is going to be at the Alvear in maybe fifteen minutes. He can’t get free long enough—twenty minutes, no more—to come here. He wants to see me. Obviously, it’s important. Any ideas? Is there someplace near the Alvear where we could meet without being seen?”
“You have an apartment in the Alvear,” Enrico said.
“I do?” Clete asked. It was the first he’d heard about that.
Enrico reached into his pocket, came out with an enormous bunch of keys, found the one he was looking for, and held it up triumphantly.
“Why do I have an apartment in the Alvear?” Clete asked.
“El Coronel used it for entertaining,” Enrico said. “When discretion was necessary.”
“What does that mean? And I thought that’s what the house on Libertador is for? A guest house.”
“The house on Libertador is used to house guests,” Enrico said, smiling. “Normally, men who come to Buenos Aires from the country with their families.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Some men, Señor Clete, if their wives do not accompany them to Buenos Aires, and sometimes even if they do, grow very lonely at night. And even sometimes in the afternoon.”
“What are you saying, Enrico? That my father kept an apartment in the Alvear so that his friends could—”
“El Coronel, Señor Clete, was famous for his hospitality.”
“I’ll be damned,” Clete said. “But I still don’t see why an apartment. Why not in the house on Libertador?”
“Señora Pellano, my beloved sister, Mariana Maria Delores Rodríguez de Pellano, Señor Clete, may she be resting in peace now for all eternity with all the saints in heaven, was a good Christian woman. El Coronel would never insult her by asking her to house inappropriate women in a house she thought of as her own.”
“Inappropriate women meaning whores, right?”
“No, Señor Clete. Your father would not insult his friends, his guests, by asking them to associate with whores.”
“Then with what?”
“A whore, Señor Clete—is this not true in the Estados Unidos as well?—will go to bed with any man who pays her—”
“That’s a prostitute, Enrico,” Clete interrupted. “A whore just likes men, all men.”
“She will sleep, a whore, with just about any man?”
“That sums it up neatly, Enrico. I guess you could say that Señora Pellano would regard both whores and prostitutes as inappropriate women. As would Señora Howell. And, of course, Señora Carzino-Cormano.”
“You understand, Señor Clete,” Enrico said approvingly.
“And did Señora Carzino-Cormano know about the apartment in the Alvear?”
“She did not want to know about the apartment, and therefore she did not know. You understand, Señor Clete?”
“Maybe,” Clete said. “What I don’t understand is who did my father get to entertain his friends who got lonely at night and sometimes in the afternoon, who we now understand were inappropriate women but neither whores nor prostitutes?”