Hi's rented bungalow was small but tastefully furnished, with what would be a fine view, on clear nights, from its patio. Introduced by Diego to McKay outside, Hi headed for the bar--it had become pure habit--when the three men came in. But Hi would have this drink in celebration, not despair. He knew that Eva, whether or not she might ever again be his, was alive. "What'll you have, gentlemen?" he asked, pouring himself a scotch on the rocks.

"A Bloody Mary," Diego said.

"Some brandy for me," McKay said.

Hi picked up a bottle of brandy. "You work for MI6?" he asked, glancing at McKay.

"Let us say there is more than one nation concerned with the subject at hand," McKay said. "I am here on the free world's behalf."

"Fair enough," Hi said, pouring the brandy. "The subject being Hitler, I understand. So what about him?"

McKay reached into a coat pocket and produced a small photograph. He walked over to Hi at the bar and handed him the black-and-white photo.

"Countess Borca of Romania," McKay said as Hi looked at her singular image. "Transylvania, to be exact."

"Transylvania? I could have guessed," Hi said with amusement, having read Dracula twice. "She looks like a vampire."

"She is," McKay said. "Or was." Hi looked at him incredulously. "She was the talk of Transylvania."

Hi studied McKay's eyes, which calmly gazed back. Hi looked over at Diego, who innocently shrugged.

After glancing again at the photo, Hi handed it back to McKay. Maybe the lady was a vampire and maybe she wasn't. To hell with it. "What's she got to do with the Führer?" Hi asked, mixing the Bloody Mary.

"In 1944," McKay said, "she was taken into custody and flown to Berlin by Hitler's elite guard, the SS."

"I suppose you're going to tell me," Hi said to McKay, "that the Führer had this lady put the bite on him." Hi handed Diego his drink.

"Exactly. For the Führer, to become a vampire was to become immortal. Losing the war would be losing one battle. He would live to fight again."

"Where is he now?"

"Somewhere in the Amazon jungle. We know he has contacted several South American leaders. His aim is to rule, first South America, then the world, through bribery: by offering world leaders something far more precious than power or gold. Immortality."

Hi considered for a moment, with a sip of his scotch. He shook his head skeptically. He had seen a good deal of that jungle, and knew of no WW2 German Nazis around. "You've got to be kidding," Hi said.

"His first South American contact," said McKay, as Hi took another sip, "was Argentina's Juan Domingo Perón."

Hi felt a chill shoot straight down his spine. He also coughed as some scotch went into his windpipe. Suddenly, frighteningly, McKay's story had taken on a whole new complexion. "Did this involve Eva?" Hi struggled to ask, his eyes watering from the fumes in his lungs.

"You okay?" asked Diego. Hi nodded yes, but coughed wetly, and yanked out a handkerchief for his running nose.

"We know," McKay said, "that Eva Perón traveled, as her husband's emissary, to Hitler's secret jungle headquarters." Now Hi couldn't stop coughing. "She never returned." Hi thought he was going to strangle. "According to our Argentine sources--" McKay paused as Hi reeled into the bathroom. "Perón believes she fell for the Führer." Hi bent over the commode and threw up.

McKay and Diego waited, listening to Hi cough and spit in the bathroom. "I couldn't believe it," McKay said quietly to Diego, "when you told me Hi was involved with Eva. I don't like this complication. Here is he puking already."

"You'd just as soon kill Eva too, right?" Diego said in an accusatory tone. "Why have to worry about it."

McKay glared at Diego as the toilet flushed in the bathroom. "Still sore about your broken pornographic pottery? I said I was sorry. Now I take it back."

Hi came out of the bathroom, over the coughing but breathing heavily, wiping his tearing eyes, trying to clear his throat. "She became a vampire?" he croaked. McKay frowned, not sure what Hi asked.

"She became a vampire?" Diego repeated to McKay.

"That would seem likely," McKay said, tactfully answering what he thought a dumb question. "The deserted Perón had little choice but to fake an untimely death for his beloved Evita. How else to explain her absence?"

"That's not her body in the ministry," Hi admitted, still recovering his voice. "You're right about that. I saw her tonight. In downtown B.A."

"Who was she with?" McKay asked.

"Some brute who knocked me out." Hi braved another sip of scotch as he let the story McKay had told him sink in. "How could Eva do it? Juan Perón was bad enough. Adolf Hitler?"

"If it's true," said Diego, "between Perón and Hitler there must now be bad blood."

"Yes," McKay said. "The jilted Perón has good reason now to rid the world of Hitler. But then don't we all."

"That's where I come in?" Hi asked rhetorically.

"No other man in the world knows the Amazon jungle as well as you," McKay said. "You're the logical choice to help lead a special team. You also speak German, should we need it, so you fill that slot as well. We must destroy him--destroy, before it starts, his vampire empire. We must save the world from Hitler Part Two."

"I sure thought we had him at the end of Part One," Hi said.

That's why the world must never know that we didn't. It would detract from the free world's hard-fought victory. This mission is therefore top secret, now and forever. What do you say?"

"You're asking if I'll help you go in and really get Hitler?"

"Liquidation of him and his vampire henchmen. We don't know how many."

"I'd do it with relish. But what about Eva?"

McKay offered no immediate answer. He didn't have one. "If Eva is with him," Diego said, "what is she doing in Buenos Aires? That is, if it was really her you saw."

"I saw her, Diego," Hi said. "In Cuco's Cabaret." Hi got a little lump in his throat. "I'd like to think she came in--the place where we met--just to see it again."

Hi headed for the bar to refill his emptied glass. McKay muttered to Diego, "What maudlin crap."

Hi turned at the bar and looked back at McKay. "What did you say?"

"I said, 'We mustn't dawdle, old chap'," McKay said nonchalantly.

"Yeah? Don't try to rush me. I won't do anything that might hurt Eva. And you know what? Neither will you."

Hi poured his refill. "With Eva involved," Diego said to McKay, "he needs time to think about this."

"You're right, pal," Hi agreed. "It's been an eventful day."

McKay sighed, still with no answer for the Eva complication. "It's been a long day, too," he said, "we're all tired. Sleep on what we've discussed, Hi. We'll talk more in the morning." McKay turned to Diego. "Let's be going."

"Where are you guys staying?" Hi asked.

"The Corrientes Hotel," said McKay.

Diego finished his Bloody Mary. "Let's go see what we can find in the bar," he said to McKay.

"I am a married man," McKay said with calm resentment. "And I just got through saying I'm tired."

Diego looked at McKay and smirked. "Age will do that to you, I'm told. Goodnight, Hi."

Outside in the fog, McKay walked into the street to the driver's side of the rented Chevy, while Diego started to open the door on the driver's side. They both stopped to look as someone suddenly walked out of the fog along the street. It was Soto, with an unlit cigarette. Soto acted glad to see them as he stopped by McKay. "Excuse me," Soto said. "Would you have a light?"

McKay looked at Soto suspiciously, but took out a lighter. As McKay lit the cigarette for him, Soto studied McKay's face in the glare of the lighter's flame. He gave McKay a big smile. "Thank you," Soto said, and walked away into the fog.

McKay and Diego looked at each other across the roof of the car. "Ever seen that man before?" McKay asked.

"Not that I know of," said Diego.

"But you'll remember if you see him again." There was a hint of sarcasm in McKay's voice, as there was a lingering tension between the two men.

"I will make a mental note of it," Diego said, and opened the car door.

A few hours after his guests left, Hi was snoring away on the couch. He hadn't made it to the bedroom, after finishing off the bottle of scotch. Hi was dreaming of Eva--the dream was weird and disjointed--when there appeared on the fog-covered patio, about four in the morning, a large, black, lumbering bat.

Hi's dream became more chaotic, a phantasmagoria of beastly, frightening images. Then Hi drifted into a state of semiconsciousness, in which a hulking, shadowy figure seemed to approach and lurk over him. When the intruder reached down and grabbed Hi by the collar, Hi, fully awake, recognized the intruder as the smirking oaf who had slugged him when he tried to chase Eva.

The oaf lifted Hi to his feet. Hi punched him in the gut. The oaf just smiled, the only effect of the blow being a sharp pain in Hi's hand. Hi grabbed the empty scotch bottle off the coffee table by the couch and smashed it over the oaf's blonde, closely cropped head. This seemed to make the intruder mad. Gripping Hi by the collar and belt, the oaf tossed him over the couch, Hi crashing into breaking furniture.

The intruder continued to tear up most of the furniture, using Hi's vainly resisting body as the instrument of destruction. Hi, with the last of his strength, grabbed up a fireplace poker, only to have the hulk easily wrest it from him. Throwing Hi to the floor, Wolfgang got down over him with the poker, which he held--against the weakening resistance of Hi's hand round his wrist--as if to plunge it down into Hi's neck.

Exhausted, Hi lay there waiting to die, his arm losing all power to resist the poker being pressed down over him. But the intruder, smiling smugly down at Hi as he held him pinned to the floor, relaxed the pressure. The oaf was not going to kill him.

"What's holding you back?" Hi asked, with hardly the breath to say it.

"Señora Perón," the monster said calmly. "I am here to take you to her."

Hi couldn't believe his ears. "You had to wreck this place first?"

The oaf kept smiling. "I don't like being hit with a bottle."