Don Patricio picked up the sobriquet in Antigua Guatemala and it became firmly attached in Mexico. The Nine Lives are harder to explain, but given the life he led over the last seventy years, odds were against his survival.
It used to be said that the ideal OSS agent would be a PhD able to win a bar fight. The author never got much further than an Oxford MA, but by the time he earned his Commando green beret with the Royal Marines he had learned a lot of dirty tricks.
