A Deadly Paradise (2 page)

It may have been Alex’s imagination, but a slight chill descended on the room after Reimann addressed him as dottore
.

4

“WE HAVE A problem!” Reimann said, holding the telephone receiver a short distance from his mouth. His hotel in Perugia had a five-star rating, but he had an innate distrust of Italian germs. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to the window, shielding his tired eyes from the sunlight streaming through the window, as he kept watch on the door.

“What now?” the voice on the Berlin end asked. Reimann heard a fat sigh of annoyance.

“Cenni. Uncooperative.” Reimann responded crisply. “We should have insisted on working with the carabinieri. They’re easier to deal with. Cenni’s threatening to turn any papers he finds over to the presiding judge.”

“Why is that a problem? Have someone from the PM’s office call the presiding judge.”

“Not very likely. The last government had no control over the judiciary, and I doubt this one does either. It’s independent here—like Cenni!”

“I want those papers, Reimann. If the information in them gets out, we’ll have serious problems. What about that African she imported? Isn’t she the logical starting point?”

A bank of clouds moved across the horizon, blocking the sun and casting a long shadow into the room.

“Disappeared!” he responded.

Another fat sigh from Berlin. “I have to go. You know what to do. No excuses; just do it. And we don’t need to know the details; but of course you know that.”

Reimann sat holding the receiver until he heard the dial tone. He was sweating profusely in the unheated room, and he used the edge of the brocade bedspread to wipe his face and hands. He was thinking about the woman he’d been speaking with.
Brass balls!
A friend of the chancellor’s, she was the first woman appointed to head the BND, Germany’s secret service, but there was nothing womanly about her ambition or her directness in serving that ambition.

I’ll lose my pension if I don’t find those papers, he realized. She blames me for letting it reach this point, Reimann thought as he poured another scotch, a larger one than the two that he’d swallowed earlier. He walked over to the hotel window, carrying his glass and the bottle, to look out at Mount Subasio in the distance. Just beyond his window was a large olive grove. He watched as the sun came from behind a cloud, dappling the pruned treetops and coloring the leaves a burnished silvery gold, the color of Jarvinia’s hair when he’d first met her. He thought about Jarvinia and the trouble she was causing him, that she’d always caused him. He was a decent man and he believed that no one should die as she had. But he was also a man who valued justice, and he knew that Jarvinia had brought it on herself.

5

A DISCERNING PERSON might call Dieter Reimann a good man. He had loved his wife, he seldom passed a beggar on the street without emptying his pockets of change, and on most Sundays he received communion. He never spoke of thieving Gypsies, drunken Irish, or conniving Jews, and he never looked down on others because they had darker skin or attended a different house of worship. No one who knew Dieter had ever heard him attribute his good fortune, a steady job, a nice house, and a comely wife to anything but luck. He was one of those rare individuals who live by the maxim that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

And yet, with all this goodness to keep him safe, he’d conducted a long and torrid love affair with Jarvinia Baudler. It was one of those events in life that cannot be explained, and perhaps if Dieter had left it that way, unexplained, he might have survived its consequences. But the selfsame Dieter who believed in a higher power believed equally in a rational basis for human behavior. He needed to understand the nature of things in general and the moral disposition of mankind in particular, and unlike so many of his fellow Germans who dismissed their history without a backward glance, Dieter spent many hours thinking and worrying about where Germany had been and where it was going.

He was forty, Jarvinia fifty, when they began their affair. It wasn’t that he didn’t know of her past. The rumors had been rife before she arrived in Rome. Jarvinia had made a name for herself on her last assignment in Spain, not just for her sexual proclivities and the very famous Spanish actress with whom it was rumored she’d had an affair (although Jarvinia denied it to him when he brought it up), but also because of the changes she had wrought in the cultural-attaché domain. The embassy had been turned into a concert hall on those evenings when it wasn’t serving as an art gallery. Her events had given so much cachet to the embassy that the ambassador had overlooked what he knew of her sexual activities. Her assignment to Rome had been a promotion. If Dieter had been your normal security officer, he would have resented Jarvinia and the burdens she placed on him. If she repeated her successes in Rome, opening up the embassy to all and sundry and to countless visiting artists and musicians, his work would be more difficult. But he thought it a fine thing that she was securing a reputation as a cultural leader for Germany. Germany had not yet redeemed itself in the eyes of the rest of Europe, and Dieter desperately wanted such redemption.

He had seen Jarvinia’s picture many times in the Foreign Service newsletter, and he was expecting to meet a big woman with a fleshy face, large round eyes, and light hair. As his mother would have said, nothing to write home about. His mother would have been wrong. Jarvinia in the flesh was a rare commodity in German womanhood: intelligent, funny, flashy, sexy, charming, nasty, bold, self-centered, and self-congratulatory. Every newsletter sent out by the Consulate after Jarvinia arrived in Rome was about Jarvinia. Of course, there were just as many things she was not: meek, generous, modest, kind. But as she had once pointed out when he had protested her unkindness to one of his clerks, all the characteristics he said she was missing added up to
boring.
“I am never boring,” Jarvinia had declared with her usual lack of modesty.

He remembered to the minute when their affair began. She had asked his help to move some furniture in the apartment provided her by the embassy. Huge, ugly Italian stuff, she’d said. “I’d like to throw it into the Tiber, but it probably wouldn’t sink.” She had a viperous tongue, and he decided to go himself rather than send one of his men.

Up until then, he had never seen Jarvinia in anything but pants. Her medical file said that she’d had polio as a child and she walked with a slight limp, so he had assumed one of her legs was bowed. She met him at her door, barefoot, in a silk robe that came to the top of her knees. She had beautiful legs. He could see her nipples through the silk robe and realized that she was not wearing underwear. But what he remembered most about that evening was her hair streaming in thick waves down to the middle of her back. She’d told him once that when she was a schoolgirl her hair had been the color of pure gold. He was glad the color had changed as she aged. At fifty, it was a mixture of gold and silver strands, thousands of shimmering strands of light.

When they lay in bed together with her hair spread out over the pillow, he wondered if he were her
Rumpel-stilzchen,
if she would betray him as the German queen had betrayed the misshapen dwarf once she’d had her gold. And, of course, with Jarvinia it was always about the gold. This seemed strange to him, as sex with Jarvinia was like nothing he had known with his wife. Lyse, a good woman, was horrified if he suggested anything that deviated from standard practice. Jarvinia had an engineer’s respect for standard practice and a creative flair for every more innovative position. She read the Kama Sutra like Lyse read her catechism. Her moans and sighs were filled with passion and longing. There was nothing faked about Jarvinia’s lovemaking.

“Why do you go with women?” he had asked her once after some particularly adventuresome sex on her balcony in clear view of her neighbors. She had laughed at first, but then took his question seriously.

“Men have to dominate. It’s always about them: get me a cup of coffee; I’m going to the football game, you can go alone to my mother’s; give up your career; stay home with the kids; look sexy for my friends; don’t look sexy for my friends. In bed, it’s even worse: get on top; move your ass; suck my cock; turn over, you’re done. Men by nature are takers and women are givers. With some exceptions, of course. I’ve got a man’s nature in a woman’s body. I prefer men for friends and women for all else, but there’s no reason not to enjoy both. And I do,” she had said.

“So what does that make me?” Dieter had asked when they’d gone inside and he was dressed to leave. “If you’re the dominator, what am I?”

“My slave, darling Dieter, what else?” she had responded. And he knew it was true.

Less than a month after they’d begun their affair, she began to use him. In the embassy, he had the authority to issue German passports without performing the usual security checks. The first time she had asked him to approve a passport, for a woman who claimed hers had been stolen, he had refused. The woman had a criminal record and it was her third lost passport in two years. He was sure she was selling them on the black market. Jarvinia had refused to have sex with him for two months.

The next time she asked, for a woman with a heavy Polish accent, a recent citizen, he had agreed. The woman was middle-aged and unattractive, and Jarvinia only enjoyed the company of younger women. From the moment he approved that passport, life, as he had known it, ended. She was circumspect and only asked him to approve passports four times in eleven years, apparently when the anticipated profit overrode the dangers. But other demands followed, some petty, one major. Nothing in the embassy was safe from her greed for beautiful things. Years into their affair, when they met rarely, he’d found a valuable Dresden vase in her bedroom. It had once adorned the ambassador’s suite, and the ambassador’s wife had accused one of the Albanian cleaning women of stealing it. The woman denied it, but the ambassador fired her anyway.

Jarvinia had laughed at his consternation when he’d accused her of stealing the vase. “A temporary loan,” she’d said. “I’ll return it when the Philistines leave. That wife of his wouldn’t know real Dresden from that junk they sell along the Kurfürstendamm.”

“What about the Albanian?” he had asked.

Jarvinia had shrugged and changed the subject.

She threatened him with exposure, to his wife and to the ambassador, until he gave her the combination to the master security files. From unsubstantiated rumors, he suspected that she had used information from those files to blackmail one of Germany’s most prominent politicians. He didn’t want to have his suspicions confirmed, so he ignored the rumors. Thoughts of suicide consumed him, and he stopped receiving communion. His wife of thirty-one years died of an aneurysm on a cold spring morning and he couldn’t stop crying. Even during working hours, tears would fall at the most inauspicious moments.

He was embarrassing himself and the ambassador, and he was asked to take two months compassionate leave. Eleven years had passed since the start of their affair, and his passion for Jarvinia waned; hers for him had never really existed. He had been a minor diversion and an interesting experiment, she had admitted when they were arguing about the vase.

When he returned to Germany, he confessed everything to his parish priest, a true saver of souls. The priest gave him absolution under the condition that he stop sleeping with Jarvinia. About the blackmail and stealing, he was grave but practical. “Change the combination on the files but don’t lose your job over something you can’t remedy. The German government won’t forgive you. God will,” and he gave him absolution again.

After he returned from Germany, Jarvinia never again asked for what she’d always so brazenly termed “a favor.” Another fourteen years passed—twenty-five in all from the time that Jarvinia had first arrived in Rome—and they settled into being nothing more than co-workers. They had drinks together like two old warhorses, and on a few occasions he accompanied her to one of the many cultural events in Rome. Her need for new and younger lovers never ceased, and he often wondered how she managed to keep them content—and, more often, how she managed to live so far above her income. Every week, he visited Lyse’s grave in Rome’s most famous cemetery, always with lilies, and waited patiently for Jarvinia’s downfall, and his own.

6

“ALEX, DOWN HERE.” The voice was Piero’s. He was seated in the lower section of the Bar Sensi, well away from the crowd of workers gathered at the top having their midday coffees. Cenni shouted over the noise to Orlando, the bar’s manager, that he needed a coffee before heading down the stairs.

The two policemen eyed each other silently. The last time they had been together was in January, to celebrate Piero’s promotion, the day before Genine had left for Munich. Alex knew that Piero blamed him for Genine’s decision to leave.

“Piero,
come stè?
” Alex finally asked in Umbrian dialect. Then with considerably more warmth, “Damn, Piero, but it’s good to see you.” He gathered his former lieutenant into a bearhug. The two of them sat and waited in awkward silence for their coffees to arrive and the noise to subside.

He looks tired, thought Piero, noticing the purple shadows under Alex’s eyes and the deepened lines around his mouth. Genine made him happy. Why’d he let her go?

Piero looks happy, and thinner, thought Alex. No sign of an apple tart in sight. In the past, Piero could never pass the Bar Sensi without stopping for at least one pastry, usually two. Marriage agrees with him, Alex reflected, with a twinge of envy. Everyone around him was moving on; only he was standing still.

Orlando came down the stairs. He unloaded two coffees from the tray, as well as an apple tart for Piero. “It’s wonderful to see the two of you together again. Welcome home, dottore,” he said to Alex, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

Alex grinned at Piero. “Elena’s doing a bang-up job managing your diet.
Cin cin!
” he said, downing his caffé macchiato in one gulp. “Orlando, another one,
per favore.”