A Deadly Paradise Read Free Page A

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