A Deadly Paradise Read Free Page B

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