The Casanova Embrace by Warren Adler Read Free Book Online

that triggered a response--a tiny
landmark, a detail in a map, something that might synthesize his own mind and
heart with those of Eduardo. It was important to know what had gone wrong. He
had been so sure of his actions. The surveillance. The entire scenario seemed
so logical. Why had this happened? He looked at the mass of files before him.
One must always go back to the beginning. He broke a seal, opened the file.
    Born in Santiago in 1936, weight eight pounds, completely
bald at birth, skin pink, healthy, a moneyed family, landed aristocracy on his
mother's side, a huge home in Santiago's suburbs where the ground sloped upward
to the Cordillera and the view of the Pacific was spectacular. The wealthy always
took the best locations to build their monuments and pursue their diversions.
The father, Manuel, had been also born in Santiago, his father before him a
Neapolitan fisherman who arrived penniless in 1901. A migration of necessity,
Dobbs mused, noting that the DINA analyst had suggested an escape from the
Carabinieri rather than a legal immigration. In those days, one did not bother
with the fine legal points of immigration.
    There was also the hint of another family, left in a Naples slum, but, if true, that did not stop the grandfather from finding solace in the
arms of Rosa, who at fourteen seemed to have been bartered for the
grandfather's labor aboard her own father's fishing boat. He was fifty at the
time. Dobbs imagined himself, fifty-five now, already dry. Comparisons were
odious, he knew, wasteful. It was, in addition, unprofessional. Rosa had been the mother of Manuel, but she had died of diphtheria before she was twenty
and somehow her husband had wound up with her father's boat.
    The Latin mind could embroider lavishly, Dobbs knew. But
antecedents carried clues and they were beginning to emerge.
    The DINA material told of still another wife, Concetta,
sixteen. So, he is getting interested in older women, Dobbs chuckled, the
thought dispelling for the moment the odd self-pity aroused in himself. Four
additional children emerge, half brothers and sisters, duly recorded by the
birth registrar at the Church of Cabrine, honoring the saint of the fisherman.
And there are two additional births recorded. Two different mothers.
Apparently, the grandfather was an honorable man, accepting the
responsibilities of his fornications.
    Energies apparently remain to acquire a fleet of fishing
boats, a moderate monetary success, enough to send Eduardo's father to the
University, then to law school, to gather expertise in marine law--no small
thing in a land with little else than copper and two thousand miles of
coastline.
    Dobbs had never been to Chile, but he had read enough to
imagine it, the Cordillera stretching into the infinite blueness of the sky,
the incredible blue Pacific and, in between, the lush land in the south and the
dry craggy earth to the north. It is the mountains, the diet, the iodine in the
fish, and the earthquakes that make them crazy, he had been told.
    The father, Manuel, had married Carlotta Ramirez. The DINA
analyst included clippings from the leading paper of Santiago, evidence of the
lavish fanfare of the event. There is a picture of Eduardo's mother, stiffly
resplendent in her bridal gown, and a report of a reception for three hundred
people. So, the son of the Italian fisherman does pretty good for himself,
Dobbs thought, shifting in his chair. The analyst describes their house, a gift
from the bride's parents, their beachside villa, also a gift. There is an
element of envy in the report. The bureaucrat's eye-view of the gentry. They
are newlyweds. He is twenty-four. She is eighteen and they have six servants,
the analyst says--bitterly, it seemed to Dobbs, who wondered whether it was his
own inner voice that had embellished the sarcasm.
    So, the stage was set, Dobbs thought, getting up to stretch
his legs, as if he needed some respite before plunging again into the mists of
Eduardo's