The Casanova Embrace
Read The Casanova Embrace Online
Authors: Warren Adler
Tags: #Fiction, Erotica, Espionage, Romance, General, Thrillers, Political
BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER
Banquet Before Dawn
Blood Ties
Cult
Death of a Washington Madame
Empty Treasures
Flanagan's Dolls
Funny Boys
Madeline's Miracles
Mourning Glory
Natural Enemies
Private Lies
Random Hearts
Residue
The Casanova Embrace
The Children of the Roses
The David Embrace
The Henderson Equation
The Housewife Blues
The War of the Roses
The Womanizer
Trans-Siberian Express
Twilight Child
Undertow
We Are Holding the President
Hostage
SHORT STORIES
Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden
Never Too Late For Love
New York Echoes
New York Echoes 2
The Sunset Gang
MYSTERIES
American Sextet
American Quartet
Immaculate Deception
Senator Love
The Ties That Bind
The Witch of Watergate
Copyright ©
1978
by Warren Adler.
ISBN 978-1-59006-095-7
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com
STONEHOUSE PRESS
and who hath fully understood how
unknown
to each other are man and woman!
 --Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Covert intelligence agents and security men in the various
embassies along the tree-lined street knew instinctively that it was a bomb
blast that had intruded on the chilly morning calm. It was hardly an
automobile's backfire. Windows nearby were shattered. Bric-a-brac fell from
shelves and tables in the elegant houses innocently included in the blast's
periphery. A pervasive, unfamiliar odor flumed invisibly upward through the
usual pall of pollutants hanging in the heavy air of Washington. Someone who
not only surmised what had occurred but actually saw the twisted wreckage of
the gray Pinto, floating, it seemed, in a cloud of smoky afterblast, called the
police.
Spectators, hovering behind heavy draperies, contemplated
with fascination the block-long wreckage. A hubcap had been blown, like a
discus, into the trunk of a tree. A tire lay on the doorstep before the heavy
wrought-iron door at the entrance of the Greek Embassy. A trail of upholstery
stuffing, white, like heavy snow, lay on the black surface of the road.
Experienced eyes, familiar with the impersonal ruthlessness
of explosives, picked knowingly among the rubbish of the violence seeking
pieces of a human being. A foot, the shoe still carefully laced and reflecting
on its shine the glint of the shrouded February sun, lay on a patch of grass,
fifty feet from the car's mangled remains. A ringed hand rested eerily on a
piece of deformed chrome ornament. Patches of red materialized adjacent to the
main wreckage, adding a grisly highlight to what might have been a surrealistic
performance for an avant-garde art show.
Officer Bryant of the Executive Protective Force, a tall
man with a craggy face, felt the backwash of bile in his throat as he tamped
down an involuntary retch. It was the worst, most horrifying scene he had ever
beheld. The first detail he was conscious of was that of a man's mangled torso
in the front seat jammed against the remains of the dashboard. Actually, it was
the sight of the head that had made him want to vomit. It was cleanly severed
at the neck and lying like an errant basketball on what might have once been
the car's back seat. The eyes were open, the silvery-gray surrounding the black
pupils oddly clear and glistening, not at all dull, as one might have expected
of dead eyes. A thin mustache, neatly edged, lay perfectly centered above a
thickish angel-bowed upper lip. The face was ivory smooth, the fleshtone dark,
not tanned by the sun. The mouth was set in a broad sardonic smile, showing
even white teeth.
"I'll be a sonofabitch," Officer Bryant heard
himself say after he had assured himself that he had conquered his urge to
vomit. He stared at the face in the isolated head, fascinated, compelled to
absorb the horror of it. He had no idea what to do. Officially, he was
paralyzed.
Sirens screeched as both marked and unmarked official cars
swarmed into the area. Materializing suddenly were wooden horses blocking both
ends of the affected geography. Police began to reroute traffic. A white
ambulance from the Georgetown University Hospital was quickly passed through
the cordon. Two pale white-coated doctors stepped out, surveyed the scene,
hesitated, went back into the ambulance and reappeared wearing surgical gloves.
A group of uniformed police with gold braid on their caps
talked quietly with men in civilian suits as they clustered around the main
area of wreckage. One of the men in civilian clothes waved the doctors forward.
Behind them came two uniformed attendants carrying a stretcher and a package of
transparent bags.
"Looks like a single corpse, male Caucasian," one
of the men in civilian clothes said. He was from the FBI, a take-charge type,
from his bearing, obviously the acknowledged senior of the group. "Be
careful," he whispered to the doctors. "There may be prints."
"They should leave their shit at home," another
man in civilian clothes said. His complexion was sallow, his hair completely
white. He was Alfred Dobbs, CIA. Flashbulbs popped as two FBI photographers
recorded every detail. An acetylene torch appeared suddenly in the hands of a
policeman. He wore welder's glasses. The flame of the torch bit into the
mangled metal and cut a long rectangular gash in the wreckage, large enough to
remove the remains.
When he had finished, the doctors knelt, poking their arms
into the opening, and gently removed the torso. Part of it seemed to
disintegrate in their hands as they deftly edged it into a large plastic bag.
Securing it with a length of tape, they placed it on the waiting stretcher.
Sliding half his body through the opening, one of the other doctors saw the
head.
"Oh, my God," he said, lifting it by the hair. He
put it in another plastic bag and handed it to the other doctor, who placed it
on the stretcher with the remains of the torso. One of the attendants was
searching the area for other signs of human remains, a plastic bag in his hand,
like a garbage picker gathering rubbish after a county fair. He picked up the severed
hand, found the foot, as well as pieces of unrecognizable parts, and put them
quickly in the bag. He was a young man, had been a medic in Vietnam. He was used to this, he told himself. He had seen worse. He sensed that people
were watching him from behind the tall windows of the big houses and he liked
the attention.
The doctors, too, continued to find bits and pieces of
flesh and bone in what was once the interior of the car. They moved
methodically. They knew that the FBI would want the pathologists to get
everything that could be found and they wanted their efficiency to be
commended.
A beeping sound grated the ear, and the FBI take-charge man
drew a compact walkie-talkie from his pocket and quickly extended the antenna.
"Grady here," the FBI man said.
"What is it, Jack?" He recognized the voice of
the director.
"A white male Caucasian, sir. Looks foreign. Probably
a Latino or Italian, maybe. About thirty feet from the Chilean Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. He bought it from a homemade, emanating from the interior of a 1974
Ford Pinto. The medics are picking up the pieces."
"A real mess, eh?"
"Better believe it."
"No identity?"
"The prints will be over shortly. Wait a minute,
sir."
One of the doctors handed him what seemed to be the remains
of a District of Columbia license. He held it up at a distance to assure the
focus of his farsighted eyes.
"I've got a license make," Grady said into the
walkie-talkie. He gave the director the number, heard the sound garble as the
director repeated it to another person. Static crackled as Grady waited. He
knew the information banks were being sent into action, the electronic probes
activated. Waiting, he watched with some annoyance as the CIA man approached,
the competitive animosity surfacing as he recognized the gray-haired man. It
was Dobbs. Pretty high up, he thought with contempt, knowing how swiftly they
would move in when they smelled a foreign involvement.
"Eduardo Allesandro Palmero." The director's
voice intruded over the static. His pronunciation was amusingly inaccurate.
"The car was registered in his name."
"Any ident yet?" Dobbs asked.
"What was that?" the director asked.
"I've got a spook here, sir," Grady said. His
contempt was undisguised.
The director sighed. "Who?" he asked.
"Dobbs," the CIA man said. Grady repeated the
name. "He wants to know." There was a brief pause. He knew what was
in the director's mind. Hoover would have told him to get lost.
"Tell him," the director said.
"Eduardo Allesandro Palmero," he said, proud of
his pronunciation. He wondered if the director had overheard.
Dobbs heard the name. It was the confirmation he had
dreaded. His stomach had lurched. How could he have not foreseen?
"Is the name familiar?" Grady asked, the contempt
hidden, professionally alert. The answer from Dobbs was spare, crisp.
"A Chilean. He was in the Allende government. We gave
him asylum." There was more to tell, Dobbs knew. But this was all they
would get. Grady sensed the sparseness. They would dole out only what was
officially necessary. He conveyed the information to the director.
"Shit," the director said. The foreign aspect
meant CIA interference, bureaucratic competition, aggravation and chicken shit.
"Keep me up on it."
"Yes, sir," Grady responded, hearing the sign-off
click. He put the walkie-talkie back in his pocket.
"That's it," one of the doctors said, tapping
Grady on the shoulder. Grady motioned to two of his men who jumped in behind
the attendants. The ambulance backed out of the street and moved swiftly down Massachusetts Avenue, sirens turned on, the message of urgency, frightening to the many ears
who could hear the shrill agony of its sound.
The street was crowded with police, FBI and other officials
and experts. Many picked meticulously through the wreckage, carefully
retrieving any object that might be potentially useful. They combed the length
of the street, peering, hawklike, on the ground. Some worked on their hands and
knees placing material in plastic bags with tweezers. Official photographers
continued to snap pictures. Technicians tenaciously brushed all available
surfaces for prints. Samples were taken of everything--blood, dust, the
upholstery stuffing. Everything.
Men with small pads, ball-point pens scribbling, paraded up
and down the street. Some went in to interview people in the big homes and
embassies nearby. They talked to servants, staff, ambassadors, their wives,
children. Reporters, forced to remain behind the wooden horses, yelled
questions to the men working in the street. Flashbulbs popped. Television and
motion picture cameras whirred.
Everyone worked swiftly. Grady was satisfied with the
cooperation of the D.C. Police, the Executive Protective Agency, his own men
and the specialists with their sophisticated equipment who sought to gather
every scrap of evidence that might tell them who had noisily separated Eduardo
Allesandro Palmero from his life on this chilly morning in February. Amid the
bedlam, he occasionally cast an annoyed glance at Dobbs. Damned spooks, he
muttered, knowing that they would, as always, withhold pieces of the puzzle.
Dobbs, Grady sensed, was already deep in speculation, which was an accurate bit
of insight. Dobbs was the Langley wizard on terrorist groups, the resident
expert on the sub-underworld of competing gangs who waged continuing war between
factions and ideologies. This battleground respected neither national
boundaries nor human life. It was an ugly, brutal, maddening war of
unparalleled intensity, with many casualties, waged far from the prying eyes of
the media. There were rarely any wounded. Combatants were wasted. Only the
innocent were occasionally maimed when, by some odd misfiring, they were not
killed.
This was Dobbs' arena. Under his supervision were hundreds
of analysts, technicians, agents in every country of the world, covering people
of every persuasion, all on the payroll--hired guns, mercenaries supplying bits
and pieces of knowledge--so that Dobbs could observe this war and synthesize it
for the President and his advisors. Essentially, he was the information filter
and he knew his own power, the power of word control.
Sometimes, with luck, he could track a hit in advance. The
Palmero thing, he knew, was an aberration. Who could believe it? His mind was
already manufacturing logic, rationalizations, the coverup. On the surface, it
could appear to be a logical Junta hit. Was anything awry, out of focus? Where
was the currency for the Junta? he asked himself. Every specific wasting had a
purpose. Nothing was without design. Perhaps, though, at the moment, it might
be useful to let the obvious prevail.
Watching the scene, now winding down, as the men
efficiently disposed of their assignments, he grew restless to be back at his
desk in Langley to read the Palmero files, to reach into the information banks,
to comb through the forest of information gleaned from the monitoring of the
Chilean counter-insurgents, an arm of DINA, their vaunted intelligence
apparatus. For Latinos they were a marvel of organization, a long and ruthless
arm that could pick out and set up anti-Junta agents with superb dispatch.
Probably the German influence, with their passion for thoroughness. They had
destroyed their enemies in Europe, Africa, the Middle East with great skill. A
quick hit. Then fadeout. He wished their own "Capos" could be half as
efficient. Capos, he called them, borrowed from the Mafiosa. They would now see
him only as a bungler.
Grady moved closer. The man was in his fifties, but still
retained that clean FBI Irish look. You could spot it coming at you almost
before you saw the face, as if they threw out some special scent.
"Well," Grady said, "how do you read
it?"
"Could be a Junta hit," Dobbs said. He wanted to
seem sincere, wondering if he had successfully achieved the role. Grady nodded,
as if he understood. "It obviously seems political." Did he seem
suspicious? Dobbs wondered. Bits of information retrieved themselves in his
mind. Palmero had been a strategist in the Allende inner circle. He had been
Allende's Minister of Interior, but that was merely to give him a handle. In
actuality, he was the propaganda man, the ideological brain, and the Junta had
put him in prison. They had given him a bad time, very bad.
The CIA had gotten him out, ostensibly, as part of a barter
for United States aid. Actually, he was set up to be one of their pigeons, a
lure, carefully marked bait. They might have intervened, prevented this act.
Had he been mesmerized, Dobbs wondered, wanting to see how Palmero's last act
would unfold. That would make him an accomplice. He shrugged. Guilt was a
wasted emotion in his business.
"It has all the earmarks," Dobbs said, feeling
the need to reinforce Grady's naive suppositions.