The Casanova Embrace by Warren Adler

and on the night
table near her bed. Reading about Chile, she felt closer to Eduardo.
    Claude lay beside her as she read, the pages of the book
illuminated by the small night light. She felt his arm steal around her middle.
    "It is late," she said. "Please." She
shrugged him away. "I am informing myself."
    "That is quite obvious. But you needn't do it with
such passion."
    What does he know about passion, she thought. Again, his
arm stole around her. "Sorry," she snapped. "I never mix
business with pleasure." He would not, of course, know which was which.
    "I'm sorry, Marie," he whispered, pecking at her
ear. "I had no idea you were becoming so sensitive."
    "Go to sleep."
    "Really, Marie. I am sorry."
    "So am I," she said, checking herself. It would
be foolish to precipitate an argument. She wondered if she should submit as she
might have done in the past. For some reason, she had never refused him
directly, only obliquely. She pondered an escape route, finally patted his
head.
    "You must sleep. Tomorrow is a busy day." She
bent over and kissed his forehead. "Only a little while longer. I want to
make you proud of me tomorrow."
    "But I am proud of you," he said. Somehow he
seemed placated and rolled further away from her. She felt relief at her wise
strategy. But it frightened her to feel her commitment to Eduardo. She
shivered, her eyes going back to the book.
    "Do you know why the national character of Chile is one of nervousness and dislocation?" She looked over to Claude. He grunted.
    "Earthquakes. Too much fish in the diet. The
mountains." She turned to see if there was any reaction. But Claude had
already drifted away.
    The Chilean Chancellery was a stately old residence located
on Massachusetts Avenue in the midst of Embassy Row. The ambassador's wife was
lovely, tall and willowy. The ambassador, too, was charming, urbane and
distinguished. He was a tall barrel-chested man with well-cut clothes. They
were hardly what one might expect Eduardo's enemies to be like. It annoyed
Marie to be in this setting. It destroyed her subjectivity, her alliance with
Eduardo in all things.
    "We are badly maligned," the ambassador was
saying and although she did not sit next to him, she listened intently,
ignoring her dinner partner, a portly gentleman, the president of some
important company that did business in Chile. "It is true we are ruled by
a junta. But this is the fate of most South American countries. Otherwise we
would be in chaos. We need order first so that we can broaden our economic base
and provide our people with a better alternative for communism, which will
destroy everything we have built since Bernardo O'Higgins and San Martin freed
our country from the Spanish in 1818."
    She knew that, she told herself happily. She had even
remembered the exact date, April 5, 1818.
    "Your April fifth," she blurted out, startling
the ambassador as he looked toward her and smiled broadly.
    "Yes," he said. "That is exactly
right."
    "But what about the DINA?" the man on her right
whispered. She knew that, too. That was their intelligence agency, their terror
troops, as Eduardo had characterized them. They were vicious brutes, he had
told her, who reached out to kill enemies of the Junta in every country of the
world. The mention of the name made her shiver briefly, for she knew that it
was the DINA that Eduardo hated most.
    The ambassador heard the reference and did not ignore it.
He was obviously defensive, but tolerant. He was a seasoned diplomat.
    "You have your CIA. We have our DINA. One must
recognize that every country has enemies. In our case, the enemies are so
numerous that we must take extra precautions. As for assassinations, they are
exaggerated. It is propaganda spread by our enemies." A slight flush on
his neck betrayed both his passion and his discipline.
    "And what of those who are banished from your country?
Or are in your prisons?" She knew it was her voice saying these things,
but could not believe it was her mind