Obsession (Year of Fire) Read Online Free

had escorted him through security and immigration with a minimum of fuss. As he had decided to wait in the American Express VIP lounge, for Centurion cardholders only, Esther had led him to a large, empty room where the waitresses offered him all manner of luxuries. He accepted a freshly squeezed orange juice. Half an hour later, the head of the Air France office at the airport arrived at the VIP room to escort him to the Boeing 777. On the plane Eliah handed her his jacket and, once out of his field of view, she put her nose to the collar and inhaled the cologne. Exquisite , she thought. She checked the garment’s label: Ermenegildo Zegna, Tailor-made . Who was this impressive man in a Zegna suit who had turned Air France’s Ezeiza office upside down with a single phone call?
    In his business-class window seat, calmed by the silence of the plane, Eliah looked out at the runway and thought about Roy Blahetter. He had realized why the thirty-three-year-old—at least that was the age on the report supplied by his contact in the SIDE, the Argentinean Secretariat of Intelligence—had seemed familiar.
    Had the woman said, “He’s her husband”? His heart sank. Why? Why should he care if she was married? Why had he felt that urge to protect her? She was pretty, but no more so than plenty of women he knew, such as, for example, the model Céline, whom he sometimes slept with. He wasn’t proud of that relationship; he was unsettled by the turbulent memories it brought back, upsetting his peace of mind. Nonetheless, Céline’s frenzied, aggressive sexuality attracted him like a moth to a flame. Sometimes he hated her for what she embodied: betrayal, his basest instincts, superficiality, frivolity; occasionally, depending on his mood, he couldn’t bear to look at her after they had had sex.
    He tried to concentrate on Roy Blahetter, the blonde girl’s husband, although the way she had reacted to him made him seem more like her worst enemy. Maybe they were separated? This notion momentarily brightened his dark mood, but it clouded over again as he chastised himself for the thought. What the hell do I care?
    His contact at the SIDE had done his job well; the photograph of Blahetter attached to the document was recent. He started to read thereport, which was dripping with irony. “Argentina,” his informant had written, “is known throughout the world for four things: Diego Armando Maradona; beef; Techint’s seamless steel pipes; and Blahetter Chemicals’ pesticides.”
    The elderly Wilhelm Blahetter, founder of the laboratory and a diverse empire that included metallurgy, construction, financial companies and train and subway operators, was still the head of the family business, which the eighty-six-year-old ran with an iron fist. A nonpracticing Jew, he was a fervent Zionist and often spoke passionately about the greatness of Israel.
    The empire had been born in Córdoba, which Blahetter saw as the perfect launching pad for his business. He would bring his knowledge of pesticides, learned while working in Germany as an assistant to Professor Gerhard Schrader, a genius with chemicals, and apply it in Córdoba where waves of pests, especially locusts, devastated the region, ruining thousands of families. His pesticides would sell like hotcakes in a country where the industry was in its infancy.
    Soon after arriving in Córdoba, he met a Jewish girl whose fortune came from her father’s agricultural businesses. His new father-in-law was very grateful to the young and brilliant Guillermo (he had Hispanicized his name by this time) for having solved the two problems that kept him up at night: insects and his daughter’s spinsterhood. Guillermo Blahetter and Roberta Lozinsky were married in 1940. Their first and only son was born at the end of the same year: they named him Ernesto. He was followed by four girls. Ernesto, Guillermo’s great hope, had started to disappoint him almost immediately after he was born with his