Dying on the Vine

SEVEN

“SO, okay,” John said relatively patiently as they turned the corner. “How do you know from her skull that she landed on her feet?”

“Well, you remember that basilar ring fracture in her skull?”

“Where the bottom got all pushed in?”

“Mm-hm. Well, there aren’t many ways you can cave in the skull base like that, but impacting on your feet after a two-hundred-foot drop is one of them. The force is so great that it not only fractures your lower limbs, it drives the spinal column up into your brain—”

John grimaced. “Yeesh.”

“—taking the bottom of the skull partway with it, because the vertebrae are wider than the opening of the foramen magnum. It’s also likely, by the way, to drive the leg bones, the femurs, up into the pelvis and punch holes through it on either side—which also happened here—and to crush and dislocate . . . well, you get the idea.”

“I do,” John said thoughtfully. “And so you think—tell me if I have this right—in a nutshell, you figure she had to have been shot after she fell and not before, because no way could she be alive, let alone conscious, after taking a .32 ACP slug right through the middle of her head.”

“Let’s just say it would be highly unusual.”

“But what could be the point? I still don’t understand that. I mean, okay, say she was alive when she went over the edge, she’d be dead as hell once she hit the bottom, right? All those injuries she had?”

“Oh, definitely. There would have been massive internal damage, organs torn from their moorings, probably a snapped spine. And the basilar ring fracture alone—”

“Okay, then, so why shoot her?”

Gideon shrugged. “John, I honestly don’t have an answer for you, but don’t you think this is all starting to get just a little circular? Anyway”—he pointed over John’s shoulder—“we’re here. Let’s go in.”

• • •

L’OSTERIA di Giovanni was in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century palazzo, relatively modest by Florentine standards. Through the modern glass doors they could see a dining room that managed to be both trendy (well-lit, with abstract art on the walls, and widely spaced, white-clothed tables) and yet distinctly Tuscan (honey-colored, roughly plastered walls, red terra-cotta floor tiles, ancient stone accents peeking through the plaster here and there). At this early hour (by Italian standards), there were few diners.

At the door they were spotted from the rear of the restaurant by a rotund, jolly fellow in a grubby green T-shirt, who came toward them at a trot. This rumpled, convivial personage turned out to be Giovanni himself, who seemed pleased to find that they were Americans, but spoke little English himself and turned them over to the part-Asian hostess. (“This my daughter, Caterina,” he told them.”She speak French too.”) Caterina led them to a table in an interior room. This space was cozier and more traditional—an old copper-hooded fireplace with a family crest, stone pillars anchoring the ceiling arches, tables closer together so it was almost like communal dining. More crowded too, and the noise level suggested the diners had been at it long enough to down a few glasses of wine.

“Your waiter will be Bruno. I hope you enjoy.”

Within seconds the busy, balding, smiling Bruno was bobbing at their side—“Buona sera, signori . . .”—setting down ice-frosted flutes of pale, sparkling wine and a fragrant, red-and-white cloth-covered basket. “Complimenti della casa,” he declared. John peeled back the cloth to have a peek. “Chicken McNuggets?” he crowed, as incredulously delighted as a kid finding a live, saddled pony waiting for him in the middle of his backyard.

The ingratiating smile dropped off Bruno’s face. He drew himself up. “Is no’ Chicken McNug’,” he told John, oozing grievance. “Is coccolini. Special pasta. Fry.”

“Okay, amico, no problemo. But they look like, mismo like, Chicken McNuggets, chicken mcnuggo, pollo mcnuggeti, that’s all. Capisce?” John’s forays into foreign languages were rare, but when they occurred they were always surprising, usually multilingual, and, at least to Gideon, highly entertaining.

Bruno stood even taller and frowned even harder. “I speak English. Is no’ necessary—”

“Grazie, Bruno,” Gideon said. “Sembrano deliziosi.”

Bruno huffed something and stomped off.

“Well, they do,” John moped. “What’s the big deal? What’s so terrible about Chicken McNuggets?”

“Can’t think of a thing. What do these taste like?”

John tried one and lit up. “Not bad! Greasy, salty, crunchy . . . wow. We better finish ’em before Marti gets here, though,” he said, reaching for another.

Marti Lau, John’s wife, was a nutritionist at a Seattle hospital, and although she knew better than to try to impose on her husband the same saltless, fatless, sugarless, meatless regimen she inflicted on her captive clientele, John, an enthusiastic trencherman, found it more enjoyable to do his cheeseburger-chomping and milkshake-slurping when she wasn’t around. She herself lived by dietary rules almost as stringent (she permitted herself cheese and dairy products—sparingly) as the super-healthy regimen she imposed on her hospital population and looked it: a five-foot-ten beanpole, healthy as a horse, and, other than her dietary strictures, a lively, funny, laid-back woman who was a terrific fit for John.

Gideon tucked in too and helped the morsel down with a swig of the wine, a fizzy, lemony prosecco. “They are good. I could make a meal of these things.”

“Probably wouldn’t be the first time somebody did,” John said. He used his fork to pluck another from the rapidly emptying basket and more or less flipped it into his mouth, to be quickly followed by one more. When Bruno bobbed up again with menus, Gideon told him they were waiting for two ladies and would order after they arrived. Bruno’s shoulders lifted and fell with acceptance and resignation, as if Fate itself had decreed that these two difficult americani were to be his burden for tonight.

“Hey, Bruno,” John called after him, holding up the basket. “We could stand another order, un altro ordero, of these things. My buddy here, mi amigo, has pretty much gobbled them up, tutto.”

Bruno came back and snatched the basket out of his hand. “Will be cost,” he told them, as if expecting an argument.

“Va bene, amigo, no problemo,” John told him with an expansive wave, but then turned seriously to Gideon. “Doc, you can see that you’ve got Rocco thinking about getting the whole case reopened, can’t you?”

“Well, maybe he should. Something’s weird.”

“Yeah, but you have to understand, it’s not just a question of him going to his boss and saying, ‘We should reopen this case.’ It’s a lot more complicated, a lot dicier, than that.”

“Dicier? Why?”

“Because egos are involved, man. When you close a file, especially on a high-profile homicide—in the Carabinieri, or the FBI, or the Podunk PD—a lot of people—prosecutor, judge, the cop that was in charge—have put their reputations on the line by signing off on it, on whatever the conclusions were. Believe me, they are not happy when some underling comes along wanting to open it up again. So Rocco knows he’s probably gonna get crucified when he brings up the idea. If he brings up the idea. He needs some solid ground to stand on.”

“And you don’t think what I’ve been telling you is solid enough.”

“Well, let me ask it this way. How sure are you about what you’ve been saying?”

“About which part?”

“About the weird part; that the fall came first, that she was already dead before she was shot.”

“Well—”

“No fancy explanations, no lectures.”

“No mumbo jumbo,” Gideon said with a smile.

“Right. Just how sure are you? Say on a scale of one to ten.”

“Come on, John, I can’t do that. Look, when I say that if you’re conscious when you fall, you’re going to land on your feet, I’m making a generalization. You realize that, don’t you? I don’t know that it works that way every single time. How could I know? How could anyone? And even when we say that a bullet traveling through the middle of the brain always produces instant loss of consciousness, how could we possibly know something like that for a certainty? And when we say—”

John tossed back his prosecco in a single impatient gulp. “Goddamn it, it never fails. It’s exactly what my boss says about you. You come on the scene, you throw a monkey wrench into everything, but then, when we want to act on it, the first thing you do is cover your rear end. ‘Gosh almighty, folks, I’m just making a generalization here, don’t hold me to it.’”

“That’s not fair, John. I can tell you what I find and what I conclude from it. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I’m not going to make stuff up.”

John shrugged. “Okay then, tell me what you do know. What are the statistics? What percentage of conscious people land on their feet, and what percentage don’t? Because you can damn well bet it’s gonna get asked in an Italian court if this ever gets there, so give me some figures. Something Rocco can work with.”

“John, you can’t—”

“You don’t have any percentages, do you? There aren’t any, are there?”

Gideon leaned back with a sigh. “Boy, in your next career, you know what you ought to be? A defense lawyer. You sound like the kind of gorilla-for-hire that comes after me in cross-examinations. ‘Can you tell the jury, Doctor Oliver, exactly what percentage of proximal tibial epiphyseal unions are complete by age twenty-two and one half among Hispanic females with one non-Hispanic maternal grandparent, as compared to that among Hispanic females with—’”

John cracked a smile. “Okay, okay, but seriously, are there any statistics? I’m just asking you: do you think Rocco should go back and stir this kettle up again unless you’re pretty sure it needs it? I mean, even if he reopens it and it goes nowhere—especially if it goes nowhere—he’ll still have a bunch of important people ticked off at him.”

“Let me put it this way—”

“Statistics,” John demanded.

With a sigh, Gideon leaned back in his chair. John had a point, but what he wasn’t taking into account was that forensics didn’t have the advantages of the experimental sciences. You couldn’t push a thousand conscious people off a cliff to see how they landed, and then shove a thousand more unconscious ones over the edge to find out how the two groups compared. All you had to work with were the suicides, murders, and accidents that happened on their own, without your help—and of those, only the ones that happened to come your way or happened to get written up, which the great, great majority of them didn’t. And even in those you were familiar with, you could only rarely be certain that a supposed suicide really was a suicide, or an accident an accident. Not after the fact.

Bruno returned with another basket of coccolini and even two more proseccos (without additional cost, presumably). John happily busied himself with them.

True, Gideon thought, there were experiments in which dummies or pig cadavers had been dropped from cranes, and those were instructive, but dummies, even anthropomorphic ones with weight distributions precisely like people’s, weren’t people. The upshot was that your forensic conclusions were often grounded on a shockingly small database, a compilation of your own experiences and those of a few others, along with an intuition that (you hoped) was based on years of subliminal information-processing But there wasn’t any point in going through all the ifs, buts, and maybes with John, who’d heard it all before anyway. “If what you’re asking me is, could I prove, to the certain satisfaction of a judge and jury, that she was still alive when she fell, still conscious, then my answer has to be no. Nobody could prove it because it’s unprovable one way or the other. Do I believe she was? Yes, definitely, and I’ve got some decent scientific backing for my opinion. But would I bet my life on it? No way.”

John shook his head. “Oh, that’s just great.”

Gideon pondered for a moment longer, gaze turned inward, finger to his lips. “Your life, maybe.”

That won a laugh from John. “Okay, so what do you think? Is there enough there to suggest that maybe this was a double murder, not a murder-suicide? Or let me put it this way: if it were you, would you push the buttons to get the case reopened? Considering that, if it didn’t come to anything, you’d be in the doghouse for the next five years.”

Gideon leaned back. “Well, before I did, what I’d really want would be to have a look at the other skeleton, the husband’s skeleton. See if it’s got anything to say for itself. But—”

“Rocco said it’d been cremated.”

“That’s right, he did. But wait a minute.” He put down the prosecco he’d been sipping. “There’s bound to be a report of some kind from the medico: an autopsy or something like it.”

“An autopsy of a bunch of bones? Be pretty short, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably, but you never know what you might find. You know, I think I’ll ask Rocco if he can send me a copy.” He searched for and found Rocco’s card and flipped his cell phone open.

As he began to dial, the sound of a welcome voice floated over his shoulder. “Well, you two weren’t very hard to find. We just followed the words ‘skeleton’ and ‘murder,’ and here you are.” She grinned at the woman standing next to her. “Do we know our husbands or don’t we?”

Gideon looked up laughing, but with a catch in his throat too. It was ridiculous, really; almost a decade of marriage, and the unanticipated sound of Julie’s voice, the sight of a smile—just for him—on that lovely face, still squeezed his heart and sent a surge of gratitude for his good fortune through him. He jumped up.

“Julie, hi! Marti, how’s it going? How was your day? Did you make it to the Bargello?”

The Museo Nazionale del Bargello was one of Florence’s smaller art museums and a little out of the way, but a real gem, housed in an especially beautiful fourteenth-century palazzo, with airy, high-ceilinged, evocative old chambers and sculptures by the likes of Michelangelo, Donatello, and Cellini. Best of all, unlike the perpetually jam-packed Uffizi, there was plenty of room to wander, and no need to elbow anybody out of the way to get close to the art. It was Gideon’s and Julie’s favorite museum in Florence, and Julie had been looking forward to showing it to Marti.

“Oh, we got there, all right,” Julie said.

“All the way to the door,” Marti put in. “Which was closed, and on which a little sign was pasted. In English, sort of: Museum close, becowse on strike.”

“Too bad. Will it be open tomorrow? We’ll still be here in the morning.”

“That information,” Marti said, “was not forthcoming.”

“But we did get to the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens,” Julie said, “so, all in all, it was a good day.”

John gestured to the two unoccupied chairs. “So, join us. We promise, no more talk about skeletons and murders.”

Marti began to sit down, but Julie stopped her. “I wouldn’t count on that, Marti. I’m looking forward to a nice, long, two-hour Italian dinner, and I don’t know about John, but I doubt that Gideon can go that long without skeletons creeping into the conversation. Let’s go freshen up and let them get it out of their systems.”

“No, really—” Gideon said.

Marti shook her head. “Nup, Julie’s right. You two were right in the middle of something. At least finish that. Anyway, I need a touch-up. We’ve been out all day.”

“Well, I might as well finish getting that call to Rocco out of the way, then,” Gideon said as the women left in search of the restroom. “Shouldn’t take long.”

Rocco picked up at once. “Pronto.”

“Rocco, it’s Gideon.”

“Hello, Gid. Look, we’re just about to eat. Could I maybe call you a little later?”

“Sure, but this’ll just take a second. I’d really like to have a look at any medical reports that were made on the husband’s skeleton. Would it be possible for you to e-mail me copies down in Figline Valdarno?”

“Yeah, it’d be possible, but it’d take about a year to get the clearance to do it. If you could come back into Florence, you can look at them here.”

“Can’t. Class until one, and then we head straight for Figline. How about the day after?

“Thursday’s not so good for me, I’m kind of tied up. Unless you could be here before things start, say eight o’clock?”

“Will do. I’ll be there at eight A.M. sharp. I expect John’ll be there too.” He threw an inquiring glance at John, who responded with a shocked “Eight A.M., as in eight o’clock in the morning?” John was not known as an early riser. “Are you kidding me?”

“He says he’s greatly looking forward to it,” Gideon said. “Where do we come?”

“Regional headquarters. Borgo Ognissanti 48. It’s not that far from Santa Maria Novella, not even a ten-minute walk.”

“Thanks, Rocco, see you Thursday. Sorry about interrupting your dinner.”

“No problem,” Rocco said, and then, mostly to himself: “Just let me jot this down. P. Cubbiddu report for—”

Startled, Gideon jerked upright. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. What’d you think I said?”

“Cubbiddu.”

“Oh. Yeah. I know, it’s a weird name—Sardinian. These people—”

“We know these people,” said Gideon. “We know these people. That’s where we’re going tomorrow, to the winery, to Villa Antica. That’s how come I know Figline Valdarno.”

“You’re kidding me! Why didn’t tell me that before?”

“Now, how could I tell you that when you never told us—”

“Okay, okay, you’re right, but how do you come to know them? Oh, jeez, I really gotta go. I’m gonna get my head handed to me if the food gets any colder. Tell me about it later.” And he was gone.

Marti and Julie had returned while Gideon was on the phone.

“Who were you talking about the Cubbiddus to?” Julie asked as she took her seat.

“Rocco Gardella. A lieutenant in the Carabinieri.”

“A carabiniere? Has something happened in the case? Have they found them?”

“Yes, both of them, Pietro and Nola. Their bodies.”

They waited for more, but Gideon just sat there, abstracted, hands steepled in front of his mouth, and it was John who had to fill them in on the afternoon’s events.

Julie had been watching her husband. “Gideon? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing, really, it’s just . . . well, it’s kind of . . . I don’t know, disconcerting . . . disturbing . . . to suddenly find out that the bones you’ve been handling so casually and treating like . . . like specimens of some kind, belonged to someone you know, a person you’ve talked to and dined with. It just brings you up short.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Just a brief funk.”

Julie nodded her understanding. “I know.” She waited a moment for him to come all the way out of it. “Gideon, why do you suppose Linda didn’t even let us know they’d been found?”

She was referring to Linda Rutledge, an old friend of theirs who was married to the middle son, Luca Cubbiddu, and who was the reason the four of them were heading down to Figline Valdarno the next day to spend the rest of the week at the Villa Antica.

“Well, the investigation was wrapped up only a few days ago. We’re not really that close to them, and I guess she figured it could wait until she saw us. After all, it’s not as if anybody thought they could still be alive after all this time.”

Bruno showed up with a fresh basket of coccolini and two proseccos for the newcomers, and menus for all. The arrival of two attractive women at his table had brought a fresh smile to his face. “Complimenti della casa,” he announced, with a far deeper bow than he’d given Gideon and John. Even his voice was a richer, more seductive purr. With a flourish he peeled back the checkered cloth like a magician revealing a wonderful surprise. “Coccolini.” And waited for his applause.

Julie accommodated him. “Mm,” she said, trying one. “Meraviglioso.”

Bruno dipped his chin in gratitude and backed away a few steps before turning and going into the kitchen. Naturally enough, Marti wouldn’t touch, let alone eat, anything deep-fried, but—thank goodness—she wasn’t one of those people who went out of her way to make you feel guilty for indulging. She simply ignored them. She sipped her prosecco, though. With wine she had no quarrel.

There were more questions now, and when Bruno showed up again to take their orders, John and Gideon were still explaining. Not having had an opportunity to examine the menus, they asked Bruno for his recommendations. Julie and Gideon took them: the antipasto platter, followed by ravioli stuffed with porcini mushrooms and black truffles, and then veal chops with roasted cherry tomatoes. And a liter of the house red, a Carmignano rosso from nearby Brucianesi. No dessert. Gideon then interpreted for Marti, whose hold on Italian was even shakier than John’s. Tuscany, of course, is justly famous for its beef and meat dishes, so finding something for her on the menu wasn’t easy.

He requested the minestrone for her, a dinner-sized portion. Bruno nodded, writing on his pad. He approved, but not wildly.

“But can she get it made with vegetable stock, not chicken stock?” Julie asked in Italian.

Bruno was shocked. “Ma certamente non!” But then he got it. He gestured at Marti. “Ah, vegetariana?”

She responded with a vigorous nod. “Si.”

He waved a magnanimous hand. All would be well. “I take care of. You leave to me. You will like very much.”

“Thank you, Bruno. That sounds wonderful. Mera . . . meraviglioso.” She expressed no reservations or caveats about salt or fat. When dining out, she very sensibly allowed herself considerable leeway.

Bruno, pleased, turned to John. “Signore?” He tried a little levity. “Sorry, no more Chicken McNug’, ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha,” said John.

Gideon knew that John was longing to try Florence’s famous bistecca alla fiorentina, a reliably gigantic slab of prime porterhouse served ultra-rare and usually simply flavored; nothing more than salt, olive oil, or butter, and perhaps a little rosemary or lemon. But with Marti there, even though she would make no comment, it would dent his pleasure with a tinge of guilt. “I’ll have what they’re having,” he said, making his request clear by gesturing at Julie and Gideon.

As Bruno, pleased with his tableful of americana after all, hurried to the kitchen to place the orders, Gideon’s cell phone emitted its soft bip-bip, the least intrusive sound he could find on its ringtone menu. When he opened it, Rocco was at the other end. “Hey, Gid, I was thinking more about all this. You said you’re going to be spending some time with the Cubbiddus the next couple of days?”

“Right. We’ll be staying with them till Sunday.”

“Well, look, let’s keep all this stuff to ourselves for now, okay? I think it’d be better if they didn’t know about these questions that have come up. In fact, I think it’d be better if nobody knew.”

“If you mean our wives, I’m afraid you’re a little late.”

“Well, tell them to shut up about it too if they know what’s good for them.”

“Oh, right. We’ll do just that.”

“Slap ’em around a little if they don’t like it.”

“Yeah, right, excellent idea, I’ll make a note of that.” He closed the phone and slipped it into a pocket. “Rocco’s asked us not to mention any of this to the Cubbiddus.”

“He’s planning on reopening the case, then?” John asked.

“Thinking about it, I guess. He didn’t say.”

Bruno returned with the wine and poured a little for everyone. They clinked glasses and settled back.

“You know, I think I’m going to give Linda a quick call while we wait,” Julie said, clicking buttons on her own phone.

“But—” Gideon began.

“No, not to talk about Pietro and Nola, just to touch base and make sure we’re all still expected. What with the bodies having just been found, and this police determination of murder-suicide . . . Linda?” she chirped. “Hi, this is Julie. . . .”

Linda Rutledge was their connection to Villa Antica and to the Cubbiddu clan. Julie and Linda had met more than a decade earlier when they were both nineteen-year-old students enrolled in culinary arts programs. (Linda had been interested in wine and food even then; Julie had been going through a hotel-management phase before switching to a multidisciplinary degree program in wildlife studies, psychology, and national-park management.) To cut costs they’d shared a hotel room at a hospitality-industry exposition in Chicago and had become fast friends, a relationship that continued even after Julie married and Linda remained single. A couple of times a year, Linda had flown from her home in Tennessee to spend a few days with the Olivers, and every once in a while, Julie had returned the favor to go on some kind of brief jaunt with her old friend, who was by then the food and beverage director at a big Memphis hotel.

Then, a few years ago, Linda had met two of the Cubbiddu sons—Luca and Nico—at a winery conference in Basel. Luca and Linda had fallen head over heels in love, and six months later she was married and living happily with her husband in Tuscany, in one of the spacious “noble apartments” of Villa Antica. Since then, Julie had heard less from her, but a year ago, when she and Gideon were on an Italian vacation, they’d accepted her invitation to visit her there; it had been only a month or so before Pietro and Nola’s disappearance. Expecting to stay only overnight, they’d wound up canceling their other reservations and remaining for a week. They’d gotten to know and like Luca, and they’d met the others at the mandatory (by order of Pietro) daily family luncheons; noisy, spirited repasts of five or six courses, mostly simple, hearty Sardinian or Italian fare built around a main dish of spit-roasted rabbit, goat, or lamb that had been turning over a charcoal fire all morning. And always there were bottles of the same hearty, rustic wines that Pietro’s father and grandfather had made back on the farm, wines that Pietro had been drinking every day of his life since the age of five, and that were still closest to his heart.

They’d enjoyed themselves immensely, and this time around, being more or less in the neighborhood, they had pretty much invited themselves back. Linda and Luca’s response had been gratifyingly enthusiastic. It would be at the tail end of the annual Val d’Arno Wine Festival, put on by the valley’s winery consortium, the program committee of which was chaired this year by Linda in her role as Villa Antica’s public relations manager. So, it would be a busy time, but a lively one.

And the very next day, Villa Antica itself would be putting on its third annual Vino e Cucina program, a four-day course, conducted in English, that was primarily a cooking class, but was richly leavened with material on Italian wines and culture. The program would be led by Luca, who had founded it.

Although John and Marti had never met Linda, she had invited all four of them to attend the program free of charge. Julie and Marti had accepted but had insisted on paying the €500 fee (they were, after all, already being put up at the villa for the better part of a week), while John and Gideon had politely and unsurprisingly declined. They would find other things to do, and Thursday morning was already allocated: they would be at Borgo Ognissanti 48 in Florence.

When the antipasto plate came, they automatically adopted the gastronomic division of labor they’d become accustomed to when the four of them ate together: John, Julie, and Gideon tucked into the salami, prosciutto, and paté, while Marti no less happily went after the olives, the roasted peppers, and the marinated artichoke hearts and eggplant.

“Well, everything’s on, and they’re expecting us,” Julie said, slipping her iPhone into her bag. “Linda told me about finding Pietro and Nola, and about the police investigation and all. It was a little awkward pretending we didn’t know anything about it, but . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, we’re supposed to meet Linda and Luca at the wine festival tomorrow afternoon. At three, if we can make it. It’s in the main square of Arezzo.”

Gideon nodded. “That’ll work. Seminar’ll finish up at one.”

“Oh, and she’s taking us up on our offer to help out at the festival—your offer, anyway,” she said to Gideon. “They want you to be a judge.”

“Do they now? For a wine tasting?” Gideon, who thought rather more of his wine expertise than was strictly warranted, was flattered.

“Um, not exactly. For the grape stomp.”

“Grape stomp,” Gideon repeated suspiciously. “And what is a grape stomp?”

“It’s a contest. Teams of people take off their shoes and socks and stomp around in barrels of grapes to see which team can squish them and produce the most juice. Being a judge is an honor,” she added but she couldn’t help laughing.

Gideon’s visage remained somber. “What do they need judges for? Wouldn’t it be easier just to measure the amount of juice?”

“Well, yes, and that’s what they do, but you’ve written books, you’ve been on television. You’re a celebrity.”

“Only one of my books has been published in Italy, and its sales were in the low three figures. And I’ve never been on Italian television, so how am I a celebrity?”

“Oh, don’t be such a grump. Linda said you’d add gravitas to the situation. You’d be a cultural ornament. You’ll do it, won’t you?”

“Great,” muttered Gideon. “A cultural ornament.”

“Oh, come on, Gideon, you will do it, won’t you?” Julie prompted. “All it takes is giving the awards to the winners.”

“Giving the awards to the winners, boy, I don’t know, that sounds pretty hard. I’m not sure I’m up to—urp.”

She had speared one of the ravioli on his plate and jammed it into his mouth. “Here, have a ravioli. It’ll improve your mood.”

He chewed and swallowed. “That’s raviolo, for your information. There’s no such thing as one ravioli.”

“Or maybe it won’t,” she said, and they all laughed and clinked glasses again.

John joined in, but he was still mulling over Thursday’s appointment with Rocco. “Eight o’clock in the frigging morning,” he grumbled. “Honest to God.”