Dying on the Vine

NINETEEN

JULIE peered doubtfully up at the time-eaten marble street plaque affixed to the corner of an old building. “Via del Bicchieraia,” she read aloud. “This is it.”

“Nah, can’t be,” John said.

The other two in their party, Marti Lau and Gideon, had to agree with him. More alley than street, barely two car widths wide, lacking sidewalks, and bordered by moldering eighteenth-century, three-story apartment houses faced with peeling stucco that showed their rubble-stone construction, Via del Bicchieraia didn’t look like a street that housed the best restaurant in Tuscany.

It was only two blocks long, overshadowed at one end by the stark “tower of a hundred holes,” the grim, thirteenth-century Romanesque bell tower of the Church of Santa Maria della Pieve, so called because of the eight forbidding stories of mullioned windows that encircled it. At the other end it was closed off by an old apartment building on a cross street. With the looming tower and the leaning buildings, it was doubtful if the sun ever made it all the way to the street itself.

“Well, he said it was here,” Gideon said. “Number twenty-three. Let’s have a look.”

They had to watch their step because there was no sidewalk; the irregular, stone-block pavement was uneven; and they had to negotiate around cars that were parked along the sides, jammed up against the walls of the buildings. When a small panel truck came down the street, they had to hurry to get around a parked car and flatten themselves against a wall.

“If two cars come along from opposite directions, it’s every man for himself,” John muttered.

But they were lucky, making it without incident to number twenty-three, the address Luca had given them. It was a storefront, its two windows partially covered by warped, gray shutters that surely hadn’t been repainted in this century, and maybe not in the last. No menu outside—not even a chalkboard—no stickers indicating acceptable credit cards, nothing but a couple of barely legible words painted in fading green directly on the stone lintel above the door: La Cucina di Nonna Natalia. Grandma Natalia’s Kitchen.

“This is it, all right,” Marti said.

“Well, he did say it wasn’t very impressive,” Gideon said.

“He got that right,” said John.

“Or very welcoming,” Julie said. “Do you think maybe it’d be better to wait for them?” She glanced up the street for Luca and Linda, who were parking the winery van in an underground lot a few blocks away. “They should only be another minute.”

At that moment, though, two automobiles did turn onto the street from opposite ends, and that decided them. Something had to give. Gideon pulled the door open—predictably, the hinges squealed—and in they went.

The aromas were wonderful; homey and warm, but with something subtle about them that was hard to pin down. The restaurant itself was less wonderful, a narrow room, only two tables wide, with an aisle down the middle. The walls held a single row of shelving on which bottles of red wine were sporadically displayed, the flooring was of much-worn tiles of cheap, wood-veneered plywood, and the tablecloths (which were white linen or cotton in almost every eating place in Italy) were red-and-white-checked plastic, the kind you found in cheap Italian chains in America. The diners, mostly older people, didn’t seem to be bothered by their shabby surroundings. They were eating happily and with gusto. Even for an Italian restaurant, the noise level was high. There was lots of laughter and the frequent clinking of glasses.

“You know, I like this place,” Gideon announced. “It’s, I don’t know . . .”

“Real?” said Julie, laughing.

“That’s it.”

An overweight woman came heavily forward to greet them. Other than wearing a scowl instead of a smile, she was an Italian version of Aunt Jemima: a white kitchen towel was wrapped bandanna-like around her head, and a white, stained apron covered a shapeless red-and-white-checked housedress that matched the tablecloths.

“You came here to eat?” she somewhat suspiciously asked in Italian.

“No, to buy car,” Marti said, but only to herself.

“Yes, please, signora,” said Gideon, the designated Italian-speaker.

“Americani?”

“Yes.”

“Not many Americans like this food.”

“We’d like very much to try it.”

“Dinner costs fifty euros. Including wine and mineral water.” It was delivered more like a warning than an information bulletin.

“That’s fine,” Gideon said.

“Bueno,” said John. “Bene, bene.”

She appeared to be of two minds about whether or not to let them come in any farther, but finally she nodded with a sigh. “All right, follow me.”

“There’ll be six of us altogether,” Gideon told her. “Our friends are on the way.”

This was met with a shrug. She led them through an archway to a smaller, extremely plain room that held only two tables, both unoccupied, and began to shove them together. Gideon and John jumped to assist, receiving no thanks for their efforts. “She’s not exactly thrilled to see us, is she?” Julie whispered to Gideon. “I’m getting a little uncomfortable.”

“How long until your friends come?” the woman asked.

“They’ll be here any minute.”

She grunted and moved off.

“Perhaps we could have some wine while we wait?” Gideon called.

Another nod.

“White wine for me,” said Marti, who had enough Italian to manage that much.

“No white wine. Only red. You want white wine, you have to go someplace else. Plenty of other restaurants in Arezzo.”

Marti didn’t understand it all, but Gideon did. He was ready to go find one of the other restaurants, but he didn’t want to disappoint Luca. But his tone was sharp: “Please bring us menus to look at while we wait. The special menus.”

“No menus.”

“No menus? How will we know what to order?”

It appeared that Gideon wasn’t the only one who was annoyed. Clearly, the woman had had it with them, and her voice went up a few decibels. “Hey. You go to the symphony, to the opera?”

“What? Yes.” But he stared at her, wondering if he’d misunderstood.

She stared fiercely back at him. “And when you go to the symphony, do you tell the conductor what to play?”

“I . . .”

“No, you trust that he knows what he is doing. You put yourself in his hands.”

“Signora—”

But whatever he was about to say was cut off by a burst of booming, full-throated laughter—only Luca laughed like that—from the archway. The woman looked up and, like some kind of quick-change magic trick, her scowl was replaced by a lovely if crooked-toothed smile that completely altered her personality and would have lit up the room on its own. “Luca!” she cried joyfully. She pointed at Gideon and then shook the finger at Luca. “You put them up to this, you scoundrel!” She was laughing almost as hard as he was, and her bare upper arms jiggled like Jell-O.

“Indeed I did, Amalia,” Luca said.

Indeed he had, Gideon thought. “And make sure to ask for the special menus,” he’d told them earnestly an hour earlier. “It will show them that you know what you’re doing, that you’re not just a bunch of dumb tourists who wandered in by mistake.”

It took a few seconds to explain to the others what had been going on, by which time everybody was laughing and was friends with everybody else. Amalia actually squeezed Gideon’s shoulder affectionately, a friendship offering. “I bring wine now,” she said in English.

“You have to stop doing that, Luca,” Linda said as they sat down. “One of these days, she’s going to dump a pot of pasta e fagioli on your head.”

“Yeah, thanks a whole lot, Luca,” John grumped.

Luca was still chuckling. “I can’t help it. I love to hear her do her symphony speech.” He went into an Italian-accent falsetto. “‘Do you tell the conductor what to play?’” A little more laughter, and then he sobered. “That lady, Amalia Vezzoni, is the finest cook I know, the finest in Tuscany. She’s my, what do you call it, my role model. In fact . . . well . . .”

“Oh, go ahead and tell them,” Linda said. “Why not?”

“Sure, why not? Well, the fact is, Amalia’s getting older now, and her husband, who used to work with her, died last year. So we’ve been talking about buying into this place, working with her—and learning from her—for a while, and then, when she’s ready to call it quits, buying the whole thing from her. Time for me to get out of Villa Antica, anyway. It’s not the same with Franco in the driver’s seat, and anyhow, it’s really food I’m excited about now, not winemaking. What do you think?”

Gideon couldn’t help glancing around the place. “Um—”

His expression gave him away. “Yeah, we know,” Linda said. “It’s a little tacky. Amalia’s kind of let the place go. We plan on putting some money into making some improvements.”

“But not too many,” Luca said. “We don’t want a fancy place, that’s not the point.” He leveled a forefinger at Linda. “And nothing changes at all in the kitchen.”

“Well, maybe some of those old cast-iron pots, the ones with holes in them?” Linda suggested.

“They can be repaired. No, the kitchen is beautiful, it’s like my grandmother’s, just five times as big. The sign out front will have to change, though. It’s going to be La Cucina di Nonna Gina.” With that happy thought, he settled back, smiling.

Amalia returned with a waiter and with two bottles of wine, six glasses, and a couple of baskets of crusty bread. Proudly, she held up one of the bottles for Luca to examine.

“Oho, Brunello di Montalcino,” he read. “From Mastrojanni. Wonderful. Is this what everybody’s getting tonight, or just us?”

“Shh, better not to ask,” Amalia whispered.

The waiter didn’t bother to offer him the cork to sniff or a dollop of wine to sip, but simply filled all six glasses, confident they’d be acceptable.

And they were. Luca raised his glass in salute after tasting.

“They wanted white wine,” Amalia told him, obviously an in-joke, but an indulgent one, like a story one parent tells to another about their child’s escapades that day. Luca smiled in response.

“So what’s wrong with white wine?” a pouting Marti wondered. “We’ve been to some first-rate restaurants in Florence and had no trouble getting a pretty damn good local pinot grigio, or a Soave, or—”

“Well, yes,” Luca answered, “it’s true you can get some ‘pretty damn good’ whites here, but Tuscany’s red wines are matchless. Its whites . . . can be matched. And Amalia, like me, is a perfectionist. As you’ll see shortly.” He dunked a crust of bread in his glass, popped the sopping chunk into his mouth, and rolled his eyes with contentment. “Ahh. So. Well. Gideon. You said you were going back to the funeral home to look at the bones again. . . .”

“Which we did.” He and John had spent two frustrating and ultimately unproductive hours with the remains. They’d filled their wives in, but not Luca and Linda.

“And did you come up with anything?” Linda asked. “Do you know what killed him? Any ideas at all?”

Gideon was surprised that they wanted to talk about it at dinner, but if they were game, he was game. Linda and Luca were technically suspects, but, perhaps unwisely, he had excluded them from his own list of possibles. “Not really, Linda. There are those green-stick fractures I was telling you about, but I’m guessing they probably came from the fall. Or put it this way: I have no reason to think they didn’t; they’re perfectly consistent with a fall from a height.”

What he didn’t tell them—why confuse things even more than they already were?—was that the fact that they were consistent with fall-type injuries didn’t mean they were inconsistent with ballistic-type injuries. When bullets hit long bones, or flat bones, or ribs, they didn’t necessarily make the nice, round, internally beveled holes that they made in the skull, and which were instantly recognizable as entrance wounds. Instead, they often just broke or shattered the bones, so they looked no different than bones that had taken some other kind of blunt-trauma hit . . . such as a fall. And Pietro’s remains had plenty of those.

“Nothing else, huh?” Luca asked. “No clues at all?”

“Afraid not, but look, you have to remember, there are all kinds of ways to kill someone without leaving any marks on the skeleton.”

“That’s true,” Linda agreed. “Poison, suffocation—”

“Well, yes, but even knives and guns. It’s not all that rare for a knife or even a slug to penetrate the heart without touching a rib or the sternum or the scapula or anything bony. So not finding anything doesn’t prove that there wasn’t anything.”

“But Gideon, I was thinking,” Julie said slowly, “if you didn’t find anything, doesn’t that mean it’s possible there wasn’t anything? That nobody killed him? That he just died from, I don’t know, a stroke, a heart attack. Anything. People die.”

“Well, yes, of course it’s possible, but if he died of natural causes, why shoot him a month later?”

“Why shoot him a month later if he died of unnatural causes?”

“And why kill Nola?” John asked her.

“And why throw them off the cliff?” Marti asked.

“Heck, I don’t know. Don’t jump all over me. I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t see that the experts”—an eyebrow-raised glance at John and Gideon—“are doing any better. In fact, for all we know, maybe killing Nola was the whole point of it, and making it look as if Pietro did it was a way of covering it up so—”

“If that’s what it was about,” Gideon said, “then I’d have to say it sure was convenient for the killer that he just happened to have Pietro’s dead body lying around just waiting for him. Talk about lucky heart attacks.” He began to laugh, but then caught a glimpse of Luca’s face. “Luca, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting. It’s your father we’re talking about. I shouldn’t be—”

Luca waved him silent. “Forget it. Time to change the subject anyway. Here comes our dinner. Get ready for the best that Italy has to offer.”

But Gideon found the five-course meal disappointing. There weren’t many Italian dishes that he actively disliked, but this meal had them all, starting with ribollita, the bread-thickened bean-and-cabbage affair that was somewhere between soup and stew, that you could eat equally well with a fork or a spoon. Then came a taglierini and truffle dish about which he had no complaints, but the main course of ossobuco—veal shanks braised in wine with tomatoes, carrots, and onions—was his least favorite Italian dish of all.

The others all seemed to love everything that was put in front of them (Marti passed on the ossobuco, of course, having two lip-smacking bowls of the ribollita instead), and after a while Gideon realized what his problem was, and why he’d never liked these particular foods. Nonna Natalia’s cooking reminded him too much of his own Polish-Austrian great aunt’s productions. The ribollita was blood-brother to her gluey cabbage and barley soup, and the ossobuco was close kin to her dreaded schmorbraten—rump roast simmered on the range top—and simmered, and then simmered some more, until the gray meat literally slid off the bone and fell apart into shreds. It was from Tante Frieda’s pot roast that he’d learned firsthand that muscle was constituted of long, separable, stringy fibers.

Even the dessert was straight out of Tante’s kitchen: bread pudding. But here he had to admit that Nonna Natalia’s budino di pane, had Tante Frieda’s ofenschlupfer beat by a mile. Frieda made up for overcooking everything she cooked on the range by under-baking everything she did in the oven. Her “famous” bread pudding was a crustless, sodden, overly sweet lump of dough, edible because it had cinnamon and raisins in it, but nothing to look forward to. Nonna Natalia’s budino was another thing altogether, brown and crunchy on top, delicate as a fine soufflé inside, only slightly sweetened, and filled with perfectly cooked apples, figs, and pears; as warming to the soul as it was to the body as it glided down his throat. Eating it was enough to make him forgive Nonna Natalia for her ossobuco, and he happily spooned up a second helping from the family-style bowl it had come in, as did most of the others.

Only as they finished their desserts, pushed back from the table a little, and turned to their espressos, biscotti, and glasses of Vin Santo, did the talk return from food and wine to the events of the day.

Luca loosened his belt a notch or two, shoved his chair back from the table, and patted his belly. “Well. I suppose, except for Linda, none of you guys have heard the latest development from the Cesare branch of the family.”

“We know about the wrongful death suit, if that’s what you mean,” Marti said.

“No, that was hours ago, ancient history. This is a weird new twist.”

“This sounds bad,” Gideon said.

“It’s not good. You remember when Severo went out to call his attorney? He couldn’t wait to tell her she might as well forget about suing us, because, what do you know, babbo couldn’t have killed Nola, being dead himself at the time?”

Gideon nodded. “Sure.”

“Well, it worked. She listened to what he had to say, she took an hour to think it over, and she did it. She dropped the suit.”

“And this is not good, why?” John asked.

“Because, instead of suing Franco for four million or whatever it was, now she’s challenging the entire will. She wants it declared invalid.”

“On what grounds?” Marti asked.

Luca waited while Amalia returned with the bottle to refill the glasses of those who wanted more Vin Santo. Only Gideon declined: too sweet for his taste. He considered asking if there was any brandy, but decided it was safer to let it pass.

“So, what you think?” a smiling Amalia asked in English when she’d finished pouring and setting the bottle down on the table for their continuing use. “Pretty good dinner, no?”

Everyone, Gideon included, agreed that it had been superb, even better than they’d expected. Only when she departed, broadly smiling, did Luca come back to Marti’s question.

“On what grounds? On the grounds that, since Pietro died before Nola—weeks before her, according to the brilliant, world-famous Skeleton Detective . . .”

Gideon sighed. “Gee, why do I have this feeling that I’m about to get blamed for something?”

“. . . that, since Nola outlived Pietro, everything should technically have gone to her when he died.”

“Wait a second,” Gideon said. “I thought his will left pretty much everything to Franco—the winery and all—with you and Nico and Cesare getting monthly stipends for a few years. Is that not right? Or did he leave something to Nola too?”

Luca poured some more wine for Linda and for himself, and passed the bottle to John. “No, that’s not right, not quite. The two of them had—I forget what it’s called in English—they had the same will—”

“A joint will?” Marti suggested.

“That’s it, yeah. Consisting of one paragraph. Three sentences. Exactly a hundred and fifteen words; I counted them once.”

“Pretty short for a will disposing of an estate like that,” said John.

“No kidding. And they didn’t even have that until Severo practically forced them into it, kicking and screaming.”

The Cubbiddus, it seemed, like many of their brethren in Barbagia at that time, didn’t believe in written wills. When a man died, his possessions passed to his eldest son, and that was that. Attorneys? Probate? The courts? No need for them, not in those mountain villages. Everyone knew the way it worked, and no one would think of contesting it when it happened. For one thing, nobody had anything worth fighting over, but even more important was the fear of what they called malocchio, the evil eye that was always on the lookout for you to make some slip, leave some opening that would let the spirits of misfortune and calamity into your life. And one way to do that, sure to bring laughter to those malevolent entities, was to “make plans” for your own death or that of someone you loved, or to talk about it, or even to think about it. So . . . no wills. And the authorities couldn’t be bothered with doing anything about it, not if it took going into those primitive, bandit-ridden mountain villages.

Luca paused, remembering. “I know this sounds like something from the Middle Ages, but, you know, I was born there, and I lived there, in Nuragugme—population forty-two, including us—until I was fifteen and babbo got married and moved us all here. Believe me, that’s the way it was, and that’s the way the two of them were. And the way they stayed. You’d think a guy with so much on the ball, all that business sense, couldn’t possibly be that superstitious—”

“No, I wouldn’t think that at all,” said Gideon. “Smart people can be pretty dumb when they venture outside of their own ballparks.”

Luca smiled. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Anyway, for years they refused to consider having wills at all. It drove Severo nuts, and then finally—this was, like, no more than five years ago—”

“Four years,” Linda said. “They did it just after I got here.”

“Four years ago,” said Luca, “he finally convinced them things were different here, and if they didn’t have a will, there’d be hell to pay when they died. I think they agreed to sign the thing just to make him stop talking about dying.”

“Well, what did it say, Luca?” Julie asked.

“It didn’t leave everything to Franco; they left everything to each other.”

“Each other?” John said. “So how did Franco wind up with the winery?”

“Here’s the way it worked: The first sentence says that they leave everything to each other. The second one says something like ‘If my spouse should predecease me, then I leave everything to my beloved son Franco,’ with those stipends to the others.”

“To Franco? Nothing about Cesare? I’m surprised Nola would have gone along with that,” Gideon said. “I only met her a few times, but she struck me as being pretty strong-minded. I’d have thought she’d have fought for more than that for him.”

“She probably did,” Luca said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re right about her being strong-minded, and she sure as hell didn’t hesitate to speak her mind.”

“I’ll say,” Linda said with a chuckly laugh. “If you think it was tough being her stepson, you should’ve tried being her daughter-in-law.”

“Yeah, but when it came to final decisions, she was just as old-school as he was. It’s the husband, the papà, who decides, and he does it on his own. He doesn’t take a vote.”

“That’s true,” Linda said, “and there’s something else. I don’t know about you, Luca, but I’m not really positive that Nola understood what was in that will. For one thing, she never did learn to read that well. For another—and Severo told me this—she seemed to think that if she didn’t look at it when she signed it, it might get around that evil eye she was worried about. So she kept her eyes closed. Severo had to guide her hand to the right place.”

“Hadn’t heard that,” Luca said. “Sounds right, though.”

“What did the third sentence say?” Gideon said.

Luca had to think for a moment. “Oh, yeah, that was the short one. It names Severo as executor. That’s it.”

“I don’t get it,” Marti said. “If I understand you right, it says that Franco gets it all, whoever predeceases whoever, right? So what’s Cesare’s grievance? What’s the lawyer expect to get for him?”

“That I can’t tell you. I’m already confused enough. Maybe she’s going to say Nola could have fought to change the will, if she’d lived. Severo thinks it’s just that she wants to get it hauled into court. Once that happens, all bets are off.”

“Just like in the States,” Marti said.

“Not only that,” said Linda, “but the way things work here, once the lawyers really get their teeth into it, it’ll be tied up for, like, the next ten years, and everything around here would be in limbo.”

“Just like in the States,” Marti said again, and hoisted her glass in toast. “Here’s to Shakespeare’s finest quote—”

“Henry VI!” someone said

And then, amidst general laughter spontaneous enough to turn heads: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”