Dying on the Vine

TWENTY

THE following morning Gideon was on his own. Julie and Marti were learning how to make zabaglione, and John had turned down his invitation to join him at the Museo Galileo, formerly the Museo di Storia della Scienze, in Florence. Having the morning to himself suited him fine. The museum, which he also had pretty much to himself, was housed in yet another gorgeous sixteenth-century palazzo (yawn) on the Arno. The building directly abutted the Uffizi, but while the line to enter that celebrated museum already wound around the corner at nine thirty in the morning, getting into the Galileo was simply a matter of walking through the human-size entry cut into the great wooden portal and paying one’s eight euros at the desk.

Once having paid, he paused in the anteroom to call Rocco and suggest lunch if the tenente was available. Rocco was all for it and recommended a little mom-and-pop place he liked on Via della Condotta, a block or so from the Piazza Signoria. “Good food, and we can be in and out in half an hour.”

Gideon wasn’t ordinarily a quick eater, but after last night’s three-hour marathon, “in and out in half an hour” sounded wonderful, and they agreed to meet at one.

“There are a couple of quick things I should probably tell you now, though,” Gideon said. “I don’t really know how important they are. Do you know about the will Pietro and Nola had? What was in it, I mean?”

“It might be in the file somewhere, or maybe Martignetti knows about it, but, no, I don’t think I’m familiar with it. So tell me. But make it short.”

Gideon explained about what he’d heard at Nonna Natalia the previous night. He could hear Rocco’s pen or pencil scratching away intermittently.

“Oh, and the situation with Cesare’s suit has changed since you heard about it too. Now he’s contesting the entire will. Says it’s invalid because Pietro was killed first.”

“That doesn’t make sense to me. Same will, what’s the difference?”

“I know. Severo thinks his lawyer just figures if you open up a can of worms, something good’s bound to come out of it.”

“Out of a can of worms?”

“Bad metaphor.”

“Hold on,” Rocco said. “I got a call coming in from Martignetti.”

The call must have been on a different telephone because Gideon heard what was said, or rather the start of what was said.

“Si, Tonino, che si dice?”

Martignetti’s reply was audible, if only barely. “Houston, abbiamo un problema.”

A few seconds later, Rocco jumped back on the line with Gideon: “I think I better hang up, Gid. See you at one—no, make it one thirty. Leave your cell phone on in case I can’t make it at all.” He clicked off, leaving Gideon to wonder what was up. If the problema The museum was a bigger place than he’d expected, with more rooms, and as far as he knew there were no more than half a dozen visitors in it. It was a shame, he thought, that science drew so paltry an audience, but it certainly made museum-going a lot more pleasant than those folks had it in the next building over. He was able to wander at his leisure and pause as long as he wished at the objects that caught his interest. Of which there were many: evocative, sepia-colored antique maps, huge sixteenth-century globes made to adorn royal apartments, fabulous golden armillary spheres that had tracked the heavens five hundred years ago. There were six-foot-long wooden astronomical telescopes, an ingenious sixteenth century calculator, frightening old surgical instruments, and even an eighteenth-century “mechanical paradox” in which a cylinder placed at the bottom of a set of rails rolled quite indubitably upward when released.

And of course there was a room devoted to Galileo Galilei, which Gideon saved for last, like dessert, and in which he wandered, blissfully absorbed, for almost an hour. There were prisms that the great man had used in his experiments with light, his magnetic lodestones, his precious, wood-and-leather occhialino (little eye) that future generations would call a microscope.

There was even a skeletal remnant for the anthropologist in him: in a transparent, egg-shaped reliquary filigreed with gold resided the gracefully extended middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, pointing straight up.

• • •

THREE blocks from where Gideon stood pondering the implications of that upraised middle finger (a last message from beyond the grave to the Inquisition that had so hounded and persecuted him in his last years?) lay the rest of the scientist’s remains. Housed in a suitably grand marble tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, they had rested for almost three hundred years alongside those of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Leonardo Bruni.

In front of the basilica was the usual broad piazza, at the far end of which, perhaps three hundred feet from the great façade, Rocco Gardella stood before the window of a top-floor apartment, his back to the famous scene. The building in which he stood was yet another restored old palazzo, distinctly upscale, with rental prices to match, but this particular apartment was anything but. The place was squalid, fetid. There were microwave trays and bowls of congealing food from more than one meal—more than five or six meals—on the kitchen counter, on the stove, in the sink. Some of them had been there so long mold was growing on them. There were blackened banana peels, shriveled brown apple cores, cups of caffe latte in which the milk had curdled halfway to yogurt. Emptied, unrinsed cans of soup, beans, and stewed fruit filled the sink. Candy wrappers everywhere. Discarded clothing, mostly socks and underwear, lay in tangled clumps and piles on the floors of all three rooms, and the bathroom as well. The whole place stank of rotting food, dirty laundry, and mildewed towels. Rocco, thinking about rats, had moved with care in looking into dark corners or closets when he’d first arrived, but if there were rats around, they’d scurried into the walls by now.

His attention was fixed on a bed containing yet another set of mortal remains. This one was curled on its side among twisted, grungy sheets, dressed in a shirt and trousers, and still wearing shoes. Bent over the body was the medico legale, doing what they do at such scenes: pressing eyeballs, raising limbs and letting them drop, sniffing at the dead, wide-open mouth. With them in the apartment were a photographer, along with two crime-scene officers busily plying their forceps, plastic envelopes, and mysterious lights, sprays, and powders. Maresciallo Antonio Martignetti was also there, wandering around and poking into drawers and closets.

Ordinarily, the death of a known addict under circumstances that practically screamed overdose wouldn’t be getting the level of scrutiny that this one was, but when the addict himself happened to be a suspect, or at the very least a potential material witness, in a double murder currently under investigation, a different level of effort was called for. And this particular corpse, the former Cesare Baccarreda Cubbiddu had fit that description to a T.

Happily (from Rocco’s point of view), Captain Conforti hadn’t felt that it was necessary to bring in the public prosecutor yet, so there was no officious Migliorini clone to deal with. It was also fortunate, he thought, that the medico legale who had been assigned was the one he found easiest to work with, the round, smiling, and Buddha-like Dr. Melio Bosco, the seventy-six-year-old physician who had been on the scene in the Casentinese when the Cubbiddus’ skeletons had been found.

Bosco had been at it for twenty minutes, and when he straightened up he did it with a groan. “My lumbar spine’s getting too old for this, Rocco,” he said, kneading his back with the fingers of both hands. “I need to find a new line of work, something easy. Look into applying to the Carabinieri, maybe. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Melio, it is awfully easy work. Wouldn’t be challenging enough for you. So, how long has he been dead?”

Bosco stripped off his gloves, tossed them into his bag, and steepled his fingers before his chest. “I would say that it was somewhere between six and twelve hours ago—thirteen to be on the safe side—that this gentleman embarked on his passage across the Styx with that ferryman of ghosts, grave Charon at his oar.”

“Dante?”

“Euripides.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You’re too smart for the Carabinieri. Six to thirteen hours. So that’d be, uh, eight o’clock or so last night at the earliest, four o’clock this morning at the latest?”

“Say, you’re pretty smart yourself.”

“Anything to say on the . . . wait a minute . . . yeah, on the cause of death?”

“Heart failure, I would guess.”

“Induced by a cocaine overdose?”

“Let’s wait for the toxicology report on that, but the circumstances would seem to point us in that direction, wouldn’t you agree?” He nodded toward the marble-topped nightstand beside the bed, with a number of items scattered across its surface: a nail clipper, a ring of keys, a bottle of cough medicine, a couple of ballpoints, some used, wadded tissues. And, more significantly, what was known in the trade as a snuff kit: a makeup-size mirror, a single-edge razor blade, a tiny spoon, a three-inch-long copper tube about the diameter of a drinking straw, and a little bottle with a bit of white sediment in it. Alongside them was the open case, made of expensive leather, that had held them neatly in their places with elastic loops and zippered pockets. It was called a snuff kit because, when advertised for sale, it was uniformly described as a set of accessories for those who took snuff. Advertisers with a sense of humor sometimes made a point of stating that it was never, ever, under any circumstances, to be used for inhaling illegal substances. Rocco had run across a lot of these in his time, but he had yet to run into one owned by an actual snuff-taker. In fact, he had yet to run into an actual snuff-taker.

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Rocco said. “I don’t suppose you’d have anything to say about whether it was accidental, or whether he had somebody helping him across that river?”

“Homicide, you mean? Why would you suspect that?”

“Melio, this guy was Pietro Cubbiddu’s stepson; Nola’s kid. We’d been wondering if he was somehow involved in their deaths. And then, he also happened to be suing the hell out of the Cubbiddus.”

“Was he? Yes, I can see why you’d find this a bit suspicious.”

“The only reason we’re here right now is that Tonino came by to bring him in for questioning on the murders. And this is what he found.”

“Oh my. Well, all I can tell you is that I’ve thus far found no signs of violence on the body, and nothing to suggest forced ingestion. But that doesn’t mean we won’t find something when we get him on the table and have a more thorough look. And when the laboratory tests are analyzed.”

“When can you do the autopsy, Melio?”

“I’ll do it today. I’ll call you later with results and have the written report tomorrow; all part of the cheerful Bosco service, my boy. Oh, I can also tell you, for what it might be worth, that he appears to have died right there in his bed. Livor mortis is consistent with his not having been moved.”

“In other words, you haven’t found anything at all so far to indicate that we’re looking at a homicide. A murder.”

“Which doesn’t mean one didn’t occur, of course.”

“Of course. What, Tonino?”

Martignetti had appeared at his side bearing two glossy booklets. “These were in a drawer in the kitchen.”

Rocco looked at the cover of the top one: Manuale ufficiale all’uso dell’Acro PC 1420. He shrugged. “So? A computer manual.”

“Right.”

He glanced at the other one; an owner’s manual for a printer. “And these are significant for some reason?”

“You’ve looked around the place, Tenente. You remember seeing a computer anywhere? Or a printer?”

“No, but maybe they’re out in his car, or in another drawer somewhere, or—”

Martignetti flipped the computer manual open to the photo on the first page. “It’s a desktop, not a notebook; it’s not going to be in any drawer. The printer’s full-size too. It’s not there either. There’s also no keyboard, no mouse, no cables, no nothing.”

“Well, couldn’t it be that—?”

“But there is an empty space on the desk in the other room that would just fit them. Just about the only empty surface in the whole room.”

Rocco nodded slowly. “So you think somebody came in and took his computer, along with everything that goes with it, after he died, is that what you’re getting at?”

“Or before,” Martignetti said.

“Or during,” said Bosco, and the three men looked at one another.