Dying on the Vine

FOUR

The following week, Tuesday, September 6, 2011

THE church of Santa Maria Novella is one of the great treasures of Florence. Built in the fourteenth century, this immense basilica boasts tranquil Romanesque cloisters, venerable statuary, and works of art by Renaissance masters like Vasari, Giotto, and Masaccio. No travel guide to Italy fails to rave about it, and it is an obligatory stop for even the most sore-footed, art-weary tourist.

But there is one wing of the church—a monumental wing, half the complex, in fact—that tourists do not see and that guide books either ignore altogether, or sidle by with no more than a curt “Closed to visitors.” This is the aptly named Great Cloister, the most ancient and historic part of the church. For two centuries now, in one of history’s more peculiar marriages of church and state (courtesy of Napoleon Bonaparte), this tranquil quadrangle, along with the four low buildings that enclose it with their gracefully arched and frescoed porticos, has been the property of Italy’s national gendarmerie, the Arma dei Carabinieri. For the last two decades it has been their Warrant Officer and Brigadier Training School.

During this particular September, it was more or less on loan, serving as the venue for the Fourteenth International Symposium on Science and Detection, a week of seminars for mid-level law-enforcement personnel from all over the world: Indian sub-inspectors, Russian militsiya majors, Japanese NPA keishi-sei, Romanian commissars. In the vaulted, richly frescoed “Pope’s Room” a lecture was currently in progress that would have singed the ears of the fifteenth-century Pope Eugenius IV when he administered the papacy from this very space. (No doubt the lecturer would have found himself more thoroughly singed soon afterward.)

The subject was human evolution, and the lecturer was Gideon Oliver, known throughout the world of forensic science as the Skeleton Detective. But in his own mind, he was first and foremost a professor (currently the Abraham Goldstein Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington), and at this moment he was in his element: a full classroom, a lectern to lean on, and a captive audience.

“What you have to remember,” he was saying, “is that ‘survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean survival of the biggest, or strongest, or cleverest, or any other such thing. No, natural selection simply favors those best adapted to the existing local conditions, by weeding out those least able to adapt to them. For example, sometimes being large—and therefore intimidating and powerful—is obviously a survival advantage; but at other times—as when food has become hard to come by or speed is more valuable than strength—it can be a disadvantage. You know that old joke about the two hikers and the bear?” he asked, shutting down the laptop he’d used for his PowerPoint presentation on post-cranial blunt-force trauma.

Only the two Americans in his audience indicated they’d heard it, responding with groans. Strictly a New World joke, apparently.

“Okay. Two hikers are out in the woods when, fifty feet down the path, a huge grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs and roars at them. Ralph immediately starts to struggle out of his backpack, getting ready to run for it. ‘Thank God I wore my running shoes,’ he says. Rodney stands there, frozen stiff. ‘What’s the point of running?’ he groans. ‘You can’t outrun a bear!’ ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear,’ Ralph yells back, already thirty feet down the path. ‘I just have to outrun you.’”

There was an obligatory murmur of laughter. Gideon waited, and then, as expected, a louder, longer wave followed. This was one of the things you had to get used to when giving lectures to multilingual audiences. English was the official language of the conference, so anyone attending was required to have a grasp of it. But grasps varied, and many attendees took a little time to process what they heard. Humor apparently took more processing than most things. It was unsettling at first—your immediate reaction was that your jokes fell flat, but eventually you got used to it and learned to wait.

He continued as the chuckling died away. “Well, to me that’s a great metaphor for the way natural selection works. Ralph didn’t have to be the fastest man alive, he just had to be fast enough to be the one to survive on that particular day. Now . . . fast-forward fifty years, and there’s Ralph, the faster one, sitting there at a family barbecue—well, a family dinner. He’s a white-haired old grandfather now, and he’s surrounded by his family—say he had two children and each of them had two children—he’d have six descendants, and all six would be carrying his genes, including, perhaps, whatever genes might have made him a little faster than Rodney that fateful day.

“And what about Rodney? Ah, poor Rodney’s but a dim memory. He’s been gone these fifty years now, and his genes with him. So in the gene pool as a whole, the ones he was carrying are a little less well represented than they used to be, while Ralph’s now have a bigger share—those six descendants. Well, assuming that those ‘fast’ genes keep providing a survival advantage—however slight—every generation will have more people carrying them and fewer and fewer of the ‘slow gene’ people. The genetic makeup of the population as a whole would change. But . . . they wouldn’t necessarily become as fast as it was humanly possible to become, they’d just need to be fast enough to get away from the bears. Well, that’s the way natural selection works. The results don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough to get by.”

One of Gideon’s many admirable traits was his ability to deliver a coherent, fully formed lecture on the spur of the moment. One of his less attractive ones was his tendency to deliver them at the drop of a hat. Like most good professors, he was convinced that the subject matter that fascinated him must likewise fascinate everyone else. He was, of course, more often wrong than right, and this was one of those times. It took a while, but eventually the glazed, concussed look on a growing number of the sixteen faces in front of him got through to him. He’d done it again, slipped right off their radar.

And no wonder, he thought guiltily. They were there to learn how knowing something about bones might help them solve homicides. The subtle, slow-moving machinery of natural selection was not a high priority, or any priority at all. He cut himself off in the middle of a sentence. “We seem to have wandered a bit off the subject here. Clive,” he said with mock severity, “kindly try not to take us off-course again.”

This was directed to Clive Devlin, a scholarly, well-spoken chief inspector from Gibraltar, whose innocent, half-joking remark had started Gideon off. “Here’s what I wonder,” the chief inspector had said. “If natural selection is as wonderful as it’s cracked up to be, and it’s been working away to weed out the weakest among us all these millions of years, how is it that we still have so many diseases? One would think our bodies would have been perfected by now.”

“Please accept my apology, Professor Oliver,” Devlin said smoothly now. “I promise not do it again.”

“Apology accepted.” Gideon smiled back, stalling for time. Now, he thought, where the hell were we? “Umm . . .”

He was saved by Lieutenant Rocco Gardella, one of five Italian Carabinieri officers in the class, who, easily reading his expression, supplied the answer. “So, you were asking if anybody here might have some skeletal materials the class could use for, like, a case study.” The cocky, outgoing Gardella was a compact, oily-haired guy in a black leather bomber jacket who reminded Gideon of a young Mafia wannabe from a 1950s teenage gang movie—a Gino or a Guido, say. Well, or a Rocco, for that matter. And his brand of perfectly fluent English went along with the image, singing more of Manhattan’s Little Italy than of Mother Italy. “I think I got one for you,” he went on. “The one I was talking about yesterday? The murder-suicide that laid out in the snow and rain and everything all year? Well, the husband’s already been cremated, but the wife—that is, the wife’s bones—should still be available.”

“That’d be great,” Gideon said, “could you bring them in?”

“No, that I can’t do. Technically, they’re not ours anymore. They’ve been released to the family. But they’re still in a funeral home down in Figline, this little town I used to live in. Not far.”

“Where?”

“Fee . . glyee . . . neh,” Rocco repeated, stressing each syllable, thinking Gideon had been stumped by the Italian pronunciation, typically not so easy on American tongues.

“I know the place,” Gideon said. “Figline Valdarno. I’ve been there.”

“You been to Figline?” Gardella’s thick black eyebrows—eyebrow would be more accurate—rose. “Why?”

“Oh, come on, it’s not such a bad place, Rocco. Look, are you saying it’d be all right to have a look at them if we went to the funeral home? If Figline Valdarno’s the place I’m thinking of, it’s just twenty kilometers or so south of Florence.”

“Yeah, that’s the place. I could call my cousin; he owns the funeral home—well, he’s almost my cousin, and he doesn’t exactly own it yet—and we could probably do it right now, if you want.”

Gideon looked at his watch. One ten. The seminar ran till four. Time enough, if they got going right then. He addressed the class as a whole. “Okay, let’s do it. How many cars do we have?”

Four hands went up: enough room for everybody. Gideon motioned the group up out of their seats. “Let’s pile in.”

Rocco pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll tell Alberto we’re coming.”