Good Blood

TWELVE

They got powdery, lukewarm coffee from a vending machine on the porch of the office building-an expansive Caravale paid for them all-and took it to a shaded picnic table beside a tiny corral in which a pot-bellied, sad-eyed donkey stood in a corner and quietly snuffled its dinner from a nose bag.

It was the limp that had been the final clue, Caravale explained. That, and the age of sixty or more, and the “small, gracile” description, and the ten-year length of time it had lain in the gravel. Put together, it all pointed to Domenico.

Phil was shaking his head. “I don’t get it. This is nuts. Sure, Zio Domenico had a limp and all that, but he drowned in a boating accident on the lake. I came for the memorial service. Are you saying he didn’t drown?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Caravale said gently. “I was with the force then, but I was only a lieutenant. I wasn’t the investigating officer, but I remember the case. Your uncle liked sailing. We used to see his boat on the lake sometimes, but he was never out for very long. The day he disappeared he’d left early, and when he didn’t come back by late afternoon, everybody began to worry. It wasn’t a good day for sailing; the wind was rough, the water had a chop to it. So they started a search for him. The boat was found the next day, overturned in shallow water, across the lake, off Porto Valtravaglia. The conclusion seemed reasonable enough: an unfortunate accident. But Domenico, he was never found. So it was never completely settled.”

Phil’s eyes were on the paper cup that he was turning round and round in his fingers. “So if this is true, somebody actually killed him. I’m sorry, but this is really hard to believe.” He looked up, almost challengingly. “Everybody loved the guy. Everybody.”

“That’s what I would have said,” Caravale agreed.

“Not quite everybody, I guess,” Julie said.

Gideon was beginning to wonder what Caravale was doing there. This was an unexpected development, yes, but there was no reason for him to have jumped in his car and driven right out to tell them about it. It could have waited until morning. It could have waited longer than that.

“Uh, Tullio, is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

“Well, yes, maybe, now that you ask. Naturally, I told Vincenzo about it,” Caravale said. “He asked me to come out to the island again to talk with the family-another goddamned council, I’m afraid. The boat will take me up at three.”

“And?”

“And I was hoping you might come along with me.”

“Me? Why?”

“They’ll ask questions about the remains. I don’t know how to answer them.”

“But what can I tell them? Wait till I’ve had a serious look at them and know something-tomorrow, the next day.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d come with me today.”

“Well… sure, if you like, but I don’t know what I can tell them.”

“A lot more than I can,” Caravale said. “Can you meet me at the police dock in Stresa at three, then? An hour from now?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Damn,” Phil said, “I’d really like to be there too. I still can’t believe it. And I’d like to see Achille, see how he’s doing.”

“Come, then,” said Caravale. “I’m sure they’d be glad to have you.”

“Can’t.” Phil shoved away his untouched coffee. “I have to get the group up to the oratorio in an hour. It’s on the schedule. And then there are things to see to-getting the bikes ready-”

“Oh, go ahead,” Julie said, “you belong with your family at a time like this. I can see to things here. Heaven knows we’ve been over everything enough times.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Go ahead, let me earn my pay.”

He gave in with a reluctant but appreciative sigh. “Thanks a million, Julie.”

“You’re not getting any pay,” Gideon observed.

She laughed. “Let me earn my keep then.”

Caravale looked at his watch and stood up. He seemed relieved. “Good. I’ll see you both at three, then.”

The drive to Stresa would take no more than ten minutes, which gave Phil and Gideon three-quarters of an hour before they had to leave. Phil immediately began to go over logistics with Julie. Lax and slipshod in his personal affairs at home-he could be counted on to be at least twenty minutes late for any appointment-he ran his tours with a near-fanatical attention to detail, and Julie lasted about five minutes before exploding.

“I am a park ranger, you know? I deal with bears, and cougars, and drunks, and hostile bikers. I think I can probably handle anything that comes up here. So get lost, I’ll take care of things.”

Gideon smiled. She was cute when she was angry, and even cuter when she was making believe she was angry.

Phil jumped up immediately. “Sorry, I get a little carried away.”

“I’ll say,” Julie muttered.

“Just let me change,” he told Gideon, and ran off to the platform tent he was sharing with three of the other men.

Thirty minutes later he emerged. “Sorry about that, thought I ought to shower. I was getting a little grungy.”

They stared at him for a full ten seconds before Julie spoke. “Shower, and put on clean clothes, and shave off your beard, and-” Her eyes narrowed. “Did you give yourself a haircut?”

“I just trimmed it a little,” he said with one of his gawkier shrugs. “You know, to show some respect.” He squirmed under their continuing scrutiny. His face was pink. “So I cleaned up. What, is this a big deal? Gideon, come on, let’s go already.”

The consiglio, for reasons Gideon couldn’t fathom, was held in a stuffy, windowless little room in the otherwise spacious and elegant villa. He had seen paintings by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters on the walls of the corridor outside-he recognized Titian, Rubens, Velazquez, or at least their schools. But this grim little room seemed to have been chosen for ugliness and discomfort. Surrounded by tiers of gloomy family portraits, some competently painted, mostly not, and hemmed in by the living members of the de Grazia clan, he sat on an amazingly uncomfortable, hard-backed wooden chair, feeling very much the stranger at an intimate family gathering. Lighting came from a single antique hanging lamp that had been converted to electricity and now bore four unpleasantly glaring, candle-shaped bulbs. The seats, some of them chairs, some heavy chests, but all of them looking every bit as uncomfortable as his, had been arranged along all four walls, leaving a five-foot square of scarred, planked wooden flooring open in the center.

Including Gideon, there were eleven people in the room, necessarily shoulder to shoulder. On his immediate right was Phil, and on the far side of Phil a slender, soft-spoken woman whose name Gideon hadn’t caught when Vincenzo had made a round of pro forma introductions. Phil had briefed him earlier on who would probably be there, but if she’d been mentioned, Gideon didn’t remember it.

Directly across from him sat old Cosimo de Grazia in his old-fashioned suit and starched white shirt, buttoned to the top but without a tie this time. Eyes closed, he sat lost in thought or in dreams, with his veined, mottled hands clasped on the silver lion’s-paw-and-tea-bud knob of his cane, his goateed chin resting on his knuckles, and Bacco asleep and snoring between his feet. In the chair beside him was a rumpled, portly, bespectacled man of Cosimo’s age who sat with an unlit, half-smoked cigar clenched between his teeth. This, according to Vincenzo, was Dr. Gianluigi Luzzatto, who had been Domenico de Grazia’s physician and closest friend and was still Cosimo’s doctor, though otherwise retired from practice. He had been making one of his twice-weekly visits to Cosimo, who had been refusing for two decades to see a younger, more up-to-date physician, and he had been invited to the consiglio by his patient out of respect for his longtime relationship with the de Grazias. It wasn’t strictly by the book, but Vincenzo had always allowed Cosimo some extra latitude in matters of family protocol. Like Cosimo, Dr. Luzzatto wore a dark, old-fashioned suit, including a tie and even a tobacco-ash-spattered vest. Unlike Cosimo, he somehow managed to make them look as if he’d been sleeping-and eating-in them for two days.

Phil had looked at him, pointed his finger, and blurted: “You’re Dr. Luzzatto! I remember you!”

“I’m flattered.”

“When I was a little kid,” Phil said, “I mean really little… you were carrying me through a… was it a hospital corridor? There were benches, white walls…”

Luzzatto nodded, pleased. “You’re right. It was in Milan. The Gaetano Pini Institute. You were not even five. A long time to remember an operation.”

“I don’t remember any operation, I just remember being carried. In your arms. I was crying… you thought I was scared, but I was embarrassed. I was in my underwear, and there were all these women there…”

“It was insensitive of me,” Luzzatto said, smiling and placing a hand over his heart. “I humbly apologize.”

Along the same wall as Luzzatto, seated together on a chest and looking like a male-female version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, were Phil’s aunt, Bella Barbero, and her husband, Basilio. Then again, she might have been his cousin; Phil hadn’t been sure. If Gideon remembered correctly, the affable, rambling Basilio was an officer in Vincenzo’s construction firm.

The entrance to the room was on the wall to Gideon’s right, a doorless opening on either side of which were the only two chairs with armrests, a matched set of high-backed, thronelike affairs with carved Gothic backrests. In one sat Vincenzo, in the other, Caravale, like coreigning monarchs waiting for their court to get itself settled.

The two remaining people, the lean, vinegary, malcontented-looking Dante Galasso and the striking but equally vinegary Francesca de Grazia Galasso, sat along the remaining wall, next to each other, but as far apart as space would allow. Dante, according to Phil, had been an ardent and articulate Marxist professor in Bologna years before, but somewhere along the line he had stopped calling himself a Communist and seamlessly turned himself into a “postmodernist,” apparently considering it more in step with the times. His formidable wife Francesca-Vincenzo’s sister-was both the CFO of Aurora Costruzioni and the de facto mistress of the de Grazia estate, someone, Phil had warned darkly, of whom it was a good idea not to get on the wrong side.

Gideon had been hoping to get a look at Achille de Grazia, but the boy preferred to stay in his room. Phil had gone up to see him and reported that he seemed to be all right, but was markedly unassertive and subdued. “I doubt if it’ll last,” Phil had said, “but we can always hope.”

“Well, then, it looks as if we’re all here,” Basilio Barbero observed when the settling process had gone on too long for him. “Ready to start, eh? When I hold a conference at work, I make it a rule to begin promptly on schedule. Otherwise, you see, those who come late are rewarded by having the meeting start the moment they arrive, while those who came early are punished by having to wait for the latecomers. Thus, one sets in motion-”

“Yes, yes, let’s begin,” Vincenzo said. “Colonel?”

Caravale opened in formal fashion. “At 12:45 P.M. this afternoon, skeletal remains found buried on land owned by the Aurora Construction Company on Mount Zeda, not far from the construction site of the new golf and country club, were positively identified as those of Count Domenico de Grazia.”

Astonishment. Consternation. Except for Vincenzo, who’d been briefed earlier, they had thought the council had been called to talk about the kidnapping.

“Mount Zeda?” Bella Barbero said when the immediate hubbub had died down. “What are you talking about? That’s impossible. He went sailing that morning. We all know that. His boat was found across the lake, at Germignaga.” She made it sound as if she was accusing Caravale of manufacturing the facts.

“It was Valtravaglia,” Francesca Galasso corrected. “Not Germignaga.”

“I don’t see-”

“His boat, yes. His remains, no,” Caravale said.

“But what would Domenico have been doing at Mount Zeda?” a puzzled, troubled Cosimo asked. “By that time he no longer had any interest in the construction business. It had all been turned over to Vincenzo. What would bring him to Mount Zeda?”

“Could it have been before the land was purchased?” Basilio asked. “Maybe it was when he was considering buying it.”

“No, no, my boy. I tell you, by then he had removed himself from such affairs, am I not right, Vincenzo?”

“That’s true, Uncle. Besides, the land had already been in our possession for several years.”

“You see?” Cosimo said. “Believe me, Colonel, I knew my brother. Like me, he was no longer at ease off the island. He disliked leaving it, other than to sail. Why would he have gone to Mount Zeda?”

“Ah, but can one really ever ‘know’ another person’s life?” Dante Galasso asked-gratuitously, thought Gideon. “Or does one simply choose his own reality from the web of stories, the ‘narrative,’ that each of us constructs for the consumption of the Other?” He spread his hands and looked around the room, smiling, waiting for acclamation.

“Asshole,” Phil grumbled to Gideon, who thought Phil had a point. His Italian wasn’t good enough to grasp every word, but he’d gotten the gist. He’d heard the same opaque sophistry, or close enough, from the postmodernist academicians at the university.

Seated next to her husband, Francesca rolled her eyes and let out a pained sigh. “Lecture number three hundred thirty-four,” she said, seemingly addressing the assembled ancestors who looked sternly down from the walls. “Reality as a Social Construct.”

Dante looked pityingly at her. “Ha, ha.”

Caravale, talking around the Galassos, replied politely to Cosimo. “We don’t believe he went there of his own free will, Signor de Grazia. We believe he was brought there, or carried there after his death, and buried.”

“But-” It was Basilio, bouncing with nervous energy, his pink face gleaming. “But-but that must mean… doesn’t that mean someone must have murdered him?”

Dante, apparently one of those compulsive talkers who either didn’t notice that other people paid no attention when he spoke, or else didn’t care, laughed. “What a privilege it is to see such an incisive mind at work, eh, Doctor?” he said to Dr. Luzzatto, sitting around the corner from him.

Luzzatto, chewing hard on his cigar, glanced at him without comment, then returned his attention to Caravale.

Out of the corner of his eye Gideon saw Bella Barbero’s plump bosom rise in indignation as she gathered her resources to defend her husband. But a couple of nervous, placatory pats on the arm from Basilio quieted her down.

“Do I detect an edgy undertone or two around here?” Gideon whispered to Phil.

“Always,” Phil cheerfully agreed.

“We’re proceeding on that assumption, Signor Barbero,” Caravale said. “As of today, the case has been reopened as a homicide investigation.”

“Finally,” said Vincenzo pointedly. He, too, was clearly simmering about something, and had been from the moment they’d seen him waiting on the dock to meet the launch.

Caravale looked at him. “Excuse me?”

“I have thought all along that my father was the victim of foul play.”

Caravale stared at him. He doesn’t like being surprised like that, thought Gideon. And he especially doesn’t like it in public. “And why is that, exactly?” he asked.

“My father was a prudent man. He knew he was not an expert sailor. When he sailed, it was with a companion, often myself. Why would he go alone this one day, without telling anyone? Why would he leave so early, before anyone was up? That was not his usual practice. Why would he choose a day when the water was rough?” He shook his head. “It made little sense then, it makes little sense now.”

Muttering as much to himself as to anyone else, Dr. Luzzatto spoke around his fat cigar. “Not so, not so. When he had something to think about, some decision to ponder, he would go alone. It made his mind clear.”

“Once in a while, yes-”

“And on that day,” Luzzatto went ponderously on, scowling, his eyes focused inward, “I can tell you for a fact that he did indeed have something important to ponder.”

“Be that as it may, Doctor, as the colonel so rightly points out, his body was not found.” Angrily, Vincenzo turned to Caravale. “Do you suppose it might have helped if the carabinieri had looked into the possibility of homicide then and there-instead of waiting for ten long years after the fact?”

“What might have helped,” a tight-lipped Caravale shot back, “was your saying something at the time.”

Vincenzo leaned aggressively into him. “I did considerably more than say something. I gave your predecessor a list of my father’s enemies, men who would benefit from his death. He chose to pay no attention.”

Another surprise for Caravale. “You talked to Colonel Pontieri about it?”

“Of course I did. Look in the case records.”

Caravale looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to believe this or not. “Let’s move on,” he said after a moment.

“If you please, signore?” Cosimo de Grazia was gently waving his raised hand. With the starched white cuff of his shirt having slipped down, his wrist was like a dissection drawing in an anatomy text. Beneath the papery skin Gideon could make out not only the usual bony landmarks, but structures invisible in most people: the pisiform, the tubercle of the scaphoid, the tendon of the Extensor pollicis brevis, even the fluttery throbbing of the radial artery. Gideon could have taken his pulse visibly from across the room.

“I would like to ask the colonel when it will be possible to have the body of my brother returned to us,” Cosimo said. “I think he has suffered enough indignities. I would like to see him at rest with his family, here in the de Grazia vault.”

“I understand completely, signore, but Professor Oliver has yet to make a full examination. I’m sure you can see the necessity.”

“I’ll be starting in the morning,” Gideon said, his first contribution of the afternoon. “It shouldn’t take-”

“I fail to see the point of further examination,” Francesca said with considerable heat. “What more is there to be learned? I must agree with my uncle. My father was a de Grazia, a count of the House of Savoy. He should be treated with respect. It is an affront to his memory to have his bones pawed over by strangers only to satisfy some morbid-”

“It’s the law, signora,” Caravale told her. “In a case like this, there has to be an autopsy.”

“An autopsy of bones?” A harsh laugh. “How does one perform an autopsy of bones?”

Caravale, happy to get off center stage, gestured to Gideon.“Professor?”

Gideon took advantage of the opportunity to get out of the torture device he was sitting in and stood up, a position from which he was also most comfortable lecturing, if lecturing was going to be called for.

“Permit me to assure you, Signora de Grazia,” he said in language every bit as flowery as Cosimo’s, “that your father’s remains are being treated with the utmost respect and esteem. At this moment they are being most carefully cleaned”-with his old Oral-B toothbrush, he chose not to point out-“and tomorrow morning I will begin the examination.”

With Phil and Caravale to help him over the words he couldn’t handle in Italian, he explained what he would be looking for and, in simple terms, how he would go about the job. Ordinarily, the primary purpose of a forensic anthropological examination was to assist in the identification of skeletal remains by determining race and sex, estimating age and stature, and distinguishing “nonmetric factors of individualization,” as the anthropologists called them: signs of past or existing trauma, pathologies, and stress-related changes in the bones that might reveal the occupations or habits of a lifetime.

Gideon would indeed be doing these things, but inasmuch as Domenico had already been identified from his dentition, his analysis would merely provide confirmation that would go into the record-an important precaution if and when there was a courtroom proceeding. His most important task, however, would be to search for anything on the skeleton that might reveal the cause of death.

The dusty, scientific talk of bones and measurements seemed to take the wind out of them. There were no questions while he spoke, and for a minute after he sat down, no one had anything to say.

“And how long will all this take?” Vincenzo asked wearily.

“It shouldn’t be long. Usually, not more than a day or so,” said Gideon.

“And then we may have my father’s remains back?”

Caravale answered him. “That depends. If Professor Oliver does find evidence of the cause of death or other important information, we would probably have to hold them as evidence. We’ll have to see. But in the end they’ll be returned to you.”

“I understand,” Vincenzo said. “Gentlemen, thank you both for coming.” He glanced around the room. “Is there anything more?”

“Only to thank God that Achille has been returned unharmed,” Cosimo whispered.

“If it’s God we’ve been relying on in that matter,” Dante Galasso said with a crooked smirk, “I can only say-”

“Nobody here cares what you can only say,” Bella Barbero said sharply, “so why don’t you just keep it to yourself, for once in your life?”

“Now you just wait one minute,” Francesca said, leveling a crimson-nailed finger at her. Criticizing her husband herself was one thing; listening to her non-de Grazia stepsister do it was entirely different. “Dante is entitled to say whatever he feels like here, and if anybody in this room is not in a position-”

“Well, well, well,” chirped Basilio Barbero, jumping up and rubbing his hands together, “will you look at the time? Clemente will have finished setting out the aperitifs in the library by now, and I, for one, am certainly ready for mine. There’s nothing like a Cynar before dinner to get the gastric juices flowing. It’s not only pleasant, it’s amazingly helpful to the digestion, something that many people fail…”

While Caravale and Phil had a few final words with Vincenzo, Gideon waited outside, near the head of the stone steps that led down to the dock, looking south along the western shore of the lake toward Stresa, visible only as a clump of shimmering yellows between the blue of the lake and the green of the mountains. After a few minutes, however, feeling the stony, mirrored gaze of the guard, Cesare, on the back of his neck, he went around the side of the house to the breakfast garden, where he sat at the table he’d shared with Julie a few days before. No marmoset this time, but either the same white male peacock or its twin brother was once again in full display, strutting and quivering at the far edge of the clearing with his tail feathers spread, quills audibly rattling. A few yards away the object of his affection, a dull, green peahen who couldn’t have been less interested, wandered aimlessly about, pecking mechanically at the ground or staring in jerky, birdlike fashion in every direction but at her suitor, who kept after her with a dogged, expectant, never-say-die determination. Tough life, Gideon thought. Of course, if you had a pea brain, it probably didn’t seem so bad.

“There you are!” Phil called, coming around from the front of the building. “We need to stick around awhile. Caravale wants to talk to Achille again.”

Beside him was the woman who’d sat next to him inside. As far as Gideon could remember, she’d said nothing during the consiglio, but had merely watched and listened.

“Lea,” Phil said in English as Gideon got out of his chair, “I’d like you to meet my very good friend Gideon Oliver. Gideon, this is my cousin Lea Pescallo.”

“Lea Barbero,” she gently corrected him, at which Phil looked immensely pleased.

“Piacere di conoscerla,” Gideon said, sensing that she wasn’t too comfortable with English.

She smiled, and he was aware of how attractive she must once have been. In her forties now, and looking her age, with weary eyes and mouth, and slightly bowed shoulders, there was still a pale, nineteenth-century kind of beauty that clung to her. She looked like the type of woman on whom swooning would look good. “I am too ’appy to know you, sir,” she said. “What you sayed about the bones. Very interesting.”

“Thank you. I hope it’ll be of some help in determining what happened.”

As he spoke, he realized with a shock why she seemed familiar. He’d seen her before, only a few days ago. Lea Barbero, in her crisp, pink-striped Oxford shirt, her fashionable, mid-calf-length khaki slacks and new-looking, open-toed leather clogs-Lea Barbero with her understated makeup and softly layered blond hair-was the drab, hunched woman in sneakers and old sweater that he and Julie had taken for a maid the other day; the woman that had turned and fled the moment she’d seen them.

He turned to look at Phil-he of the new haircut, fresh shave, and clean shirt-and realized that there was a look on his face that was totally unfamiliar, a cocky, jaunty, hey-look-at-me expression that was wholly unlike him. Even his posture seemed different: he was practically strutting.

He looked, in short, an awful lot like a love-dazed peacock.

Son of a gun.