Good Blood

FIFTEEN

When the polizia arrived a few minutes later, they found him still on the ground and a little muddled, but sitting up against the parapet, surrounded by four or five solicitous people, one of whom was trying to get him to swallow some brandy from a paper cup.

“Inglese?” the police wanted to know once they’d heard him say a couple of words in Italian.

“Americano,” he said.

The two cops exchanged an I-thought-as-much glance. Still, they were courteous and concerned, and they dumbed down their Italian to his level. They wanted to run him over to emergency, but by then, with his mind clearing, Gideon was able to convince them that he was all right, that the blood on his collar wasn’t his. And he knew that ten or twelve seconds of having his carotids compressed wasn’t going to do his brain any permanent harm. Twenty seconds, you were a vegetable. Twelve seconds, no problem. Strange but true. So no hospital, thanks all the same.

They used a cotton swab to collect some blood from his hair, presumably for evidence, and then while one of the cops talked to the witnesses, the other one sat him down to take his statement in the front seat of their cruiser-a white Fiat minihatchback with a snazzy green stripe running horizontally around it, the kind of car Gideon might have mistakenly hailed for a taxi if he’d seen it drive by.

With a portable tape recorder running, Gideon told him what he could, which wasn’t much. He’d never seen the man. He’d come up behind him, dug a knee into his back, wrapped one hefty arm around his neck, and squeezed. About all he could say was that he was big and he was strong. But with a little artful probing on the policeman’s part, he was able to come up with a little more: The man had been wearing a short-sleeved shirt, he was Caucasian, with wiry black hair (at least on his forearms), and he’d had a ham and cheese roll or something like it for breakfast, along with a caffe corretto. Oh, and he was pretty definitely Italian: his reaction to getting his nose broken had been a heartfelt “Merda!” That was about it.

“He communicated nothing to you? He didn’t try to take your money?”

“He said “Merda,” but I doubt if that counts as communication. And he wasn’t interested in money. He was interested in killing me.”

“And you don’t know why?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I’m working on a case with Colonel Caravale-”

The cop sat up. “Colonel Caravale? The carabinieri commander?”

“Yes, I’m an anthropologist-”

“A moment, please, signore.” The cop got on his car radio to relay this information. Then, while Gideon drank some bottled water that the second cop offered him, the first one waited to be called back. Five minutes later the call came rattling out of the speaker. Gideon couldn’t understand it, but the cop started up the engine and his partner got in back and slammed the door.

“He wants to see you. Caravale.” He looked impressed.

“How about letting me clean up first? I’m just up the street at the Primavera.”

The cop had his doubts, but when Gideon wiped a hand through his hair and held up bloody fingers, he changed his mind. “Okay, five minutes. We’ll drive you.”

In the lobby, the nighttime clerk, on his final hour of duty, looked up from his copy of Playboy Italy to see Gideon step out of the police car and come in, bloodied and disheveled, and still a little unsteady.

He blinked slowly a couple of times. “Sorry, signore, no breakfas’ yet for one more ’alf-hour,” he said.

Carabinieri headquarters were at the corner of Viale Duchessa di Genova and Via Fratelli Omarini, one block from the railroad station and two from the water, in what passed for Stresa’s low-rent district. Surrounded by a grim, spike-topped wall of rough-hewn stone, the featureless concrete building was painted white, but that had been done long ago. Now it was splotched and streaky with a black mold that seemed to spread as you looked at it. On one side the three-story building overlooked an eighteenth-century church; on the other a ruined villa with a jungly, once-ambitious estate garden that looked as if it hadn’t been pruned in a century.

But hidden within the forbidding walls that surrounded the unlovely building was a beautiful little ornamental garden of flowers and shrubs, devotedly tended, and it was onto this garden of fresh reds and pinks that Caravale’s ground-floor office looked. The office itself was as neat and orderly as a monk’s cell, but considerably more plush. Thick, plum-colored carpet, a big old wooden desk near the window with a few framed family photographs on it, two matched, leather-upholstered desk chairs, and in a corner on the opposite side of the room a large chestnut butler’s table with four more soft leather armchairs. It was at the table that Gideon and Caravale sat, with two cups of killer espresso, as thick as Turkish coffee, that had been brought in from a vending machine in the hallway. Unlike just about every other cop’s office he’d ever seen, there were no taped-up maps or charts or reminders on the walls. The only object on the beige grass-cloth wallpaper was a corroded pair of giant pincers centered in pride of place above the butler’s table.

Caravale saw him looking at them. “Those? They’re for use on uncooperative prisoners. And,” he added darkly, “on consultants who get above themselves.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Caravale smiled at him. “They belonged to my grandfather,” he said, turning to look fondly at them. “ Nonno Fortunato. They’re ice tongs. All his life my grandfather, my sainted grandfather, drove an ice wagon. A runt of a man, soaking wet he didn’t weigh fifty kilos, but with those tongs he’d lift a block of ice half his own weight, throw it over his shoulder, and walk up three flights with it. And then come down and get the next block. A truly good man, worth all those de Grazias put together, and yet all his life what did he have? Nothing. Just work, and poverty, and worry. But from those heavy, freezing blocks of ice that finally broke him, he sent my father to college. And my father sent me.”

Gideon was as surprised by these confidences as by the depth of feeling that came with them. “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

“He was, indeed,” Caravale said appreciatively. “It was because of him that I enrolled in the police academy. I had to fight my father every step of the way.”

“Your father didn’t want you to go into police work?”

“My father,” Caravale said wryly, “was of the opinion that we carabinieri are no more than an apparatus of the established order-willing tools of the oppressor class.”

“Ah,” Gideon said, not knowing what else to say.

“I beg your pardon. I’m talking too much. It was the tongs.” He hunched his shoulders. He was in civilian clothes again, and without the shoulder boards, there wasn’t much to hunch. “Ah, it’s all long ago. They don’t make men like that anymore. Now what about you, Gideon, are you all right? Not hurt or anything?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks for the coffee. It’s just what I need.”

Caravale nodded. “I just listened to your statement.”

“It wasn’t much help, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” He permitted himself another small smile. “All forces in the region are now on the look-out for a large man with ham and cheese on his breath.”

“And who speaks Italian, don’t forget that part.”

“Yes, of course.” Caravale, pretending to write in the notebook on the table, murmured: “Large man. Ham. Cheese. Speaks Italian. Wonderful, he’s as good as caught. It’s only a question of time now.”

Gideon laughed. “Next time I’ll be more observant.”

“Good, I’ll appreciate it.” He vacuumed up his espresso, swished it once around his mouth, and swallowed. “So tell me, what do you suppose this was about?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Gideon said. “My first thought was that it had to be about those bones, that somebody didn’t want me to examine them. But the more I thought about it, the less sense I could make out of it.”

“Why?”

“Because I could understand it if the idea was to keep us from finding out that Domenico de Grazia didn’t drown in the lake after all, but that somebody killed him and then hid his body in a culvert on Mount Zeda. But we already knew it was Domenico, so what would the point be-unless this somebody who tried to strangle me didn’t know you’d gone ahead and made the identification?”

“Possible, but doubtful. It would mean he would have had to be aware that the remains had been found, but not that they’d been identified. Who could that be? The de Grazia people-they’re the only ones we told, and they all know it’s Domenico. Who else would know anything about it?”

“Well, then, I don’t know what the point was.” He thought for a few seconds. “I haven’t found anything that indicates the cause of death yet. Maybe somebody doesn’t want us to know how he died, and thinks I might come up with it?”

“But why wouldn’t they want us to know? Knife, club, axe… what difference does it make? Why would someone commit murder to prevent its being known?”

“I already said I don’t know,” said Gideon with some annoyance. Caravale was holding something back. “Twice. Let’s hear your theory.”

Caravale tipped his chair back and folded his hands in front of his belt. “I don’t know either. But I think you might have it right.” He paused. “Oh. I meant to tell you. They tried to steal your bones last night.”

“Uh… come again?”

“At three o’clock in the morning. Someone tried to break into the morgue. When the Polizia Municipale showed up, he ran off. But he’d been trying to force the door of the room where Domenico’s bones were being kept. And there was nothing else in there but some linens.”

“So first they tried to get the bones,” Gideon said slowly. “And when that didn’t work, they came after me.”

“It looks that way.”

“Then that’s why the attempt on me was so… so crude, so risky-I mean, coming up behind a guy in a public park and choking him? Not exactly brilliantly planned. But they were running out of time, they’d already failed to get the bones, and I was going to examine them in a couple of hours. They were desperate. So they hung around the hotel waiting for me to come out, and… well, there it is.” Thoughtfully, he finished the last of his cooling, grainy coffee and took a sip from the glass of water that had been brought with it.

“Yes, there it is.” Caravale slapped the table with the palm of his hand and got briskly out of his chair. “If you’re up to it, let’s get to them, then.”

Gideon, whose thoughts had been straying, looked up at him. “To what?”

“The bones. Let’s see what it is they don’t want you to find out.”

Domenico de Grazia’s remains were no longer at the hospital. After the attempted break-in, Caravale had ordered them brought to carabinieri headquarters, where they had been placed in the evidence room, a cryptlike vault deep within the building, far from any windows; a blockhouse within a blockhouse, with one wall consisting of a steel-barred grille, like the door to a cell. Two of the other concrete-block walls were faced, floor to ceiling, with wooden pigeon holes in which there were tagged items in bags or boxes. Against the remaining wall was a chipped, stained, Formica-topped table. In the corner, standing on end, was a tagged crossbow, along with other objects-a mangled tire rim, a music stand, a kitchen stepladder-too large for the pigeon holes. It was, Caravale told him, probably the most secure room in the city of Stresa.

The bones were in two cardboard cartons and a large paper bag that had been laid on the table. Whoever had put them in had apparently used size as his sole criterion for sorting. The big bones-the cranium, pelvic bones, and arm and leg bones-were in a printer-paper box; the medium-sized bones-the mandible, ribs, vertebrae, scapulas, clavicles, and sternum-were in a canned mushroom carton; and the small ones-the wickedly irregular, tiny, exasperating-to-sort bones of the hands and feet, all one hundred six or so of them (more than half the body’s bones were in the hands and feet)-were in the bag, along with a few loose teeth. If the good Corporal Fasoli had really gone to the trouble of arranging them anatomically, it had all gone to waste.

But at least they were clean. “He did a good job, your Corporal Fasoli,” Gideon said, beginning to get them out onto the table. The bones showed the usual unappetizing stains of blood, mold, earth, and body fluids-it would have taken bleach to get them out, and there really wasn’t any good reason for doing that (Gideon’s aesthetic sensitivities weren’t good enough reasons)-but the clotted dirt and the dried remnants of ligaments, tendons, and who-knows-what were pretty much gone.

He squinted up at the ceiling lights, four long neon tubes behind pebbled, translucent sheets of plastic.

“Something wrong?” Caravale asked.

“The light’s awfully flat. I need something that will cast sharper shadows, bring out texture. A desk lamp would do if it’s bright enough. Maybe there’s a goose-necked one somewhere that I could use? Oh, and a good magnifying glass?”

“Goose-necked?” It was an unfamiliar term to him, but when Gideon demonstrated with his hands, he nodded and moved toward the open door. “Give me two minutes.”

“Okay, yeah,” Gideon said, already absorbed in gingerly removing the mortal remains of Domenico de Grazia from their containers. Ordinarily, the next task would have been to lay the bones out anatomically, every single one of them, including those tricky hand and foot bones, but this wasn’t an ordinary case, and he was eager to get to the crucial question: Was there anything here that could shed light on old Domenico’s death? What Gideon did, therefore, was to separate the bones he wanted to look at first, the ones most likely to hold clues to the cause of death: the skull, for obvious reasons; the ribs, for injuries that might indicate damage to internal organs; and the metacarpals and phalanges of the hands, for nicks or small fractures that might have come from clutching at a blade in self-defense or warding off a blow.

The skull was first. The shriveled husk of brain still lay within. For forensic purposes, it was useless. He lifted it out with two fingers and placed it in a clean sack, to eventually go back to the family with the bones.

A cursory examination of the cranium showed nothing. Unquestionably, the broken parietal and maxilla were recent damage. But sometimes new injuries could cover the signs of old ones, so he went over the broken areas with care. Still nothing. As for the loose teeth in the bag-an upper incisor and first molar-the sharp-edged, unbroken sockets from which they’d come showed that they’d fallen out long after death, a normal occurrence as the soft tissue holding them in place shrank and disappeared. There were four other teeth missing as well, but they had come out decades before death; their sockets barely existed now, the bone having been slowly reabsorbed over the years. There seemed to be nothing else, no signs of-

“Gideon?”

He jumped. Caravale was standing behind him with a goose-necked desk lamp in one hand and a rectangular magnifying lens with a built-in light in the other. “Will these do?”

“They’ll do fine, thanks.”

“It’s all right if I watch?”

“Sure, stay.” Why not, it wouldn’t kill him not to talk to himself for a while.

Gideon plugged in the lamp and set it up on the table, adjusting its neck so it cast a sidewise light that would emphasize textural irregularities-depressions, cracks, nicks, anything. Then, using the magnifying glass, but without flicking on its bulb (a direct light would only flatten everything out again), he began going over the skull one more time.

Meanwhile Caravale, whom Gideon hadn’t seen smoke before, opened a packet of Toscano cigars, pulled out one black, twisted stick, snipped it in two with a tiny pair of blunt-edged scissors he produced from somewhere, and put one of the evil-looking halves back in the packet.

“For later,” he said. “One a day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon.” He lit up-it smelled as bad as it looked-leaned against the grille, and watched; asking nothing, saying nothing.

Gideon worked steadily and silently, pulling over a stool when he got tired of bending over. There was nothing useful on the cranium, nothing on the mandible. The metacarpals and phalanges of the hands showed an old, healed fracture of the right fifth metacarpal and plenty of arthritis, but nothing else. After twenty intent, focused minutes he straightened up, stretched, and massaged the back of his neck. Caravale, who had left without his noticing, came back with a couple of cold bottles of Brio. Gideon accepted the quinine-flavored soft drink gratefully, taking a couple of long gulps and then turning to the ribs, examining them one at a time.

Ten minutes passed before he found anything. “Well, well,” he said, separating one rib from the rest and laying it aside.

Caravale came closer, leaned on the table. “What?”

Gideon motioned for him to wait another minute, which Caravale obediently did. Another ten minutes passed. “Ah, so,” Gideon said with satisfaction. A second rib was separated from the others.

He turned to Caravale, holding up a rib in each hand like a couple of batons. “Success. Got a cause of death for you.”