Good Blood

SIXTEEN

“This is the seventh rib, right side,” Gideon said. “And this is the vertebral end of it, the end in back, where it connects to the spinal column.”

“I never knew you could tell one rib from another. They all look the same to me.”

“If you have them all, it’s easy; you compare the relative lengths and the shapes of the arcs. But there are plenty of other differences too. See, here there are variations in the articular facets and tubercles of the first, second, tenth-”

With a raised palm, Caravale warded him off. “Please. I’ll take your word for it.”

“Well, you asked me.”

“And I deeply regret it, I assure you. Continue, please.”

Coming out of Caravale’s porky, beetle-browed face as it did, it made Gideon laugh. “Okay, I won’t try to educate you. Now take a look at the top side of the rib-this is the top side-near the back end. This is the back end. Do you see the-”

“This little sliver, coming out of the bone?”

“That’s right. That’s a knife cut.”

Caravale adjusted the lamp and bent interestedly over the rib. “It’s like a shaving, like what you get when you’re whittling a piece of wood.”

“That’s just what it is. When bone is green-when it’s alive-it’s soft, and if a knife slices into it at a shallow angle, a sliver of bone is likely to curl away from it. Like this. Once bone dries, it doesn’t happen. Try to cut it with a knife after it’s dry and the piece would just chip off.”

“Ah.” Caravale absently pulled out and lit the half-cigar he’d put away for the afternoon. “And this one small cut, this cut you can hardly see without the lens-this proves he was stabbed to death?” He was thinking ahead, to the presentation of evidence in a court of law, and he had his doubts.

“There’s more, Tullio.” He pulled the other rib into the circle of brightest light and pointed with a ballpoint pen. “This nick? That’s also a knife cut.”

“Is it?” He scrutinized it with the magnifying glass. “But it’s completely different. There’s no sliver. This is more like a, like a-”

“It’s more like a gouge. Which is what it is. It’s not a sharp slice, it’s a relatively blunt, V-shaped notch. If you use the glass again, you can see where the fibers at the edges have been mashed down into it.”

Caravale shrugged. He was willing to take Gideon’s word for that too. Smoking, he studied the gouge, “It’s like what you’d expect from an axe, or from an extremely dull knife…”

“Yes.”

“But the other wound is from a sharp blade.”

“Yes.”

“So… two different weapons?” He looked confused, as well he might.

“No, no, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you. See, this one-wait, it’d be easier to show you. Is there a kitchen in this place?”

“A-? Yes, just down the hall there.”

“Okay, don’t go away.”

In the kitchen he startled the cook by barging in, saying he needed to borrow something, and snatching an eight-inch chef’s knife from the knife block. The frightened cook was looking mutely around for help when Corporal Fasoli, who was having a cup of coffee and a pastry, called through the opening from the dining room: “It’s all right, he’s with the colonel. He’s harmless.”

The cook recovered himself as Gideon was on his way out. “Just make sure you bring it back,” he called after him, brandishing a spatula to show he meant it.

When he returned to the evidence room, Gideon laid the seventh rib on the table, right side up, so the curling slice-mark was on top. With care, he slipped the knife blade gently into the slice, under the shaving of bone. At an angle of about thirty degrees, the fit was perfect. The knife remained propped there without the need for additional support.

“Now, this other bone, that’s the sixth rib, the one right above, and the V-shaped gouge, as you see, is in the bottom of it, the underside. If I place it in position above the seventh and lower it. ..”

“The gouge was made by the back, the spine, of the knife!” Caravale exclaimed on seeing the snug fit. “A single weapon, a single thrust!”

“Exactly. It’s V-shaped, not square, you see, even though the spine of the knife is square, because it went in at an angle. See, a single sharp weapon can make a lot of different-shaped wounds depending on the way it goes in, or how far it penetrates, or whether it was twisted in a manner that-” He realized he was on the verge of lecturing again and caught himself. “Anyway, with the blade going in like that”-he gestured at the knife and the two ribs, locked together in a circle of light like some grisly museum exhibit-“the point couldn’t have missed penetrating the left atrium of the heart. Death inside of a minute, probably sooner. What? Is something bothering you?”

Caravale had been frowning, fingering his side, near the bottom of his rib cage, like a man whose ulcer was worrying him. “I don’t mean to question your expertise, but… well, a few years ago I fractured a rib in an automobile accident. Down here.”

“Yes?”

“The doctor said… Well, I’m fairly certain he said… that it was my seventh rib.”

“That looks about right,” Gideon agreed. “The seventh or eighth.”

“But the heart, isn’t it up here?” He put his other hand, with the cigar, on his sternum. At Gideon’s nod, he went on. “Well, then, how could a knife thrust here, at the seventh rib, go into the heart? That is, unless it was practically straight up-which our knife there isn’t. It would go into, into…”

“The left lobe of the liver, correct. Several inches below the heart.”

“So…?” Caravale shook his head, lost.

Gideon laughed. “What you’re forgetting is that the ribs don’t go straight around, they angle upward from front to back. Yes, that’s the seventh rib down there in front, but by the time it curves around and connects to the vertebral column in back, it’s way up here.” He reached around and with one finger tapped Caravale on the upper back, between the left scapula and the spine. “And that’s where the knife went in.”

“Ahh,” said Caravale with his brown-toothed grin. “I see. Straight into the heart.”

“Well, it would have had to get through a few muscle layers first, and the left lung, but yes. Straight into the heart.”

“Stabbed in the back.”

Gideon nodded. “Yup.”

They stood looking down at the bones. “So he put his arm up to ward off the blow-that’s how he got it broken-succeeded for a moment. ..,” Caravale took a final drag on his cigar stub and ground it out in a metal ashtray. “… but must have fallen and gotten himself knifed in the back.”

“That’s pretty much it, but from the angle of the thrust, it doesn’t look to me as if he was on the ground when the blade went in. I think he probably just twisted around, maybe trying to get away, and got stabbed before he could make it. He was an old man, and he was lame.”

Gideon finished his Brio and tossed the bottle into a wastepaper basket under the table. It still surprised him how easy it was to talk about these hideous events as if they hadn’t really happened to a living human being, as if they hadn’t involved agony and terror and unspeakable, bloody horror.

“All right, so what do we know now that we didn’t know before?” he asked, musing, getting his mind back on the clean, comfortable present.

“Several things,” said Caravale. “We know the cause of death. We know for certain that he was murdered. Until now it was strictly circumstantial-he was buried, therefore, he must have been murdered. But now we know. ”

“Yes, sure. But why did somebody try to steal the bones? Why was I attacked? What was that all about? Okay, so we know he was murdered with a kitchen knife or something like it. So what? Why kill me to keep that from coming out?”

Caravale pensively scratched his cheek. “It could be to make sure we didn’t identify the murder weapon and somehow connect it to the killer.”

“So throw away the knife. They’ve had ten years to do it. Wouldn’t that be a whole lot simpler?”

“And safer.” Nodding, Caravale plucked a dark fleck of tobacco from his lip. “There must be something else.”

“Maybe, but I sure can’t imagine what. I’ll go over every single bone, though. Give me an hour.”

With Caravale gone, Gideon worked bone by bone by bone, sliding each one into the light, turning it over in his fingers to see and to feel every angle and facet, scanning it with the magnifying glass, putting it aside into the “discard” pile, and moving smoothly on to the next one. He could work far more quickly than usual because there was no reason to measure them, apply height or race formulas, or do anything else to help in the identification process. All he had to do, basically, was look for anything unusual; in particular, trauma and pathologies.

There was nothing that amounted to anything. Some dental caries, a lot of expectable age-related arthritis, and various long-standing deformities of the lumbar vertebrae and of the knee, ankle, and foot joints, all of which were clearly related to the old man’s hip problem, but that was all. Nothing new, nothing that explained anything.

Still, it ended up taking quite a bit more than an hour, and when he found Caravale in his office to tell him the results, Caravale simply looked up with a grumpy expression and said: “Jesus, it’s about time. I’ve been sitting here listening to my stomach rumble for the last twenty minutes. Let’s go and have some lunch.”

Caravale preferred not to eat in Stresa, where so many people knew him. Instead, they drove a few miles up the lakeshore road, past graceful villas and Art Nouveau hotels, to the quieter town of Baveno, where they pulled into the parking lot of a rustic, homey restaurant called II Gabbiano, the seagull. The owner knew Caravale and his preferences, and without being asked he showed them to a wooden table more or less hidden in a niche beside an arched entryway separating the two small rooms that made up the place. The place smelled of oregano and baking bread. It was like sitting in somebody’s country kitchen.

As Gideon had surmised, Caravale took his eating seriously. After a brief but thorough scan of the menu, he rattled off an order for artichoke pie appetizer, risotto Milanese, veal pizzaiola, parsleyed potatoes, and sauteed fennel, with cheese, grapes, and coffee to follow. Mineral water to drink. This was a stupendous initial order (for a native) in a country in which doggie bags do not exist because one’s stomach is supposed to plan ahead, and people generally choose one course at a time, not an entire meal that they might not be able to finish. The restaurant owner was not surprised, however. Without writing it down, he grunted, then turned to Gideon and said, translating as he went: “The trota, trout, is very fine, fresh this morning in the lago, the lake. Very good fritto, fried.”

Gideon went along with that, ordering a bowl of minestrone and some bread and mineral water to accompany it. Coffee afterward, but no dessert.

“That’s all you want?” Caravale seemed disappointed. “Your meal is courtesy of the Carabinieri di Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta. That doesn’t happen every day. You should make the most of it.”

“I didn’t realize that, but really, that’s all I want. And thank you.”

“A small expression of our gratitude.” He rubbed his hands together and looked over his shoulder. “So, let’s go and see what awaits on the antipasto table.”

With a platter of olives, sauteed peppers, salami, stuffed zucchini, and marinated shrimp and mussels between them, Gideon picked at a slice or two of salami, then raised something that had been at the back of his mind for a while.

“Tullio, I had a nasty thought. What you said before, about who could have attacked me, who could even have known that you’d found the bones…”

“Ahh,” said Caravale with an evil, knowing grin. So he’d had the same nasty thought.

“Assuming you or your men haven’t been broadcasting it around,” Gideon went on, “the only people who’d know would be-”

“The de Grazias, that’s right. We’re back to them. And that doctor, Luzzatto. Or maybe other people they might have told. But that’s easy to check. For the time being, it looks as if we’re talking about the nine fine people that were in that room with us yesterday.”

“Eight people. I think you can pretty safely exclude Phil Boyajian.”

Caravale said nothing, but only tipped his head to one side and waggled his hand, palm down. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Fair enough, Gideon thought. From the police point of view, at this stage of the game no one was to be excluded, certainly not on the testimony of an old friend.

Gideon did a little more pondering. “If it is one of those people-”

“One or more of those people.”

“-then that pretty much has to mean that the same person-”

“Or people.”

“-was behind Domenico’s murder ten years ago, or at least involved in it in some way. Right? Why else try to hide anything about the bones?”

Caravale’s answer was a head-tilted, open-handed shoulder shrug that as much as said that the conclusion was self-evident; the facts spoke for themselves.

“His own family,” Gideon said.

“Or Luzzatto. One of the nine people in that room,” he said again.

Gideon shook his head. “The guy that choked me-he wasn’t in that room, I can tell you that much. Believe me, I would have remembered those arms.”

“A hired hand.”

They paused while the owner-waiter set down Gideon’s soup and Caravale’s wedge of artichoke pie.

“Hired hands kidnapping Achille last week, a hired hand trying to stop me from examining the bones of his murdered grandfather today,” Gideon said. “Isn’t that a lot of hired hands? You can’t have that many criminals for hire wandering around Stresa. Doesn’t it make you wonder at least a little if the two things might be related?”

“Wandering around Stresa, no. But not so many kilometers away, wandering around Milan, yes. Look, Gideon, the kidnapping, the murder, they happened ten years apart.”

“To the same family.”

“Yes, the same family. So? What are you suggesting, that one of the de Grazias not only murdered Domenico, but kidnapped Achille too? We had a liquor store robbed the day before yesterday in Stresa. Do you think that might have been the de Grazia gang as well?”

“No, of course that’s not what I’m suggesting-well, I don’t know, maybe I am. All I’m saying is that the two things might possibly be connected one way or another. I had an old professor who used to talk about what he called the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. I don’t know how that would translate into Italian, but what he was saying was that when too many seemingly unrelated incidents occur to the same set of people in the same-”

“I understand what he was saying, but what do you say we just deal with the facts that we have instead of coming up with complicated theories? We have a decade-old murder of an old man. We have a week-old kidnapping of a boy. Two separate cases, ten years apart. Believe me, we have enough resources to deal with them both on their own merits. And as things stand, I don’t see a good reason for assuming they’re part of anything bigger.”

Gideon held up his hands in defeat. Caravale had just delivered a pretty good precis of Gideon’s standard classroom presentation on Occam’s razor, the Law of Parsimony: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. The simplest theory that fits the facts is the best one upon which to proceed.”

And Gideon believed in that. Absolutely.

On the other hand, there was Alfred North Whitehead’s take on the subject: “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” That was the nice thing about theories. If you looked hard enough, you could always find one to fit what you were thinking.