Good Blood

TWO

In Stresa the headquarters of the Polizia Municipale and the offices of the regional carabinieri are separated by only five short, pleasant blocks, but they might as well be in different universes. The Polizia’s office is in the bustling, upscale heart of Stresa, on the lakefront, just off the busy, modern Corso Italia, where it shares a handsome building with the ferry company and the city’s chamber of commerce. Carabinieri headquarters, on the other hand, are hidden away on a little-traveled backstreet, next door to the overgrown garden of an empty, moldering nineteenth-century villa, in an unappealing concrete blockhouse of a building, utterly-almost purposefully-without charm.

But in this case appearances are deceiving, for the carabinieri are an accomplished national police force whose simple black uniforms command universal respect, while the Polizia Municipale, despite their flashier outfits and imposing sidearms, generally (and wisely) confine themselves to matters of local traffic control and minor crimes. They are quick to hand off any hot potatoes to their carabinieri colleagues who are, fortunately, only a telephone call away.

And when the phone call was made person-to-person, on a secure line, from Comandante Boldini of the Polizia to his carabinieri counterpart, Colonnello Tullio Caravale-an event that had occurred but five times in six years-Caravale knew even as he picked up the receiver that it wasn’t just another hot potato, but one of which Comandante Boldini was more than usually anxious to wash his hands and to do it in a hurry.

He was right. The longer he listened, the worse it got. The extraordinary accident that had completely stopped downtown traffic for the last hour, it was now clear, had been a meticulously planned ruse, a clever kidnapping plan that had kept the police cars helpless in their lot, while at the same time forcing their quarry to detour into the narrow, deserted side streets. There the object of it all-a vintage Daimler limousine, no less-had been hemmed in and trapped on Via Garibaldi by two cars with armed hoodlums in them. The kidnapping had been successful but there had been a shootout that had left two men dead: the uniformed driver of the limo, who was sprawled on his back on the blood-smeared front seat, and one of the attackers, apparently left to bleed to death by his accomplices. Still wearing his stocking mask, he had been found mumbling beside the car but had died before the medics could get to him.

“Has anything been moved?” Caravale asked.

“No, no, Caravale, nothing’s been touched. I thought you would want your people to examine the scene.”

“Very good, Boldini, that’s exactly what I want.”

In his mind’s eye, he could imagine Boldini’s grimace of disapproval. In a meaningless ceremony a few years ago, the city council had made the comandante an honorary maresciallo of Stresa in recognition of his “invaluable service commanding the extensive traffic reorganization necessitated by the repaving of the Strada Statale del Sempione.” And in Boldini’s eyes, since marshals outranked colonels, he was entitled to call Caravale by nothing more than his last name-but not the other way around-and he was patently miffed when Caravale didn’t see it that way. And so, of course, Caravale called him “Boldini” every chance he got.

“All right, Boldini, I’m on my way, then,” he said. He began to hang up, then spoke again. “As to who was kidnapped-I take it you don’t know yet?”

Boldini hesitated. “Actually, we do. It was, ah, Achille de Grazia.” His voice was as somber and reverent as a muffled church bell.

“I see.”

“Sixteen years old, the son of Vincenzo de Grazia.”

“Yes, all right.”

“You do know Vincenzo de Grazia…?”

“Yes, Boldini, I know Vincenzo de Grazia. The son, was he hurt?”

“That we don’t know for certain. There is a witness, Carlo Muccia, a grocer-my men are holding him for you-he says the boy was definitely alive, but they had to drag him to their car-it took two of them-so, yes, it appears he may have been injured.”

Or it could be that he just preferred not to go. “Thank you, Boldini, we’ll take over from here. You’ve informed de Grazia?”

“Ah, no, as a matter of fact. As you may know, Signor de Grazia has honored me by making it clear that he does prefer to conduct any local police business through my office. However, in this case, I think the nature of the circumstances, the regrettable nature of the circumstances, ah, suggests that you be the one to inform him, don’t you agree?”

So. That accounted for the person-to-person call. Now we were getting down to it. It wasn’t the shooting, it wasn’t the two dead men, it wasn’t even the kidnapping, per se. Boldini just didn’t want to be the one to tell Vincenzo de Grazia that his son had been taken. Well, his attitude, weak-kneed as it was, was understandable. The comandante served at the pleasure of the Stresa city council, after all, and Vincenzo, as everyone knew, was one of the powers behind that august group.

As a colonel in the federal police, however, Caravale didn’t have to worry about local “powers.” True, Vincenzo had a long reach; no doubt he could put in a good-or bad-word for him in Rome and significantly affect his chances for advancement in the force. But that didn’t make any difference either. Caravale was that rare thing-a man not interested in advancing. No ambition burned in his belly, no resentment at the progression of friends and enemies through the ranks stuck in his craw. He was exactly where he wanted to be. When he’d been a boy of ten, he had sometimes accompanied his sainted grandfather on his ice wagon runs in Stresa, sitting with him up in the driver’s box and working the reins if the traffic wasn’t too bad. And one rainy day Nonno Fortunato, his words whistling through the gap where other people’s front teeth were, had said, out of nowhere: “Tell me, Tullio, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Out of nowhere, Caravale had answered, “A policeman, Grandfather.”

“A policeman!” the old man had said, beaming. He’d raised his arm, stood up in the driver’s box, and pretended to make an announcement to the world at large. “Honored ladies and gentlemen, you see this little fellow sitting next to me? This is my grandson, Tullio Caravale. Remember his name, because someday he is going to be the comandante ”-he’d pointed to a building they were passing-“right there.”

The building was carabinieri headquarters, and for Caravale, that had been that. Dreams of being an actor, a pilot, an international soccer star, were gone from his mind. Despite his father’s often-voiced reservations about the police, he knew from that time on exactly what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to do it.

And here he was.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll take care of telling de Grazia. I’ll go see him.”

“Now?”

“Give me a chance to look at the scene and see what’s what first. Then I’ll talk to him. His company’s up in Ghiffa, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Aurora Construction, but these days he’ll be at his field office in Intra. It’s on Corso Mameli, a block north of the old port, right across-”

“I know where it is. You’ll release no information before I see him?”

“No, no, not until you tell me. Do you… did you want me to accompany you?”

“That’s not necessary. It will be simpler if I do it myself.”

“Well… all right, then, if you’re sure that’s best…?”

Even over the telephone, his relief was palpable.

“Definitely,” said Caravale.

Intra, a quick ten kilometers north of Stresa, was the western shore’s commercial and small-industry center. Anywhere else it would have been commonplace, but along this stretch of Lake Maggiore it stood out: a homely, workaday few blocks in the midst of the dreamlike promenades, elegant villas, and grand hotels that otherwise lined the lakeshore. Caravale felt at home here. He’d lived in nearby Caprezzo, one of the backward little villages that dotted the flanks of Mount Zeda, until he was fourteen, and he’d worked in Intra three afternoons a week from the time he was twelve.

In those days, there had been a withered, green-toothed ancient named Verrucchio who had owned a dry-cleaning shop (now a hardware store) only a block away from what was now de Grazia’s field office (then a pharmacy). As a youngster, Caravale had spent a lot of after-school hours behind the counter, waiting on customers and straightening out accounts, while old Verrucchio, who could neither read nor write, sweated buckets in back and breathed in the corrosive fumes that would do him in a few years later.

On the day after Caravale’s fourteenth birthday, his father, who had lived in America for five years after he got out of the Italian Army, had landed a job teaching English in Cremona and had taken the family with him. It was in Cremona a few months later that young Tullio heard about Verrucchio’s death. He was shocked to learn that the shrunken old man had been only forty-seven.

The Aurora Construction Company had been a far smaller enterprise back then. The old man, Domenico de Grazia, had still been alive, and under his patriarchy the de Grazias did not willingly stoop to commerce. They had still owned untold hectares of land on the eastern shore then, and they lived like the titled aristocrats they’d been since the fifteenth century. A significant part of their income had come from timber and mining leases, but when those had begun dwindling away about twenty years ago, Domenico, looking to the future, had sold off much of the de Grazia land and put the money into several local businesses, with (so Caravale had heard) generally unfortunate results. But among them had been Aurora Costruzioni, a small construction contractor in Ghiffa that specialized in concrete work. With the help of his son, the young Vincenzo, who had been sent off to the University of Pisa and the London School of Economics for degrees in architectural design and business management, he had built Aurora into a profitable operation, with projects throughout the region.

But it had been the son, Vincenzo, who had turned it into what it was today. Gradually taking over as the old man had aged, and infusing the company with the money from continuing land sell-offs and with his own intelligence and energy, the young Vincenzo had transformed it into one of northern Italy’s largest general contracting companies. After Domenico had died, Vincenzo had taken the company public and had himself installed as CEO and chairman of the board of directors. From there, things had really taken off. Aurora now had projects throughout Piedmont and Lombardy, and even, if the stories were true, consulting contracts as far away as Ireland and Gibraltar, building everything from plastic-recycling facilities to high-rise condominiums. With its fleet of heavy equipment, and its ninety permanent employees and more than two hundred seasonal and temporary workers, Aurora Costruzioni was now Ghiffa’s largest employer by a factor of ten, making Vincenzo one of the area’s most influential businessmen, which was the way he liked it. Unlike his aloof and courtly father, Vincenzo loved to be center stage. He was a mover and a shaker, a natural entrepreneur who relished the power plays and wheeler-dealer mentality of land acquisition and development.

“Count de Grazia,” everyone had called old Domenico as he limped about Stresa or Ghiffa. It had made Caravale’s father, a socialist and a fiery antimonarchist, livid, but to young Tullio the genteel Domenico de Grazia had been the embodiment of what a storybook count should be: silver-haired and handsome, properly aloof, yes, but scrupulously courteous to all, right down to the street urchins.

Since that time, Caravale had come around to agreeing in large part with his father about the self-induced delusions of the post-war Italian “aristocracy,” but never in regard to Domenico de Grazia. The man had been a true, bred-in-the-bone patrician, the last of his kind. Or so it seemed in memory.

No one referred to Vincenzo as “Count” nowadays, but his noble lineage still made some people weak in the knees, and his behind-the-scenes involvement in regional politics (useful in getting building permits and variances) had made him more widely influential than his father had ever been. None of that had any effect on Caravale. Less than nothing. To him, Vincenzo de Grazia was just another human being like him, only richer, and not one he was particularly fond of at that. His relentless terracing of the foothills of Caravale’s beloved Mount Zeda into “Residenze This” and “Ville That” had chewed at him for years. Who needed all those developments? Who could afford them? Not the people who lived and worked here, that was for sure.

Beyond that, these new walled, gated communities of de Grazia’s represented something else, something essentially un-Italian to his way of thinking. When Caravale had been growing up, the rich and the poor had lived together. People didn’t believe it now anymore, but it was true. Oh, there were great villas and humble cottages, but they’d existed side by side on the same streets and alleys, as they had for centuries, sharing the same neighborhood concerns. In Caprezzo, the best drinking water had come from a centuries-old stone fountain in the courtyard of the village’s wealthiest landowner, and every afternoon, as they had since Caravale’s grandmother had been a girl, and probably long before, the housewives and peasant women would come to fill their jugs and bottles, and to gossip, on essentially equal terms, with the family of the padrone. Or if not on equal terms, then at least one could say they understood and appreciated one another. How was that going to happen when all the rich had walled themselves off behind the locked gates of these new “California-style” communities? It wasn’t, and something that made Italy what it was was being lost.

All the same, de Grazia was a father, and the news that was about to descend on him was almost as dreadful as anything a father could hear. Caravale’s heart went out to him. Getting out of his car, he found himself thinking that it would be nice if there were someone else he could hand this task off to, the way Boldini had handed it off to him. But the comandante was right; it was Caravale who was going to be running the investigation, and the task properly fell to him.

De Grazia was not in the office, a pretty secretary, dark as a gypsy, told him, but at the site of the new golf course and residential community that the company had just begun to excavate. Did the colonel know where it was?

He did not.

“You can’t miss it,” he was told. “Take the road up Mount Zeda, and right after the turnoff to Caprezzo-you know Caprezzo?”

“That’s where I was born,” he said with a smile.

“Really?” She looked as if she didn’t know whether or not he was joking. “Well, right after the turnoff, before you get to the village, you’ll see an area where they’re clearing the trees-lots of bulldozers at work. You’ll find him there.”

“Right after the turnoff? Do you mean the big pasture below the village? He’s putting in a development there? Another development?”

She laughed. “Well, I don’t know what it was before, but it’s not a pasture anymore.”

Caravale’s heart was perhaps just a little less softened as he returned to his car.