Good Blood

SIX

The gallery, in which the consiglio was to be held, was a smallish room without windows on the ground floor, the faded, red-flocked walls of which were covered floor-to-ceiling with portraits of defunct de Grazias, some in medieval armor; some in frilly seventeenth-century courtiers’ garb, some in military uniforms or 1930s businessmen’s suits, and in one case, the reason for which was no longer known, in a balloon-trousered Turkish pasha’s outfit complete with turban and jeweled dagger. Furnished with the oldest, ugliest, and least comfortable furniture in the house-dark, slab-backed, hard-seated wooden chairs from the Italian Gothic (apparently a time when human anatomy was imperfectly understood)-and with a couple of massive, grim commodes to match, the gallery had been Vincenzo’s choice for familial consigli from the day he took the reins from his father. He frequently said it was because it imbued their councils with the fitting ambience of family tradition. But the prevailing view, in which Phil shared, was that he’d picked it because the uncomfortable seating guaranteed that the meetings would be brief. There was even a rumor that he’d had an inch taken off the front legs of all the chairs to help speed people on their way.

On the way there, Vincenzo took Phil aside, into the music room with its two harpsichords and virginal-tuned every three months without exception and dusted weekly, but never, to Phil’s knowledge, played-to fill him in on the current status of things. Achille had been taken from a company limousine the previous Thursday, four days earlier. There had been shooting and two people were dead, but Achille was believed to be all right. Nothing at all had been heard until a few hours ago, when the carabiniere in charge of the case, Colonel Caravale, had telephoned. It seemed that a fax from the kidnappers, with their demands, had been sent to Vincenzo’s office in Ghiffa and automatically diverted, as were all faxes and telephone calls for the time being, to carabinieri headquarters.

“What do they want?” Phil asked.

“I don’t know yet. I didn’t speak with him personally. He’ll be here with it at eleven o’clock.” As custom required, Vincenzo had called a consiglio, and the de Grazias and their kin were now gathered and awaiting the colonel’s arrival.

“The usual crew?” Phil asked.

With a sigh and a barely discernible lift of his eyes, Vincenzo nodded. “Every last one. Your ‘sainted’ grandfather, of course, who, in his usual way-”

“Yes, I met him outside,” Phil said, cutting him off. He didn’t want to hear Vincenzo’s mocking assessment of the aged Cosimo. “Let’s go in.”

“I want to wait out front for the colonel, but you go ahead and join the others,” Vincenzo said. “I know you can’t wait to see them all again.”

“Mm,” said Phil noncommittally.

The fact was, he always did look forward to seeing them. His Italian relatives were, after all, the only family he had. Between visits he would invariably forget how much they got on his nerves. That is, he knew they did, but he couldn’t quite remember why. It usually took about ten minutes for it to come back to him, and today was no exception. Once the excitement and surprise at his showing up had died down, it started.

And as usual, it was Dante Galasso who was the first to get to him.

Technically speaking, Dante wasn’t a relative-that is, a blood relative-either of Phil’s or of the de Grazias’. But he was married to Vincenzo’s older sister Francesca, which gave him the privilege of residing with her at the villa, along with the right to participate in the consigli if he so chose, which he unfailingly did.

A sinewy man with a deeply lined face, a bony head atop a snakelike neck, and a thin, contemptuous twist to his lips, as if he knew all sorts of things you didn’t, he had been a Marxist professor of Italian language and culture at the University of Bologna in 1984, when Francesca had been a student there. She had fallen under his spell and the following year, over the vigorous objections of her father Domenico, she had married him. This had caused Domenico enormous grief, inasmuch as Francesca, even more than his brother Cosimo or his son Vincenzo, had been his dearest confidante and had served as mistress of Isola de Grazia since the death of her mother.

A week after the wedding the married couple came to the villa to pay their respects. In a rare emotional scene, the outraged Domenico had Dante forcibly ejected, and for many months father and daughter were estranged. But when Francesca began visiting without Dante in tow, Domenico’s reserve broke down, and they soon became as close as ever. As Phil understood it, the one condition the old man insisted upon was that Dante’s name, or the fact of Francesca’s marriage to him, never be referred to, even indirectly. Francesca, apparently, had no objections and took to spending one or two husbandless weekends a month at her old home.

In the meantime, Dante had continued to teach in Bologna, living in nearby Modena with Francesca, until Domenico had died in 1993. Then, with the old man’s hostility no longer an issue and the widowed Vincenzo more than happy to have his sister on hand to reassume her old role as mistress of Isola de Grazia, he had returned with Francesca to take up residence at the villa “for a year of reflection and renewal.”

That had been ten years ago, but here he was, still reflecting and renewing away, with no sign of letting up.

“So then, here we are,” he said when they had retaken their uncomfortable seats after greeting Phil. He sipped from a gold-rimmed teacup and gestured at the dark, sober portraits that surrounded them, “Once again we find ourselves in the de Grazia Family Hall of Undistinguished Provincial Magistrates, Obscure Papal Sycophants, and Second-Rate, Do-Nothing Admirals.”

This was said just as Cosimo came in from his walk with Bacco. Phil knew perfectly well that it was meant to bait the old man, and predictably, it did.

“The de Grazias have centuries of public service to their credit,” he said sternly, taking one of the remaining chairs, pointedly turning it so that he wasn’t required to rest his eyes directly on Dante, and settling the old dog beside his legs, “which is more than can be said for the Galassos. And I remind you that my sainted brother Alfredo was no ‘donothing admiral.’ He fought and died as a decorated naval officer in the Second World War.”

Dante tipped back his head and laughed. “Sure, with the Fascists. Now there’s something to be proud of, all right.”

“He despised the Fascists, as you well know. He loathed Mussolini.”

“But he fought on their side anyway. Pardon me, but I’ve never understood how that makes sense.”

Bacco, sensing that his master was in need of support, uttered an uncertain growl in Dante’s direction. Cosimo sat very straight, stroking the furry, nervous head. “It is to Alfredo’s unending credit that he gave his life in a war he hated, obeying a leader he abhorred, in a cause he distrusted. I assure you, if he didn’t bear the name he did, he would not have done it, something I don’t expect you to understand.”

He sat up even straighter. “Do you know what he said to Domenico and to me the morning he left?” He was addressing the entire group now. “‘This war is going to be lost, brothers, I have no doubt of that. But we must lose it as well as we can.’” He looked from face to face. “He was a de Grazia.”

Dante shook his head, as if in incredulity, although he, like all of them, had heard the story before. “All I can say is, let us all be grateful that such traditions are now obsolete, along with the decadent, moribund aristocracy that spawned them.”

“Decadent… I… you…” Cosimo, having run out of steam, shook his head with an old man’s trembling frustration. The dog, looking up at him with concerned eyes, nuzzled his hand.

It was an old debate, and although on an intellectual level Phil had to agree with Dante, it was his grandfather’s side that he instinctively took. The only thing that had kept him from publicly standing with Cosimo so far was his reluctance to begin his visit by getting into an unwinnable argument. Besides, this had been going on for years and would keep going on after he left, so what difference would it make? But he was now resolved to jump in if Dante pushed his luck in the face of Cosimo’s capitulation, as he probably would.

Francesca saved him the trouble. Before Dante had gotten out another full sentence (“Once it’s understood that all the tired old ideas of reactionism and imperialism have been obsolete for fifty years, and Italy comes to terms with its tawdry history of marginalization-”) her dismissive, painfully incisive voice cut him off.

“Tired old ideas is exactly right. Keep it up, Dante, and when the revolution comes, you won’t have to kill all the capitalists, you’ll have bored them to death long before.”

Dante glowered at her. “How very amusing.”

“I thought it was time for someone to be amusing.”

Francesca de Grazia Galasso had been-still was-one of those classic Italian beauties, long-nosed, black-haired, flashing-eyed, and from Phil’s point of view, overwhelmingly, almost frighteningly, hard-edged. Although they had never taken to each other-as a child, Francesca had preferred to keep well clear of her Ungaretti kin-he was always grateful for her presence at family affairs, which were dull things in her absence. With Francesca around, the clang of steel blades, the exciting glint of armor, was never very far away.

Well into her forties now, and more formidable than ever, she had been a textbook example of the adoring student who fulfilled her dreams by marrying the professor she idolized, only to find that his brilliant and profound observations tended to be less dazzling after she’d heard them a few dozen times. It also hadn’t taken her long to figure out-correctly, in Phil’s opinion-that she was smarter than he was. For many years now she had been paying little attention to anything he said, and on the few occasions she did, she was equally likely to be bored or irritated.

Over those years she had turned from the rebel against her own class that Dante had briefly made her, into as much a defender of the ancienne noblesse as Cosimo was, but of a very different sort. Caustic and exacting, she was the terror of the household staff, more than once reducing a new maid or young assistant gardener to tears. Not long before, Clemente and Genoveffa Candeloro, the married couple who had served as major domo and housekeeper since Domenico’s day, had thrown an unprecedented joint tantrum and walked out. It seemed that Francesca, during one of her white-glove tours of inspection, had shut one too many French windows and said, one too many times: “If dirt does not get in, dirt does not have to be got out.” It had taken the intervention of Vincenzo to get them to return, and relations were still on the dicey side.

Long ago, when Francesca had first started talking back to Dante, he had reacted with astonishment and indignation, neither of which had had any lasting effect on her. Now she no longer argued, but she no longer listened either, and when she casually cut him off or publicly ignored him, he still flared up once in a while, but generally did nothing worse than mutter back at her and eventually shut up. What their life might be like in private nobody knew and nobody wanted to guess.

As it was, and probably very much for the better, they spent little time together. The highly intelligent Francesca, who had gotten her accounting degree at Bologna despite the distractions provided by Dante, was Aurora’s chief financial officer and Vincenzo’s trusted second-in-command. In effect, it was Francesca who ran the company day-to-day, while Vincenzo was jetting around making deals or getting his clothes filthy at the building sites-an arrangement they both preferred. These duties kept her away from the villa a good forty, and sometimes fifty, hours a week (to the great relief of the household staff). Dante, on the other hand, stuck close to home, cranking out fiery manifestos for various left-wing or postmodernist antiestablishment periodicals, unbothered by the paradox of living high off the hog, in the bosom of a patrician family, while doing it.

Around the corner of the room from them, seated side-by-side, shoulders touching, like a pair of oversized nuthatches, on a heavy wooden dowry chest from the fifteenth century, were two people who were, in appearance, almost the exact opposites of the Galassos: a plump, pink-cheeked couple who were invariably protective of each other. These were the Barberos, Bella and Basilio. Bella was the daughter, by a previous marriage, of Domenico’s wife, which made her Vincenzo’s half-sister, which, Phil supposed, made her his own… what, stepaunt? Second cousin, once removed? He’d have to ask Gideon.

Or maybe not. He’d gotten along until now without knowing, after all.

As Domenico’s stepdaughter, Bella had grown up on the island, among the de Grazias, and had married Basilio when they were both twenty-four. That had been thirty-five years ago, and if they’d ever said a cross word to each other since, nobody could remember having heard it. Not that Bella had any shortage of cross words when it came to other people. Hypersensitive and short-fused, she had chafed most of her life under the humiliation of depending on the largesse of her stepfamily. Marriage to Basilio had come as a tremendous release, and she’d wasted no time in escaping to Milan with him. However, her husband, an ineffectual, jovial man with a diploma in human resources, had proven unequal to the task of supporting her in the style to which she’d become accustomed. After a few years of relative deprivation in Milan, she had turned for help to her stepfather.

Not unexpectedly, Domenico had come through. Following his father’s instructions, Vincenzo had created a make-work job with a nice title for him at Aurora: employee salary and benefits administrator. With the appointment to this position, the Barberos had come back to the villa to live. It had been intended as a temporary measure until they found someplace nearby, but somehow it had settled into permanence.

Later, when Vincenzo had taken over the company as CEO and chairman of the board of directors, he had given the somewhat underemployed Basilio another essentially meaningless responsibility as chairman of the newly created policy advisory committee. In the decade since then, Basilio, being Basilio, had voted with Vincenzo 434 out of 435 times, the one exception being in 1996 when Basilio stood up for his principles and voted, against Vincenzo’s openly expressed wishes, for installing a candy machine in the plant. There had been no similar revolt since.

While Domenico had been alive, it hadn’t been so bad for Bella at the villa. Although not a de Grazia, she was, after all, the daughter of the padrone’ s own wife and he had treated her with consideration, if not with great affection. But after the old man died, once Vincenzo had become padrone, the atmosphere had changed. It was nothing he’d ever said in so many words, but he made it clear, every day, in a hundred ways, that she was now nothing more than one more unwelcome ward, an unasked-for, barely noticed obligation he was honor-bound to meet. His despicable sister Francesca and even the snot-nosed young Achille had taken their cues from Vincenzo and had begun treating her accordingly. But despite the many provocations, after twenty-two years it no longer seemed conceivable to live elsewhere. Besides, the damned de Grazias owed it to her.

Basilio Barbero was very different from his wife, a nervous, always-jolly, accommodating man with thinning reddish hair and a drinker’s veiny nose and cheeks. Left to his own devices, he would take whatever hand Fate dealt him without complaint. Unlike Bella, he was constitutionally averse to conflict, so that while Bella had been taking malicious pleasure at the exchange between Dante and Francesca, her husband had been getting increasingly uncomfortable.

“I can’t help wondering,” he piped up as Dante arranged his all-but-lipless mouth into the most satisfactory position for a cutting retort to his wife, “what those people”-he meant the kidnappers-“have to say. And I certainly hope young Achille is all right. I know we’re all terribly worried about him.”

“Oh, are we really?” Dante said mockingly. “Tell me, would it be violating some primeval law of the de Grazia canon to be honest for once? Is there anyone here who really cares, one way or the other, what happens to that know-it-all brat?”

“I-” Cosimo began indignantly.

“Except, of course, for our venerable patriarch over there,” Dante allowed, with a half-bow in his direction.

“Come now, Dante, I know you don’t mean what you said,” Basilio replied with a chuckle. “After all, who among us did not become a know-it-all at sixteen?”

“I did not.”

“That’s true enough,” Francesca muttered into her cup of espresso. “Dante knew everything there was to know from the day he was born.”

Her husband folded his arms and turned away in his chair to make it clear that a direct reply was beneath him. “Charming,” he said.

“ I care about Achille,” Bella Barbero blurted, as if she’d been holding herself back only with difficulty. “I feel very deeply for him.”

The others looked at her with skepticism-including Phil, who was aware that the family’s antipathy toward Achille, with the sole exception of old Cosimo, was universal and well deserved. Kidnapped or not, there was no denying that Achille was, and always had been, a pill: demanding and disrespectful as a child; arrogant, contemptuous, and self-centered as a teenager. To his credit, Vincenzo, proud of his new son, had really tried with the boy at first, but fatherhood did not come naturally to him, and in any case, nothing, neither tolerance, nor severity, seemed to make a lasting difference. Achille was simply Achille. And when Vincenzo’s wife, Achille’s mother, had died when the boy was eleven, Vincenzo had thrown up his hands altogether. He had turned Achille’s upbringing over to the busy Francesca, who had eventually thrown up her hands in turn and more or less given him over into Genoveffa’s care.

Vincenzo still tried sometimes with him for the sake of familial continuity, but it was apparent to all that their relationship had become strained and distant, and he, like the others, had been openly relieved as Achille grew older and began to spend more and more time off the island. Only Cosimo still saw the possibility (increasingly remote, although he wouldn’t admit it) of the noble, truly patrician genes of the boy’s grandfather someday asserting themselves in him.

“Very deeply,” Bella repeated through her teeth, while her considerable bosom swelled. She had a somewhat pneumatic appearance to begin with, and when she was angry, she gave the remarkable impression of physically expanding. “There are good reasons for his behaving as he does. I, too, was an unloved child in this house,” she said darkly. “I understand what he’s had to go through.”

“Oh?” said Francesca. “And how were you mistreated? Tell us, were you chained up in the cellar? Were you denied food?”

“Not all mistreatment need be physical,” Bella said, her fingers at the strand of pearls on her throat.

“That’s so,” said her husband. “Indeed, that’s so. Many, many cases-”

“You’re a de Grazia, Francesca,” Bella went on without pause. “I don’t expect you to comprehend. You think that because I happen not to have your noble and wondrous name, I should sit without complaint, keep my mouth closed, and be grateful for every crumb, every kind word that’s thrown to me.”

Phil understood her point. To Francesca, as it had been to Domenico and as it still was to Cosimo and Vincenzo, blood counted above everything, and the blood that counted above all other blood, no matter how ancient or ennobled, was that which ran in the veins of the de Grazias. By that token, the only members of the consiglio whose opinions really mattered, who were there by virtue of an unassailable hereditary right, were Vincenzo himself, Cosimo, and Francesca. And Phil, too, although to a lesser degree. Although he’d been born an Ungaretti, he was nevertheless the grandson of Cosimo and great-nephew of Domenico. The blood of the de Grazias flowed in his veins. But the others-Dante, Bella, Basilio-were members of the de Grazia family merely through marriage, the most technical of loopholes.

“Oh, I understand, all right,” Francesca shot back. “I understand you hated it here so much you didn’t leave until you were twenty. And you ran back soon enough with your tail between your legs; you and your husband both.”

Bella’s eyes bulged. Although it seemed impossible, the great bosom distended even more. “If you think for one minute-”

“You know what? I believe I’ll stand up for a while,” Basilio announced out of the blue.

The others watched him stand up.

“There, that feels better,” he said, waggling his arms. “It gets the circulation going. Dr. Luzzatto says we should all stand up and move our limbs at least once an hour. At work, I make sure that my secretary lets me know whenever I’ve been sitting at my desk for more than an hour. It’s very easy to lose track of time when one is constantly busy. Of course, if I’m in a conference that can’t be interrupted, well, then, it simply has to wait. Work comes first. But other than that, once an hour, Basilio Barbero is up and about. By example, I try to encourage our employees to do the same thing, but I’m not always successful. One of these days, I’m going to get a conditioning room put in, so that our office employees can use their breaks for healthy, enjoyable exercise. Personally, I’d be in favor of allowing everyone twenty minutes for exercise, over and above any other breaks. Well, not the construction workers, of course; they get all the exercise they need, that goes without saying. People think that such a policy would reduce work output, but in reality the opposite is true.”

Phil was beginning to remember what it was about the essentially harmless Basilio that got on his nerves. It wasn’t merely that he was too anxious to please, too quick to laugh at your jokes, too relentlessly cheery, too scatterbrained. Those were mild annoyances compared to the way he had of gabbling away like a chimp on amphetamines. Whenever he got nervous, or agitated, or anxious (all of which occurred frequently), his tongue would start flapping, and once he got started, it was impossible to shut him up.

Basilio took a breath-a quick one, not long enough to give Bella and Francesca a chance to start taking whacks at each other again. “Look at the clock, it’s fifteen minutes past eleven,” he rattled on. “Wasn’t he supposed to be here at eleven? I understand that the man is a carabinieri colonel with a good many responsibilities and you can’t expect him to be prompt down to the minute, but aren’t our responsibilities to be taken into consideration too? Ah, well, I suppose I might as well sit down again. Standing’s not going to make Colonel Caravale get here any sooner, is it? Still, you would think that if he knew he was going to be as late as this, he would have had the common courtesy to have us telephoned. But common courtesy is hardly as common as it used to be, is it? It’s all push and shove and go and run nowadays. People have forgotten-”

Phil shot out of his chair and ran for the pantry across the corridor, where the tea and coffee had been set up on a trestle table. “Jeez,” he said as opened the tap of the coffee urn to fill an espresso cup, but he was laughing as he said it. “What a- damn!”

“Oh, excuse me, signore!”

In turning away from the buffet he had collided with a thin, sallow, worn-looking woman with limp, mouse-brown hair and indistinct features unenhanced by makeup. He had juggled and caught the espresso cup before it hit the stone-tiled floor, but not before it splattered some of its contents over his T-shirt.

“I’m so sorry, signore. I wasn’t looking where I was going…” Her near-colorless eyebrows went up. “Oh, my God, it’s Fili, isn’t it? What are you doing here?”

He stared at her, open-mouthed. “Lea?”

She smiled. “Have I changed so much then?” She wore a thin, button-up, old-womanish sweater over a nondescript collared blouse and tan pants, along with a pair of bulky, multicolored running shoes.

“You haven’t changed at all. I just didn’t expect to see you, that’s all. You look wonderful.”

She looked, he thought, like absolute hell. Lea Pescallo, the daughter of Bella and Basilio Barbero, had been an early love. He had first known her-and then forgotten her-when they had both been children at the villa. But later, on a family visit when he was eighteen, he had fallen passionately, hopelessly in love with her. At that age, he had been pretty much a younger version of what he was now in his forties: knobbly, gangling, vaguely ill-formed. (He’d been desperately shy, too, but that, at least, he’d been able to overcome with the years.) But Lea… Lea had been heartbreakingly beautiful; seductive and ethereal at the same time, like something out of Botticelli.

“That one will die young. You can see it in her face,” his mother had remarked years before, but Phil had found Lea’s fragile beauty, her gentle, wonderfully graceful hands, her soft voice, her quiet, modest ways, heartbreakingly attractive… and miles beyond anything a misfit like him might conceivably hope for. Around her, he’d turned into a nitwit, blushing and perspiring after every dumb thing he’d said.

They had somehow become friends in spite of this, and had carried on a chaste, pointless, increasingly intermittent correspondence for years, until she had fallen in love with and married the impossibly dashing Raffaele Pescallo, he of the gleaming white teeth, a rising star on the European motocross circuit. As a sort of self-punishment-for what he wasn’t sure-Phil had come to the wedding, a predictably flashy affair in Arona. It was the last time he’d seen her and it was clear that the intervening seventeen years had been brutally hard on her. Someone seeing her now for the first time-the defeated shoulders, the faint pink smudge of mouth, the puffy, watery eyes underscored with bruiselike streaks of fatigue-would have a hard time believing that this drab, beaten-down woman had once been beautiful, and not such a very long time ago at that.

“Are you here for the consiglio?” Phil asked, searching for something to say. It wasn’t only her appearance that had devastated him, but her question: “Have I changed so much then?” No effort at irony, just a melancholy, rueful query-more a statement, really-to which she already knew the answer.

“The consiglio? Oh… no, I wouldn’t feel comfortable at that. I don’t really belong. No, I’m just… visiting.”

“Ah. Well. Are you still working for that hotel group?” The last he’d heard, she was some kind of consultant for a consortium of hotels that operated throughout Europe.

“Oh, yes. And you, do you still… the tours, the travel books?”

“Yes.” He was wildly pleased that she remembered. “That’s really why I’m in Italy now, doing a tour.”

“Ah. Well…” She was getting ready to go.

“Is Raf here with you?” he asked.

“Raf? No. I’ve left him, didn’t you know? No, why would you know? It was three months ago. I’ve been staying here, with my parents, until… well, until I can figure out where I go next.”

“I’m sorry.” He waited to see if she’d tell him anything more, and after a few seconds she did.

“I was wrong and everybody else was right about Raf,” she said humbly. As her lips pressed together, he noticed for the first time the dry, middle-aged lines that radiated from their corners. It was as if a pincer squeezed his heart. “He was never cut out to be a husband. I thought he would change. I should have known better.”

To his shame, a surge of something like vindication flowed through him. If you had married me instead of Raf, you would still be beautiful. I would have made you happy. You should have married me. The fact that he had never asked her to, or even hinted at it, was forgotten for the moment.

“You should have married me,” he said to his own surprise. And to his astonishment, he was blushing again, something he’d thought he’d gotten over twenty years ago.

She looked down, but he could see she was smiling. “Maybe I should have.”

He was relieved to hear Vincenzo’s rough, dismissive voice from across the corridor, at the entrance to the gallery:

“You all know Colonel Caravale. Shall we get started? Where’s Fili?”