Good Blood (17 page)

They caught up with him on the steps of the log cabin office, but a noisily idling diesel-powered tour bus a few yards away drove them back to the lawn to talk.

“How’s Achille doing?” Phil asked at once.

“About the way you’d expect. Shaken up, filthy, but that’s about all, except for the drugging. They treated him fairly well, apparently.”

“Was he able to tell you anything?”

“Not a great deal. He was in a tent the entire time; they never let him out.”

“A tent?” Julie asked. “You mean they kept him outside?”

“No, he’s sure it was indoors. A tent inside a building of some kind. But he has no idea where.”

“What about descriptions?” Gideon asked. “Did he get a look at them?”

Caravale shook his head. “One of the men didn’t have a mask on when they kidnapped him, but he was too terrified by all the shooting to have a clear memory of him. He was ‘big,’ that’s all he can remember. It doesn’t help much.”

“Who wouldn’t have been terrified?” Julie asked. “Poor kid.”

“What about later?” Gideon asked. “He never saw them?”

“Later, whenever they came in, they made him put a blindfold over his head first-some kind of elastic bandage. He thinks there were two of them, both men, but maybe three. I’m starting to wonder if he might not have been drugged-sedated, at any rate-for the whole time. He says he doesn’t think so, but I’m not so sure.”

“So you don’t have much to go on, do you?”

“Much?” Caravale laughed. “You must be seeing something I missed. I didn’t think I had anything to go on.”

“Well, the main thing is, he’s out and he’s all right,” Phil said, as usual pointing out the bright side. “Is he home now?”

“Oh, sure, with his papa and his loving family. They’re all making a fuss over him, he’s very happy. All is well on Isola de Grazia.” He rocked back and forth on his feet, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his Sam Browne belt.

Something’s funny here, Gideon thought. Caravale was looking too pleased with himself. No doubt he was relieved that Achille had come out of it alive, but at the same time he was now a cop with a big, unclosed case on his hands and nowhere to go with it; not a lead in sight. In Gideon’s experience, that usually made cops cranky.

“Is there something else on your mind, Tullio?” Gideon asked.

“Something else?” He pretended to think. “Oh, yes, that’s right, I almost forgot. Those remains you were kind enough to help out with this morning? We have a positive ID on them.”

Gideon was astounded. “But… I left Fasoli with them not even two hours ago. They can’t even be clean yet. How did you-”

“Why, I did what you told me. I got a dental identification.”

“But how, how did you-”

“We found his dentist and asked him.”

“I understand, but how could you possibly-I never made any charts, we didn’t-”

He stopped in mid-sentence. Caravale was grinning at him, revealing a surprisingly perfect row of small, square, brown teeth. It was the first full smile that Gideon had seen on his face, and it made him look like a wicked Cupid. Obviously, he wasn’t above taking pleasure in a little mind-boggling of his own.

Fair enough, a little tit for tat. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “I’m completely mystified. How about letting me in on how you managed that?”

“It wasn’t so hard. I decided not to wait for your charts. I simply had our digital photography person photograph the jawbone from a lot of different angles and e-mailed them to the dentist-his office is in Milan-and a little later he called back with a hundred-percent positive ID. Nothing to it. The whole thing took… oh, twenty minutes.”

“But-”

“But how did we manage to find the right dentist? That was no problem. You see, I was already ninety percent sure I knew who those bones came from.”

He looked from one to the other of them, saving the last, longest look for Phil. His expression composed itself, flipping from self-satisfied to grave. “They are the remains of Domenico de Grazia.”

Phil’s mouth opened, shut, and opened again. “Domenico de-”

“Your uncle. The old padrone. The father of Vincenzo de Grazia. I’m sorry.”

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.