by Aaron Elkins
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said that first I should decide whether or not to cooperate with you. All right, I’ve agreed to cooperate. What next?”
“Next, I would strongly advise you to employ a professional negotiator to deal with them. I can put you in touch with several good ones.”
De Grazia seemed surprised. “What is there to negotiate? Colonel, I’m not about to bargain for my son’s life. ‘Yes, I’ll give you a million euros to spare him.’ ‘No, I won’t give you two million, go ahead and shoot him.’ Is that what you want? Absurd. I will not have it said that the boy was killed because Vincenzo de Grazia was reluctant to part with his money.”
There it was again, Caravale thought—the presence of anger, of pride; the absence of anything that came across as deep human feeling. Another man might have said, “I won’t let the boy be killed because I was reluctant to part with my money.” But Vincenzo had said, “I will not have it said . . .” To Vincenzo de Grazia, the big problem was what people might say about him, about the de Grazias.
“Let me understand,” Caravale said, “whatever they ask, you’re prepared to pay?”
“Well, not if they name an impossible amount, naturally. But whatever is necessary, yes, of course. And the sooner it’s over with, the better.”
“They may ask a great deal. You’re a rich man, you have a big company.”
De Grazia gave him a wry smile. “I’m not as rich as you might think, Colonel. But this is Italy, and I’m like any other sensible businessman. I have kidnapping insurance. The policy is for ten million dollars—twelve million euros. I’ve been paying regular premiums for years, damned big ones. A Bermudian company, Argos Risk Management. Now it’s their turn to live up to their obligations.”
Caravale shook his head. “All right, I can’t make you hire a negotiator, but one thing you’d better understand right now is that it’s not going to be over and done in a day or two. These people don’t work like that, it’s not to their advantage. Three weeks, a month—that’s more like it. And all kinds of unexpected things are going to happen, because they just do. Believe me, it’s very much to your benefit to have someone who isn’t emotionally involved representing you, someone experienced—”
“I’m not bringing some stranger into it, Colonel, someone I don’t know and don’t trust with my son’s life. I’ll deal with them myself.” The skin under his eyes tightened. “We de Grazias are not known for being overemotional.”
Caravale shrugged. How unemotional would “we de Grazias” be when they threatened to send him one of the boy’s ears to convince him to be more forthcoming? The man was hard, but was he that hard? Well, he just might be. In any case, it was up to de Grazia, not him. Besides, he probably did have enough money to meet their demands, so the chances were that it wouldn’t come to that.
“Fine,” he said. “If you change your mind, let me know. In the meantime—”
“What about you?” de Grazia said.
“What about me?”
“Didn’t you say you had some experience in these things?”
“Yes, I was assigned to the crisis management unit in Cosenza for a year. I handled a few cases.”
“All right, will you negotiate in my behalf? You, I would trust.”
Automatically, Caravale began to jerk his head no. Such a thing was out of the question. Policemen and negotiators had different goals, conflicting priorities. A negotiator was a middleman, a facilitator, a neutral. He wasn’t an adversary of the kidnappers any more than he was an ally of the police. His overriding objective was to bring the situation to an end without harm coming to the abductee or to anyone else. If the prisoner was released without anyone’s getting hurt, he had successfully done his job, and whether or not the kidnappers got the money or got away were distant, secondary concerns. But as a carabinieri officer, the priorities were necessarily reversed. These men were not only kidnappers but murderers, and his primary objective had to be their apprehension.
It was impossible to do both. In Cosenza he’d been part of an experimental unit that had been kept scrupulously independent of the carabinieri’s law enforcement arm. But in Stresa there was no experimental unit. There was only law enforcement.
“I’m sorry, that’s impossible,” had already formed itself in his throat and was on its way to his lips, when he surprised himself by a sudden reversal of gears.
“All right, if you want,” he was amazed to hear himself say.
But on second thought, maybe not so amazed. There was no rule, after all, or at least nothing in writing, that prohibited a carabiniere from negotiating a kidnapping. And Silvestri, his regional commander in faraway Turin, had happily given Caravale his head in just about all matters a long time ago, so there would be no difficulty there. (Silvestri was the nephew of his older sister’s husband, after all.)
Why shouldn’t he try it, then, given that Vincenzo had explicitly asked him to? Serving as the contact with them would likely provide valuable information for later that he’d otherwise have to try to get secondhand. So where was the problem? If he didn’t take it on, Vincenzo had made it clear that he would do it himself, and surely that was the most dangerous path of all.
One thing was sure. It wasn’t going to get in the way of his catching the bastards.
FOUR
THROUGH the living room’s bay window they watched the gray, red, and white Coho Ferry in the distance, pulling stern-first away from the Port Angeles dock, slowly turning, lumbering into the sunshine, and starting on its stately 5:15 P.M. run around Ediz Hook and across the Strait of San Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island, visible through the sea haze some seventeen miles away.
“Il battello . . . um . . . parte a Victoria,” Julie said. “No, per Victoria.”
“Very good,” Phil Boyajian said. “And what about you, Gideon, my man, how’s the Italian coming?”
“Muy bien, gracias,” Gideon said.
Phil shook his head. “Wrong language.”
“Oh. Sehr gut?”
“Um, you’re not quite there yet, Dr. Oliver.”
“Don’t let him kid you, Phil,” Julie said. “He speaks it almost as well as you do. He has this knack with languages. It’s very annoying.”
“What can I say, it’s true,” Gideon said immodestly. “I spent a couple of summers on an Etruscan dig up near Tarquinia. I guess Italian just stayed with me.”
Actually, it hadn’t come that easily to him—he’d been learning Spanish not long before, and the two languages were close enough to confuse him—but he’d loved the lilt of those long, high, singing Italian vowels and he’d worked at it, continuing even after he’d gotten back to the States. He’d kept it sharp by occasionally reading Italian articles on the Web, but now, for the first time in years, he’d have a chance to put it to real use. The three of them would be flying to Italy in a couple of days; Phil was going over the details one final time.
“We arrive in Milan at six-fifty in the morning, pick up the rental car, and drive up the lake. A day and a night on our own in Stresa to get over the jet lag, and the next morning we go on back down to Milan to meet our flock at the airport. And so the merry adventure begins.”
The “flock” were the eighteen venturesome, pennywise travelers who had signed up for the “Italian Lakes Country Pedal and Paddle Adventure,” the week-long kayak-and-bicycle tour of Lake Maggiore and Lake Orta that was being put on by Travel on the Cheap, the thriving tour and guidebook company headquartered in Seattle. Phil, a frequent tour leader for On the Cheap, would lead it. One of Gideon’s oldest friends (he had been a fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin), he had sweet-talked them into helping out on the trip almost a year before. Or rather, he had talked Julie into it; for expenses, she would serve as the tour naturalist and assistant “host.” It hadn’t taken much sweet talking. A supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park’s headquarters in Port Angeles, it was the kind of thing that she enjoyed doing anyway, and it g
ave her a chance to study the natural history of a new area.
Gideon, on the other hand, was paying his own way, being basically along for the ride, although he’d promised to help out if needed. The trip had struck him as a good idea. He’d be between spring and summer quarters at the university, he’d never seen Italy’s lake country, and the kayaking sounded like fun. And of course, a week with Julie in northern Italy, even with the “flock” in tow, sounded a lot better than a week at home without her, especially with no classes, active forensic cases, or papers in preparation to keep him engaged. The bicycling part and the overnight stays at “clean, convenient campgrounds” were less enticing, and he’d reserved to himself the right to spend the nights in more deluxe accommodations. He’d made it clear that he intended to sleep in a clean bed in a pleasant room every night, get at least one good, hot meal a day, and shower every morning—in a private bathroom of his own.
Phil had taken good-natured offense. “Hey, wait’ll you see the campgrounds I lined up. Platform tents already set up for us, laundry machines, delicious hot meals every night, luxurious sleeping arrangements—”
“Oh, right,” Gideon said, “On the Cheap is well known for its attention to the finer amenities.”
“Okay, maybe not exactly luxurious, but—”
And what was more, Gideon said, he intended to rent a car for himself so he could get around on his own and drive wherever he pleased in luxury while the others sweated over their bicycles during the cycling phase.
These provisos had been received with the contempt they deserved. “And he calls himself an anthropologist,” Julie had said with withering scorn.
“I am an anthropologist. That doesn’t mean I have to be a masochist.”
“Soft,” Phil had sneered. “Pathetic. Not the man I once knew.”
But Gideon had stuck to his guns and there the matter stood. No camping out, no sweaty bicycling up and down hills. “I’m paying my own way, I’m not on a dig, and I see no purpose in being uncomfortable,” was his sole and frequently repeated defense.
For their first night Phil had booked rooms for them in a three-star family-run hotel in Stresa, though he’d claimed it violated his populist principles by one star.
“Besides which,” he said, “Stresa isn’t really that great a place. It’s like one big English tea shop, all cutesy and super-clean and full of flowers and doilies and things. It’s a resort town.”
“Sounds wonderful to me,” said Julie, “but if you don’t like it, why are we staying there?”
“Basically because it makes it easy for me to grab the boat in the afternoon for a quick visit to my family.” He hesitated. “Hey, I don’t suppose you guys would want to come along? I don’t like being alone with those people.”
Gideon stared at him. “You have family in Italy?”
“Sure, you didn’t know? Didn’t you know I was Italian? Why do you think I go there every couple of years?”
“Phil, you’re on the road all the time. I don’t keep tabs on where you go.”
“Hell, I was born in Italy. I lived there till I was seven. You’re telling me you didn’t know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that. Do you suppose it could be because you never mentioned it?”
“I didn’t? Well, maybe I didn’t,” Phil allowed.
“Amazing,” Julie said, “truly amazing. Men and women really are different species, you know that? Two women would know that kind of thing about each other inside of twenty minutes. And you two, you’ve been friends for twenty years.”
“Well, how could I know if he never told me?” Gideon said defensively. “But now that you mention it, I should have figured it out on my own. What else could somebody named Phil Boyajian be but Italian?”
“Yeah, well, see,” Phil said, “that’s because my mother’s second husband was Armenian—he was a petroleum engineer, which is how come I was living in Cairo and Riyadh in my teens—”
“You lived in Cairo and Riyadh?” Julie exclaimed. “Phil, I’ve known you for five years myself. How could you never have told me that?”
Phil shrugged.
“See?” said Gideon.
“Anyway,” Phil went on, “he adopted me, and I took his name. I figured Boyajian sounded more American, you know? But no, I had a good Italian name to start with.”
He bowed. “Filiberto Ungaretti,’atsa me.”
GIDEON just shook his head. Even after two decades, Phil was always coming up with something to surprise him. His career had been one unexpected (and entertaining) twist after another, a sort of career-in-reverse. When he’d gotten his Ph. D. in cultural anthropology, he had stepped into a coveted tenure-track position at a big state university but had found university politics more than he was willing to cope with. He’d then tried teaching at a Seattle community college, but couldn’t stand the committee assignments. Next had come a period as a high school teacher (but the nonteaching, largely custodial responsibilities weren’t to his liking), followed by a three-year stint teaching grade school. While he pondered his next move—kindergarten? preschool? day care?—he was offered a summer job going to Egypt to research and write Egypt on the Cheap, the very first On the Cheap guidebook.
It had turned his life around. With his scruffy, eager, friendly manner and his natural willingness to see the best in common people and in their customs, he had at last found the occupation he’d been made for. The book had done better than anyone expected, and Phil had been made a contributing editor for the new series, a position he still held. In addition, he also led eight or ten no-frills tours a year for the company, of which the Italian lakes trip was the latest.
Gideon, by contrast, had taken a more conventional path, beginning as an assistant professor of physical anthropology at Northern California State University, where he was promoted after a few years to associate professor and contentedly settled in for a long, rewarding career of teaching and scholarship in San Mateo, California.
But fate had a jog of its own in store for him. Almost by accident, he had begun consulting for the FBI on the side, on cases involving forensic anthropology, and eight years ago one of those cases had taken him to Washington State’s Olympic rain forest, where two things had occurred that would change his life forever, one to his mild but frequent embarrassment, the other to his great and unremitting joy. The first was that a local reporter following the case had referred to him as the Skeleton Detective, and the sobriquet had stuck to him like glue, providing a rich source of not-so-subtle ragging to his colleagues at meetings and conventions ever since.
The second thing, the enormous, life-altering thing, was that he’d met a beautiful young park ranger named Julie Tendler, who had been incidentally involved in finding the human remains that had brought him to Washington. His much-loved first wife Nora had been killed in a car crash two years earlier, and Gideon had never gotten over his grief. In his case, it had slowly evolved into a terrible impassivity, a sense of deep isolation from everyone around him. For two years he had felt himself to be as cold and dead and impervious to emotion—to positive emotion—as a stone. It was Julie who had reawakened him, unthawing feelings and sensibilities that he had truly thought frozen for good.
A year after that they’d been married and he’d lucked into an associate professorship at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus (he’d since advanced to full professor). They had bought this hillside house that was a ten-minute walk in one direction from Julie’s office in the headquarters building, and a ten-minute walk in the other direction to campus. A perfect location. A perfect life. A day didn’t go by that he wasn’t grateful to her for bringing him to life again.
“Filiberto Ungaretti,” she said now, also shaking her head. “That’s amazing. Sure, it’d be interesting to visit your family, Phil. If you’re really sure they wouldn’t mind.”
“Interesting I can’t promise. Weird I can guarantee.”
“Weird how?” Gideon asked. “Weird like you?”
/> “No, different. They own this island, sort of, and they live in practically this palace—well, you’ll see.”
“A day at the Ungarettis,” Julie mused. “Sounds good.”
“No, Ungaretti was my father’s name, the creep. I haven’t seen him since I was three. This is my mother’s family we’d be visiting.”
“And what’s their name?”
“Their name,” said Phil, “is de Grazia.”
FIVE
STRESA was much as Phil had described it: a bright, clean, discreetly fading nineteenth-century resort town on Lake Maggiore, full of flowers, gardens, and romantic villas, and boasting a generous, park-like promenade, the Lungolago, that ran along the lakefront from one tip of the city to the other, bordering one side of the main street, the Corso Italia. On the other side of the Corso was an unbroken row of upscale boutiques and hotels. Away from the lakefront, Stresa was equally attractive, but in a different way: a maze of romantic piazzas and narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with picturesque restaurants and hole-in-the wall cafés. Their hotel, the Primavera, was on one of these streets, a modest, pleasant place a block inland (the four-and five-star hotels were all on the lakefront). Phil, who had slept most of the time on the fifteen-hour flight from Seattle, had, amazingly, gone to sleep in his room as soon as they’d arrived, but Julie and Gideon, who hadn’t slept at all, and whose eyes by now felt glued open, were eager to get out in the fresh air.
They had strolled lazily around the town for half an hour and now they sat, loopy and jet-lagged, among families of Swiss and Italian tourists, at a sun-drenched outdoor café on the promenade, where Phil had promised to join them at nine-thirty for the visit to the de Grazias. From the boat terminal a block away, ferries carried tourists to, from, and around Stresa’s big attractions, the fabulous Borromean Islands a few hundred yards offshore, with their splendid seventeenth-century gardens and palaces. Gideon was reading aloud from a guidebook description of Isola Bella, the closest and most fantastic of the three islands.
