by Aaron Elkins
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 indi
stinct 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?”
SEVEN
“‘WE have your son,’” Caravale read aloud.
“‘He is in good health. If you would like him back you will need to pay five million euros. Payment will be made by means of a wire transfer to our account. You will receive detailed instructions later.
“‘Do not try to get in touch with us at this point. As soon as the money is available, you are to place a classified advertisement in La Stampa. The advertisement is to be under Real Estate for Sale and must say “Prestigious villa, near Oggebbio, mountain view, 5,000,000 euros. Cash only,” followed by the name, telephone number, and fax number of the person we are to contact. You have exactly one week. Do not waste our time with counteroffers, delays, or explanations, we are not interested and will not respond. If this advertisement does not appear by Monday, June 23, you will not see your son again. His fate will be on your head.’”
He laid the fax down, readjusted the glossy, white Sam Browne belt that ran diagonally down the front of his tunic, folded his hands on the small, homely table that had been provided for him, and looked around the room while he waited for the buzz to die down.
He was in a bad mood and having a hard time not showing it. This “galleria” was, he thought, probably the least favorite room he’d ever been in; at any rate among those that didn’t have a dead body in them. All those deceased, self-satisfied, better-than-thou de Grazias looking down their noses at him. All those live, self-satisfied, better-than-thou de Grazias looking down their noses at him. This archaic “consiglio” business annoyed him too, more than he liked to admit, even to himself. It was irritating to let all this blue-blood nonsense get to him, but he couldn’t help being put out by it. Like father like son, he supposed. An old story.
Vincenzo, to whom he’d shown the fax a few minutes before, sat scowling, resting his chin on his hand. Most of the others were talking, some of them to themselves. Having met them at a previous consiglio the day after the kidnapping, and then talked individually with them, he was beginning to know what to expect from each of them. Old Cosimo sat removed in the far corner, gravely conferring with his dog, who listened with rapt attention. Basilio Barbero chattered excitedly to his wife Bella, who shrugged as if to say: “What could you expect with a family like this?” Near them, Dante Galasso muttered to his wife with that smirk of his that implied he knew a great deal more than he was letting on. At the previous meeting, Caravale, briefly suspicious, had wondered if that was indeed the case with Dante, but he was soon convinced that it was merely Galasso’s everyday, know-it-all expression. He was, after all, a onetime professor, and a Red one at that, so it was hardly surprising. Galasso’s jet-haired wife—Francesca, was it?—stared at the ceiling, manifestly not listening to her husband.
The only person he hadn’t met before was the bearded American, Filiberto—Phil—Boyajian, a cousin of some sort. Improbably enough, Caravale had taken to him almost on sight, probably because he seemed as out of place among the de Grazia clan as Caravale himself. Phil, wearing walking shorts, had sat with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing during the reading, but he was the first to speak up afterward.
“What do we do now, Colonel?”
“That’s up to S
ignor de Grazia,” Caravale said, looking at Vincenzo, and six other pairs of eyes swung toward the padrone.
Vincenzo jerked his head angrily. “It’s more than I thought they’d ask, damn them. Five million.”
“Your insurance company will cover it and then some, so what’s the problem?” Dante Galasso asked. “They can afford it. They make millions every year from bilking the ignorant and the greedy.”
With a brief, lancing look at Dante (“Who asked for your opinion?” he might just as well have said), Vincenzo directed his response to Caravale. Argos, like most kidnap insurers, didn’t actually pay ransom demands directly, he explained; they reimbursed you for what you paid (minus a 250,000m deductible in Argos’s case) from your own resources, and only on proof that the ransom had indeed been paid.
“But if the insurance company guarantees payment,” Phil said, “can’t you just borrow on their guarantee? Argos is a big firm, they have a good reputation.”
Unfortunately no, Vincenzo explained. As with other kidnap insurers, It was strictly against the rules, and possibly against the law, to use the policy itself as collateral. Doing so would invalidate it, so he had to come up with the money on his own. His Aurora stock alone would more than provide the necessary collateral, never fear. He was surprised—angry—that they would demand so much, that was all.
He turned again to Caravale. “What do you propose, Colonel?”
