Good Blood

by Aaron Elkins

  “And how long will all this take?” Vincenzo asked wearily.

  “It shouldn’t be long. Usually, not more than a day or so,” said Gideon.

  “And then we may have my father’s remains back?”

  Caravale answered him. “That depends. If Professor Oliver does find evidence of the cause of death or other important information, we would probably have to hold them as evidence. We’ll have to see. But in the end they’ll be returned to you.”

  “I understand,” Vincenzo said. “Gentlemen, thank you both for coming.” He glanced around the room. “Is there anything more?”

  “Only to thank God that Achille has been returned unharmed,” Cosimo whispered.

  “If it’s God we’ve been relying on in that matter,” Dante Galasso said with a crooked smirk, “I can only say—”

  “Nobody here cares what you can only say,” Bella Barbero said sharply, “so why don’t you just keep it to yourself, for once in your life?”

  “Now you just wait one minute,” Francesca said, leveling a crimson-nailed finger at her. Criticizing her husband herself was one thing; listening to her non-de Grazia stepsister do it was entirely different. “Dante is entitled to say whatever he feels like here, and if anybody in this room is not in a position—”

  “Well, well, well,” chirped Basilio Barbero, jumping up and rubbing his hands together, “will you look at the time? Clemente will have finished setting out the aperitifs in the library by now, and I, for one, am certainly ready for mine. There’s nothing like a Cynar before dinner to get the gastric juices flowing. It’s not only pleasant, it’s amazingly helpful to the digestion, something that many people fail . . .”

  WHILE Caravale and Phil had a few final words with Vincenzo, Gideon waited outside, near the head of the stone steps that led down to the dock, looking south along the western shore of the lake toward Stresa, visible only as a clump of shimmering yellows between the blue of the lake and the green of the mountains. After a few minutes, however, feeling the stony, mirrored gaze of the guard, Cesare, on the back of his neck, he went around the side of the house to the breakfast garden, where he sat at the table he’d shared with Julie a few days before. No marmoset this time, but either the same white male peacock or its twin brother was once again in full display, strutting and quivering at the far edge of the clearing with his tail feathers spread, quills audibly rattling. A few yards away the object of his affection, a dull, green peahen who couldn’t have been less interested, wandered aimlessly about, pecking mechanically at the ground or staring in jerky, birdlike fashion in every direction but at her suitor, who kept after her with a dogged, expectant, never-say-die determination. Tough life, Gideon thought. Of course, if you had a pea brain, it probably didn’t seem so bad.

  “There you are!” Phil called, coming around from the front of the building. “We need to stick around awhile. Caravale wants to talk to Achille again.”

  Beside him was the woman who’d sat next to him inside. As far as Gideon could remember, she’d said nothing during the consiglio, but had merely watched and listened.

  “Lea,” Phil said in English as Gideon got out of his chair, “I’d like you to meet my very good friend Gideon Oliver. Gideon, this is my cousin Lea Pescallo.”

  “Lea Barbero,” she gently corrected him, at which Phil looked immensely pleased.

  “Piacere di conoscerla,” Gideon said, sensing that she wasn’t too comfortable with English.

  She smiled, and he was aware of how attractive she must once have been. In her forties now, and looking her age, with weary eyes and mouth, and slightly bowed shoulders, there was still a pale, nineteenth-century kind of beauty that clung to her. She looked like the type of woman on whom swooning would look good. “I am too ’appy to know you, sir,” she said. “What you sayed about the bones. Very interesting.”

  “Thank you. I hope it’ll be of some help in determining what happened.”

  As he spoke, he realized with a shock why she seemed familiar. He’d seen her before, only a few days ago. Lea Barbero, in her crisp, pink-striped Oxford shirt, her fashionable, mid-calf-length khaki slacks and new-looking, open-toed leather clogs—Lea Barbero with her understated makeup and softly layered blond hair—was the drab, hunched woman in sneakers and old sweater that he and Julie had taken for a maid the other day; the woman that had turned and fled the moment she’d seen them.

  He turned to look at Phil—he of the new haircut, fresh shave, and clean shirt—and realized that there was a look on his face that was totally unfamiliar, a cocky, jaunty, hey-look-at-me expression that was wholly unlike him. Even his posture seemed different: he was practically strutting.

  He looked, in short, an awful lot like a love-dazed peacock.

  Son of a gun.

  THIRTEEN

  IT was called the Napoleon Room because Napoleon was supposed to have slept there for two nights during the Italian campaign of 1797, and it was one of the more impressive rooms in the villa. The heavy canopy bed, easily big enough for four, was in a curtained alcove off the larger sitting room. The sitting room floor was inlaid marble, the walls and the high ceiling decorated with intricate stucco work. There were several de Grazia coats of arms, and cupids and angels peeped from around every corner. There were gilded mirrors and ornately framed landscapes on the walls, and from the ceiling hung an elaborate chandelier of Venetian glass. Over the white marble mantel there was a life-size, full-length portrait of Napoleon standing next to his horse. There were upholstered divans and chairs, console tables, commodes and cabinets, and directly under the chandelier an elegant, round, marble-topped table with four armchairs. There was room to spare for everything, and everything, even the elaborate prisms of the chandelier, looked as if it had been dusted within the last hour. Caravale had lived in four-room apartments with less space than this.

  It was Achille de Grazia’s bedroom, and had been since he’d been six years old.

  Three people were seated at the table: Vincenzo de Grazia, Achille, and Caravale. In front of Achille was a transcript of his statements earlier in the day. “Should I sign it, or should my father?” he asked.

  “You,” Caravale said. “And initial each page. Read it first, though. Make sure it’s right.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Physically, Achille looked better than he had when Caravale had seen him at the hospital. They’d been unable to do anything about a ferocious flare-up of acne, but he’d been thoroughly spruced up and now wore a soft-collared blue shirt, dress jeans, and a pair of buttery tasseled loafers, much like his father’s, that had probably cost the equivalent of half a month’s salary for Caravale. Otherwise, he seemed about the same—downcast, listless, docile, numbed . . . as if there were nobody inside.

  From everything Caravale had been told about him, this was a striking departure from his usual bullying self-centeredness, and it seemed to worry Vincenzo, who sat close to the boy, as if to prop him up if he should need support. Vincenzo even had his arm around Achille’s shoulders. Well, not quite around his shoulders, but over the back of his chair. Even so, it seemed to Caravale a noteworthy show of concern, considering whom it was coming from.

  Achille pretended to read the transcript, but Caravale could see his eyes darting away from the print, as if on their own initiative. He signed it as requested.

  “I would like to see it too,” Vincenzo said.

  “Of course,” Caravale said. Above his head a stray eddy of air set the chandelier to tinkling.

  Keeping one arm over the back of Achille’s chair, Vincenzo hungrily read the statements—muddled memories of the kidnapping itself, and a description of his days in the tent—while Achille leaned gratefully into him, like a puppy responding to his master’s closeness.

  With a grunt, Vincenzo finished the transcript and slid it across the table to Caravale. “All right. I trust you’re finished with him and would have no objection if he goes away to school in Switzerland.”

  “You mean right now?”<
br />
  “In a few days.”

  “Do you want to go away to Switzerland?” Caravale asked Achille.

  “Of course he does. It was his idea. This terrible experience—”

  “I’d prefer Achille to answer for himself. Do you want to go to school in Switzerland, son?”

  Achille nodded. He looked like a four-year-old that had had a bad scare. “Yes, sir, please,” he mumbled. “I . . . I don’t want to stay here anymore.” A little firmness, a touch of the old Achille, crept back into his voice: “I’m not going back to La Sacca.”

  “He was supposed to start in Switzerland next fall anyway,” Vincenzo said. “Saint Gotthard’s School in Bern. It’s a boys’ school, mostly for the sons of businessmen and government officials. Highly rated, with excellent security. Given what’s happened, they’ve agreed to take him early. They’ll send somebody from Bern to accompany him.”

  “All right, I have no objections, as long as you understand that we’ll probably have to contact him later, and we might have to ask him to come back.”

  “All right, then. Achille, thank the colonel.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Achille said. He had yet to meet Caravale’s eyes, even once.

  Caravale wasted no time getting out of his chair. He hadn’t liked that damned chandelier hanging over his head.

  VINCENZO and Caravale walked in silence down the central corridor, between hanging rows of old tapestries, but once out on the portico, Caravale stopped.

  “I was wondering, Signor de Grazia, where the money to pay the ransom came from.”

  Vincenzo seemed puzzled by the question. “From my bank. As I told you.”

  “Banca Popolare di Milano.”

  “Yes.” And again, with a lilt of annoyance: “As I told you.”

  “That’s so, but you didn’t tell me where the money came from.”

  Vincenzo shook his head impatiently. “I don’t—”

  “The Banca Popolare di Milano wired the money for you to the Bank of Rezekne, yes. We’ve established that. But they didn’t lend you the money. And you’d only had a few hundred thousand euros in your accounts there. I’d like to know where you got the rest.”

  Now Vincenzo was surprised. “Why? What difference does it make? Why have you been looking at my accounts?”

  “Are you refusing to tell me?”

  “I’m not refusing anything. I’m asking you why it should be of importance.”

  “It’s a routine question, signore.” Which was true, although now he was beginning to wonder if he’d hit on something. “Surely you can see that.”

  Vincenzo turned so that he faced Caravale squarely. “I don’t see it at all. I will tell you frankly, Colonel. I don’t appreciate your sticking your fingers into my financial affairs. My advice to you is to stick to the matter at hand.”

  Saying nothing, Caravale stared steadily back, although he had to tip his head back to do it, and after a few moments it was Vincenzo who broke from the locked gaze. “All right, then, I borrowed against my stock holdings, if it’s so important. As I said I would. My broker took care of it.”

  “All five million euros?”

  “Yes,” Vincenzo said shortly. “Now, if that’s what you wanted to know, I’d like to get back to work. And you, I believe, have a ten-year-old homicide to solve.” Caravale considered pressing him a little more—Which stocks did he borrow against? What exactly was the lending arrangement? Who was his broker?—but he could sense the workings of the gears in Vincenzo’s mind, a step ahead of him, already framing ambiguous replies to whatever he might ask, so he let it pass. Besides, if the man, in desperation, had done something not-quite-legal to get the money to ransom his son, Caravale wasn’t about to go after him on account of it.

  All the same, his cop’s soul told him that there was something here that didn’t add up, and he made a mental note to have his people look a bit more closely into the financial end of things as they pursued their investigations.

  “All right, signore,” he said pleasantly. “As you say.”

  BACK in Stresa after dropping Phil off at Camping Costa Azzurra, Gideon was in a rotten mood. He picked at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant meal of pollo alla cacciatora, watching with ethnocentric and unanthropological disapproval as a five-year-old was encouraged to sip his father’s red wine (but had his hand slapped when he reached for his coffee). The dinner was good, but he had little appetite and left half of it on the plate. His hands hurt. He had unthinkingly done his digging that morning without the benefit of gloves, and although it hadn’t bothered him at the time, it now felt as if the gravel had inflicted a hundred tiny paper cuts. Stupid.

  On his roundabout way back to the hotel, he stopped at a gelateria on the Corso for his usual dessert. For the first time, however, he found himself annoyed rather than charmed by the baffling Italian custom of adding two inexplicable steps to the purchase. Going up to the gelato counter, he was required to tell the woman behind it what he wanted, in return for which she gave him, not his two-scoop cone of chocolate and pistachio, but a piece of paper on which she’d scrawled some arcane symbols. This he had to take back to the cashier near the door, to whom he gave his 1.30m; and from whom he received a receipt. The receipt was then taken to the counter (again), and the gelato finally given to him. The process had never bugged him before, but it did tonight.

  And the standard, useless, plastic gelato spoon that came with it—not only absurdly minuscule, but spade-shaped rather than spoon-shaped (why, to make eating the stuff more of a challenge?)—was one more irritant.

  He knew what it was that was really bothering him, of course. While his solitary, footloose dining arrangements had been enjoyable at first, after five evenings they were getting depressing. So were his solitary sleeping arrangements. He missed Julie; missed her company, missed her presence through the night. Next time, if there was a next time, he’d be less finicky about his demands for material comfort. He thought briefly of checking out of the Hotel Primavera in the morning and joining the group after all, but there was only one more night to go after this one, and he’d be spending it in a tent with two or three other men anyway, so what was the point?

  Unable to focus on the International Herald Tribune or a book, and too lazy to go out for another walk, he kicked off his shoes and turned on the television set. The Primavera brought in only one English-speaking channel: Eurosport, a British import that was showing cycling at the moment, but was promising, with barely controlled enthusiasm, to move on to an exciting weight-lifting competition from Sofia at the top of the hour. There was a German station with talking heads and a French one that had a noisy, laughy game show. The rest were in Italian: another couple of game shows, including a homegrown version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a Judge Judy-type program, two dubbed American sitcoms with the usual weirdly assorted families and creepy children, and Law and Order (La Legge e le Forze dell’Ordine) with Jerry Orbach chasing down perps in Italian (“Alt! Polizia!”).

  He watched the last twenty minutes of La Legge e le Forze dell’Ordine, and at nine o’clock he switched off the TV and went to bed.

  FOURTEEN

  AT 3:22 that morning a remarkable telephone call was received at Stresa’s Polizia Municipale headquarters on Piazza Marconi. According to the caller, Sister Susanna, the nighttime receptionist at the hospital, there were strange sounds coming from the morgue in the basement. “As if,” she whispered, “something is trying to get out.”

  “No, no, Sister,” said Ettore Omodeo, the police dispatcher, with a reassuring laugh. “After all, how could anyone get out of a morgue? But it’s chilly out tonight, it might be someone trying to get in, to keep warm. You stay where you are, Sister. I’ll have someone there right away.”

  Omodeo contacted the lone patrol car on duty and gave them the message. Then he shook his head.

  What kind of a person would want to break into a morgue?

  GIDEON had always been an early riser, often earlier than he wished, a
nd going to sleep at 9 didn’t help any. By 5:00 A.M. he was awake and restless, itching to get moving. And he needed coffee. He did some stretching and enough push-ups and sit-ups to get some blood into his muscles, showered, shaved, slipped on a windbreaker against the predawn chill, and trotted downstairs, feeling a bit more positive about the world in general. He nodded to the teenaged nighttime desk clerk, who greeted him with a mournful shrug.

  “No breakfas’ yet, signore. Seven o’clock.”

  “I know. See you then.”

  He walked past shuttered shops and restaurants to the quiet Corso Italia and crossed it to the Lungolago, the lakeside promenade. Near the ferry terminal there was an espresso and snack stand that he knew from past experience would be open for the benefit of early-arriving ferry workers.

  By now the barista knew him by sight. “Buongiorno. Cappuccino. Doppio. Senza cioccolato.”

  “Si, grazie,” said Gideon, smiling. It was practically like being in Seattle.

  Relatively contented now, he walked along the promenade, slowly sipping coffee from a giant Styrofoam cup. The only other people he saw were a couple of elderly men walking their dogs and looking lonesome and pensive in the way of early-morning dog walkers everywhere. The ornamental fountains had still to be turned on, and with no traffic whizzing down the Corso yet, he could actually hear the gentle lapping of the lake against the stone bulwark on which the promenade had been built.

  It was very peaceful, very pretty. The air smelled of camellias and lemon oil, cut by the pungent, not unpleasant scent of creosote from the ferry terminal pilings. The globe lamps along the promenade were still lit, but the sky had begun to lighten, so the perfectly pruned trees, the brick walking paths, and the dark lake itself were all highlighted with streaks of rose and gold. After a while he stopped to lean on the balustrade and look out over the water, waiting for the sun to top the mountains on the other side, shoot out its brief explosion of brilliant yellow rays, and touch the graceful towers and parapets of the Borromean Islands with the day’s first light. He’d watched it before, and with a still-warm double cappuccino in his hand, it was about as good a way to start the day as any he could imagine; given, that is, that he had to start it without Julie.