Good Blood

by Aaron Elkins

  At which point Gideon, to his surprise and embarrassment, burst into a brief but noisy snort of close-mouthed laughter, managing to more or less snuff it out after a couple of honks. They stared at him, even the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  But there was no way he could explain, especially in Italian, that when Franco had leaned over them and peered so intensely at them, an image of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the famous old Tenniel illustration, had jumped into his mind with amazing clarity. In his memory, the parallel was almost exact. There was Franco, the Mad Hatter himself, running the show according to rules that nobody understood, with the docile, dopey Dormouse—the woman with her shabby wig, in this case—slipping in and out of awareness beside him. Phil was the March Hare, who, if he wasn’t nuts before, seemed well on his way now. That left Gideon as Alice, the observer from outside who didn’t quite belong and couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on or where it was headed. A perfect fit all around.

  Franco’s story fit too: a bizarre, jumbled tale of switched babies, bamboozled rich uncles, and confused identities straight out of a Victorian potboiler. Gideon’s Italian was just barely up to the job of following him, and even then, only because an increasingly incredulous Phil interrupted after almost every sentence with a befuddled “Che?” or “Como?” or a helpless, hands-spread “Non capito.”

  This was the upshot, as near to it as Gideon could make out:

  In 1960 or thereabouts, Domenico de Grazia, whose wife was barren, had arranged with Franco and his wife Emma—

  “My mother,” Phil had put in hopefully.

  “Wait and see,” Franco said.

  —had arranged with Franco and his wife Emma that Emma, through a process of artificial insemination, should secretly bear Domenico’s child, the object being to provide him with a genetically suitable heir. The process was successfully accomplished and Franco and Emma were secluded here in Gignese for several months, awaiting the baby’s birth. Emma wasn’t good at being pregnant—sick every morning—and complaining from morning till night, so much so that Franco couldn’t take it anymore and went home to Caprera after a while, until the baby was born, leaving Caterina, the live-in housekeeper, to deal with Emma’s moods. But finally it was over, and it was the old doctor—Lazzero? Luzzatto?—who delivered it, a baby boy that met Domenico’s requirements: a son and heir.

  “Vincenzo?” Phil exclaimed dazedly. “You’re talking about Vincenzo?”

  “Of course, Vincenzo, what do you think?”

  “So Vincenzo and I are brothers—half-brothers? We have the same mother? Wait a minute, we’re the same age, how could—are you telling me we’re twins?”

  “Stop interrupting,” Franco said. “Do you want to know or not?”

  “Sorry,” Phil said meekly.

  “All right, then.” Franco looked at Gideon and gestured at his empty glass.

  This time Gideon wasn’t as anxious to leave and managed to signal the barman from where he sat. Franco watched hungrily as his second double brandy was carried out to him and set down, then quickly drank half of it and licked the residue from his lips.

  “I can’t help wondering what happened to all those towels,” the woman mumbled. “Where could they have gone to? After so many years. It was so strange.”

  Franco glanced at her, wiped his mouth with his fingers, and continued.

  After the birth, Emma moped about until Franco, with Domenico’s assistance, persuaded her to adopt a child of her own, which Domenico “purchased” for her from a young neighbor girl she’d become friends with, an unmarried teenager, who was unable to care for her newly delivered baby.

  Franco looked at Phil, his eyebrows lifted, waiting for him to speak.

  Phil cleared his throat. “And that . . . that baby, that’s me? The one that was bought?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right,” Franco said meanly, “the one that was bought, that’s you. Five hundred dollars, American, was the price.”

  Gideon had his doubts about Franco’s reliability and his intentions, but Phil seemed not to. “So you’re really not my father.”

  “You’re finally catching on?”

  “And my—and Emma Ungaretti isn’t really my mother.”

  Franco nodded.

  Phil swallowed. “Who else knows about this?”

  “I’m pretty sure Vincenzo knows. The snotty sister, Francesca, she knows. Oh, and the servant, what was her name—Genoveffa, if she’s still alive. She was right here the whole time, snooping around and spying on us.”

  “And . . .” Phil hesitated. “And Cosimo? Does he know?”

  Franco puffed his lips dismissively. “Of course not. He wouldn’t believe it anyway.” He finished the brandy, lost his balance, and flopped back into his chair.

  Phil looked as if he didn’t know what had hit him. “So I don’t even know who my mother is.” He murmured it in English, with an arid laugh.

  “Listen, Phil,” Gideon said, “you better get some verification on this. This guy . . .”

  “Why did you tell me all this, after all these years?” Phil asked, switching back to Italian. “Why did you bother coming to meet me at all? You’re right—I’m nothing to you, you’re nothing to me.”

  “Why did I come?” He snickered and used his chin to point at the woman. “Because this one wanted me to, and I’m a nice guy, that’s why.”

  Phil turned to her. “Why did you—” But she was off in cloud-cuckoo-land again, trailing a fingernail around the rim of her cup and tipping her head toward it as if she could make out a tune. “Why should she care?” he asked Franco.

  “Why should she . . .?” Franco guffawed, a real laugh this time. “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you? This is your mother, idiot!” He shook her roughly by the shoulder. “Gia, look! It’s Filiberto! It’s your darling baby boy!”

  She looked foggily up from her cup. Her eyes filled with tears. “My boy,” she said. Then, as an afterthought, she opened her arms to him.

  Phil couldn’t have shied back any more violently if she’d come at him with a knife. “You’re my . . . Who’s my father, then?”

  She let her arms fall to her sides. “Your father?” She looked at Franco as if for help, but he merely shrugged. He’d lost interest. He raised his arms and waved at the men watching from inside the café—a performer who’d given them a good show. Some of them waved back with jeers and mimed applause. As café entertainments in Gignese went, this one had obviously been a hit.

  “Your father,” she said again, thinking hard. “I remember him. A very nice boy, so sweet. Pietro, I think his name was. Yes.” She knitted her eyebrows, put a nail-chewed finger to chapped lips, and pondered some more. “No, that’s not right, Pietro was the one with the two sisters, remember? Pasquale? No, Pasquale had the warts, ugh. Guglielmo? Mm, no . . .”

  “CAN you believe that?” Phil said as Gideon started up the car. “Can . . . you . . . believe that? I am really ticked off.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Gideon said, edging out into the light traffic on Via Margherita. “That was quite a story. If it’s true.”

  “You don’t think it is? Why would he make up something like that?”

  “I’m not saying he made it up. But he didn’t strike me as the most reliable informant in the world either. I’d check it out with Vincenzo if I were you.”

  “No way. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

  “Francesca, then.”

  “Francesca,” Phil mused. “I think I’m beginning to see why she always treated me like dirt—I mean, even more than she treats other people like dirt. I always thought it was because I was the runt of the litter, and even as a kid I was gimpy.”

  “Phil, you’re not—”

  “And besides that, I was just a lousy Ungaretti, not a de Grazia. Now I see it was way worse than that. In her eyes, I’m barely human. No, forget it, I’m not talking to Francesca about it either.”

  “W
ell, then, with the servant—Genoveffa, was it? You can’t just take Franco’s word for it.” But the truth was that as the time passed, Gideon found himself more and more taking Franco’s word for it. Why would he have concocted such a wild story? Was he even capable of inventing it? And what about the woman? That addled, tearstained “My boy.” Surely that hadn’t been an act.

  “Genoveffa,” Phil said. “Yeah, maybe Genoveffa.”

  He didn’t say it with any conviction, but Gideon didn’t press, and for a few minutes Phil stared stonily ahead with his arms folded. Then, as they picked up the winding road down the mountain, he raised his fists and let out a tooth-rattling growl. “GHAAARGHH! I am really ticked off!”

  “Phil, I believe you. Truly.”

  “Here’s this guy,” Phil railed, “this so-called father I despised my whole life. I mean I’ve loathed him for, like, almost forty years now. There were a lot of times I would have strangled him if I could have gotten my hands on him. And now, after all this time, I find out he’s not my father after all. I wasted all that hating! It is really annoying.”

  “That’s what you’re mad about?”

  “Sure,” Phil said, turning his baseball cap around so the bill was backward. And suddenly he looked reassuringly like the old, familiar Phil again. “What’d you think I was mad about?”

  “Well, I thought maybe the fact that you weren’t related to any of the people you thought you were related to.”

  “You mean Vincenzo and the rest of them? Nah, that’s a relief. That feels great. That never felt right. I should have known.”

  “Or—if what he said is true—that you’re actually, well—”

  “A bastard, right. No longer in name only. And I have a mother who barely knows who I am, let alone who my father was, and who talks like Ozzy Osbourne.” He considered. “No, that’s okay too. That’s interesting, actually. Anyway, I know who my real mother was, and she’s the same as she always was. As for my father . . .” He started laughing. “‘Pietro? No. Mario? No. Guglielmo? No. Arturo Toscanini? No. Enrico Caruso? No.’ I think it gives me an air of mystery, don’t you? Makes me even more dashing than I already am.”

  “Definitely, no doubt about that.”

  “And hey, now Lea’s definitely not my cousin, right? How about that?”

  “She never was your cousin, Phil.”

  “Right, whatever.” He settled back with a sigh.

  “So what are you going to do?” Gideon asked after a few minutes passed.

  Phil glanced at him. “What is there to do?”

  “Well . . . you can’t very well just keep stringing things along the way they were before, can you?”

  “Sure I can, why not?”

  “I mean, visiting them, acting like one of the family—”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Well, why would you want to? I don’t think you were ever too crazy about them. Anyway, it’d be a fraud, a sham.”

  “So? It always was a sham, what’s different now?”

  Gideon shrugged. “I’m just surprised. I assumed—”

  “Look, let me give it to you in a nutshell. Vincenzo, Dante, that whole bunch—I couldn’t care less if I never saw them again for the rest of my life. But Cosimo—my grandfather, even if he isn’t really—it would break his heart. He believes in this good-blood crap, and if he found out that I was just . . . well, it wouldn’t be good. After he goes, it’ll probably be a different story. But until then, I remain his grandson.”

  “Ah,” said Gideon. Now he understood.

  As they turned from the highway into Stresa’s bustle, Phil started laughing again. “Mussolini? Mm, no. Rudolph Valentino? Mm, no. . . .”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “COLONEL, you got a minute?”

  Caravale, on his way back from the soft drink machine with a Brio, stopped at the door to his office. “What do you have, Lombardo?”

  Lombardo and Rigoli were his financial specialists, and at his instruction they had spent the last few days probing into Vincenzo’s situation. This morning they had gone up to Ghiffa to interview the people at Aurora Costruzioni.

  “Well, you were right,” Lombardo told him. “De Grazia didn’t pay that ransom by borrowing on his stocks. He didn’t have any left to borrow against. Not enough for this, anyway.”

  Caravale frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Lombardo, knowing full well that finance was not Caravale’s strong point, kept it as simple as he could. “See, he’d already pledged just about all his holdings, at a fifty percent margin, as collateral to buy more stocks, mostly Internet stuff . . . a chain of Internet bars he was interested in. Well, not only did that not pan out, but the collateralized stock lost almost twenty-five percent of its value, so at a fifty percent margin, that meant his equity was down to a little more than thirty percent . . . are you still with me here?”

  “Not only am I not with you, I already have a headache. If you could get to the punch line, I’d appreciate it.”

  “The punch line is, not only does he not have stocks to borrow against, but his collateral is damn near the point where his broker is going to be making a margin call any day now.”

  “You mean call in the loan? How much is he in for?”

  “Three hundred thousand.”

  Caravale leaned his back against the wall, thinking. “Wait, let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Vincenzo is three hundred thousand euros in debt, and the axe is about to come down on him if he doesn’t come up with it?”

  “It’s at least three hundred thousand,” Lombardo told him. “Could be more we don’t know about. You think he was desperate enough to kidnap his own kid to get the money?”

  “Five million euros,” Caravale said. “That’s a lot more than he needed.”

  “As far as we know. Anyway, if he thought he could get away with it for three hundred thousand, why not make it five million? It’s always nice to have a little spare cash on hand.”

  Caravale, who had been thinking much the same thing, nodded. “I knew there was something funny going on,” he said half-aloud. He started into his office and beckoned Lombardo to follow him. “So how did he pay the ransom? Come on in, tell me what you found out.”

  “I can do better than that,” Lombardo said. “We brought a couple of the Aurora officers down for formal statements. Aldo’s in there with the CFO right now. I think you might want to sit in too.”

  “The CFO? Vincenzo’s sister, right? Francesca.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Caravale took a swig of the Brio and put the bottle on a table just inside his office. “Let’s go. I don’t want to sit in, though. We’ll watch through the one-way.”

  Once in the darkened observation booth next to the interrogation room, Inspector Lombardo rapped sharply on the wall to let the interrogator, Inspector Aldo Rigoli, know that they were there.

  “Now then, Signora Galasso,” Rigoli said in his courteous, hesitant manner, “these microphones will record our conversation and a typed transcript will be prepared from it.”

  Rigoli and Lombardo were two of Caravale’s better interviewers, but two very different types. Rigoli was an unassuming, bespectacled man who looked and spoke like an assistant bank teller. Unlike the hulking Lombardo, he didn’t frighten people. When it seemed more desirable to put the fear of God into the interviewee, it was Lombardo who took over.

  “Afterward, the transcript will be sent to you so that you may—”

  “Yes, yes,” Francesca interrupted. “May we get on with it, please? I’d like to get done as quickly as possible. I assume it’s the damned loan you want to hear about again?”

  The only makeup she wore was a touch of eyeliner and a vivid slash of dark red, almost black, lipstick on what otherwise would have been a wide but thin-lipped mouth. Her long, squared-off fingernails were painted the same predatory shade. She was in a work outfit: a scarf wrapped tightly around her head like a turban, a high-collared, open-throated white shirt with blo
used sleeves, a single strand of black pearls, spike-heeled, open-toed shoes, and trim slacks narrowed at the ankles. The slacks were made of a glossy gray fabric—sharkskin, Caravale thought, but maybe that was because sharkskin seemed right for Francesca Galasso.

  It occurred to him that they might have done better to use Lombardo for this.

  “If you please, signora,” Rigoli said.

  “Very well. It’s exactly as I told you before.”

  Matter-of-factly, but with a distinct air of condescension, as if it might be difficult for police minds to grasp, she explained. As the company’s chief financial officer, she had signed off the previous week on a five-million-euro loan to Eurotecnica Servizi, a Milan subsidiary of Aurora Costruzioni that specialized in preparing historical buildings for restoration. In actuality, however, Eurotecnica Servizi performed only three or four jobs a year, had no permanent staff (other than Vincenzo himself), and existed chiefly as a dummy corporation, a repository in which to bury occasional loans to Vincenzo when one or another of his varied investments needed an infusion of cash.

  “In your opinion—” Rigoli began.

  “You want to know if, in my opinion, such an arrangement is legal.” She folded her graceful hands on the table in front of her. “In a technical sense, possibly not. But when the cash flow problems were repaired, the money would be promptly repaid, so where exactly was the harm? In effect my brother was borrowing from himself, and paying himself back. Who suffered? And the economy, the companies he invested in, obviously, they benefited.”

  “And the loans, they were always paid back? There are none outstanding?”

  “Yes, absolutely, do you think I would have been a party to it otherwise? You can examine the books for yourself if you wish.”

  “We’ve done that,” Lombardo told Caravale. “What she says is true. Seven loans to Eurotecnica in the past ten years, all of them paid back in full, with interest, well inside the loan period.”