by Aaron Elkins
These days, they were professional colleagues, sometimes serving on the same panels, and Gideon had discovered that, underneath the crust, O’Malley was a pretty good egg. Not quite a heart of gold, no, but not so bad, once you made allowances. Still, some things were hard to get over.
“What can I do for you?” O’Malley asked. “Where are you calling from?”
“I’m in Italy, and the reason that I’m calling is that the other day somebody mentioned the Gaetano Pini Institute in Milan, which made me remember that you’d taken your residency there years ago, and that brought to mind—”
“I’m going to go make myself a cup of coffee now, Oliver. You just keep talking away, and maybe by the time I get back, you’ll be getting to the point.”
Gideon coughed. “Well, the point, Pro—uh, Bill, is that I remembered the segment in Non-traumatic Osteomyelitis that discusses aseptic necrosis of the epiphysis of the femoral head, and that mentions the possibility of confusing the results of a subcapital or transcervical fracture of the neck of the femur with the aftereffects of certain pathological—”
“Yes, yes, the aftereffects of Perthes disease. When did you get so damned verbose? I don’t remember you talking so much.”
“Well, um, anyway, I don’t have your book here with me to compare your photographs—”
“What are you saying? You travel without a copy of Non-traumatic Osteomyelitis of the Post-cranial Skeleton with you at all times? I’m shocked, shocked!” Gideon could imagine his hand going to his breast, his eyes rolling in mock disbelief.
He laughed politely. “—so what I’d like to do is fax you a few photos—of the femoral head and surrounding area—from a case I’m working on, and ask you which you think it is, Perthes disease or a fracture. Would that be all right? And if it looks like Perthes to you, I’d appreciate a summary of the disease’s incidence, heritability, demographics, that kind of thing. Today, if you can manage.”
“Oh, is that all you want? Well, of course, what else could I possibly have to do today?”
“I know it’s an imposition—”
“I’m glad you know it,” he said, then abruptly decided he’d terrorized Gideon enough this time around. “Well, look, I don’t have a fax machine here at home, but I’ll be at the university from one o’clock on.” O’Malley was an emeritus professor at Columbia and went to his office most days. “You can fax it to me there: 212-854-1111. I’ll look at it first thing and see what I can do.”
Gideon scrambled for a pen and wrote it down. “Great, thanks a million.” One P.M., New York time, would be seven in the evening in Stresa. He’d be on the Isola de Grazia at Achille’s farewell party. “And if you come up with anything definitive, I’d really appreciate it if you’d call me right away.” He read him the villa’s phone number from a note he’d made earlier.
“You don’t expect very much, do you?” O’Malley grumbled, but Gideon heard the scratching of a pen.
“Thank you, professor.”
He was wincing even before the shouted reply: “Oliver, for crying out—”
“Bill!” Gideon quickly amended. “Bill, Bill. Thank you very much, Bill. Good-bye, Bill.”
He hung up and with his finger wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead.
Sheesh. It was as bad as being back in Paleopathology 502.
TWENTY-THREE
DR. Luzzatto’s home and office were on the ground floor of one of the better-kept apartment buildings in Gignese, a few blocks from the village center. The mustard-colored paint on the outside was relatively new, the balconies had hardly any rust, and last night’s bedding had already been taken in from the upstairs windowsills. A satellite dish, not a frequent sight in Gignese, was bolted to one of the third-floor balconies. When Gideon arrived, he found Caravale sitting on the low stone wall bordering the driveway, leafing through a pocket-sized, leather-bound notebook and having his afternoon half-cigar.
“Okay if I go in?” Gideon said.
“Hm?” Barely looking up, Caravale waved his cigar in the direction of the door. “Mm.”
But Gideon stopped, caught by Caravale’s preoccupation. “Got something interesting there?”
“Perhaps, if I could figure out what it means.” With a sigh, he snapped the notebook shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “I need to walk around a little, stretch my legs, maybe find a cup of coffee. Do you want to come, or are you in a hurry to get in there?”
“No, I’m not in a hurry. I could use some coffee myself.”
They walked half a block without speaking. Caravale was in a sport coat and blue jeans, so the curious stares they drew from the locals were no more than any strangers in this part of the village would have gotten.
“Your theory of Interconnected Monkey Business?” Caravale finally said pensively. “It looks as if it’s panning out.”
“Oh?” Gideon prompted when it appeared Caravale was going back to smoking and ruminating in silence.
Caravale tapped ash from his cigar. “The chauffeur, the bodyguard, that was killed in the kidnapping? He was a replacement. Praga, the one that was scheduled to drive the boy that day, called in just before he was due and begged off with an upset stomach, then never showed up again. You see what that means, don’t you?”
“Well . . . that the original guy—Praga—was part of the plan and got cold feet at the last minute?”
“That’s right. And here’s guy number two, Dellochio, who knows nothing about it—”
“—and the kidnappers haven’t heard that guy number one won’t be driving—”
“—so instead of putting up a fake resistance and letting them get away with it, the way they expected him to, the poor bastard defends Achille with his life and ends up shot to death.”
“An inside job at Aurora,” Gideon murmured. “Huh. What does that do to the theory that it has to be one of the de Grazias?”
“Nothing. The company drivers occasionally chauffeured family members around in their off-hours. They all knew Praga. Any of them could have approached him with this. Of course, it’s worth noting that several of them work at Aurora, so they’d have the easiest access to him and would probably know him best—it’s not exactly the sort of thing you ask a stranger to do.”
Gideon nodded. “Francesca is the CFO and Basilio is something in payroll.”
“And last but not least”—Caravale ran his tongue over his lips—“let’s not forget the boss man . . . Vincenzo.”
Gideon stopped. “You suspect Vincenzo of kidnapping his own son? Of staging the whole thing? Why would he do that?”
“The money. Five million euros is a lot of money.”
“But he’s rich as . . . as . . .” He groped.
“Croesus?” suggested Caravale around the cigar. He gestured at a bar across the street. “Let’s go get that coffee.” Using the fingers of his left hand, he carefully snuffed out the cigar and stuck the inch-and-a-half-long stub behind his ear. “I’m rationing myself,” he explained.
The Bar Lanterna, as opposed to the distinctly blue-collar Bar Ricci, where Phil and Gideon had met Franco and Gia, appeared to be the meeting place for Gignese’s with-it set. A sign advertised evening karaoke, video games, and Internet access, and one of the tables actually had two unaccompanied women at it. The air held only a thin veil of old cigarette smoke. Over a couple of espressos served with slender glasses of water, Gideon picked up where they’d left off.
“Thank you. Croesus. So why would he need the money?”
Caravale smiled tolerantly while he stirred sugar into the tiny cup. “Well, I tell you, my naïve professor-friend: You’d be surprised at the things rich people do for money. Besides . . . Vincenzo isn’t as rich as Croesus. I’ve been doing some checking, and our Vincenzo, in fact, is having financial difficulties. The money that was raised to ransom Achille? It wasn’t his own at all. Raising it took some, shall we say, highly creative accounting practices with the books at Aurora Costruzioni.”
“I don�
��t get this at all. How could he need money? Look at that house he maintains. Look at that whole island. Did you see some of those paintings? The tapestries? If he needed the money, all he had to do was sell off five million euros’ worth of paintings and nobody would even notice they were gone. What would he want to rig up something as crazy as this for?”
“Ah, now, his private wealth, that’s interesting too. We’ve had a look at the provisions of the de Grazia legacy, and it turns out the bequest, which is enormous, is strictly entailed for the purpose of keeping Isola de Grazia in the family, in perpetuity. It provides for physical maintenance of the property, for household staff, for death taxes when the generations change, and for the food, clothing, and general upkeep of the family members staying there. I think there’s some kind of small allowance for them too. Beyond that, they’re expected to fend for themselves. They get nothing, not even Vincenzo.”
“Wow. You’ve been busy,” Gideon said.
Caravale touched the tip of his tongue to his espresso, then drank. “Most of them also got an inheritance from Domenico’s personal will, but it wasn’t all that much, and it’s long gone now. And as for selling the art, he can’t. It’s expressly prohibited, and the lawyers stay on him like leeches. He can have things restored or cleaned, and the bequest will pay for it, but he can’t sell anything. He’s more like the custodian of the place, really, than the owner.”
“Well, okay, I understand what you’re getting at,” Gideon agreed. “He has money problems. But to kidnap Achille . . . his own son? He almost got him killed!”
“Ah, but couldn’t that have been because of the change in chauffeurs? That’s my whole point. If Praga had been there as planned, there wouldn’t have been any gunfire, or maybe just a little harmless shooting to make it look good.”
“I see what you mean. Right.”
“Of course, right. Pay attention. In any case, I’m not saying it’s Vincenzo. Not for certain. It could still be any one of them.”
“Not Cosimo, surely?”
“Well, he’s not at the top of my list,” Caravale said with a smile. “Neither is your friend Phil, but I think you knew that. But we’re getting close to the end here, Gideon. I have good intuition about these things, and I can feel it in my stomach.” He brought the thumb and fingers of his hand together. “I can sense the closing of the net.”
“Mm,” Gideon said. He drank half the espresso, savoring the bitter taste, the ashy texture.
“What do you mean, ‘Mm’? We’ve already established it has to be one of the de Grazia crowd, haven’t we?”
“Well, yes,” Gideon allowed. “Big Paolo’s being involved in the kidnapping and the attack on me—”
“And in trying to steal Domenico’s bones,” Caravale added, jabbing the cigar at him. “Oh, didn’t I tell you about that? One of the nuns identified him as the man she saw sneaking around the hospital courtyard in the middle of the night, how about that? So he was definitely tied in with everything—Domenico’s murder, Achille’s kidnapping—which means—well, you know.”
Gideon nodded. What it meant, as they’d established earlier, was that at least one of the de Grazias was also tied up with everything, because only the de Grazias—no one else—had known that Domenico’s bones had been found. Whoever it was, therefore, Big Paolo’s presence linked him or her to both Domenico’s death and Achille’s kidnapping. And since the de Grazias were the only ones who had heard Luzzatto muttering about the mysterious things Domenico had had on his mind the day he was killed, that almost certainly had to mean that one of them was involved in Luzzatto’s murder too—assuming that Luzzatto had been murdered.
“Wait a minute, though,” Gideon said. “Back to Vincenzo for a minute. At the consiglio he said he’d told the previous carabinieri commander that Domenico was murdered ten years ago, back when it happened.”
“And he did. I looked at the case file.”
“So, does that add up? A man murders his father, then tells the cop in charge—who thinks it’s an accident and is inclined to let it go—that he ought to investigate it as a homicide?”
“On the surface, maybe not. But if in that way he establishes a façade of innocence for himself without providing any incriminating information for the police to work with . . . maybe yes.”
Gideon stretched and sighed. “Okay, I grant you, it all makes sense on paper, but it’s pretty . . . well, ornate. It’d sure be nice if you could get your hands on Big Paolo and just ask him who hired him. That’d settle it.”
Caravale grinned at him.
“You found him?”
They had indeed. With the help of local police in Sesto San Giovanni, one of the gritty industrial suburbs north of Milan, Big Paolo Tossignani had been located and apprehended. Caravale had not yet had a chance to talk to him, but he was at this moment being transported to Stresa for that purpose. He would arrive by 4 P.M.
“And I’ll be there to welcome him with open arms,” Caravale said.
“That’s great,” said Gideon, impressed. “If he cooperates—”
“I doubt if there’ll be any problem with that. This young man is in very big trouble. He’s been positively identified at the kidnapping, remember, and there’s a homicide charge associated with that, let alone the attack on you and everything else he has to worry about. So he can either say nothing and go to prison for the next thirty years while the person that originated the idea and paid him a few euros comes away from it all without a scratch, or he can cooperate by giving us some information that would make the court look more favorably on him.”
“And you think he will?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t he? They call him Dumb Paolo, but he can’t be that dumb.” He chuckled delightedly. “And listen to this. The Sesto people faxed me what records they had on him. In the past three years, lo and behold, he’s hired on twice as a laborer on Milanese projects, with a regional construction company. Not only that, but Ugo Fogazzaro—the dead kidnapper—was hired for the same jobs, by the same company. Would you care to hazard a guess as to the name of this well-known construction company that is on such familiar terms with these two particular gangsters?”
“Aurora!” said Gideon. “Damn!”
The links to the de Grazias were piling up too thick and too fast to be shrugged off now. Caravale was getting close to wrapping things up, and it looked as if Paolo was going to provide the ribbon with which to do it. They had finished their coffees but they both had some water left, and Caravale looked so tickled that Gideon raised his water glass for a congratulatory toast.
“To Dumb Paolo,” Caravale said as the glasses clinked.
“BEFORE you go in, look at this and tell me what you think,” Caravale said as they got back to Luzzatto’s apartment building. He handed Gideon the leather-bound notebook he’d been reading earlier. “It’s not very long.” From his manner, Gideon could see that he had only that moment decided to let Gideon in on it.
Gideon took it. “What is it?”
“It’s a personal journal. He started keeping if some years ago, one notebook per year. We found them at the back of a drawer in his desk. This is the last one.” He sat down on the stone wall again, plucked the cigar from behind his ear, and stuck it between his lips. “While you read it, keep in mind what he was saying that day at the consiglio.”
“About Domenico having something to ponder the day he was killed?”
“Exactly.” He scratched a wooden match on the mortar between the stones of the wall, lit up, and settled back to watch Gideon read.
Gideon sat down beside him, taking care to keep upwind. The notebook had perhaps a hundred pages, but only the first few had been used. The first entry was dated January 3, 1992. Gideon tried struggling through a sentence or two, but then shook his head and handed the journal to Caravale. “I’m not used to this kind of handwriting. You’ll have to tell me what it says. Something about leukemia?”
“Yes,” Caravale said, spreading the notebook open on his thi
gh. “He was diagnosed with advanced acute leukemia on December twenty-eighth, 1991—”
“Wait a minute. And he was still alive and riding his motorcycle in 2003? That’s—”
“Unlikely, yes. The fact is, there was a mistake at the laboratory. His bone marrow sample was confused with someone else’s.”
“Some mistake,” Gideon said.
Caravale tapped the notebook. “It’s all in here, but the important thing is that—at the time—Luzzatto believed he had only a few weeks or months to live. Now listen to this. This is January fifth. ‘For twenty-seven years,’” he read, translating as he went along, “‘I have kept this secret buried in my heart, unwilling (or unable?) to tell Domenico. Now it can wait no longer. Tomorrow I will speak with him.’” He looked up from the journal. “Would you like to guess the date of Domenico’s death?”
“January sixth?”
“January eighth. Two days after Luzzatto told him.”
“Told him what?”
“That’s the question, all right. And the answer, unfortunately, is that I have no idea. There are no entries until the tenth of January.”
“So you can’t even be sure he did tell him.”
“No, we can be quite sure. Here is what he had to say on the tenth: ‘Dear God, can this terrible thing be my fault? Did I drive this fine, generous man to his death? Even if not, surely I made him wretched for the last few days of his life. And for what? For vanity’s sake? To satisfy my egotistical notions of honesty, of candor? For the bitter, self-indulgent pleasure of living my own last few hours on this earth as an “honest” man? May God forgive me.’”
Caravale blew out a cloud of sour cigar smoke. “Quite a philosopher, our Dr. Luzzatto. After this, he wrote nothing for a week, and then there was a brief entry describing the error in the laboratory tests. After that, apparently he lost his taste for journals.”
