Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “Fine, pally,” he said amicably, “how about you?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Hey, who’s tending the booth?” Linda asked.

  “Gianni and Ettore are there now,” Luca said. “We just wanted to say hello. We’ll go back in a minute and give them a hand wrapping up. There won’t be that much to load back up in the truck. We moved a lot of wine.”

  “Yeah, it helps when you’re giving it away,” Nico said and went to the bar, coming back with Luca’s coffee and for himself a glass of Moscato, a golden, mellow, afternoonish kind of wine.

  “No, I mean we sold a lot too,” Luca said. “It was a good festival.”

  Nico sat, took a long swallow, sighed, and stretched, looking worn out. “Lot of work, though. I’m beat.”

  “You’re beat,” Luca said. “How do you think I feel? And about three hours from now, Vino e Cucina gets going. Whew. It’s like it never ends.”

  Linda laughed. “You know you love it, honey.”

  “I thought the class started tomorrow morning,” Julie said.

  “The class, yeah, but there’s an opening reception at seven tonight. You two will be there, I hope. And your friends.”

  “Actually,” Gideon said, “John and I haven’t signed up, Luca, so—”

  “Oh, please, tonight’s different. No cooking demonstrations, I promise. No lectures. Just some good wine and a few simple appetizers, and a chance for people to mingle. And a few introductions. I’d really appreciate it if you came, Gideon. You’d be a—”

  “Cultural ornament,” Gideon said. “I know.”

  “Well, that too, definitely, but I was thinking more of an extra body to help out in the kitchen with the heavy labor.” As it often did, a burst of bluff, hearty laughter followed his comment.

  “Oh, well now, that’s different, Luca. Of course I’ll be there.”

  Nico stood up and finished his wine with a single gulp. “Luca, my man, what do you say we head back to the booth and flog another case or two of Villa Antica plonk to the unsuspecting masses?”

  Luca responded in kind. “Watch it, baby brother, you’re speaking of what I love most in the world.”

  Linda cleared her throat, loudly and meaningfully.

  “Second most, that’s what I meant to say,” Luca amended. He bent to plant a kiss on her forehead. Eyes closed, smiling, she tilted up her face to receive it.

  “We’ll see you two later,” Luca said to the Olivers.

  “Ciao, pallies” Nico said.

  “I’ll be along in a while,” she called after them, and then to Julie and Gideon, with a long sigh: “I really love that man, did I ever tell you that?”

  “Really? You’re kidding us,” Gideon said. “I would have thought from those flushed cheeks and shining eyes that you couldn’t stand the guy. Hey, I’m going to get a cappuccino for myself. Watching Julie drink one always makes me want one of my own. Linda?”

  “You bet. Don’t tell anyone, though. Having a cappuccino at any time of the day other than with breakfast incurs the wrath of the purists.”

  Julie declined, holding up her cup to demonstrate that it was still half full.

  Gideon went back to the counter, put the barista through his motions again, and returned with the brimming cups. While he’d been getting them, Linda had gone to one of the colorful little pushcarts and brought back a cardboard carton of zeppole, the sugared, donut-hole-like fritters originally from Naples, but now a fixture at every Italian street fair from Rome to San Francisco. She lifted the lid as he set the coffees down in their saucers, bit into one, and offered them around.

  Julie took one. “Linda, a couple of minutes ago you said you used to think Pietro put family above everything. What was that about? If it’s none of our business, just—”

  “No, no, that’s okay.” She and Julie had shared many confidences over the years and, in any case, she was one of those cheerfully open, talkative people who didn’t need any coaxing when it came to retailing inside information that more guarded people would keep close to the vest.

  “Well, here’s what happened. Last summer, a couple of months before he died, babbo got this amazing offer from Humboldt-Schlager to buy the winery, lock, stock, and barrel. We’re talking megabucks here.”

  “Aren’t they a beer company?” Julie asked. “Are they into wines too?”

  “This was going to be their entry. Well, babbo liked the idea—he was thinking about retiring anyway—and even if the rest of us weren’t crazy about it, we weren’t dead set against it either. According to their offer, Humboldt would stay out of the internal management of the winery for at least two years with Franco as chief operating officer and also a member of the corporation’s board of directors. The rest of us would stay on in our present jobs at the same salaries we were getting from babbo. And we could keep on living here. Not a bad deal, really.”

  “But,” said Gideon.

  “‘But’ is right. Babbo took his time about signing, and Humboldt had second thoughts. About a week before he’s going to go up to the cabin, they change the terms. No jobs for the boys or for me, and no place to live either—we’d even have to clear out of our living quarters. No financial settlement either, just good-bye and good luck. And they weren’t open to negotiations. Take it or leave it.” She polished off her fritter and licked the sugar off her fingers.

  “Yikes, that must have caused a little consternation,” Julie said.

  “Well, it would have if we’d known, but we didn’t. As blunt and straight-talking as babbo was, apparently he didn’t have the nerve to tell us. We only found out a couple of months later when the whole deal went south for good and Severo finally let us in on it. He felt bad about keeping it from us, Severo did, but he’d been honoring babbo’s request. I don’t blame him. It’s a good thing babbo was already dead, though, or one of the boys probably would have killed him.” She began to laugh but cut it off and sobered. “Whoa, that was just a stupid joke. Not for one minute do I think any one of them would ever—I mean, those boys loved—”

  “We understand,” Julie said smiling.

  “Figure of speech, not a statement of fact,” said Gideon.

  He was also smiling, but his mind was chewing over what she’d said. Rocco had said they hadn’t come up with any tenable motives for anybody but Pietro himself. Here, all of a sudden was a lulu of a motive, and three people—four, counting Linda—who shared it. There was a time when he’d have felt guilty and been embarrassed about having such thoughts about friends, but sad experience had taught him not to discount them. It didn’t stop him from hoping (and believing) that there was nothing to them, but Rocco would need to hear this all the same.

  “They wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway,” said Linda, still a little defensive. “Babbo was making up for it by giving them big stipends, more than enough to live on when the sale went through—which it never did, of course—so nobody would have been exactly poor. Even Cesare was going to get one, the same as the other three.”

  Julie frowned. “Who’s Cesare?”

  Linda frowned back. “Who’s Cesare? Cesare, Nola’s son . . . Luca and Nico’s stepbrother. And Franco’s. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. I didn’t know Nola had a son,” Julie said. She glanced at Gideon, her brows knit: Did you know?

  Gideon hunched his shoulders. “News to me.”

  “How could you not know about Cesare?” Linda demanded, as if they’d been remiss in their study of Cubbiddu history.

  “I don’t know how we’d know unless you told us,” Julie said, “and you never told us.”

  “You mean you didn’t . . . Oh, wait a minute, that’s right; you didn’t meet him when you were here last time. He’d moved out by then, and there was no particular reason to talk about him.” She hesitated. “He . . . well, he wasn’t all that popular, to put it bluntly. He didn’t get along with the brothers very well, and he had . . . issues with Pietro too. I mean . . . you know.”

  Gi
deon didn’t know, but he was suddenly interested. Issues with Pietro? “Like what?” Motives seemed to be popping up all over the place.

  “Oh, it wasn’t anything that—”

  “Come on, Linda, I’m curious too,” Julie said. “A step-brother—how does he fit into the picture?”

  “Oh, all right,” said Linda, lighting up at the prospect of opening up another skeleton closet. She dabbed powdered sugar from her lips and paused a moment to order her thoughts. “Okay, now, you remember that the two of them, Nola and Pietro, came from Sardinia, which is another world to begin with, but you probably don’t know that the particular region they come from is Barbagia, which is the part—”

  “The central interior,” Gideon said. “Nuoro Province, basically. Mountainous, isolated, poor. Depending on how you look at it, very traditional or very backward and primitive.”

  “That’s the place. Interestingly enough, the name—Barbagia—is supposed to mean ‘barbarian’—”

  “It does,” Gideon said. “From ‘bárboros,’ ancient Greek for the way foreigners were supposed to talk.”

  “Right,” Linda said with a slight arching of one eyebrow in Gideon’s direction. “Anyway—”

  “It’s because, to their ears, other languages sounded like bar-bar-bar-bar—babbling, in other words. They used the term a lot when they were naming places and peoples.”

  Linda made a growling noise. “Hey, who’s telling this story?”

  “The Barbary Coast, for example, although some authorities seem to think that’s because the Barbary pirates were Berbers, but—”

  “Is he always like this?” Linda asked.

  “Pretty much, yup,” said Julie. “He can’t help himself. Apparently, it’s in his DNA. You just have to ride it out. If you wait long enough, he runs out of gas. Or out of trivia; one or the other.” She smiled sweetly at him.

  Gideon laughed. “All right, I can take a hint. And anyway, I’m flush out of both. It’s all yours, Linda.”

  “We’ll soon see,” Julie murmured.

  “Well, the reason I mentioned the name at all is because it’s still pretty barbaric in some ways. It’s the only place in Italy where there are still honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned bandits in the mountains, and the only place—”

  “Where vendetta still exists,” said Gideon. “It—” He winced. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, won’t happen again.”

  “All right, then,” Linda said a little suspiciously. “Well . . .” She threw a wary eye at him to make sure he was really giving up the floor. When she saw that he was, she settled happily back into her chair with another zeppola. “Now, if you ever want to hear a real-life Romeo-and-Juliet story, this is it. . . .”

  Pietro Cubbiddu and Nola Baccaredda had been born in the neighboring ancient stone villages of Nuragugme and Dualchi. The two families had been involved in an on-again, off-again vendetta going back to the 1950s that had begun over confused back-and-forth accusations of sheep-stealing. There had been three murders over the years and at least a half dozen attempted murders. According to Pietro, when he had been christened, the priest had consecrated six bullets and put them in with his swaddling clothes for use in avenging his family’s honor, a not-uncommon practice in Barbagia at the time.

  But the feud had died down about then, flaring up only occasionally in minor altercations, until 1985, when Nola’s then-husband, Eliodoro, had been ambushed and assassinated on his way to deliver a load of cheese to Nuoro, the provincial capital.

  Soon after, Pietro’s older brother Primo had been shotgunned to death while tending his goats in their winter pasture. The Cubbiddu clan had made it clear to Pietro that it was now his solemn duty to put some of those six bullets to use, but Pietro had no wish to continue the feud—primarily because he had gone over to the dark side; he had met and fallen in love with Nola.

  In 1986, they had shocked both families by announcing their upcoming marriage. Pietro was in his mid-thirties with three young sons. Nola, four years younger, had one child, Cesare, who was then an infant.

  It was the couple’s hope that their wedding, like a union between foreign royals in old Europe, would end the bad blood and even bring the two families together. As a gesture, one of Pietro’s wedding gifts to Nola was the six bullets, still in the padded box in which they’d come from the priest. But it was not to be. Most members of both families—including the couple’s parents—stayed away from the church, and muttered threats hung in the air. And when Pietro’s oldest son, Franco, narrowly averted a nighttime roadside ambush (a row of flaming garbage cans suddenly blocking his way at a country crossroads, and two cars, each with several men in them, waiting alongside the road), Pietro and Nola concluded that it was time to leave. The family headed for Tuscany, the only place in mainland Italy with which they had any familiarity at all.

  As it happened, Pietro had had a huge windfall a few months earlier: a government bulldozer had cut across his land without permission, wrecking his vineyard and much of his small, century-old olive grove. Fearing a suit, the government had quickly settled on 5 million lire for him—at the time the equivalent of three thousand euros. It was a fortune, ten times more money than he’d ever seen at once, and most of it went to buy an abandoned fifteenth-century convent, dilapidated and war-damaged, that he’d seen in the Val d’Arno, thirty kilometers south of Florence. It had been converted to a winery for a while in the early years of the twentieth century, and it came with a half hectare of withered, moribund Malvasia grapes. But the soil was fertile and the climate conducive to grape growing; this was Tuscany, after all. They had had to set to work at once, and work like dogs they did, joined by Luca and Franco, who were then in their teens.

  Gideon and Julie had heard this part of the story before, but Linda was rolling along in high gear, and they didn’t have the heart to stop her. Besides, they both liked listening to her smooth, gentle Tennessee accent.

  The Cubbiddus had plowed their earnings back into the vineyard, and with time success had come. The enterprise had blossomed (Villa Antica was now the fourth largest of the valley’s seventy-something wineries), their sons thrived and grew into four healthy young men, and they lived without the fear of faida hanging over their heads, since no one in Barbagia knew where they were.

  Yet all was not well in the Cubbiddu household. At the time of the marriage, Franco and Luca were still grieving for their mother, who had died from a kidney infection a few weeks after bearing Nico, and Nola’s intrusion into the family in her place was deeply resented. Nola, for her part, made an effort to win them over, but, like Pietro, she wasn’t endowed with much in the way of patience, and she soon gave it up, settling for the mutual disaffection, deep but in general peaceably constrained, that continued to the end. This rift had created an ongoing strain between husband and wife, and, to a lesser degree, between father and sons as well.

  But it was Nola’s son, Cesare, who’d had the toughest time of all. When she and Pietro had married, Pietro’s two older boys were fifteen and sixteen. Cesare was a squalling infant, not yet a year old; the teenage Cubbiddu boys couldn’t have had less interest in him; at best, he was simply another intruder, but one who commanded a great deal more than his share of attention. And although Pietro treated the boy with kindness and generosity—he adopted him, he did his best to treat him no differently from his own sons—the underlying paternal pull was simply not there. Cesare had no doubt felt his isolation and by the age of four or so he had become a needy, manipulative, totally self-centered child. To Luca and Franco, by then into their young manhood, he was nothing but a hindrance and a pest.

  “To Luca and Franco,” Gideon said. “Not to Nico?”

  “That’s right. Well, you see, Nico is quite a bit younger than his brothers too, so as a kid he didn’t have much in common with them either, although of course the love was always there. Blood, you know; this is Italy. But Nico and Cesare—at the time, they were only a few months apart—well, they still are, of course, but as chil
dren, they couldn’t play with Franco or Luca, but they could play with each other. And they had no memory of ever not being brothers, which also wasn’t the case for the older boys. So there was a connection there that nobody else had with Cesare. You understand, I wasn’t there for any of this. Basically, I’m telling you what Luca’s told me.”

  “Of course,” said Julie.

  “Nico was the older one, the more secure one, so he sort of took Cesare under his wing, spoke up for him, took his side, that kind of thing. Made excuses for him. Baby brother playing big brother. And he still does; he still sees himself as Cesare’s protector. I have my doubts about how Cesare feels about Nico these days, but I do know that there’s still a genuine love there on Nico’s part. You wouldn’t think so from that loosey-goosey way of his, would you, but Nico’s a deeply affectionate guy. He’s never given up on trying to bring Cesare more into the family.” She shook her head fondly. “It’s kind of touching, really.”

  “But apparently it hasn’t worked,” Julie said. “Bringing him more into the family.”

  Linda paused to let another zeppola go down before continuing. “That’s right, Franco despises him, and Luca’s not exactly crazy about him either. Neither am I, for that matter. And this I can tell you from my own experience: ‘manipulative’ and ‘self-centered’ still fit him to a T. He’s always . . . I don’t know, hatching something for his own benefit, if you know what I mean. As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad we don’t see the little worm that much.”

  She paused, hesitating, but decided she might as well finish the story. “And it doesn’t help any that he’s been into and out of drugs since he was fourteen. Marijuana at first, then other junk, then cocaine. Babbo paid for him to go to rehab three, four times, but it never took. His best friend died from it, from mixing cocaine and booze—”

  “A lethal combination,” Gideon said with a shake of his head.

  “And that stopped him for a while, but then he started thinking, ‘Well, I guess I better give up one of them, but do I really have to quit both?’ Unfortunately, it was the booze he gave up. He doesn’t even drink wine any more, which is pretty unique around here. But now he’s back on coke. Nico says it’s all because of stress, because Pietro threw him out, and maybe it is, but I don’t know. . . .” She shook her head. “It’s all just too damn bad.”