Good Blood (2 page)

Domenico would ask if there was anything they wanted. The answer was always no, although Franco would sometimes have some additional requirement concerning the promised Ferrari. At precisely three o’clock Domenico would rise, Emma would offer her cheek to be kissed, he would nod to Franco-for some time he had preferred not to shake hands with him-and he would leave, feeling guilty and unfulfilled, as if there was something he had come to do, and he hadn’t done it. Emma was so quiet now, so pale and resigned. With time his old affection for her had blossomed again, and his heart ached to see her as she was.

But after a month Franco’s interest in these weekly calls waned and he began finding other things to do: coffee and newspapers with his friends at the cafe; bocce on the court beside the village square. He would spend days at a time back in Stresa, doing God knew what-cavorting with his mistresses, Domenico assumed. But it was all to the good. Emma began to blossom. She became talkative again, and laughed often, with that merry little hiccup at the end, a sweet sound Domenico hadn’t heard for years. With the swelling of her abdomen she seemed to become contented and happy, and Domenico along with her. His weekly visits, far from being a chore, became something he looked impatiently forward to.

Most important, Dr. Luzzatto pronounced her health, and that of the developing child, excellent. And it was his opinion, from the way she was carrying the baby, that it was indeed a boy.

There were only two things to mar his happiness. First-and this was something that Dr. Luzzatto had warned him about more than once-he worried that there would be a problem later, when it was time for her to turn the child over to Stefania and him. The hormones that flowed through a new mother’s body, Luzzatto had said, often exerted a power that no man could understand. Emma was likely to experience depression, even despair, when the baby was taken from her. Domenico should prepare himself for it. It was natural and expectable, and there was nothing to be done about it. Given time, it would pass. Still, it hurt him to think of her unhappiness to come.

The other worm in the apple was a thing he learned from Caterina, the live-in servant he’d hired to look after Emma. Emma had become friends with the young laundress who came once a week to bring the washed and pressed linens and to take away the dirty ones. This Gia, according to Caterina, was a sluttish, independent creature with loose morals and brutish manners. At first the friendship between two women of such different classes had been inexplicable, but then one day Caterina had heard them whispering and giggling about pregnancy and childbirth. Gia was also pregnant, and there lay the source of their closeness. But-and here the housekeeper lowered her voice to a whisper-Gia could not even say for sure who the father was. The dreadful girl spoke laughingly-laughingly!-of giving the child up for adoption if there was money to be made from it. Even in jest, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t natural. Caterina wrung her hands beneath her apron. This Gia was not a fit companion for a woman of Emma’s class.

In his thoughts Domenico agreed with her and might easily have seen to it that there was no further contact between them. But he hesitated to interfere. Whom else did Emma have to giggle with and confide her girlish secrets in? Franco? Besides, once she returned to Stresa and was with her own kind, time and distance would necessarily put an end to their closeness. The problem would take care of itself.

But the other problem, the problem of Emma’s maternal hormones, did not take care of itself.

Emma gave birth at the villa in Gignese. Her labor, attended only by a midwife and her assistant (Dr. Luzzatto had been with a patient in Belgirate and had not made it back in time) was difficult and extremely hard on her. The baby, a strapping, squalling boy, was healthy-everything Domenico could have wished for-but Emma’s condition troubled him. When he arrived a few days later (she had asked that he permit her time to recover, which was what gave him the first real inkling that all was not as well as it might have been), she remained secluded in her bedroom, and it was the nurse who brought him the beautiful infant. Dr. Luzzatto prevented Domenico from seeing her until the following day. It was not her physical condition that was cause for concern, Luzzatto warned gravely, but her mental state. It was more precarious than he’d expected. Four days now, and still her spirits were dangerously low.

The following day, when Domenico was permitted to call on her-Stefania was not with him, having preferred to remain at home-Emma was on a regimen of tranquilizers that Luzzatto had prescribed. It was like talking to some cleverly made mannequin, an automaton controlled by gears and pulleys, but ultimately lifeless. Her hair had been combed and her face had been made up to hide her pallor. She smiled, she nodded, she replied to questions, but there was no emotion, no human connection. Her eyes were enough to make one weep. For Domenico, all the joy had been squeezed from the occasion. It was the tranquilizers that were making her so spiritless, Luzzatto said, but both men knew there was more to it than that.

Even Franco, for once in his life, had been genuinely worried about his wife’s state of mind for the last month. Responding to the stress in true Franco fashion, he had run off to be with his family in Caprera for the final two weeks of Emma’s pregnancy, claiming that his presence only added to her nervous tension.

Domenico, who had considered his absence God-sent, had said nothing about this desertion, but he was blunt with Franco at dinner that night, while Emma stayed in her bed. She had so far refused even to look at the infant, which was being cared for by a wet nurse.

“What she needs is a baby of her own,” Domenico told him.

Franco shook his head. “Sure, that’s what I told her. But she doesn’t want to go through it again. I’ll tell you the truth, neither do I.” He puffed his cheeks and blew air from his mouth. It had been a few days since he’d shaved. “So what’s to be done?”

Domenico pushed away his untouched plate of pasta and let his chin fall to his chest. “I don’t know.”

But later that night, sitting in his darkened room, unable to sleep, he had an idea, and the next morning it was Domenico de Grazia who carried Emma’s breakfast of caffe latte, focaccia, and marmalade to her. He set the tray on the bed for her, pulled a chair up next to her, and got quickly to the point.

“Emma, my dear, your friend Gia-has she had her child?’”

“I don’t know, Uncle. Any day now.”

“And what will happen to it? Is it true that she plans to give it up for adoption?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. I think maybe that was just talk.” She offered up a listless smile that wrung his heart. “And you feel different once you’ve had it.”

“But can she afford to keep it? A single woman? A laundress?”

Emma had picked up a wedge of focaccia, but put it down again. “It will be hard. She has no father. Her mother no longer speaks to her. She has no money… It won’t be easy.”

But her face said it all: she would happily have traded places.

Domenico laid his hand on hers and tried to keep the building excitement out of his voice. “Emma, I have an idea. Now don’t say no until you hear me out…”

And so the arrangements were made. With the help of a generous financial settlement from Domenico, Gia agreed to part with her baby (a little too readily for Domenico’s taste), and when Emma and Franco returned to Stresa a few days later, after their absence of six months, they, too, had a newborn baby boy to show off to the world. And the glowing Emma was her happy, sweet-natured self again.

The two infants were christened a few weeks apart at the parish church in Stresa, where Domenico’s great-great-great-grandfather had been christened in 1786, the year of the church’s founding. Domenico’s new heir was called Vincenzo Paoli de Grazia, after San Vincenzo di Paoli, the great benefactor of the poor. The Ungarettis named their baby Filiberto, after Franco’s maternal grandfather, a knife grinder. It was hardly the name Domenico would have chosen, but there was no room in his heart to begrudge anyone anything. Filiberto Ungaretti it would be.

All was well.

The Village of Stresa, Lake Maggiore, Italy, the Present

It was the blue Honda that had started it, both traffic policemen agreed afterward.

The two veteran traffic officers, spruce and natty in their crisp blue uniforms and their caps, belts, and crisp white shirts, were just discarding their cigarettes and pushing through the glass doors of the Polizia Municipale building to report for the morning shift when the blast of noise-squealing tires, blaring horns, warning shouts-made them turn back toward the street.

The little Honda was trying to do the impossible or at the very least the idiotic-to pass another car on the Corso Italia in the middle of the morning rush. True, the Corso was ample by local standards, the widest avenue in Stresa, a beautiful concourse that ran picturesquely along the lakefront, with two lanes in each direction. And as rush hours went, Stresa’s wasn’t anything to brag about, but that didn’t mean you could expect to lane-change as if you were on the motorway around Rome. And certainly not with a big semitrailer truck-a Mercedes-Benz cab hauling an empty flatbed-bearing down on you in the oncoming lane and more than filling it.

There was nothing they could do but stand there and watch it happen. The driver of the truck slammed on his brakes-they could see him pulling on the wheel so hard (as if it made any difference) that he was standing up, like a wagon driver hauling back on the reins. The truck slewed to the left, veered in front of the oncoming traffic, bounced heavily up over the curb, scattering pedestrians, and went scraping and grinding across the entrance to the police parking lot until its huge left front wheel sank squarely into one of the planting beds that bordered the entrance.

The only damage to city property that they could see were a couple of bushes that had been run over, but the truck was in sorry shape. The flatbed in the rear, carried forward by its momentum, had swung around to the right, snapping or twisting something in the trailer connection, so that it ended up tilted and jackknifed, with its rear end clear on the other side of the street, almost up to the sidewalk and thoroughly eliminating any possibility of through traffic for hours to come. And as if that weren’t bad enough, an oncoming French tour bus had also veered wildly to avert disaster, and had ended up directly across from the police station, drunkenly sprawled in the Piazza Matteoti, which the city hall shared with the upscale Cafe Bolongaro. Cafe tables and chairs, unused at this time of the morning (so there was one little piece of luck, at any rate), had been overturned and now littered the little square. The bus passengers sat in their seats like statues, silent and white. Below the line of stunned faces, printed in bright red letters on the side of the bus, was the tour company’s slogan: LE PLAISIR DE VOYAGER.

As for the blue Honda that had caused it all, it had managed to scoot out of the way back into its lane and was long gone.

The two constables were running toward the driver before the truck tire had finished sinking into the soft earth. “Hey there, are you all right? Are you hurt?” Officer Giuseppe di Paolo called up to him.

The poorly shaven, gray-mustached man raised his head from the steering wheel, looking shell-shocked. “All right? Yes… it wasn’t my fault… there was a car…”

“We saw, we saw,” the officer said. “Did you get the license plate?”

“No, I couldn’t… it was… no.”

At this point Officer Gualtiero Favaretto asserted his natural authority (he was senior by four months) and took charge. “You,” he commanded the driver, “sit there a minute, make sure you’re not injured. Then go inside at once and tell them what happened.” His tone grew more somber. “You’d better ask for Comandante Boldini.”

The driver nodded wanly. “Yes, sir.”

Favaretto turned to his partner. “Giuseppe, this is going to create the mother of all snarls. Nobody’s going to be able to get through town. I’ll do what I can to get started cleaning up here. You better go in and tell them we need to put somebody out on the Corso up by the Regina Palace, and somebody else down at the Villa Palavicino turnoff, to divert traffic.”

Di Paolo started docilely in, then stopped and gestured vaguely in the direction of the warren of narrow, winding alleys and pedestrian streets that constituted Stresa. And in the other direction was the lake. The only avenue of any substance in the town was the Corso itself. “Divert to where?”

“That,” Favaretto replied magisterially, “is their problem. And Giuseppe,” he added, waving at the obstructed police lot, “tell him they’ll have to get there on foot. There will be no vehicles leaving here for some time to come.”

Enrico Dellochio saw the whole thing too; unfortunately for him, from the best seat in the house-behind the wheel of the dove-gray, perfectly kept-up 1978 Daimler limousine that had been trailing the flatbed truck. He’d been stuck in its wake for three blocks, ever since the lumbering flatbed had turned unexpectedly out of Via Prini and cut directly in front of them, forcing him to jam on his brakes and bringing a petulant complaint from Achille de Grazia in the back seat. Enrico would ordinarily have had his suspicions about a truck cutting them off like that, but an empty flatbed with nobody visible in it but the driver? Not much threat there. Still, he checked the rearview mirror to satisfy himself that no one had come up behind to hem them in. No, nothing, just some tourist on a rented moped, driving with the frozen concentration of a man who wished he was anywhere but on it.

Enrico had spotted the blue Honda coming toward them, darting in and out of traffic like a bug, apparently well before the truck driver had. By the time the big rig’s brake lights flashed on, Enrico had already eased the limo to a gentle, anticipatory standstill. He watched with a mixture of satisfaction and disgust-he hated idiot drivers-as the rig made the disastrous, swerving, locked-brake attempt at a stop that would leave it splayed like a beached whale across the full breadth of the Corso Italia. Meanwhile, here came the Honda, picking up speed as it slipped by the careening flatbed and getting back into its own lane barely in time to avoid the now stationary Daimler. It scooted by, gunning its engine, its rear end shimmying, and with maybe ten inches to spare. If they’d both been standing still, he could have reached out and grabbed the Honda’s driver by the neck, which he wouldn’t have minded doing.