Good Blood (28 page)

The next day was their last full day in Italy and, as usual, they were making plans for what was left of it over another late breakfast, tossing around and discarding various ideas.

“You want to know what I’d really like to do?” Julie asked over a bowl of anonymous, Wheaties-like cereal she’d gotten from a plastic jar on the buffet table.

“Yes, I do. You’d like to take the day off from being tourists, not have any schedule at all, start getting ready for tomorrow. Check on our airline tickets, do some packing, make sure we have some clean clothes, take care of the postcards, rest up for the trip home, that kind of thing, so we don’t wind up all stressed out.”

The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. “How in the world did you know that?”

“Because whenever you quit on the breakfast croissants and the cold cuts and go back to eating cereal, I know that means you’re ready to go home. Your mental gears have shifted.” He himself was working on his second brioche, split and filled with sliced ham and cheese.

She continued to look at him for a few moments, then shook her head. “We’ve been married too long,” she said, returning to her cereal.

“Actually, not having a schedule suits me too. I’d like to go have another look at Domenico’s bones.”

“Domenico’s bones? Why?”

“I’m starting to wonder if I might have made a mistake with them.”

“A mistake? You mean they’re not Domenico’s? Caravale’s going to love that.”

“Oh, no, they’re Domenico’s, all right. No question there.”

“What then? The cause of death?”

“No, I don’t have any doubts about that either. He was stabbed to death. But I think I might have misinterpreted something.”

She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “And you’re not going to tell me what it is, right?”

“Well, let me look at them first.”

“Is it something important?”

“Could be, if it’s true. Which it almost certainly isn’t. But it might be.”

She watched him finish his sandwich and dab pensively at his lips without saying anything more. “Thank you so much,” she said, “for that lucid and comprehensive explanation.”

“More later,” he told her, smiling. “Heck, I’m probably all wet anyway.” He finished the last of his coffee and kissed the back of her hand with a smack. “See you in a couple of hours.”

Ah, no, he was informed by a sympathetic corporal at carabinieri headquarters, unfortunately it would not be possible for him to look at the bones because they’d been sent to the Rome laboratory for further forensic analysis. But a thorough set of photographs had been taken. Would the dottore care to see those? Copies could be made for him if he wished.

That might be even better, Gideon said, and a few minutes later he was sitting in an interrogation room with five dozen large, sharp, well-lit color photographs of Domenico de Grazia’s remains. He spent half an hour over them, talking to himself all the way, at the end of which time he carried them back to the clerk who’d given them to him.

“I’ll take this one, and this one, and this one,” he said. “This one too.”

They were quickly reproduced and brought back. The carabinieri had good equipment; the copies were as crisp as the originals. He slipped them into the manila envelope provided.

“Thanks very much. Oh, and is the colonel here?”

“Ah, but he’s not in the office this morning, Signor Oliver,” she said regretfully. “He can possibly be reached, however, if it’s a matter of importance. Would you care to speak with him?”

“No, that’s all right,” he said and was almost out the door with his photographs when he turned around and came back. “Well, yes, on second thought, I guess I would.”

He found Julie back at the Primavera. She had started her to-do list and had pulled the armchair and the ottoman up to the wide-open French windows to work on it, but her eyes were closed and her hands lay comfortably folded over the note pad. The list had gotten as far as a double-underlined “To Do” at the top of the page, but no further. Soothing sounds of quiet conversations in Italian and German drifted up from the open-air cafes in the street below, and the breezes off the lake were stirring a few unruly strands of black hair at her temples. All told, she looked about as stressed out as a house cat dozing on a sunny rug in front of the living room window.

He smoothed the hair back, then bent to breathe in its clean, familiar fragrance and to kiss her gently on the temple, her hair springy and supple against his mouth. “What’s this?” he murmured in her ear. “I thought you had all kinds of things to do.”

“I’m planning,” she replied without opening her eyes. “That’s the key to my efficiency. I thought you knew that.”

He tapped the note pad. “Is that so? You don’t seem to have gotten-”

“Shuddup and gimme a real kiss.” She lifted her arms, opened her eyes wide, and puckered up extravagantly.

“I bet this is what it’s like to kiss a guppy,” he said, laughing, but of course he complied.

“That’s more like it.” She stretched and yawned. “So did you find what you were looking for?”

“I’m not sure.” He slid her feet over so that he could sit on the ottoman beside her.

“Still playing your cards close to the vest, eh? Oh, by the way, Vincenzo de Grazia called. The padrone himself.”

“Here? What did he want?”

“Achille’s going off to school in Switzerland, and there’s a party for him at the villa tonight. We’re invited. Very informal, so you don’t have to worry about fancy clothes.”

“Why are we invited?”

“Because of your kind assistance to the family in the matter of his father’s remains, is what he said. Because Phil probably asked him to invite us, is what I think. Want to go?”

He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know, it’s our last night… do you?”

“Actually, yes,” she said, surprising him. “I haven’t been inside the house, you know. I’d love to see it. And after all I’ve heard, I’d hate to miss the chance to see the de Grazias in action.”

“Well, they’re worth seeing, all right, but what happened to resting up for tomorrow?”

“Oh, come on, be a sport. How bad can it be?”

“Okay, let’s do it,” he said, doing his best to get into the spirit. “Might actually be fun. What time?”

“They’ll send a boat to the pier for us at five thirty.” She looked at her watch. “Which gives me just three hours before I have to start getting dressed. Yikes.” She swung her feet to the floor and stood up. “Have to get going. Lots to do.”

“Need any help from me?”

“No,” she said, as he knew she would. “No offense, but things go better if you just stay out of the way.”

“That’s fine,” he said, unoffended. “I have a phone call to make, and then I was thinking of going up to Gignese again.”

“Gignese? Do you have a burning desire to see the Umbrella Museum? Or don’t tell me you want to talk to what’s-his-name, Franco, again?”

“Not in this lifetime, thanks. But Caravale’s going to be up there with some of his people, going through Dr. Luzzatto’s records, and I’d like to stop by and look at some things myself. I already called him. He said okay, he’ll let them know to expect me if he’s not there himself.”

He stood up too, and they embraced contentedly, looking out across the lake at the red-roofed villages climbing the far hillsides. “And are you planning to tell me anytime soon why you want to go to Gignese and look at some things in Dr. Luzzatto’s office?” she asked after they slowly rocked back and forth for a while. “Or why it was so important to look at Domenico’s bones, for that matter?”

“Julie,” he said, “I’ve got this idea… well, it’s too crazy to even talk about at this point”

She nuzzled up beside him again. “Come on, what? You can trust me.”

“No, this is really crazy. Let me do some more checking first; think it through a little more before I talk about it.”

“Oh, dear, our relationship is on the rocks for sure. You never hesitated to tell me your crazy ideas before.”

“I know, but this is probably the craziest one I ever had.”

She dug a knuckle into his ribs and laughed. “Now that,” she said, “would really take some doing.”

“Professor O’Malley?”

“Yes?” The voice on the other end of the line was guarded.

“This is Gideon Oliver, sir.”

“Oliver, for God’s sake, you make me feel a million years old when you do that. I hereby give you permission for the two hundred and sixty-seventh time to call me just plain ‘O’Malley,’ or even ‘Bill,’ if you can bring yourself to do it. You’re a big boy now, you’re as famous as I am. Well, almost.”

“Sorry, uh, Bill, will do.”

But he knew it wouldn’t last any more than it ever had before. William Tuskahoma O’Malley, M.D., Ph. D., was a towering figure in skeletal pathology and one of the very few academics who could still intimidate him. He had been one of Gideon’s professors at the University of Wisconsin and had served on his dissertation committee. His Non-traumatic Osteomyelitis of the Post-cranial Skeleton remained the undisputed giant of the field, even after thirty years in print. A gruff, melodramatic, bugle-voiced genius famously impatient with unpreparedness, inattention, fuzzy thinking, and most other human failings, he had terrified Gideon as a young graduate student.

Gideon had taken O’Malley’s courses at a time when, in an effort to make his dissertation deadline, his resources were stretched thin and he was starving for sleep. With most of his professors, he was able to get away with the occasional discreet catnap in class. Not with the eagle-eyed O’Malley, however, who would pounce before he knew himself that he was drifting off. “Snap out of it, Oliver!” the bulky, bearded figure would bark at about eighty decibels, and Gideon would jerk awake. It happened so often that for a while his friends started referring to him as Snap-Out-of-It-Oliver.

Even now, the occasional back-to-school stress dreams that he had didn’t involve discovering he’d studied for the wrong test or being unable to find the right room in which to take an exam. Instead, he would dream that he was peacefully dozing, perhaps on a beach, perhaps in a hammock, and would suddenly hear O’Malley’s curt “Snap out of it, Oliver!” He would awaken (in his dream) to find himself in O’Malley’s paleopathology seminar. Totally unprepared, of course.

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.

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.