Good Blood

The building was carabinieri headquarters, and for Caravale, that had been that. Dreams of being an actor, a pilot, an international soccer star, were gone from his mind. Despite his father’s often- voiced reservations about the police, he knew from that time on exactly what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to do it.

And here he was.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll take care of telling de Grazia. I’ll go see him.”

“Now?”

“Give me a chance to look at the scene and see what’s what first. Then I’ll talk to him. His company’s up in Ghiffa, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Aurora Construction, but these days he’ll be at his field office in Intra. It’s on Corso Mameli, a block north of the old port, right across—”

“I know where it is. You’ll release no information before I see him?”

“No, no, not until you tell me. Do you... did you want me to accompany you?”

“That’s not necessary. It will be simpler if I do it myself.”

“Well... all right, then, if you’re sure that’s best ...?”

Even over the telephone, his relief was palpable.

“Definitely,” said Caravale.

INTRA, a quick ten kilometers north of Stresa, was the western shore’s commercial and small-industry center. Anywhere else it would have been commonplace, but along this stretch of Lake Maggiore it stood out: a homely, workaday few blocks in the midst of the dreamlike promenades, elegant villas, and grand hotels that otherwise lined the lakeshore. Caravale felt at home here. He’d lived in nearby Caprezzo, one of the backward little villages that dotted the flanks of Mount Zeda, until he was fourteen, and he’d worked in Intra three afternoons a week from the time he was twelve.

In those days, there had been a withered, green-toothed ancient named Verrucchio who had owned a dry- cleaning shop (now a hardware store) only a block away from what was now de Grazia’s field office (then a pharmacy). As a youngster, Caravale had spent a lot of after-school hours behind the counter, waiting on customers and straightening out accounts, while old Verrucchio, who could neither read nor write, sweated buckets in back and breathed in the corrosive fumes that would do him in a few years later.

On the day after Caravale’s fourteenth birthday, his father, who had lived in America for five years after he got out of the Italian Army, had landed a job teaching English in Cremona and had taken the family with him. It was in Cremona a few months later that young Tullio heard about Verrucchio’s death. He was shocked to learn that the shrunken old man had been only forty-seven.

The Aurora Construction Company had been a far smaller enterprise back then. The old man, Domenico de Grazia, had still been alive, and under his patriarchy the de Grazias did not willingly stoop to commerce. They had still owned untold hectares of land on the eastern shore then, and they lived like the titled aristocrats they’d been since the fifteenth century. A significant part of their income had come from timber and mining leases, but when those had begun dwindling away about twenty years ago, Domenico, looking to the future, had sold off much of the de Grazia land and put the money into several local businesses, with (so Caravale had heard) generally unfortunate results. But among them had been Aurora Costruzioni, a small construction contractor in Ghiffa that specialized in concrete work. With the help of his son, the young Vincenzo, who had been sent off to the University of Pisa and the London School of Economics for degrees in architectural design and business management, he had built Aurora into a profitable operation, with projects throughout the region.

But it had been the son, Vincenzo, who had turned it into what it was today. Gradually taking over as the old man had aged, and infusing the company with the money from continuing land sell-offs and with his own intelligence and energy, the young Vincenzo had transformed it into one of northern Italy’s largest general contracting companies. After Domenico had died, Vincenzo had taken the company public and had himself installed as CEO and chairman of the board of directors. From there, things had really taken off. Aurora now had projects throughout Piedmont and Lombardy, and even, if the stories were true, consulting contracts as far away as Ireland and Gibraltar, building everything from plastic-recycling facilities to high-rise condominiums. With its fleet of heavy equipment, and its ninety permanent employees and more than two hundred seasonal and temporary workers, Aurora Costruzioni was now Ghiffa’s largest employer by a factor of ten, making Vincenzo one of the area’s most influential businessmen, which was the way he liked it. Unlike his aloof and courtly father, Vincenzo loved to be center stage. He was a mover and a shaker, a natural entrepreneur who relished the power plays and wheeler- dealer mentality of land acquisition and development.

“Count de Grazia,” everyone had called old Domenico as he limped about Stresa or Ghiffa. It had made Caravale’s father, a socialist and a fiery antimonarchist, livid, but to young Tullio the genteel Domenico de Grazia had been the embodiment of what a storybook count should be: silver-haired and handsome, properly aloof, yes, but scrupulously courteous to all, right down to the street urchins.

Since that time, Caravale had come around to agreeing in large part with his father about the self-induced delusions of the post-war Italian “aristocracy,” but never in regard to Domenico de Grazia. The man had been a true, bred-in-the-bone patrician, the last of his kind. Or so it seemed in memory.

No one referred to Vincenzo as “Count” nowadays, but his noble lineage still made some people weak in the knees, and his behind-the-scenes involvement in regional politics (useful in getting building permits and variances) had made him more widely influential than his father had ever been. None of that had any effect on Caravale. Less than nothing. To him, Vincenzo de Grazia was just another human being like him, only richer, and not one he was particularly fond of at that. His relentless terracing of the foothills of Caravale’s beloved Mount Zeda into “Residenze This” and “Ville That” had chewed at him for years. Who needed all those developments? Who could afford them? Not the people who lived and worked here, that was for sure.

Beyond that, these new walled, gated communities of de Grazia’s represented something else, something essentially un-Italian to his way of thinking. When Caravale had been growing up, the rich and the poor had lived together. People didn’t believe it now anymore, but it was true. Oh, there were great villas and humble cottages, but they’d existed side by side on the same streets and alleys, as they had for centuries, sharing the same neighborhood concerns. In Caprezzo, the best drinking water had come from a centuries-old stone fountain in the courtyard of the village’s wealthiest landowner, and every afternoon, as they had since Caravale’s grandmother had been a girl, and probably long before, the housewives and peasant women would come to fill their jugs and bottles, and to gossip, on essentially equal terms, with the family of the padrone. Or if not on equal terms, then at least one could say they understood and appreciated one another. How was that going to happen when all the rich had walled themselves off behind the locked gates of these new “California-style”