Well into her forties now, and more formidable than ever, she had been a textbook example of the adoring student who fulfilled her dreams by marrying the professor she idolized, only to find that his brilliant and profound observations tended to be less dazzling after she’d heard them a few dozen times. It also hadn’t taken her long to figure out—correctly, in Phil’s opinion—that she was smarter than he was. For many years now she had been paying little attention to anything he said, and on the few occasions she did, she was equally likely to be bored or irritated.
Over those years she had turned from the rebel against her own class that Dante had briefly made her, into as much a defender of the ancienne noblesse as Cosimo was, but of a very different sort. Caustic and exacting, she was the terror of the household staff, more than once reducing a new maid or young assistant gardener to tears. Not long before, Clemente and Genoveffa Candeloro, the married couple who had served as major domo and housekeeper since Domenico’s day, had thrown an unprecedented joint tantrum and walked out. It seemed that Francesca, during one of her white-glove tours of inspection, had shut one too many French windows and said, one too many times: “If dirt does not get in, dirt does not have to be got out.” It had taken the intervention of Vincenzo to get them to return, and relations were still on the dicey side.
Long ago, when Francesca had first started talking back to Dante, he had reacted with astonishment and indignation, neither of which had had any lasting effect on her. Now she no longer argued, but she no longer listened either, and when she casually cut him off or publicly ignored him, he still flared up once in a while, but generally did nothing worse than mutter back at her and eventually shut up. What their life might be like in private nobody knew and nobody wanted to guess.
As it was, and probably very much for the better, they spent little time together. The highly intelligent Francesca, who had gotten her accounting degree at Bologna despite the distractions provided by Dante, was Aurora’s chief financial officer and Vincenzo’s trusted second-incommand. In effect, it was Francesca who ran the company day-to-day, while Vincenzo was jetting around making deals or getting his clothes filthy at the building sites—an arrangement they both preferred. These duties kept her away from the villa a good forty, and sometimes fifty, hours a week (to the great relief of the household staff). Dante, on the other hand, stuck close to home, cranking out fiery manifestos for various left-wing or postmodernist antiestablishment periodicals, unbothered by the paradox of living high off the hog, in the bosom of a patrician family, while doing it.
Around the corner of the room from them, seated side-by-side, shoulders touching, like a pair of oversized nuthatches, on a heavy wooden dowry chest from the fifteenth century, were two people who were, in appearance, almost the exact opposites of the Galassos: a plump, pink-cheeked couple who were invariably protective of each other. These were the Barberos, Bella and Basilio. Bella was the daughter, by a previous marriage, of Domenico’s wife, which made her Vincenzo’s half-sister, which, Phil supposed, made her his own... what, stepaunt? Second cousin, once removed? He’d have to ask Gideon.
Or maybe not. He’d gotten along until now without knowing, after all.
As Domenico’s stepdaughter, Bella had grown up on the island, among the de Grazias, and had married Basilio when they were both twenty-four. That had been thirty-five years ago, and if they’d ever said a cross word to each other since, nobody could remember having heard it. Not that Bella had any shortage of cross words when it came to other people. Hypersensitive and short-fused, she had chafed most of her life under the humiliation of depending on the largesse of her stepfamily. Marriage to Basilio had come as a tremendous release, and she’d wasted no time in escaping to Milan with him. However, her husband, an ineffectual, jovial man with a diploma in human resources, had proven unequal to the task of supporting her in the style to which she’d become accustomed. After a few years of relative deprivation in Milan, she had turned for help to her stepfather.
Not unexpectedly, Domenico had come through. Following his father’s instructions, Vincenzo had created a make-work job with a nice title for him at Aurora: employee salary and benefits administrator. With the appointment to this position, the Barberos had come back to the villa to live. It had been intended as a temporary measure until they found someplace nearby, but somehow it had settled into permanence.
Later, when Vincenzo had taken over the company as CEO and chairman of the board of directors, he had given the somewhat underemployed Basilio another essentially meaningless responsibility as chairman of the newly created policy advisory committee. In the decade since then, Basilio, being Basilio, had voted with Vincenzo 434 out of 435 times, the one exception being in 1996 when Basilio stood up for his principles and voted, against Vincenzo’s openly expressed wishes, for installing a candy machine in the plant. There had been no similar revolt since.
While Domenico had been alive, it hadn’t been so bad for Bella at the villa. Although not a de Grazia, she was, after all, the daughter of the
Basilio Barbero was very different from his wife, a nervous, always-jolly, accommodating man with thinning reddish hair and a drinker’s veiny nose and cheeks. Left to his own devices, he would take whatever hand Fate dealt him without complaint. Unlike Bella, he was constitutionally averse to conflict, so that while Bella had been taking malicious pleasure at the exchange between Dante and Francesca, her husband had been getting increasingly uncomfortable.
“I can’t help wondering,” he piped up as Dante arranged his all-but-lipless mouth into the most satisfactory position for a cutting retort to his wife, “what those people”—he meant the kidnappers—“have to say. And I certainly hope young Achille is all right. I know we’re all terribly worried about him.”
“Oh, are we really?” Dante said mockingly. “Tell me, would it be violating some primeval law of the de Grazia canon to be honest for once? Is there anyone here who really cares, one way or the other, what happens to that know-it-all brat?”
“I—” Cosimo began indignantly.
“Except, of course, for our venerable patriarch over there,” Dante allowed, with a half-bow in his direction.
“Come now, Dante, I know you don’t mean what you said,” Basilio replied with a chuckle. “After all, who among us did not become a know-it-all at sixteen?”
“I did not.”
“That’s true enough,” Francesca muttered into her cup of espresso. “Dante knew everything there was to know from the day he was born.”
Her husband folded his arms and turned away in his chair to make it clear that a direct reply was beneath him.
