Good Blood

“Charming,” he said.

“I care about Achille,” Bella Barbero blurted, as if she’d been holding herself back only with difficulty. “I feel very deeply for him.”

The others looked at her with skepticism—including Phil, who was aware that the family’s antipathy toward Achille, with the sole exception of old Cosimo, was universal and well deserved. Kidnapped or not, there was no denying that Achille was, and always had been, a pill: demanding and disrespectful as a child; arrogant, contemptuous, and self-centered as a teenager. To his credit, Vincenzo, proud of his new son, had really tried with the boy at first, but fatherhood did not come naturally to him, and in any case, nothing, neither tolerance, nor severity, seemed to make a lasting difference. Achille was simply Achille. And when Vincenzo’s wife, Achille’s mother, had died when the boy was eleven, Vincenzo had thrown up his hands altogether. He had turned Achille’s upbringing over to the busy Francesca, who had eventually thrown up her hands in turn and more or less given him over into Genoveffa’s care.

Vincenzo still tried sometimes with him for the sake of familial continuity, but it was apparent to all that their relationship had become strained and distant, and he, like the others, had been openly relieved as Achille grew older and began to spend more and more time off the island. Only Cosimo still saw the possibility (increasingly remote, although he wouldn’t admit it) of the noble, truly patrician genes of the boy’s grandfather someday asserting themselves in him.

“Very deeply,” Bella repeated through her teeth, while her considerable bosom swelled. She had a somewhat pneumatic appearance to begin with, and when she was angry, she gave the remarkable impression of physically expanding. “There are good reasons for his behaving as he does. I, too, was an unloved child in this house,” she said darkly. “I understand what he’s had to go through.”

“Oh?” said Francesca. “And how were you mistreated? Tell us, were you chained up in the cellar? Were you denied food?”

“Not all mistreatment need be physical,” Bella said, her fingers at the strand of pearls on her throat.

“That’s so,” said her husband. “Indeed, that’s so. Many, many cases—”

“You’re a de Grazia, Francesca,” Bella went on without pause. “I don’t expect you to comprehend. You think that because I happen not to have your noble and wondrous name, I should sit without complaint, keep my mouth closed, and be grateful for every crumb, every kind word that’s thrown to me.”

Phil understood her point. To Francesca, as it had been to Domenico and as it still was to Cosimo and Vincenzo, blood counted above everything, and the blood that counted above all other blood, no matter how ancient or ennobled, was that which ran in the veins of the de Grazias. By that token, the only members of the consiglio whose opinions really mattered, who were there by virtue of an unassailable hereditary right, were Vincenzo himself, Cosimo, and Francesca. And Phil, too, although to a lesser degree. Although he’d been born an Ungaretti, he was nevertheless the grandson of Cosimo and great-nephew of Domenico. The blood of the de Grazias flowed in his veins. But the others—Dante, Bella, Basilio—were members of the de Grazia family merely through marriage, the most technical of loopholes.

“Oh, I understand, all right,” Francesca shot back. “I understand you hated it here so much you didn’t leave until you were twenty. And you ran back soon enough with your tail between your legs; you and your husband both.”

Bella’s eyes bulged. Although it seemed impossible, the great bosom distended even more. “If you think for one minute—”

“You know what? I believe I’ll stand up for a while,” Basilio announced out of the blue.

The others watched him stand up.

“There, that feels better,” he said, waggling his arms. “It gets the circulation going. Dr. Luzzatto says we should all stand up and move our limbs at least once an hour. At work, I make sure that my secretary lets me know whenever I’ve been sitting at my desk for more than an hour. It’s very easy to lose track of time when one is constantly busy.

Of course, if I’m in a conference that can’t be interrupted, well, then, it simply has to wait. Work comes first. But other than that, once an hour, Basilio Barbero is up and about. By example, I try to encourage our employees to do the same thing, but I’m not always successful. One of these days, I’m going to get a conditioning room put in, so that our office employees can use their breaks for healthy, enjoyable exercise. Personally, I’d be in favor of allowing everyone twenty minutes for exercise, over and above any other breaks. Well, not the construction workers, of course; they get all the exercise they need, that goes without saying. People think that such a policy would reduce work output, but in reality the opposite is true.”

Phil was beginning to remember what it was about the essentially harmless Basilio that got on his nerves. It wasn’t merely that he was too anxious to please, too quick to laugh at your jokes, too relentlessly cheery, too scatterbrained. Those were mild annoyances compared to the way he had of gabbling away like a chimp on amphetamines. Whenever he got nervous, or agitated, or anxious (all of which occurred frequently), his tongue would start flapping, and once he got started, it was impossible to shut him up.

Basilio took a breath—a quick one, not long enough to give Bella and Francesca a chance to start taking whacks at each other again. “Look at the clock, it’s fifteen minutes past eleven,” he rattled on. “Wasn’t he supposed to be here at eleven? I understand that the man is a carabinieri colonel with a good many responsibilities and you can’t expect him to be prompt down to the minute, but aren’t our responsibilities to be taken into consideration too? Ah, well, I suppose I might as well sit down again. Standing’s not going to make Colonel Caravale get here any sooner, is it? Still, you would think that if he knew he was going to be as late as this, he would have had the common courtesy to have us telephoned. But common courtesy is hardly as common as it used to be, is it? It’s all push and shove and go and run nowadays. People have forgotten—”

Phil shot out of his chair and ran for the pantry across the corridor, where the tea and coffee had been set up on a trestle table. “Jeez,” he said as opened the tap of the coffee urn to fill an espresso cup, but he was laughing as he said it. “What a—damn!”

“Oh, excuse me, signore!”

In turning away from the buffet he had collided with a thin, sallow, worn-looking woman with limp, mouse- brown hair and indistinct features unenhanced by makeup. He had juggled and caught the espresso cup before it hit the stone-tiled floor, but not before it splattered some of its contents over his T-shirt.

“I’m so sorry, signore. I wasn’t looking where I was going...” Her near-colorless eyebrows went up. “Oh, my God, it’s Fili, isn’t it? What are you doing here?”

He stared at her, open-mouthed. “Lea?”