Good Blood

IN the evening, with the rain having slackened off, Gideon had a half-carafe of local Barolo at the outdoor cafe across the street from the hotel, then walked the two short blocks to the cobblestoned Piazza Cadorna, to the Ristorante Nazionale, where he, Julie, and Phil had been for dinner on their first night. He sat outside, on the lively piazza, at an umbrellaed table set among potted flowering plants and ordered what he’d had before: pizza quattro stagione, with artichokes, ham, olives, and mushrooms, each on its own quarter; a salad; and a limonata. As it had been the other time, the pizza was perfectly baked in a brick, wood-fired oven, the crust was thin and tender, with just the right dusting of ash on the bottom, and the vegetables were fragrant and al dente. But this time the meal seemed to lack zest. He was thinking about alien abductions. He was thinking of the conversations to come in the days following.

His old teacher, Abe Goldstein, had put it well, as he had put almost everything. “If these aliens would only keep all the people they abduct, the world would be a whole lot less crazy.”

BUT back at the Hotel Primavera, salvation awaited him. Angela, the kindly desk clerk who had taken a sympathetic interest in him because he was the only resident who was there alone, had a message for him. Colonel Caravale of the carabinieri would appreciate it if Gideon called him. He would be in his office until nine.

“You’re not in trouble?” she asked, handing him the message.

“Not as far as I know, Angela.”

“Because I know this Colonel Tullio Caravale, he can be a hard one. You want my advice? Better not try to bribe him.”

“I’ll remember that,” Gideon said.

HOW long, the colonel wanted to know, does it take for a dead body to become a skeleton?

Gideon took a sip of the Vecchia Romagna—he’d developed a taste for the flinty Italian cognac on an earlier trip—which he’d poured into a bathroom glass before sitting down to return Caravale’s call, and pondered. What was this about? Did there lurk the possibility—he hardly dared allow himself to hope—that there was something doing in this for him? A forensic case to get into? A possible escape, even if temporary, from Paula Ardlee-Arbogast, Garnoth-Thoth, and the cunning EBEs?

“That depends on a lot of things, Colonel,” he said. “First of all, the environment—whether the body was indoor or outdoors—”

“Outdoors.”

“Outdoors. Okay, that speeds decomposition up. Was it buried or was it on the surface?”

“Buried.”

“Buried. All right, that slows decomposition down. Clothed or unclothed?”

“That I don’t know.”

“What kind of soil is it in, what’s the weather, what—”

“It’s here, in the soil of Piedmont; a gravel bed. The temperature’s moderate, the rainfall’s—I don’t know— light, I guess.” He waited.

“Look, Colonel,” Gideon said, getting a little impatient, “how about just telling me exactly what it is you need to know?”

“Could it turn into a skeleton in one week?”

“Highly doubtful.”

Just about flat-out impossible, but he’d learned not to commit himself, especially on the basis of someone else’s description of skeletal remains. Skeletonization was tricky business, depending on a lot of variables, many of which were imperfectly understood. Once he’d exhumed a Civil War burial, and the corpse had looked (and smelled) as if it had died the week before. Another time he read a police report’s description of a defleshed shoulder girdle that had been fished out of Puget Sound and recklessly said (this was before he’d learned not to commit himself) that it had been in the water a week to ten days. The body had gone in the night before.

“What about eight days?” Caravale asked.

Gideon’s interest quickened. He did a quick calculation. “Eight days, did you say?” Let me take a wild guess here. “Colonel, do you think you might have found the de Grazia boy, is that it?”

Caravale let loose a long, troubled sigh. “De Grazia paid the ransom yesterday. His son was supposed to be released right away. He hasn’t shown up yet. And now, this afternoon, two local workmen come upon some human bones buried in a shallow grave. So, yes, the thought that it just might be Achille de Grazia has crossed my mind.”

There was almost no chance that the skeletonized body could be that of Achille de Grazia, but bones were bones, and he could surely help. Caravale might not be the most amenable colleague in the world, but he was better than Paula Ardlee-Arbogast. “I doubt it very much, but would you like me to look at them? I’d be happy to.”

Caravale hesitated, reluctant to ask for more assistance. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from your travel group,” he said gruffly.

“That’s all right,” Gideon said. “I don’t mind at all. Are we talking about tomorrow? I could do it tomorrow.” Say yes.

“Tomorrow?” There was another pause, and then the colonel took the plunge. “Tomorrow morning would be excellent, Professor. Perhaps I could pick you up at seven? Or even at six, if you don’t mind getting up early. I put off the crime-scene search until daylight, so we sealed the site and left things as they are for the night, under guard, of course, but I’d like to get at it as early as possible.”

“Six is fine,” Gideon said. “Six is perfect.”

He hung up the phone and stood looking out the window, at the iron-stained stone bellower of the old church across Via Cavour, and at the lake, rose-colored in the day’s last light, and at the soft green mountains beyond. Another rich, slow sip of cognac slid warmly down.