Good Blood

Thirty minutes later he emerged. “Sorry about that, thought I ought to shower. I was getting a little grungy.”

They stared at him for a full ten seconds before Julie spoke. “Shower, and put on clean clothes, and shave off your beard, and—” Her eyes narrowed. “Did you give yourself a haircut?”

“I just trimmed it a little,” he said with one of his gawkier shrugs. “You know, to show some respect.” He squirmed under their continuing scrutiny. His face was pink. “So I cleaned up. What, is this a big deal? Gideon, come on, let’s go already.”

THE consiglio, for reasons Gideon couldn’t fathom, was held in a stuffy, windowless little room in the otherwise spacious and elegant villa. He had seen paintings by seventeenth- and eighteenth- century masters on the walls of the corridor outside—he recognized Titian, Rubens, Velazquez, or at least their schools. But this grim little room seemed to have been chosen for ugliness and discomfort. Surrounded by tiers of gloomy family portraits, some competently painted, mostly not, and hemmed in by the living members of the de Grazia clan, he sat on an amazingly uncomfortable, hard-backed wooden chair, feeling very much the stranger at an intimate family gathering. Lighting came from a single antique hanging lamp that had been converted to electricity and now bore four unpleasantly glaring, candle-shaped bulbs. The seats, some of them chairs, some heavy chests, but all of them looking every bit as uncomfortable as his, had been arranged along all four walls, leaving a five-foot square of scarred, planked wooden flooring open in the center.

Including Gideon, there were eleven people in the room, necessarily shoulder to shoulder. On his immediate right was Phil, and on the far side of Phil a slender, soft-spoken woman whose name Gideon hadn’t caught when Vincenzo had made a round of pro forma introductions. Phil had briefed him earlier on who would probably be there, but if she’d been mentioned, Gideon didn’t remember it.

Directly across from him sat old Cosimo de Grazia in his old-fashioned suit and starched white shirt, buttoned to the top but without a tie this time. Eyes closed, he sat lost in thought or in dreams, with his veined, mottled hands clasped on the silver lion’s-paw-and-tea-bud knob of his cane, his goateed chin resting on his knuckles, and Bacco asleep and snoring between his feet. In the chair beside him was a rumpled, portly, bespectacled man of Cosimo’s age who sat with an unlit, half-smoked cigar clenched between his teeth. This, according to Vincenzo, was Dr. Gianluigi Luzzatto, who had been Domenico de Grazia’s physician and closest friend and was still Cosimo’s doctor, though otherwise retired from practice. He had been making one of his twice-weekly visits to Cosimo, who had been refusing for two decades to see a younger, more upto-date physician, and he had been invited to the consiglio by his patient out of respect for his longtime relationship with the de Grazias. It wasn’t strictly by the book, but Vincenzo had always allowed Cosimo some extra latitude in matters of family protocol. Like Cosimo, Dr. Luzzatto wore a dark, old-fashioned suit, including a tie and even a tobacco-ash- spattered vest. Unlike Cosimo, he somehow managed to make them look as if he’d been sleeping—and eating—in them for two days.

Phil had looked at him, pointed his finger, and blurted: “You’re Dr. Luzzatto! I remember you!”

“I’m flattered.”

“When I was a little kid,” Phil said, “I mean really little...you were carrying me through a...was it a hospital corridor? There were benches, white walls....”

Luzzatto nodded, pleased. “You’re right. It was in Milan. The Gaetano Pini Institute. You were not even five. A long time to remember an operation.”

“I don’t remember any operation, I just remember being carried. In your arms. I was crying...you thought I was scared, but I was embarrassed. I was in my underwear, and there were all these women there...”

“It was insensitive of me,” Luzzatto said, smiling and placing a hand over his heart. “I humbly apologize.”

Along the same wall as Luzzatto, seated together on a chest and looking like a male-female version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, were Phil’s aunt, Bella Barbero, and her husband, Basilio. Then again, she might have been his cousin; Phil hadn’t been sure. If Gideon remembered correctly, the affable, rambling Basilio was an officer in Vincenzo’s construction firm.

The entrance to the room was on the wall to Gideon’s right, a doorless opening on either side of which were the only two chairs with armrests, a matched set of high-backed, thronelike affairs with carved Gothic backrests. In one sat Vincenzo, in the other, Caravale, like coreigning monarchs waiting for their court to get itself settled.

The two remaining people, the lean, vinegary, malcontented-looking Dante Galasso and the striking but equally vinegary Francesca de Grazia Galasso, sat along the remaining wall, next to each other, but as far apart as space would allow. Dante, according to Phil, had been an ardent and articulate Marxist professor in Bologna years before, but somewhere along the line he had stopped calling himself a Communist and seamlessly turned himself into a “postmodernist,” apparently considering it more in step with the times. His formidable wife Francesca—Vincenzo’s sister—was both the CFO of Aurora Costruzioni and the de facto mistress of the de Grazia estate, someone, Phil had warned darkly, of whom it was a good idea not to get on the wrong side.

Gideon had been hoping to get a look at Achille de Grazia, but the boy preferred to stay in his room. Phil had gone up to see him and reported that he seemed to be all right, but was markedly unassertive and subdued. “I doubt if it’ll last,” Phil had said, “but we can always hope.”

“Well, then, it looks as if we’re all here,” Basilio Barbero observed when the settling process had gone on too long for him. “Ready to start, eh? When I hold a conference at work, I make it a rule to begin promptly on schedule. Otherwise, you see, those who come late are rewarded by having the meeting start the moment they arrive, while those who came early are punished by having to wait for the latecomers. Thus, one sets in motion—”

“Yes, yes, let’s begin,” Vincenzo said. “Colonel?”

Caravale opened in formal fashion. “At 12:45 p.m. this afternoon, skeletal remains found buried on land owned by the Aurora Construction Company on Mount Zeda, not far from the construction site of the new golf and country club, were positively identified as those of Count Domenico de Grazia.”

Astonishment. Consternation. Except for Vincenzo, who’d been briefed earlier, they had thought the council had been called to talk about the kidnapping.

“Mount Zeda?” Bella Barbero said when the immediate hubbub had died down. “What are you talking about? That’s impossible. He went sailing that morning. We all know that. His boat was found across the lake, at Germignaga.” She made it sound as if she was accusing Caravale of manufacturing the facts.

“It was Valtravaglia,” Francesca Galasso corrected. “Not Germignaga.”

“I don’t see—”