preferences, and without being asked he showed them to a wooden table more or less hidden in a niche beside an arched entryway separating the two small rooms that made up the place. The place smelled of oregano and baking bread. It was like sitting in somebody’s country kitchen.
As Gideon had surmised, Caravale took his eating seriously. After a brief but thorough scan of the menu, he rattled off an order for artichoke pie appetizer, risotto Milanese, veal pizzaiola, parsleyed potatoes, and sauteed fennel, with cheese, grapes, and coffee to follow. Mineral water to drink. This was a stupendous initial order (for a native) in a country in which doggie bags do not exist because one’s stomach is supposed to plan ahead, and people generally choose one course at a time, not an entire meal that they might not be able to finish. The restaurant owner was not surprised, however. Without writing it down, he grunted, then turned to Gideon and said, translating as he went: “The
Gideon went along with that, ordering a bowl of minestrone and some bread and mineral water to accompany it. Coffee afterward, but no dessert.
“That’s all you want?” Caravale seemed disappointed. “Your meal is courtesy of the Carabinieri di Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta. That doesn’t happen every day. You should make the most of it.”
“I didn’t realize that, but really, that’s all I want. And thank you.”
“A small expression of our gratitude.” He rubbed his hands together and looked over his shoulder. “So, let’s go and see what awaits on the antipasto table.”
With a platter of olives, sauteed peppers, salami, stuffed zucchini, and marinated shrimp and mussels between them, Gideon picked at a slice or two of salami, then raised something that had been at the back of his mind for a while.
“Tullio, I had a nasty thought. What you said before, about who could have attacked me, who could even have known that you’d found the bones...”
“Ahh,” said Caravale with an evil, knowing grin. So he’d had the same nasty thought.
“Assuming you or your men haven’t been broadcasting it around,” Gideon went on, “the only people who’d know would be—”
“The de Grazias, that’s right. We’re back to them. And that doctor, Luzzatto. Or maybe other people they might have told. But that’s easy to check. For the time being, it looks as if we’re talking about the nine fine people that were in that room with us yesterday.”
“Eight people. I think you can pretty safely exclude Phil Boyajian.”
Caravale said nothing, but only tipped his head to one side and waggled his hand, palm down. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Fair enough, Gideon thought. From the police point of view, at this stage of the game no one was to be excluded, certainly not on the testimony of an old friend.
Gideon did a little more pondering. “If it is one of those people—”
“One or more of those people.”
“—then that pretty much has to mean that the same person—”
“Or people.”
“—was behind Domenico’s murder ten years ago, or at least involved in it in some way. Right? Why else try to hide anything about the bones?”
Caravale’s answer was a head-tilted, open-handed shoulder shrug that as much as said that the conclusion was self-evident; the facts spoke for themselves.
“His own family,” Gideon said.
“Or Luzzatto. One of the nine people in that room,” he said again.
Gideon shook his head. “The guy that choked me—he wasn’t in that room, I can tell you that much. Believe me, I would have remembered those arms.”
“A hired hand.”
They paused while the owner-waiter set down Gideon’s soup and Caravale’s wedge of artichoke pie.
“Hired hands kidnapping Achille last week, a hired hand trying to stop me from examining the bones of his murdered grandfather today,” Gideon said. “Isn’t that a lot of hired hands? You can’t have that many criminals for hire wandering around Stresa. Doesn’t it make you wonder at least a little if the two things might be related?”
“Wandering around Stresa, no. But not so many kilometers away, wandering around Milan, yes. Look, Gideon, the kidnapping, the murder, they happened ten years apart.”
“To the same family.”
“Yes, the same family. So? What are you suggesting, that one of the de Grazias not only murdered Domenico, but kidnapped Achille too? We had a liquor store robbed the day before yesterday in Stresa. Do you think that might have been the de Grazia gang as well?”
“No, of course that’s not what I’m suggesting—well, I don’t know, maybe I am. All I’m saying is that the two things might possibly be connected one way or another. I had an old professor who used to talk about what he called the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. I don’t know how that would translate into Italian, but what he was saying was that when too many seemingly unrelated incidents occur to the same set of people in the same —”
“I understand what he was saying, but what do you say we just deal with the facts that we have instead of coming up with complicated theories? We have a decade-old murder of an old man. We have a week-old kidnapping of a boy. Two separate cases, ten years apart. Believe me, we have enough resources to deal with them both on their own merits. And as things stand, I don’t see a good reason for assuming they’re part of anything bigger.”
Gideon held up his hands in defeat. Caravale had just delivered a pretty good precis of Gideon’s standard classroom presentation on Occam’s razor, the Law of Parsimony: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond
