Good Blood

“Yes, sure, but...” He shook his head. “Help me out here. I’m still a little slow.”

At five forty-five in the morning, Caravale explained, the only cafe in Stresa that was open was old Crossetti’s stand next to the ferry building, which started serving at five o’clock for the benefit of the ferry workers.

“Where I got my coffee,” Gideon said.

“Right. And that’s where Big Paolo here”—he tapped the photo again—“got his ham-and-cheese panino and his caffe corretto half an hour before that. We described the order to old Crossetti, and old Crossetti promptly described the buyer to us. There’d been only two orders like that so far—five fifteen is a little early for panini—and the other person was an old lady with a goiter—Crossetti has a keen eye for his customers. And when we showed him the photographs I just showed you, he picked out Big Paolo without hesitation.”

“Big Paolo. You even know his name.”

“Paolo Tossignano. Also known as Dumb Paolo, but not to his face. Another thug-for-rent from Milan. As I thought,” he reminded Gideon.

“Tullio, you don’t waste any time, do you?” Gideon shook his head in genuine admiration. “Two hours after he came out of the ground, you had Domenico identified. And now you figure out who this guy is almost as fast— without any eyewitnesses. No wonder you got to be a colonel.”

Caravale’s pouty, pock-marked face gleamed with pleasure. “You haven’t heard the most interesting part. We didn’t just happen to have Paolo’s picture handy, you know. Would you like to know why we had it?”

“That would be nice,” Gideon said.

“Because,” Caravale said, enjoying himself, “he’d just been identified as taking part in another recent crime. You see, there was one reliable witness to Achille’s kidnapping—a grocer, Muccio. He got a good look at the one kidnapper without a mask, and a few days ago he was able to identify him as—”

“Dumb Paolo.”

“Correct, the very same.”

“But that would mean... that would mean...” Maybe he was groggy. He was having a hard time sorting out the implications. “What would it mean?”

“It would mean,” Caravale said, “that there just might be something to this theory of interconnected whatever- itis after all.”

“Monkey business,” Gideon said.

“Whatever. But the one thing we can say for sure is that Big, Dumb Paolo Tossignano not only tried to twist your head off, but was also one of Achille’s kidnappers.”

“So,” said Gideon, thinking out loud to clarify his thoughts, “that leaves us with the de Grazias again. We know that they were the only ones who knew where the bones were and that I was working on them, so it had to be one of them that sicced him on me. And unless he got himself hired to do the kidnapping by somebody completely different, somebody unconnected to the first person—which would put a hell of a strain on the interconnected monkey business theory—it must have been the same person—a de Grazia—who hired him for both things. Is that the idea?”

“That is the idea.”

Gideon shook his head. “Whew. So one of them is hooked up in both Domenico’s murder and Achille’s kidnapping?”

“It looks that way.”

“But it seems so...I don’t know, I guess I can imagine one of them murdering the old man for his money or something, but the idea that one of his own family had Achille kidnapped? That’s too...too...”

“It might be too-too,” Caravale said a little impatiently, “but I can tell you on good authority that it happens. Now would you like to hear something really interesting?”

“You mean it gets more interesting? I don’t know if I can stand it.”

“Remember Luzzatto?”

“The doctor—the one who was going on about what Domenico had on his mind before he was killed. Have you talked to him?”

“He’s dead.”

“Good God, that can’t be. He was just—”

“I know, I know. He was alive yesterday, how can he be dead today? Well, so were you, almost. That’s the way it works. First you’re alive, then you’re dead. He went off the road on his Vespa, going up to where he lives in Gignese.”

“Luzzatto drove a motorcycle? The guy must have been eighty.”

“In America that might be strange. Here, a lot of old people do it. A Vespa is not exactly a Harley, you know.”

“And you think it was—you don’t think it was an accident?”

“The timing’s a little suspicious, wouldn’t you say? What was that theory again? I’m starting to really like it.”

“I don’t know, Tullio. An eighty-year-old man riding a motorcycle on a mountain road, you have to expect —”

“An eighty-year-old man who’s been driving a Vespa since before either of us was born, and he’s never been killed before. He certainly picked an inconvenient time for it. Inconvenient for us, quite convenient, I’d say, for someone else who had something he didn’t want to come out.”