“Right. And they were going through his records and talking to people, looking for any kind of lead, and the name ‘Franco Ungaretti’ came up as a recent patient of Luzzatto’s, and since they’d been out at the Isola de Grazia doing interviews, they knew who Phil was, and they asked this Franco if he was related to those Ungarettis, and he is.” Gideon came and sat on an ottoman beside her, his elbows on his thighs. “He’s Phil’s father.” He tapped a notepad on his knee. “I have his address and phone number.”
“That’s fascinating. What’s he like, do you know? Does he want to see his son?”
“I have no idea if he wants to see Phil, but the guy who talked to him wasn’t too impressed. He’s a familiar figure with the local police up there—scuffles, public drunkenness, bar fights, that kind of thing. In and out of jail, but never for anything terribly serious. The reason he’d been to Luzzatto was to get a cut cheek patched up. Somebody’d taken a chunk out of it with a broken wine bottle.”
“Ick,” she said.
“He lives with a woman—Caravale’s thinks she’s his common-law wife—who everybody says fried her brains with drugs years ago. Still hires out to do housework when she can find somebody who doesn’t know her reputation, which isn’t too often.”
“Whew, not exactly Ozzie and Harriet. What does his father do? Does he have a job?”
“He’s a part-time night watchman at the Umbrella Museum up there.”
“At the what?”
“Il Museo dell’Ombrello e del Parasole. Caravale says it’s Gignese’s number-one tourist attraction. Well, its only tourist attraction.”
She couldn’t help laughing. “An umbrella museum. Only in Italy. Okay, go ahead, I’m all ears.”
“There isn’t any more. That’s it.”
“About his father, I mean.”
“That’s all.”
She shook her head, perplexed. “That’s all extremely interesting, but why is Caravale calling you about it?”
“He didn’t know what to do with the information. I mean, he talked to Phil the other day, and he knows the way he feels about his father—”
“Not too warmly. Let’s see,” she said, ticking off the items on her fingers, “there was ‘creep,’ ‘lousy,’ ‘no good’...”
“Exactly. So he wasn’t sure whether he even ought to mention it to him, and he figured that since I was an old friend, he’d leave it up to me.”
“And will you? Mention it to him?”
“What do you think? Should I? I don’t want to upset the guy for no reason, but—”
“I think he has a right to know. He can decide for himself if he wants to see him. It’s his father, Gideon. You can’t keep something like that to yourself.”
He nodded. “I guess that’s what I think too,” he said, but without much certainty. “I’ll call him now.”
PHIL was adamant about wanting nothing to do with Franco Ungaretti. “That sonofabitch? He abandoned us,” he yelled bitterly into the phone. “He never came to see us again, he never wrote, he never told us where he was. And she really loved him, you know? But he just took off, ‘See ya around sometime.’ I don’t have a single happy memory of him, not one. He didn’t give a damn about me, why would I give a damn about him? Screw him.”
They had been happy to let it go at that, but the next morning he showed up in the Primavera’s breakfast room as they were finishing their coffee and plopped down on a chair at their table.
“Okay, you win,” he said, “I’ll go and talk to him. But only on one condition.”
“What do you mean, we win?” Julie asked. “I don’t recall that we were pressing you.”
“No, but if I act as if I’ve gotten pushed into it, then that lets me not admit to myself that I’m kind of curious to see him. See? It’s my technique for dealing with cognitive dissonance. Does that make any sense?”
“With you, it does,” Gideon said. “So what’s the condition?”
The waiter, seeing Phil, brought another caffe latte setup: pitchers of milk and coffee, and a giant cup.
Phil poured the milk and cream in at the same time, Italian style. “The condition is,” he said to Gideon, “you gotta come with me.”
“Me?” a surprised Gideon exclaimed. “No, thanks, leave me out of this. What do I have to do with it?”
“Nothing, I just...” His skinny shoulders peaked up toward his ears. “I don’t know, I just feel like I need some moral support. This is kind of a weird thing for me, you know?”
“Phil, I’d like to help out, but sitting in on something as...as personal as that...I’d feel...well...”
“Oh, do it,” Julie told him. “I’d do it in a flash if I knew enough Italian to be any help.”
“Thank you, Julie,” Phil said warmly. “You don’t know how good it makes me feel to know that I have one real friend anyway, someone to stick by me when I need support. But never mind, I guess I can get along without seeing my poor, old, long-estranged old father, who I haven’t set eyes on in—”
“Okay, okay,” Gideon said. “I’ll go with you. But I’m not getting involved. I’m just there for—”
“Moral support, right. I really appreciate this, Gideon.”
“You owe me, pal. I hate this stuff. Well, you better call him and set something up then. We only have a couple of days before we leave.”
“I already did, last night. I used the number you gave me. Guess what, it’s a bar. He doesn’t have a telephone,
