Phil swallowed. “Who else knows about this?”
“I’m pretty sure Vincenzo knows. The snotty sister, Francesca, she knows. Oh, and the servant, what was her name—Genoveffa, if she’s still alive. She was right here
the whole time, snooping around and spying on us.”
“And...” Phil hesitated. “And Cosimo? Does he know?”
Franco puffed his lips dismissively. “Of course not. He wouldn’t believe it anyway.” He finished the brandy, lost his balance, and flopped back into his chair.
Phil looked as if he didn’t know what had hit him. “So I don’t even know who my mother is.” He murmured it in English, with an arid laugh.
“Listen, Phil,” Gideon said, “you better get some verification on this. This guy...”
“Why did you tell me all this, after all these years?” Phil asked, switching back to Italian. “Why did you bother coming to meet me at all? You’re right—I’m nothing to you, you’re nothing to me.”
“Why did I come?” He snickered and used his chin to point at the woman. “Because this one wanted me to, and I’m a nice guy, that’s why.”
Phil turned to her. “Why did you—” But she was off in cloud-cuckoo-land again, trailing a fingernail around the rim of her cup and tipping her head toward it as if she could make out a tune. “Why should she care?” he asked Franco.
“Why should she . . .?” Franco guffawed, a real laugh this time. “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you? This is your mother, idiot!” He shook her roughly by the shoulder. “Gia, look! It’s Filiberto! It’s your darling baby boy!”
She looked foggily up from her cup. Her eyes filled with tears. “My boy,” she said. Then, as an afterthought, she opened her arms to him.
Phil couldn’t have shied back any more violently if she’d come at him with a knife. “You’re my... Who’s my father, then?”
She let her arms fall to her sides. “Your father?” She looked at Franco as if for help, but he merely shrugged. He’d lost interest. He raised his arms and waved at the men watching from inside the cafe—a performer who’d given them a good show. Some of them waved back with jeers and mimed applause. As cafe entertainments in Gignese went, this one had obviously been a hit.
“Your father,” she said again, thinking hard. “I remember him. A very nice boy, so sweet. Pietro, I think his name was. Yes.” She knitted her eyebrows, put a nail-chewed finger to chapped lips, and pondered some more. “No, that’s not right, Pietro was the one with the two sisters, remember? Pasquale? No, Pasquale had the warts, ugh. Guglielmo? Mm, no...”
“CAN you believe that?” Phil said as Gideon started up the car. “Can...you... believe that? I am really ticked off.”
“I’m not surprised,” Gideon said, edging out into the light traffic on Via Margherita. “That was quite a story. If it’s true.”
“You don’t think it is? Why would he make up something like that?”
“I’m not saying he made it up. But he didn’t strike me as the most reliable informant in the world either. I’d check it out with Vincenzo if I were you.”
“No way. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”
“Francesca, then.”
“Francesca,” Phil mused. “I think I’m beginning to see why she always treated me like dirt—I mean, even more than she treats other people like dirt. I always thought it was because I was the runt of the litter, and even as a kid I was gimpy.”
“Phil, you’re not—”
“And besides that, I was just a lousy Ungaretti, not a de Grazia. Now I see it was way worse than that. In her eyes, I’m barely human. No, forget it, I’m not talking to Francesca about it either.”
“Well, then, with the servant—Genoveffa, was it? You can’t just take Franco’s word for it.” But the truth was that as the time passed, Gideon found himself more and more taking Franco’s word for it. Why would he have concocted such a wild story? Was he even capable of inventing it? And what about the woman? That addled, tearstained “My boy.” Surely that hadn’t been an act.
“Genoveffa,” Phil said. “Yeah, maybe Genoveffa.”
He didn’t say it with any conviction, but Gideon didn’t press, and for a few minutes Phil stared stonily ahead with his arms folded. Then, as they picked up the winding road down the mountain, he raised his fists and let out a tooth-rattling growl. “GHAAARGHH! I am really ticked off!”
“Phil, I believe you. Truly.”
“Here’s this guy,” Phil railed, “this so-called father I despised my whole life. I mean I’ve loathed him for, like, almost forty years now. There were a lot of times I would have strangled him if I could have gotten my hands on him. And now, after all this time, I find out he’s not my father after all. I wasted all that hating! It is really annoying.”
“That’s what you’re mad about?”
“Sure,” Phil said, turning his baseball cap around so the bill was backward. And suddenly he looked reassuringly like the old, familiar Phil again. “What’d you think I was mad about?”
“Well, I thought maybe the fact that you weren’t related to any of the people you thought you were related to.”
“You mean Vincenzo and the rest of them? Nah, that’s a relief. That feels great. That never felt right. I should
