Good Blood

Gideon stopped. “You suspect Vincenzo of kidnapping his own son? Of staging the whole thing? Why would he do that?”

“The money. Five million euros is a lot of money.”

“But he’s rich as...as...” He groped.

“Croesus?” suggested Caravale around the cigar. He gestured at a bar across the street. “Let’s go get that coffee.” Using the fingers of his left hand, he carefully snuffed out the cigar and stuck the inch-and-a-half-long stub behind his ear. “I’m rationing myself,” he explained.

The Bar Lanterna, as opposed to the distinctly blue-collar Bar Ricci, where Phil and Gideon had met Franco and Gia, appeared to be the meeting place for Gignese’s with-it set. A sign advertised evening karaoke, video games, and Internet access, and one of the tables actually had two unaccompanied women at it. The air held only a thin veil of old cigarette smoke. Over a couple of espressos served with slender glasses of water, Gideon picked up where they’d left off.

“Thank you. Croesus. So why would he need the money?”

Caravale smiled tolerantly while he stirred sugar into the tiny cup. “Well, I tell you, my naive professor-friend: You’d be surprised at the things rich people do for money. Besides...Vincenzo isn’t as rich as Croesus. I’ve been doing some checking, and our Vincenzo, in fact, is having financial difficulties. The money that was raised to ransom Achille? It wasn’t his own at all. Raising it took some, shall we say, highly creative accounting practices with the books at Aurora Costruzioni.”

“I don’t get this at all. How could he need money? Look at that house he maintains. Look at that whole island. Did you see some of those paintings? The tapestries? If he needed the money, all he had to do was sell off five million euros’ worth of paintings and nobody would even notice they were gone. What would he want to rig up something as crazy as this for?”

“Ah, now, his private wealth, that’s interesting too. We’ve had a look at the provisions of the de Grazia legacy, and it turns out the bequest, which is enormous, is strictly entailed for the purpose of keeping Isola de Grazia in the family, in perpetuity. It provides for physical maintenance of the property, for household staff, for death taxes when the generations change, and for the food, clothing, and general upkeep of the family members staying there. I think there’s some kind of small allowance for them too. Beyond that, they’re expected to fend for themselves. They get nothing, not even Vincenzo.”

“Wow. You’ve been busy,” Gideon said.

Caravale touched the tip of his tongue to his espresso, then drank. “Most of them also got an inheritance from Domenico’s personal will, but it wasn’t all that much, and it’s long gone now. And as for selling the art, he can’t. It’s expressly prohibited, and the lawyers stay on him like leeches. He can have things restored or cleaned, and the bequest will pay for it, but he can’t sell anything. He’s more like the custodian of the place, really, than the owner.”

“Well, okay, I understand what you’re getting at,” Gideon agreed. “He has money problems. But to kidnap Achille... his own son? He almost got him killed!”

“Ah, but couldn’t that have been because of the change in chauffeurs? That’s my whole point. If Praga had been there as planned, there wouldn’t have been any gunfire, or

maybe just a little harmless shooting to make it look good.”

“I see what you mean. Right.”

“Of course, right. Pay attention. In any case, I’m not saying it’s Vincenzo. Not for certain. It could still be any one of them.”

“Not Cosimo, surely?”

“Well, he’s not at the top of my list,” Caravale said with a smile. “Neither is your friend Phil, but I think you knew that. But we’re getting close to the end here, Gideon. I have good intuition about these things, and I can feel it in my stomach.” He brought the thumb and fingers of his hand together. “I can sense the closing of the net.”

“Mm,” Gideon said. He drank half the espresso, savoring the bitter taste, the ashy texture.

“What do you mean, ‘Mm’? We’ve already established it has to be one of the de Grazia crowd, haven’t we?”

“Well, yes,” Gideon allowed. “Big Paolo’s being involved in the kidnapping and the attack on me—”

“And in trying to steal Domenico’s bones,” Caravale added, jabbing the cigar at him. “Oh, didn’t I tell you about that? One of the nuns identified him as the man she saw sneaking around the hospital courtyard in the middle of the night, how about that? So he was definitely tied in with everything—Domenico’s murder, Achille’s kidnapping— which means—well, you know.”

Gideon nodded. What it meant, as they’d established earlier, was that at least one of the de Grazias was also tied up with everything, because only the de Grazias—no one else—had known that Domenico’s bones had been found. Whoever it was, therefore, Big Paolo’s presence linked him or her to both Domenico’s death and Achille’s kidnapping. And since the de Grazias were the only ones who had heard Luzzatto muttering about the mysterious things Domenico had had on his mind the day he was killed, that almost certainly had to mean that one of them was involved in Luzzatto’s murder too—assuming that Luzzatto had been murdered.

“Wait a minute, though,” Gideon said. “Back to Vincenzo for a minute. At the consiglio he said he’d told the previous carabinieri commander that Domenico was murdered ten years ago, back when it happened.”

“And he did. I looked at the case file.”

“So, does that add up? A man murders his father, then tells the cop in charge—who thinks it’s an accident and is inclined to let it go—that he ought to investigate it as a homicide?”

“On the surface, maybe not. But if in that way he establishes a facade of innocence for himself without providing any incriminating information for the police to work with... maybe yes.”

Gideon stretched and sighed. “Okay, I grant you, it all makes sense on paper, but it’s pretty...well, ornate. It’d sure be nice if you could get your hands on Big Paolo and just ask him who hired him. That’d settle it.”