Good Blood

“No, he doesn’t have one, and that’s what struck me.” Sated enough to take a breather now, he put down his own knife and fork, leaned forward, and told her what O’Malley had told him. “The genetics of Perthes disease are obscure and very complex, but in general it’s inherited, and if it shows up twice among close relatives, you can bet it’s inherited, so—”

“So if anybody had it, it should have been Vincenzo,” Julie said slowly, “not Phil. Only it’s the other way around.”

“Right. Ergo: it’s Phil who’s Domenico’s son, not Vincenzo.”

“Wow.” Mechanically, she started eating again. “But...” She chewed and swallowed. “Francesca is Domenico’s daughter, isn’t she? Why doesn’t she have it?”

“Because it doesn’t always show up, and when it does, it’s five to one in boys as opposed to girls.”

“Oh. No, wait, there’s a big problem here. What about that whole story that his so-called father told? About how Vincenzo was really Emma’s baby, and Phil was bought from that woman, that Gia, for five hundred dollars as a... a consolation prize?”

“The story was true. Only he reversed Phil and Vincenzo. Phil was the baby. Vincenzo was the consolation prize.”

“Gideon, the more you explain, the more confused I get.

I am getting really frustrated here. What reason would Franco have to lie like that?”

The waiter came to take Gideon’s plate and to ask what he wanted for his second course. “I’ll have another plate of this,” Gideon told him, earning a tolerant shake of the waiter’s head. These Americans.

“He wasn’t lying, Julie. Emma fooled them both— Franco and Domenico. I’m doing a little surmising here, but what I figure is that her maternal hormones kicked in as she got into her pregnancy, and she didn’t want to give her own baby up—her own baby being Phil. So, overcome with remorse, she works out a plan with Gia, who’s also at about the same stage: a switch. When the babies are born, she’ll give Gia’s child—”

“Vincenzo?”

He nodded. “Vincenzo—to Domenico, leaving her own child—”

“Phil.”

“Yes, Phil—with Gia for the time being. Then she finesses Domenico into suggesting that she adopt a child— and paying for it—and she pretends to adopt Gia’s son... who’s really her own, her own and Domenico’s.”

“And how do you finesse someone into suggesting that you adopt a child?”

“That I don’t know, but I don’t doubt it’s possible.”

“Well, maybe...but wouldn’t Franco know—”

“Franco wasn’t there for the last month.”

“But the mother—the other mother, Gia—she seemed to think Phil was hers.”

“Julie, you didn’t get to meet this woman. She’s so zonked out she’d believe I was her kid if Franco told her so.”

Julie had eaten only half of her cotoletta, but with a shake of her head, she pushed the plate aside. “Well, I suppose it’s all possible, but ‘surmising’ is putting it mildly, wouldn’t you say? You’re taking quite a leap here.”

“No, I don’t think so. I haven’t told you yet about what happened when I went up to Gignese this afternoon to look at Luzzatto’s records.”

She laughed. “You’ve had yourself quite a day, haven’t you?”

Over his second helping of the risotto Gideon told her about Luzzatto’s journal, with its angst-ridden references to the mysterious “secret buried in my heart” that was kept from Domenico for twenty-seven years, and then finally revealed to him...two days before he was killed.

Julie listened, sipping her second glass of wine and nibbling at a cheese tray they’d ordered. “I think I finally see where you’re going. Luzzatto was in on the baby switch too, correct? That Vincenzo wasn’t the real son—that was the secret. And when he finally told Domenico, Francesca must have found out too, and to prevent him from disinheriting Vincenzo, she... No? I’m not right?” she said when she saw Gideon shaking his head.

“You’re almost right. That was the secret, all right, but Luzzatto wasn’t in on the switch. He only found out years later.”

“How can you possibly know that, if it wasn’t in the journal?”

“Luzzatto told me, or rather his medical records did. See, twenty-seven years ago wouldn’t have been when the babies were born. Twenty-seven years ago would have been 1966, five years after that. And in 1966, according to his files, he took five-year-old Filiberto Ungaretti in to the Gaetano Pini Institute for an operation to correct an incipient case of...” He waited.

“Perthes disease!” Julie said. “And since he was also Domenico’s doctor, he already knew that Domenico had it, so he came to the same conclusion you did: Emma had pulled a fast one to keep her own baby. Phil was really his son, not Vincenzo.”

“Now you’ve got it. He then kept it to himself all those years, but when he thought he was dying, he went to Domenico with it, and Domenico, with his unshakable belief in the importance of good blood, probably would have disinherited Vincenzo—”

“Hold on. So why didn’t Vincenzo kill him, then? No, I didn’t put that right. I meant, why would Francesca be the one to murder him over that? She was still his legitimate daughter, wasn’t she? It wouldn’t affect her. And for that matter, why was she skimming money? Why would she have had Achille kidnapped? Why did she need so much money anyway?”

“I don’t know.”