Dying on the Vine

He turned the skull upside down again so the bottom faced up. They found themselves looking at a caved-in skull base. A good third of it—much of the rear half—had been thrust a half inch inward (upward in a person standing erect), cracking a ragged-edged disk of bone two to three inches in diameter. In the center of the disk, as in the center of a CD, was a smooth-rimmed hole, the foramen magnum, the opening through which the spinal cord emerges from the brain.

“Is this another depressed fracture?” someone asked, fingering the collapsed bone. “Only this one goes the right way, pushed in, not out.”

“Right,” Gideon said.

“But that’s huge,” Rocco said. “What the hell caused that?”

“You don’t know?” Gideon asked.

“No, I don’t,” Rocco said defensively. “Look, I never actually saw the skull before, all cleaned up like this.”

“But your medico’s report didn’t say?”

Rocco shrugged. “It said a lot of the bones were busted. Was I supposed to memorize them or something?”

“Hey, relax, Rocco. I just thought he might have made a special point about it.”

“Well, he didn’t.”

“Then he missed something pretty significant,” Gideon said, laying the skull back on the table. “This is what is known as a basilar ring fracture. It’s not very common, and it tells us something important about what exactly happened here.”

“What?” asked someone.

“Well, let me give you a chance to figure the whole thing out for yourselves first. It’d be a better exercise if we didn’t know what the circumstances were and what had actually happened, but Rocco’s already told us, so —”

“No, he told us what the Carabinieri concluded had happened,” somebody said archly. “That’s a different thing.”

Rocco pulled a face. “Thanks a lot, pal.”

“Actually, that’s a good way to look at this whole exercise, if you like,” Gideon said. “Your job is to review the police findings on these bones and see if you agree or disagree. Murder-suicide, both deaths by gunshot, and so on—did they get it right? And just concentrate on the trauma, don’t worry about the other things we’ve talked about—race, age, occupational indicators, height—just the trauma. I’ll give you”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes, plus another five minutes to write up your report on the dry-marker board over there.”

“What if we all don’t agree?” someone asked.

“Then indicate that in the report. Okay, folks, the clock is running. Better get on with it.”

While John and the others went to work, Gideon and Rocco sat on stools next to the other table, with Rocco back in a good mood and telling dumb-carabinieri jokes. Apparently there was no shortage of them.

“So this village station commander—a maresciallo, a marshal—is sitting in his car, and he calls one of his carabinieri over. ‘Martino, take a look at my rear turn lights, will you, and tell me if they’re working right.’ The carabiniere goes to the back of the car and watches, while the commander holds down the turn-indicator lever.

“‘Yes, maresciallo,’ he says after a second, ‘they work fine. No, wait, they don’t. No, wait, they do. No, wait, they don’t. No, wait . . .’”

Gideon smiled, which encouraged Rocco. “Why do carabinieri always work in pairs?

“Beats me.”

“One to read and one to write.” Rocco laughed.

“I gather there are a lot of these?” Gideon asked.

“Millions. In real life, though,” Rocco said, turning serious, “the Carabinieri are a pretty selective outfit with some really stiff standards. Hell, my own brother applied, but they turned him down. You know why?” He waited for Gideon to bite, but Gideon wouldn’t, so Rocco supplied the answer. “He scored too high on the intelligence test.”

They were only a few feet from the work table, so the others had no trouble hearing them, and most grinned at the jokes every now and then. But a Carabinieri major from Rome, the highest-ranking officer there, had been glaring over his shoulder at Rocco for a while, clearly unamused.

“Um, Rocco . . .” Gideon began.

“Hey, do you know why carabinieri trousers have those red stripes down the sides? So they can find the pockets, hee-hee.”

The major continued to glare. “Rocco, I think maybe . . .”

“Okay, wait, this guy lives halfway up a narrow mountain road. So one day he sees this Carabinieri car driving backward up the mountain. ‘How come you’re driving backward?’ he wants to know. ‘Because we’re not sure if there’ll be a place to turn around at the top,’ they tell him. An hour later, here they come back down the mountain . . . backward again. ‘So why are you still driving backward?’ he asks. ‘Because we found a place to turn around after all.’”

When Rocco paused to think up the next one, Gideon was finally able to break in. “Rocco, I think you might be annoying the stern, important-looking gentleman over there at the foot of the table,” he said quickly, hoping to head Rocco off.

Rocco glanced up. “Major Grimaldi?” he whispered back. “He’s been listening? Oh Christ, that’s all I need. Come on, let’s get some fresh air. I need a smoke.”

“Are you in trouble?” Gideon asked when they’d stepped outside into the rear parking lot and gotten under an eave to avoid the misty rain that had begun to fall. Gideon had gotten a soft drink, a limonata, from the vending machine next to the door, and he pulled back the tab and took a couple of gulps.

Rocco, in the meantime, flipped open a box of Marlboros, pulled one out with his lips, lit up, and blew out a long breath. “Nah, not trouble, exactly. But I know Grimaldi. He’ll report it to my captain, who won’t be happy. Ah, don’t worry about it, no big deal.”

“Carabinieri jokes are a no-no?”

“Everything’s a no-no, Gideon, everything that doesn’t make the carabinieri look like God’s gift to the world. You know what this general told us the day we graduated from the academy?” He tucked in his chin and lowered his voice to a magisterial bass. “‘From this day forward, no longer are you Paolo, Mario, or Giovanni. You are a carabiniere. Everything you say, everything you do, is a reflection on the republic which we are honored to serve, and the glorious history of the body of which you are now a part.’ And God, did he mean it.”

Another long pull on the Marlboro. “One time, when I was still on patrol, I was eating my lunch in the car, relaxing, noshing on a panino, you know? And this call comes in. There’s a knife fight in a bar less than a block away from where I’m sitting, and somebody’s gonna get killed. So I drop what I’m eating, jump out of the car, and run over there, and, sure enough, there are these two guys having at it, and they are seriously trying to hurt each other. I get in between them, which is when I got this”—he held out his hand, showing a thin white scar running diagonally along the heel of his palm—“and manage to get them apart. One guy was totally whacked out on something, and I had to get him down on the floor and cuffed before he calmed down. Anyway, I called it in, got them arrested, went to the hospital to get stitched up, and was back at headquarters in an hour to write up my report. What do you think I got for my trouble?”

“Not an award, I’m guessing.”

“A reprimand. Because why? Because I appeared in public without my cap.” He grunted a laugh. “Can you believe it? Jesus H. Christ.”

“Rocco, I have to say—are you sure the carabinieri are a good fit for you? You don’t quite seem . . . well, cut out for the life.”

The lieutenant was shocked. “Are you kidding me? I love the corps. It’s fantastic. I’m proud to be on it. It’s just that they can be a little . . . tight-assed sometimes, about things that seem pretty