Dying on the Vine

“You bet. Don’t tell anyone, though. Having a cappuccino at any time of the day other than with breakfast incurs the wrath of the purists.”

Julie declined, holding up her cup to demonstrate that it was still half full.

Gideon went back to the counter, put the barista through his motions again, and returned with the brimming cups. While he’d been getting them, Linda had gone to one of the colorful little pushcarts and brought back a cardboard carton of zeppole, the sugared, donut-hole-like fritters originally from Naples, but now a fixture at every Italian street fair from Rome to San Francisco. She lifted the lid as he set the coffees down in their saucers, bit into one, and offered them around.

Julie took one. “Linda, a couple of minutes ago you said you used to think Pietro put family above everything. What was that about? If it’s none of our business, just—”

“No, no, that’s okay.” She and Julie had shared many confidences over the years and, in any case, she was one of those cheerfully open, talkative people who didn’t need any coaxing when it came to retailing inside information that more guarded people would keep close to the vest.

“Well, here’s what happened. Last summer, a couple of months before he died, babbo got this amazing offer from Humboldt-Schlager to buy the winery, lock, stock, and barrel. We’re talking megabucks here.”

“Aren’t they a beer company?” Julie asked. “Are they into wines too?”

“This was going to be their entry. Well, babbo liked the idea—he was thinking about retiring anyway—and even if the rest of us weren’t crazy about it, we weren’t dead set against it either. According to their offer, Humboldt would stay out of the internal management of the winery for at least two years with Franco as chief operating officer and also a member of the corporation’s board of directors. The rest of us would stay on in our present jobs at the same salaries we were getting from babbo. And we could keep on living here. Not a bad deal, really.”

“But,” said Gideon.

“‘But’ is right. Babbo took his time about signing, and Humboldt had second thoughts. About a week before he’s going to go up to the cabin, they change the terms. No jobs for the boys or for me, and no place to live either—we’d even have to clear out of our living quarters. No financial settlement either, just good-bye and good luck. And they weren’t open to negotiations. Take it or leave it.” She polished off her fritter and licked the sugar off her fingers.

“Yikes, that must have caused a little consternation,” Julie said.

“Well, it would have if we’d known, but we didn’t. As blunt and straight-talking as babbo was, apparently he didn’t have the nerve to tell us. We only found out a couple of months later when the whole deal went south for good and Severo finally let us in on it. He felt bad about keeping it from us, Severo did, but he’d been honoring babbo’s request. I don’t blame him. It’s a good thing babbo was already dead, though, or one of the boys probably would have killed him.” She began to laugh but cut it off and sobered. “Whoa, that was just a stupid joke. Not for one minute do I think any one of them would ever—I mean, those boys loved—”

“We understand,” Julie said smiling.

“Figure of speech, not a statement of fact,” said Gideon.

He was also smiling, but his mind was chewing over what she’d said. Rocco had said they hadn’t come up with any tenable motives for anybody but Pietro himself. Here, all of a sudden was a lulu of a motive, and three people—four, counting Linda—who shared it. There was a time when he’d have felt guilty and been embarrassed about having such thoughts about friends, but sad experience had taught him not to discount them. It didn’t stop him from hoping (and believing) that there was nothing to them, but Rocco would need to hear this all the same.

“They wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway,” said Linda, still a little defensive. “Babbo was making up for it by giving them big stipends, more than enough to live on when the sale went through—which it never did, of course—so nobody would have been exactly poor. Even Cesare was going to get one, the same as the other three.”

Julie frowned. “Who’s Cesare?”

Linda frowned back. “Who’s Cesare? Cesare, Nola’s son . . . Luca and Nico’s stepbrother. And Franco’s. You know.”

“No, I don’t know. I didn’t know Nola had a son,” Julie said. She glanced at Gideon, her brows knit: Did you know?

Gideon hunched his shoulders. “News to me.”

“How could you not know about Cesare?” Linda demanded, as if they’d been remiss in their study of Cubbiddu history.

“I don’t know how we’d know unless you told us,” Julie said, “and you never told us.”

“You mean you didn’t . . . Oh, wait a minute, that’s right; you didn’t meet him when you were here last time. He’d moved out by then, and there was no particular reason to talk about him.” She hesitated. “He . . . well, he wasn’t all that popular, to put it bluntly. He didn’t get along with the brothers very well, and he had . . . issues with Pietro too. I mean . . . you know.”

Gideon didn’t know, but he was suddenly interested. Issues with Pietro? “Like what?” Motives seemed to be popping up all over the place.

“Oh, it wasn’t anything that—”

“Come on, Linda, I’m curious too,” Julie said. “A step-brother—how does he fit into the picture?”

“Oh, all right,” said Linda, lighting up at the prospect of opening up another skeleton closet. She dabbed powdered sugar from her lips and paused a moment to order her thoughts. “Okay, now, you remember that the two of them, Nola and Pietro, came from Sardinia, which is another world to begin with, but you probably don’t know that the particular region they come from is Barbagia, which is the part—”

“The central interior,” Gideon said. “Nuoro Province, basically. Mountainous, isolated, poor. Depending on how you look at it, very traditional or very backward and primitive.”

“That’s the place. Interestingly enough, the name—Barbagia—is supposed to mean ‘barbarian’—”

“It does,” Gideon said. “From ‘barboros,’ ancient Greek for the way foreigners were supposed to talk.”

“Right,” Linda said with a slight arching of one eyebrow in Gideon’s direction. “Anyway—”

“It’s because, to their ears, other languages sounded like bar-bar-bar-bar— babbling, in other words. They used the term a lot when they were naming places and peoples.”

Linda made a growling noise. “Hey, who’s telling this story?”

“The Barbary Coast, for example, although some authorities seem to think that’s because the Barbary pirates were Berbers, but—”

“Is he always like this?” Linda asked.

“Pretty much, yup,” said Julie. “He can’t help himself. Apparently, it’s in his DNA. You just have to ride it out. If you wait long enough, he runs out of gas. Or out of trivia; one or the other.” She smiled sweetly at him.

Gideon laughed. “All right, I can take a hint. And anyway, I’m flush out of both. It’s all yours, Linda.”

“We’ll soon see,” Julie murmured.

“Well, the reason I mentioned the name at all is because it’s still pretty barbaric in some ways. It’s the only place in Italy where there are still honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned bandits in the mountains, and the only place —”

“Where vendetta still exists,” said Gideon. “It—” He winced. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, won’t happen again.”

“All right, then,” Linda said a little suspiciously. “Well . . .” She threw a wary eye at him to make sure he was really giving up the floor. When she saw that he was, she settled happily back into her chair with another zeppola. “Now, if you ever want to hear a real-life Romeo-and-Juliet story, this is it. . . .”

Pietro Cubbiddu and Nola Baccaredda had been born in the neighboring ancient stone villages of Nuragugme and Dualchi. The two families had been involved in an on-again, off-again vendetta going back to the 1950s that had begun over confused back-and-forth accusations of sheep-stealing. There had been three murders over the years and at least a half dozen attempted murders. According to Pietro, when he had been christened, the priest had