Dying on the Vine

“You won’t have any trouble finding it. Things haven’t changed since you were here last.”

“Wait, one more question?”

Linda paused. “Okay, shoot, but I need to run.”

“You mentioned issues with Pietro. Anything serious?”

Linda studied him for a moment, wondering why he was interested. “Well, not really, not until last year. Cesare took an offer to become assistant cellar master at this big winery right here in the valley—an old enemy of Pietro’s. It was a few months before you came the last time. From babbo’s point of view—after all the things he’d done for him, all he’d taught him about wine, yada yada—it was nothing short of treachery. He threw him out of the villa the day he found out about it, which is why he wasn’t here anymore when you showed up.

“How did Nola feel about that?” Julie asked. “Throwing out her son?”

“How do you think? But if anything, she was madder at Cesare than she was at babbo. I think down deep she thought the kid had gone out of his way to screw up a pretty decent situation—which he had—and what he got was what he deserved. At the same time, well, he was her son, and she and Pietro had some pretty good dustups about it. You could probably hear them in Florence. But there was only one padrone here, and it wasn’t Nola.”

“So Cesare must have been pretty ticked off at both of them,” Gideon said.

“Not as ticked off as babbo was at him. Babbo cut him out of his will, disowned him. Or rather, he was going to. It was the first thing he was going to do when he got back from the mountains. ‘You are henceforth no longer the son of Pietro Cubbiddu.’” She shrugged. “But of course, he never did get back, so Cesare wound up getting the exact same share as the brothers got—from the will, I mean. Which is a damn shame, in my opinion. Babbo probably turned over in his grave. Or he would have if he’d had one at the time.”

“Well, how—” Gideon started.

“No, I really have to go. Luca and Cesare will screw everything up without some responsible adult supervision. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.”

Julie and Gideon, still seated at the table, watched her leave. Then Julie looked at Gideon curiously. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“I suspect so. One more person with a reason to murder Pietro—to murder both of them, really.”

“That’s what I was thinking you were thinking, all right. I was thinking it too.”

“Great minds,” said Gideon. “Well, I’ll tell Rocco about all this tomorrow. I’m not sure how happy it’s going to make him, though. What do you say, shall we go?”

“Let’s take what’s left of the zeppole for John,” Julie said. “After a day out with Marti, he’ll appreciate them.”

“After a day out with Marti, he’ll need them,” Gideon said, picking up the carton.

NINE

THE Figline Valdarno of today is basically a small manufacturing center and Florence-area bedroom community, but some of it is centuries old, and Villa Antica was situated half in, half out of the old part. Half in, half out of the city, for that matter. The buildings of the one-time convent were just within the ancient city walls, with a hundred-foot section of the wall, including a romantic and evocative watchtower, providing the back border of its formal garden. Once upon a time, Gideon assumed, this beautiful, enclosed garden had been the nun’s cloister. It had probably looked much the same then, six hundred years ago, as it did now, with four paths, bordered by well-pruned boxwoods, that intersected at its center, making four symmetrical triangles of lawn, lush and closely mowed. At the center, where the pathways met, there was an old stone fountain, now lichen-encrusted and still. Set along the outer edges of the lawns were clay olive oil jugs planted with shrubs. Lined up along the back wall was a row of cypress trees spaced a few feet apart. It was this beautiful garden that Gideon had most looked forward to seeing again, a lovely, tranquil space equally conducive to quiet contemplation or—even better—free- floating woolgathering.

But the greater part of the winery’s property extended well beyond this enclave, on the other side of the wall. Go through a truck-sized passage that had been cut through the wall’s five-foot-thick, buttressed base, and you were at the foot of row upon row of trellised vineyards that marched in gracefully arching ranks up and over and around the nearby low hills. If he remembered correctly, there were something like four hundred acres of them: mostly Sangiovese, merlot, and cabernet, but a couple of smaller areas of whites as well.

The villa building itself consisted of a large central section and two attached smaller wings that enclosed the two sides of the garden. The three wings were connected by a long, porticoed terrace that ran along the back of the central building and constituted the garden’s front border. The central building now held the winery. The north wing contained the kitchen, the laundry, and the onetime refectory, which was essentially unchanged and still used for formal tastings and occasional dinners, mostly for members of the wine club that Linda had started. The larger south wing, once the sisters’ living quarters, was now the Cubbiddus’ residence. What had originally been thirty-five airless and austere cubicles were now five spacious, splendid apartments for the family and two smaller but almost equally handsome guest suites, all with canopied platform beds; twelve-foot ceilings; eighteenth-century furniture; nameless, noseless Roman busts on marble pedestals; and age-darkened old oil paintings. The Laus were being put up in one of the guest suites, the Olivers in Cesare’s old apartment, as before.

Gideon and Julie had arrived a little after five, two hours before the reception, and with John having not yet shown up, they were on their own, and they spent the time wandering over the property on both sides of the city wall. Linda had said that nothing had changed, but something had, and in their opinion, Villa Antica was the poorer for it.

Despite Pietro’s two decades on the mainland, the old patriarch had never felt himself to be in anything but an alien culture. To ease his longing for home, he’d created a little piece of rural Barbagia right there in the heart of worldly, trendy Tuscany. The last time they’d been here, there had been a fire pit and a kiln-shaped clay oven wedged into the niche created where a buttress jutted out from the wall. The goat or lamb or hare that had been served every day at lunch had spent the preceding morning roasting there. And just outside the wall through a second passageway, this one human-size, had been a muddy, wire-fence enclosure that held six or seven primitive wooden pens. In them had been the living lambs and goats, along with chickens, rabbits, pigs, and even a couple of full-grown, small dairy cattle.

It was Pietro Cubbiddu’s homesick approximation of the Sardinian fattoria in which he’d grown up; a primitive family homestead, basic but self-sustaining. But Franco was neither a sentimentalist nor a lover of old Sardinia. The pens, like the oven, were no longer to be seen. In their place were a couple of hundred square yards of asphalt that served as a private parking area for the family and an overflow lot to use when the one in front of the villa was filled by wine-tasting visitors.

To Gideon the animals, the primitive oven, the rich farmyard stink, had all been wonderful; hands-on connections to a past not very long gone but never to return, at least not to Tuscany, and he missed finding them there. A year ago, Villa Antica had been a one of a kind, like no other winery they’d ever seen. Now there were probably ten others right there in the valley that might easily be confused with it. Gideon wondered if the same was true of its wines.

They’d walked back to the winery wing of the villa to look around there as well. The old tasting room had changed quite a bit too. For one thing, it wasn’t there any more. In Pietro’s day, it had been in one of the old chapels, a cramped little windowless place that had a claptrap trestle table as its counter—a slab of old plywood nailed to some sawhorses—with a few bottles set out for that day’s tasting. Five or six stools. No room for tables. If there were any decorative touches, Gideon couldn’t remember what they might have been. But whatever else it was, the place hadn’t been bogus funky, it was genuinely funky, a very different thing. Sans pretensions, as the French would say; nothing if not nondescript.

Under Franco, however, the chapel had been converted to a storeroom for equipment replacement parts. The new tasting room, sunlit and spacious, was housed where the old choir had been. A couple of the old stained-glass windows were still in place, but otherwise it had been completely—and expensively—redone. It was all clean lines,