Dying on the Vine

Gideon ordered frutti di mare, the seafood pizza. He asked about local beers, and the waiter recommended Birrificio Artigianale pale ale. “Is most same like bitter,” he said, apparently thinking they were British. Gideon said fine, and John went along with him.

The beers came quickly, and while they worked at them, Gideon explained what Linda had told him at the wine festival about Cesare, the little-known stepson.

“Whoa,” John said. “You’re saying you think this guy killed the two of them?”

“No, I’m nowhere near there. Not yet, anyway. All I’m saying is that Rocco said that one reason they were so sure that Pietro did it was that everything pointed to him and nothing at all pointed to anybody else. They didn’t have any other viable suspects. Any suspects at all. Well, wouldn’t you say Cesare would be a viable suspect? Pietro was about to cut him out of his will.”

“So why would he kill Nola? Christ, she was his mother, wasn’t she?”

“And you never heard of anybody killing his mother before.”

“Well, okay, that’s a point. But why would he kill her?”

“That I don’t know.”

“What about the fact that it was Pietro’s gun?”

“John, I still don’t like it that that gun just happened to stay with him while he was falling two hundred feet and bouncing off rocks all the way.”

“So you’re still on about that.”

“Yes, I am. It just doesn’t sit right. You know that suicides generally don’t hang on to the gun. A lot more likely for it to get flung five or six feet away than to stay in his hand.”

“Well, actually, you got me thinking about that, and I came up with a perfectly good reason it didn’t happen this time.”

“Which is?”

“Cadaveric spasm,” John announced brightly, referring to the rare bodily reaction in which a kind of rigor mortis sets in instantly (rather than several hours later), locking the muscles into whatever position they were in at the moment of death. In that case, if a gun had been grasped in one’s hand to shoot oneself, it would conceivably continue to be gripped so rigidly that it would be hard to pry or jar it out of the death clasp. “It happens,” he added when he saw Gideon’s dubious expression.

“That’s so, it happens, and I suppose it also happens a gun can get stuck in a jacket in such a way that any fingerprints that might be on it are still going to be there a year later—not that I’ve ever seen it personally, of course.”

“Well, no, me neither,” John agreed. “But it could happen, right?”

“Sure, but what would you say the odds are of both things happening together? Cadaveric spasm, and then the leather-jacket thing.”

“Not great,” admitted John. He held up his beer bottle. “Hey, you know, this isn’t bad. Hoppy, malty. Citrusy, is that a word?” Of the two of them, John was the beer authority.

The waiter came back with their pizzas. John looked at his with a sigh. “I’m in hog heaven.” The pizza was thick with prosciutto, ham, pepperoni, and mortadella. And a few chunks of artichoke for the health-minded. Gideon’s looked terrific too, a plain marinara sauce, no cheese, covered with mussels and clams in their shells, shrimp, and crabmeat.

“Well,” Gideon said, cutting into his, “maybe it’ll all become clearer tomorrow.”

“Boy,” John said, “will you look at all this bacon?”

“It’s prosciutto.”

“You call it prosciutto, I call it bacon,” John sang happily. “Let’s call the whole thing off.”

ELEVEN

IN the morning, Gideon and John had to get started for Florence before the attendees’ buffet breakfast had been laid out, but they found the kitchen, begged some caffe latte from Maria, and took them out to the garden to drink, which they did, John wrapped in moody silence. “Okay, I think I’m probably capable of walking now,” he said after he’d gone back for and drunk his second giant cupful, but with a dirty look at Gideon. He still hadn’t forgiven him. “Only don’t expect me to talk.”

Considering that it was a workday, they thought they’d be better off avoiding the morning traffic into Florence, so they walked to the Figline train station to catch the 7:11 on its way from Rome to Florence, which showed up in Figline bang on time. Except for the signs in Italian, it might have been a morning commuter train in any American city: reasonably clean, rows of seats all facing the same direction (as opposed to European-style separate compartments), serious, suited businessmen reading Il Corriere Fiorentino or Milano Finanza, fashionably dressed young women applying the final touches to their hair or makeup, and a few sulky, slouching teenagers coming in for a day in the city and up to no good.

John ordered an espresso in a plastic cup from a vendor who worked his way up the aisle, and it seemed to finally do the trick. “Okay, you can talk to me now.”

But by then they were already pulling into Florence’s Santa Maria Novella train station exactly at 7:39, as scheduled, and all Gideon said was, “I guess Mussolini really did get the trains to run on time.”

“Yeah, sure, except when they have a strike,” a man behind him muttered in good American English. “But no sweat, that’s only once or twice a week or so. Have a nice day.”

As Rocco had told them, it took about ten minutes to get to Borgo Ognissanti, a narrow street of somber, gray, two-and-three story palazzos that cut diagonally through the city. Carabinieri headquarters was in one of these, a few doors down from the equally gray and somber facade of the thirteenth- century All Saints Church, which had given the street its name. They walked by the headquarters building twice before spotting the inconspicuous CARABINIERI COMANDO PROVINCIALE plaque beside the tall, double-doored entry. Like most of the entrances to these old palazzos, it was big enough to admit a good-sized coach, and it opened not into the interior of the building but into a courtyard. A couple of steps into the courtyard there was a roofed corridor, in which a uniformed young carabiniere sat behind a counter and in front of a switchboard.

He looked up with a smile. “Signori?”

When Gideon told him they were there to see Tenente Gardella, he said a few words into a telephone and a minute later a heavy, studded wooden door creaked open a few feet away, and out popped Rocco, resplendent in a smart, tailored uniform of dark blue, with epaulets, medals, ribbons, and collar tabs on the jacket and crisp red stripes running down the sides of the trousers.

“Whoa, look at you,” John said. “You’re beautiful. Jeez, I wish they dressed us like that in the Bureau.”

“Believe me, you don’t,” Rocco said. “So come on up.” Moving at a trot, he led them up two flights of stone steps and into his office, the kind of office that any mid-level cop anywhere in the world might have. Not an office, per se, but a twelve-by-twelve space enclosed by three fabric-covered, shoulder-high partitions, the open side facing out into a bullpen area of desks for the less lofty. Rocco’s office had no ornaments of any kind, and the furniture—a two-drawer file cabinet, a desk, a desk chair, and two visitors’ chairs—was all stainless steel and vinyl. The only books were a few procedural manuals and volumes of legal code that leaned crookedly between a pair of inexpensive metal bookends on top of the file cabinet.

Rocco sat behind his desk and motioned John and Gideon into the visitors’ chairs. “Got it right here,” he said, poking through the clutter on his desktop. “Somewhere. Ah. Here. I was able to get away with making a couple of copies. You can’t take them with you, though.”

He pushed copies of Pietro’s autopsy report across the desk, leaned back, and waited.

John glanced only briefly at his before tossing it back down with a snort. “This isn’t gonna mean too much to me, Rocco. Wouldn’t mean much to me even if it were in English. Can I get a cup of coffee somewhere in here while the doc does his shtick?”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll take you. I could use one myself. What about you, Gid?”

“Um . . . no.” Already, he was absorbed.

“We’ll be back in a minute.”

They were out the door and halfway through the bullpen before Gideon even nodded. “Take your time,” he mumbled, or at least he meant to.