Dying on the Vine

“And what about Rodney? Ah, poor Rodney’s but a dim memory. He’s been gone these fifty years now, and his genes with him. So in the gene pool as a whole, the ones he was carrying are a little less well represented than they used to be, while Ralph’s now have a bigger share—those six descendants. Well, assuming that those ‘fast’ genes keep providing a survival advantage—however slight—every generation will have more people carrying them and fewer and fewer of the ‘slow gene’ people. The genetic makeup of the population as a whole would change. But . . . they wouldn’t necessarily become as fast as it was humanly possible to become, they’d just need to be fast enough to get away from the bears. Well, that’s the way natural selection works. The results don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough to get by.”

One of Gideon’s many admirable traits was his ability to deliver a coherent, fully formed lecture on the spur of the moment. One of his less attractive ones was his tendency to deliver them at the drop of a hat. Like most good professors, he was convinced that the subject matter that fascinated him must likewise fascinate everyone else. He was, of course, more often wrong than right, and this was one of those times. It took a while, but eventually the glazed, concussed look on a growing number of the sixteen faces in front of him got through to him. He’d done it again, slipped right off their radar.

And no wonder, he thought guiltily. They were there to learn how knowing something about bones might help them solve homicides. The subtle, slow-moving machinery of natural selection was not a high priority, or any priority at all. He cut himself off in the middle of a sentence. “We seem to have wandered a bit off the subject here. Clive,” he said with mock severity, “kindly try not to take us off-course again.”

This was directed to Clive Devlin, a scholarly, well-spoken chief inspector from Gibraltar, whose innocent, half-joking remark had started Gideon off. “Here’s what I wonder,” the chief inspector had said. “If natural selection is as wonderful as it’s cracked up to be, and it’s been working away to weed out the weakest among us all these millions of years, how is it that we still have so many diseases? One would think our bodies would have been perfected by now.”

“Please accept my apology, Professor Oliver,” Devlin said smoothly now. “I promise not do it again.”

“Apology accepted.” Gideon smiled back, stalling for time. Now, he thought, where the hell were we? “Umm . . .”

He was saved by Lieutenant Rocco Gardella, one of five Italian Carabinieri officers in the class, who, easily reading his expression, supplied the answer. “So, you were asking if anybody here might have some skeletal materials the class could use for, like, a case study.” The cocky, outgoing Gardella was a compact, oily-haired guy in a black leather bomber jacket who reminded Gideon of a young Mafia wannabe from a 1950s teenage gang movie—a Gino or a Guido, say. Well, or a Rocco, for that matter. And his brand of perfectly fluent English went along with the image, singing more of Manhattan’s Little Italy than of Mother Italy. “I think I got one for you,” he went on. “The one I was talking about yesterday? The murder-suicide that laid out in the snow and rain and everything all year? Well, the husband’s already been cremated, but the wife—that is, the wife’s bones— should still be available.”

“That’d be great,” Gideon said, “could you bring them in?”

“No, that I can’t do. Technically, they’re not ours anymore. They’ve been released to the family. But they’re still in a funeral home down in Figline, this little town I used to live in. Not far.”

“Where?”

“Fee . . glyee . . . neh,” Rocco repeated, stressing each syllable, thinking Gideon had been stumped by the Italian pronunciation, typically not so easy on American tongues.

“I know the place,” Gideon said. “Figline Valdarno. I’ve been there.”

“You been to Figline?” Gardella’s thick black eyebrows—eyebrow would be more accurate—rose. “Why?”

“Oh, come on, it’s not such a bad place, Rocco. Look, are you saying it’d be all right to have a look at them if we went to the funeral home? If Figline Valdarno’s the place I’m thinking of, it’s just twenty kilometers or so south of Florence.”

“Yeah, that’s the place. I could call my cousin; he owns the funeral home—well, he’s almost my cousin, and he doesn’t exactly own it yet—and we could probably do it right now, if you want.”

Gideon looked at his watch. One ten. The seminar ran till four. Time enough, if they got going right then. He addressed the class as a whole. “Okay, let’s do it. How many cars do we have?”

Four hands went up: enough room for everybody. Gideon motioned the group up out of their seats. “Let’s pile in.”

Rocco pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll tell Alberto we’re coming.”

FIVE

BUT the lieutenant had been unable to get through to almost-cousin Alberto, the almost-proprietor of the funeral establishment. As a result, Alberto Cippollini was understandably startled when three imposing midnight-blue Carabinieri vehicles—two Alfa Romeo 159 compact executives and one Iveco VM 90 van, plus one not- so-imposing two-seater, an aptly nicknamed ovetti (little egg) that looked like the cockpit of a helicopter (minus the helicopter)— pulled screeching into the parking area of Onoranze Funebri Cippollini and fourteen burly men (and two burly women) piled out of them. A tentative, nervous little man in a too-tight black suit and tie, he came to the glass doors looking a little sick.

Blinking, he opened one of the doors enough to stick his head through. “Che . . . che cosa . . . ? ”

“It’s all right, Alberto,” Rocco yelled back to him in Italian, his hands lifted placatingly. “This is nothing official. We just want to look at that skeleton you got the other day. It’s for our school.”

“You mean right now? But . . . but there is a memorial service in progress in the chapel,” he whispered. “I can’t have you . . . marching through . . .” His hands were fluttering in front of his chest. Gideon expected him to start wringing them, and a second later he did. “The mourners . . .”

“Well, let us into the workroom through the back door, then. We won’t go anywhere near the chapel. They’ll never know we’re here.”

“You’re not going to take the, the remains away, are you? The cremation is tomorrow. It’s all been arranged by the son, and I don’t want—”

“I’m Professor Oliver,” Gideon interrupted in Italian. His command of the language was good enough to put together grammatically correct sentences (as long as they were in the present tense), and to comprehend a good deal more. “I’m in charge of the class, and I promise you that we won’t disturb the remains in any way. All we need is an hour, and we’ll leave everything as we find it.”

“Of course, yes, I see. Now, I . . . I haven’t done anything with them, you understand. That is to say, I haven’t prepared them, other than to clean them up a little—”

Rocco laughed. “Alberto, they’re bones. I don’t think anybody expected you to embalm them.”

“Well, that’s certainly so, ha-ha.” He cleared his throat and lowered his voice even more. “Come around to the back then. I’ll get them out for you.” He hesitated. “And Rocco—perhaps you could see to it that these police cars are moved out of sight to the parking area in back? It doesn’t look so good to visitors, you know?”

• • •

AS forensic scientists went, Gideon Oliver was a celebrated wuss. He didn’t like working with dead bodies, and the more violent the manner of death or the fresher the bodies, the queasier they made him. What he did like working with, what intrigued and motivated him, were skeletons: the cleaner, and drier, and older, the better. Early Pleistocene remains were about right, and they constituted his main area of scholarly research. He didn’t like autopsy rooms, he didn’t like dissection labs, and he didn’t like mortuary embalming rooms. As a result, the preparation room at Onoranze Funebri Cippollini came as a pleasant surprise. When the door was opened and signor Cippollini stepped out of the way to let them in, Gideon steeled himself for the expected odor (a combination of innards and formaldehyde, like a high-school lab where frogs and fetal pigs are dissected, only worse). Instead, what greeted him was a welcome wisp of lavender. And the room itself was almost jolly, with multicolored wall tiles randomly placed among the white ones. Even the bases of the two work tables were faced with colorful tile mosaics.