Phil had looked at him, pointed his finger, and blurted: “You’re Dr. Luzzatto! I remember you!”
“I’m flattered.”
“When I was a little kid,” Phil said, “I mean really little… you were carrying me through a… was it a hospital corridor? There were benches, white walls…”
Luzzatto nodded, pleased. “You’re right. It was in Milan. The Gaetano Pini Institute. You were not even five. A long time to remember an operation.”
“I don’t remember any operation, I just remember being carried. In your arms. I was crying… you thought I was scared, but I was embarrassed. I was in my underwear, and there were all these women there…”
“It was insensitive of me,” Luzzatto said, smiling and placing a hand over his heart. “I humbly apologize.”
Along the same wall as Luzzatto, seated together on a chest and looking like a male-female version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, were Phil’s aunt, Bella Barbero, and her husband, Basilio. Then again, she might have been his cousin; Phil hadn’t been sure. If Gideon remembered correctly, the affable, rambling Basilio was an officer in Vincenzo’s construction firm.
The entrance to the room was on the wall to Gideon’s right, a doorless opening on either side of which were the only two chairs with armrests, a matched set of high-backed, thronelike affairs with carved Gothic backrests. In one sat Vincenzo, in the other, Caravale, like coreigning monarchs waiting for their court to get itself settled.
The two remaining people, the lean, vinegary, malcontented-looking Dante Galasso and the striking but equally vinegary Francesca de Grazia Galasso, sat along the remaining wall, next to each other, but as far apart as space would allow. Dante, according to Phil, had been an ardent and articulate Marxist professor in Bologna years before, but somewhere along the line he had stopped calling himself a Communist and seamlessly turned himself into a “postmodernist,” apparently considering it more in step with the times. His formidable wife Francesca-Vincenzo’s sister-was both the CFO of Aurora Costruzioni and the de facto mistress of the de Grazia estate, someone, Phil had warned darkly, of whom it was a good idea not to get on the wrong side.
Gideon had been hoping to get a look at Achille de Grazia, but the boy preferred to stay in his room. Phil had gone up to see him and reported that he seemed to be all right, but was markedly unassertive and subdued. “I doubt if it’ll last,” Phil had said, “but we can always hope.”
“Well, then, it looks as if we’re all here,” Basilio Barbero observed when the settling process had gone on too long for him. “Ready to start, eh? When I hold a conference at work, I make it a rule to begin promptly on schedule. Otherwise, you see, those who come late are rewarded by having the meeting start the moment they arrive, while those who came early are punished by having to wait for the latecomers. Thus, one sets in motion-”
“Yes, yes, let’s begin,” Vincenzo said. “Colonel?”
Caravale opened in formal fashion. “At 12:45 P.M. this afternoon, skeletal remains found buried on land owned by the Aurora Construction Company on Mount Zeda, not far from the construction site of the new golf and country club, were positively identified as those of Count Domenico de Grazia.”
Astonishment. Consternation. Except for Vincenzo, who’d been briefed earlier, they had thought the council had been called to talk about the kidnapping.
“Mount Zeda?” Bella Barbero said when the immediate hubbub had died down. “What are you talking about? That’s impossible. He went sailing that morning. We all know that. His boat was found across the lake, at Germignaga.” She made it sound as if she was accusing Caravale of manufacturing the facts.
“It was Valtravaglia,” Francesca Galasso corrected. “Not Germignaga.”
“I don’t see-”
“His boat, yes. His remains, no,” Caravale said.
“But what would Domenico have been doing at Mount Zeda?” a puzzled, troubled Cosimo asked. “By that time he no longer had any interest in the construction business. It had all been turned over to Vincenzo. What would bring him to Mount Zeda?”
“Could it have been before the land was purchased?” Basilio asked. “Maybe it was when he was considering buying it.”
“No, no, my boy. I tell you, by then he had removed himself from such affairs, am I not right, Vincenzo?”
“That’s true, Uncle. Besides, the land had already been in our possession for several years.”
“You see?” Cosimo said. “Believe me, Colonel, I knew my brother. Like me, he was no longer at ease off the island. He disliked leaving it, other than to sail. Why would he have gone to Mount Zeda?”
“Ah, but can one really ever ‘know’ another person’s life?” Dante Galasso asked-gratuitously, thought Gideon. “Or does one simply choose his own reality from the web of stories, the ‘narrative,’ that each of us constructs for the consumption of the Other?” He spread his hands and looked around the room, smiling, waiting for acclamation.
“Asshole,” Phil grumbled to Gideon, who thought Phil had a point. His Italian wasn’t good enough to grasp every word, but he’d gotten the gist. He’d heard the same opaque sophistry, or close enough, from the postmodernist academicians at the university.
Seated next to her husband, Francesca rolled her eyes and let out a pained sigh. “Lecture number three hundred thirty-four,” she said, seemingly addressing the assembled ancestors who looked sternly down from the walls. “Reality as a Social Construct.”
Dante looked pityingly at her. “Ha, ha.”
Caravale, talking around the Galassos, replied politely to Cosimo. “We don’t believe he went there of his own free will, Signor de Grazia. We believe he was brought there, or carried there after his death, and buried.”
“But-” It was Basilio, bouncing with nervous energy, his pink face gleaming. “But-but that must mean… doesn’t that mean someone must have murdered him?”
Dante, apparently one of those compulsive talkers who either didn’t notice that other people paid no attention when he spoke, or else didn’t care, laughed. “What a privilege it is to see such an incisive mind at work, eh, Doctor?” he said to Dr. Luzzatto, sitting around the corner from him.
Luzzatto, chewing hard on his cigar, glanced at him without comment, then returned his attention to Caravale.
Out of the corner of his eye Gideon saw Bella Barbero’s plump bosom rise in indignation as she gathered her resources to defend her husband. But a couple of nervous, placatory pats on the arm from Basilio quieted her down.
“Do I detect an edgy undertone or two around here?” Gideon whispered to Phil.
“Always,” Phil cheerfully agreed.
“We’re proceeding on that assumption, Signor Barbero,” Caravale said. “As of today, the case has been reopened as a homicide investigation.”
“Finally,” said Vincenzo pointedly. He, too, was clearly simmering about something, and had been from the moment they’d seen him waiting on the dock to meet the launch.
Caravale looked at him. “Excuse me?”
“I have thought all along that my father was the victim of foul play.”
Caravale stared at him. He doesn’t like being surprised like that, thought Gideon. And he especially doesn’t like it in public. “And why is that, exactly?” he asked.