Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 11 - Good Blood Read online

  Even Franco, for once in his life, had been genuinely worried about his wife’s state of mind for the last month. Responding to the stress in true Franco fashion, he had run off to be with his family in Caprera for the final two weeks of Emma’s pregnancy, claiming that his presence only added to her nervous tension.

  Domenico, who had considered his absence God-sent, had said nothing about this desertion, but he was blunt with Franco at dinner that night, while Emma stayed in her bed. She had so far refused even to look at the infant, which was being cared for by a wet nurse.

  “What she needs is a baby of her own,” Domenico told him.

  Franco shook his head. “Sure, that’s what I told her. But she doesn’t want to go through it again. I’ll tell you the truth, neither do I.” He puffed his cheeks and blew air from his mouth. It had been a few days since he’d shaved. “So what’s to be done?”

  Domenico pushed away his untouched plate of pasta and let his chin fall to his chest. “I don’t know.”

  But later that night, sitting in his darkened room, unable to sleep, he had an idea, and the next morning it was Domenico de Grazia who carried Emma’s breakfast of caffé latte, focaccia, and marmalade to her. He set the tray on the bed for her, pulled a chair up next to her, and got quickly to the point.

  “Emma, my dear, your friend Gia—has she had her child?’”

  “I don’t know, Uncle. Any day now.”

  “And what will happen to it? Is it true that she plans to give it up for adoption?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle. I think maybe that was just talk.” She offered up a listless smile that wrung his heart. “And you feel different once you’ve had it.”

  “But can she afford to keep it? A single woman? A laundress?”

  Emma had picked up a wedge of focaccia, but put it down again. “It will be hard. She has no father. Her mother no longer speaks to her. She has no money . . . It won’t be easy.”

  But her face said it all: she would happily have traded places.

  Domenico laid his hand on hers and tried to keep the building excitement out of his voice. “Emma, I have an idea. Now don’t say no until you hear me out…”

  AND so the arrangements were made. With the help of a generous financial settlement from Domenico, Gia agreed to part with her baby (a little too readily for Domenico’s taste), and when Emma and Franco returned to Stresa a few days later, after their absence of six months, they, too, had a newborn baby boy to show off to the world. And the glowing Emma was her happy, sweet-natured self again.

  The two infants were christened a few weeks apart at the parish church in Stresa, where Domenico’s great-great-great-grandfather had been christened in 1786, the year of the church’s founding. Domenico’s new heir was called Vincenzo Paoli de Grazia, after San Vincenzo di Paoli, the great benefactor of the poor. The Ungarettis named their baby Filiberto, after Franco’s maternal grandfather, a knife grinder. It was hardly the name Domenico would have chosen, but there was no room in his heart to begrudge anyone anything. Filiberto Ungaretti it would be.

  All was well.

  ONE

  The Village of Stresa, Lake Maggiore, Italy, the Present

  IT was the blue Honda that had started it, both traffic policemen agreed afterward.

  The two veteran traffic officers, spruce and natty in their crisp blue uniforms and their caps, belts, and crisp white shirts, were just discarding their cigarettes and pushing through the glass doors of the Polizia Municipale building to report for the morning shift when the blast of noise—squealing tires, blaring horns, warning shouts—made them turn back toward the street.

  The little Honda was trying to do the impossible or at the very least the idiotic—to pass another car on the Corso Italia in the middle of the morning rush. True, the Corso was ample by local standards, the widest avenue in Stresa, a beautiful concourse that ran picturesquely along the lakefront, with two lanes in each direction. And as rush hours went, Stresa’s wasn’t anything to brag about, but that didn’t mean you could expect to lane-change as if you were on the motorway around Rome. And certainly not with a big semitrailer truck—a Mercedes-Benz cab hauling an empty flatbed—bearing down on you in the oncoming lane and more than filling it.

  There was nothing they could do but stand there and watch it happen. The driver of the truck slammed on his brakes—they could see him pulling on the wheel so hard (as if it made any difference) that he was standing up, like a wagon driver hauling back on the reins. The truck slewed to the left, veered in front of the oncoming traffic, bounced heavily up over the curb, scattering pedestrians, and went scraping and grinding across the entrance to the police parking lot until its huge left front wheel sank squarely into one of the planting beds that bordered the entrance.

  The only damage to city property that they could see were a couple of bushes that had been run over, but the truck was in sorry shape. The flatbed in the rear, carried forward by its momentum, had swung around to the right, snapping or twisting something in the trailer connection, so that it ended up tilted and jackknifed, with its rear end clear on the other side of the street, almost up to the sidewalk and thoroughly eliminating any possibility of through traffic for hours to come. And as if that weren’t bad enough, an oncoming French tour bus had also veered wildly to avert disaster, and had ended up directly across from the police station, drunkenly sprawled in the Piazza Matteoti, which the city hall shared with the upscale Café Bolongaro. Café tables and chairs, unused at this time of the morning (so there was one little piece of luck, at any rate), had been overturned and now littered the little square. The bus passengers sat in their seats like statues, silent and white. Below the line of stunned faces, printed in bright red letters on the side of the bus, was the tour company’s slogan: LE PLAISIR DE VOYAGER.

  As for the blue Honda that had caused it all, it had managed to scoot out of the way back into its lane and was long gone.

  The two constables were running toward the driver before the truck tire had finished sinking into the soft earth. “Hey there, are you all right? Are you hurt?” Officer Giuseppe di Paolo called up to him.

  The poorly shaven, gray-mustached man raised his head from the steering wheel, looking shell-shocked. “All right? Yes . . . it wasn’t my fault . . . there was a car . . .”

  “We saw, we saw,” the officer said. “Did you get the license plate?”

  “No, I couldn’t . . . it was . . . no.”

  At this point Officer Gualtiero Favaretto asserted his natural authority (he was senior by four months) and took charge. “You,” he commanded the driver, “sit there a minute, make sure you’re not injured. Then go inside at once and tell them what happened.” His tone grew more somber. “You’d better ask for Comandante Boldini.”

  The driver nodded wanly. “Yes, sir.”

  Favaretto turned to his partner. “Giuseppe, this is going to create the mother of all snarls. Nobody’s going to be able to get through town. I’ll do what I can to get started cleaning up here. You better go in and tell them we need to put somebody out on the Corso up by the Regina Palace, and somebody else down at the Villa Palavicino turnoff, to divert traffic.”

  Di Paolo started docilely in, then stopped and gestured vaguely in the direction of the warren of narrow, winding alleys and pedestrian streets that constituted Stresa. And in the other direction was the lake. The only avenue of any substance in the town was the Corso itself. “Divert to where?”

  “That,” Favaretto replied magisterially, “is their problem. And Giuseppe,” he added, waving at the obstructed police lot, “tell him they’ll have to get there on foot. There will be no vehicles leaving here for some time to come.”

  ENRICO Dellochio saw the whole thing too; unfortunately for him, from the best seat in the house—behind the wheel of the dove-gray, perfectly kept-up 1978 Daimler limousine that had been trailing the flatbed truck. He’d been stuck in its wake for three blocks, ever since the lumbering flatbed had turned unexpectedly out of Via Pr
ini and cut directly in front of them, forcing him to jam on his brakes and bringing a petulant complaint from Achille de Grazia in the back seat. Enrico would ordinarily have had his suspicions about a truck cutting them off like that, but an empty flatbed with nobody visible in it but the driver? Not much threat there. Still, he checked the rearview mirror to satisfy himself that no one had come up behind to hem them in. No, nothing, just some tourist on a rented moped, driving with the frozen concentration of a man who wished he was anywhere but on it.

  Enrico had spotted the blue Honda coming toward them, darting in and out of traffic like a bug, apparently well before the truck driver had. By the time the big rig’s brake lights flashed on, Enrico had already eased the limo to a gentle, anticipatory standstill. He watched with a mixture of satisfaction and disgust—he hated idiot drivers—as the rig made the disastrous, swerving, locked-brake attempt at a stop that would leave it splayed like a beached whale across the full breadth of the Corso Italia. Meanwhile, here came the Honda, picking up speed as it slipped by the careening flatbed and getting back into its own lane barely in time to avoid the now stationary Daimler. It scooted by, gunning its engine, its rear end shimmying, and with maybe ten inches to spare. If they’d both been standing still, he could have reached out and grabbed the Honda’s driver by the neck, which he wouldn’t have minded doing.

  “Crazy bastard!” Enrico shouted after him, applying the appropriate finger arrangement.

  “Let’s not have any of that,” came the adenoidal injunction from the backseat.

  Enrico muttered to himself. He still tried to think of Achille as a polite, quiet kid who respected his elders, but that had been years ago, when Enrico had first started work for the boy’s father, Vincenzo de Grazia, and it had been a misapprehension at the time. Since then, he’d come to know Achille only too well as the snotty, overbearing little turd he was. So much for what being born to a life of privilege could do for a kid.

  “Sorry, sir,” Enrico said politely. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  It had been a few months now since Achille had suggested that Enrico address him as “sir,” even in private, and it still rankled. Enrico was fifty-one years old, for Christ’s sake. What was Achille, sixteen? And age differences aside, Enrico didn’t take kindly to calling someone wearing a Hootie and the Blowfish T-shirt “sir.”

  By now the boy had taken in the mess in front of them. “Oh, no, I don’t believe it. Can we squeeze around that?”

  “Not a chance,” Enrico said. “Sir.”

  “Well, what are you going to do? My French class starts in twenty minutes. My father will kill me if I miss another one. You better think of something, or you’re in big trouble, Enrico, I’m telling you.”

  That was another thing that got to him—this empty, pointless, throwing around of his puny weight—but Enrico had lots of practice repressing the urge to give the kid a whack across the chops. “It won’t be a problem, sir. That lane on our right, that’s Via Principe Tomaso. We can—”

  “That’s a pedestrian street, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, technically, but it’s early, the crowds aren’t out yet, we can get away with it. There are only a couple of tight corners. Principe Tomaso takes us up a block to Via Ottolini, where we can do a short left on Via Mazzini, which—”

  “All right, all right, do it. Jesus Christ.”

  “I have to back up a little first.”

  Enrico stuck his head and arms out the window and made pushing motions with his hands. The moped driver was slow to understand, but finally rolled back a few feet. Enrico waved his thanks, reversed for a few feet, and turned up Via Principe Tomaso, a cobblestoned alley that ran between the sides and backs of buildings that faced the Corso, and was only just wide enough for the Daimler. Instinctively he glanced up at the mirror to see if anybody was following, but there was no one. There wouldn’t be many people who’d be aware that you could get back onto the Corso by circling around this way. Fifty yards up the street, he turned into the equally narrow, equally empty Via Ottolini, edged cautiously around the planter boxes set out in front of the Hotel da Cesare, jogged around the blind corner at the intersection of Via Mazzini (where a surprised grocer setting his wares out on the pavement grumblingly made room for him to pass), eased with care onto Via Garibaldi—

  “Enrico, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, I know what I’m doing.” Achille had been in a fouler mood than usual from the start this morning, and Enrico, who was supposed to have had a day off today, was starting to feel a little testy himself. “Don’t get excited, we’ll be back out on the road in two minutes. All we have to do is turn left on Via Rosmini there.”

  “Then why are we just sitting here?”

  Then why don’t you look out the damn window and see? “There’s a car in our way, sir. That Audi up ahead, it’s blocking Rosmini. It just backed out of the church parking lot, and it takes a while to get straightened out in these little alleys.”

  Achille said something but Enrico didn’t hear. He had made another one of his automatic rearview mirror checks and this time there was something there; a gray Opel hatchback with one man in it had drawn up behind them, no more than ten yards away.

  Now they were blocked front and back. An edgy little prickle slid up the nape of his neck. Not that there was anything really unusual about the situation—this kind of thing was bound to happen all the time on Stresa’s constricted old streets, and often did—but it was exactly the kind of predicament that he wasn’t supposed to get into, the kind of predicament he was paid to avoid: a narrow, virtually windowless alley hemmed in by walls of stone and stucco, a car in front and a car behind, and no room to get by either one of them.

  He tapped the horn. “Come on, come on, let’s go!” he yelled to the one in front, still jiggling its way into a position from which it could drive forward. That one, he saw now, had two men in the front seat. He got a little edgier. This had been really stupid of him. The hell with the kid’s French class. He’d known better, he should have used his head. They should have waited it out with everybody else on the Corso.

  “Enrico, for Christ’s sake,” Achille said angrily, with his hands to his ears, “you could at least warn me before you blow that thing. With these stone walls—”

  “Shut up,” Enrico said. “Get down on the floor.”

  Achille was shocked into stuttering. “Wh—wh—what is it? Those men—”

  “Get the hell down! Now!” Enrico snapped when the boy didn’t move, and Achille hurriedly dropped out of sight behind him.

  Enrico’s eyes were fixed dead ahead. The Audi’s doors had opened. The men were clambering out, brandishing handguns, their heads covered by stocking masks, their hands gloved. His nervousness had hardened into a sort of instant, stony calm. His mind was suddenly still, focused, stripped of extraneous thought. It was an instinctive reaction that had once made him a good cop and, later, a more-than-good soldier-for-hire. And it made him good at what he did for a living now.

  Acting with disciplined speed, he made sure the doors were locked, pressed the button to roll up all the windows, flicked open the snaps on his holsters, jogged the grips of the handguns to make sure they were at the ready, and hit the memory button on the cell phone to dial the carabinieri . The two men ran up to the limo, one on either side, looking like a couple of monster twins, their features squashed and deformed by the stocking masks.

  “PUT the phone down!” Ugo Fogazzaro shouted through the gauzy skin of the mask, hammering on the window with the heel of his hand. “Put the goddamned phone down!”

  They’d just begun but already things were going wrong. If the boss was such a great planner, how come nobody had mentioned the phone? From the first day he’d had a bad feeling about this job.

  The window glass was tinted, but Ugo could see that the driver had the telephone to his ear but wasn’t speaking into it yet. Whoever he was calling hadn’t yet answered. The driver stared ahead, st
iff-faced, without moving, ignoring the guns directed at him from either side. Ugo whacked the window with the butt of his gun, a heavy, snub-nosed Ruger .357 magnum. The safety glass held up. He hit it again, harder, and this time it buckled, a hole opening up in the middle. Now he could hear the driver’s voice.

  “I’m in a car on—”

  Using the barrel of the gun, Ugo reached in and batted the phone away. A welt appeared on the driver’s temple, where the muzzle had scraped it, and quickly beaded with blood. The driver didn’t move. Ugo put the Ruger up against the corner of his jaw. “Turn off the engine.”

  The driver did as he was told.

  “Now unlock the doors, all of them.”

  “The ignition has to be on.” He was still staring stolidly ahead, his jaw muscles working. A tough guy.

  “No, it doesn’t. Don’t mess with me!” He shoved the muzzle hard against the man’s jaw and clicked back the hammer with his thumb. “Hurry up!”

  There was a soft tick as the locks unlatched. Ugo pulled open the front door. On the passenger side, Marcello did the same.

  “Keys,” Ugo said.

  The driver took them from the ignition and handed them to him. Ugo flung them over a stone garden wall beside the church.

  “Now,” he said, “both hands on the wheel, up at the top. Okay, now use your left hand to get your gun out of the holster. Two fingers only.”

  “I don’t carry a—”

  “Don’t bullshit me! I told you once.” He dug the muzzle of the pistol with its jutting front sight into the tender place where neck and jaw intersected, and twisted. He could feel ligaments grind in there, and the driver grunted and tried to pull his head away. What do you know, not so tough after all.