by Aaron Elkins
“Family crest?” Gideon asked.
Phil nodded. “Lion’s paw holding a tea bud. The de Grazias are supposed to have brought tea to Italy. I forget what the lion has to do with it. Nobody takes that heraldic crap too seriously anymore. Well, except for my grandfather, of course, God bless him.”
“What was that he said about a crisis? Did we come at a bad time?”
Phil shrugged. “I doubt it. Nonno Cosimo isn’t always . . . well, he kind of lives in his own world—namely the pre-1946 world, before the dissolution of the aristocracy. Anyway, he’s well into his eighties, and sometimes, you know, the skylight leaks a little? In a charming way, of course. ‘Time of crisis’ probably means Bacco didn’t take his morning dump.”
“Fili, welcome to the island, why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
It was spoken in Italian, with impatience—if not irritation—and it didn’t sound like much of a welcome. They turned to see a trim, wiry, gray-headed man dressed in a perfectly tailored cashmere sport coat; tie; pale, flawlessly pressed trousers; and tasseled loafers striding, with every appearance of authority, toward them. Ah, the boss man, Gideon thought. Vincenzo de Grazia, il padrone.
The corners of Phil’s mouth turned down just a little. “Hello, Vincenzo. When have I ever told you I was coming?”
Vincenzo uttered a flat, one-note laugh. “That’s true enough. But at a time like this? You might have let me know.” Gideon noticed that the usual Mediterranean embrace wasn’t in evidence.
“At a time like what? Is something the matter?”
“Are you serious? You didn’t know? Achille—” He stopped and peered at Gideon. “Who are these?” he said to Phil.
“These are my friends Professor and Mrs. Oliver,” Phil said.
“Americans?” Vincenzo asked, and on receiving nods, switched without comment to fluent English. “You’re welcome here, but we are having a problem. My son has been kidnapped.”
Phil gaped at him. “Achille?”
“Do I have another son?” Vincenzo said tartly.
“I’m sorry, I only—”
“I know, I know. I apologize, I’m a little tense. It’s good that you’re here, Fili. We’re about to hold a . . . you know, a consiglio . . .” He groped for the English word.
“A council,” Gideon supplied. He didn’t want to seem to be hiding from Vincenzo the fact that he had some Italian.
“A family council, that’s right.” Vincenzo said, unimpressed. “They’re all waiting in the gallery. When Cesare told me you’d come, I assumed that was why.”
“I didn’t know anything about it. But I’d like to sit in, if that’s all right. Maybe there’s something I can do.”
“Of course it’s all right. You’re one of the family, aren’t you?” Then, after another joyless laugh: “More than most of them, anyway.” He turned to Gideon. “In the meantime, perhaps you and your wife would care to—”
“I’m afraid we’ve picked a bad time for a visit,” Gideon said. “We’re sorry for your trouble, signore. I think it’d be best if my wife and I just went back to Stresa.”
But Vincenzo wouldn’t allow it. “Certainly not. It won’t take us long. Make yourselves comfortable in the breakfast garden. My man will see to refreshments. And the island is yours to explore. The animals are tame.”
“Grazie, signore,” Julie said.
“Jesus, Vincenzo, I really am really sorry about this,” they heard Phil saying as he was led back to the villa. “Is he all right? When did it happen? Jesus.”
SIX
THE gallery, in which the consiglio was to be held, was a smallish room without windows on the ground floor, the faded, red-flocked walls of which were covered floor-to-ceiling with portraits of defunct de Grazias, some in medieval armor; some in frilly seventeenth-century courtiers’ garb, some in military uniforms or 1930s businessmen’s suits, and in one case, the reason for which was no longer known, in a balloon-trousered Turkish pasha’s outfit complete with turban and jeweled dagger. Furnished with the oldest, ugliest, and least comfortable furniture in the house—dark, slab-backed, hard-seated wooden chairs from the Italian Gothic (apparently a time when human anatomy was imperfectly understood)—and with a couple of massive, grim commodes to match, the gallery had been Vincenzo’s choice for familial consigli from the day he took the reins from his father. He frequently said it was because it imbued their councils with the fitting ambience of family tradition. But the prevailing view, in which Phil shared, was that he’d picked it because the uncomfortable seating guaranteed that the meetings would be brief. There was even a rumor that he’d had an inch taken off the front legs of all the chairs to help speed people on their way.
On the way there, Vincenzo took Phil aside, into the music room with its two harpsichords and virginal—tuned every three months without exception and dusted weekly, but never, to Phil’s knowledge, played—to fill him in on the current status of things. Achille had been taken from a company limousine the previous Thursday, four days earlier. There had been shooting and two people were dead, but Achille was believed to be all right. Nothing at all had been heard until a few hours ago, when the carabiniere in charge of the case, Colonel Caravale, had telephoned. It seemed that a fax from the kidnappers, with their demands, had been sent to Vincenzo’s office in Ghiffa and automatically diverted, as were all faxes and telephone calls for the time being, to carabinieri headquarters.
“What do they want?” Phil asked.
“I don’t know yet. I didn’t speak with him personally. He’ll be here with it at eleven o’clock.” As custom required, Vincenzo had called a consiglio, and the de Grazias and their kin were now gathered and awaiting the colonel’s arrival.
“The usual crew?” Phil asked.
With a sigh and a barely discernible lift of his eyes, Vincenzo nodded. “Every last one. Your ‘sainted’ grandfather, of course, who, in his usual way—”
“Yes, I met him outside,” Phil said, cutting him off. He didn’t want to hear Vincenzo’s mocking assessment of the aged Cosimo. “Let’s go in.”
“I want to wait out front for the colonel, but you go ahead and join the others,” Vincenzo said. “I know you can’t wait to see them all again.”
“Mm,” said Phil noncommittally.
THE fact was, he always did look forward to seeing them. His Italian relatives were, after all, the only family he had. Between visits he would invariably forget how much they got on his nerves. That is, he knew they did, but he couldn’t quite remember why. It usually took about ten minutes for it to come back to him, and today was no exception. Once the excitement and surprise at his showing up had died down, it started.
And as usual, it was Dante Galasso who was the first to get to him.
Technically speaking, Dante wasn’t a relative—that is, a blood relative—either of Phil’s or of the de Grazias’. But he was married to Vincenzo’s older sister Francesca, which gave him the privilege of residing with her at the villa, along with the right to participate in the consigli if he so chose, which he unfailingly did.
A sinewy man with a deeply lined face, a bony head atop a snakelike neck, and a thin, contemptuous twist to his lips, as if he knew all sorts of things you didn’t, he had been a Marxist professor of Italian language and culture at the University of Bologna in 1984, when Francesca had been a student there. She had fallen under his spell and the following year, over the vigorous objections of her father Domenico, she had married him. This had caused Domenico enormous grief, inasmuch as Francesca, even more than his brother Cosimo or his son Vincenzo, had been his dearest confidante and had served as mistress of Isola de Grazia since the death of her mother.
A week after the wedding the married couple came to the villa to pay their respects. In a rare emotional scene, the outraged Domenico had Dante forcibly ejected, and for many months father and daughter were estranged. But when Francesca began visiting without Dante in tow, Domenico’s reserve broke down, and they soon became as close
as ever. As Phil understood it, the one condition the old man insisted upon was that Dante’s name, or the fact of Francesca’s marriage to him, never be referred to, even indirectly. Francesca, apparently, had no objections and took to spending one or two husbandless weekends a month at her old home.
In the meantime, Dante had continued to teach in Bologna, living in nearby Modena with Francesca, until Domenico had died in 1993. Then, with the old man’s hostility no longer an issue and the widowed Vincenzo more than happy to have his sister on hand to reassume her old role as mistress of Isola de Grazia, he had returned with Francesca to take up residence at the villa “for a year of reflection and renewal.”
That had been ten years ago, but here he was, still reflecting and renewing away, with no sign of letting up.
“So then, here we are,” he said when they had retaken their uncomfortable seats after greeting Phil. He sipped from a gold-rimmed teacup and gestured at the dark, sober portraits that surrounded them, “Once again we find ourselves in the de Grazia Family Hall of Undistinguished Provincial Magistrates, Obscure Papal Sycophants, and Second-Rate, Do-Nothing Admirals.”
This was said just as Cosimo came in from his walk with Bacco. Phil knew perfectly well that it was meant to bait the old man, and predictably, it did.
“The de Grazias have centuries of public service to their credit,” he said sternly, taking one of the remaining chairs, pointedly turning it so that he wasn’t required to rest his eyes directly on Dante, and settling the old dog beside his legs, “which is more than can be said for the Galassos. And I remind you that my sainted brother Alfredo was no ‘donothing admiral.’ He fought and died as a decorated naval officer in the Second World War.”
Dante tipped back his head and laughed. “Sure, with the Fascists. Now there’s something to be proud of, all right.”
“He despised the Fascists, as you well know. He loathed Mussolini.”
“But he fought on their side anyway. Pardon me, but I’ve never understood how that makes sense.”
Bacco, sensing that his master was in need of support, uttered an uncertain growl in Dante’s direction. Cosimo sat very straight, stroking the furry, nervous head. “It is to Alfredo’s unending credit that he gave his life in a war he hated, obeying a leader he abhorred, in a cause he distrusted. I assure you, if he didn’t bear the name he did, he would not have done it, something I don’t expect you to understand.”
He sat up even straighter. “Do you know what he said to Domenico and to me the morning he left?” He was addressing the entire group now. “‘This war is going to be lost, brothers, I have no doubt of that. But we must lose it as well as we can.’” He looked from face to face. “He was a de Grazia.”
Dante shook his head, as if in incredulity, although he, like all of them, had heard the story before. “All I can say is, let us all be grateful that such traditions are now obsolete, along with the decadent, moribund aristocracy that spawned them.”
“Decadent . . . I . . . you . . .” Cosimo, having run out of steam, shook his head with an old man’s trembling frustration. The dog, looking up at him with concerned eyes, nuzzled his hand.
It was an old debate, and although on an intellectual level Phil had to agree with Dante, it was his grandfather’s side that he instinctively took. The only thing that had kept him from publicly standing with Cosimo so far was his reluctance to begin his visit by getting into an unwinnable argument. Besides, this had been going on for years and would keep going on after he left, so what difference would it make? But he was now resolved to jump in if Dante pushed his luck in the face of Cosimo’s capitulation, as he probably would.
Francesca saved him the trouble. Before Dante had gotten out another full sentence (“Once it’s understood that all the tired old ideas of reactionism and imperialism have been obsolete for fifty years, and Italy comes to terms with its tawdry history of marginalization—”) her dismissive, painfully incisive voice cut him off.
“Tired old ideas is exactly right. Keep it up, Dante, and when the revolution comes, you won’t have to kill all the capitalists, you’ll have bored them to death long before.”
Dante glowered at her. “How very amusing.”
“I thought it was time for someone to be amusing.”
Francesca de Grazia Galasso had been—still was—one of those classic Italian beauties, long-nosed, black-haired, flashing-eyed, and from Phil’s point of view, overwhelmingly, almost frighteningly, hard-edged. Although they had never taken to each other—as a child, Francesca had preferred to keep well clear of her Ungaretti kin—he was always grateful for her presence at family affairs, which were dull things in her absence. With Francesca around, the clang of steel blades, the exciting glint of armor, was never very far away.
Well into her forties now, and more formidable than ever, she had been a textbook example of the adoring student who fulfilled her dreams by marrying the professor she idolized, only to find that his brilliant and profound observations tended to be less dazzling after she’d heard them a few dozen times. It also hadn’t taken her long to figure out—correctly, in Phil’s opinion—that she was smarter than he was. For many years now she had been paying little attention to anything he said, and on the few occasions she did, she was equally likely to be bored or irritated.
Over those years she had turned from the rebel against her own class that Dante had briefly made her, into as much a defender of the ancienne noblesse as Cosimo was, but of a very different sort. Caustic and exacting, she was the terror of the household staff, more than once reducing a new maid or young assistant gardener to tears. Not long before, Clemente and Genoveffa Candeloro, the married couple who had served as major domo and housekeeper since Domenico’s day, had thrown an unprecedented joint tantrum and walked out. It seemed that Francesca, during one of her white-glove tours of inspection, had shut one too many French windows and said, one too many times: “If dirt does not get in, dirt does not have to be got out.” It had taken the intervention of Vincenzo to get them to return, and relations were still on the dicey side.
Long ago, when Francesca had first started talking back to Dante, he had reacted with astonishment and indignation, neither of which had had any lasting effect on her. Now she no longer argued, but she no longer listened either, and when she casually cut him off or publicly ignored him, he still flared up once in a while, but generally did nothing worse than mutter back at her and eventually shut up. What their life might be like in private nobody knew and nobody wanted to guess.
As it was, and probably very much for the better, they spent little time together. The highly intelligent Francesca, who had gotten her accounting degree at Bologna despite the distractions provided by Dante, was Aurora’s chief financial officer and Vincenzo’s trusted second-in-command. In effect, it was Francesca who ran the company day-to-day, while Vincenzo was jetting around making deals or getting his clothes filthy at the building sites—an arrangement they both preferred. These duties kept her away from the villa a good forty, and sometimes fifty, hours a week (to the great relief of the household staff). Dante, on the other hand, stuck close to home, cranking out fiery manifestos for various left-wing or postmodernist antiestablishment periodicals, unbothered by the paradox of living high off the hog, in the bosom of a patrician family, while doing it.
Around the corner of the room from them, seated side-by-side, shoulders touching, like a pair of oversized nuthatches, on a heavy wooden dowry chest from the fifteenth century, were two people who were, in appearance, almost the exact opposites of the Galassos: a plump, pink-cheeked couple who were invariably protective of each other. These were the Barberos, Bella and Basilio. Bella was the daughter, by a previous marriage, of Domenico’s wife, which made her Vincenzo’s half-sister, which, Phil supposed, made her his own . . . what, stepaunt? Second cousin, once removed? He’d have to ask Gideon.
Or maybe not. He’d gotten along until now without knowing, after all.
As Domenico’s stepdaughter, Bella
had grown up on the island, among the de Grazias, and had married Basilio when they were both twenty-four. That had been thirty-five years ago, and if they’d ever said a cross word to each other since, nobody could remember having heard it. Not that Bella had any shortage of cross words when it came to other people. Hypersensitive and short-fused, she had chafed most of her life under the humiliation of depending on the largesse of her stepfamily. Marriage to Basilio had come as a tremendous release, and she’d wasted no time in escaping to Milan with him. However, her husband, an ineffectual, jovial man with a diploma in human resources, had proven unequal to the task of supporting her in the style to which she’d become accustomed. After a few years of relative deprivation in Milan, she had turned for help to her stepfather.
Not unexpectedly, Domenico had come through. Following his father’s instructions, Vincenzo had created a make-work job with a nice title for him at Aurora: employee salary and benefits administrator. With the appointment to this position, the Barberos had come back to the villa to live. It had been intended as a temporary measure until they found someplace nearby, but somehow it had settled into permanence.
Later, when Vincenzo had taken over the company as CEO and chairman of the board of directors, he had given the somewhat underemployed Basilio another essentially meaningless responsibility as chairman of the newly created policy advisory committee. In the decade since then, Basilio, being Basilio, had voted with Vincenzo 434 out of 435 times, the one exception being in 1996 when Basilio stood up for his principles and voted, against Vincenzo’s openly expressed wishes, for installing a candy machine in the plant. There had been no similar revolt since.
While Domenico had been alive, it hadn’t been so bad for Bella at the villa. Although not a de Grazia, she was, after all, the daughter of the padrone’s own wife and he had treated her with consideration, if not with great affection. But after the old man died, once Vincenzo had become padrone, the atmosphere had changed. It was nothing he’d ever said in so many words, but he made it clear, every day, in a hundred ways, that she was now nothing more than one more unwelcome ward, an unasked-for, barely noticed obligation he was honor-bound to meet. His despicable sister Francesca and even the snot-nosed young Achille had taken their cues from Vincenzo and had begun treating her accordingly. But despite the many provocations, after twenty-two years it no longer seemed conceivable to live elsewhere. Besides, the damned de Grazias owed it to her.