by Aaron Elkins
“Ahh,” said Caravale with an evil, knowing grin. So he’d had the same nasty thought.
“Assuming you or your men haven’t been broadcasting it around,” Gideon went on, “the only people who’d know would be—”
“The de Grazias, that’s right. We’re back to them. And that doctor, Luzzatto. Or maybe other people they might have told. But that’s easy to check. For the time being, it looks as if we’re talking about the nine fine people that were in that room with us yesterday.”
“Eight people. I think you can pretty safely exclude Phil Boyajian.”
Caravale said nothing, but only tipped his head to one side and waggled his hand, palm down. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Fair enough, Gideon thought. From the police point of view, at this stage of the game no one was to be excluded, certainly not on the testimony of an old friend.
Gideon did a little more pondering. “If it is one of those people—”
“One or more of those people.”
“—then that pretty much has to mean that the same person—”
“Or people.”
“—was behind Domenico’s murder ten years ago, or at least involved in it in some way. Right? Why else try to hide anything about the bones?”
Caravale’s answer was a head-tilted, open-handed shoulder shrug that as much as said that the conclusion was self-evident; the facts spoke for themselves.
“His own family,” Gideon said.
“Or Luzzatto. One of the nine people in that room,” he said again.
Gideon shook his head. “The guy that choked me—he wasn’t in that room, I can tell you that much. Believe me, I would have remembered those arms.”
“A hired hand.”
They paused while the owner-waiter set down Gideon’s soup and Caravale’s wedge of artichoke pie.
“Hired hands kidnapping Achille last week, a hired hand trying to stop me from examining the bones of his murdered grandfather today,” Gideon said. “Isn’t that a lot of hired hands? You can’t have that many criminals for hire wandering around Stresa. Doesn’t it make you wonder at least a little if the two things might be related?”
“Wandering around Stresa, no. But not so many kilometers away, wandering around Milan, yes. Look, Gideon, the kidnapping, the murder, they happened ten years apart.”
“To the same family.”
“Yes, the same family. So? What are you suggesting, that one of the de Grazias not only murdered Domenico, but kidnapped Achille too? We had a liquor store robbed the day before yesterday in Stresa. Do you think that might have been the de Grazia gang as well?”
“No, of course that’s not what I’m suggesting—well, I don’t know, maybe I am. All I’m saying is that the two things might possibly be connected one way or another. I had an old professor who used to talk about what he called the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. I don’t know how that would translate into Italian, but what he was saying was that when too many seemingly unrelated incidents occur to the same set of people in the same—”
“I understand what he was saying, but what do you say we just deal with the facts that we have instead of coming up with complicated theories? We have a decade-old murder of an old man. We have a week-old kidnapping of a boy. Two separate cases, ten years apart. Believe me, we have enough resources to deal with them both on their own merits. And as things stand, I don’t see a good reason for assuming they’re part of anything bigger.”
Gideon held up his hands in defeat. Caravale had just delivered a pretty good précis of Gideon’s standard classroom presentation on Occam’s razor, the Law of Parsimony: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. The simplest theory that fits the facts is the best one upon which to proceed.”
And Gideon believed in that. Absolutely.
On the other hand, there was Alfred North Whitehead’s take on the subject: “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” That was the nice thing about theories. If you looked hard enough, you could always find one to fit what you were thinking.
SEVENTEEN
“GIDEON?” Caravale said on the drive back to Stresa. “Do you remember yesterday, at the ‘consiglio’”—he put a sour-mouthed set of quotation marks around the word—“that Luzzatto said something about Domenico de Grazia’s having something to ponder on the day he died?”
“Yes.”
“Can you remember exactly what he said?”
“Everybody was speaking Italian, Tullio. I didn’t pick up every word. But didn’t he say he knew—knew for a fact—that Domenico had some kind of decision to on his mind?”
“But not what? No specifics?”
“If he did, I didn’t hear it.”
“Nor did I. Then that will be an interesting question to ask him, don’t you think?”
“What important decision Domenico had on his mind just before somebody killed him? Yeah, I’d say it would be.”
“I would too,” said Caravale.
As Caravale slid the car into a parking space at the Hotel Primavera, the question of Gideon’s safety was raised and quickly disposed of. The colonel needed to go out to the island that afternoon to interview the family and get statements. While there, he would make sure that everyone was informed that Gideon’s examination of the remains was done and his report to Caravale had already been made. He’d do the same with the local press, which was naturally showing interest. That would, or should, remove any new danger to him. Unless, of course, Gideon wished protection, in which case it would be provided.
“Thanks, no.” Gideon had been through the well-meaning intrusiveness and inconvenience of police protection before. He got out of the car, closed the door, and leaned in the open window. “I’ll be fine, Tullio. I appreciate the offer, but I’d be happier not seeing a cop every time I turn around.”
Caravale looked up at him and mournfully nodded. “So would I.”
IT took a while for Gideon’s parasympathetic nervous system’s post-stress reaction to fully kick in, but when it did, it was a lulu. Saying “ciao” to Caravale, he’d felt all right, but by the time he’d climbed the three flights to his room, his leg muscles were twitching and the strength was running out of him like water. Fumbling weakly at the door with his key, he could practically feel the adrenaline overdose draining out of his system. He made straight for the bed and flopped on his face. Before he could take his shoes off, he was asleep.
When the telephone rang two hours later, he was still on his face, his feet over the edge of the bed. He lifted his head and cocked one eye open to see the time and to gauge how he felt. Better than he’d expected: no shakiness, no palpitations. Homeostasis pretty much restored. But the short, deep sleep had made him dopey. It took four chirps of the phone before he was sitting up and groping for it. Caravale was on the line.
“Listen, are you up to coming over to my office? If not, I can come there.”
“No, I’m fine. I could use the fresh air. What’s up?”
“I have a picture I want to show you.”
THERE were six color photos, not one, arranged along the edge of the desk for his inspection. Four of them were dual, full-face-profile mug shots, the other two candid photographs. The men in them all looked superficially similar.
“Do you recognize any of them?” Caravale asked, tilting back in his chair and crossing one stocky thigh over the other.
Gideon glanced along the row. “Is one of these the one who tried to strangle me?”
“Ah? What makes you think so?”
Gideon shrugged. “Because they look strong, and they look dumb. And why else would you be showing me photographs? Anyway, no, I don’t recognize any of them. Which one did you think it was?”
“This one.” Caravale leaned forward and put his finger on the set of mug shots that was second from the left.
Gideon scrutinized them more carefully, thinking that perhaps he had caught a glimpse of the man’s face without realizing it, and that it might come back to him. The man had oily, recedi
ng black hair, eyebrows like caterpillars, a jowly lantern jaw, and a glowering aura of bull-headed obstinacy.
“Sorry, not familiar at all. Doesn’t look like anybody I know,” Gideon said, which wasn’t entirely true. What the guy looked like was a muscle-bound version of Tullio Caravale. “Sorry.”
“Too bad. It would have been better if you could verify it. But he’s the one, all right. We have someone else who picked him out.”
“You found a witness? I thought it was too dark, I thought they were too far away.”
“Not a witness to the attack, no . . . not exactly. But we have someone who can verify his breakfast.”
“Verify his . . . Tullio, you’re losing me again.”
Caravale smiled. “Ham and cheese, remember? Coffee with grappa. You’re the one who told us.”
“Yes, sure, but . . .” He shook his head. “Help me out here. I’m still a little slow.”
At five forty-five in the morning, Caravale explained, the only café in Stresa that was open was old Crossetti’s stand next to the ferry building, which started serving at five o’clock for the benefit of the ferry workers.
“Where I got my coffee,” Gideon said.
“Right. And that’s where Big Paolo here”—he tapped the photo again—“got his ham-and-cheese panino and his caffé corretto half an hour before that. We described the order to old Crossetti, and old Crossetti promptly described the buyer to us. There’d been only two orders like that so far—five fifteen is a little early for panini—and the other person was an old lady with a goiter—Crossetti has a keen eye for his customers. And when we showed him the photographs I just showed you, he picked out Big Paolo without hesitation.”
“Big Paolo. You even know his name.”
“Paolo Tossignano. Also known as Dumb Paolo, but not to his face. Another thug-for-rent from Milan. As I thought,” he reminded Gideon.
“Tullio, you don’t waste any time, do you?” Gideon shook his head in genuine admiration. “Two hours after he came out of the ground, you had Domenico identified. And now you figure out who this guy is almost as fast—without any eyewitnesses. No wonder you got to be a colonel.”
Caravale’s pouty, pock-marked face gleamed with pleasure. “You haven’t heard the most interesting part. We didn’t just happen to have Paolo’s picture handy, you know. Would you like to know why we had it?”
“That would be nice,” Gideon said.
“Because,” Caravale said, enjoying himself, “he’d just been identified as taking part in another recent crime. You see, there was one reliable witness to Achille’s kidnapping—a grocer, Muccio. He got a good look at the one kidnapper without a mask, and a few days ago he was able to identify him as—”
“Dumb Paolo.”
“Correct, the very same.”
“But that would mean . . . that would mean . . .” Maybe he was groggy. He was having a hard time sorting out the implications. “What would it mean?”
“It would mean,” Caravale said, “that there just might be something to this theory of interconnected whatever-it-is after all.”
“Monkey business,” Gideon said.
“Whatever. But the one thing we can say for sure is that Big, Dumb Paolo Tossignano not only tried to twist your head off, but was also one of Achille’s kidnappers.”
“So,” said Gideon, thinking out loud to clarify his thoughts, “that leaves us with the de Grazias again. We know that they were the only ones who knew where the bones were and that I was working on them, so it had to be one of them that sicced him on me. And unless he got himself hired to do the kidnapping by somebody completely different, somebody unconnected to the first person—which would put a hell of a strain on the interconnected monkey business theory—it must have been the same person—a de Grazia—who hired him for both things. Is that the idea?”
“That is the idea.”
Gideon shook his head. “Whew. So one of them is hooked up in both Domenico’s murder and Achille’s kidnapping?”
“It looks that way.”
“But it seems so . . . I don’t know, I guess I can imagine one of them murdering the old man for his money or something, but the idea that one of his own family had Achille kidnapped? That’s too . . . too . . .”
“It might be too-too,” Caravale said a little impatiently, “but I can tell you on good authority that it happens. Now would you like to hear something really interesting?”
“You mean it gets more interesting? I don’t know if I can stand it.”
“Remember Luzzatto?”
“The doctor—the one who was going on about what Domenico had on his mind before he was killed. Have you talked to him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Good God, that can’t be. He was just—”
“I know, I know. He was alive yesterday, how can he be dead today? Well, so were you, almost. That’s the way it works. First you’re alive, then you’re dead. He went off the road on his Vespa, going up to where he lives in Gignese.”
“Luzzatto drove a motorcycle? The guy must have been eighty.”
“In America that might be strange. Here, a lot of old people do it. A Vespa is not exactly a Harley, you know.”
“And you think it was—you don’t think it was an accident?”
“The timing’s a little suspicious, wouldn’t you say? What was that theory again? I’m starting to really like it.”
“I don’t know, Tullio. An eighty-year-old man riding a motorcycle on a mountain road, you have to expect—”
“An eighty-year-old man who’s been driving a Vespa since before either of us was born, and he’s never been killed before. He certainly picked an inconvenient time for it. Inconvenient for us, quite convenient, I’d say, for someone else who had something he didn’t want to come out.”
“Coincidence?” Gideon offered weakly.
Caravale snorted. “God doesn’t like coincidences like that.”
That was pretty much what Gideon thought too. “Tullio, if he was really murdered, and it was because of what he said at the consiglio yesterday, that has to mean the person who killed him was also somebody who was there. One of the de Grazias—again. Or am I not seeing this clearly?”
“You’re seeing it the same way I am.” He suddenly banged his desk with the side of a hammy fist. “I should have interviewed him right away. I never should have put it off.”
Gideon shook his head. “I don’t see how you can fault yourself for that. There was no way of knowing what was going to happen to him. We were talking about a crime from ten years back. Who could guess somebody else was going to be killed?”
“All the same . . .” He leaned back in his chair and stretched. “Listen, my friend, it’s almost dinnertime. What would you say to a glass of wine and some antipasti, and we can talk this through a little more? I have a few more ideas I want to try out on you.”
“No, sir!” Gideon said firmly. “This is your case, not mine. I’ve done my job, I’m out of it. My head hurts. I’m going back to bed.”
Caravale shrugged good-naturedly. “As you like. I’ll give you a lift.”
THE following day, Monday, was the final day of the Pedal and Paddle Adventure. At 7:30 A.M. the bus for which the ever-efficient Phil had arranged arrived at Lake Orta to pick up the members, most of whom were showing serious signs of having been cooped up too long with the same small group of people, and to take them to Milan’s Malpensa Airport. Gideon, who had intended to go along to help out, overslept—something unusual for him—and went down to the breakfast room with mixed feelings of relief (Paula Ardlee-Arbogast no longer clouded his horizon) and guilt (had he purposely, if subconsciously, overslept to avoid her?). Liberal helpings of ham, brioche, and soft Bel Paese cheese from the buffet table took the edge off his guilt, however, and the usual enormous serving of caffé latte, with the coffee and the hot milk brought to the table in separate steaming pitchers, left him feeling quite fine. The fact that he would soon have Julie back to himself undo
ubtedly had a lot to do with it too.
After a walk around the town—the lakefront promenade didn’t appeal to him this morning—and a stop to pick up some fruit at the GS supermercato on Via Roma, he settled down to spend the day at his notebook computer, happily catching up on e-mail and munching green grapes.
Phil and Julie, both looking frazzled, showed up at 3 P.M. Phil went up to his room to nap (“Call me when it’s time for dinner”), and Julie announced that she was in extreme need of three things: a truly scorching shower with water that would stay hot for more than three minutes at a time; a chance to buy some new non-camping-style clothing, preferably involving a skirt, and shoes that didn’t take laces; and a decent meal in an actual restaurant that served things on nondisposable plates. ln that order.
Gideon returned contentedly to his computer, having only briefly considered offering his assistance, if needed, in the shower. She had been pretty explicit in her priorities, and right now it was more than enough just to have her around again.
At five thirty, with Julie looking splendidly dewy and fresh in a crisp, new, just-above-the-knee sleeveless dress and new sling-back, open-toed, leather-weave sandals, they met Phil in the lobby of the Primavera.
“Where to?” Phil said. “There’s a great pizza place right around the corner—What?” He had caught Julie’s grimace.
She looked from Phil to Gideon and put on her wistful face, the one with the pouty lips and the puppy eyes. “Could we eat someplace—no offense, Phil, I enjoyed all those stews and pizzas—but do you suppose we could eat someplace really nice? You know, with actual courses?”
“Oh, jeez,” muttered Phil.
“Having thoroughly researched the matter,” Gideon said, “I know just the place. You’ll love it.” He turned to Phil. “But you’ll need to get some long pants, buddy.”
Phil glowered at him. “You’re kidding me.”
“There’s a nice men’s shop up the block at Via Roma,” Julie told him.