Aaron Elkins - Good Blood

The second thing, the enormous, life-altering thing, was that he’d met a beautiful young park ranger named Julie Tendler, who had been incidentally involved in finding the human remains that had brought him to Washington. His much-loved first wife Nora had been killed in a car crash two years earlier, and Gideon had never gotten over his grief. In his case, it had slowly evolved into a terrible impassivity, a sense of deep isolation from everyone around him. For two years he had felt himself to be as cold and dead and impervious to emotion-to positive emotion-as a stone. It was Julie who had reawakened him, unthawing feelings and sensibilities that he had truly thought frozen for good.

A year after that they’d been married and he’d lucked into an associate professorship at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus (he’d since advanced to full professor). They had bought this hillside house that was a ten-minute walk in one direction from Julie’s office in the headquarters building, and a ten-minute walk in the other direction to campus. A perfect location. A perfect life. A day didn’t go by that he wasn’t grateful to her for bringing him to life again.

“Filiberto Ungaretti,” she said now, also shaking her head. “That’s amazing. Sure, it’d be interesting to visit your family, Phil. If you’re really sure they wouldn’t mind.”

“Interesting I can’t promise. Weird I can guarantee.”

“Weird how?” Gideon asked. “Weird like you?”

“No, different. They own this island, sort of, and they live in practically this palace-well, you’ll see.”

“A day at the Ungarettis,” Julie mused. “Sounds good.”

“No, Ungaretti was my father’s name, the creep. I haven’t seen him since I was three. This is my mother’s family we’d be visiting.”

“And what’s their name?”

“Their name,” said Phil, “is de Grazia.”

Good Blood

Aaron Elkins – Gideon Oliver 11 – Good Blood

Stresa was much as Phil had described it: a bright, clean, discreetly fading nineteenth-century resort town on Lake Maggiore, full of flowers, gardens, and romantic villas, and boasting a generous, park-like promenade, the Lungolago, that ran along the lakefront from one tip of the city to the other, bordering one side of the main street, the Corso Italia. On the other side of the Corso was an unbroken row of upscale boutiques and hotels. Away from the lakefront, Stresa was equally attractive, but in a different way: a maze of romantic piazzas and narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with picturesque restaurants and hole-in-the wall cafes. Their hotel, the Primavera, was on one of these streets, a modest, pleasant place a block inland (the four-and five-star hotels were all on the lakefront). Phil, who had slept most of the time on the fifteen-hour flight from Seattle, had, amazingly, gone to sleep in his room as soon as they’d arrived, but Julie and Gideon, who hadn’t slept at all, and whose eyes by now felt glued open, were eager to get out in the fresh air.

They had strolled lazily around the town for half an hour and now they sat, loopy and jet-lagged, among families of Swiss and Italian tourists, at a sun-drenched outdoor cafe on the promenade, where Phil had promised to join them at nine-thirty for the visit to the de Grazias. From the boat terminal a block away, ferries carried tourists to, from, and around Stresa’s big attractions, the fabulous Borromean Islands a few hundred yards offshore, with their splendid seventeenth-century gardens and palaces. Gideon was reading aloud from a guidebook description of Isola Bella, the closest and most fantastic of the three islands.

“‘But it is to the most ambitious and far-sighted of the Borromeos, Vitalio the Sixth, to whom we owe thanks for the Isola Bella we see today. It was Vitalio who began the prodigious earth-moving project that transformed the morphology of the land into ten superimposed garden terraces in the form of a gigantic truncated pyramid on the example of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The many pools and fountains were fed by pipes from an enormous cistern installed beneath… ’”

He glanced up at Julie, who had been suspiciously silent for a long time. She sat with her eyes closed and her face tipped up to the sun. “Hello?” he said. “Are you still with us?”

“Mm-hm,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “‘It was Vitalio who something-somethinged the project that transformed the something into ten superimposed something-somethings on the example of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’ Do go on.”

With a smile, he closed the book. “I think maybe I’ve had enough too. Why don’t we just sit here and soak up the sunshine and this nice, warm air? Doesn’t it feel great after the spring we’ve had, or rather, haven’t had?”

“Mmm,” she said, more a purr than a murmur. Except to recross her ankles, she didn’t stir.

Given the chance, he watched her face for a while: the slightly turned-up nose; the pert chin-softening now, but all the more attractive for it-the lively mouth always on the verge of a smile; the glossy, curly black hair, cut short now, that framed the whole pretty picture. He shook his head. What did I do to get so lucky? he wondered contentedly, as he had so many times before.

“I love you,” he said.

He saw her smile, though her eyes were still closed. “Likewise,” she murmured.

“Good, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.” He looked at the menu again. “I’m having a problem figuring out what to order.”

“Hm?”

“It’s because of the difference in time zones.”

“Mm.”

He put down the menu and looked at her again. “I’m not boring you? Not keeping you awake?”

“No, not at all. I’m glued to every word. ‘It’s because of the difference in time zones.’”

“What is?”

She thought for a moment. “What you were talking about.”

He laughed. “The thing is, I think I’m hungry, but I don’t know what to get. It’s eight-thirty in the morning here, but our internal clocks still think it’s eleven-thirty at night. I don’t know whether to get breakfast or a midnight snack.”

“What would you get if you ordered breakfast?”

“Bacon and eggs, probably. It’s on the menu, probably for the English tourists. And coffee.”

“And what would you get for a midnight snack?”

He thought it over. “Coffee. And bacon and eggs.”

“That’s a pretty tough problem you have there, mister. I don’t see how I can help you with that one.”

They had finished their bacon and eggs and were on their third cups of coffee when Phil showed up, looking greatly refreshed and highly disreputable. It seemed to be a point of honor with him when he traveled, to look as if he’d been trekking through the Arabian desert for six months, so he had let his salt-and-pepper beard come in again. He’d also skipped his last few haircuts so that his thinning hair now hung in tendrils down the back of his neck. With his hitching gait-Phil habitually walked with one side a little higher than the other-he looked like a down-and-out sailor that had jumped ship a few years back and had never managed to get himself another berth.

To complete the travel-worn image, he was attired in his professional tour leader’s regalia: rumpled, faded, multi-pocketed khaki shorts; a tired T-shirt with sagging neck-line; sockless sneakers; and an old, long-billed “On the Cheap” baseball cap. Phil’s first rule of travel for his excursion groups was “Never take more than can go in a backpack,” of which he made himself a living example. In his pack, as Gideon knew, were two duplicates of each item he was wearing (except for the sneakers, of which he had only a single extra pair), plus a waterproof windbreaker and a few toiletries, including a roll of toilet paper, without which he never traveled (rule two). That was it. As a result, Phil seemed to spend a lot of time searching out a convenient place and time to wash and dry his underwear, but he considered that a small price to pay.