Aaron Elkins - Good Blood

“Finish up,” he said, slipping into an empty chair at their table, “The boat’s waiting. We’re off to Isola de Grazia.”

“Isola de Grazia?” Julie repeated. “You mean your family really has its own island?” Julie asked.

“Sure, what’s the big surprise? I told you that.”

“You said they ‘own this island, sort of,’” Gideon pointed out.

“Forgive me for using a figure of speech. What, is there a difference?”

“There’s a big difference,” Gideon said. ‘Sort of’ connotes ‘not exactly’ or ‘not really,’ doesn’t it? And what does it modify, ‘island’ or ‘owned’? ‘They sort of own an island.’ ‘They own sort of an island.’ Those are two entirely different referents, and either way-”

“You have to live with this all the time?” Phil asked Julie.

“It’s a trial,” she said. “But he has good points as well.”

“I’m only trying to introduce a little clarity into your thinking, my dear Filiberto.”

“And don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” Phil said, getting up with a yawn. “What do you say we go?”

The boat was a canopied launch with three rows of seats for a dozen people, but they had it to themselves. As soon as they boarded, the captain, a bony, gray-haired woman in a Greek fisherman’s cap and bib overalls, cast off, eased backward from the landing, and turned the bow toward the north. In ten minutes they had left Stresa and the busy ferry run behind, and were sliding over smooth, bright, blue water, with green mountains rising from either shore, and far ahead, over the Swiss border, the grim, granite, glacier-topped mountains of the Simplon Alps. The warm, fresh breeze felt like satin on their skin and the three of them sat quietly for a while, with their eyes closed and their faces turned into the breeze.

“Don’t tell me,” Gideon said when he opened his eyes.

They looked at him. “Tell you what?” Julie asked.

“Don’t tell me that that’s Isola de Grazia.”

He was gesturing at a solitary island a half-mile ahead. Roughly oval and about a quarter-mile long, the point nearest them was occupied by a pink-stuccoed villa, relatively modest in size but gracefully proportioned in the refined, austerely symmetrical Palladian style of the seventeenth century. A set of stone steps at the front of the house led up to a broad, central entrance portico with four tall, slender columns supporting a Greek-style pediment at roof level. Two elegant stories high, with chimney pots shaped like Grecian urns rising from the red tile roof, the building fronted a wide stone courtyard that extended to a quay at which two gleaming wooden launches were tied up. Behind the handsome house and covering the rest of the island were formal gardens that were smaller but almost as elaborate as those they’d seen on Isola Bella. There were fountains, terraces, colonnades, statues, mazes, rows of orange trees, mimosas, and tamarinds, and pungent aromatic shrubs that they could smell from the boat.

“Yup, that’s it,” Phil said. “Home, sweet home.”

Julie was flabbergasted. “But it… it really is a palace… and those grounds!”

“I told you.”

“You said it was practically a palace. You made it sound-”

Phil rolled his eyes. “Oh, God, now she’s starting. What is it with you people, you have something against adverbial constructions? Is it some kind of a life mission?”

“Of course not,” Julie said, laughing. “It’s just that it’s a little hard to imagine the Phil Boyajian we know-”

“And love,” Gideon assured him.

“-growing up in a place like that. Oh, look, isn’t that a peacock?”

“Oh, yeah. They’ve got monkeys too, for Christ’s sake. There’s a whole goddamn menagerie wandering around the gardens. And yes, I grew up there, or at least I lived there for a few years. But I was born back in Stresa.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The house isn’t there anymore. It’s a parking lot for the railroad station now. My mother got my no-good father a job as some kind of a watchman or maybe a gamekeeper on the de Grazia property up north, and I lived in town till I was three. That’s when my father decided he wasn’t a family man after all and took off for good, never to be seen again, and my mother took me to live on the island, in the villa, till I was six or seven, which is when we came to the States and she got married again. Let me tell you, that place always spooked me,” he said, looking at the house. “I still come here every few years, kind of in memory of my mother, I guess. And it still gives me the creeps.”

“It’s gorgeous, fantastic,” Julie said. “It must cost a fortune to take care of.”

“Oh, I think Vincenzo can afford it,” Phil said with a laugh.

“Vincenzo’s the owner?”

“Well, there really isn’t any ‘owner.’ The de Grazia family owns the estate in perpetuity. They got it in the fourteenth century-along with the titles of ‘Count’ and ‘Countess,’ if you can believe it-when somebody’s great-uncle-twice-removed was Holy Roman Emperor for about five minutes. But Vincenzo de Grazia is the current padrone. He’s my cousin. Well, he’s my mother’s cousin, what does that make him? My uncle, I guess, but we’re the same age.”

“He’s your first cousin, once removed,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “What kind of a cultural anthropologist are you, anyway? Didn’t they teach you about kinship systems?”

Phil shrugged. “Sure. You want to know about the exopatrilocal kinship structure of the Arunta? That I understand perfectly. Ours I never got straight; too complicated. Anyway, Vincenzo’s father-my uncle Domenico-was the previous padrone, and Vincenzo’s son Achille will be the next one, and so on, yeah, into the far-distant future. So he gets this humongous inheritance and he gets to live there- he has to live there, actually; that’s in the covenant, if I understand it right. If he doesn’t, he forfeits the inheritance.”

“Not too bad a deal.” Gideon said, more and more taken with the island’s beauty as they came nearer. “I think I could live with that.”

The boat had slowed down now and was steering toward the stone quay, which led up to the courtyard by a wide flight of stone steps with two full-size palm trees in enormous pots at their head. The fabric of the building, the windows, the worn steps themselves, the many statues and plants they could see-all looked meticulously cared for, as if cleaning and pruning crews had been out that morning.

“Yeah, but it’s not all gravy,” said Phil. “See, the deal is, anybody else in the family who wants to live there also has the right to do it, no charge, for as long as he wants, and Vincenzo has to put up with him and foot the bill unless he can come up with some kind of justification not to-moral turpitude, murder, something along those lines. So aside from the oddball, so-called relatives who come and go, Vincenzo’s had… let me see… four people-no, five-who’ve been there just about forever and are never going to leave; not in this lifetime. And there are all kinds of rules about them: They have to dine with the padrone if they want to, they have to be consulted in family matters, and so on. It’s all very medieval and complicated. Vincenzo tried to get it overturned once, but no luck. It’s foolproof, written in stone.”

“On second thought, maybe not such a good deal,” Gideon said.

As the boat entered the still pool between the two curving arms of the quay and worked its way around the tied-up launches, a dark, lean man in mirrored sunglasses, black suit, black T-shirt, and mirror-shined black shoes emerged from the shade of a lawn umbrella, where he had been sitting in a folding chair, apparently working a puzzle in a magazine. Never turning his head away from them, he used his heel to grind his cigarette out on the pavement, shrugged both shoulders to set his suit coat better, tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves, and sauntered toward them.