Aaron Elkins - Good Blood

“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.”

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.