Aaron Elkins: Good Blood

In his thoughts Domenico agreed with her and might easily have seen to it that there was no further contact between them. But he hesitated to interfere. Whom else did Emma have to giggle with and confide her girlish secrets in? Franco? Besides, once she returned to Stresa and was with her own kind, time and distance would necessarily put an end to their closeness. The problem would take care of itself.

But the other problem, the problem of Emma’s maternal hormones, did not take care of itself.

Emma gave birth at the villa in Gignese. Her labor, attended only by a midwife and her assistant (Dr. Luzzatto had been with a patient in Belgirate and had not made it back in time) was difficult and extremely hard on her. The baby, a strapping, squalling boy, was healthy-everything Domenico could have wished for-but Emma’s condition troubled him. When he arrived a few days later (she had asked that he permit her time to recover, which was what gave him the first real inkling that all was not as well as it might have been), she remained secluded in her bedroom, and it was the nurse who brought him the beautiful infant. Dr. Luzzatto prevented Domenico from seeing her until the following day. It was not her physical condition that was cause for concern, Luzzatto warned gravely, but her mental state. It was more precarious than he’d expected. Four days now, and still her spirits were dangerously low.

The following day, when Domenico was permitted to call on her-Stefania was not with him, having preferred to remain at home-Emma was on a regimen of tranquilizers that Luzzatto had prescribed. It was like talking to some cleverly made mannequin, an automaton controlled by gears and pulleys, but ultimately lifeless. Her hair had been combed and her face had been made up to hide her pallor. She smiled, she nodded, she replied to questions, but there was no emotion, no human connection. Her eyes were enough to make one weep. For Domenico, all the joy had been squeezed from the occasion. It was the tranquilizers that were making her so spiritless, Luzzatto said, but both men knew there was more to it than that.

Even Franco, for once in his life, had been genuinely worried about his wife’s state of mind for the last month. Responding to the stress in true Franco fashion, he had run off to be with his family in Caprera for the final two weeks of Emma’s pregnancy, claiming that his presence only added to her nervous tension.

Domenico, who had considered his absence God-sent, had said nothing about this desertion, but he was blunt with Franco at dinner that night, while Emma stayed in her bed. She had so far refused even to look at the infant, which was being cared for by a wet nurse.

“What she needs is a baby of her own,” Domenico told him.

Franco shook his head. “Sure, that’s what I told her. But she doesn’t want to go through it again. I’ll tell you the truth, neither do I.” He puffed his cheeks and blew air from his mouth. It had been a few days since he’d shaved. “So what’s to be done?”

Domenico pushed away his untouched plate of pasta and let his chin fall to his chest. “I don’t know.”

But later that night, sitting in his darkened room, unable to sleep, he had an idea, and the next morning it was Domenico de Grazia who carried Emma’s breakfast of caffe latte, focaccia, and marmalade to her. He set the tray on the bed for her, pulled a chair up next to her, and got quickly to the point.

“Emma, my dear, your friend Gia-has she had her child?’”

“I don’t know, Uncle. Any day now.”

“And what will happen to it? Is it true that she plans to give it up for adoption?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. I think maybe that was just talk.” She offered up a listless smile that wrung his heart. “And you feel different once you’ve had it.”

“But can she afford to keep it? A single woman? A laundress?”

Emma had picked up a wedge of focaccia, but put it down again. “It will be hard. She has no father. Her mother no longer speaks to her. She has no money… It won’t be easy.”

But her face said it all: she would happily have traded places.

Domenico laid his hand on hers and tried to keep the building excitement out of his voice. “Emma, I have an idea. Now don’t say no until you hear me out…”

And so the arrangements were made. With the help of a generous financial settlement from Domenico, Gia agreed to part with her baby (a little too readily for Domenico’s taste), and when Emma and Franco returned to Stresa a few days later, after their absence of six months, they, too, had a newborn baby boy to show off to the world. And the glowing Emma was her happy, sweet-natured self again.

The two infants were christened a few weeks apart at the parish church in Stresa, where Domenico’s great-great-great-grandfather had been christened in 1786, the year of the church’s founding. Domenico’s new heir was called Vincenzo Paoli de Grazia, after San Vincenzo di Paoli, the great benefactor of the poor. The Ungarettis named their baby Filiberto, after Franco’s maternal grandfather, a knife grinder. It was hardly the name Domenico would have chosen, but there was no room in his heart to begrudge anyone anything. Filiberto Ungaretti it would be.

All was well.

The Village of Stresa, Lake Maggiore, Italy, the Present

It was the blue Honda that had started it, both traffic policemen agreed afterward.

The two veteran traffic officers, spruce and natty in their crisp blue uniforms and their caps, belts, and crisp white shirts, were just discarding their cigarettes and pushing through the glass doors of the Polizia Municipale building to report for the morning shift when the blast of noise-squealing tires, blaring horns, warning shouts-made them turn back toward the street.

The little Honda was trying to do the impossible or at the very least the idiotic-to pass another car on the Corso Italia in the middle of the morning rush. True, the Corso was ample by local standards, the widest avenue in Stresa, a beautiful concourse that ran picturesquely along the lakefront, with two lanes in each direction. And as rush hours went, Stresa’s wasn’t anything to brag about, but that didn’t mean you could expect to lane-change as if you were on the motorway around Rome. And certainly not with a big semitrailer truck-a Mercedes-Benz cab hauling an empty flatbed-bearing down on you in the oncoming lane and more than filling it.

There was nothing they could do but stand there and watch it happen. The driver of the truck slammed on his brakes-they could see him pulling on the wheel so hard (as if it made any difference) that he was standing up, like a wagon driver hauling back on the reins. The truck slewed to the left, veered in front of the oncoming traffic, bounced heavily up over the curb, scattering pedestrians, and went scraping and grinding across the entrance to the police parking lot until its huge left front wheel sank squarely into one of the planting beds that bordered the entrance.

The only damage to city property that they could see were a couple of bushes that had been run over, but the truck was in sorry shape. The flatbed in the rear, carried forward by its momentum, had swung around to the right, snapping or twisting something in the trailer connection, so that it ended up tilted and jackknifed, with its rear end clear on the other side of the street, almost up to the sidewalk and thoroughly eliminating any possibility of through traffic for hours to come. And as if that weren’t bad enough, an oncoming French tour bus had also veered wildly to avert disaster, and had ended up directly across from the police station, drunkenly sprawled in the Piazza Matteoti, which the city hall shared with the upscale Cafe Bolongaro. Cafe tables and chairs, unused at this time of the morning (so there was one little piece of luck, at any rate), had been overturned and now littered the little square. The bus passengers sat in their seats like statues, silent and white. Below the line of stunned faces, printed in bright red letters on the side of the bus, was the tour company’s slogan: LE PLAISIR DE VOYAGER.