Aaron Elkins - Good Blood

“Can you believe that?” Phil said as Gideon started up the car. “Can… you… believe that? I am really ticked off.”

“I’m not surprised,” Gideon said, edging out into the light traffic on Via Margherita. “That was quite a story. If it’s true.”

“You don’t think it is? Why would he make up something like that?”

“I’m not saying he made it up. But he didn’t strike me as the most reliable informant in the world either. I’d check it out with Vincenzo if I were you.”

“No way. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

“Francesca, then.”

“Francesca,” Phil mused. “I think I’m beginning to see why she always treated me like dirt-I mean, even more than she treats other people like dirt. I always thought it was because I was the runt of the litter, and even as a kid I was gimpy.”

“Phil, you’re not-”

“And besides that, I was just a lousy Ungaretti, not a de Grazia. Now I see it was way worse than that. In her eyes, I’m barely human. No, forget it, I’m not talking to Francesca about it either.”

“Well, then, with the servant-Genoveffa, was it? You can’t just take Franco’s word for it.” But the truth was that as the time passed, Gideon found himself more and more taking Franco’s word for it. Why would he have concocted such a wild story? Was he even capable of inventing it? And what about the woman? That addled, tearstained “My boy.” Surely that hadn’t been an act.

“Genoveffa,” Phil said. “Yeah, maybe Genoveffa.”

He didn’t say it with any conviction, but Gideon didn’t press, and for a few minutes Phil stared stonily ahead with his arms folded. Then, as they picked up the winding road down the mountain, he raised his fists and let out a tooth-rattling growl. “GHAAARGHH! I am really ticked off!”

“Phil, I believe you. Truly.”

“Here’s this guy,” Phil railed, “this so-called father I despised my whole life. I mean I’ve loathed him for, like, almost forty years now. There were a lot of times I would have strangled him if I could have gotten my hands on him. And now, after all this time, I find out he’s not my father after all. I wasted all that hating! It is really annoying.”

“That’s what you’re mad about?”

“Sure,” Phil said, turning his baseball cap around so the bill was backward. And suddenly he looked reassuringly like the old, familiar Phil again. “What’d you think I was mad about?”

“Well, I thought maybe the fact that you weren’t related to any of the people you thought you were related to.”

“You mean Vincenzo and the rest of them? Nah, that’s a relief. That feels great. That never felt right. I should have known.”

“Or-if what he said is true-that you’re actually, well-”

“A bastard, right. No longer in name only. And I have a mother who barely knows who I am, let alone who my father was, and who talks like Ozzy Osbourne.” He considered. “No, that’s okay too. That’s interesting, actually. Anyway, I know who my real mother was, and she’s the same as she always was. As for my father…” He started laughing. “‘Pietro? No. Mario? No. Guglielmo? No. Arturo Toscanini? No. Enrico Caruso? No.’ I think it gives me an air of mystery, don’t you? Makes me even more dashing than I already am.”

“Definitely, no doubt about that.”

“And hey, now Lea’s definitely not my cousin, right? How about that?”

“She never was your cousin, Phil.”

“Right, whatever.” He settled back with a sigh.

“So what are you going to do?” Gideon asked after a few minutes passed.

Phil glanced at him. “What is there to do?”

“Well… you can’t very well just keep stringing things along the way they were before, can you?”

“Sure I can, why not?”

“I mean, visiting them, acting like one of the family-”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, why would you want to? I don’t think you were ever too crazy about them. Anyway, it’d be a fraud, a sham.”

“So? It always was a sham, what’s different now?”

Gideon shrugged. “I’m just surprised. I assumed-”

“Look, let me give it to you in a nutshell. Vincenzo, Dante, that whole bunch-I couldn’t care less if I never saw them again for the rest of my life. But Cosimo-my grandfather, even if he isn’t really-it would break his heart. He believes in this good-blood crap, and if he found out that I was just… well, it wouldn’t be good. After he goes, it’ll probably be a different story. But until then, I remain his grandson.”

“Ah,” said Gideon. Now he understood.

As they turned from the highway into Stresa’s bustle, Phil started laughing again. “Mussolini? Mm, no. Rudolph Valentino? Mm, no…”

“Colonel, you got a minute?”

Caravale, on his way back from the soft drink machine with a Brio, stopped at the door to his office. “What do you have, Lombardo?”

Lombardo and Rigoli were his financial specialists, and at his instruction they had spent the last few days probing into Vincenzo’s situation. This morning they had gone up to Ghiffa to interview the people at Aurora Costruzioni.

“Well, you were right,” Lombardo told him. “De Grazia didn’t pay that ransom by borrowing on his stocks. He didn’t have any left to borrow against. Not enough for this, anyway.”

Caravale frowned. “What do you mean?”

Lombardo, knowing full well that finance was not Caravale’s strong point, kept it as simple as he could. “See, he’d already pledged just about all his holdings, at a fifty percent margin, as collateral to buy more stocks, mostly Internet stuff… a chain of Internet bars he was interested in. Well, not only did that not pan out, but the collateralized stock lost almost twenty-five percent of its value, so at a fifty percent margin, that meant his equity was down to a little more than thirty percent… are you still with me here?”

“Not only am I not with you, I already have a headache. If you could get to the punch line, I’d appreciate it.”

“The punch line is, not only does he not have stocks to borrow against, but his collateral is damn near the point where his broker is going to be making a margin call any day now.”

“You mean call in the loan? How much is he in for?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

Caravale leaned his back against the wall, thinking. “Wait, let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Vincenzo is three hundred thousand euros in debt, and the axe is about to come down on him if he doesn’t come up with it?”

“It’s at least three hundred thousand,” Lombardo told him. “Could be more we don’t know about. You think he was desperate enough to kidnap his own kid to get the money?”

“Five million euros,” Caravale said. “That’s a lot more than he needed.”

“As far as we know. Anyway, if he thought he could get away with it for three hundred thousand, why not make it five million? It’s always nice to have a little spare cash on hand.”

Caravale, who had been thinking much the same thing, nodded. “I knew there was something funny going on,” he said half-aloud. He started into his office and beckoned Lombardo to follow him. “So how did he pay the ransom? Come on in, tell me what you found out.”

“I can do better than that,” Lombardo said. “We brought a couple of the Aurora officers down for formal statements. Aldo’s in there with the CFO right now. I think you might want to sit in too.”

“The CFO? Vincenzo’s sister, right? Francesca.”

“That’s the one.”

Caravale took a swig of the Brio and put the bottle on a table just inside his office. “Let’s go. I don’t want to sit in, though. We’ll watch through the one-way.”