Aaron Elkins - Good Blood

“I’m planning,” she replied without opening her eyes. “That’s the key to my efficiency. I thought you knew that.”

He tapped the note pad. “Is that so? You don’t seem to have gotten-”

“Shuddup and gimme a real kiss.” She lifted her arms, opened her eyes wide, and puckered up extravagantly.

“I bet this is what it’s like to kiss a guppy,” he said, laughing, but of course he complied.

“That’s more like it.” She stretched and yawned. “So did you find what you were looking for?”

“I’m not sure.” He slid her feet over so that he could sit on the ottoman beside her.

“Still playing your cards close to the vest, eh? Oh, by the way, Vincenzo de Grazia called. The padrone himself.”

“Here? What did he want?”

“Achille’s going off to school in Switzerland, and there’s a party for him at the villa tonight. We’re invited. Very informal, so you don’t have to worry about fancy clothes.”

“Why are we invited?”

“Because of your kind assistance to the family in the matter of his father’s remains, is what he said. Because Phil probably asked him to invite us, is what I think. Want to go?”

He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know, it’s our last night… do you?”

“Actually, yes,” she said, surprising him. “I haven’t been inside the house, you know. I’d love to see it. And after all I’ve heard, I’d hate to miss the chance to see the de Grazias in action.”

“Well, they’re worth seeing, all right, but what happened to resting up for tomorrow?”

“Oh, come on, be a sport. How bad can it be?”

“Okay, let’s do it,” he said, doing his best to get into the spirit. “Might actually be fun. What time?”

“They’ll send a boat to the pier for us at five thirty.” She looked at her watch. “Which gives me just three hours before I have to start getting dressed. Yikes.” She swung her feet to the floor and stood up. “Have to get going. Lots to do.”

“Need any help from me?”

“No,” she said, as he knew she would. “No offense, but things go better if you just stay out of the way.”

“That’s fine,” he said, unoffended. “I have a phone call to make, and then I was thinking of going up to Gignese again.”

“Gignese? Do you have a burning desire to see the Umbrella Museum? Or don’t tell me you want to talk to what’s-his-name, Franco, again?”

“Not in this lifetime, thanks. But Caravale’s going to be up there with some of his people, going through Dr. Luzzatto’s records, and I’d like to stop by and look at some things myself. I already called him. He said okay, he’ll let them know to expect me if he’s not there himself.”

He stood up too, and they embraced contentedly, looking out across the lake at the red-roofed villages climbing the far hillsides. “And are you planning to tell me anytime soon why you want to go to Gignese and look at some things in Dr. Luzzatto’s office?” she asked after they slowly rocked back and forth for a while. “Or why it was so important to look at Domenico’s bones, for that matter?”

“Julie,” he said, “I’ve got this idea… well, it’s too crazy to even talk about at this point”

She nuzzled up beside him again. “Come on, what? You can trust me.”

“No, this is really crazy. Let me do some more checking first; think it through a little more before I talk about it.”

“Oh, dear, our relationship is on the rocks for sure. You never hesitated to tell me your crazy ideas before.”

“I know, but this is probably the craziest one I ever had.”

She dug a knuckle into his ribs and laughed. “Now that,” she said, “would really take some doing.”

“Professor O’Malley?”

“Yes?” The voice on the other end of the line was guarded.

“This is Gideon Oliver, sir.”

“Oliver, for God’s sake, you make me feel a million years old when you do that. I hereby give you permission for the two hundred and sixty-seventh time to call me just plain ‘O’Malley,’ or even ‘Bill,’ if you can bring yourself to do it. You’re a big boy now, you’re as famous as I am. Well, almost.”

“Sorry, uh, Bill, will do.”

But he knew it wouldn’t last any more than it ever had before. William Tuskahoma O’Malley, M.D., Ph. D., was a towering figure in skeletal pathology and one of the very few academics who could still intimidate him. He had been one of Gideon’s professors at the University of Wisconsin and had served on his dissertation committee. His Non-traumatic Osteomyelitis of the Post-cranial Skeleton remained the undisputed giant of the field, even after thirty years in print. A gruff, melodramatic, bugle-voiced genius famously impatient with unpreparedness, inattention, fuzzy thinking, and most other human failings, he had terrified Gideon as a young graduate student.

Gideon had taken O’Malley’s courses at a time when, in an effort to make his dissertation deadline, his resources were stretched thin and he was starving for sleep. With most of his professors, he was able to get away with the occasional discreet catnap in class. Not with the eagle-eyed O’Malley, however, who would pounce before he knew himself that he was drifting off. “Snap out of it, Oliver!” the bulky, bearded figure would bark at about eighty decibels, and Gideon would jerk awake. It happened so often that for a while his friends started referring to him as Snap-Out-of-It-Oliver.

Even now, the occasional back-to-school stress dreams that he had didn’t involve discovering he’d studied for the wrong test or being unable to find the right room in which to take an exam. Instead, he would dream that he was peacefully dozing, perhaps on a beach, perhaps in a hammock, and would suddenly hear O’Malley’s curt “Snap out of it, Oliver!” He would awaken (in his dream) to find himself in O’Malley’s paleopathology seminar. Totally unprepared, of course.

These days, they were professional colleagues, sometimes serving on the same panels, and Gideon had discovered that, underneath the crust, O’Malley was a pretty good egg. Not quite a heart of gold, no, but not so bad, once you made allowances. Still, some things were hard to get over.

“What can I do for you?” O’Malley asked. “Where are you calling from?”

“I’m in Italy, and the reason that I’m calling is that the other day somebody mentioned the Gaetano Pini Institute in Milan, which made me remember that you’d taken your residency there years ago, and that brought to mind-”

“I’m going to go make myself a cup of coffee now, Oliver. You just keep talking away, and maybe by the time I get back, you’ll be getting to the point.”

Gideon coughed. “Well, the point, Pro-uh, Bill, is that I remembered the segment in Non-traumatic Osteomyelitis that discusses aseptic necrosis of the epiphysis of the femoral head, and that mentions the possibility of confusing the results of a subcapital or transcervical fracture of the neck of the femur with the aftereffects of certain pathological-”

“Yes, yes, the aftereffects of Perthes disease. When did you get so damned verbose? I don’t remember you talking so much.”

“Well, um, anyway, I don’t have your book here with me to compare your photographs-”

“What are you saying? You travel without a copy of Non-traumatic Osteomyelitis of the Post-cranial Skeleton with you at all times? I’m shocked, shocked!” Gideon could imagine his hand going to his breast, his eyes rolling in mock disbelief.

He laughed politely. “-so what I’d like to do is fax you a few photos-of the femoral head and surrounding area-from a case I’m working on, and ask you which you think it is, Perthes disease or a fracture. Would that be all right? And if it looks like Perthes to you, I’d appreciate a summary of the disease’s incidence, heritability, demographics, that kind of thing. Today, if you can manage.”