Aaron Elkins: Good Blood

“Ah, but couldn’t that have been because of the change in chauffeurs? That’s my whole point. If Praga had been there as planned, there wouldn’t have been any gunfire, or maybe just a little harmless shooting to make it look good.”

“I see what you mean. Right.”

“Of course, right. Pay attention. In any case, I’m not saying it’s Vincenzo. Not for certain. It could still be any one of them.”

“Not Cosimo, surely?”

“Well, he’s not at the top of my list,” Caravale said with a smile. “Neither is your friend Phil, but I think you knew that. But we’re getting close to the end here, Gideon. I have good intuition about these things, and I can feel it in my stomach.” He brought the thumb and fingers of his hand together. “I can sense the closing of the net.”

“Mm,” Gideon said. He drank half the espresso, savoring the bitter taste, the ashy texture.

“What do you mean, ‘Mm’? We’ve already established it has to be one of the de Grazia crowd, haven’t we?”

“Well, yes,” Gideon allowed. “Big Paolo’s being involved in the kidnapping and the attack on me-”

“And in trying to steal Domenico’s bones,” Caravale added, jabbing the cigar at him. “Oh, didn’t I tell you about that? One of the nuns identified him as the man she saw sneaking around the hospital courtyard in the middle of the night, how about that? So he was definitely tied in with everything-Domenico’s murder, Achille’s kidnapping-which means-well, you know.”

Gideon nodded. What it meant, as they’d established earlier, was that at least one of the de Grazias was also tied up with everything, because only the de Grazias-no one else-had known that Domenico’s bones had been found. Whoever it was, therefore, Big Paolo’s presence linked him or her to both Domenico’s death and Achille’s kidnapping. And since the de Grazias were the only ones who had heard Luzzatto muttering about the mysterious things Domenico had had on his mind the day he was killed, that almost certainly had to mean that one of them was involved in Luzzatto’s murder too-assuming that Luzzatto had been murdered.

“Wait a minute, though,” Gideon said. “Back to Vincenzo for a minute. At the consiglio he said he’d told the previous carabinieri commander that Domenico was murdered ten years ago, back when it happened.”

“And he did. I looked at the case file.”

“So, does that add up? A man murders his father, then tells the cop in charge-who thinks it’s an accident and is inclined to let it go-that he ought to investigate it as a homicide?”

“On the surface, maybe not. But if in that way he establishes a facade of innocence for himself without providing any incriminating information for the police to work with… maybe yes.”

Gideon stretched and sighed. “Okay, I grant you, it all makes sense on paper, but it’s pretty… well, ornate. It’d sure be nice if you could get your hands on Big Paolo and just ask him who hired him. That’d settle it.”

Caravale grinned at him.

“You found him?”

They had indeed. With the help of local police in Sesto San Giovanni, one of the gritty industrial suburbs north of Milan, Big Paolo Tossignani had been located and apprehended. Caravale had not yet had a chance to talk to him, but he was at this moment being transported to Stresa for that purpose. He would arrive by 4 P.M.

“And I’ll be there to welcome him with open arms,” Caravale said.

“That’s great,” said Gideon, impressed. “If he cooperates-”

“I doubt if there’ll be any problem with that. This young man is in very big trouble. He’s been positively identified at the kidnapping, remember, and there’s a homicide charge associated with that, let alone the attack on you and everything else he has to worry about. So he can either say nothing and go to prison for the next thirty years while the person that originated the idea and paid him a few euros comes away from it all without a scratch, or he can cooperate by giving us some information that would make the court look more favorably on him.”

“And you think he will?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t he? They call him Dumb Paolo, but he can’t be that dumb.” He chuckled delightedly. “And listen to this. The Sesto people faxed me what records they had on him. In the past three years, lo and behold, he’s hired on twice as a laborer on Milanese projects, with a regional construction company. Not only that, but Ugo Fogazzaro-the dead kidnapper-was hired for the same jobs, by the same company. Would you care to hazard a guess as to the name of this well-known construction company that is on such familiar terms with these two particular gangsters?”

“Aurora!” said Gideon. “Damn!”

The links to the de Grazias were piling up too thick and too fast to be shrugged off now. Caravale was getting close to wrapping things up, and it looked as if Paolo was going to provide the ribbon with which to do it. They had finished their coffees but they both had some water left, and Caravale looked so tickled that Gideon raised his water glass for a congratulatory toast.

“To Dumb Paolo,” Caravale said as the glasses clinked.

“Before you go in, look at this and tell me what you think,” Caravale said as they got back to Luzzatto’s apartment building. He handed Gideon the leather-bound notebook he’d been reading earlier. “It’s not very long.” From his manner, Gideon could see that he had only that moment decided to let Gideon in on it.

Gideon took it. “What is it?”

“It’s a personal journal. He started keeping if some years ago, one notebook per year. We found them at the back of a drawer in his desk. This is the last one.” He sat down on the stone wall again, plucked the cigar from behind his ear, and stuck it between his lips. “While you read it, keep in mind what he was saying that day at the consiglio. ”

“About Domenico having something to ponder the day he was killed?”

“Exactly.” He scratched a wooden match on the mortar between the stones of the wall, lit up, and settled back to watch Gideon read.

Gideon sat down beside him, taking care to keep upwind. The notebook had perhaps a hundred pages, but only the first few had been used. The first entry was dated January 3, 1992. Gideon tried struggling through a sentence or two, but then shook his head and handed the journal to Caravale. “I’m not used to this kind of handwriting. You’ll have to tell me what it says. Something about leukemia?”

“Yes,” Caravale said, spreading the notebook open on his thigh. “He was diagnosed with advanced acute leukemia on December twenty-eighth, 1991-”

“Wait a minute. And he was still alive and riding his motorcycle in 2003? That’s-”

“Unlikely, yes. The fact is, there was a mistake at the laboratory. His bone marrow sample was confused with someone else’s.”

“Some mistake,” Gideon said.

Caravale tapped the notebook. “It’s all in here, but the important thing is that-at the time-Luzzatto believed he had only a few weeks or months to live. Now listen to this. This is January fifth. ‘For twenty-seven years,’” he read, translating as he went along, “‘I have kept this secret buried in my heart, unwilling (or unable?) to tell Domenico. Now it can wait no longer. Tomorrow I will speak with him.’” He looked up from the journal. “Would you like to guess the date of Domenico’s death?”

“January sixth?”

“January eighth. Two days after Luzzatto told him.”

“Told him what?”

“That’s the question, all right. And the answer, unfortunately, is that I have no idea. There are no entries until the tenth of January.”

“So you can’t even be sure he did tell him.”

“No, we can be quite sure. Here is what he had to say on the tenth: ‘Dear God, can this terrible thing be my fault? Did I drive this fine, generous man to his death? Even if not, surely I made him wretched for the last few days of his life. And for what? For vanity’s sake? To satisfy my egotistical notions of honesty, of candor? For the bitter, self-indulgent pleasure of living my own last few hours on this earth as an “honest” man? May God forgive me.’”