Aaron Elkins: Good Blood

“Nope.” He took a swallow, savored the surprisingly heavy, concentrated heat of it, and then had a second, longer swallow. He could feel it slither all the way down his gullet and sit in a warm, comforting pool in his stomach. “Hoo, boy, that’s better. Red wine and crusty Italian bread, nature’s perfect foods.” Grabbing another chunk of bread, he took the time to butter this one, bit gratefully into it, and relaxed with a sigh. “Well, I imagine you have a few questions.”

“A few thousand is more like it.”

“Okay, where do I start? Well, first, the reason we know it was Francesca is that they found Big Paolo, the guy that tried to strangle me and was also one of the kidnappers, and when Caravale interrogated him, Paolo was very clear about who hired him for both jobs: Francesca de Grazia; no one else. Vincenzo was to be kept in the dark. That came as a surprise to Caravale because he’d pretty much settled on Vincenzo in his mind. Me, too, for that matter. But you see, Francesca had been milking money from the company for years-”

“No, no, no, that’s all very interesting, but I want to know about Phil! Start with Phil. I mean, the day before yesterday he was simply good old Phil Boyajian, and then yesterday the two of you come back from Gignese with a story that he’s the illegitimate son of this bizarre woman who doesn’t even know his father’s name, and just when I start getting used to that, suddenly tonight, he’s the padrone of Isola de Grazia?”

“In a word… yes.”

“How did you come up with that? Was that your ‘crazy idea’?”

“That was part of it.”

Without being asked, the waiter had brought another glass, and Gideon poured himself some more wine. He was unwinding by the second. “But as to how I came up with it… you know, it’s always hard to trace your thought processes after the fact, but I think it was something like this.” He chewed his bread, sipped his wine, arranged his thoughts. “Do you remember my mentioning that the Gaetano Pini Institute came up at the consiglio? Dr. Luzzatto was talking about it.”

“Can’t say that I do, no.”

“Well, I probably forgot. There really wasn’t any reason to tell you at the time. But it stuck in my mind. Do you know what the Gaetano Pini Institute is?”

“Not a clue.”

“No, I ordered the risotto alla monzese, ” Gideon said in Italian to the waiter, who had just set an antipasto plate-salami, prosciutto, fried mozzarella, marinated vegetables-in front of him, along with some more bread.

The waiter shrugged. “The risotto, it takes a little while. You look hungry. You want me to take it back?”

“No!” Gideon said, making a grab for it before the man could follow through. “And thank you very much.”

He made a start on the sausage before continuing. “The Gaetano Pini Institute is an orthopedic clinic specializing in ambulatory joint diseases. It’s associated with the University of Milan, and the reason that I know about it is that this old professor of mine did a year of post-doc in the rheumatology department there and he had a wonderful set of slides from it that he used to show. Anyway, thinking about old O’Malley made me think about his work on Perthes disease-Legg-Calve-Perthes disease. You know what Perthes disease is?”

“Gideon, dear,” Julie said with a sweet smile, “could you possibly just explain without asking me questions you know I don’t know the answer to?”

“Was that what I was doing?”

“That’s what you always do. I think it’s a pedagogical technique. I’m sure it’s very effective in class.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, laughing. “Pedagogical habits die hard. Anyway, one of the things about Perthes disease-which, between us, I had completely forgotten-is that its effects can sometimes be confused with the aftereffects of a broken femoral neck. So what naturally jumped into my mind at that point was that-”

“-the injury you thought you’d found in Domenico’s hip-the reason for his walking with a limp-might not be an injury at all, but the result of Perthes disease.”

“Exactly. That’s why I wanted to go back and look at the bones again. Well, the bones had been sent off to Rome, but they had a good set of photographs, which I looked at, but I still wasn’t positive, so I sent them off to O’Malley for diagnosis.”

“And was it? Perthes disease?”

“Sure enough. The call I got at the villa was from him. Perthes disease for sure. And that settled it. That was what Francesca was afraid I’d find. That was why they tried to get rid of the bones. That was why they tried to get rid of me. It had nothing at all to do with the cause of death. Ahh,” he said as the steaming plate of risotto was set down in front of him.

The waiter had also brought Julie’s veal cutlet. Thoughtfully, while Gideon dug in, she picked up her knife and fork and began to cut off a piece of meat, but then shook her head and put the utensils down. “No. Wait a minute. What did it settle? What does all this have to do with Phil? What does it have to do with anything?”

“Patience,” he counseled between bites. “There’s some pretty intricate deduction involved here. What it has to do with is Phil’s limp.”

“His limp? I wouldn’t call that a limp. He just has a sort of a. .. snag to his walk.”

“What he has, not that I ever gave it much thought before, is a very mild form of what’s known as a Trendelenburg gait, or a gluteus medius lurch, which is what you get with inadequately functioning hip abductors in one leg. The affected leg tends to be held in an externally rotated posture and the joint itself is kept flexed-”

“Are you saying that Phil has Perthes disease too?”

“Yes. The operation apparently corrected it to the point where the limp is barely noticeable. But you’re getting ahead of me now. See, hearing that he had an operation when he was five got me thinking about what kind of condition he might have had, and one of the first things that naturally came to mind was Perthes disease.”

“Why ‘naturally’?”

“Because, even though it’s rare, it is the most common of the osteochondroses, and it usually shows up right around that age-five, six, seven-and unlike most other joint diseases, it’s unilateral more often than not-and Phil, like Domenico, is only affected on one side. Umm, this is really good risotto. Now, then: once Perthes disease started knocking around in my brain, it got me thinking about Vincenzo-”

“Vincenzo? Does Vincenzo have it too? I didn’t notice any kind of limp.”

“No, he doesn’t have one, and that’s what struck me.” Sated enough to take a breather now, he put down his own knife and fork, leaned forward, and told her what O’Malley had told him. “The genetics of Perthes disease are obscure and very complex, but in general it’s inherited, and if it shows up twice among close relatives, you can bet it’s inherited, so-”

“So if anybody had it, it should have been Vincenzo,” Julie said slowly, “not Phil. Only it’s the other way around.”

“Right. Ergo: it’s Phil who’s Domenico’s son, not Vincenzo.”

“Wow.” Mechanically, she started eating again. “But…” She chewed and swallowed. “Francesca is Domenico’s daughter, isn’t she? Why doesn’t she have it?”

“Because it doesn’t always show up, and when it does, it’s five to one in boys as opposed to girls.”

“Oh. No, wait, there’s a big problem here. What about that whole story that his so-called father told? About how Vincenzo was really Emma’s baby, and Phil was bought from that woman, that Gia, for five hundred dollars as a… a consolation prize?”

“The story was true. Only he reversed Phil and Vincenzo. Phil was the baby. Vincenzo was the consolation prize.”