Aaron Elkins: Good Blood

“Gideon, the more you explain, the more confused I get. I am getting really frustrated here. What reason would Franco have to lie like that?”

The waiter came to take Gideon’s plate and to ask what he wanted for his second course. “I’ll have another plate of this,” Gideon told him, earning a tolerant shake of the waiter’s head. These Americans.

“He wasn’t lying, Julie. Emma fooled them both-Franco and Domenico. I’m doing a little surmising here, but what I figure is that her maternal hormones kicked in as she got into her pregnancy, and she didn’t want to give her own baby up-her own baby being Phil. So, overcome with remorse, she works out a plan with Gia, who’s also at about the same stage: a switch. When the babies are born, she’ll give Gia’s child-”

“Vincenzo?”

He nodded. “Vincenzo-to Domenico, leaving her own child-”

“Phil.”

“Yes, Phil-with Gia for the time being. Then she finesses Domenico into suggesting that she adopt a child-and paying for it-and she pretends to adopt Gia’s son… who’s really her own, her own and Domenico’s.”

“And how do you finesse someone into suggesting that you adopt a child?”

“That I don’t know, but I don’t doubt it’s possible.”

“Well, maybe… but wouldn’t Franco know-”

“Franco wasn’t there for the last month.”

“But the mother-the other mother, Gia- she seemed to think Phil was hers.”

“Julie, you didn’t get to meet this woman. She’s so zonked out she’d believe I was her kid if Franco told her so.”

Julie had eaten only half of her cotoletta, but with a shake of her head, she pushed the plate aside. “Well, I suppose it’s all possible, but ‘surmising’ is putting it mildly, wouldn’t you say? You’re taking quite a leap here.”

“No, I don’t think so. I haven’t told you yet about what happened when I went up to Gignese this afternoon to look at Luzzatto’s records.”

She laughed. “You’ve had yourself quite a day, haven’t you?”

Over his second helping of the risotto Gideon told her about Luzzatto’s journal, with its angst-ridden references to the mysterious “secret buried in my heart” that was kept from Domenico for twenty-seven years, and then finally revealed to him… two days before he was killed.

Julie listened, sipping her second glass of wine and nibbling at a cheese tray they’d ordered. “I think I finally see where you’re going. Luzzatto was in on the baby switch too, correct? That Vincenzo wasn’t the real son-that was the secret. And when he finally told Domenico, Francesca must have found out too, and to prevent him from disinheriting Vincenzo, she… No? I’m not right?” she said when she saw Gideon shaking his head.

“You’re almost right. That was the secret, all right, but Luzzatto wasn’t in on the switch. He only found out years later.”

“How can you possibly know that, if it wasn’t in the journal?”

“Luzzatto told me, or rather his medical records did. See, twenty-seven years ago wouldn’t have been when the babies were born. Twenty-seven years ago would have been 1966, five years after that. And in 1966, according to his files, he took five-year-old Filiberto Ungaretti in to the Gaetano Pini Institute for an operation to correct an incipient case of…” He waited.

“Perthes disease!” Julie said. “And since he was also Domenico’s doctor, he already knew that Domenico had it, so he came to the same conclusion you did: Emma had pulled a fast one to keep her own baby. Phil was really his son, not Vincenzo.”

“Now you’ve got it. He then kept it to himself all those years, but when he thought he was dying, he went to Domenico with it, and Domenico, with his unshakable belief in the importance of good blood, probably would have disinherited Vincenzo-”

“Hold on. So why didn’t Vincenzo kill him, then? No, I didn’t put that right. I meant, why would Francesca be the one to murder him over that? She was still his legitimate daughter, wasn’t she? It wouldn’t affect her. And for that matter, why was she skimming money? Why would she have had Achille kidnapped? Why did she need so much money anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know which?”

“Any of it, any of the ‘whys.’ Neither does Caravale at this point. Francesca’s the only one who knows, and she wasn’t exactly forthcoming at the police station. She’s a pretty tough cookie, Julie. She just might never explain. We might never find out.”

They found out the following Sunday, four days later, back home in Port Angeles. Phil had come in from Italy on a red-eye at 7:50 A.M. and had driven straight out to Port Angeles, having promised to fill them in on everything. The idea had been to take a picnic brunch down to Dungeness Spit, the hump-backed, six-mile ribbon of sand and driftwood that angled out into the stormy strait like a sheltering arm, protecting the quiet waters of Dungeness Bay within its curve. It was Phil’s favorite spot on the Peninsula, and he thought the salt air, the sense of space, the cries of seals and gulls, and the grand, ever-present backdrop of the Olympics might help him decompress.

But Sunday, like the previous three days, came up rainy and glowering, a typical Pacific Northwest spring morning without a “sunbreak” in sight, and so they’d settled for a brunch of scrambled eggs, lox, bagels, and cream cheese at home instead. Phil had been taciturn and a little grumpy when he’d walked in, and Gideon’s greeting of “How goes it, padrone?” hadn’t helped matters. “This is nothing to joke about,” had been the querulous reply.

But a bagel sandwich of lox and cream cheese smeared with cherry jam (“That’s the way we Armenians like it,” he’d said defensively. “You want to make something of it?”) had helped him unwind, and with the pouring of his second cup of coffee, he began to open up.

“I had a talk with Francesca, you know,” he said, stirring in sugar. “Yesterday. They’re holding her in Turin. I drove up there to see her.”

“And she talked to you?” Gideon said. “I’m surprised.”

“So am I, to tell you the truth. But I had to at least ask her some questions-you know, to try to make sense of things. They’ve got her in a kind of a… not really a cell, but like a dorm room, only the door is metal, and it has a window in it. Somebody stood outside and watched us the whole time. They said I couldn’t see her at first, but I called Caravale and he got me in.” He was stirring, stirring, his mind 7,000 miles away, back in a dorm-like room in Turin.

“How did she seem?” Julie prompted.

“Like Francesca. Nasty. ‘So you’ve come to gloat, eh? Go ahead, have your fill.’ Those were her first words to me.”

He had spent half an hour in her company, he explained, unable to get her to say anything. She had sat on her cot in silence, with her arms folded, and her eyes half-closed, and a distant half-smile on her face, while he pleaded with her to shed some light on what she’d done. And then, when he had already gotten up and was about to leave, he had stopped just before signaling to get out and had said, in bafflement and frustration: “He was stabbed in the back, Francesca! I can’t even make myself imagine that. That you would stab Domenico… your father… in the back-”

She had jumped up from the cot on which she’d been sitting, her dark eyes alight for the first time. “Yes, in the back, the way he stabbed me in the back!”

“She confessed to you?” Gideon said, astounded.

Phil nodded. He’d finally finished stirring his coffee and lifted it to his lips, but it was obvious he hardly knew he was drinking it. “She got carried away; she couldn’t hold it back. I mean, it just poured out of her. It was horrible-this flood of bile, of resentment. .. it was like I wasn’t even there. I was, like, paralyzed…” He put the coffee down, stared out at the gray murk, and in a quiet, neutral voice told them what had burst from her with so much passion.