Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

The shy, plump, young widow he had married back in Sardinia had been full of gratitude to him. She’d been a simple, dutiful wife, and for the first five hard years in Tuscany she had worked shoulder to shoulder with him, planting vines, building trellises, culling and harvesting grapes until their fingers bled. But things changed when a noted wine critic more or less accidentally visited Villa Antica in 2009 and tasted the 2001 Pio Pico, then raved about it in his blog: “elegant yet rustic, assertive yet balanced, subtle yet bold, this big-hearted wine . . .”

What made it truly astounding was that what the famous critic was blathering about wasn’t one of Franco’s fancy, meticulously engineered varietals, but the simple, down-to-earth wine Pietro made primarily for their own everyday drinking, the same blend of Carignane and Nebbiolo that his father and grandfather had made back on the farm in Sardinia.

Nevertheless, the review put them on the enological map; their fortunes took a sudden, huge jump; and things were never again the same with Villa Antica. Unfortunately they had never been the same with Nola either. Now that she was part of Tuscan royalty, she changed overnight from a Sardinian to an Italian: first the relinquishing of her kitchen duties to a newly hired housekeeper, then the driving lessons, the “diction” lessons, the fashion magazines, the hairdresser in Milan, the endless diet regimens, the flaunting of her middle-age body in shamefully revealing new clothes. At home and with the winery staff, she had become domineering; in public, vulgar and whorish—

“I don’t have anything else, babbo ,” Luca said.

“I don’t have anything, babbo ,” Nico said.

Franco, sulking over the rotary fermenter, was silent.

“All right, then,” Pietro said, getting up. “Don’t blow up the winery while I’m gone. Franco, you’re in charge.”

Franco stood up to shake hands with his father. “We’ll take care of everything. I’ll see you at the end of the month.”

“If God wills it,” Pietro grunted. “ Che sara sara .”

TWO

Eleven months later, August 22, 2011

RESPONDER:“One-one-two, emergency response. What is the nature of the problem, please?”

CALLER:“I don’t know if this is the number I should be calling. I—I—”

RESPONDER:“Just tell me the problem, signore. Speak slowly.”

CALLER:“Well, I just saw two dead bodies.”

RESPONDER:“Give me the address, please, signore.”

CALLER:“There is no address. I was hiking. I’m in the mountains, in the Casentino National Park near Mount Falterona. But I have a GPS. The coordinates are, ah, 43.87983 and, ah, 11 .758633. Yes, that’s right, 8633.”

RESPONDER:“And can you see these bodies right now?”

CALLER:“Not exactly. They’re on the other side of a big boulder, maybe five meters from me. I’m at the bottom of a cliff. If I remember right, there’s a path up there along the edge, and it looks to me like they fell off it, but I don’t—”

RESPONDER:“Signore, you are certain they’re dead?”

CALLER:“Oh, yes, definitely.”

RESPONDER:“Are you sure? Have you checked their pulse? Their breathing?”

CALLER:“No, but—”

RESPONDER:“It may be that they’re still alive. We—”

CALLER:“If they are, it’ll be the first time I ever saw skeletons that were still alive.”

RESPONDER:“Skeletons? Did you say skeletons? But are you’re sure they’re human? There are many animals in the park, signore. Goats—”

CALLER:“Well, if they’re goats, it’ll be the first time I ever saw goats wearing clothes.”

RESPONDER:“I see. Signore, the authorities will be there shortly. We request—”

CALLER:“I’m not sure they’ll be able to find the place, even with a GPS. Tell them to drive into the park on SS67, and maybe two kilometers after they come to a tiny village—Campigna, it’s called—there’s a gravel road on the right. It’s not much of a road, it has no number, it’s rough, you have to drive slow. But it they take that a few kilometers through the forest, they’ll come to a clearing—it looks like maybe they were going to build something there, but there isn’t anything. Well, that’s where I am, and the skeletons are right—”

RESPONDER:“Signore, we request that you kindly remain at the site.”

CALLER:“Oh no, I don’t think so. I’ve done my duty. This doesn’t concern me.”

RESPONDER:“But may I have your name, please?”

CALLER:“No, no, I don’t think so, no.”

Telephone call terminated

• • •

CAPITANORoberto Marco Conforti, commander of the Operations Department of Florence Province’s Arma dei Carabinieri , read the transcript for the second time, while his secretary, who had brought it to him, awaited his instructions.

“Cosima,” he said, with a sigh of resignation that few people besides his longtime aide would recognize for what it was, “please tell Tenente Gardella I would like to see him.”

As Cosima left, the captain rose from his teak desk and walked to the arched window of his airy office. Ordinarily the view down Borgo Ognissanti, an ancient street of ancient churches and stately, gray palazzos (of which Number Forty-eight, Carabinieri headquarters with its great interior stone courtyard, was a classic example), pleased and calmed him, but not today. Beribboned, bemedaled (by the president of Italy, no less), and famed within the corps for his unflappability, Captain Conforti was not a man to be intimidated by anything, least of all by the prospect of an interview with a member of his own staff. With one exception. From the day the young lieutenant had been transferred from Palermo four years earlier, Rocco Gardella had displayed an unmatched knack for raising the captain’s blood pressure.

“Come!” he called on hearing the quiet tap at his door. When it opened, he turned reluctantly from the window to look dourly at his subordinate.

“You wanted to see me about something?” Lieutenant Gardella asked.

Well, there you were. The conversation hadn’t even begun, and already the lieutenant had managed to get under his skin. “Upon entering the presence of a superior officer, Tenente , it is customary to salute,” he said coldly.

“Oh yeah, right, sorry about that,” was Gardella’s affable reply, accompanied by a vague gesture in the general direction of his forehead, a motion somewhere between a wave and a flap.

The captain, erect as always despite his fifty-four years, returned this halfhearted gesture, but did it one hundred percent by the book, shooting it back with stiff, snapping precision. Not that he thought the lesson would take; not with Gardella. Still, it was his obligation to try. “It is also customary to address senior officers either by their rank or by ‘sir.’”

“Sir,” Gardella said, following it with a closed-mouth grin, as if happy to go along for the sake of form with a custom that they both knew to be ridiculous.

With a discreet roll of his eyes, Conforti returned from the window to sit behind his desk, indicating with a curt dip of his chin that Gardella was to take the chair across from him. Gardella fell into it and settled comfortably back. A small, fit, compact man, he sprawled like a teenager, more or less on the bottom of his spine, not easy to do in a government-issue visitor’s chair, and not at all suited to the beautifully tailored uniform he wore, and even less to the two silver stars on each shoulder tab. Just looking at him was enough to make Captain Conforti grind his teeth.