Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

“You came here to eat?” she somewhat suspiciously asked in Italian.

“No, to buy car,” Marti said, but only to herself.

“Yes, please, signora,” said Gideon, the designated Italian-speaker.

“ Americani ?”

“Yes.”

“Not many Americans like this food.”

“We’d like very much to try it.”

“Dinner costs fifty euros. Including wine and mineral water.” It was delivered more like a warning than an information bulletin.

“That’s fine,” Gideon said.

“ Bueno ,” said John. “ Bene, bene. ”

She appeared to be of two minds about whether or not to let them come in any farther, but finally she nodded with a sigh. “All right, follow me.”

“There’ll be six of us altogether,” Gideon told her. “Our friends are on the way.”

This was met with a shrug. She led them through an archway to a smaller, extremely plain room that held only two tables, both unoccupied, and began to shove them together. Gideon and John jumped to assist, receiving no thanks for their efforts. “She’s not exactly thrilled to see us, is she?” Julie whispered to Gideon. “I’m getting a little uncomfortable.”

“How long until your friends come?” the woman asked.

“They’ll be here any minute.”

She grunted and moved off.

“Perhaps we could have some wine while we wait?” Gideon called.

Another nod.

“White wine for me,” said Marti, who had enough Italian to manage that much.

“No white wine. Only red. You want white wine, you have to go someplace else. Plenty of other restaurants in Arezzo.”

Marti didn’t understand it all, but Gideon did. He was ready to go find one of the other restaurants, but he didn’t want to disappoint Luca. But his tone was sharp: “Please bring us menus to look at while we wait. The special menus.”

“No menus.”

“No menus? How will we know what to order?”

It appeared that Gideon wasn’t the only one who was annoyed. Clearly, the woman had had it with them, and her voice went up a few decibels. “Hey. You go to the symphony, to the opera?”

“What? Yes.” But he stared at her, wondering if he’d misunderstood.

She stared fiercely back at him. “And when you go to the symphony, do you tell the conductor what to play?”

“I . . .”

“No, you trust that he knows what he is doing. You put yourself in his hands.”

“Signora—”

But whatever he was about to say was cut off by a burst of booming, full-throated laughter—only Luca laughed like that—from the archway. The woman looked up and, like some kind of quick-change magic trick, her scowl was replaced by a lovely if crooked-toothed smile that completely altered her personality and would have lit up the room on its own. “Luca!” she cried joyfully. She pointed at Gideon and then shook the finger at Luca. “You put them up to this, you scoundrel!” She was laughing almost as hard as he was, and her bare upper arms jiggled like Jell-O.

“Indeed I did, Amalia,” Luca said.

Indeed he had, Gideon thought. “And make sure to ask for the special menus,” he’d told them earnestly an hour earlier. “It will show them that you know what you’re doing, that you’re not just a bunch of dumb tourists who wandered in by mistake.”

It took a few seconds to explain to the others what had been going on, by which time everybody was laughing and was friends with everybody else. Amalia actually squeezed Gideon’s shoulder affectionately, a friendship offering. “I bring wine now,” she said in English.

“You have to stop doing that, Luca,” Linda said as they sat down. “One of these days, she’s going to dump a pot of pasta e fagioli on your head.”

“Yeah, thanks a whole lot, Luca,” John grumped.

Luca was still chuckling. “I can’t help it. I love to hear her do her symphony speech.” He went into an Italian-accent falsetto. “‘Do you tell the conductor what to play?’” A little more laughter, and then he sobered. “That lady, Amalia Vezzoni, is the finest cook I know, the finest in Tuscany. She’s my, what do you call it, my role model. In fact . . . well . . .”

“Oh, go ahead and tell them,” Linda said. “Why not?”

“Sure, why not? Well, the fact is, Amalia’s getting older now, and her husband, who used to work with her, died last year. So we’ve been talking about buying into this place, working with her—and learning from her—for a while, and then, when she’s ready to call it quits, buying the whole thing from her. Time for me to get out of Villa Antica, anyway. It’s not the same with Franco in the driver’s seat, and anyhow, it’s really food I’m excited about now, not winemaking. What do you think?”

Gideon couldn’t help glancing around the place. “Um—”

His expression gave him away. “Yeah, we know,” Linda said. “It’s a little tacky. Amalia’s kind of let the place go. We plan on putting some money into making some improvements.”

“But not too many,” Luca said. “We don’t want a fancy place, that’s not the point.” He leveled a forefinger at Linda. “And nothing changes at all in the kitchen.”

“Well, maybe some of those old cast-iron pots, the ones with holes in them?” Linda suggested.

“They can be repaired. No, the kitchen is beautiful, it’s like my grandmother’s, just five times as big. The sign out front will have to change, though. It’s going to be La Cucina di Nonna Gina .” With that happy thought, he settled back, smiling.

Amalia returned with a waiter and with two bottles of wine, six glasses, and a couple of baskets of crusty bread. Proudly, she held up one of the bottles for Luca to examine.

“Oho, Brunello di Montalcino,” he read. “From Mastrojanni. Wonderful. Is this what everybody’s getting tonight, or just us?”

“Shh, better not to ask,” Amalia whispered.

The waiter didn’t bother to offer him the cork to sniff or a dollop of wine to sip, but simply filled all six glasses, confident they’d be acceptable.

And they were. Luca raised his glass in salute after tasting.

“They wanted white wine,” Amalia told him, obviously an in-joke, but an indulgent one, like a story one parent tells to another about their child’s escapades that day. Luca smiled in response.

“So what’s wrong with white wine?” a pouting Marti wondered. “We’ve been to some first-rate restaurants in Florence and had no trouble getting a pretty damn good local pinot grigio, or a Soave, or—”

“Well, yes,” Luca answered, “it’s true you can get some ‘pretty damn good’ whites here, but Tuscany’s red wines are matchless. Its whites . . . can be matched. And Amalia, like me, is a perfectionist. As you’ll see shortly.” He dunked a crust of bread in his glass, popped the sopping chunk into his mouth, and rolled his eyes with contentment. “Ahh. So. Well. Gideon. You said you were going back to the funeral home to look at the bones again. . . .”

“Which we did.” He and John had spent two frustrating and ultimately unproductive hours with the remains. They’d filled their wives in, but not Luca and Linda.

“And did you come up with anything?” Linda asked. “Do you know what killed him? Any ideas at all?”

Gideon was surprised that they wanted to talk about it at dinner, but if they were game, he was game. Linda and Luca were technically suspects, but, perhaps unwisely, he had excluded them from his own list of possibles. “Not really, Linda. There are those green-stick fractures I was telling you about, but I’m guessing they probably came from the fall. Or put it this way: I have no reason to think they didn’t; they’re perfectly consistent with a fall from a height.”