Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

“ Si, Tonino, che si dice ?”

Martignetti’s reply was audible, if only barely. “ Houston, abbiamo un problema .”

A few seconds later, Rocco jumped back on the line with Gideon: “I think I better hang up, Gid. See you at one—no, make it one thirty. Leave your cell phone on in case I can’t make it at all.” He clicked off, leaving Gideon to wonder what was up. If the problema The museum was a bigger place than he’d expected, with more rooms, and as far as he knew there were no more than half a dozen visitors in it. It was a shame, he thought, that science drew so paltry an audience, but it certainly made museum-going a lot more pleasant than those folks had it in the next building over. He was able to wander at his leisure and pause as long as he wished at the objects that caught his interest. Of which there were many: evocative, sepia-colored antique maps, huge sixteenth-century globes made to adorn royal apartments, fabulous golden armillary spheres that had tracked the heavens five hundred years ago. There were six-foot-long wooden astronomical telescopes, an ingenious sixteenth century calculator, frightening old surgical instruments, and even an eighteenth-century “mechanical paradox” in which a cylinder placed at the bottom of a set of rails rolled quite indubitably upward when released.

And of course there was a room devoted to Galileo Galilei, which Gideon saved for last, like dessert, and in which he wandered, blissfully absorbed, for almost an hour. There were prisms that the great man had used in his experiments with light, his magnetic lodestones, his precious, wood-and-leather occhialino (little eye) that future generations would call a microscope.

There was even a skeletal remnant for the anthropologist in him: in a transparent, egg-shaped reliquary filigreed with gold resided the gracefully extended middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, pointing straight up.

• • •

THREEblocks from where Gideon stood pondering the implications of that upraised middle finger (a last message from beyond the grave to the Inquisition that had so hounded and persecuted him in his last years?) lay the rest of the scientist’s remains. Housed in a suitably grand marble tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, they had rested for almost three hundred years alongside those of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Leonardo Bruni.

In front of the basilica was the usual broad piazza, at the far end of which, perhaps three hundred feet from the great façade, Rocco Gardella stood before the window of a top-floor apartment, his back to the famous scene. The building in which he stood was yet another restored old palazzo, distinctly upscale, with rental prices to match, but this particular apartment was anything but. The place was squalid, fetid. There were microwave trays and bowls of congealing food from more than one meal—more than five or six meals—on the kitchen counter, on the stove, in the sink. Some of them had been there so long mold was growing on them. There were blackened banana peels, shriveled brown apple cores, cups of caffe latte in which the milk had curdled halfway to yogurt. Emptied, unrinsed cans of soup, beans, and stewed fruit filled the sink. Candy wrappers everywhere. Discarded clothing, mostly socks and underwear, lay in tangled clumps and piles on the floors of all three rooms, and the bathroom as well. The whole place stank of rotting food, dirty laundry, and mildewed towels. Rocco, thinking about rats, had moved with care in looking into dark corners or closets when he’d first arrived, but if there were rats around, they’d scurried into the walls by now.

His attention was fixed on a bed containing yet another set of mortal remains. This one was curled on its side among twisted, grungy sheets, dressed in a shirt and trousers, and still wearing shoes. Bent over the body was the medico legale , doing what they do at such scenes: pressing eyeballs, raising limbs and letting them drop, sniffing at the dead, wide-open mouth. With them in the apartment were a photographer, along with two crime-scene officers busily plying their forceps, plastic envelopes, and mysterious lights, sprays, and powders. Maresciallo Antonio Martignetti was also there, wandering around and poking into drawers and closets.

Ordinarily, the death of a known addict under circumstances that practically screamed overdose wouldn’t be getting the level of scrutiny that this one was, but when the addict himself happened to be a suspect, or at the very least a potential material witness, in a double murder currently under investigation, a different level of effort was called for. And this particular corpse, the former Cesare Baccarreda Cubbiddu had fit that description to a T .

Happily (from Rocco’s point of view), Captain Conforti hadn’t felt that it was necessary to bring in the public prosecutor yet, so there was no officious Migliorini clone to deal with. It was also fortunate, he thought, that the medico legale who had been assigned was the one he found easiest to work with, the round, smiling, and Buddha-like Dr. Melio Bosco, the seventy-six-year-old physician who had been on the scene in the Casentinese when the Cubbiddus’ skeletons had been found.

Bosco had been at it for twenty minutes, and when he straightened up he did it with a groan. “My lumbar spine’s getting too old for this, Rocco,” he said, kneading his back with the fingers of both hands. “I need to find a new line of work, something easy. Look into applying to the Carabinieri , maybe. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Melio, it is awfully easy work. Wouldn’t be challenging enough for you. So, how long has he been dead?”

Bosco stripped off his gloves, tossed them into his bag, and steepled his fingers before his chest. “I would say that it was somewhere between six and twelve hours ago—thirteen to be on the safe side—that this gentleman embarked on his passage across the Styx with that ferryman of ghosts, grave Charon at his oar.”

“Dante?”

“Euripides.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You’re too smart for the Carabinieri . Six to thirteen hours. So that’d be, uh, eight o’clock or so last night at the earliest, four o’clock this morning at the latest?”

“Say, you’re pretty smart yourself.”

“Anything to say on the . . . wait a minute . . . yeah, on the cause of death?”

“Heart failure, I would guess.”

“Induced by a cocaine overdose?”

“Let’s wait for the toxicology report on that, but the circumstances would seem to point us in that direction, wouldn’t you agree?” He nodded toward the marble-topped nightstand beside the bed, with a number of items scattered across its surface: a nail clipper, a ring of keys, a bottle of cough medicine, a couple of ballpoints, some used, wadded tissues. And, more significantly, what was known in the trade as a snuff kit: a makeup-size mirror, a single-edge razor blade, a tiny spoon, a three-inch-long copper tube about the diameter of a drinking straw, and a little bottle with a bit of white sediment in it. Alongside them was the open case, made of expensive leather, that had held them neatly in their places with elastic loops and zippered pockets. It was called a snuff kit because, when advertised for sale, it was uniformly described as a set of accessories for those who took snuff. Advertisers with a sense of humor sometimes made a point of stating that it was never, ever, under any circumstances, to be used for inhaling illegal substances. Rocco had run across a lot of these in his time, but he had yet to run into one owned by an actual snuff-taker. In fact, he had yet to run into an actual snuff-taker.

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Rocco said. “I don’t suppose you’d have anything to say about whether it was accidental, or whether he had somebody helping him across that river?”