Aaron Elkins: Dying on the Vine

John happily took in the rows of quaint, colorful, indubitably English pump handles. “You can send over four pints of that Old Speckled Hen, por favor .”

“Half pint for me,” Marti amended.

“And some menus, please,” said Gideon.

The place was only half full—everyone else was Italian, as far as they could tell—so they had no trouble finding a table. They chose one in a niche, under a wall hung with old ad posters for Pears’ soaps and Triumph motorcycles, and scattered black-and-white photos of matronly Victorian ladies, including Victoria herself. They had barely sat down when the beers came, in traditional, dimpled glass mugs.

They all raised a silent toast and sipped, except for John, who glugged down a long contented swallow, then studied his glass. “Interesting. A toffee-and-forest-mold foundation supporting leathery after tones with a blackberry edge—”

“He’s been at Villa Antica too long,” Marti said. “We’ve got to get him home.”

“I saw that once in England in a beer ad, and I memorized it,” John confessed. “Been waiting forever for the chance to try it out.”

“So what do you really think of it?” Julie asked.

“S’okay.”

The day’s menus were delivered by a second guy in a black T-shirt, not quite so burly, and with a slightly smaller black beard. Brothers, Gideon thought. One look at the menus explained the smell they couldn’t place: it was a mixture of jalapeños, salsa, guacamole, and fried tortillas. No Scotch eggs, no shepherd’s pie, no ploughman’s lunch, neither in the air nor on the menu. They had come on a Monday, and Mondays were il Pranzo Messicano days. For English food, come back tomorrow.

Their disappointment lasted about two seconds before they started poring over the menus, which were in English and Italian.

“Anybody want to split a fantasy salad?” Marti asked. “Feta cheese, olives, radicchio, tomatoes, cucumbers . . . sounds good, doesn’t it?”

All she got back from the others were brief, contemptuous glances before they returned to their studies.

Gideon was deciding between a couple of dishes when his phone bipped. It was Rocco, starting out in high gear. “Hey, listen, I just got the damn—”

“Hold on a second, Rocco, I can hardly hear you. Let me take the phone outside.” He stood up. “It’s Rocco. Be back in a minute. Order me the beef burrito, will you?”

There was a raucous, impromptu, four-man-team soccer game going on in the piazza, but he found a relatively safe place at the edge of the square and stood in the scant shade of a lone tree, next to a marble-slab bench.

“Okay, Rocco, I’m back. You just got the damn what?”

“The lab report on Cesare, and also the—”

“Whoa, whoa, you got that two days ago. You already told me about it.”

“No, not that report; the report on the cocaethamethawhatever. And they—”

“The cocaethylene report? How could you have that already? The request just went in yesterday.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that. Look, what you gotta remember is that we don’t have all those murders you got in the States, you know? Our lab isn’t all booked up for weeks and weeks. They do a lot of sitting around. They appreciate it when we give them something.”

“Still, it’s unbelievable. In one day? I didn’t even think it was possible. I thought it only happened on TV.”

Rocco let go a noisy sigh. “Are you gonna shut up and let me say what I want to say? I don’t have all day here.”

“Speak. I’m all ears.” The soccer ball had come rolling his way, and he gently kicked it back to the players.

“Thank you. Okay. Here’s what it says. . . . Umm . . . I don’t know, milligrams, kilograms . . . but the upshot is, now they’re saying the primary cause of death isn’t cocaine toxicity anymore, it’s coca . . . coca . . . what you said.”

“Cocaethylene toxicity. Son of a gun.”

“Yeah. But the manner of death is still undetermined, no change. So I get them on the phone—this was, like, ten minutes ago—I get them on the phone, and I say, What am I supposed to do with this? What’s it mean? Why did you send it to me instead of the public prosecutor? And they say, Hey, all we do is analyze the blood sample. You’re the ones who figure out what it means. You ordered it, don’t you know? Except that I didn’t order it—”

“Uh, yeah, Rocco, that was me. I tried calling you yesterday—”

“I know, Tonino explained it to me.”

“It wasn’t his fault, Rocco, I—”

“I know, I know, he’s not in any trouble; he does it all the time, don’t worry. But he doesn’t know why you wanted it either. So how about telling me now? Why did you ask for this particular test? What does it mean?”

Gideon sat down on the bench, his thoughts tumbling.

“Gid?”

“I think it means,” he said slowly, “that you do have another murder on your hands, all right. And now we’ve got some solid evidence to back it up.”

Cocaethylene, he explained, was a toxic metabolite that was formed in the liver when cocaine and alcohol were taken together and which subjected both the liver and the heart to enormous stress; many times more stress than was produced by alcohol or cocaine alone. Some studies indicated that the risk of death as a result of cocaethylene formation was twenty-five times greater than the risk of death from cocaine alone.

“So Cesare was drinking, along with snorting the coke, is that what you’re saying?”

“As far as I know, that’s the only way that cocaethylene gets made.”

“So where did the alcohol come from, Gid? There wasn’t any booze on the nightstand. There wasn’t any in the whole apartment. No wine, no cordials, no bottles in the garbage, nothing.”

“That’s because he didn’t drink, Rocco. Ever. He knew better. Linda told me he once had a friend who died from mixing the two. Which is why we can assume that if he had any alcohol in him—and the cocaethylene proves that he did—he didn’t drink it knowingly.”

“You’re losing me again, buddy. If he was doing coke and alcohol at the same time, how could he not know it? And where did the alcohol come from? You’re saying whoever did it took it away with him?”

“No, I’m saying it was right there on the nightstand.”

“The nightstand?” Gideon could practically hear Rocco’s forehead wrinkling. “What, the cough medicine? No, that was Giorniquilla. I know that stuff. No alcohol.”

“Rocco, I also asked Martignetti to request an analysis of the contents of that bottle. That didn’t come back yet?”

“I don’t think so. Just a minute.” A clatter indicated the phone had been put down, and Gideon heard just bits and pieces of what ensued. “Hey, Tonino . . . did we . . . ? Well, why the hell didn’t you . . . ? Let me see. . . .” And then he was back, speaking directly into the mouthpiece again. “Gid, there was alcohol in it—twenty-five percent. You want to tell me what the hell is going on here, please? And how you knew about it?”

“I didn’t know, Rocco; I guessed.” But it was a masterful guess—a masterful series of guesses, really—and he was feeling highly satisfied with himself.

The idea had come to him the previous morning at breakfast, when the literal meaning of Giorniquilla had belatedly dawned on him. Giorni , of course, meant “days,” and quilla was probably from tranquilla, so Giorniquilla was a medicine that would quiet your cough and give you “tranquil days.” Well—and here was where the guesswork started—if there was a cough medicine for quiet days, might there not be a variant of that medicine for quiet nights? And if there was, might that variant contain alcohol, as some American nighttime cold medicines did? And, if luck was on his side, might that medicine taste much like the daytime version, or at least enough so that someone wigged out on cocaine might not notice the difference? Might it even look like the daytime version?