Good Blood (7 page)

Phil shrugged.

“See?” said Gideon.

“Anyway,” Phil went on, “he adopted me, and I took his name. I figured Boyajian sounded more American, you know? But no, I had a good Italian name to start with.”

He bowed. “Filiberto Ungaretti,’atsa me.”

Gideon just shook his head. Even after two decades, Phil was always coming up with something to surprise him. His career had been one unexpected (and entertaining) twist after another, a sort of career-in-reverse. When he’d gotten his Ph. D. in cultural anthropology, he had stepped into a coveted tenure-track position at a big state university but had found university politics more than he was willing to cope with. He’d then tried teaching at a Seattle community college, but couldn’t stand the committee assignments. Next had come a period as a high school teacher (but the nonteaching, largely custodial responsibilities weren’t to his liking), followed by a three-year stint teaching grade school. While he pondered his next move-kindergarten? preschool? day care?-he was offered a summer job going to Egypt to research and write Egypt on the Cheap, the very first On the Cheap guidebook.

It had turned his life around. With his scruffy, eager, friendly manner and his natural willingness to see the best in common people and in their customs, he had at last found the occupation he’d been made for. The book had done better than anyone expected, and Phil had been made a contributing editor for the new series, a position he still held. In addition, he also led eight or ten no-frills tours a year for the company, of which the Italian lakes trip was the latest.

Gideon, by contrast, had taken a more conventional path, beginning as an assistant professor of physical anthropology at Northern California State University, where he was promoted after a few years to associate professor and contentedly settled in for a long, rewarding career of teaching and scholarship in San Mateo, California.

But fate had a jog of its own in store for him. Almost by accident, he had begun consulting for the FBI on the side, on cases involving forensic anthropology, and eight years ago one of those cases had taken him to Washington State’s Olympic rain forest, where two things had occurred that would change his life forever, one to his mild but frequent embarrassment, the other to his great and unremitting joy. The first was that a local reporter following the case had referred to him as the Skeleton Detective, and the sobriquet had stuck to him like glue, providing a rich source of not-so-subtle ragging to his colleagues at meetings and conventions ever since.

The second thing, the enormous, life-altering thing, was that he’d met a beautiful young park ranger named Julie Tendler, who had been incidentally involved in finding the human remains that had brought him to Washington. His much-loved first wife Nora had been killed in a car crash two years earlier, and Gideon had never gotten over his grief. In his case, it had slowly evolved into a terrible impassivity, a sense of deep isolation from everyone around him. For two years he had felt himself to be as cold and dead and impervious to emotion-to positive emotion-as a stone. It was Julie who had reawakened him, unthawing feelings and sensibilities that he had truly thought frozen for good.

A year after that they’d been married and he’d lucked into an associate professorship at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus (he’d since advanced to full professor). They had bought this hillside house that was a ten-minute walk in one direction from Julie’s office in the headquarters building, and a ten-minute walk in the other direction to campus. A perfect location. A perfect life. A day didn’t go by that he wasn’t grateful to her for bringing him to life again.

“Filiberto Ungaretti,” she said now, also shaking her head. “That’s amazing. Sure, it’d be interesting to visit your family, Phil. If you’re really sure they wouldn’t mind.”

“Interesting I can’t promise. Weird I can guarantee.”

“Weird how?” Gideon asked. “Weird like you?”

“No, different. They own this island, sort of, and they live in practically this palace-well, you’ll see.”

“A day at the Ungarettis,” Julie mused. “Sounds good.”

“No, Ungaretti was my father’s name, the creep. I haven’t seen him since I was three. This is my mother’s family we’d be visiting.”

“And what’s their name?”

“Their name,” said Phil, “is de Grazia.”

Good Blood

Aaron Elkins – Gideon Oliver 11 – Good Blood

Stresa was much as Phil had described it: a bright, clean, discreetly fading nineteenth-century resort town on Lake Maggiore, full of flowers, gardens, and romantic villas, and boasting a generous, park-like promenade, the Lungolago, that ran along the lakefront from one tip of the city to the other, bordering one side of the main street, the Corso Italia. On the other side of the Corso was an unbroken row of upscale boutiques and hotels. Away from the lakefront, Stresa was equally attractive, but in a different way: a maze of romantic piazzas and narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with picturesque restaurants and hole-in-the wall cafes. Their hotel, the Primavera, was on one of these streets, a modest, pleasant place a block inland (the four-and five-star hotels were all on the lakefront). Phil, who had slept most of the time on the fifteen-hour flight from Seattle, had, amazingly, gone to sleep in his room as soon as they’d arrived, but Julie and Gideon, who hadn’t slept at all, and whose eyes by now felt glued open, were eager to get out in the fresh air.

They had strolled lazily around the town for half an hour and now they sat, loopy and jet-lagged, among families of Swiss and Italian tourists, at a sun-drenched outdoor cafe on the promenade, where Phil had promised to join them at nine-thirty for the visit to the de Grazias. From the boat terminal a block away, ferries carried tourists to, from, and around Stresa’s big attractions, the fabulous Borromean Islands a few hundred yards offshore, with their splendid seventeenth-century gardens and palaces. Gideon was reading aloud from a guidebook description of Isola Bella, the closest and most fantastic of the three islands.

“‘But it is to the most ambitious and far-sighted of the Borromeos, Vitalio the Sixth, to whom we owe thanks for the Isola Bella we see today. It was Vitalio who began the prodigious earth-moving project that transformed the morphology of the land into ten superimposed garden terraces in the form of a gigantic truncated pyramid on the example of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The many pools and fountains were fed by pipes from an enormous cistern installed beneath… ’”

He glanced up at Julie, who had been suspiciously silent for a long time. She sat with her eyes closed and her face tipped up to the sun. “Hello?” he said. “Are you still with us?”

“Mm-hm,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “‘It was Vitalio who something-somethinged the project that transformed the something into ten superimposed something-somethings on the example of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’ Do go on.”

With a smile, he closed the book. “I think maybe I’ve had enough too. Why don’t we just sit here and soak up the sunshine and this nice, warm air? Doesn’t it feel great after the spring we’ve had, or rather, haven’t had?”

“Mmm,” she said, more a purr than a murmur. Except to recross her ankles, she didn’t stir.

Given the chance, he watched her face for a while: the slightly turned-up nose; the pert chin-softening now, but all the more attractive for it-the lively mouth always on the verge of a smile; the glossy, curly black hair, cut short now, that framed the whole pretty picture. He shook his head. What did I do to get so lucky? he wondered contentedly, as he had so many times before.

“I love you,” he said.

He saw her smile, though her eyes were still closed. “Likewise,” she murmured.

“Good, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.” He looked at the menu again. “I’m having a problem figuring out what to order.”

“Hm?”

“It’s because of the difference in time zones.”

“Mm.”

He put down the menu and looked at her again. “I’m not boring you? Not keeping you awake?”

“No, not at all. I’m glued to every word. ‘It’s because of the difference in time zones.’”

“What is?”

She thought for a moment. “What you were talking about.”

He laughed. “The thing is, I think I’m hungry, but I don’t know what to get. It’s eight-thirty in the morning here, but our internal clocks still think it’s eleven-thirty at night. I don’t know whether to get breakfast or a midnight snack.”

“What would you get if you ordered breakfast?”

“Bacon and eggs, probably. It’s on the menu, probably for the English tourists. And coffee.”

“And what would you get for a midnight snack?”

He thought it over. “Coffee. And bacon and eggs.”

“That’s a pretty tough problem you have there, mister. I don’t see how I can help you with that one.”

They had finished their bacon and eggs and were on their third cups of coffee when Phil showed up, looking greatly refreshed and highly disreputable. It seemed to be a point of honor with him when he traveled, to look as if he’d been trekking through the Arabian desert for six months, so he had let his salt-and-pepper beard come in again. He’d also skipped his last few haircuts so that his thinning hair now hung in tendrils down the back of his neck. With his hitching gait-Phil habitually walked with one side a little higher than the other-he looked like a down-and-out sailor that had jumped ship a few years back and had never managed to get himself another berth.

To complete the travel-worn image, he was attired in his professional tour leader’s regalia: rumpled, faded, multi-pocketed khaki shorts; a tired T-shirt with sagging neck-line; sockless sneakers; and an old, long-billed “On the Cheap” baseball cap. Phil’s first rule of travel for his excursion groups was “Never take more than can go in a backpack,” of which he made himself a living example. In his pack, as Gideon knew, were two duplicates of each item he was wearing (except for the sneakers, of which he had only a single extra pair), plus a waterproof windbreaker and a few toiletries, including a roll of toilet paper, without which he never traveled (rule two). That was it. As a result, Phil seemed to spend a lot of time searching out a convenient place and time to wash and dry his underwear, but he considered that a small price to pay.

“Finish up,” he said, slipping into an empty chair at their table, “The boat’s waiting. We’re off to Isola de Grazia.”

“Isola de Grazia?” Julie repeated. “You mean your family really has its own island?” Julie asked.

“Sure, what’s the big surprise? I told you that.”

“You said they ‘own this island, sort of,’” Gideon pointed out.

“Forgive me for using a figure of speech. What, is there a difference?”

“There’s a big difference,” Gideon said. ‘Sort of’ connotes ‘not exactly’ or ‘not really,’ doesn’t it? And what does it modify, ‘island’ or ‘owned’? ‘They sort of own an island.’ ‘They own sort of an island.’ Those are two entirely different referents, and either way-”

“You have to live with this all the time?” Phil asked Julie.

“It’s a trial,” she said. “But he has good points as well.”

“I’m only trying to introduce a little clarity into your thinking, my dear Filiberto.”

“And don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” Phil said, getting up with a yawn. “What do you say we go?”

The boat was a canopied launch with three rows of seats for a dozen people, but they had it to themselves. As soon as they boarded, the captain, a bony, gray-haired woman in a Greek fisherman’s cap and bib overalls, cast off, eased backward from the landing, and turned the bow toward the north. In ten minutes they had left Stresa and the busy ferry run behind, and were sliding over smooth, bright, blue water, with green mountains rising from either shore, and far ahead, over the Swiss border, the grim, granite, glacier-topped mountains of the Simplon Alps. The warm, fresh breeze felt like satin on their skin and the three of them sat quietly for a while, with their eyes closed and their faces turned into the breeze.

“Don’t tell me,” Gideon said when he opened his eyes.

They looked at him. “Tell you what?” Julie asked.

“Don’t tell me that that’s Isola de Grazia.”

He was gesturing at a solitary island a half-mile ahead. Roughly oval and about a quarter-mile long, the point nearest them was occupied by a pink-stuccoed villa, relatively modest in size but gracefully proportioned in the refined, austerely symmetrical Palladian style of the seventeenth century. A set of stone steps at the front of the house led up to a broad, central entrance portico with four tall, slender columns supporting a Greek-style pediment at roof level. Two elegant stories high, with chimney pots shaped like Grecian urns rising from the red tile roof, the building fronted a wide stone courtyard that extended to a quay at which two gleaming wooden launches were tied up. Behind the handsome house and covering the rest of the island were formal gardens that were smaller but almost as elaborate as those they’d seen on Isola Bella. There were fountains, terraces, colonnades, statues, mazes, rows of orange trees, mimosas, and tamarinds, and pungent aromatic shrubs that they could smell from the boat.

“Yup, that’s it,” Phil said. “Home, sweet home.”

Julie was flabbergasted. “But it… it really is a palace… and those grounds!”

“I told you.”

“You said it was practically a palace. You made it sound-”

Phil rolled his eyes. “Oh, God, now she’s starting. What is it with you people, you have something against adverbial constructions? Is it some kind of a life mission?”

“Of course not,” Julie said, laughing. “It’s just that it’s a little hard to imagine the Phil Boyajian we know-”

“And love,” Gideon assured him.

“-growing up in a place like that. Oh, look, isn’t that a peacock?”

“Oh, yeah. They’ve got monkeys too, for Christ’s sake. There’s a whole goddamn menagerie wandering around the gardens. And yes, I grew up there, or at least I lived there for a few years. But I was born back in Stresa.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The house isn’t there anymore. It’s a parking lot for the railroad station now. My mother got my no-good father a job as some kind of a watchman or maybe a gamekeeper on the de Grazia property up north, and I lived in town till I was three. That’s when my father decided he wasn’t a family man after all and took off for good, never to be seen again, and my mother took me to live on the island, in the villa, till I was six or seven, which is when we came to the States and she got married again. Let me tell you, that place always spooked me,” he said, looking at the house. “I still come here every few years, kind of in memory of my mother, I guess. And it still gives me the creeps.”