Dying on the Vine (12 page)

Gideon and Julie had heard this part of the story before, but Linda was rolling along in high gear, and they didn’t have the heart to stop her. Besides, they both liked listening to her smooth, gentle Tennessee accent.

The Cubbiddus had plowed their earnings back into the vineyard, and with time success had come. The enterprise had blossomed (Villa Antica was now the fourth largest of the valley’s seventy-something wineries), their sons thrived and grew into four healthy young men, and they lived without the fear of
faida
hanging over their heads, since no one in Barbagia knew where they were.

Yet all was not well in the Cubbiddu household. At the time of the marriage, Franco and Luca were still grieving for their mother, who had died from a kidney infection a few weeks after bearing Nico, and Nola’s intrusion into the family in her place was deeply resented. Nola, for her part, made an effort to win them over, but, like Pietro, she wasn’t endowed with much in the way of patience, and she soon gave it up, settling for the mutual disaffection, deep but in general peaceably constrained, that continued to the end. This rift had created an ongoing strain between husband and wife, and, to a lesser degree, between father and sons as well.

But it was Nola’s son, Cesare, who’d had the toughest time of all. When she and Pietro had married, Pietro’s two older boys were fifteen and sixteen. Cesare was a squalling infant, not yet a year old; the teenage Cubbiddu boys couldn’t have had less interest in him; at best, he was simply another intruder, but one who commanded a great deal more than his share of attention. And although Pietro treated the boy with kindness and generosity—he adopted him, he did his best to treat him no differently from his own sons—the underlying paternal pull was simply not there. Cesare had no doubt felt his isolation and by the age of four or so he had become a needy, manipulative, totally self-centered child. To Luca and Franco, by then into their young manhood, he was nothing but a hindrance and a pest.

“To Luca and Franco,” Gideon said. “Not to Nico?”

“That’s right. Well, you see, Nico is quite a bit younger than his brothers too, so as a kid he didn’t have much in common with them either, although of course the love was always there. Blood, you know; this is Italy. But Nico and Cesare—at the time, they were only a few months apart—well, they still are, of course, but as children, they couldn’t play with Franco or Luca, but they could play with each other. And they had no memory of ever
not
being brothers, which also wasn’t the case for the older boys. So there was a connection there that nobody else had with Cesare. You understand, I wasn’t there for any of this. Basically, I’m telling you what Luca’s told me.”

“Of course,” said Julie.

“Nico was the older one, the more secure one, so he sort of took Cesare under his wing, spoke up for him, took his side, that kind of thing. Made excuses for him. Baby brother playing big brother. And he still does; he still sees himself as Cesare’s protector. I have my doubts about how Cesare feels about Nico these days, but I do know that there’s still a genuine love there on Nico’s part. You wouldn’t think so from that loosey-goosey way of his, would you, but Nico’s a deeply affectionate guy. He’s never given up on trying to bring Cesare more into the family.” She shook her head fondly. “It’s kind of touching, really.”

“But apparently it hasn’t worked,” Julie said. “Bringing him more into the family.”

Linda paused to let another
zeppola
go down before continuing. “That’s right, Franco despises him, and Luca’s not exactly crazy about him either. Neither am I, for that matter. And this I can tell you from my own experience: ‘manipulative’ and ‘self-centered’ still fit him to a
T
. He’s always . . . I don’t know,
hatching
something for his own benefit, if you know what I mean. As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad we don’t see the little worm that much.”

She paused, hesitating, but decided she might as well finish the story. “And it doesn’t help any that he’s been into and out of drugs since he was fourteen. Marijuana at first, then other junk, then cocaine.
Babbo
paid for him to go to rehab three, four times, but it never took. His best friend died from it, from mixing cocaine and booze—”

“A lethal combination,” Gideon said with a shake of his head.

“And that stopped him for a while, but then he started thinking, ‘Well, I guess I better give up one of them, but do I really have to quit both?’ Unfortunately, it was the booze he gave up. He doesn’t even drink wine any more, which is pretty unique around here. But now he’s back on coke. Nico says it’s all because of stress, because Pietro threw him out, and maybe it is, but I don’t know. . . .” She shook her head. “It’s all just too damn bad.”

“He injects it?” asked Gideon

“According to Nico, he snorts it. He thinks it’s less harmful than injecting, less addictive.”

“About harmful I don’t know, but about addictive he’s probably right. You get a more immediate, more intense high from delivering it straight into the bloodstream.”

“Nico keeps thinking he can get him to quit, but . . . well, good luck to him, but I think it’s way, way too late. He’s already lost his cellar-master job. Doesn’t have a job at all, as far as I know. Lives on
babbo’s
will.”

“That’s really sad,” Julie said.

Linda nodded. “Yes, it is. But trust me, he’d still be a creep even if he wasn’t stoned half the time.” She drank the last of her cappuccino and set the cup down with a satisfied sigh. “Well, that’s pretty much the story, and I’d better head back to the booth to help out. Things are winding down here.” She gestured toward the piazza, in which the crowds had indeed thinned out. A general sense of fatigue now hung over it. Several of the booths were already being dismantled.

“Can I help?” Gideon asked. “Need some muscle?”

“No, thanks, we’ve got everything under control.” She pushed herself to her feet. “You know how to get to the villa from here?”

Gideon nodded. “SR69 to the A1, and then straight up to Figline.”

“Right. You’re in the same apartment you were in last year. Key’s in the door. Reception’s at seven. Totally informal; what you’re wearing is fine. With the weather so nice, it’ll be outdoors, on the garden terrace. Remember where that is?”

“Oh, I think so.”

“You won’t have any trouble finding it. Things haven’t changed since you were here last.”

“Wait, one more question?”

Linda paused. “Okay, shoot, but I need to run.”

“You mentioned
issues
with Pietro. Anything serious?”

Linda studied him for a moment, wondering why he was interested. “Well, not really, not until last year. Cesare took an offer to become assistant cellar master at this big winery right here in the valley—an old enemy of Pietro’s. It was a few months before you came the last time. From
babbo’s
point of view—after all the things he’d done for him, all he’d taught him about wine, yada yada—it was nothing short of treachery. He threw him out of the villa the day he found out about it, which is why he wasn’t here anymore when you showed up.

“How did Nola feel about that?” Julie asked. “Throwing out her son?”

“How do you think? But if anything, she was madder at Cesare than she was at
babbo.
I think down deep she thought the kid had gone out of his way to screw up a pretty decent situation—which he had—and what he got was what he deserved. At the same time, well, he
was
her son, and she and Pietro had some pretty good dustups about it. You could probably hear them in Florence. But there was only one
padrone
here, and it wasn’t Nola.”

“So Cesare must have been pretty ticked off at both of them,” Gideon said.

“Not as ticked off as
babbo
was at him.
Babbo
cut him out of his will, disowned him. Or rather, he was
going
to. It was the first thing he was going to do when he got back from the mountains. ‘You are henceforth no longer the son of Pietro Cubbiddu.’” She shrugged. “But of course, he never did get back, so Cesare wound up getting the exact same share as the brothers got—from the will, I mean. Which is a damn shame, in my opinion.
Babbo
probably turned over in his grave. Or he would have if he’d had one at the time.”

“Well, how—” Gideon started.

“No, I really have to go. Luca and Cesare will screw everything up without some responsible adult supervision. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.”

Julie and Gideon, still seated at the table, watched her leave. Then Julie looked at Gideon curiously. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“I suspect so. One more person with a reason to murder Pietro—to murder both of them, really.”

“That’s what I was thinking you were thinking, all right. I was thinking it too.”

“Great minds,” said Gideon. “Well, I’ll tell Rocco about all this tomorrow. I’m not sure how happy it’s going to make him, though. What do you say, shall we go?”

“Let’s take what’s left of the
zeppole
for John,” Julie said. “After a day out with Marti, he’ll appreciate them.”

“After a day out with Marti, he’ll
need
them,” Gideon said, picking up the carton.

NINE

THE
Figline Valdarno of today is basically a small manufacturing center and Florence-area bedroom community, but some of it is centuries old, and Villa Antica was situated half in, half out of the old part. Half in, half out of the city, for that matter. The buildings of the one-time convent were just within the ancient city walls, with a hundred-foot section of the wall, including a romantic and evocative watchtower, providing the back border of its formal garden. Once upon a time, Gideon assumed, this beautiful, enclosed garden had been the nun’s cloister. It had probably looked much the same then, six hundred years ago, as it did now, with four paths, bordered by well-pruned boxwoods, that intersected at its center, making four symmetrical triangles of lawn, lush and closely mowed. At the center, where the pathways met, there was an old stone fountain, now lichen-encrusted and still. Set along the outer edges of the lawns were clay olive oil jugs planted with shrubs. Lined up along the back wall was a row of cypress trees spaced a few feet apart. It was this beautiful garden that Gideon had most looked forward to seeing again, a lovely, tranquil space equally conducive to quiet contemplation or—even better—free-floating woolgathering.

But the greater part of the winery’s property extended well beyond this enclave, on the other side of the wall. Go through a truck-sized passage that had been cut through the wall’s five-foot-thick, buttressed base, and you were at the foot of row upon row of trellised vineyards that marched in gracefully arching ranks up and over and around the nearby low hills. If he remembered correctly, there were something like four hundred acres of them: mostly Sangiovese, merlot, and cabernet, but a couple of smaller areas of whites as well.

The villa building itself consisted of a large central section and two attached smaller wings that enclosed the two sides of the garden. The three wings were connected by a long, porticoed terrace that ran along the back of the central building and constituted the garden’s front border. The central building now held the winery. The north wing contained the kitchen, the laundry, and the onetime refectory, which was essentially unchanged and still used for formal tastings and occasional dinners, mostly for members of the wine club that Linda had started. The larger south wing, once the sisters’ living quarters, was now the Cubbiddus’ residence. What had originally been thirty-five airless and austere cubicles were now five spacious, splendid apartments for the family and two smaller but almost equally handsome guest suites, all with canopied platform beds; twelve-foot ceilings; eighteenth-century furniture; nameless, noseless Roman busts on marble pedestals; and age-darkened old oil paintings. The Laus were being put up in one of the guest suites, the Olivers in Cesare’s old apartment, as before.

Gideon and Julie had arrived a little after five, two hours before the reception, and with John having not yet shown up, they were on their own, and they spent the time wandering over the property on both sides of the city wall. Linda had said that nothing had changed, but something had, and in their opinion, Villa Antica was the poorer for it.

Despite Pietro’s two decades on the mainland, the old patriarch had never felt himself to be in anything but an alien culture. To ease his longing for home, he’d created a little piece of rural Barbagia right there in the heart of worldly, trendy Tuscany. The last time they’d been here, there had been a fire pit and a kiln-shaped clay oven wedged into the niche created where a buttress jutted out from the wall. The goat or lamb or hare that had been served every day at lunch had spent the preceding morning roasting there. And just outside the wall through a second passageway, this one human-size, had been a muddy, wire-fence enclosure that held six or seven primitive wooden pens. In them had been the living lambs and goats, along with chickens, rabbits, pigs, and even a couple of full-grown, small dairy cattle.

It was Pietro Cubbiddu’s homesick approximation of the Sardinian
fattoria
in which he’d grown up; a primitive family homestead, basic but self-sustaining. But Franco was neither a sentimentalist nor a lover of old Sardinia. The pens, like the oven, were no longer to be seen. In their place were a couple of hundred square yards of asphalt that served as a private parking area for the family and an overflow lot to use when the one in front of the villa was filled by wine-tasting visitors.

To Gideon the animals, the primitive oven, the rich farmyard stink, had all been wonderful; hands-on connections to a past not very long gone but never to return, at least not to Tuscany, and he missed finding them there. A year ago, Villa Antica had been a one of a kind, like no other winery they’d ever seen. Now there were probably ten others right there in the valley that might easily be confused with it. Gideon wondered if the same was true of its wines.

They’d walked back to the winery wing of the villa to look around there as well. The old tasting room had changed quite a bit too. For one thing, it wasn’t there any more. In Pietro’s day, it had been in one of the old chapels, a cramped little windowless place that had a claptrap trestle table as its counter—a slab of old plywood nailed to some sawhorses—with a few bottles set out for that day’s tasting. Five or six stools. No room for tables. If there were any decorative touches, Gideon couldn’t remember what they might have been. But whatever else it was, the place hadn’t been bogus funky, it was
genuinely
funky, a very different thing.
Sans pretensions
, as the French would say; nothing if not nondescript.

Under Franco, however, the chapel had been converted to a storeroom for equipment replacement parts. The new tasting room, sunlit and spacious, was housed where the old choir had been. A couple of the old stained-glass windows were still in place, but otherwise it had been completely—and expensively—redone. It was all clean lines, pale walls of flawless, satiny birchwood, and abstract copper sculptures. The slick, faux-marble tasting counter was thirty feet long, and behind it was a softly backlit, twelve-level wine rack that ran its full length. There were eight or ten small, round tables, and every one of them had people sitting at it, sipping wine and wearing astute, judicious wine-evaluation faces.

“Wow, it’s beautiful,” Julie had breathed. “And obviously, it’s doing very well.”

There was no arguing with that, but Gideon hadn’t been happy with it all the same. “I suppose so, but it doesn’t feel . . . I don’t know,
real
.”

“Feels real to me.”

“You know what I mean,” he’d grumbled. “It’s too smooth, too
gleaming.
I don’t feel as if I’m in a winery.”

“Well, where else would you be?” She’d waved a hand at the counter, the bottles, the people drinking.

“Frankly, it feels more like I’m in some yuppie bar in Rome. On the Via del Corso, maybe.”

Julie laughed. “And where would you prefer to be, in some dank, dark cellar? Maybe somewhere that looks like a setting for ‘The Cask of Amontillado’?”

Gideon had thought about that for a moment. “Well . . . yeah,” he’d said.

• • •

JULIE
decided to go to their apartment and put her feet up for a while, but Gideon was still in the mood for wandering. He went down a set of stone steps to the barrel room, off-limits to the public except on organized tours, which were given only a peek at it from one end. He was hopeful that Franco wouldn’t have worked his heavy-handed, modish wizardry there, and he was right. The barrel room—the old crypt—was beautiful; just as it had been in Pietro’s day. Running the full length of the church above, well over a hundred feet, it was stone-walled, windowless, and dimly lit by dangling, unshaded bulbs. Four long rows of oak barrels ran almost from one end of the room to the other, the barrels set on their sides on adze-cut wooden trestles. The place looked the way an ancient wine cellar should: dank, spooky, moldy, and cobwebby. And it smelled terrific, a wine-lover’s idea of paradise. It had been one of Pietro’s favorite places in the villa, Gideon remembered, and at the far end a beat-up, wine-stained table and a few rickety chairs in the corner had served as a sort of family tasting room, where father and sons would meet to sample and judge the progress of their products.

To his surprise, it was in use. When he heard the drone of echoing voices coming from that direction, he looked down the corridor between the two right-hand rows of barrels, and there were Nico and Franco and some others he couldn’t make out, gathered at the old table. On the table he could see several open bottles of wine. Franco, facing in his direction, spotted him right away.

“Well, well, can that be the famous Skeleton Detective himself?” he called in English, peering down the long aisle, one hand across his forehead as if to shield his eyes from the near nonexistent light. “Come join us.” He used the hand to wave Gideon over. “We are in grave need of an educated palate and an unbiased mind, but we’ll settle for you instead.”

Franco Cubbiddu could sometimes demonstrate a dry wit, but he didn’t do “jocular” very well and was wise enough not to try it too often. A year older than Luca, he had an obvious familial resemblance to his earthy, outgoing younger brother, but he was an attenuated Luca, long and thin, with sharper features—his nose, his eyebrows, his mouth were all straight lines—and an air altogether more arid and contained. Still, as Gideon approached, Franco tried a smile—his smiles were painful to watch, seeming to overstretch dry lips that weren’t meant for the job. Then an easy wave, indicating the one empty chair. That single, magisterial gesture made it crystal clear that he was the man in charge now that Pietro was gone. This, of course, had been expected by everyone who knew them. In the Barbagia, primogeniture ruled, and in his heart of hearts, Pietro had never stopped being a Barbagian. Of course he would leave the winery in Franco’s charge (unless he’d decided to sell it, of course, which he hadn’t lived to do).

In the two remaining chairs were Luca, Nico, and a large, portly man in his late fifties with a self-satisfied, jowly face and a natural “don’t-you-try-to-pull-anything-with-me” expression on it. This was Severo Quadrelli, not a Cubbiddu relative in the technical sense of the term, but one of the family in every other. It took him a moment to place Gideon, but when he did, he nodded soberly at him without getting up. In his tightly knotted dark tie, his three-piece suit of herringbone tweed (much too heavy for a Tuscan September, Gideon would have thought), and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, he looked more like an actor playing a successful lawyer—a 1930s lawyer—than a real one. His hair, elegantly graying at the temples, was neatly parted an inch to the left of the center line. And he was the first man Gideon had met in decades who wore a vest-pocket watch on a chain. A pair of pince-nez on a string would have provided the perfect finish to the image, but maybe it was too outré, even for Quadrelli. Instead, he’d opted for the nearest thing in eyewear: a pair of round spectacles with steel rims that were so thin they were almost invisible.

He’d been Pietro’s oldest friend, an upcoming young Florentine attorney when they’d met a quarter of a century ago. At that time, being fresh off the ferry from Sardinia, Pietro was trying to buy the decrepit old convent/winery that was to become Villa Antica. Quadrelli had been representing the absentee owner, a signor Cocozza, but he’d been an honest broker. When the scurrilous Cocozza tried to put over a fast one on the trusting greenhorn (Pietro, accustomed to handshakes, not contracts, had no lawyer of his own), Quadrelli had refused to go along. That had gotten him fired, and in righteous indignation he’d switched sides to energetically represent Pietro’s interests with no more than a promise of payment sometime in the future.

The promise had been fulfilled within two years. They’d become fast friends, and Severo had come to serve as Pietro’s trusted counselor, formal and informal, not only in legal matters, but in all things mainland-Italian. In time Villa Antica had prospered to the extent that Severo had given up his position with a Florence firm and taken a generous yearly retainer to concentrate solely on the winery and the Cubbiddu family as their attorney and financial manager. Julie and Gideon had met him on their visit of the previous year. At that time he had just been coaxed by Pietro into finally moving into one of the guest apartments in the villa’s residential wing, living among the Cubbiddus and taking his meals with them. One of the family, indeed.

“Ah, Linda, she tell me you come,” he said in his mellow, authoritative bass. “Is good to see you again. Welcome, welcome here.”

Interestingly, while it was Severo who had reputedly convinced Pietro that fluency in English was a must for the sons, he himself, a cosmopolitan and well-educated man, sounded like a fresh-off-the-boat Italian in an old vaudeville skit.
Leenda, she tell-a me you come-a. . . .

Not for the first time, Gideon wondered if his own Italian might not be quite as smooth as he imagined.

“Thank you, signor Quadrelli,” he answered. “It’s good to be here, and I’m glad to see you again.” He spoke in English. To a self-regarding and somewhat pompous man like Severo, doing otherwise would have been perceived as a slur on his linguistic abilities.

There was a bit of friendly chatting, and then Franco, showing himself to be a busy man with many responsibilities, rapped on the table to bring them back to business. On the table were two partially emptied bottles of red wine and one full one, uncorked, along with a dishwasher rack half full of stemmed, ballooned wineglasses, a pile of cloth napkins, a pitcher of water, a basket of broken-up bread sticks, and a metal bowl with a little spat-out wine in the bottom. Eight used wineglasses stood in a clump a little away from the other things.