Excerpt
Murder on the Vine
Chapter One Gravigna, a small town in the Chianti hills of Tuscany A Sunday in mid-October, 10:35 a.m. Nico Doyle sat on the balcony of his small, rented farmhouse dressed in his running shorts, a faded Yankees T-shirt, his feet bare, eating the last of his toast. The overbearing summer heat had finally retreated, leaving warm days and cool nights. The three swallows that slept between the wooden beams on the balcony ceiling had already flown off on their long migration to South Africa, leaving their empty nests waiting to be refilled in the spring.
He had a free day ahead of him. Tilde didn’t expect him at Sotto Il Fico until dinnertime. Looking out at a view that still surprised him, made whatever sadness he had from the past disappear. The colors of an Italian autumn were mostly muted—varying shades of yellows, browns, grays, faded greens. Italian maple trees did not offer eye-stopping splashes of New England red. The only strong color came from the deep dark green of the cypress trees in the distance.
Nearby the leaves of his landlord’s olive trees glinted silver in the bright sun. Beyond the grove were neat rows of Ferriello vines, their leaves yellowed, their grapes already picked by hand. The harvesting of the olives would begin at the end of the month. Last year Nico had joined his landlord and the day workers for the harvest. Perched on an ancient wooden ladder, he’d shaken branches, hand-picked clingers, showering the green fruit onto the black nets below. He looked forward to helping out this year too. Payback was two bottles of the best olive oil he’d ever tasted.
A series of shots rang out from the woods behind the farmhouse. The hunting season was open and the quiet of weekends was now pockmarked with rifle shots. The sound made Nico look over at the small table where Perillo, maresciallo dei carabinieri of the Greve-in-Chianti station, was downing his third espresso. They had met just over a year ago thanks to the sound of a single shot followed by a dog’s yelping that had sent Nico running into the woods. He’d adopted the dog. OneWag was now asleep at his feet. The maresciallo had become a friend.
“I never asked you,” Nico said. “Do you hunt?”
Perillo shook his head. “I don’t see the fun in it.” He’d popped in on Nico without calling first. Nico had been surprised to find him at his doorstep early on a Sunday morning but had welcomed him in with a smile and immediately offered him breakfast. Nico’s dog had greeted him with a swish of his tail and a good sniff at his shoes.
Perillo pushed his empty plate aside and reached for his pack of cigarettes. “You’re a good man for taking me in and feeding me. It’s not the bacon and eggs breakfast you once promised”—Perillo tapped the unfiltered cigarette on the table—“but I’ll concede toast slathered with ricotta and acacia honey is very good.”
Nico reached down to pick up a bowl filled with new potatoes sitting next to OneWag. “I didn’t know you were coming.” For a moment, the maresciallo’s serious expression had led Nico to think something bad had happened, but Perillo had eaten breakfast and said nothing. Nico knew that whatever was on his friend’s mind would eventually come out.
“What are you going to do with all those potatoes?” Perillo asked. Nico was always trying to come up with new recipes for the restaurant run by Tilde, his dead wife’s cousin. It was an odd hobby for an ex-homicide detective, Perillo thought, but then being an unpaid waiter at the restaurant was even odder.
“I’m going to peel them,” Nico said, “and I know not to ask for your help.”
“That is an unfair assessment of our friendship.” Perillo reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his rolled-up newspaper. “For you, I will spread this yet unread paper at your feet to catch the peelings.”
“Very generous of you, Maresciallo.”
Perillo sat back in his chair, fingering his cigarette. He wasn’t in the best of moods, hadn’t been for weeks now. It was Ivana’s idea to talk to Nico. As an American and some years older, Nico would have a different perspective.
From under the table, OneWag eyed the spread-out newspaper. He raised his snout and sniffed. The paper must have given off a warm smell because the small dog took a few steps and curled himself into a ball on top of it.
“Ehi, Rocco, get off.” Perillo shook one edge of the paper to get the dog to move. He’d given OneWag a name he could pronounce. The dog, being smart, answered to both names. He now gave the maresciallo his
Do I know you? stare. He didn’t budge. Paper was much warmer than tile.
“It’s okay,” Nico said. “He’ll get covered with potato skins. That’ll teach him.”
“O Sole Mio” rang out from the suede jacket hanging on the back of Perillo’s chair. He reached for it, checked who was calling and swept his finger over the screen. “Vince, didn’t I tell you I was taking the morning off?” Perillo put the phone on speaker.
“You did, Maresciallo, but a Signorina Benati insisted I call you.”
“For what reason?”
“Her bartender has been missing for three days.”
“Take down the details, tell her we’ll look into it, then send her home.”
“She won’t go until she talks to you. She says you met her last September. She’s the manager of the Hotel Bella Vista.”
“Of course, I remember her. Offer her a coffee from the bar. I’ll be there in half an hour.” He slipped the phone back into his jacket pocket.
“Nothing serious, I hope,” Nico said.
“The last time we went looking for someone, the missing woman had decided to solve a fight with her husband by taking off to Paris for a week. Keep your fingers crossed that it’s not more serious than that.” Perillo eyed the cigarette he was still holding for a few seconds, then slipped it back in the pack.
Nico noticed but didn’t say anything. He’d never seen Perillo, a heavy smoker, put a cigarette away before.
“I’m thinking it would be good for me to stop smoking,” Perillo announced, as if reading Nico’s thoughts.
Nico dropped the peeled potato back in the colander and picked up another one. “Excellent thinking.”
Perillo kept staring at the cigarette pack. “It takes courage.”
Both quitting and voicing his worries, Nico thought. “Far less courage than hunting down a murderer.”
Perillo leaned forward, dropping his elbows on his knees. “I did a terrible job with the last one.”
“You found the guilty party.”
Perillo shook his head. “I’ve become a man I don’t like.”
A strong statement from a man who came across as very sure of himself, sometimes even pompous. Nico dropped his peeler in the colander and turned to look directly at Perillo. “What man is that?”
“A man who eats and smokes too much, who worries about getting old.” Perillo looked down at his feet. “I don’t trust my own capacity to move forward. I’m full of doubts. I don’t recognize myself.”
“Where I’m from, we call that a midlife crisis.”
“You had this crisis?” Perillo didn’t wait for an answer. “Did it make you feel like a lesser person?”
“Not lesser, just different. I did go through a period of obsessing about the changes in my body and my brain, then Rita got sick. I quickly realized how lucky I was to just be alive.”
The idea of something happening to Ivana made Perillo shiver. She had become his axis. “I feel like a weakling.”
“Whenever my thinning hair or a new ache gets me down,” Nico said, “I remind myself that having most of my wits still with me is pretty damn fantastic.”
Perillo looked out on the olive grove, the fields beyond, thinking of Ivana soon coming home from Mass, starting to cook the Sunday meal, waiting for him. Thinking of Signorina Benati waiting for him at the station. Nico was right. What he had was good: a wonderful woman who still put up with him, a job he enjoyed, a good friend in Nico. He would need to remind himself when the doubts crept back in, as he was sure they would. “Thank you, Nico. You’ve lifted my spirits.” Perillo stood up. “Tell me the truth—I wasn’t really so ineffective with the last murder, was I?”
Nico picked up his peeler and a potato. “Not at all. You led a team effort with great tenacity and intelligence.” He was exaggerating a bit. Daniele, Perillo’s right-hand man, had been the tenacious one. “The Three Musketeers, isn’t that what Ivana called us?”
Relief spread across Perillo’s face. “One for all. All for one. Thanks again for breakfast and the boost. I have to get back to Greve.”
“You’re welcome. I may not have any bacon in the refrigerator, but I’ve always got ears on me.”
“I’m counting on that. I’ll see myself out. Ciao, Rocco.”
OneWag conceded a tail swish.
As the sun continued to rise and spread light over the olive grove, Nico turned his mind to a happier subject—a surprise for his adopted family at Sotto Il Fico—thinly sliced potatoes layered with crumbled sausages, sliced onions, Parmigiano, a sprinkling of rosemary and a sweep of olive oil.
