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entrepreneur who relished the power plays and wheeler-dealer mentality of land acquisition and development.
    “Count de Grazia,” everyone had called old Domenico as he limped about Stresa or Ghiffa. It had made Caravale’s father, a socialist and a fiery antimonarchist, livid, but to young Tullio the genteel Domenico de Grazia had been the embodiment of what a storybook count should be: silver-haired and handsome, properly aloof, yes, but scrupulously courteous to all, right down to the street urchins.
    Since that time, Caravale had come around to agreeing in large part with his father about the self-induced delusions of the post-war Italian “aristocracy,” but never in regard to Domenico de Grazia. The man had been a true, bred-in-the-bone patrician, the last of his kind. Or so it seemed in memory.
    No one referred to Vincenzo as “Count” nowadays, but his noble lineage still made some people weak in the knees, and his behind-the-scenes involvement in regional politics (useful in getting building permits and variances) had made him more widely influential than his father had ever been. None of that had any effect on Caravale. Less than nothing. To him, Vincenzo de Grazia was just another human being like him, only richer, and not one he was particularly fond of at that. His relentless terracing of the foothills of Caravale’s beloved Mount Zeda into “Residenze This” and “Ville That” had chewed at him for years. Who needed all those developments? Who could afford them? Not the people who lived and worked here, that was for sure.
    Beyond that, these new walled, gated communities of de Grazia’s represented something else, something essentially un-Italian to his way of thinking. When Caravale had been growing up, the rich and the poor had lived together. People didn’t believe it now anymore, but it was true. Oh, there were great villas and humble cottages, but they’d existed side by side on the same streets and alleys, as they had for centuries, sharing the same neighborhood concerns. In Caprezzo, the best drinking water had come from a centuries-old stone fountain in the courtyard of the village’s wealthiest landowner, and every afternoon, as they had since Caravale’s grandmother had been a girl, and probably long before, the housewives and peasant women would come to fill their jugs and bottles, and to gossip, on essentially equal terms, with the family of the padrone. Or if not on equal terms, then at least one could say they understood and appreciated one another. How was that going to happen when all the rich had walled themselves off behind the locked gates of these new “California-style” communities? It wasn’t, and something that made Italy what it was was being lost.
    All the same, de Grazia was a father, and the news that was about to descend on him was almost as dreadful as anything a father could hear. Caravale’s heart went out to him. Getting out of his car, he found himself thinking that it would be nice if there were someone else he could hand this task off to, the way Boldini had handed it off to him. But the comandante was right; it was Caravale who was going to be running the investigation, and the task properly fell to him.
    De Grazia was not in the office, a pretty secretary, dark as a gypsy, told him, but at the site of the new golf course and residential community that the company had just begun to excavate. Did the colonel know where it was?
    He did not.
    “You can’t miss it,” he was told. “Take the road up Mount Zeda, and right after the turnoff to Caprezzo-you know Caprezzo?”
    “That’s where I was born,” he said with a smile.
    “Really?” She looked as if she didn’t know whether or not he was joking. “Well, right after the turnoff, before you get to the village, you’ll see an area where they’re clearing the trees-lots of bulldozers at work. You’ll find him there.”
    “Right after the turnoff? Do you mean the big pasture below the village?