He made a start on the sausage before continuing. “The Gaetano Pini Institute is an orthopedic clinic specializing in ambulatory joint diseases. It’s associated with the University of Milan, and the reason that I know about it is that this old professor of mine did a year of post-doc in the rheumatology department there and he had a wonderful set of slides from it that he used to show. Anyway, thinking about old O’Malley made me think about his work on Perthes disease-Legg-Calve-Perthes disease. You know what Perthes disease is?”
“Gideon, dear,” Julie said with a sweet smile, “could you possibly just explain without asking me questions you know I don’t know the answer to?”
“Was that what I was doing?”
“That’s what you always do. I think it’s a pedagogical technique. I’m sure it’s very effective in class.”
“Sorry about that,” he said, laughing. “Pedagogical habits die hard. Anyway, one of the things about Perthes disease-which, between us, I had completely forgotten-is that its effects can sometimes be confused with the aftereffects of a broken femoral neck. So what naturally jumped into my mind at that point was that-”
“-the injury you thought you’d found in Domenico’s hip-the reason for his walking with a limp-might not be an injury at all, but the result of Perthes disease.”
“Exactly. That’s why I wanted to go back and look at the bones again. Well, the bones had been sent off to Rome, but they had a good set of photographs, which I looked at, but I still wasn’t positive, so I sent them off to O’Malley for diagnosis.”
“And was it? Perthes disease?”
“Sure enough. The call I got at the villa was from him. Perthes disease for sure. And that settled it. That was what Francesca was afraid I’d find. That was why they tried to get rid of the bones. That was why they tried to get rid of me. It had nothing at all to do with the cause of death. Ahh,” he said as the steaming plate of risotto was set down in front of him.
The waiter had also brought Julie’s veal cutlet. Thoughtfully, while Gideon dug in, she picked up her knife and fork and began to cut off a piece of meat, but then shook her head and put the utensils down. “No. Wait a minute. What did it settle? What does all this have to do with Phil? What does it have to do with anything?”
“Patience,” he counseled between bites. “There’s some pretty intricate deduction involved here. What it has to do with is Phil’s limp.”
“His limp? I wouldn’t call that a limp. He just has a sort of a. .. snag to his walk.”
“What he has, not that I ever gave it much thought before, is a very mild form of what’s known as a Trendelenburg gait, or a gluteus medius lurch, which is what you get with inadequately functioning hip abductors in one leg. The affected leg tends to be held in an externally rotated posture and the joint itself is kept flexed-”
“Are you saying that Phil has Perthes disease too?”
“Yes. The operation apparently corrected it to the point where the limp is barely noticeable. But you’re getting ahead of me now. See, hearing that he had an operation when he was five got me thinking about what kind of condition he might have had, and one of the first things that naturally came to mind was Perthes disease.”
“Why ‘naturally’?”
“Because, even though it’s rare, it is the most common of the osteochondroses, and it usually shows up right around that age-five, six, seven-and unlike most other joint diseases, it’s unilateral more often than not-and Phil, like Domenico, is only affected on one side. Umm, this is really good risotto. Now, then: once Perthes disease started knocking around in my brain, it got me thinking about Vincenzo-”
“Vincenzo? Does Vincenzo have it too? I didn’t notice any kind of limp.”
“No, he doesn’t have one, and that’s what struck me.” Sated enough to take a breather now, he put down his own knife and fork, leaned forward, and told her what O’Malley had told him. “The genetics of Perthes disease are obscure and very complex, but in general it’s inherited, and if it shows up twice among close relatives, you can bet it’s inherited, so-”
“So if anybody had it, it should have been Vincenzo,” Julie said slowly, “not Phil. Only it’s the other way around.”
“Right. Ergo: it’s Phil who’s Domenico’s son, not Vincenzo.”
“Wow.” Mechanically, she started eating again. “But…” She chewed and swallowed. “Francesca is Domenico’s daughter, isn’t she? Why doesn’t she have it?”
“Because it doesn’t always show up, and when it does, it’s five to one in boys as opposed to girls.”
“Oh. No, wait, there’s a big problem here. What about that whole story that his so-called father told? About how Vincenzo was really Emma’s baby, and Phil was bought from that woman, that Gia, for five hundred dollars as a… a consolation prize?”
“The story was true. Only he reversed Phil and Vincenzo. Phil was the baby. Vincenzo was the consolation prize.”
“Gideon, the more you explain, the more confused I get. I am getting really frustrated here. What reason would Franco have to lie like that?”
The waiter came to take Gideon’s plate and to ask what he wanted for his second course. “I’ll have another plate of this,” Gideon told him, earning a tolerant shake of the waiter’s head. These Americans.
“He wasn’t lying, Julie. Emma fooled them both-Franco and Domenico. I’m doing a little surmising here, but what I figure is that her maternal hormones kicked in as she got into her pregnancy, and she didn’t want to give her own baby up-her own baby being Phil. So, overcome with remorse, she works out a plan with Gia, who’s also at about the same stage: a switch. When the babies are born, she’ll give Gia’s child-”
“Vincenzo?”
He nodded. “Vincenzo-to Domenico, leaving her own child-”
“Phil.”
“Yes, Phil-with Gia for the time being. Then she finesses Domenico into suggesting that she adopt a child-and paying for it-and she pretends to adopt Gia’s son… who’s really her own, her own and Domenico’s.”
“And how do you finesse someone into suggesting that you adopt a child?”
“That I don’t know, but I don’t doubt it’s possible.”
“Well, maybe… but wouldn’t Franco know-”
“Franco wasn’t there for the last month.”
“But the mother-the other mother, Gia- she seemed to think Phil was hers.”
“Julie, you didn’t get to meet this woman. She’s so zonked out she’d believe I was her kid if Franco told her so.”
Julie had eaten only half of her cotoletta, but with a shake of her head, she pushed the plate aside. “Well, I suppose it’s all possible, but ‘surmising’ is putting it mildly, wouldn’t you say? You’re taking quite a leap here.”
“No, I don’t think so. I haven’t told you yet about what happened when I went up to Gignese this afternoon to look at Luzzatto’s records.”
She laughed. “You’ve had yourself quite a day, haven’t you?”
Over his second helping of the risotto Gideon told her about Luzzatto’s journal, with its angst-ridden references to the mysterious “secret buried in my heart” that was kept from Domenico for twenty-seven years, and then finally revealed to him… two days before he was killed.
Julie listened, sipping her second glass of wine and nibbling at a cheese tray they’d ordered. “I think I finally see where you’re going. Luzzatto was in on the baby switch too, correct? That Vincenzo wasn’t the real son-that was the secret. And when he finally told Domenico, Francesca must have found out too, and to prevent him from disinheriting Vincenzo, she… No? I’m not right?” she said when she saw Gideon shaking his head.
“You’re almost right. That was the secret, all right, but Luzzatto wasn’t in on the switch. He only found out years later.”
“How can you possibly know that, if it wasn’t in the journal?”
“Luzzatto told me, or rather his medical records did. See, twenty-seven years ago wouldn’t have been when the babies were born. Twenty-seven years ago would have been 1966, five years after that. And in 1966, according to his files, he took five-year-old Filiberto Ungaretti in to the Gaetano Pini Institute for an operation to correct an incipient case of…” He waited.