The American Lady(19)

There was laughter around the table, but it had a nervous undertone.

Franco glared at the group and saw that the man who had spoken was Solverino Mauro. He was a customer too, but not a good one. Only two days earlier, Franco had needed to pay a call on Solverino with four of his bruisers to collect some money he still owed from the last wine shipment.

The other diners were all looking over at Franco now like animals that had caught wind of something interesting. Some looked nervous, others awestruck, a few of them skeptical—there was hardly anybody in the neighborhood who didn’t know him. Everybody wanted to know how the powerful Count de Lucca’s son would react to such a provocation.

Franco looked coolly at Solverino. “I wouldn’t talk so loud if I were you. Or have you forgotten our little conversation a couple of days ago?” Solverino had only agreed to pay once one of Franco’s men had started to get a little rough.

The man lifted his hands in apology and gave an embarrassed grin.

“Solverino doesn’t know the first thing about wine!” another man called over to Franco. “Or he’d know that the de Lucca Rossese di Dolceacqua really lives up to its name . . .” He looked around to make sure that everyone was listening before unleashing his punch line. “It has no more flavor than the water it’s named after!”

The table erupted with raucous laughter.

“What’s going on? Haven’t you got anything better to do than bother my guests with your idle chatter?” Paolo interrupted. “Maybe I should come eat at your place and do the same.”

He heaved a sigh as he sat down in the chair his daughter had occupied a few moments earlier. “What a rabble! As soon as they’ve had a few drinks they start to behave like silly schoolboys. Is there anything worse than having your competitors in as customers?”

Silly schoolboys! Not at all. Franco gritted his teeth. “Let’s talk about your next order. I have other calls to make today.”



When Franco got back to his apartment that night, he felt as though he’d spent a week working in a Sicilian quarry. His back ached and the muscles in his cheeks were so tense he could not relax his face at all.

It was a warm night. Tired though he was, he didn’t feel the need to go to bed yet. Instead he lit a cigarette and went out onto the balcony. Although he was almost at the top of an eighteen-story block, with only one apartment above him, there was nothing special about the view; to the right was a strip of the harbor and to the left the back wall of a print works whose chimney belched out stinking smoke day and night. Franco supposed it had to belong to one of the daily papers, though not one of the important ones.

He stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette.

Back home in Genoa the crickets would have begun their nightly symphony at this hour, the chirring call carried along on warm winds from the sea that reached into every last corner of the palazzo. The green marble floor of the courtyard would be shining silver in the light of the sickle moon.

The cigarette smoke had turned stale. Franco tasted a flat, musty flavor on his tongue like that of a rotten lemon.

Nobody had ever criticized his family’s wine before, not on any of his previous trips to New York. He would never have believed that anyone would dare.

He tossed his cigarette from the balcony and watched it arc away into the darkness. Something had to be done. He could not allow centuries of tradition—or his family’s good name—to be harmed.

He could well imagine what his father would say in this situation:

You have to be tougher. You have to shut up loudmouths like that before they can even say Mamma mia! If all our ancestors had been good-natured chumps like my son is, our family would never have lasted four hundred years. Do you want to be the first Count de Lucca to drag our name through the mud?

And so on and so forth.

Franco laughed bitterly at the thought. His father would never consider the possibility that one way to secure the family’s good name might be to make good wine. No, the old count had his own methods. Franco hated to admit it but he had to concede that—in their own way—they worked. Liguria was not by nature a fine wine region like Lombardy, for instance, or the Veneto, but there wasn’t a family in Italy who exported more wine to America. This was because the count bought up all the grape juice he could find on the market—and he didn’t care about the quality as long as the price was right.

All of a sudden Franco could hear his grandmother Graziella’s voice in his ear. “Wine only comes out right if the Lord God blesses it with just enough sun and rain.” He smiled at the memory of the elegant old lady. She had always taken him along with her to the vineyards when he was a little boy. He had held her hand, and in the last years of her life, when she was no longer so steady on her feet, she had held his. She clasped hold of his arm with her right hand and held the walking stick in her left, its silvered handle shaped like a bunch of grapes.