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accompany you?”
    “That’s not necessary. It will be simpler if I do it myself.”
    “Well… all right, then, if you’re sure that’s best…?”
    Even over the telephone, his relief was palpable.
    “Definitely,” said Caravale.
     
    Intra, a quick ten kilometers north of Stresa, was the western shore’s commercial and small-industry center. Anywhere else it would have been commonplace, but along this stretch of Lake Maggiore it stood out: a homely, workaday few blocks in the midst of the dreamlike promenades, elegant villas, and grand hotels that otherwise lined the lakeshore. Caravale felt at home here. He’d lived in nearby Caprezzo, one of the backward little villages that dotted the flanks of Mount Zeda, until he was fourteen, and he’d worked in Intra three afternoons a week from the time he was twelve.
    In those days, there had been a withered, green-toothed ancient named Verrucchio who had owned a dry-cleaning shop (now a hardware store) only a block away from what was now de Grazia’s field office (then a pharmacy). As a youngster, Caravale had spent a lot of after-school hours behind the counter, waiting on customers and straightening out accounts, while old Verrucchio, who could neither read nor write, sweated buckets in back and breathed in the corrosive fumes that would do him in a few years later.
    On the day after Caravale’s fourteenth birthday, his father, who had lived in America for five years after he got out of the Italian Army, had landed a job teaching English in Cremona and had taken the family with him. It was in Cremona a few months later that young Tullio heard about Verrucchio’s death. He was shocked to learn that the shrunken old man had been only forty-seven.
    The Aurora Construction Company had been a far smaller enterprise back then. The old man, Domenico de Grazia, had still been alive, and under his patriarchy the de Grazias did not willingly stoop to commerce. They had still owned untold hectares of land on the eastern shore then, and they lived like the titled aristocrats they’d been since the fifteenth century. A significant part of their income had come from timber and mining leases, but when those had begun dwindling away about twenty years ago, Domenico, looking to the future, had sold off much of the de Grazia land and put the money into several local businesses, with (so Caravale had heard) generally unfortunate results. But among them had been Aurora Costruzioni, a small construction contractor in Ghiffa that specialized in concrete work. With the help of his son, the young Vincenzo, who had been sent off to the University of Pisa and the London School of Economics for degrees in architectural design and business management, he had built Aurora into a profitable operation, with projects throughout the region.
    But it had been the son, Vincenzo, who had turned it into what it was today. Gradually taking over as the old man had aged, and infusing the company with the money from continuing land sell-offs and with his own intelligence and energy, the young Vincenzo had transformed it into one of northern Italy’s largest general contracting companies. After Domenico had died, Vincenzo had taken the company public and had himself installed as CEO and chairman of the board of directors. From there, things had really taken off. Aurora now had projects throughout Piedmont and Lombardy, and even, if the stories were true, consulting contracts as far away as Ireland and Gibraltar, building everything from plastic-recycling facilities to high-rise condominiums. With its fleet of heavy equipment, and its ninety permanent employees and more than two hundred seasonal and temporary workers, Aurora Costruzioni was now Ghiffa’s largest employer by a factor of ten, making Vincenzo one of the area’s most influential businessmen, which was the way he liked it. Unlike his aloof and courtly father, Vincenzo loved to be center stage. He was a mover and a shaker, a natural