in a dank prison cell, where he was intermittently beaten and abused, and ironically, after his release, it was a bottle of wine infused with Fungi di Santo that Giuseppe used to bludgeon his uncle to death.

“Tartufi, tartufi!” Benito’s voice rang through the forest.

“Yes, you idiot,” Giuseppe mumbled as he collected the mushrooms, tucked them into his satchel and made his way in the direction of Benito’s voice. My God, Giuseppe thought with some surprise, could those little pigs have really caught a scent of a truffle in late August?

Benito was relieved to see Giuseppe approach, as his sows had been halted by a new chest-high wood fence that cut through the forest. Benito couldn’t remember his pigs ever behaving this excitedly. Such commotion would have normally thrilled him, but he found the circumstances before him quite conflicting and he looked to Giuseppe for direction.

“Ebrei,” said Giuseppe as he stepped aside the pigs and gazed over the wood fence protecting a patch of recently cleared land and a lone tombstone marked with strange letters and a six-pointed star. “Gli Ebrei,” Giuseppe repeated, lips crinkling with disgust.

Benito’s sows snorted anxiously as they dug with their snouts about the base of the fence, where the wood planks ran into the earth. Benito found this unsettling and though the muscles of his lower back ached and his belly gurgled with nausea, he mustered the strength to pull the hot-blooded creatures back.

Giuseppe could excuse the snorting and salivating of the sows as a bestial sound common to their nature, but he found the labored panting of Benito intolerable. To Giuseppe’s never-ending vexation, Benito was always making some disgusting and distracting noise, be it his heavy mouth-breathing, his habit of humming and singing songs to which he hardly knew the words or, even worse, the combination of moaning, lip-smacking and belching that accompanied his eating.

“Will you stop your Goddamn slobbering!” Giuseppe spat out the words like rancid wine. He needed to think. How, Giuseppe pondered, as he’d pondered over much of the last year, could a sorry handful of Ebrei have come into possession of such a fine parcel, which had belonged to the Meducci for as long as anyone could remember?

Over the course of summer, Giuseppe’s curiosity had grown to the point where he could no longer ignore it and, under the guise of hunting for game and foraging for truffles, Giuseppe began bringing Benito and his pigs to the forests southeast of town to get a clearer sense of just how much property the Ebrei possessed. Though Giuseppe had no information on how the small clan of Florentine Ebrei had managed to acquire the land, experience had taught him that only guilt, greed or love could cause a man to blatantly ignore and contradict every law and tradition that governed property ownership in Tuscany. But what does one as rich and powerful as the Meducci feel guilt or greed over, especially from a lowly lot of Ebrei? It must be a woman, thought Giuseppe. One of the famed Courtesane Ebreane 5, perhaps? The reason hardly mattered, for what was now clear as day was that Giuseppe was no longer the preeminent landholder in the area and this was entirely unacceptable to him.

Grave-robbing, chided La Piccola Voce, the little voice inside Benito’s head, which so often spoke in opposition to Giuseppe’s wishes, is a task for only the truly wretched. Benito had foraged for truffles in many places and under a variety of circumstances. He had dug his hands into all kinds of soil, but never had he done so in such proximity to a tombstone, particularly an Ebreo tombstone.

Benito had never actually met an Ebreo. According to the village’s recently deceased padre, Ebrei in general, and this clan in particular, were especially worthy of suspicion and contempt. They had planted their fields with a strange red fruit that the old padre derisively referred to as Love Apples straight from the Garden of Eden. Benito had no idea what a Pomo di Amore was, nor did he fully recall what transpired in Il Giardino di Eden, but he knew it wasn’t good and the little voice inside his head told him to let the dead rest in peace.

Benito turned to his boss for a cue. He had known Giuseppe since the very first day he arrived at the olive orchard, and the decades of familiarity had bred their share of contempt. Like many other itinerants looking for a few weeks’ work harvesting olives and