The Light in the Ruins

  “That’s an odd question,” he said, stalling, as he tried to guess at her agenda.

  “But it’s not a difficult one to answer, is it?” She raised her eyebrows.

  “No,” he said, and then he understood the hidden portent behind the inquiry. “I can tell you honestly, I’ve done my duty as a soldier in France and Greece and Russia. I have no regrets and no secrets.”

  She nodded, and then suggested a price for the necklace. Friedrich found himself shocked at how little she wanted. He wondered whether it was hunger that was driving the number or whether this woman was merely a romantic he had charmed. He decided it was probably a little of both and the proper response was to ask if she was serious.

  Nicoletta said that she was and repeated the figure. “I may never be able to give it to my granddaughter. I may never be able to give it to my grandson to give to whatever girl he falls in love with. But if I sell it to you? I’ll know at least that it helped to fire a romance.”

  And so Friedrich agreed to buy the piece on the spot. But he had a thought. “I imagine your ration cards aren’t as helpful now as they were a few months ago,” he began. “I, on the other hand, seem to have access to meat and potatoes and sometimes even real coffee. The problem? I don’t have a kitchen where I’m billeted. And even if I had one, I really can’t cook. But let me send something special your way.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I want to. Give me your address. I want to thank you.”

  Stefano and the jeweler looked at each other as if this young German had lost his mind, but Nicoletta volunteered the name of the street where they lived, and Friedrich scribbled the address on a scrap of paper he found in his wallet.

  “I am a man of my word,” he told them. “I never forget a kindness—or a slight. I keep my promises. Keep your eyes out for a package.”

  He was about to place the necklace unceremoniously in his tunic pocket when the jeweler motioned him over. The fellow reached into a drawer in the tall wooden cabinet behind him and pulled out a felt-covered box with a snap at the front. When he handed it to Friedrich, he said, “This is a fitting presentation for a necklace so lovely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Take good care of that Italian girl,” the jeweler said.

  “I will.”

  “May your love survive many years,” he added, a benediction of sorts.

  Stefano glanced over at the jeweler and corrected him. “May it survive a single year,” he advised. Then he shrugged. “May we all survive a single year. My wife is an optimist. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her what’s coming.”

  Just before dawn, Cristina tiptoed into the room the family still called the nursery, even though Massimo and Alessia were no longer toddlers. The children were both sound asleep in their beds, and Cristina knelt on the floor beside Alessia and kissed the girl on the cheek. The child’s skin smelled of lavender soap. When she opened her eyes and saw in the dim light that her aunt was already in her riding clothes, she started to speak, but Cristina shushed her, smiling, and led her downstairs. The night before, Cristina had laid out an outfit for Alessia, and now she helped the sleepy girl climb into her jodhpurs and, it seemed to Cristina, impossibly small boots. Then together they walked down the hill through the damp grass to the barn where the estate’s two remaining horses lived with the remnants of the Rosatis’ herd of Chianina cattle. Ilario and one of the other farmhands had already walked the cattle out to the hillside above the estate’s small pond for the day, so the barn was empty but for the horses: Arabella and her mother, Oriana.

  As Cristina brushed the animal’s back, Alessia said, “When the war’s over, my papa is going to get me a pony.”

  “That’s right,” Cristina told her niece.

  “And she is going to be all black. And her mane is going to be like silk.”

  Arabella was a light chestnut with long patches of white on her forehead and chest. Her mane was mostly cinnamon, but when the sun was right it seemed to have streaks of red. When she would first see Cristina for the day, her dark eyes would follow the young woman wherever she went in the barn. The marchese once joked that the horse was the sister Cristina never had. Arabella had been born on the estate when Cristina was ten, and the animal had been Cristina’s since birth. Now she was tall and muscular, her back strong and smooth from withers to croup.

  “She’ll be as beautiful as Arabella,” Alessia went on. “But she’ll be even faster.”

  Cristina draped a blanket over the horse and then gently lowered the saddle onto the tall animal. “Arabella’s very fast,” she reminded her niece.

  “I know,” Alessia said, and then she reached down and handed Cristina the girth. “So we’ll race. You and me and our horses.”

  “I accept your challenge.”

  Alessia leaned back against the side of the stall. Oriana stretched toward the girl, nuzzling her blouse to see if she had a piece of an apple or a sweet hidden in a pocket there. The child giggled and then kissed the horse on the nose. “Mama says you have a new friend,” she said. “A German.”

  “I do.”

  “Is he handsome?”

  “I think so.”

  “Mama doesn’t like him.”

  Cristina rolled her eyes to herself. “Did your mother say why she doesn’t like him?”

  “No. But you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “When I get big, I will have a fast horse and a boyfriend. Just like you.”

  “Your mother says my new friend is a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  Cristina liked this idea and rolled the notion around in her mind. She and Friedrich had kissed, but did that make him her boyfriend? She wondered what impression they radiated to others when they were together.

  Once Arabella was saddled, the horse turned toward Cristina and raised her long nose, flaring her nostrils ever so slightly, and snorted. The animal was indeed in the mood to run today, but the horse would have to wait. This was Alessia’s morning first, and Cristina had no plans of letting go of the lead line. “Ready?” she asked her niece.

  Alessia nodded, and Cristina hoisted her off the ground and into the saddle. Then she took the leather strap and slowly led the horse and the girl from the barn and out into the dawn. Maybe in an hour, when Alessia was tired of walking and the sun was higher, she would send the girl back to the villa and she and her horse could run a little wild. She thought again of what her sister-in-law had said about Friedrich and smiled.

  Suddenly more groups of officers from both the Italian and the German armies were visiting the Villa Chimera to see the Etruscan tombs there, and the artifacts that had been removed from the site years ago and sent to Arezzo, where they had been gathering dust for half a decade, once more seemed to matter. The Germans wanted some of the relics in Berlin and some in Rome; the Italians wanted them to remain here in Tuscany. Though the particulars of the discussion were lost on Massimo and Alessia, even they understood that a veneer of glamour now coated the ancient crypt on the Rosati estate. It was Massimo who had suggested to his mother that today they have their picnic on the grass atop the site. Across the small ravine, amid the cypress, they could see the Rosati cemetery: the modest temple and the stone cross, the half circle of headstones around the marble walkway.

  As he sat on the blanket between his mother and his aunt, the sun high overhead, Massimo scowled at his younger sister. She was wandering nearby, picking wildflowers for a bouquet. The family didn’t have the largesse for a picnic they would have had even in the spring, but they had the very last strawberries of the season (which Beatrice had hidden from the army quartermaster when he came to requisition fruit), as well as a carafe of goat’s milk they had not turned into cheese. Even this small feast, however, had made Cristina uncomfortable. When she had been in Monte Volta that morning, she had seen the village women standing in lines that stretched beyond the granary, hoping to get a cup of milk to divide among their children. The
peasants had ration cards, but they were essentially useless.

  “You look worried.”

  Cristina glanced up at Francesca. She hadn’t realized that her anxiety was so obvious on her face.

  “I was thinking of the milk lines in the village this morning.”

  “Milk lines are the least of your problems.”

  Massimo looked at his mother. She brushed a lock of hair off his forehead and away from his eyes. He brushed it right back, stood up, and wandered to the hill that banked away from the tombs. His sister put down her bouquet in the grass and went to join him. It looked like the children were inspecting the view.

  “You were probably thinking of that German,” Francesca continued.

  “If I had been, I would have been smiling.”

  “See? That’s why you should be worried.”

  “The other day you told Alessia he was my boyfriend.”

  “I was being polite. I could have chosen a different word. I could have chosen very different words for you both.”

  Abruptly the children threw themselves onto the ground and started rolling like spindles down the slope. Their laughter carried up and over the small hill.

  “I think he’s handsome—and sweet,” Cristina said.

  “He’s trouble. He’s a Nazi. Nothing more.”

  “I haven’t discussed politics with him.”

  “You should. You’ll see he has the same ridiculous opinions as the rest of the Germans. You’ll see he hates Jews and Russians and—”

  “I doubt that,” she said. “He’s not like that.” Then, trying to change the subject, she asked, “Do you ever think it’s ghoulish that we picnic beside a tomb?”

  Francesca nodded. “All the time. When Alessia tells me her stories of the dancers on the walls coming to life in the night, I shudder.”

  In a moment they saw the children reappear, giggling. Alessia was moving unsteadily on her feet, still dizzy from her roll down the hill. Nevertheless, once again she fell into the grass beside Massimo and started spinning her way back to the bottom.

  “I’m serious,” Francesca warned her sister-in-law now. “Steer clear of that soldier.”

  Cristina shook her head, a little exasperated. “I doubt anything will ever come of it,” she said, but she didn’t mean it. She hoped very much that something would come of their flirtation. She thought of what it had been like to be inside the burial chambers beside him, whispering, the shadows from the candle flickering against those strong cheekbones and beautiful eyes. At one point they had stood side by side and stared at a pair of nudes on the wall—dancers, a male and a female—and almost as one they had brought their candles near the image. Never before had she thought the painting was in the slightest way erotic, but that changed when she gazed upon it with Friedrich. She had been planning to highlight for him the necklace the female was wearing, but their fingers and candles had touched and a little hot wax had dripped onto her wrist. She had gasped, but the sensation had been filled with as much pleasure as pain.

  “He will return, you know,” Francesca said.

  Cristina rose to her feet and brushed the grass off her thighs. She could abide Francesca’s wariness no longer. “I hope he does,” she replied, a small purr rippling through her voice. Then she went to watch her nephew and niece play on the hill.

  FROM THEIR HOTEL room window, the marchesa watches her daughter sling her purse over her shoulder and then adjust her sunglasses against the morning sun. From across the street, I can see them both. Lucky me. Framed by the open window, she follows Cristina with her eyes until the young woman is around the corner and—forgive my conjecture—she is wishing she were younger. Less done in by the last decade and change—by her daughter-in-law’s death now. I imagine Beatrice had wanted to accompany Cristina when she met with the nuns who were going to distribute Francesca’s earthly belongings to the poor. But even getting dressed this morning had been a chore. Exhausting. She needs to rest before she and Cristina finish emptying out Francesca’s apartment on the Via Zara in the afternoon. The two of them are planning to leave Florence tomorrow.

  So envision what I am about to tell you. (I do. I recall it often.)

  Once more Beatrice is wearing a black skirt she deems suitable for mourning, but she is still in her stocking feet. Perhaps she had thought that she might lie down and read a book until her daughter returned. (She is not going to read the newspaper, I assure you—not with an article somewhere inside it on the fiend who ripped out Francesca Rosati’s heart and left it resting in an ashtray.) But first she decides she will venture down the corridor to the water closet.

  Which brought her to me.

  I am alone in the hallway when she emerges from the bathroom, my valise by my feet on the black-and-gold carpet. She almost walks right past me. Oh, she sees me, but don’t forget, this is a marchesa. Not quite a princess, but well above a countess. She presumes she is meeting only another guest of the hotel, and why would she deign to acknowledge some stranger in the hallway of a hotel that is, in her opinion, beneath her station? But then the veil rises from her eyes and she remembers. She remembers it all, she remembers me. At least she thinks she does. After all, it has been a long time. So I allow her a moment of recognition: long enough for the taste of the madeleines to return to her mouth, but not long enough for her to cry out.

  Honestly, I am not even sure that she saw the jagged edge of the blade as more than a blur. I yanked back her head by her hair, exposing her still-slender, still-regal neck, and ran the knife hard and fast from one hinge of her jaw to the other. Then I dragged her back into her hotel room, left her to finish bleeding out on the floor by the bed while I retrieved my bag with my tools.

  I had brought with me a wooden box for the heart, the sort in which a man might stash a wristwatch and a pen and some change, but when I was removing the bone saw I noticed that the mother and daughter had retrieved from Francesca’s apartment the whore’s red velvet jewelry box. Once I had removed the top shelf for earrings, the heart would rest nicely, snugly, inside it.

  And how perfect: later that day some tourists would spy the box on the balustrade of the bridge by the Uffizi, open it up, and discover Beatrice Rosati’s heart.

  Though of course they would not know at the time that the heart belonged to the first victim’s mother-in-law. They might not even be sure it was human. They would simply take the box with the heart to the police. And the police would know now that this was a vendetta against the Rosati family. This was not about Francesca Rosati’s present, sordid and squalid as that was; it was about her—and her family’s—past. And so they would warn Cristina and Vittore, they would protect them.

  Fine. They would not be able to protect them forever.

  Or even, I suspected, for very long.

  1955

  ON HER WAY to Rome, Serafina detoured first to Monte Volta. It was about a third of the way to the city, an hour and a half south of Florence, and her plan was to spend today there and then tonight drive the rest of the way into Rome. Tomorrow morning she would talk to Vittore. She recalled Paolo’s gentle admonition that this return might undermine the psychological dam she had built between before and after, and cause whatever memories she was living comfortably without to flood back. Milton had offered a similar caution. Paolo said he had even considered going to southern Tuscany and then Rome himself, so she wouldn’t have to. But she had insisted that she would be fine, and Paolo had to admit, Serafina had never in her life been uncomfortable with violence and trauma and, this week, a killer whose idiosyncrasies tended toward gruesome.

  And so now here she was in Monte Volta.

  In another life, she thought.

  In another life … what?

  She had parked Milton’s BMW on the eastern side of the village and immediately walked the length of the small town. Since she was going to see no one today from Homicide, she was wearing flats, and she was glad. Tomorrow, in Rome, she would wear less sensible shoes. The walk took barely ten mi
nutes. The village was largely unchanged from the place she remembered: one long street, barely wide enough for two cars to pass side by side, and a series of even narrower ones winding their way up to the oldest neighborhood. The granary sat at the southwestern edge, its one remaining tower rearing up today against a cerulean-blue sky. A black kite was nesting along the chess piece–like masonry at the top, and for a moment she watched the bird circle, gliding on the high currents of wind, before abruptly plunging at its prey in the field beside the massive obelisk. Because the village had neither a duomo nor a museum, tourists from America and northern Europe had yet to discover Monte Volta the way they had some of the larger villages in southern Tuscany. Places like Pienza and Montepulciano. The main street had a police station, a butcher shop, a bakery, and two small cafés at one end and an unassuming school at the other. There was a pharmacy, a barbershop, and a small grocery smack in the middle. The main church existed up a slender street that wound its way to the highest point in the village.

  Although she had called ahead, she checked in at the police station. The officer on duty couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three; he was slender, and his uniform hung badly off his shoulders. The poor kid was still fighting a losing battle with acne along his cheeks and neck. He was from Pienza and knew virtually nothing about the Rosatis. One time that spring he had wandered among the ruins of their estate, but it was only because it was a sunny day and he had had nothing else to do. He’d never met any of the family.

  Outside, Serafina saw an old woman sweeping the front steps to her home and asked her what she recalled of the war, and the woman immediately told the story of how the Nazis had tried and failed to blow up the remaining granary tower.

  “Did you know the Rosatis?” Serafina asked her. “The marchese and marchesa?”

  “No. But I knew people who worked their land. My nephew was one of their farmhands,” she answered. Then she told Serafina about the overseer of the olive grove, now dead, and the fellow who had managed their vineyard, now employed by wine growers in Montalcino. She put her hands atop the handle of the broom, not precisely leaning upon it but resting, and said, “My nephew works at the terra-cotta factory.”