The Light in the Ruins

  “She wasn’t a good wife?”

  He smiled and spread out his arms, palms up. “You misunderstand me. I presume she was a fine wife. What other man would have touched her? She was—forgive me—a bitch.” He said the word almost innocently. “Whoever killed her did it because she deserved it.”

  “She deserved to be killed? You honestly believe that?”

  “Okay, not killed. I give you that. But she was a bully. She bullied her family, she bullied men, she bullied me.”

  “How?”

  “She treated us all like donkeys. We were the brutes who did the heavy lifting and the farming and the milking and the pruning and the cutting. Never said a kind word. Never treated us like men. We were all donkeys to her, that’s all.”

  “Did the other farmhands dislike her as much as you?”

  “I think so. We all made fun of her.”

  “Anyone hate her enough to kill her?”

  “I’m sure someone did. Frankly, I was not especially fond of the marchese or the marchesa either. I worked for that family because I had to. But I didn’t really like any of them.”

  Serafina thought of what Ilario’s aunt had told her about him. “What about Cristina? The marchese’s only daughter? Did you hate her, too?”

  He raised his eyebrows and then looked into the trees. “She was a traitor. And before that she was a—” He stopped midsentence.

  “Your aunt said you had a crush on her.”

  “My aunt said that?”

  “Yes.”

  He smirked. “Well, I did. I was stupid. Cristina Rosati was nice to me, but she was really just a … a tease. I am using that word because you’re a lady. But she was much worse than a tease.”

  “She led you on?”

  “She led us all on. Prancing about in a bathing suit with Francesca’s daughter like she was just an innocent five- or six-year-old, too. Wearing dresses that always caught the wind just right to show off her legs. Riding around in tight pants on that horse. She would sometimes bring us carafes of lemonade. How could I not have a crush on her? I was young and, yes, stupid. But she showed us her true colors. She showed us all her true colors. She started sleeping with a German. And not just any German. One of those spineless thieves who stole from the museums.”

  “Do you recall his name?”

  He sat back and took a breath. “Friedrich Strekker. He was a lieutenant. And a cripple.”

  “What do you mean, he was a cripple?”

  “The fellow was missing a foot.”

  “And you know he was her lover.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “A man can tell.”

  She stared at him, meeting his eyes. “Do I have a lover?”

  “No,” he answered. “But you want people to think you do.”

  Behind them, she heard the wide garage door opening, the signal that siesta was beginning and the other workers were about to descend upon them.

  “Seriously, can you think of someone who might have had such a deep grudge against Francesca that he was willing to kill her?”

  “She dishonored men. She and Cristina both. If I’m surprised by anything, it’s that whoever killed the woman waited so long to cut her throat.”

  “Okay, then, Ilario. Tell me one more thing. Where were you on Monday night?”

  “Is that the night Francesca died?”

  She watched a squirrel scramble up the trunk of one of the chestnut trees. “Technically, it was the early hours of Tuesday morning.”

  He nodded. “I was home in Monte Volta with my beautiful wife, Detective. You can ask her. I promise you, as much as I hated that woman, it wasn’t worth the cost of a train ticket to Florence to kill her.”

  Serafina used the telephone in a small restaurant on the outskirts of Orvieto to check in with Paolo in Florence. It was between lunch and dinner and so the restaurant was closed, but she showed the chef her badge and he let her inside and allowed her to call from the owner’s small office.

  She really wasn’t quite sure whether she had learned anything of value in Monte Volta, but a notion was starting to form in her mind. If Francesca’s murder did have something to do with the end of the war, then perhaps Cristina was in danger now. It was, however, just a vague concept, founded on the misogyny of one terra-cotta factory hand and the possibility that the Rosatis may have been more allied with the Germans than Cristina or Beatrice had told them.

  She was just starting to outline for Paolo what she had learned when he cut her off. “It’s not a wild idea at all that Francesca was murdered because of something that occurred a decade ago. It is, in fact, a very logical assumption,” he said.

  She could tell from his measured tone that something had happened. “Go on,” she said.

  He cleared his throat. Then: “About ten-thirty this morning, Cristina found the marchesa dead in their hotel room. And about an hour ago, some American found a human heart in a jewelry box on the Ponte Vecchio.”

  “God …,” she said, her own heart sinking.

  “I know.”

  “How is Cristina?”

  “Not as hysterical as you might expect from a woman who has found two dead relatives in a couple of days with their hearts cut from their chests. Mostly she’s in shock. Morose.”

  “Scared?”

  She heard him lighting a cigarette, sucking in deeply on the first draw. “I don’t believe she fully comprehends that she might be next.”

  “Or Vittore,” she said.

  “That’s right. Or Vittore.”

  “Remind me—how did their father die?”

  He paused. “Are you thinking that perhaps it wasn’t of natural causes?”

  “I think we have to wonder about that now.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “I assume Vittore’s on his way to Florence.”

  “He is. No need for you to continue on to Rome. You should just come back here yourself.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back by six or six-thirty tonight, unless I’m behind a slow-moving tractor. I’ll meet you at the station.”

  “Good. I want to hear all about Monte Volta.”

  After she hung up, she put her head into the kitchen to see if the chef was there so she could thank him. He was slicing chanterelle mushrooms when she walked in, and she paused. The aroma was taking her back to the Etruscan tombs. That was precisely what she had been breathing back there in the dark. Mushrooms. And she hated mushrooms. Hadn’t been able to abide them since the war. Since the time she had nearly been killed. When she was healing, someone had tried to feed her some and she had recoiled at the stench. Almost vomited. Now, as she inhaled their smell in the kitchen, it was once again 1944.

  She realized she was going to be late for her meeting with Paolo. She was going to return to the Villa Chimera on her way back to Florence.

  SO, CRISTINA. VITTORE.

  And Vittore’s family. He had a lovely wife: Giulia. They had a pair of adorable girls, one who was four and one who was not quite two—a toddler.

  My work was more complicated now that even the feebleminded knew that a Rosati was next. But as I said, how long could the police protect them? A week? A month? Not years.

  In my mind, this would not be five separate executions. It would be two or three moments of operatic grandeur. First I would exact my revenge on Vittore’s family, but not on Vittore. In one evening I would still—and extract—three beating hearts: Giulia’s and the two children’s. Was three at a time gluttonous? Unseemly? Arguably. It did suggest binge butchering. But it also had a logic to it, because then, separately, I would kill Vittore and, finally, Cristina. The last of the Monte Volta Rosatis.

  But I did fantasize one other possibility: a single bacchanal on the grounds of the villa when the clan’s survivors buried Francesca and the marchesa. My instincts, however, told me it was unlikely I would have that opportunity.

  Besides, that funeral was only days distant. And when I was done? After I had finished my work
?

  After that, nothing. At least nothing of consequence. I would have completed my labors, handled my business with integrity, been—and I was thinking this way—an avenging, albeit evenhanded, angel. Character is fortune, and their characters had started this bloodbath. I was only the instrument of retribution, and a rather blunt one at that. Think bone saw.

  And so completion meant also that I would have absolutely nothing to look forward to, nothing to … anticipate. (And make no mistake: I had relished murdering Francesca and Beatrice and spreading wide their ribs.)

  I would, alas, merely grow old and bored, waiting to die myself.

  1943

  SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Colonel Erhard Decher stood in his T-shirt and underwear in the hotel room where he was billeted, staring aimlessly at the pile of Italian books on his dresser, which he could barely read, and wishing that he were anywhere but here. His responsibilities were somewhere between ludicrous and degrading. While the armies of the Reich were fighting for their lives in Russia or preparing to defend themselves against numerous assaults in the west, he was supposed to track down Etruscan art and send what he found to Berlin or Rome. Satisfy the artistic eccentricities of the Gestapo in the Eternal City. It was appalling. He understood well that he should view himself as fortunate; all he had to do was watch Friedrich limp to know how lucky he was. But he still felt unmanned. He had never been a soldier and certainly hadn’t expected a soldier’s posting when he had been recruited. He was, he was told, needed because he was an architect and had valuable knowledge of architectural history. Yes, he did. And so how he had wound up in the Uffizi and what he was doing in a world of Etruscan pottery was beyond him.

  And he hated the climate here. He found the heat oppressive and the stench from the Arno unbearable. Had there ever been a river that smelled this rank? He’d overheard another German remarking that some afternoons it reminded him of an enormous slit trench that an army had used one day too long. Often he found himself wondering, What is the Ahnenerbe thinking? We couldn’t possibly be descended from people like this. In his armoire he had a pair of the new tropical-weight uniforms the Wehrmacht now offered soldiers in southern Europe—they were made of cotton and had an open collar—and he decided that one of these days he was going to have to break down and wear them. So far he had resisted, however, because the uniform might signal to other soldiers just how new he was to the army.

  Now he took one of the books from the dresser and thumbed through the illustrations of pottery. He studied the profiles of strange doglike animals and nude dancers in block silhouette. There were serpents. There were lions. There were swastikas. According to eyes more learned than his when it came to this sort of thing, the lettering and orientalizing resembled the artwork on relics left behind two millennia ago by the tribes to the north. He’d been given reams of paper to read by the Ahnenerbe about the ancient peoples of India and Scandinavia, the differing theories about the earliest true Aryans. But Italians? Please. He realized he hated Italians. They were almost as bad as the Slavs and the Jews.

  Outside his window he heard a clap of thunder in the distance. At least he hoped it was thunder. Conceivably, it was the start of an air raid. Or partisan sabotage in the northern section of the city. If it was the latter, those idiots would have to know what they were in for. The reprisals, as always, would be ghastly. A moment later there was another rumble and he realized it was only an approaching storm. He was relieved, but partly because a storm meant this sauna of a city might actually be cooled. One could hope.

  He tossed the book aside and thought of the tombs at the Villa Chimera. He thought of Cristina and his young assistant’s infatuation with the Italian girl. It was an inappropriate romance. Completely inappropriate. Hitler had misjudged the Italians. They’d shown their true stripes the moment the real war had begun. They’d lost wherever they’d fought. Friedrich shouldn’t be wasting his time with the marchese’s daughter. It was like horses and zebras. There was no possibility of a future. The moment the Americans or the British put their boots on Italian soil, Mussolini would be gone.

  And where would that leave the lieutenant and Cristina?

  Besides, she and that sister-in-law, Francesca, were just like Vittore. Detested the Germans—their supposed allies. Still, he had been impressed with the family estate. The villa. The first time he had stood in the entryway, he’d seen not a single Madonna or martyr hanging anywhere on the walls. Thank God.

  Nevertheless, he decided he would have another talk with the young officer in the morning. The lieutenant needed to be reminded of the impropriety of a relationship with a girl who had no interest in the Axis cause or—worse, because this could not be cured with counsel or remediation—blood that was unsuitable for a man of his lineage. And, he had to admit, Vittore and Francesca and the girl’s parents probably felt the same way about her relationship with Lieutenant Strekker.

  He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and felt how moist the cotton had become. The word tainted came to mind. He was not as rabid a purist as some of the officers of the Ahnenerbe who worried constantly about the contamination of Aryan blood, but the fact remained: these Italians were of a race that was profoundly inferior to the Germans, and it was only a matter of time before Berlin figured that out.

  There was just the hint of a breeze rolling up from the olive groves at the Villa Chimera, and Friedrich paused before the front door to the house. It was wide open. He knocked and called inside, but there was no response. His driver, a nineteen-year-old private, was sitting on the stone wall beside the end of the driveway, his cap in his hands, licking melted chocolate off his fingers. Earlier that morning the two of them had delivered a big box with bread and chicken and coffee to that old couple who had sold him the necklace. They were shocked. They admitted that they had never expected to see him again.

  Finally Friedrich turned away from the villa entrance, disappointed, and started back to the car. All the way from Florence he’d imagined standing behind Cristina here in Monte Volta—perhaps at the pool where she had greeted him in her swimsuit, like one of Diana’s nymphs—and draping the necklace around her. Gently pulling aside her hair so he could snap shut the small, delicate clasp.

  “Onward to Pienza?” the private asked him. There they were supposed to retrieve a gold crucifix from the cathedral altar.

  He nodded, hoping his exasperation wasn’t evident. He had detoured here to Monte Volta for nothing. All that would come of this side trip was more grief from Colonel Decher—another ridiculous lecture about horses and zebras and why Vittore’s sister wasn’t worthy of him—because certainly Decher would ask him why they had returned to Florence so late in the day.

  As he was climbing into the passenger seat of the vehicle, however, he heard her voice. Cristina’s voice. She was calling out to him from a stretch of the road below them, her arms so full of wildflowers that he could barely see her face. She was wearing a white linen dress that was tapered at the waist and the large, round sunglasses that her sister-in-law had been wearing when he had been here the other day. And so he motioned for the driver to relax and started down the road with the pebbles as white as Cristina’s dress, his vexation evaporating instantly in the Crete Senesi sun.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, smiling, and pushed her sunglasses up and over her forehead until they had pulled her hair completely away from her face.

  “I have an … errand … in Pienza. So I came here first. Where is your family?”

  She shrugged. “Out and about. My father is with an army quartermaster, my mother is meeting with Father Mancini. We may be taking in some refugees whose homes were bombed in Bologna. I don’t know. And Francesca and the children are in the village.”

  “Why didn’t you join them?”

  “I wanted to be alone. I wanted some quiet.”

  He paused. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

  “No, not at all! I was actually getting bored.” She took a yellow flower he didn’t r
ecognize, each of its petals shaped like a pinecone and spotted like a leopard, and placed it behind the pin that held the Iron Cross to his tunic. “There. Now you have some color,” she said. Then she shook her head and added, “You must be roasting inside that uniform.”

  “I am.”

  “I promise, you won’t be court-martialed if you take off your jacket. I won’t tell a soul.”

  “What about the flower?”

  She plucked it from behind the medal and placed it behind his ear. “Better?”

  And with that, he unbuttoned his tunic and slung it over his shoulder. He felt the box with the necklace in his jacket’s hip pocket bounce against the very middle of his back.

  She was vaguely aware of the necklace as she kissed him on the terrace beside the swimming pool, but mostly she was savoring the same dizzying rush she had experienced when they had stood alone together in the tombs. Now, as she felt his tongue against hers and his fingers upon the sides of her face, she was conscious of the way that seemingly every nerve in her body was tingling. She stood on her toes in her sandals and could feel her legs shaking. Her whole body was trembling. Certainly she had kissed other men—boys, actually. Other boys. She had felt boys’ hands on her breasts; she had been aware of the desperate urgency they felt—she, too, sometimes. Never, however, had she felt quite this same voraciousness. This hunger. And so for the briefest of moments she wondered what it was about this kiss that was different, and she recalled a painting by a Milanese Romantic from the previous century: a man in a hat and a young woman in a mauve dress that fell to the floor. Her face was in his hands, too. But the image lasted in her mind only as long as a breeze, because then she was relishing the feel of his lips against hers and the way their whole mouths and tongues seemed to be merging. She wrapped her arms around the small of his back and pulled his body against hers, and suddenly they had moved in such a way that his thigh was between her legs—Had she done this? Had he? No matter, no matter at all—and the pressure against her groin was causing her heart to race. She was quivering between her legs, and the sensation became electric when his hands slid down her body, down her neck and her ribs and her hips, and suddenly they were caressing her rear, just the merest wisps of cotton clothing separating her skin from his. She allowed her own hands to drift down from his back and across his hips, reaching for the bulge at the front of his uniform pants, all the while rubbing and grinding herself against the hard muscle of his thigh.