The Light in the Ruins

“And it is the summer. He is at his wife’s family home in the hills outside Messina.”

  “In Sicily.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we know he was there the night Francesca was killed?”

  “That’s what he and his wife say.”

  “And the German colonel?”

  “Dead,” Paolo answered, and here he paused. “But it is interesting how he died—or rather, what he did in the days before he died. And maybe interesting is the wrong word. Perhaps I should say interesting and horrifying. In the middle of June 1944, Erhard Decher, like many of the Germans who had mostly been looting art, was pressed into real service. On July 14, days before the Germans withdrew north from Arezzo, he was among a group of Nazis who went to a village just south of the city and massacred twenty-three villagers, including the parish priest. It was a reprisal for a partisan attack. They took them to an olive grove and made them shovel a single very large grave. There they bayoneted them one by one, and then placed explosive charges among the bodies. When the British arrived, there were bits of bloody clothes—still damp, apparently—and human limbs dangling like fruit from the trees.”

  “I remember hearing about that massacre in the autumn. When they started telling me what I had missed. The massacre wasn’t all that far from Monte Volta and Trequanda.”

  “As you know as well as anyone, it wasn’t uncommon for the Germans to execute innocent villagers in response to your … activities.”

  “And Decher was there?”

  “He was. He did not order the executions, but he was in charge of carrying them out.”

  “Where did he die?”

  “A little south of Arezzo. The Allies got him only hours after he had all of those villagers butchered. But like so many Nazis whom we now see for the war criminals they were, his cause of death should, in hindsight, be considered mysterious.”

  “No body?”

  “No, there was a body. But it was unrecognizable and not wearing a dog tag. Presumed to be Decher by the kit beside it and the pay book found in a tunic pocket.” He reached for another piece of yellow paper on his desk and glanced at it. “It seems that a sizable portion of the body was blown apart or”—and here he paused before continuing—“burned away.”

  “So Decher could still be alive,” she said, careful not to react to Paolo’s discomfort.

  “Apparently,” he agreed.

  “What of the Germans who fought at the villa? Muller and Bayer?”

  “As Cristina presumed, they both died in the battles around Monte Volta.”

  “Their bodies accounted for?”

  “Muller’s, yes. Bayer’s, no.”

  She nodded. Then: “I believe I have the name of that third visitor who was going to the villa in 1943 and 1944—and going there often. That German whose name Cristina claimed she forgot.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was a lieutenant named Friedrich Strekker. He was missing a foot and part of his leg.”

  “I can tell you have a theory why Cristina pretended she’d forgotten his name.”

  “I believe they were lovers.”

  He pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “You know,” he said, “we should not lose sight of the fact that there could be reasons someone doesn’t like the Rosatis that have nothing to do with the war.”

  “I agree. It’s possible.”

  “But you think it’s unlikely.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then,” he said after a long, quiet moment. “Tell me about Monte Volta. What was it like for you?”

  Vittore was tall and thin and a little gaunt. But Serafina instantly saw a resemblance to Cristina: he had the same almond-shaped gray eyes, and his hair, though receding high on his forehead, was still dark brown on the sides, with faint waves of cinnamon. He might at first glance have been mistaken for an American, because his face was clean-shaven. She and Paolo sat with him and his sister in a small anteroom off the hotel’s lobby. The room was dusky and windowless, but it was private, and somewhere Paolo had found two more chairs, bringing the total they could place around the side table with the lamp to four. No one was smoking, but Vittore had dragged the young officer guarding him to the bar across the street and brought back a tall, vermouth-heavy Negroni to sip. They had been talking for fifteen minutes now and the glass was almost empty. Vittore, like his sister, insisted that he could think of no one who hated the family so much that he would murder first Francesca and then Beatrice. Twice he had asked for assurance that an officer in Rome was keeping watch over his wife and his children. The second time he had even wondered whether a single officer was enough, observing that whoever had killed and mutilated his sister-in-law and his mother was both insidious and violent.

  “This just makes no sense,” he was saying. “And you really haven’t any clues at all?”

  “Not good ones,” Paolo answered. “There were no fingerprints in your sister-in-law’s apartment from any criminal in our files. And while there are fingerprints all over the corridor upstairs—I’m honestly not sure it has been dusted since the war—it will take us a long time to make any sense of them.”

  Serafina thought about her boss’s use of the word war. She hadn’t been sure whether now would be a good time to bring up the German lieutenant who was missing a foot. Should she wait to ask Cristina alone? At the moment the woman was sitting hunched over, her head bowed, her hands in her lap. She had, according to Paolo, stopped crying early that afternoon, and although he had considered calling a physician over lunch and getting her one of those French tranquilizers that were becoming the rage, in the end he hadn’t bothered. Finally Serafina decided to probe a different lead.

  “A woman on Francesca’s floor said your sister-in-law had wanted to know the name of a good locksmith,” Serafina began. “This was a month ago. She never did change her locks, but this woman said Francesca had seen someone that day who’d frightened her. And whoever killed her had not broken the door to the apartment or the lock, so most likely Francesca knew him. Any idea of someone who might have scared her?”

  “I lost touch with my sister-in-law years ago,” Vittore said, his tone a little sad. “These days, all I ever knew of Francesca was what Cristina told me about her.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did we lose touch? Because the Rosati name once meant something. And Rosati men do not associate with … with the sort of woman Francesca had become. After the war she started pulling away from us. From my mother and my father. From our family. Maybe that makes sense after what she went through. But, my God, my family experienced it, too. So we wanted to help. We wanted to rebuild our lives together. But she didn’t want our help. She didn’t want to see us,” he said. He glanced at Cristina and then added, “Most of us, that is.”

  “Did you know any of her lovers?” Serafina asked him.

  “No.”

  “The other day Cristina told us that you worked with Erhard Decher and Giancarlo Lorenzetti at the Uffizi and the two of them used to come visit the Villa Chimera.”

  “What could that possibly have to do with my sister-in-law’s and my mother’s deaths?” Vittore responded.

  “Maybe nothing.”

  “Both men were animals. Decher was a snake. Lorenzetti was a weasel.”

  She thought about this. Then she addressed her next question to both Rosatis. “Decher massacred twenty-three villagers just south of Arezzo in July 1944. Did either of you know that?”

  Cristina came a little more alive. “He was there?” she asked, looking up at Serafina.

  “He was in charge.”

  “Frankly, I’m not surprised,” Vittore said. “I told you, the man was a snake. Cold-blooded and vicious.”

  She recalled how Cristina had said the other day that the last time she thought Decher or Lorenzetti had gone to Monte Volta had been April 1944, but she decided to ask Vittore the same question now.

  “Late April,” he answered after a moment. “Maybe early May.”

/>   “Was it just the two of them?”

  “I wasn’t with them,” Vittore said.

  “It was just Decher that last time,” Cristina said. “And some of his staff.” She looked up and reached for Vittore’s glass. Briefly the siblings’ eyes met and then she swallowed the last of his drink.

  Cristina and Vittore were both given accommodations on the sixth and highest floor of the Boccaccio, with an officer in the lobby and another in the hallway outside their doors. Now Serafina nodded at the guard, a fellow younger than she who she knew was from Siena, and walked Cristina back to her room.

  “Good night,” Cristina said, a small tremor still marking her voice. “Thank you.”

  Serafina nodded. “Don’t thank me yet. Can I come in? I want to talk to you about something. I didn’t want to bring it up in front of your brother.”

  Cristina pressed the key into the lock, opened the door, and motioned the detective inside. Then the woman turned on the light, tossed her purse onto the bed, and pulled wide the shutters to the single window facing the street. Outside, Serafina heard the plates and glasses and the laughter from the bar in the small piazza. She watched Cristina stand against the wall beside the window and close her eyes. She was exhausted and beaten. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “When you were first telling me about Decher and Lorenzetti, it felt to me that you were about to give me a third name. Another soldier.”

  Cristina’s face didn’t change; her eyes remained shut.

  “Am I right?” Serafina pressed.

  After a moment Cristina opened her eyes, but she seemed to be gazing at the wall behind the detective. Serafina saw that, as red as those eyes already were, despite all that she had cried that day, once more they were starting to grow moist. “His name was Friedrich Strekker,” she answered. “We used to …”

  “Go on.”

  “He was billeted at a hotel a few blocks from here. I would come to Florence so we could be together. So we could be alone.”

  “And he worked for Decher?”

  “He was his adjutant. But I assure you, he had nothing to do with the massacre near Arezzo. And I can promise you this, too—he would never have killed either Francesca or my mother.”

  “And you are sure of that … why?”

  A single tear started to slide down one of her cheeks, and she brushed it aside with two of her fingers. “Because he loved me,” she said simply, standing up a little straighter. “And because I loved him.”

  Serafina leaned gingerly against the hotel brick wall that faced the piazza and watched as Paolo reached over and lit her cigarette for her. She shared with him what Cristina had told her when they had been upstairs just now in the woman’s room.

  “If she and this Lieutenant Strekker loved each other so much, why did they never marry?” he asked when she was through.

  She found herself staring at a young couple walking past her, the two of them holding hands and the woman—eighteen or nineteen, Serafina guessed—pressed against her boyfriend in the dark. “She assumes he died. She never heard from him after the Germans retreated north.”

  “When was the last time she saw him?”

  “July 1944. At the villa.”

  “You know, if he reported to Decher, there is every reason to believe he was with Decher at the massacre.”

  “But he had only one foot. Just because Decher was reassigned doesn’t mean Strekker was.”

  Paolo shrugged. “You don’t need two feet to bayonet unarmed peasants in an olive grove. But we’ll see what we can find. We’ll see if we can find out where—if—he died.”

  “She says she really didn’t expect to hear from him during the last months of the war. After all, he was now the enemy. But all summer long in 1945, after the Germans surrendered, she waited. Then in the autumn, when she hadn’t heard from him, she wrote letters to the museum in Dresden where his father had worked. She wrote in the winter, too, and then again throughout 1946. But she never heard anything back. Not a word. She has no idea if the letters even got there. She says she even tried to find him through the Red Cross, but Dresden and Kesselsdorf were in the Soviet zone—”

  “And Dresden was rubble,” he remarked.

  “Yes. In any case, she never heard anything from the Red Cross either.”

  Paolo stamped out his cigarette with the sole of his shoe and sighed. “I talked to Mario Spagnoli again today,” he said after a moment, referring to the fellow Francesca had dined with on the last night of her life.

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to know if Francesca mentioned this Decher or Lorenzetti. I wanted to know if she had said anything about being frightened by someone she might have seen on the street here in Florence.”

  “That would have made for an interesting first date if she had.”

  “She didn’t,” he grumbled.

  “Did she say anything at all about the war?”

  “Only what you’d expect on a first date. She talked a little about the marchese and the marchesa—their pretensions and affectations. She told him her children had died in the wake of the fighting at the villa. But no details.”

  “No mention of any Germans.”

  He shook his head. “No. No mention of any Germans.”

  “Tomorrow I’m going to see if there is anyone left at the Uffizi who might have known them—Decher or Lorenzetti or this Friedrich Strekker.”

  He looked up through the buildings at the starless sky and then adjusted his straw hat. “We should get some sleep,” he said. “Your boyfriend will not be happy with me if I never let you go home.”

  Serafina woke early Saturday morning and went to the Uffizi, arriving there hours before it was open to the public and entering through the office doors opposite the main entrance. There, in a windowless conference room, she met with an assistant director and an exhibits manager, both of whom had worked at the museum during what Florentines now referred to—a little disingenuously, in some cases—as the German occupation. For most Italians throughout most of the war, it was an alliance, not an occupation. In any case, neither fellow had seen Decher since July 1944, and they guessed, since the colonel had wanted so badly to be in combat, that he was probably dead. Strekker, too. They told her that Lorenzetti was thriving at the University of Milan, which she already knew, and that Ludwig Heydenreich and Jürgen Voss were both somewhere in Germany. The two of them had been part of the German Military Art Protection Front in Florence, the Nazi group responsible for crating up whatever paintings and sculptures it could and sending them north to be hidden in the salt mines near Heilbronn or displayed in some minister’s estate outside Berlin. In point of fact, the assistant director said, Heydenreich had undermined his superiors wherever possible and prevented the worst of the pillaging, even protecting Bernard Berenson’s collection in the Villa I Tatti from Hermann Göring. When Heydenreich had heard that German soldiers had mined the bridges across the Arno, like a madman he had photographed them all so there would be a record of Florence before the destruction.

  “You know who you should really talk to?” the exhibits manager said finally. “Roberto Piredda. He works at the museum in Arezzo. He used to be here once or twice a month, or we used to see him in Arezzo.”

  “He didn’t like the Rosatis?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure he liked them just fine. He was the one who went to that estate of theirs in Monte Volta before the war, when the family discovered the Etruscan tombs. He supervised the excavation. Over time he became a mentor for Vittore—Vittore really looked up to him. They may still be friends, or they may have lost touch. I couldn’t say for sure, because Vittore and I haven’t seen each other in years. But Piredda might be able to tell you more about”—and here he glanced quickly at his associate, smiling at what was clearly an inside joke—“the old gang.”

  “I knew I was going to make my life here eleven years ago. It was June 4, 1944,” Milton was saying on Saturday night to the group of American and Italian bankers and their gi
rlfriends and wives gathered at the private room in the back of the restaurant. There were sixteen people, eight women and eight bankers, including the bank president from New York City. Serafina had heard Milton tell this story before—the liberation of Rome by the Americans and the wondrous, welcoming response of the Italians—but tonight he was using it because the American and Italian banks together were financing the massive Kariba hydroelectric dam in Africa. And the tale, she knew, allowed him both to praise his European host nation and to celebrate the friendship that now existed between the two countries. He was standing at the head of the table, holding a glass of prosecco.

  “The irony, of course, is that two days after we entered Rome, my compatriots—as well as a great many Brits and Canadians—landed in Normandy, and so the liberation of the Eternal City very soon was eclipsed and relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers,” he said. “But, my God, was it exciting for us—and for me personally. Rome is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And while I didn’t get to spend long there that June, I spent enough time for my fondness for your country—and, of course, for your wine—to grow even deeper. So it is with that small introduction that tonight I will, as I have hundreds of times this past decade, raise a glass to our friendship. To the United States, and to Italy!”

  They toasted, and as Milton sat down, the fellow on Serafina’s right, an Italian named Vincenzo with an impressive mop of barely groomed silver hair, an equally hoary mustache, and weathered, deeply brown Sicilian skin, said, “Milton tells me you’re a detective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not easy work for a beautiful young lady.”

  “Or, I would imagine, a handsome young man.”

  “Excellent—well put.” He chuckled. “I must admit, I have never met a female detective.”

  “I’m the only one.”

  He nodded, digesting this information. Then: “How long have you and Milton been dating?”

  “Two and a half years.”

  A pair of waiters began placing on the settings before each of them a small plate with delicately fried squash blossoms filled with goat cheese.