The Light in the Ruins

  “What does he think of your … work?”

  “He doesn’t mind.”

  “And why are two such delightful young adults not married? You should be.”

  “Someday.”

  “I probably sound like your father. Forgive me,” he said, and he cut into the first of his squash blossoms.

  “No forgiveness is necessary.”

  “We like Milton very much. That’s all.”

  “I do, too.”

  “What kind of detective are you?”

  “A very good one.”

  Again he laughed. She glanced at Milton’s end of the table and saw that he was charming the women to both sides of him.

  “Seriously,” the banker went on, “what do you investigate? I have a feeling you do more than find stray kittens and bring home lost babies.”

  “Murder.”

  His face went grave. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “We have female detectives and they’re investigating murders? Right here in Florence?”

  “We do. Me.”

  “Do you …”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you carry a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “How did this happen? How did you wind up carrying a gun and looking for killers?”

  “I asked.”

  “Really?”

  “In the war, I picked up special … skills. It would have been a shame not to put them to use. And so I went to Paolo Ficino and asked for a job.”

  “The chief inspector?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was just that simple?”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing is ever that simple.”

  “But that’s all you’re going to tell me.”

  “Inspector Ficino is a very good man. He knew I needed to work and he took me under his wing. He took a risk.”

  “I would not want my daughter doing what you do. But I have a feeling you are quite capable.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you know anything about that poor woman—excuse me, those poor women who had their hearts cut from their chests?”

  “A little.” She smiled wryly, flirting really, and asked, “Do you?”

  He put down his fork and raised his hands. “Innocent, I promise you.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But you can’t talk about it.”

  “No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “I never met the marchese,” he said, “but I knew people who knew Antonio.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. I have no—what is that American expression?—smoking gun.”

  “What did people say about him?”

  “He was a good man and deserved his title. He looked out for his commune and the peasants who worked his land. But then came the war, and like everyone else, he made compromises.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, he sold out to Germans. But then, didn’t we all?”

  “No. We all didn’t.”

  He grinned as if he were a proud grandfather and said, “Okay, I may have no smoking gun, but you—and I think this is how the Americans use this word for a sharp woman—are a pistol.” Then he raised his glass with the last of the prosecco and clinked it against hers.

  “What do you mean, he sold out to the Germans?”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. Really, all I have is rumor and innuendo.”

  She reached over and for a long second placed two of her fingers on the back of his hand and gazed at him. “You must tell me. Please. For all you know, what you have heard may help me save a life.” She feared briefly after she had spoken that she had taken the flirtation too far, but when he looked back at her, she knew he was going to open up like a cooked mussel.

  “Well,” he said, his voice a little ruminative, “we surrendered in North Africa in May 1943. The Allies invaded Sicily two months later. Early July. They bombed Rome for the first time a week or two after that. And it was clear by then that it was over. It really was. Everyone knew it but the Germans. So we arrested Mussolini. You remember. By the end of the month we had even kicked out the Blackshirts. And we all know how well that worked out.”

  She nodded. She thought of her mother and father. Their execution. The new Badoglio government initially pledged its loyalty to Berlin but by early September had surrendered to the Allies. Within days the Germans had occupied Rome, rescued Mussolini from the ski resort in the Apennine Mountains where he was being held prisoner, and reestablished a puppet Fascist government with Il Duce as the figurehead. And she and her brothers were on the run.

  “It was like a civil war in the midst of the world war,” he was saying. “And Antonio Rosati, people said, made the mistake of siding too long and too often with the Nazis and their Blackshirt lapdogs. Either he couldn’t see the future or he wouldn’t.”

  “What did he do? Specifically?”

  “While the rest of us were starving, people said his estate never lacked for honey and beef. Never. His grandchildren always had milk. And throughout the second half of 1943 and 1944, while Italian patriots were fighting the Germans in the woods behind their lines, Antonio was matchmaking, trying to arrange marriages between his daughters and Nazi officers. He held a Christmas ball in December 1943 for the Germans at the Villa Chimera—his estate.”

  She thought of the rooms she had seen there that now were rubble. “He had only one daughter,” she said, not so much because she wanted to defend Antonio as because she wanted to see if this clarification might jog Vincenzo’s memory. “He had two sons, one of whom was married to Francesca.”

  A waiter cleared away the plates that had held the squash blossoms and brought them bowls of thick ribollita, the tomatoes and carrots in the soup conspiring to give it a beautiful, orange terra-cotta hue.

  The banker sat back and seemed to be surveying the next course. Then: “That’s right. But the one girl. Cristina, right?”

  “Right.”

  “She was a friend of many Germans, they say. And one of the brothers was, too. Didn’t he help the Nazis loot Florence?”

  “Or, arguably, he tried to prevent them from looting the city.” He tasted his soup. “You barely touched the squash blossoms. This is delicious. I think you’ll like it.” He took another spoonful and then went on. “I know this—Antonio and Beatrice Rosati entertained Nazis and Blackshirts throughout 1943 and 1944. They billeted German officers in their home after Rome fell. I’m sure Antonio was not happy about the fact that his friends from the north decided to make their last stand at the Villa Chimera, but he had no one to blame but himself.”

  She glanced toward Milton, and he winked at her. She smiled at him and then turned back to the Italian banker beside her. “And what did you do during the war?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “Not enough,” he said, his tone a little rueful. “Not nearly enough.”

  THE MURDERS OF the Rosati women gave the tourists who descended on Tuscany something to think about other than wine and cheese and tasteless little trinkets of Michelangelo’s David. The elegant Boboli Gardens at the Pitti Palace look very different if you are imagining satanic rituals in the woods behind the amphitheater and a murderer cutting the hearts from his victims. The Via de’ Tornabuoni becomes more than a mere tony shopping street. You glance casually up at the apartments above the lingerie and dress stores, the shops that sell chocolate and leather, and you imagine …

  Well, you know what you imagine. I don’t.

  Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys. It’s as if the Uffizi is no longer enough. The Duomo and the tower and the Baptistery doors (they are replicas, you know; the real ones are kept safe from the elements in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) are less enticing than the notion that there’s a fiend in the shadows.

  But of course you are in danger only if you are related to a Rosati. So you can
enjoy the thrill ride with no fear of falling yourself.

  I have always found it interesting that two women were executed for murder that summer, one just before I started my work and another very soon after. On June 3, the Americans sent Barbara Graham to the gas chamber in California. On July 13, the British hanged Ruth Ellis in London. And yet, curiously, no one in the Italian media conjectured that I might be female.

  Other news that summer of 1955? You’ll recall that the pope excommunicated Juan Perón in June. Eighty-three spectators died in a Le Mans race-car cataclysm. Antonio Segni formed a new government in Rome. In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park.

  And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman’s family. It made for a great story … and, I must confess, I did succumb to a giddy little narcissistic rush as I devoured the articles.

  Clearly the police would be watching Giulia Rosati and her girls, and so I considered taking a breather. I could travel to their little home on the outskirts of Vatican City in a week or a month or a year. As I have told you, there was no rush. I was feeling no insatiable compulsion.

  But then I read a quote from police detective Paolo Ficino in the newspaper: “Nothing will happen to either Cristina or Vittore Rosati—or to Vittore’s family. We will be there for them.”

  Can you imagine? He was challenging me, goading me on.

  Well, I have never backed down from a challenge. I packed my valise and drove south to Rome.

  1943

  CRISTINA STOOD IN the window in the hotel in Florence and wished either that Friedrich’s room were on a higher floor or that the building across the street were shorter so it wouldn’t obstruct her scrutiny of the moon as it began its descent. She presumed that Vittore’s room, which was two stories above her, might have a view, but Friedrich’s didn’t. Briefly she imagined her older brother standing by his window frame, too, his hands on the sill, scanning the sky. In all likelihood, however, he was sound asleep … somewhere else. It was not yet four a.m. and Vittore was doubtless unconscious—no one slept more deeply than he did—wherever it was that he had chosen to lay his head. But that bed wasn’t in this hotel. At first she had been so afraid that her brother would discover she was here with this German that she had been reluctant to come. But Friedrich had been right: it wasn’t simply that Vittore hadn’t set foot on this floor ever, as far as Friedrich could tell; he spent as many nights as he could away from the hotel. Although he had never spoken directly to Friedrich about where he went, it was common knowledge among that small cadre of officers at the Uffizi that Vittore was seeing a secretary named Giulia who worked at a radio station, and he was either with her or with her and her mother in Fiesole. Still, Cristina had made it clear to Friedrich that they had to be gone from the hotel before breakfast. Her mother and father and Vittore believed she was spending the weekend with a family friend named Donata, a woman Francesca’s age who always put romance before responsibility and—as Cristina had expected—had been happy to cover for her once she had been introduced to the German lieutenant. Donata was the mistress of one of Mussolini’s generals and had a floor of his spectacular townhouse here in Florence to herself.

  In the bed behind her she heard Friedrich stir, and she turned. His eyes were still shut, but his long arm had fallen onto the side of the mattress from which she had just risen. She watched him stretch his fingers and roll them aimlessly along the sheets and the edge of the pillow as he slowly woke up.

  “What time is it?” he asked. He rubbed his fists against his eyes in a manner so boyish that she was reminded of her nephew back in Monte Volta.

  “Four.”

  “Come back to bed then.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “The hotel mattress?” he asked, his voice light. “Having to share a bed with a snoring German soldier?”

  She smiled. “You weren’t snoring.”

  “I’m relieved. I’ve been told that I do.”

  “Not by other women, I hope.”

  “No. Only by other German soldiers who really do snore.” He sat up, kicking his legs over the side of the bed, and motioned for her to come sit beside him. She did, and he pulled her toward him, against him, resting his hands on the small of her back. “So why couldn’t you sleep?” he asked.

  She realized he was worried about her. He was afraid she had regrets, either because they had made love for the first time or because she had lied to her family. Or perhaps because she was in a man’s room in the small hours of the morning. But in fact she had no regrets at all. She felt suddenly like a grown woman. She was excited. This was the sort of romance and exhilaration that thus far the war had denied her. Yes, she had missed the sorts of galas and balls that Francesca had enjoyed when she had been eighteen and nineteen, but Cristina had something she decided now was much, much better: she had a lover. She had beside her in this bed a man with whom she knew she was falling in love.

  “Tell me,” Friedrich asked her again. “Please.”

  She kissed him. “Because I like it here,” she murmured softly.

  “In Florence?”

  “With you. In your room. I guess I don’t want to sleep through the night.”

  “I would take you dancing, but obviously nothing is open right now.”

  As he spoke, she found herself starting to flinch, expecting the sentence to end differently: I would take you dancing, but obviously I can’t dance. She was aware right now of the way his shin ended in a club: his left foot was flat on the foor, while his right shin was hovering well above it. This was why he had beckoned her to him rather than rising and coming to her in the window. Earlier in the night, when they were making love and discovering the idiosyncrasies and imperfections that marked each other’s bodies, she had explored his legs and his disfigurement. She had caressed him and kissed him, determinedly overcoming her own squeamishness to run her fingertips over the stump—the skin hairless and glassy—where even now he said he felt only the odd tingle.

  “You dance?” she asked, teasing him. Her forearms were draped on his shoulders, and she began to massage the back of his neck.

  “I do. I am not as elegant on the dance floor as I once was. But I can still manage the occasional very precise gavotte.”

  “Precision. That does matter to you Germans, doesn’t it?”

  He smiled. “And I’m not even Prussian.”

  “Someday you’ll show me how well you dance. Maybe even this weekend.”

  “That would be wonderful, yes.”

  Outside Friedrich’s room, along the hotel corridor, they heard doors opening and the sound of men running with great urgency. There was a sliver of light now beneath their door because someone had turned on the hall sconces. And then there was the sound of someone knocking, pounding really, for Friedrich to wake up and join Colonel Decher downstairs. It was Jürgen Voss. Apparently the Allies had begun to invade Sicily.

  Captain Marco Rosati’s first thought was that an animal carcass was rotating on a spit: he heard what he presumed was a crackling fire and the air was filled with the aroma of cooked meat. But as he opened his eyes, he understood that he was in that foggy moat between sleeping and waking, and his dream of a cooked pig or boar was quickly erased by the fact that his new adjutant was shaking him awake by his shoulder, the young man’s eyes wide with panic. He had been, it seemed, asleep in the chair by his desk in this modest second-story apartment in Gela, where he was billeted. He recalled ruefully that he had been writing another letter to Francesca.

  Now he forced himself fully awake and stood and listened as this absolutely terrified fellow, whom everyone called Lungo, told him of enemy paratroopers between them and the airfield behind them, and the waves and waves of enemy landing craft that had been spotted off the Sicilian beach and were working their way through the waves. He was just reaching for his holster and pistol when there was a series of colossal explosions—behind him, beside them, before them; it was almost like dominoes—and he was hurled aga
inst the coatrack next to the writing table and then onto the floor. The lone light went out and the room was lit only by the moon. Marco felt plaster dust raining gently upon him when the shaking stopped. He saw that Lungo was trying to tell him something, but Marco’s ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear a single word. Then the fellow closed his eyes and rolled onto his back, and Marco saw that the adjutant’s shirt had been shredded by shrapnel, his abdomen all but scooped out, and his intestines were protruding like a nest of baby snakes. Marco leaned over him, stifling his gag reflex and wishing that he had the slightest idea how to help him. But the engineer’s fear and sense of absolute helplessness lasted but a moment, because Lungo’s chest abruptly stopped heaving as the body stopped straining for air and the fellow expired. So Marco found where he had dropped his pistol and moved as quickly as he could through the debris and clutter that now marked the way from his room to the stairs. He bumped into furniture that had been upended and felt his way along walls that suddenly were pockmarked with holes. He was aware that his hearing was already starting to return, because now he could hear women and soldiers screaming alike, and the sound of machine-gun fire nearby. From the beach he heard the thunder of artillery fire, and he imagined the massive American and British battleships sitting safely at sea and pummeling his desperately frightened men in their wholly inadequate bunkers. Initially he had assumed it was a bomb that had ripped into his quarters and killed his adjutant, but it dawned on him now that it had probably been a shell hurled from those behemoths floating out in the waves, well beyond the range of the Italian guns on the beach. Still, this revelation passed almost instantly through his mind, whisked from consciousness because he heard the shrill whistle of another missile approaching. He was at the top of the building’s stairs and so he raced down them, leaping the last few steps as if he were jumping into the pool at the Villa Chimera, and though he landed awkwardly and twisted his ankle, he continued outside into the chaos of the piazza—into the stream of horrified women pulling their thin-legged children by their hands and the frightened men with their carbines trying to muster in the street for their officers—just as another building along the corniche seemed to evaporate in a deafening roar of smoke and hot ash.