The Light in the Ruins

  The death of Beatrice, however, seemed to suggest this was something very different.

  When Giulia returned to the living room, the uniformed police officer was reading the newspaper. She gazed for a long moment at his holstered gun. He sensed she was watching him, bent down the top of the newspaper, and shrugged. He had a long face and a seemingly lipless mouth. She guessed he was, like her, in his late thirties.

  “The babies asleep?” he asked.

  “I think my four-year-old would not be happy to be called a baby,” Giulia told him lightly.

  “She is headstrong then. Like my daughter.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “She is a bit headstrong.”

  He put the newspaper down on the side table. “You’ll be fine,” he said after a moment. “Nothing is going to happen to you or your children. Not here in Rome.”

  “Not anywhere.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Not anywhere.”

  Giulia’s mother still lived just outside Florence, in Fiesole. She had told her daughter on the phone that all anyone in the city was talking about was the killer with the vendetta against the remnants of a Tuscan marchese’s family. She’d added that some people, it seemed, had gone from worrying about their own safety after Francesca had been killed—who was this madman who had cut the heart from a woman?—to viewing it more as an unbelievably interesting spectacle that didn’t concern them. After all, if you weren’t among the last of the Rosatis, you weren’t in danger.

  “Would you like more coffee?” she asked the officer.

  He nodded and handed her his cup and saucer. “Thank you,” he said. “You want me awake tonight.”

  She passed the mirror that hung on the wall between the living room and the kitchen, but didn’t notice herself in the glass as much as she did the carvings of Venus and Mars at the base of the gilt wood frame. The mirror was just under five hundred years old, and according to Rosati family myth, it had once belonged to Piero de’ Medici. It had survived the shelling and then the looting at the Villa Chimera, when Beatrice herself had dug a hole in the high grass beyond the swimming pool and buried it.

  Giulia had never seen the estate before it was charred trees and rubble. She had never seen the chimera. But she had seen pictures of the villa before the war had come to Monte Volta.

  In the kitchen, she packed as much coffee as she possibly could into the espresso machine filter. She did indeed want to be sure that this policeman was awake until morning. She presumed she would be, too.

  Chief Inspector Paolo Ficino tossed his own newspaper into the trash can on the sidewalk before climbing the stairs to his apartment. He knew his wife had already seen the latest articles Sunday afternoon about the butcher who was cutting the hearts from a Tuscan family in Florence, but there was no point in bringing those sorts of lurid headlines into their home for their sixteen-year-old daughter to read.

  The reporters hadn’t yet made the leap that whoever had murdered the two Rosatis might have done so because of the war, and neither he nor the prosecutor had volunteered that theory when they had been interviewed. Maybe they never would. Because maybe there really was no connection. After all, Paolo kept asking himself, if this did go back to the war, why had the killer waited a decade to start his work? And it had been a decade. Paolo had looked into Antonio Rosati’s death, and the fellow had died of a heart attack on a sunny summer afternoon, walking through the Villa Borghese in Rome. There were witnesses galore. Paolo knew he was taking the idea that this vendetta had something to do with the war seriously only because of Serafina. Clearly the prosecutor, Sergio Contucci, gave very little credence to the notion.

  When Serafina had returned from Monte Volta, she told him that she believed she had been to the Villa Chimera before. After the firefight in the summer of 1944, when the partisans had retreated from the hills outside Trequanda, they must have taken her to the Rosati estate. She had been hidden there, shielded inside the Etruscan tombs from the sun and the Nazis. But, Paolo wondered, did this have any bearing on the investigation? Again, he couldn’t imagine how. He hoped she was telling him everything, but he honestly wasn’t sure. So much of her life was a mystery to him and, he guessed, even to her. He recalled the intense, wounded sparrow who had come to him in 1947, wanting to be a detective. He would have dismissed the idea right away if he hadn’t noticed her neck and her ear; her disfigurements had been more obvious then. He knew, as young as she was, this wasn’t play-acting. He knew she had a history and it was a history that might make her a worthy apprentice. A worthy pioneer. He discovered quickly how smart she was. And, at her insistence, what a good shot she was. He gave her a gun, suggested she not advertise that she had it. For years, almost nobody knew. Now those who did looked the other way.

  Paolo considered whether he should be more worried about Beatrice’s sister in Naples or her niece’s little family in London, but his instinct told him that these murders had nothing to do with them. Still …

  He stood for a moment and breathed in the night air, grateful that it was a little cooler, a little less humid than he had expected. Then he started up the narrow stairway to his wife and teenage daughter.

  “Vittore and Cristina are planning to bury their mother and Francesca with the rest of the family at the estate in Monte Volta,” Serafina told Milton as their paths crossed in the kitchen in their apartment Monday morning. For breakfast Milton would have either coffee and a cigarette or a day-old chocolate pastry, if he happened to find a leftover one on the counter. It was pretty much how she started the day, too.

  He seemed to think about this. He was holding a pair of neckties in his hands, and she pointed at the blue-and-gold one.

  “Really? I’m wearing a gray suit today. I was leaning toward the red one.”

  “The blue always looks good against your eyes,” she reminded him.

  “Can’t argue with that,” he said. Then: “Will you be there?”

  “At the funeral?”

  “Uh-huh.” He draped the red necktie over a chair and started tying the blue one around his neck. He was using the chrome side of the toaster as a mirror. She’d bought him the toaster for Christmas last year, thinking he would want to heat bread in the morning because he was an American, but he used it rarely and only, she presumed, because he loved her and wanted her to feel that he appreciated the gift.

  “Yes. I think Paolo and I will both go.”

  “When is it?”

  “Soon. Wednesday, I believe.”

  “Family only?”

  “What’s left of it. But Cristina says some villagers will probably come out of respect for the marchesa. And maybe some of the peasants who once worked on the farm.”

  “Such as that delightful young man you told me about who’s now employed at the terra-cotta factory?”

  “Ilario? Perhaps. We’ll see.”

  He had finished with his necktie now and he took a puff from her cigarette. When he had replaced it in the ashtray, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms and asked, his voice firm, “And how are you? You’ve told me about some of the people you interviewed when you went to Monte Volta, but almost nothing about what it was like for you to be back there.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Maybe later because it’s a long story or maybe later because it’s a wrenching one?”

  “Just long.”

  “You’re lying.”

  She took his right hand off her arm and kissed it. “Yes, I am,” she said. Then she licked her fingers and wiped her lipstick off his skin. “But it’s a long story, too. And we both have to get to work.”

  When Serafina arrived at the police station, she had a cable waiting from West Berlin. Friedrich Strekker was listed as missing and presumed dead. In October 1944 he had been promoted from lieutenant to captain and transferred to a newly formed Panzergrenadier combat division. The division had been almost entirely wiped out in the battle for Budapest in the early months of 1945. No more than two or three hundred men esca
ped the city on February 13, and a one-legged captain was not among them.

  “Serafina?”

  She looked up and saw Paolo.

  “The Rosatis are here,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She put the wire into a folder. She wondered how she would tell Cristina.

  Serafina and Paolo sat on one side of the table in the drab interview room down the hall from the detectives’ desks, and Vittore and Cristina sat on the other. Serafina hoped the Rosatis had each gotten a good night’s sleep, but based on the bags under their eyes, she doubted it.

  “Have you given any more thought this weekend to who doesn’t like you?” Paolo asked. Then he focused his attention on Vittore. “The sooner you can give us any direction, the sooner we can apprehend this lunatic and your wife and children will be safe. Your aunt in Naples will be safe.”

  Vittore sat back in the wooden chair, his hands in his lap. “Obviously people were jealous of us. But by 1944 they should have pitied us. Really, who lost as much as we did?”

  Paolo shrugged. “But since the war? Did you offend someone at the Vatican? Did your mother—”

  “Even if I did offend someone at the Vatican Museum,” he said, emphasizing the word museum, “why would he kill Francesca? Why not kill me? Besides, I spend my life examining and cataloging five-hundred-year-old pieces of sculpture. I design exhibits for tourists. I’m not sure it’s possible for me to offend someone.”

  “Why did you lose interest in the Etruscans?”

  “I didn’t. I lost interest in Arezzo and Florence and Tuscany. Giulia and I wanted to live in Rome. I work with Renaissance sculptures because I was able to get a job at the Vatican Museum. It’s not complicated.”

  The older detective turned to Cristina. “And why did you and your parents move to Rome instead of remaining in Monte Volta?”

  “After what our family endured there? That would be too painful. None of us could ever live there. Someday, perhaps, we’ll try to sell it. Besides, if you saw the villa …,” she said, her voice trailing off. She turned to Serafina and continued. “Remind him what you saw when you went there the other day.”

  Paolo held up both hands. “I know your estate is in very bad shape. But why not take a place in the nearby village, where you had roots? If money is tight, I would think it would be much less expensive to live in Monte Volta than in Rome.”

  “Our father was a marchese and our mother a marchesa,” Vittore answered. “Given their station, it would have been beneath them to live among the villagers.”

  Cristina shook her head and smiled a little wanly. “Honestly, Vittore, you make them out to be such snobs. They weren’t. Especially Mother. My parents and I lived in Rome to be near Vittore and Giulia. Then, after Father died, my mother and I stayed there because Mother wanted to be near her grandchildren. It’s just that simple. She wanted to be near you and Giulia and the kids, especially after the loss of Massimo and Alessia.” Then she said to the two detectives, “We didn’t lose everything in the war. Obviously. We can afford our apartment in Rome.”

  Serafina leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “A wire came in early this morning. From Germany.” She watched both siblings grow alert. “Your lieutenant, Cristina—Friedrich—died in the battle for Budapest. I don’t know if it matters, but he died a captain.”

  Cristina nodded ever so slightly and breathed in deeply through her nose. Then she sighed. “Where is he buried?” she asked after a moment.

  “We’ll never know. The body was never recovered. Let’s face it, Budapest was in ruins. A city of rubble by the time the Nazis and the Soviets were finished with it.”

  “Maybe he was taken prisoner,” Cristina argued, but it was halfhearted.

  “A captain? By then the Russians weren’t taking captains prisoner,” Vittore said, and although Serafina knew he was right, she wished he hadn’t been so blunt.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Cristina. “I really am.”

  “It is what I assumed all these years. Obviously.”

  “It’s probably a relief to know, isn’t it?” Paolo added.

  Instead of agreeing, however, Cristina looked directly at Serafina and said, a small hesitation in her voice, “My mother told me something interesting after she met you.”

  Serafina waited. She had a sense of what was coming, and while Cristina probably wasn’t sharing it consciously as a quid pro quo—This is what you get for confirming that my Friedrich is dead—Serafina understood that on some level it was.

  “She thought she knew you,” Cristina said. “She thought she had seen you before.”

  “Serafina?” Paolo asked. “Your mother thought she knew Serafina?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” he asked. “Where?”

  Serafina sat unmoving, a hum in her ears. Inside her head. She thought of the birds amid the black clouds on the ceiling of the tomb and an Etruscan boy steering his small boat against maelstromlike seas. She saw them now from the stone floor where the partisans had placed her nearly ruined body. She recalled the agony of the burns and how she had noticed the painting—and yes, the sun behind the thunderclouds—first through her tears. She had had to blink them away to be sure that what she was seeing was not a hallucination. In her mind, she smelled the mushrooms.

  “She said she thought you were the burned girl,” Cristina was saying. “The partisan burned girl. She thought you had died in the tombs.”

  Serafina felt everyone at the table staring at her. “Did she tell you anything else?” she asked.

  “About you?”

  “Yes. About … me.”

  “At first, on Wednesday, she honestly wasn’t sure where she had seen you before. But then on Thursday, when she saw you run out of Francesca’s apartment, she noticed your ear. And then she knew.”

  “Go on.”

  “My mother said she brought you the very last of our olive oil. She gave it to the men who carried you to the tombs. She even gave them the last of Francesca’s face cream. They took it, but mostly they wanted soap and rags they could boil. They wanted water. They really didn’t want my mother’s help. They were going to nurse you themselves.”

  “Especially the woman,” Serafina said. She was thinking of Teresa, Enrico’s wife. Teresa was as capable of shooting a German officer as she was, but Teresa was eight years older. She was no longer a teenager and thus mothered their small band. She could be tender; she was tender. The men adored her and Serafina revered her. So much of what they did as a group was simply waiting—waiting for orders, waiting for food, waiting for dark—but Teresa seemed always to be moving. She cooked. She scouted. She wrote notes for the men who couldn’t read. Like her husband, she felt acutely every death and every defection. Now Serafina could imagine how hard she and Enrico must have worked to keep her alive.

  “The woman,” Cristina agreed. “But the men, too.”

  “And then the British arrived,” Serafina said. It was a statement, but she really wasn’t sure.

  “Yes,” Vittore said. “Then the British arrived.”

  “So you were in Monte Volta, too?” Serafina asked him.

  “No, I was here—in Florence.”

  “And where were you, Cristina?” Paolo asked. “Did you see Serafina when the partisans brought her to your estate?”

  “I never saw your face. I only saw your … back,” she said, almost swallowing the last word as if it were an obscenity. As if seeing the wound had been a violation of sorts. “You were lying on the floor in the kitchen,” she continued after a moment.

  “This wasn’t in the tombs?” Serafina asked.

  “Not at first,” Cristina said. “The Germans had blown up the granary that morning before leaving and there was fighting in Trequanda, the next village over. I remember the ground literally shook from the granary blast, even at the Villa Chimera. That night the partisans came and you were brought to the house. But then the Germans returned. The British were already behind them and so the Nazis were going to make a
last stand at the estate—they liked the high ground.” Then she looked right at Serafina. “And so my mother and father had me take you all to the underground tombs to hide. I think they expected you to leave in the middle of the night. Just disappear. At least that’s what they hoped.”

  “But we wouldn’t leave,” Serafina said. “Because they were afraid to move me again.” She watched as Vittore draped his hand on his sister’s and squeezed it. Outside, a delivery van honked and someone yelled for a double-parked automobile to move off the street. She heard a motorcycle race through the congestion. And down the corridor, in the room with the detectives’ desks, she heard laughter and a typewriter. In her mind, she still couldn’t see Beatrice in 1944, she couldn’t recall the marchesa bringing them water and oil and lotion, but somewhere very far away she heard a man’s voice and she had a sense it was Antonio’s. He and Enrico were arguing, and they were arguing about her. The small band of partisans had refused to leave the estate, retreating only as far as the Etruscan tombs. It was in all likelihood the reason that she was alive today.

  As the two of them left the police station for a bite to eat, Paolo surprised Serafina by offering her his elbow. She took it, but she was puzzled.

  “So you think Captain Friedrich Strekker died in the battle for Budapest,” he said casually.

  “I don’t think it. I know it. I have the cable from Berlin.”

  “A one-legged man who has been out of combat more than two years is promoted to captain in a Panzergrenadier division. That’s what you believe.” He motioned with his free hand at a lavender dress in a shop window. “I should buy that for my wife. The only thing stopping me? Many thousands of lire.”

  “The Nazis were desperate for manpower by the end of the war,” she reminded him. “They were commandeering fifteen-year-old boys and fifty-five-year-old men. Think of the Volkssturm.”

  “This wasn’t Volkssturm. This was a Panzergrenadier division. This was the battle for Budapest.”