The Light in the Ruins

  “Serafina,” he said tenderly, after he had sat up. He massaged her left shoulder, the corner of her back where she could tolerate being touched.

  Without meeting his eyes she said, “Some people bite their fingernails. I do this.”

  Across the river there was absolutely no sign of life. She nuzzled her face into Milton’s neck and wondered if she had ever in her life not been lonely.

  In the morning Paolo had a long and entirely unsatisfying phone conversation with his counterpart in the police department in Rome, a tall fellow Paolo had met before with the oddly appropriate last name Torregrossa: tall tower. Paolo recalled Torregrossa as a rail with thinning brown hair and ears that seemed glued flat to the sides of his head.

  “So the fellow has been fired?” Paolo asked him.

  “He will be,” Torregrossa said. “At the moment he has merely been suspended while we investigate. The important thing is that the family is fine—that nothing happened to them.”

  Paolo thought of the commedia dell’arte and the daggered, comic, and wholly ineffective Il Capitano. He and his wife had seen a performance two weeks ago not far from here. Five blocks, maybe. Last night must have been terrifying for Giulia Rosati and her little family, but in the light of day the big problem was that their guard was a stock character from a hyperbolic strain of Renaissance theater.

  “Just how drunk was he when he was found?” Paolo asked. “Passed out, I assume.”

  “No, actually. Only hung over. And he wasn’t found. He returned to the Rosatis’ apartment just before daybreak. By then everyone was gone.”

  “Where are Giulia and the children now?”

  “We took them to some family friends who live on the other side of the Vatican.”

  Paolo tried to re-create the critical moments in his head: Giulia Rosati lowering her four-year-old to the ground in a bedsheet in the middle of the night and then climbing down that bedsheet herself with a toddler cradled against her chest. “Do you know what time the guard left the apartment?” he asked.

  “It was early. Still light out. He says he didn’t leave the front door open. Insists a breeze must have opened it. He thought he was just going to run downstairs to a little place where he could buy a soda.”

  “And instead he bought a grappa.”

  Torregrossa chuckled. “He ran into friends. One thing led to another. The next thing he knew, he woke up, it was almost morning, and he was in the park by the castle.”

  “Those are fine friends.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “The family has another guard now—at their friends’ apartment?”

  “Yes. And this one will know not to excuse himself for a soda.”

  “Or a grappa.”

  “Indeed,” said Torregrossa. “Or a grappa.”

  “When was the last time you saw Roberto Piredda?” Serafina asked Vittore that morning in his hotel’s small dining room. Vittore was visibly agitated about the ordeal his wife had endured last night, and Serafina found it difficult to keep him focused. He kept circling back to the ineptitude of the Rome police and his desire to get on the road and drive home. He was not precisely chain-smoking, because he wasn’t finishing his cigarettes. But he was continually lighting them, one American Lucky Strike after another, taking a single deep puff, and then forgetting them until they had almost burned out. Then he would light another.

  “I don’t know,” he told her. “It’s been years.”

  “That’s what Piredda said. He didn’t think he had seen you in at least five years—and the last time was at a lecture at the University of Milan, where he just happened to run into you. I think he was a little hurt that he’s never met your children.”

  “Please. People change. Times change.”

  “But once he was like a mentor to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you cut ties with him?”

  “Why do you think it was me? Maybe he cut the ties. Maybe neither of us did. Maybe life just intervened and we grew apart.”

  “Was he correct about when you two saw each other last?”

  “At the university? It’s possible. I don’t recall seeing him since. I barely recall seeing him at that lecture.”

  “Did you two have a quarrel?”

  “At the lecture?”

  “Or before,” she said.

  He reached for the smoldering cigarette, took a puff, and then extinguished it. “Look, we grew apart during the war. Before the war he was merely an archeologist. He understood the tombs on our property. I viewed him as a scholar. But during the war—during the occupation—he became something else.” He brought a fresh Lucky Strike to his lips, and Serafina watched the flame on his lighter when he raised it toward his face. After he had lit the cigarette, he continued, “He became a bootlicker. It was pathetic. Pathetic and sad. He gave away two-thousand-year-old artifacts to philistine Nazis. He encouraged this Ahnenerbe nonsense that there was some connection between Etruscans and Aryans. He was the worst of the toadies. But there was no explosion between us. I just felt dirty being around him.”

  “Did you feel that way around your father?” Instantly, the moment the words had escaped her lips, she regretted them. She wondered if there was a way to retract them, to take them back. But they were out there between them now, and of course she couldn’t.

  “My father and I had an agreement the last years of his life,” he said, his voice leaden. “Giulia made sure of that.”

  “And that was?”

  “I would abide his presence. I would be cognizant of the reality that he had lost almost everything—including, worst of all, his oldest son and his grandchildren.”

  “But you didn’t forgive him.”

  Vittore remained silent. He glanced at his watch.

  “And your sister. Have you forgiven her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She was eighteen. Eighteen-year-olds make mistakes. Besides, a man expects more from his father than he does from his younger sister. In the war, she was still such a … a child.”

  “I was the same age as she was.”

  “So? What in the world has that got to do with anything?”

  Serafina tried to gather herself. This was the second stupid thing she had said in the last minute. What she had been doing during the war was irrelevant.

  “Let’s go back to Piredda,” she said. “You were mad at him.”

  “I was disappointed in him. There’s a difference.”

  “Did he feel any anger toward you? Did he have any sort of grudge?”

  “No. Not toward me and not toward my family.”

  “You see where I was going.”

  He reached for his cigarette, gazed at its blue smoke, but didn’t take a drag. “Piredda killed no one. Really, he hasn’t any reason.” And with that, Vittore stood, taking the Lucky Strike with him.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’m sure of that. Now, forgive me, Detective, but I should be leaving. I have a long drive ahead of me and I want to get back to my family.”

  “Are you still burying your mother and sister-in-law tomorrow?”

  “We are. I’m going to see you there, aren’t I?”

  “I am coming, yes. But I promise to be unobtrusive.”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he looked up and said, “I’m not worried about spectacle. I’m worried about my family. I want you and Inspector Ficino and anyone else you bring to be as obtrusive as you want.”

  Cristina sat in the passenger seat of her own little Fiat, wishing for the first time in her life that she smoked. A cigarette might mask the menthol stench from the aftershave of the police officer who, at the insistence of Paolo Ficino, was driving her all the way back to Rome. His name was Armando and she guessed he was a few years younger than she was. He drove like a madman and viewed his ability to terrify the periodic hay wagons—the farmers and their horses alike—he passed as they raced south throu
gh Chianti as a barometer of his masculinity. She’d been so shocked when he’d had the audacity to ask if she had a man in her life that she had failed to lie. She had just looked at him, a little aghast, and shook her head no. Then she had mumbled, “My mother is going to be buried tomorrow,” hoping he would see the spectacular inappropriateness of asking her out now. He hadn’t. He’d expressed his sympathy instead. Told her that he couldn’t imagine why someone was cutting the hearts from her family. Then he added that, although he had been to Rome only a few times in his life, an older friend had told him of a very romantic restaurant on the Via Margutta, mere blocks from the base of the Spanish Steps. He offered to take her there that night.

  She ignored him, her mind’s eye transfixed by images of her mother’s bedroom in the Rome apartment they shared. She saw the bed, which her father had had built after the war, incorporating the piece of a headboard he had salvaged from the ruins of the Villa Chimera, the family crest carved into the center of the wood. There was the long closet with her mother’s two tiers of dresses and blouses and skirts. It was a big closet by the standards of the city but tiny compared to the small dressing room off the bedroom where the marchesa’s clothing had been stored at the villa. On the bureau was an Etruscan psykter, which Beatrice had used like a vase, placing a fresh bouquet of flowers there every second or third day. She and her mother had a woman who came in twice a week to clean the apartment, but it had never been a demanding job; Cristina wondered whether she would retain her now. The woman needed the work; wasn’t that reason enough? Meanwhile, she herself was going to need Vittore to help her understand better her assets—their assets. She felt infantilized by all that she didn’t know.

  And as she gazed out the window at the countryside, she tried to decide whether she was more sad or scared.

  In the end it was her memories of Friedrich that tipped the scales. For a decade she had believed he was dead while allowing herself to hope he was alive. She had told herself that he was a prisoner somewhere in Siberia and eventually even the communists would let him go. Send him home. Technically, nothing Serafina had shared with her in Florence should have changed that. After all, there was still no body. But in fact there was now a concreteness to her fears. To his end. Budapest. The Eastern Front. As her brother had reminded her, by 1945 the Soviets weren’t likely to take a German captain prisoner.

  She wondered where Friedrich had gone after he had left the villa for the last time. She wondered when he had left Italy. Once, when Vittore had grown frustrated with the way she was pining for the lieutenant, he had tried to turn her against him by insisting that Friedrich was likely to have been with Decher when the villagers and their priest had been massacred just south of Arezzo. She had told him that wasn’t possible. Friedrich wasn’t capable of that sort of violence or brutality. He wasn’t. It was just that simple.

  “We’ll be in Rome by the middle of the afternoon,” Armando was saying, one hand on the wheel, the other arm dangling outside the window. “It will still be light out. We’ll park your car and lock you safely inside your apartment. Like a princess—which they tell me you are.”

  “Someone told you I’m a princess?”

  “Someone did,” he said.

  “No,” she corrected him. “Whoever told you that was mistaken.”

  He took a turn on a switchback so quickly that she fell against him. He smiled, pleased with even that small, inadvertent contact. She looked past him out the window at the sheep on the hillside and settled back on her side of the vehicle.

  “I hear the drivers are maniacs in Rome,” he told her. “But I’m an excellent driver. I can keep up with the best of them. I should race cars.”

  For a few seconds she was able to hear the tinkling of the sheep’s bells through the open windows. It reminded her of her summers as a child.

  “Maybe before we park your car, we should drive down the Via Margutta. Find that restaurant,” he went on. “I bet I’d recognize the name if I saw it.”

  When she had been a teenager, from a distance some afternoons she would watch Ilario tend to the sheep. Clearly he loved the animals. It was a testimony either to how handsome he was or to how lonely and bored she was, but sometimes when she had taken him lemonade or almonds the cook had fried in olive oil and salt, she had daydreamed that together they would find romance. Not many years after that, her niece would create similar fantasies with her dolls: princesses falling in love with blacksmiths and stable hands. Unsuitable men for the princesses, which made it all the more romantic. And now? Now even Alessia was dead. All that remained of the anointed who had once walked the loggia at the Villa Chimera and managed the vineyards and olive groves—a family that, before the war, had seemed to glide effortlessly through the gardens and sunlight and rarefied air of the hilltop villa—was her brother and herself. It was as if the estate had become a necropolis, the contours of the fields but a ghostline, and the ruins of the main house a monument to the Rosati dead.

  “My shift ends at ten,” Armando told her, tapping the horn twice to scare an old woman with a walking stick who was strolling slowly along the side of the road. “But you have to eat, right? Me, too. So I’ll find us that restaurant. Really, you’ll like it—it’s very romantic.”

  Cristina looked at him. She had absolutely no idea what to say.

  IT WAS A missed opportunity. I would learn only later that Giulia and her children had been alone at the apartment, the police officer guarding them drunk on grappa a block away.

  But that also gave me resolve. I would not make such a mistake again.

  The Rosatis would be together in Monte Volta to bury the marchesa and her daughter-in-law. All of them—at least all of the ones who mattered to me. Now, I would not finish them all off at once; that would demand the sort of atomic option that was inimical to the surgical precision that I wanted to mark my little project.

  But I would get one of them at the Villa Chimera. I would entice one of them away from the police and the crowd (though I was honestly unsure whether there would be a sizable number of mourners) and I would extract one more heart.

  The day before the funeral, a little before dusk, I went to the estate. I saw that workers had already prepared the two plots and left. I inspected their work. And then I walked the grounds, surveying the melancholy rubble of the villa and the dreary remains of the outbuildings. It had all gone to hell—which perhaps was fitting. In a decade the vineyards had been lost entirely to creep and weed, and the olive grove had more dead trees than live ones. It was bleak. There were feral cats and rats and birds living inside the villa, while the roof of the cattle barn had collapsed and two of the walls had crumbled.

  I was, of course, not displeased by the ruin and gloom.

  That night I slept in my car, and I slept well, dreamless and long. I awoke with the sun, drove into Pienza, and drank my espresso beneath an unexpectedly welcoming touch: a bright red Campari umbrella.

  1944

  IT WAS DARK now and the power was out at the villa, but the kitchen was awash in candlelight. The candelabra from the dining room and the loggia had been brought here, as had a pair of oil lamps Francesca had found. Still, Cristina could not see the wounded girl’s face because she was rolled on her side, her knees pulled up toward her chest. She lay on a pile of blankets on the kitchen floor. But Cristina knew that her mother could see the partisan’s face: Beatrice was squatting on the tile before the girl, patting her forehead gently with a rag of cold water. Cristina could not help but wonder if her face was as badly burned as her back. From her spot near the stove, she could see the young woman’s skull and her right shoulder, and she was riveted. Instead of skin, she saw a roiling landscape of festering black tissue and red hillocks, some oozing an almost hueless butter. The flickering candlelight made it look vaguely like lava, undulating and alive. She wanted to help, but she couldn’t imagine how. Still, she asked her mother if there was anything at all she could get her, anything at all she could do.

  “
No,” her mother said, and then she put the rag in the pot of cold water and took the girl’s wrist in her hands, feeling the pulse with her fingertips.

  The partisan was lying on a white sheet, but it had small blue and gold flowers embroidered along one of the edges and Cristina didn’t believe it belonged to her family. Besides, it was filthy, browned by dust and grime from the road. Cristina speculated that the girl had already been wrapped in the sheet when the group had turned up at the villa. Her bare feet were exposed, and Cristina saw the cuff of what she guessed was a pair of men’s gray work trousers. The feet, so dirty and small, were childlike. Somehow they managed to make the girl’s back, charred and blistered and maimed, seem even worse. It was as if this had happened to Alessia.

  Finally her mother stood and said to the couple who had been watching over her as she examined the girl, “What did you say your names were?”

  “We didn’t. But I’m Enrico. And this is my wife, Teresa.”

  “Well, Enrico. Teresa. This girl needs a hospital.”

  Enrico rubbed his forehead and then wiped his eyes. He was in his mid-twenties, his hair the ash blond of a northern Italian. His sleeves were rolled up not quite to his elbows. Teresa gazed down at the girl on the floor and then knelt beside her. Her hair was a shade darker than Enrico’s, but it may just have looked that way because it hadn’t been washed in days. It fell to her shoulders. “We know she needs a hospital,” Enrico said, his tone somewhere between exhaustion and exasperation. “The villagers thought you might have a car. We want to get her to the hospital in Montepulciano. Or, if the Germans are still there, take her to one farther south.”

  Three more partisans were outside on the terrace, two men and another woman, and one of the men was wounded as well—though not nearly as badly as this girl. He had burns, too, but they were only on his left hand and arm.