The Light in the Ruins

  “Actually, a lot of us did—most of us, as a matter of fact. Including, for a time, your own father. Now, you and your friends had the moral high ground. I grant you that. But you were among the few. Remember, ‘Mussolini is always right,’ ” he said, reciting one of the classic Blackshirt maxims.

  She smiled at him a little grimly and replied with another, equally popular Fascist motto: “Me ne frego,” she said. I don’t give a damn.

  As they were about to climb into Paolo’s car and leave the villa, Luciano Cassini arrived. He was a small, heavy man with salt-and-pepper hair, a sunburned complexion, and clothes that always looked uncomfortably tight. Serafina knew that he had never approved of her. He was one of the older officers who thought Paolo had lost his mind allowing a woman to join the polizia. But he was calm and competent and knew what he was doing. The first thing he did was ask to see the Rosati cemetery.

  “I think we have time,” Serafina said to the two men. “The service doesn’t begin for another forty-five minutes. But we should be quick.”

  “Is it far?” Cassini asked.

  “Not really,” she said as they started away from the villa. “It’s actually rather modest. When I was here the other day, I counted thirteen small headstones around a stone cross. Some small pots for flowers. There are rows of cypress on three sides. It’s pretty.”

  “Let me guess,” Paolo said. “At least some of those small pots are not your typical terra-cotta, are they?”

  “I don’t know,” she told him.

  “What are you getting at?” Cassini asked Paolo.

  “Don’t be surprised if the pots are rather valuable—Etruscan.”

  “They’re using museum artifacts as flowerpots?”

  “We’ll see,” Paolo said. “From what Cristina told us, when they unearthed the tombs, the pots were like seashells at the beach. The valuable ones they gave to the museum in Arezzo. The others? The marchesa decorated with them.”

  “It must have been nice to have been the marchesa,” said Cassini.

  “Not at the end,” Paolo corrected him.

  “No,” Cassini agreed. “Not at the end.”

  By noon a small crowd had assembled inside the church in Monte Volta. The church sat halfway up a hill, nestled between ancient brick homes on one of the narrow, winding cobblestone roads that rose up from the village center. Cristina and Vittore and his family had still not arrived from Rome, however, and so Serafina excused herself from the rear pew and went outside for a cigarette. As she had expected, the funeral was small; no more than thirty people were inside the church.

  She stared for a moment at the matching pair of long black Lancia Aurelias with gold trim in the windows that dominated the street. Inside each had been a casket, the hearts restored to the cadavers. Now the coffins were at the front of the church. The other cars, including Paolo’s Fiat, were parked down the hill, in a lot at the edge of the village. She guessed that most of those vehicles were from Florence or Rome, or in one case Arezzo. The Arezzo exception? Inside the church, she had spied the museum director, Roberto Piredda.

  She was not convinced the killer was here, either among the mourners or lurking somewhere back at the Villa Chimera with a rifle with a scope. But she was still glad that Cassini was with them, as well as the two officers who were coming from Rome. Cassini was not the sort who would leave them for a grappa, and she had to believe that the pair from Rome would be just as conscientious.

  Now she leaned against the brick wall of the building beside the church and lit a Serraglio, restraining the urge to run the matchstick flame under her thumb, and inhaled the smoke deeply.

  “Good morning.”

  When she turned, she saw that Piredda had sidled up beside her. “I saw you wander outside,” he said. “I thought I’d join you.”

  “Oh?”

  He shrugged. “That’s a beautiful dress.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, fashion is a rather brutal taskmistress. You are expected to wear a black dress to the funeral, despite the heat. Me? I’m a man. I can get away with light gray. You must be sweltering.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And, alas, you need—or at least believe that you need—an especially high collar.”

  “I hadn’t realized you thought so much about fashion.”

  He raised a single finger professorially. “I think about beauty. I imagine you once had a swan’s neck before something happened to you in the war.”

  She shook her head and watched the smoke from the tip of her cigarette. “Nope. You would have been disappointed.”

  He smiled down at her but changed the subject. “I’m going to visit the tombs after the burial. I’m looking forward to that. It’s such a fascinating site. I expect it will bring back for me very fond memories of the excavation.”

  “Are you looking forward to seeing Vittore?”

  “I am, I am—though, obviously, I wish it were under different circumstances.”

  “Let’s talk later today, after you’ve visited the site.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps the tombs will trigger memories that will help me.”

  “Help you?”

  She rubbed her eyes at the bridge of her nose. “I phrased that badly,” she said. “Perhaps seeing the tombs again will make you recall something that might help with the investigation. Maybe you’ll think of someone we should talk to.”

  “You—you and your inspector and your prosecutor—have absolutely no idea who killed the Rosatis, do you?” he asked, and there was an edge to the question that she hadn’t heard from him before. Not quite disgust. More like condescension. Incredulity. He was squinting into the sun.

  “No,” she admitted, curious to see where he would lead the conversation if she was passive.

  “Don’t you people always go back to the basics when you’re stumped?”

  “Go on.”

  “You know—motivation? You sat across from me in my office just the other day and asked me this: Who hated the Rosatis enough to kill them?”

  “And …”

  “You seem to think it all has something to do with the Second World War. You wanted to know about the people Vittore and I knew a decade ago. Maybe your story goes back to the war, but I’m not sure this one does. It seems to me, if any of them—if any of us—wanted to kill them, we would have had ample opportunities in the midst of the battles that raged between Rome and Florence. We would have had plenty of chances in the first months after the Germans retreated north. It was chaos, absolute chaos.”

  She snuffed out her cigarette on the balustrade and then wiped the ashes over the side. “Meaning?”

  “Maybe the Rosatis did something last month. The marchesa or Vittore or that first girl who was killed.”

  “Francesca.”

  “Yes, her.”

  “What could they have done?”

  “As I’ve told you, I’ve not seen them in years. I have no idea.” He walked to the center of the empty street and gazed in the direction of the villa. “Why, you ask, do people hate them? Maybe it has nothing to do with the Villa Chimera. Maybe it has everything to do with Rome.”

  “Rome,” she repeated.

  “It is where they all live, isn’t it?”

  “Not Francesca. And she hadn’t had anything to do with the Rosatis in years.”

  “Well, you’re the detective,” he said, and suddenly he took two quick steps back toward the wall and leaned into her. He stared at her brooch so intently that for a moment she thought he was going to touch it. “A replica, of course,” he said, “but lovely. Inspired by work from the third century B.C. Intelligent use of filigree and enameling. An eagle. Very well done.” He looked up from it and added, “A brooch is perfect for you, Serafina. It draws a man’s eyes precisely where you want them.” Then he did touch her. With the gentleness of a parent he pressed his fingertips against the side of her head and added, “Skin grafting has come so far since the war. You know that, don
’t you? It’s too bad they didn’t know then what they know now.” Then he parted her hair to stroke the ruin that had once been her ear.

  Father Silvio Mancini had been the priest in Monte Volta since 1928 and once had known the Rosatis well. He had performed Francesca and Marco’s marriage. Serafina guessed he was in his fifties, but he was completely bald and might have been considerably older. Still, his face was weathered, not geriatric, and he moved and spoke with great energy. Serafina had been outside the church with Piredda when the Rosati family cars had arrived, and she had watched the priest greet Cristina and Vittore and then Vittore’s wife and children. There was an older woman among them, too, and Cristina guessed this was Elena, Beatrice’s sister from Naples. The priest escorted the family into a narrow alley beside the church, no doubt planning to take them inside through a side door so they could discuss any last-minute details in an anteroom prior to entering the sanctuary. She noted that one of the two uniformed officers from Rome accompanied the Rosatis while the other went straight inside the church. She knew that Paolo was supposed to take charge of them before the service began. She nodded good-bye to Piredda and then returned to her pew in the rear of the sanctuary beside Paolo.

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back,” Paolo whispered, rising to convene with the police officers. “I was beginning to think you’d gotten bored and gone exploring.”

  She shook her head no and gazed at the lit candles at the front of the church, losing herself for a moment in the rows of small, beautiful, featherlike flames. She touched her ear where Piredda’s fingers had been.

  After the service, once the caskets with Beatrice and Francesca Rosati’s bodies had been loaded back into the two hearses, Serafina watched the mourners start together down the hill to their cars. Ilario, his pregnant wife on his arm, nodded politely at her, and she thought the pair was a rather handsome couple. His wife was pretty. Ilario wasn’t wearing a jacket, but his white shirt and necktie were as crisp as anything Milton ever wore.

  She waited outside the church because she wanted to be sure that she saw the officers from Rome escort the family into their own vehicles. She wasn’t precisely sure why; after all, this wasn’t her job and she didn’t believe the killer was in fact present. But here she was.

  “Coming?” asked Paolo.

  “You go on,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “You want to see the Rosatis get into their cars.”

  “I do.”

  He smiled, adjusted his homburg, and stood beside her. A moment later a young man wearing a tan suit and carrying a notepad approached them. A reporter, but probably not from Florence, because neither she nor her boss recognized him. He introduced himself, and indeed, he was from Rome. She listened as Paolo talked to the fellow, answering some questions honestly and being charmingly evasive on others. Soon she saw the Rosatis emerge. She watched as Cristina and her aunt Elena climbed into one vehicle and Vittore and his wife and children climbed into the other. A police officer took the wheel behind each, and they started the long, slow process of turning the automobiles around in the thin cobblestone street. And then they gave up: someone had arrived late and parked beside the wide hearses, effectively penning the two family cars in. And so the vehicles started up the hill instead, farther into the labyrinthine warren of cobblestone roads atop Monte Volta. Quickly Serafina turned back to the reporter and Paolo, raising a finger to interrupt.

  “What do you think about that?” she asked.

  Paolo shrugged. “The family cars couldn’t get around that new vehicle and the two hearses.”

  “I know. Should we follow them?”

  “The cars with the Rosatis? I don’t think so. Remember, this is their village. I say that metaphorically, but once upon a time, it practically was. I’m sure Cristina and Vittore can tell the drivers exactly how to return to the center. Besides, how many roads can really be up there?”

  “You’re not worried?”

  He seemed to think about this. In a moment, however, it didn’t matter. The automobiles were out of sight.

  “Come on,” he said to her. “We should head up to the villa, too.” Then he shook the reporter’s hand and they all started down the hill to their cars.

  The two black hearses pulled into the weedy white gravel parking square just outside the villa, and so did the automobile with Cristina, her aunt, and Father Mancini. A moment later Serafina and Paolo arrived, climbing from the Fiat and joining the mourners who had left before them. Serafina watched the police officer emerge from the first family car and open the back door for the Rosatis and the priest. Then the young fellow glanced down the winding road that led to the estate. Like everyone else, he assumed the second car was somewhere behind him. It would appear any minute. It had to. And so they all waited and wondered as Cristina whispered something to her aunt and as Father Mancini said something to the guard. Finally Serafina turned to Paolo. He was staring down at his watch, but she could see he was worried.

  “I presume Luciano is down at the cemetery,” she said.

  Paolo nodded. Then he motioned for her to follow him as he ventured over to the officer. “The best thing you can do right now is stay here with Miss Rosati and her aunt,” he said to him. “Okay? I’ll have Serafina go get our man down at the cemetery while I backtrack to the church. It’s probably nothing, but let’s be sure.”

  The young man said he would wait and, along with Cristina, peered anxiously at the road behind him. Then Paolo walked briskly toward his Fiat while Serafina started down the hill to the Rosati family plot. Behind her a reporter called out to Paolo, but she recognized the sound of his engine as he started his car. She told herself, as she had over and over that morning, that the killer wasn’t here, he couldn’t be.

  But the truth was, she no longer believed it.

  IT WAS A land where men ground rocks to make pigments and transformed tree sap and egg yolks into binders. The sky from a stone: lapis lazuli. They studied the way the world changed at morning and dusk and imagined how the sun might fall on the skin of a goddess. They painted their deities onto canvases and wooden slabs, onto their walls and ceilings and domes. The Son of Man and his virgin mother, the saints and martyrs and popes.

  And before the monotheists, there were the polytheists with their temples and sculptures. Their Pantheon.

  The church in Monte Volta, where the marchesa and her daughter-in-law were eulogized, had frescoes dating back five hundred years. There, fading but still impressive, was a mural along one plaster wall depicting the life and death of John the Baptist. Along the other was the story of the Annunciation. There were doves on one side, a decapitation on the other.

  The cemetery at the Villa Chimera, where they were to be buried, had a temple modeled after the Minerva facade in Assisi and an angel that was, in my opinion, amateurishly derivative of the winged guardians along the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. You could see the angel from the entrance to the Etruscan chambers; you could see the temple from the hillside above that opening in the earth.

  Now, make no mistake, the battle for Italy was horrible. But it was nothing like the Eastern Front. That was an innermost ring far worse than anything even Dante conceived.

  Still, for two days in the summer of 1944, the Villa Chimera was hell. It was—of this you can be sure. It’s a wonder anyone survived.

  During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.

  Eleven years later I watched the family and the mourners and the police file into the church across the valley from the villa. Then, of course, I was pretending only that I was civilized.

  By the time they filed out, I was ready. The sky that day, if anyone had happened to paint it, was lapis lazuli.

  1944

  THE FIRST SHELLS fell in the pool, sending up oddly mischievous sprays of water—Massimo cannonballing into the deep end—along wi
th the killing shards of marble. The wooden and wicker pergola beside the water erupted in flame, illuminating that side of the terrace, and the small statue of Venus in the raised garden near the loggia was decapitated. And then it was gone, obliterated in an instant. The chimera was butchered, the conjoined triplets—a lion, a snake, a goat—separated, gutted, and then blasted to pebbles. The remnants of the olive grove caught fire and the olive press started to burn.

  And the Germans fired back, the great howitzers shaking the hillside, and Marco winced reflexively each time the ground around him heaved or a part of his childhood was destroyed. He was terrified. He was more scared now than he had ever been in the past year, more frightened even than when the Allies had first invaded Sicily or, months later, when he had thought the Germans were going to execute him rather than merely force him at gunpoint into a work crew. This was worse, much worse, because he was afraid that somewhere here on the grounds of the estate was his family. He told himself it wasn’t possible, they had to be gone, long gone. But what if they were here, trapped amid the bricks and mortar that seemed sure to come down in the battle?

  He knew enough not to move, at least at the moment, to stay crouched behind the tufa boulder. He recalled the rock from his childhood, because as a boy he’d pretended it was an asteroid. When a shell would explode and briefly the night would become day, he would see tendrils of tobacco-brown smoke wafting up from the cratered gardens and lawn. He might have remained hidden there until the shelling subsided, curled in a ball as his home was destroyed, but amid the furious din of the artillery and the sounds of the Germans barking their orders, he heard a woman’s voice screaming out his wife’s name.

  “Francesca! Father! Francesca!” He peered over the stone and there she was, his little sister. Cristina was running, hunched over, between the remnants of the gardens on the far side of the pool, trying either to get through the shelling to the villa or—perhaps—to escape from the house. He couldn’t decide, because she was making no progress as she ran back and forth between the explosions, hysterical, calling out for their father and his wife. And so he emerged from his hiding spot and raced after her, grabbing her by her arms when he reached her and pulling her down to the ground. Then he rolled her against the marble blocks that marked the side of one of the raised flower beds and fell on top of her, shielding her from the shrapnel as best he could. He told her that yes, yes, it was him, he was home and alive. He could feel her body trembling, and her face was wet with tears and sweat. But she didn’t seem to be wounded. He was about to ask her where everyone else was—their parents, his wife and children, whether Vittore was here, too, because clearly the family had not escaped—when a shell crashed into the hillside nearby and the ground beneath them rolled like an ocean wave and briefly they were lifted up. Then they were showered with small rocks and dirt, the stones bruising them as they fell hard upon their arms and legs. He realized they couldn’t stay here; they had to find better cover than this. He asked her again where everyone was and she told him they were inside the villa. And so he pulled her to her feet by her hands, shocked at the blisters there. Then, zigzagging, he led her toward the terrace and up the marble steps that led to the swimming pool. When he reached the terrace, he paused for the briefest of seconds, wondering whether to continue on to the left or the right to get to the house, and then he heard a pair of German privates screaming for them to stop where they were and put their arms up. And so they did, and Marco was careful to spread wide his fingers so that even in the dark the fellows could see he was unarmed. Both soldiers’ eyes were wild with fear, and one was waving his Karabiner rifle at them.