The Light in the Ruins

  He hopped off the truck near San Lorenzo and started back toward the Uffizi. It had taken almost as long to drive as it would have to walk, because the roads were clogged with German military vehicles and staff cars. No one knew if the Allies would arrive in two days, two weeks, or even a month. The Nazis weren’t expected to put up much of a fight south of Florence, but they were still building their defensive line to the north. It was possible—likely, even—that a rearguard action might grow more intense as they tried to delay the Allied advance.

  When he reached the museum, he expected he would have another protection assignment waiting for him, another fresco or statue to entomb. Instead, however, he found Lorenzetti in the office they shared, packing a small satchel with a few books and some clothing that the scholar apparently kept at the Uffizi.

  “What’s this about?” he asked Lorenzetti.

  “It’s time for me to go underground,” the fellow answered.

  Vittore looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. “You’re joining the partisans?” he inquired, honestly unsure if he had heard Lorenzetti correctly.

  “God, no. The last thing I want is to get myself killed in the last days of this appalling war. By underground, I meant hiding. You should do the same. Maybe go back to that beautiful estate of yours and hide in the olive press. The Germans must have left by now.”

  Vittore leaned against the credenza and peered out the window behind Lorenzetti. The sun was reflecting off the glass of the buildings across the way. He thought of Giulia’s bosses burning their papers. And yet the real Florentines did not seem on the verge of panic—only the Nazis and Blackshirts and collaborators. And did he fall into any of those categories? Of course not. Despite his uniform. Nevertheless …

  “I won’t ask where you’re going.”

  “No. Please don’t,” Lorenzetti agreed. Then he handed Vittore a piece of paper with an official-looking seal and said, “Decher left us each one of these before leaving. Yours is on your desk.” Vittore saw that it was an order from the colonel. The expert on Donatello and bas-relief was being told to report immediately to a combat unit being formed in Arezzo. “I told you, we are supposed to become cannon fodder.”

  Vittore put the paper down. “When was the last time you fired a gun?”

  “Training camp.”

  “Me, too.”

  “And Decher? He’s used to commanding the likes of us, not real soldiers. I tell you, he’ll get everyone killed.”

  “You think he’s that inept?” Vittore asked.

  “I do. I also believe he’s arrogrant. And it seems to me that ineptitude and arrogance are a bad combination in battle. Dangerous.”

  “Cowardice is, too.”

  Lorenzetti raised an eyebrow. “In my case, we won’t find out now, will we?”

  Vittore picked up the dress dagger on the desk. It was about a foot long in its black scabbard and had a Roman eagle on the handle. Lorenzetti used it as a paperweight. “As you know,” he told Lorenzetti, “I don’t think much of Decher either. I never have. But my father rather likes him. And I’ve always thought my father had good sense.”

  “Your father misjudged him. I worked with Decher more closely than you. I know what he really thinks of your family.”

  Vittore fingered the tip of the blade, waiting. When Lorenzetti said nothing, he told him, “Go on.”

  “Your sister is beautiful but an inappropriate lover for his adjutant. Your sister-in-law is beautiful but should have her tongue cut out. Your mother is beautiful but too concerned with the peasantry. And your father is a fool who makes good wine but little else. He was lucky to be born rich.”

  “Was Decher the one who suggested that the Villa Chimera was a good spot for the howitzers? For Captain Muller’s battery?”

  “Of course he was.” Lorenzetti shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “I think I suspected as much.”

  “The bright side?”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “His adjutant will never be your brother-in-law. I wouldn’t worry about that. Friedrich Strekker is the sort of eager young cripple who will be proud to die for the fatherland. Once the Germans are north of Florence, your sister can fall in love with a handsome Italian poltroon.”

  “Like you.”

  He put up his hands. “Like me—but not me. I promise.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Of course you will. After the war. I will descend on your family’s estate and avail myself of all its glories. The wine, the olive oil. The pretty girls at the parties. But you, my friend, what will you do?”

  He thought of the orders he had waiting for him. “I guess I’ll report to Arezzo.”

  “Even after what I just told you about Decher?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t say I’d be of much help.”

  The gunshot was nearly deafening in the kitchen, and the bullet ricocheted off the floor and chipped plaster off the wall above Cristina. “Stop it!” she screamed. “He’s not a partisan! You just saw it wasn’t his gun!”

  “Just shoot her, too,” Bayer said. “She’s pretty, but loud.”

  “No,” Muller said to no one in particular. “I agree, I don’t think he’s a partisan. But I do think this. I think all of you are hiding them here, somewhere.” He waved his finger at the adults before turning toward the marchese, who was sitting, stunned, against the wall, one hand on his rapidly swelling cheek. “Where are they, Antonio?”

  Antonio took his fingers away from his face and tried to speak. But the inflammation and his ruined mouth savaged his German the first time he tried to form words.

  “What’s that, old man?” Muller asked. “You sound insane.”

  Antonio took a breath to gather himself. “I will tell your commander what you are doing,” he said slowly, forcing out each syllable with care. “Colonel Decher and I are friends.”

  Muller rolled his eyes. “Of course you are.”

  “You cannot treat us this—” the marchese continued, but Muller kicked him hard in the side, the way a few minutes earlier he had put his boot into Marco.

  “We’re surrounded by the fucking British Army! I’m not going to get shot in the ass by partisans! I asked you a question. Where are they? Where the fuck are you hiding them?”

  None of the Rosatis said a word, and so Muller raised the rifle once again, aiming it now at Marco’s chest. Her brother was, much to Cristina’s horror, still conscious, and so she found her eyes darting between Bayer and Muller and then to the two privates who had accompanied Muller into the kitchen and were restraining Marco. Unaccountably and unreasonably, she realized she was looking to them for help. She focused on the younger of the pair. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen; butterfly-shaped splotches of blood from the palm of Marco’s hand dotted his uniform sleeve. And yet he met her gaze and his sheer boyishness gave her the hope that somehow Captain Muller—his commanding officer—wouldn’t actually finish off her brother. He wouldn’t. This couldn’t be happening.

  “Please,” she heard herself pleading, her voice little more than a murmur.

  Muller glared at her, and the private looked away. The captain shook his head in disgust. “Please what?” he asked her.

  “Spare him,” she begged. “Spare us.”

  “Then tell me, goddamnit! Where the fuck are they? Now!”

  She might have told him. Deranged by terror and loss and simple exhaustion, the abyssal descent into compromise, she found herself murmuring the answer in her head and trying to understand what would happen if she said the words aloud. In her mind’s eye, she saw the captain pulling down his gun. Ordering his men to the tombs. And then …

  Then what? Would Muller bother to ask her or her parents why the partisans were here on their property? And if he did ask, would he listen when one of them explained that the partisans had arrived the night before and there was nothing—nothing at all!—the family could have done? After that, would the Germans just exit the kitchen
and leave them alone?

  “I’ve had enough!” Muller snapped when she remained mute. Before he fired, however, Francesca yelled for him to stop. She fell at his feet and wrapped her arms around his legs.

  “They’re in the tombs!” she cried.

  “The tombs,” he repeated.

  Francesca looked up at the soldier, nodding frantically. “Yes, yes—the Etruscan tombs! They’re all there—they’re all down the hill! If you don’t know where the tombs are, I can show you!”

  “Lieutenant?” Muller asked.

  Bayer shrugged. “I know where they are. The entrance is by the cemetery.”

  “Good,” Muller said. Then he glanced down at Francesca. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  She was weeping, but her tears only annoyed him. He arched his eyebrows and pushed her away with his boot, pressing the hobnailed sole into her neck and chest. She started to crawl back toward Marco, but one of the soldiers pinning her husband shooed her away. “Both of you, stand clear,” he said to his men. Then he brought the British rifle to his shoulder one final time, pushed the black muzzle between Marco’s teeth, and fired.

  1955

  SERAFINA JOGGED AROUND the loggia, and it was impossible not to imagine the statue of Venus that Cristina said had once stood atop the fragmented base. There were the goddess’s gently curved arms, her slender hips, her petite, perfectly formed ears. The smooth, unblemished skin along the neck. Serafina envisioned the wisteria that had scaled the pergola before the war had come to the estate, and the children splashing in the swimming pool. She saw the olive grove in the midst of the harvest, the nets on the ground and the ladders against the trees. The farmhands, Ilario perhaps, amid the branches. She saw the cattle and the sheep and the horses. She heard the animals’ bells. She pictured the lion’s head of the chimera, the monster baring its teeth, its mane resplendent and wild in the summer sun.

  But she also found herself picturing the Nazis on the terrace, some in black SS uniforms, Antonio’s red wine in their elegant crystal glasses. The marchese entertaining them with his stories. She heard the sound of the Germans’ laughter and their boots on the marble.

  And she recalled the mushrooms. The Etruscan paintings. The mustached face of the British doctor who had saved her life.

  Up ahead, Serafina saw Cassini’s coffee-colored beret on the top step beside one of the columns of the Roman temple the Rosatis had built to anchor their family cemetery. She paused just beyond the path to the tombs and then, when she heard nothing, walked as far as the edge of the cemetery. There she stopped again and stood perfectly still on one of the marble slabs along the wall of cypress trees.

  “Luciano?” she called out finally. “Cassini?”

  A pair of swallows darted out from beneath the cornice and flew, almost playfully, over her head and beyond the Etruscan vault. But otherwise there was no response. And so, carefully, she reached inside her purse for her Beretta and flipped off the safety.

  When Paolo didn’t find the vehicle with Vittore’s family on his way back into Monte Volta, he detoured to the village’s small police station. He was furious with himself. He had the sense he had been too cavalier, convinced the madman struck only when he had one of the Rosatis alone. It seemed now that he was mistaken. At the station he alerted the lone officer on duty to the make and model of the missing automobile and asked the young fellow behind the desk to call the police in the neighboring towns about the missing car.

  It was almost ten minutes later, on his way back to the villa, that he noticed the grass. He cursed himself once again, because he should have spotted it on his way into town: a patch of flattened brush beside one of the switchbacks on the hill that descended from Monte Volta into the narrow valley that separated the villa from the village. His eyes should have been on that side of the road even on his way into town; it was the direction in which the Rosati funeral car would have been driving. But he was so focused on keeping his own car on the pavement that, pure and simple, he’d missed it.

  Now he parked the Fiat half on and half off the thin road, just about where the weeds and wildflowers had been crushed by tires, and climbed from his car. He peered down into the ravine and there it was. There they were. At the bottom of the gorge, easily sixty or seventy meters below him. The vehicle was overturned, a turtle upside-down on its shell, tires for feet, but right away he counted the people outside the dented metal and it seemed that everyone was alive. The only question was Tatiana, because she was in Giulia’s arms, pressed against her mother’s chest. But Giulia’s body language suggested relief, not despair, as she walked back and forth beneath the shade of a beech tree, and the detective took this as a good sign. Meanwhile, Vittore was squatting on his haunches and talking to Elisabetta, and he seemed to be examining her arm. She was sitting upright in the tall grass and broom, crying, which Paolo found reassuring. And the police officer who had been driving? He had trudged perhaps halfway up the hill and was pressing a handkerchief hard against his forehead as he limped. He was putting little weight on his left leg.

  “Here I come!” Paolo called to him as he began his way down the steep incline, careful not to tumble over the rocks and roots that hid beneath the grass.

  The driver paused and waited for him.

  “Is everyone okay?” Paolo asked the fellow when he reached him.

  “I think so,” he answered. “The older girl’s arm is broken. Maybe her foot, too.”

  “And the baby?”

  He shrugged. “She seems fine. Too little even to be scared. It was Elisabetta and her father who got the worst of it.”

  “Vittore doesn’t look hurt.”

  “You can’t see the side of his face from here. It’s a pretty bad cut.”

  “And you?”

  The officer pulled the handkerchief off his forehead. There was a long gash just above his eyebrow, but already the bleeding was starting to slow. Still, a welt that might soon rival the size of a bird’s egg already was forming. “I lived.”

  “You might have a concussion,” Paolo said.

  “I know. And I’ve done something to my ankle.”

  “A sprain?”

  “I guess.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “That road is ridiculous. It’s meant for oxen and donkey carts, not automobiles.”

  “No one sabotaged your car?”

  “No.”

  “And no one tried to run you off the road?”

  He seemed to think about this. “Maybe I should tell people someone did. Maybe I should tell you that.”

  “But it was just a bad road.”

  He put the handkerchief back against his forehead and winced. “That’s right. It was just a very, very bad road. I’m from Rome, where we have modern roads.”

  Paolo imagined him failing to navigate the tight turn and had to rein in his annoyance. In all likelihood, the man had been driving too damn fast. Poor Giulia. The other night she was climbing down a bedsheet with that little girl in her arms because a guard had left her for grappa. Now? This idiot before him had pretended he was racing in the Mille Miglia and nearly killed her and her children. Her husband, too. “I’m going to talk to the family,” he said finally. “I’ll see what Vittore wants to do about the burial. Can you make it back to the road?”

  “Yes. I’ll be fine.”

  “Good. Flag down a car. Go to the villa and tell everyone what happened. We were all starting to get worried.”

  “I think that little girl and her father need to go to the hospital.”

  “I think you do, too.”

  “Then maybe I should go to the village instead and get a doctor for the Rosatis? I could call for an ambulance.”

  “Let me talk to Vittore,” Paolo said. “You just get to the villa, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” he added, and then he continued down the hill to the family. As angry as he was at the officer, he was far more relieved that Vittore and his wife a
nd children were alive. Never before had a car accident—a mere car accident, even one this needless and stupid—made him happy.

  A pillar of sunlight fell through a hole in the roof of the villa, and the thrum of voices—her aunt, the priest, the villagers who were there for her mother—began to recede for Cristina. She crossed the gravel driveway to the front steps of the house and stood there for a moment, lost in a memory. Once more she was holding in her hands her niece’s cloth dolls and the red and gold napkins that would become the gowns of Renaissance princesses. She gazed back at the small crowd and told herself that her brother and his family had to be fine, if only because the sheer logistics of killing or kidnapping them between the village and the estate seemed unmanageable. She reminded herself that they were being escorted by an officer with a gun. As her eyes wandered among the moldering ruins of her childhood home—the gardens, the terrace, and of course the villa itself—she recalled the thousands of hours she had spent beside the swimming pool. Slowly, almost like a sleepwalker, she walked to the edge of the hill and gazed down on it, the pool now but a cracked and dry cavity, weeds stretching up toward the sun through the tile. Still, she saw herself there in a white bathing suit and a towel. A German soldier in a gray-green uniform, his eyes a hyacinth blue. She reached for the stone at the center of the necklace he’d given her years and years ago and pressed it against the top of her sternum. Against her heart. She almost never wore it when she was going to see Vittore because it annoyed him: he said it meant she was still dreaming of a man long dead, but she knew he was also angry because Friedrich had been Decher’s adjutant and a German. But she wore it today. How could she not? She was returning to the place where Friedrich had given it to her.