The Light in the Ruins

  When this war was over—and, sadly, it would be soon—he would find a way to straighten this out. He would concoct an explanation. But perhaps with the two dog tags he could be Strekker as long as necessary and then Decher when it was time to go home. The main thing he had to do now was ensure that if the Brits caught him, he wasn’t saddled with the blame for this monstrosity and shot against the stone wall of some villa or—because, as the Rosatis might say, this war was slipping fast into Dante—an olive tree.

  1955

  SERAFINA STOOD WITH her back flat against the tufa wall, the entrance to the underground tombs four feet to her right. She held her breath for a long moment, listening. She thought she heard movement inside there. Cassini? Maybe. But she wasn’t confident enough to call out to him now. She hadn’t seen the beam of a flashlight or the flickering halo of a cigarette lighter or match. The idea crossed her mind that it was an animal. A boar, perhaps. A feral cat. No, not a cat. Cats are silent. In the trees on the hill just above her, she heard birds taking flight. She knew what her instincts were telling her: something was wrong. Someone was inside, and it wasn’t her fellow detective from Florence. Or, if the detective was inside, he was already dead. And so she resolved to wait right where she was, at least for the moment, and see if anyone or anything emerged from the opening. She raised her pistol and focused. She thought she could smell the mushrooms, but she honestly wasn’t sure if this was merely her mind playing tricks.

  She couldn’t have said for how long she stood like that, head turned, eyes on the entrance, gun drawn—two minutes? three?—when she felt movement above her and to her right. She was just looking up when she saw him, leaping down from the embankment a dozen feet above her, falling upon her, and chopping his arm so hard into hers that she lost the Beretta as together they tumbled to the dirt. She tried to breathe, but the wind had been knocked from her. Reflexively she started to extend her right arm to find the gun, but she couldn’t raise it far enough; the scar tissue might just as well have been concrete, and the pistol remained inches beyond her reach. Still, she struggled, rolling so she could claw for the gun with her left hand, but by then it was too late. He was on top of her, on her back, wrenching her arm up toward her shoulder blade. She stopped trying to seize the pistol and instead used her free hand for leverage to push with all her strength against the grass to try to topple him off her.

  And, surprising herself, she succeeded. But he still had a gun and now she didn’t. He rolled away from her and stood up, gazing down at her, his chest heaving from exertion.

  Serafina thought that she might have said aloud the single word You, but she honestly wasn’t sure.

  He looked older than when she’d seen him last. A lot older. Certainly more than eleven years older. But still she believed that she might have recognized him if she had passed him on the street in Florence, and—in context—she would have known him for sure in a small village such as Trequanda or in the woods of Mount Amiata. And, obviously, here. The last time they had been together had been in Monte Volta—right here in Monte Volta—and she had been in and out of consciousness. And, blessedly, mostly out. Yet still she had identified him instantly, even though she had assumed all these years that he was dead. A lean face beneath thick eyebrows and hair—ash blond, even now—that was no longer the boyish mop it had once been. It was thin, his forehead high. He looked wan, a little dissolute, but she knew the pattern of stubble that ringed that hard jaw and the way his gaze more times than not blended impatience and passion. He had always been intense.

  She would have asked him why, but she knew the answer. She had understood the moment she had realized who it was who had attacked her here at the entrance to the tombs. The Rosatis had told the Germans where the six partisans were hiding. Where she was hiding. And then Muller and his small execution squad had killed Enrico’s wife, Teresa. His brother, Salvatore. The only reason they hadn’t shot her, she guessed, was that they had seen she was dying, and dying in serious pain, which probably made her death all the more pleasurable for them. Who knows? Maybe they even thought she was already dead. And yet somehow he had survived. She couldn’t imagine how.

  “You’re alive,” she said simply.

  Enrico nodded. “I am. And you are, too. Thank God.”

  “So … you’re not going to kill me?”

  He looked down at the gun in his hand and considered the fact that he was pointing it at her. It almost seemed to surprise him. “No,” he answered. “Not unless I have to. And even then, I’m not sure I could.”

  She motioned at the tombs. “Is Cassini in there? Is he dead?”

  “Is that his name? The detective from Florence? Yes, he’s in there. Chloroformed and bound. But he’s alive. I only want the Rosatis. That’s all. I want this to be … clean.” He smiled. “Remember, my father was a physician.”

  She thought to herself, Yes, yes, of course he was. It’s why you knew how to keep me alive after the firefight. It’s why you know now how to extract a human heart.

  He looked at her approvingly. “I thought I saw you last week. You were on a street corner with another detective—that Paolo Ficino fellow. But then I thought, not possible. Not possible at all. You were killed with everyone else inside there.” A realization came to him and he nodded. “You changed your name,” he said.

  “I did.”

  “Serafina, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Clever,” he observed. “And you’re a detective. Imagine.”

  She tried to keep her eyes soft; she focused on Enrico but used her peripheral vision to explore the world beside him. Around them. She needed a weapon, and he was standing between her and her pistol. The gun was sitting in a patch of stone perhaps a dozen feet behind him.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “The last night? The last week? The last year? Last night I actually slept in my car.”

  “The last … decade.”

  “Most of it? A POW camp in Pskov. You’ve never heard of it. It’s in Russia. It wasn’t the worst of the camps. I got lessons in communism. Can you imagine? There’s an irony. Who knows? Maybe they thought I was a monarchist or a republican. Anyway, it was hard to be a communist by the time I left. Still, I only lost thirty pounds there. And I never even got typhus.” He shrugged. “They repatriated me two years ago. When I had my health back—which took some time—I looked up the Rosatis.”

  “How in the name of God did you survive the massacre in there?” she asked, motioning back at the tombs. “How did you wind up in a Russian POW camp?”

  “I wasn’t in the tombs when the Germans came. I was over there,” he said, rolling his eyes and pointing toward a meadow. “There used to be an irrigation canal. I was trying to get us water. I was trying to get you water. We were constantly boiling rags and cooling rags and putting them on your back and your side. Then I heard the shots. They were muffled because of the cave walls, but I knew what I was hearing. I knew what was happening. By the time I got there, you were all dead. You, too, I supposed. Christ, it was awful. I held my Teresa for I don’t know how long. Her body was growing cold when I finally left. I went through the olive grove. The vineyard. I went into the valley because I knew the Germans wanted the high ground. I was … delirious. Devastated. I really wasn’t thinking. And so, somehow, before the Nazis even made their last stand, I was behind their lines. In the midst of them—but not by design. That wasn’t my plan—I wasn’t going to try to sabotage anything. I was trying to get to the British or the Americans or the French. I don’t know anymore. But suddenly the Germans were everywhere, so I hid in a work detail on the road to Arezzo. Italian soldiers who’d been disarmed by the Germans and reduced to slave labor.”

  “Like Marco Rosati,” she said.

  “I guess. But they shipped us all to the Apennines to build trenches and bunkers and antitank ditches before I could get away. And then, the night before a group of us were going to escape, we were put on a train and sent to Germany. Again, sla
ve labor. And, worst of all, the Eastern Front. Maybe that’s redundant. By then the Eastern Front and Germany were practically the same thing. Anyway, I was on the Oder River. At one point some SS thugs handed us winter coats and boots. I was grateful, I really was. But then they gave us rifles instead of shovels and told us to go stop the Russians. They said they’d be behind us if we even considered trying to run away. So instead we surrendered to the Russians. Fifteen of us. Maybe sixteen. I can’t remember.”

  He grinned sheepishly, and she was reminded of how charismatic he had once been. And how cold-blooded. Perhaps he did take pride in being a doctor’s son, but she recalled well how easy it had been for him to order an assassination. Then, of course, he had been a patriot. But executing the Rosatis today, ten years after the war was over? This was just murder. This was nothing more than revenge.

  And he will have to kill me, too, she thought. Maybe he doesn’t want to, but how can he not, since I know what he’s done—what he’s planning to do? Any moment he was going to circle back to this hard reality and, as much as it pained him, pull the trigger.

  “I’m sorry about your ear,” he said suddenly. He looked at her more closely. “And your neck.”

  She nodded.

  “Your back? Is it …”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. The right side.”

  He seemed to think about this—to recall the dying girl she had once been. He was still strangely moved by their reunion, by the fact that she, too, had managed against all odds to survive. He had absolutely no idea that twenty or twenty-five meters behind him, standing perfectly still, was Cristina Rosati. Serafina guessed that she must have wandered down to the family cemetery while everyone else was waiting for the car to arrive with her brother and his family. Her expression was somewhere between bewilderment and shock, and Serafina knew that she had to distract Enrico. She needed to speak, to say something, to give Cristina the chance to turn and slink away—to escape the madman who wanted to cut out her heart. And so Serafina started to tell him more about her back and the British doctor who had saved her life, but she hadn’t spoken long before she saw that Cristina was neither edging backward nor running away. She wasn’t retreating at all. Clearly she recognized Enrico, too. Clearly she remembered the night she had led the German soldiers to the tomb. Serafina could see in her eyes that Cristina knew this was not merely the partisan leader who once, long ago, had come to the Villa Chimera desperately looking for help; this was also the man who was exacting revenge on her family.

  And now the woman had seen the Beretta on the rock and was slinking toward it on cat’s feet. So Serafina described for Enrico what she had felt so long ago when she had first looked in a mirror at the hospital and gazed, transfixed, at her neck and her ear, and how she had felt a jarring riot of relief that she was alive and sadness that her family—her real family as well as her replacement family, people like Enrico and Teresa—was dead and she looked like … like this. Not an ogre. Not a monster. But forever scarred.

  And then, her eyes still soft, she watched the marchese’s daughter, a woman roughly her age who just the other day had found her own mother dead on a hotel room floor and seen her sister-in-law’s heart in an ashtray—who had witnessed her family’s torture in a kitchen in a once magical villa up the hill from where they were now—pick up the Beretta, spread wide her legs for purchase on the tufa stone, and shoot Enrico Tarantola in the back.

  Hours and hours later, in the night, Paolo Ficino and his wife stood in the doorway to their daughter’s bedroom in their apartment in Florence and watched the sheet atop their teenage girl’s shoulders rise and fall almost imperceptibly in the moonlight. The child was a little more than half Serafina’s and Cristina’s age. Paolo had awoken first and come here, not precisely a vigil but a small, simple quest for reassurance. His wife had joined him a minute or two later. He thought now of his scarred detective and the marchese’s daughter and the row of cedars that lined the path between the Rosati cemetery and the ancient Etruscan burial chambers.

  In Rome, Vittore and Cristina Rosati sat in almost absolute silence at his dining room table, a single light on, while Vittore sipped a half glass of vermouth. He had planned to mix a Negroni, but it was two in the morning and that seemed like too much work. Giulia and the girls were sound asleep, even Elisabetta with her arm in that cast, the three of them in his and Giulia’s bed. There really hadn’t been room for him there anyway, he decided. Besides, he was never going to sleep tonight. Apparently his sister wasn’t either. He had assumed she was out like a light in his older daughter’s bedroom. She wasn’t. He noticed that she was wearing one of Giulia’s nightgowns. He rubbed his temples with his fingers, and with his thumb felt the bandages and gauze along the side of his face. It would be days before the swelling would go down. He thought of the moment that afternoon when the car had rolled off the switchback and, in the front passenger seat, he had felt helpless, unable to shield or embrace either Tatiana or Elisabetta. Thank God they had been fine. Yes, Elisabetta’s arm was broken, but it wasn’t a bad break, the doctor had said. And her foot was only bruised.

  He looked up at Cristina and with the umbilicus of siblings sensed instantly what she was thinking. Not the precise details, not the particular images. But the lines around her eyes were all grief, and he knew that behind them was a memory of Massimo and Alessia. Their nephew and niece. Vittore had walked away from the war and found his way back to the Villa Chimera two days before Massimo had stepped on the land mine. He and Cristina had known instantly what it was that day in 1944, but for a moment he, at least, had deluded himself into believing that an animal had set off the explosion. It was just after three in the afternoon, and the two of them were working together to drape a piece of canvas across the cavernous hole in the villa’s living room wall—the remnants of the family were still trying to convince themselves that they could rebuild their lives in Monte Volta—when they heard the dull bang. It was more of a pop, Vittore thought now. But then Francesca had come racing through the house like a madwoman and they had followed her out onto the terrace. There, down near the tombs, was a single stray plume rising black and still against the late summer sky. By the time the three of them had reached the children, Massimo was dead, his body ripped into small pieces—a leg here, a foot there—and Alessia was unconscious and dying. He had run with her in his arms back to the villa while Cristina had tried to restrain their sister-in-law; her howling would live on in his ears for months. But there had been no help and nothing to do for the girl at the house. She’d died within minutes. That night both Vittore and Cristina had feared that Francesca would kill herself.

  “May the worst that Elisabetta and Tatiana recall from this summer be a car accident and a cast,” Cristina said, breaking the silence.

  “Tatiana? Who knows what toddlers remember?” he said, and he finished his vermouth. Then he stood and went to the window. From there he said, “And Elisabetta is like Alessia. Afraid of nothing.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever grow to like Friedrich at all?”

  “No. You know that.”

  “Even after—”

  “No,” he repeated, cutting her off. “Never.” He knew how she would have finished the sentence, because they had had different versions of this conversation so many times in the past. He turned around to face Cristina and leaned against the window frame. “Now that you know for a fact he’s gone, will you please stop carrying that torch?” he asked. “Now that Mother’s gone, will you start living your life?”

  She considered arguing that she did not know for a fact that Friedrich was gone. No one did. She considered reminding him that although she had lived with their mother, she had lived her life. Instead, however, she went to him and bowed her head against his chest—a peace offering.

  “It really is just us now,” she said, her voice melancholic and tired.

  “I know,” he agreed. “I know.” He put his ar
ms around her and rubbed her back. If someone on the street had gazed up at them in the window, he would have presumed they were lovers, reuniting after a quarrel.

  Which was precisely what someone in Florence would have surmised if he had glanced up at Serafina and Milton that moment on their terrace in Florence. From across the river, they might have spied the woman on a wrought iron chair, most of her weight on her left side. This time it was the man whose head was bowed. He seemed to be studying something on the insides of her thighs, or he—the two of them—might have been contemplating something far more intimate. From across the Arno, it was hard to say, and an onlooker was likely to have looked away, just in case.

  And if he did, he would have missed this: a sudden small phosphorescent burst from a match as it rained heat and light upon the woman’s bare skin.

  NO, I DID NOT DIE when Cristina shot me. Obviously. I’m here, after all. The bullet shattered a rib and punctured a lung. But it was enough. One moment I was rather enjoying my reunion with—and she chose her name well—Serafina, and the next I was on the ground struggling for breath. And then I was looking up at the two women.