The Light in the Ruins

  “And that is where?” Vittore asked. Out of necessity, he had learned German over the past three years, but he didn’t especially like the sound of the language, and it seemed almost blasphemous to be speaking it here in the shadows of the Palazzo Vecchio.

  “Oh, you’ve never heard of it. Kesselsdorf. Just outside of Dresden. My father works at the museum there.”

  “In Dresden.”

  “Yes. It’s considered the Florence on the Elbe, you know.”

  “No, I did not know,” Vittore said. He restrained himself from asking which part of the museum or what the man did there. But it didn’t matter, because in a moment Strekker was telling him anyway.

  “He’s a curator,” the German said. “His specialty is dinnerware. Silver. China. Stemware. You’d like him.”

  “I’m sure I would.”

  “You’re being sarcastic. But you two have more in common than you realize.”

  Vittore sighed. He gazed at a pretty young woman in a black skirt and a white blouse, her dark hair a little flat in the heat. She turned and he noted how her lips were parted ever so slightly, but before he could even nod in her direction or smile, Strekker continued, “Like you, he is very protective of his art. He views all those eighteenth-century place settings as his responsibility. One time the Führer requisitioned a silver service that had belonged to Frederick the Great. My father sent him instead a service that looked like it but was really only fifty or sixty years old. It was a big risk—the Gestapo would have sent my father God knows where if anyone had discovered the substitution.”

  When Vittore glanced back to find the woman in the crowd, she was gone. He was feeling generous and offered Strekker one of his cigarettes.

  “No, thanks,” Strekker said. “They make me nauseous.”

  “How did your father know that Hitler wouldn’t notice the difference?”

  “He met him.”

  “Hitler?”

  Strekker raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “You sound surprised.”

  “I am.”

  “He really doesn’t know the Führer. But the Führer has come to Dresden twice, and my father was among the curators who guided him through the museum. The Führer views himself as quite knowledgeable when it comes to art. My father would disagree. He was less worried about the Führer discovering the substitution than someone in the Führer’s inner circle.”

  “When was this?”

  “A year ago. Apparently no one’s noticed. My father still has his job.”

  “And you’re safely in Florence.”

  “Not by choice.”

  Vittore didn’t believe that for a moment, but he remained quiet. And, as he expected, Strekker instantly filled the silence.

  “But I do love your country,” he said. “I learned Italian in gymnasium. I was studying the Renaissance with Heydenreich—”

  “Our Heydenreich?” Vittore asked. One of the Nazis in charge of the museum was Ludwig Heydenreich.

  “Yes. He was one of my professors in Berlin when the war started. Still, I wish I were serving my country—our alliance—in a more meaningful way.”

  “You’d rather be off getting shelled in the Ukraine, I suppose? Or trapped right now in Tunis? Waiting to be captured or killed?”

  “I was in Russia.”

  “Really?”

  Strekker had been leaning against the pedestal of the statue, too, and now he fell to one knee and rolled up the trouser leg that was perpendicular to the ground. It took a few seconds for Vittore to comprehend what he was seeing, but then he understood. Where there should have been an ankle and a shin, he saw instead leather straps, a silver buckle, and a bone-white shaft made of wood.

  Alone in his quarters, the sky growing dark, Friedrich Strekker unbuckled the straps that held his prosthetic ankle and foot against the stump two-thirds of the way up his shin. There were buckles where there should have been the actual joint of his ankle and another pair three inches above his knee. He was oblivious to the ones at the ankle, but the clasps above his knee chafed his skin. When tape or gauze was available, he would place a strip between the buckles and his leg, and that helped. It was not, however, a perfect solution: the edges of the buckles might still leave bruises. Consequently he was always spinning the straps and rotating the metal clips, trying to spare any one part of his thigh too much pain. The army doctors told him that once the war was over, there would be much-improved prosthetics and he should be patient. In the meantime, when he went to bed at night he would find himself transfixed by the rococo-like contusions and marks on his skin.

  Usually he felt no self-pity. There were times, such as when he forgot himself and tried to run or when he realized how slowly his compatriots climbed stairs when he was beside them, but they were infrequent. There were also moments of guilt that he had been spared so much fighting and been relegated these days to an academic world of amateur soldiers and middle-aged men. To quarters that were more cushy than a university student’s bedroom. He actually had a room of his own, and though it was modest, it was within a block of the Arno River. The mattress on his bed was plump and the handles on his dresser were finished with ivory. He had an armoire for his uniforms that was taller than he was, the wood stained the color of bourbon. Until recently the room had been part of a clean but unexceptional hotel.

  It was his father, the curator, who had gotten him this post, knowing of his interest in Italy. His father had been a Party member for well over a decade and had a surprising amount of clout. He was also friendly with Heydenreich, and when the time came had reminded the scholar that his son had been studying the Italian Renaissance with him in Berlin when the war started and thus had knowledge the army could use.

  Now the soldier gazed at the way his right leg ended in the gently rounded point of a club. At the scar tissue, still too pink in his mind for real skin. Today had been a complete and utter waste. Colonel Decher had him assisting Vittore catalog bits of pottery that looked no more interesting than fragments of seashells, while the colonel and Major Lorenzetti had gone off without telling anyone where. They had taken a driver, a private, who had nothing to do with their group. Friedrich had overheard Lorenzetti remarking in a tone that was somewhere between amusement and disgust that the young fellow had never set foot inside the Uffizi or even heard of the Medici family. Friedrich could not help but wonder at the secrecy. Plunder, he decided finally. That was the answer. Probably they had been commandeering some painting or tapestry for Decher’s wife or Lorenzetti’s lover. He rested his head in his hands, a little appalled by the idea. He was not uncomfortable serving as Decher’s adjutant, but he did not especially like the man, and this was a new experience for him. In combat, Friedrich had tended to honestly like his commanders. He’d respected most of them. But he didn’t respect Decher. The colonel was out of his element here. But then, fighting probably wasn’t his element either. Decher had never commanded soldiers in combat and—like many men who had never been shot at—claimed to long for the opportunity. He’d come here from Paris.

  It was ironic, but it seemed to Friedrich that the more time he spent in Florence, the more he was becoming his father. Until recently he had always considered his father slightly absurd. Effete. A man too interested in the way an artist or artisan from another era might have fired a plate. No longer. Sometimes Friedrich even wondered how he would now handle the trials and hardships of a real soldier if, for some reason, he were thrown back into the breach. Once, he knew, he had been an excellent soldier. He had the decorations to remind himself, if he ever forgot. Even this post was a decoration of sorts, a station he had earned after he was crippled, a thank-you for his valor in France and Greece and the Ukraine. He had been a sergeant at twenty-one, and now, at twenty-three, he was a lieutenant—though he was a lieutenant with access to drivers and a car but no real soldiers at his command.

  He unbuttoned his tunic and loosened the collar of his shirt, trying to clear his mind. Then he swung his legs onto the bed and lay
down to rest. Decher had scheduled a staff meeting for eight o’clock at the museum and Friedrich wanted to be fresh.

  1955

  SERAFINA UNDERSTOOD THAT her living arrangements were scandalous and would probably have shocked her family. But because her family had all been dead since 1943, she really didn’t care. She had one of the two bedrooms in an apartment on the south side of the Arno with a beautiful view of the river and the hordes of tourists that had begun to crowd the Ponte Vecchio in search of bargains in silver and gold jewelry. Her roommate was an American banker named Milton, who was nearing forty but still had a thick mop of magnificent red hair, cheekbones that most actors would have killed for, and a male lover closer to Serafina’s age than to his, who was a purser on the transatlantic SS Cristoforo Colombo. Whenever the Cristoforo Colombo was docked in Italy and the purser came to Florence, Serafina would make herself scarce as a courtesy to the pair. Otherwise, however, she was content to serve as Milton’s beard and live in a neighborhood and an apartment that were well beyond her means. Milton paid the lion’s share of the rent, and most people, including the other detectives, presumed he was her lover. In reality, he was her best friend. Given the numbers of people he, too, had killed in the war—twice with a knife and once with only his hands—they shared a wistfulness and a rectitude and, when they really thought about it, a guilt that was rare in the cafés on that side of the river.

  In truth, Serafina had no idea whether her family would have been disappointed in her because they believed she was sleeping with a man out of wedlock or disgusted at the idea that her closest friend was a homosexual. Her family had all been slaughtered before she was old enough to have a definitive sense of which was worse in their opinion, premarital sex or living with a gay man.

  The night after she had seen Francesca Rosati’s heart sitting black and still in an ashtray and then had espresso with Cristina, she got home well before Milton. She poured herself a glass of wine, got a pack of matches, and thought about the Rosati family—as well as her own. Their families were demographically identical. Or at least close to identical. Both she and Cristina came from families of five and they both had a pair of older brothers; in other words, the two of them had been the babies in their families, the youngest child and the only daughter. Cristina, of course, still had a mother and a brother; Serafina had no one and had had no one for nearly twelve years. Cristina, the two of them had determined, was nine months older than she was.

  Now she sat in her high-collared blouse and skirt in an ornate wrought iron chair on her and Milton’s terrace, her bare feet on the balustrade over the river, and watched the sky grow dark and the lights emerge across the river. She had most of her weight on her left side, as she did always when she reclined, careful to keep the back of the chair from pressing against the thick pink scars that spiraled like ornamental filigree from where her neck met her skull to her waist. It wasn’t painful when anything pressed against them; instead she would experience a tingling around their edges and then a disconcerting numbness in their center—it was as if her back was hollow—which could all too quickly take her back to those long days of agony when she awoke and there was little that anyone could do for the burns. They’d told her they had thought she would die; among her first words in response, they said, was that she wished she had. Apparently she had begged them to shoot her. Today she hid both disfigurment and disability. Only Paolo knew that she was unable to raise her right arm over her head. But he wasn’t worried; he’d told her one evening, shrugging, that he never expected her life would depend on her ability to shoot a bird from the sky.

  Now she lit a match and let it burn for a moment before blowing it out. Then she pressed the still-smoking tip against the skin on the inside of her thigh. She did this three times, tossing the three burned matches into the ashtray, and felt a little better when she was done.

  She recalled what Cristina had said as they were talking on the street outside that depressing little café near Francesca’s apartment: At least they’re all together now. Meaning Francesca and her husband and their two children. This wasn’t a clue, in Serafina’s opinion, because it was evident that whoever had killed Francesca hadn’t been trying to effect a heavenly reconciliation. Rather, it spoke to how unkind life had been to the woman—and how far the Rosati family had fallen since they had lived in that villa in Monte Volta.

  In the end Serafina had pressed Cristina for the names of any men Francesca had recently mentioned, and Cristina had come up with three: Giovanni, Aldo, and an American who was named either Richard or Russell. The American was married and lived in New York, but he worked in a museum there and came to Florence periodically on business. Cristina had no idea what either Giovanni or Aldo did for a living. Francesca hadn’t brought up any of these men in the past six months. Perhaps longer. Cristina couldn’t say whether her sister-in-law had a lover right now, but she guessed that she did because sex was how Francesca had smothered her sadness and grief since the war.

  And while Serafina and Paolo could joke that whoever had ripped out Francesca’s heart wasn’t a surgeon because the crime scene had been such a cataclysmic mess, the reality was that whoever had killed the woman had indeed used a bone saw—or a tool very much like a bone saw. So it wasn’t inconceivable that the murderer worked in a hospital or a morgue.

  Behind her she heard the apartment’s front door open and recognized the sound of Milton’s keys falling upon the glass-topped table in the entryway, and then his footsteps as he strolled through the living room to the terrace. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, and she could smell a vestigial trace of the sandalwood lotion he had rubbed on his face after shaving that morning.

  “So, any mayhem and madness today?” he asked in Italian. “Or were the Florentines too done in by this heat to kill one another?”

  “I saw a human heart.”

  “Where?”

  “In an ashtray.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “The rest of the body was far worse.”

  He sat in the chair beside her, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

  “Is that a new suit?” she asked. It was a summer-weight gray pinstripe, the lapels cut into deep, sharp triangles just below his collarbone.

  “It is. Do you like it?”

  “I do. Very much.”

  “Tell me all about your day,” he said gently. “Clearly yours was far more grisly than mine.”

  Serafina was back at Francesca Rosati’s apartment house the next morning by seven, knocking on doors. By nine she had spoken with everyone in the building she had missed yesterday, asking them to tell her all that they knew about the dead woman, her lovers and friends. Francesca, everyone agreed, kept to herself; when she didn’t, when she ran into her neighbors in the stairway or along the thin corridor, she was acerbic or aloof. Either she would allow herself a sardonic passing remark on the walls’ desperate need for a paint job or she barely would nod. No one knew much about her past, even though she had lived on the Via Zara almost a year and a half, but everyone assumed that once she had been rather spoiled and well off—no doubt, they surmised, because she had been some Blackshirt’s mistress. A kept woman. The sort who’d never married. She had not, in her neighbors’ opinions, grown accustomed to her diminished social standing and genteel poverty. They knew she had different men come to her apartment, but they knew also that she worked in a dress shop, and no one thought she was a prostitute.

  The closest Serafina had come to a helpful lead was offered by an old woman who had one of the other two apartments on Francesca’s floor. The woman was a widow who, like everyone else in the building, had no idea that Francesca had lost a husband and both of her children in the war. But she did tell Serafina this: about a month ago, Francesca had asked her for the name of a good locksmith in the neighborhood. She had come straight home to the apartment from the dress shop where she worked and was uncharacteristically agitated when they met on the front steps.


  “She saw someone she recognized whom she didn’t like—someone who frightened her. I didn’t think that woman could be scared of anyone,” the old widow had told Serafina. And while she had recommended a locksmith a few blocks to the west, as far as she knew, Francesca had never gotten around to contacting the fellow or putting a more substantial lock on her door.

  The dress shop was called the Sunflower, and although it was near the train station, it had a largely local clientele, Florentine women who could not afford to shop at the tonier boutiques along the Via de’ Tornabuoni or the Via dei Calzaiuoli. The owner was a gaunt woman in her sixties with a haughty face, thin lips, and a sheen of cold cream across her forehead. Her name was Isabella and she reminded Serafina of the grandmother of a fellow she’d dated a few years ago, a woman who always managed to look down her slender nose at whomever she was talking to.

  “I’m so sad,” Isabella was saying now to the detective, as they spoke in a small, windowless room with two sewing machines behind the shop, but she really didn’t seem especially devastated. Serafina had the sense that the woman was more annoyed that she had lost a salesperson who also could sew than she was saddened by the fact that Francesca was dead.

  “Did Francesca tell you where she was going after work the day before yesterday?” she asked Isabella.

  “The day she died.”

  “That’s right.”

  “No. But I knew she had a date. A new man.”

  “What was his name?”

  She sighed, and for a second Serafina presumed the shopkeeper was trying to recall the name; then, however, she realized that Isabella was pausing because she was disgusted. “She saw too many men. This one was a lawyer. He worked in Bologna and was only coming to town to take her to dinner and then have his way with her.”

  “His name?”