The Light in the Ruins

  “I never asked.”

  “Did she say what kind of law he practiced?”

  “He was wealthy. At least Francesca believed he was.”

  “Did she believe he was going to marry her someday?”

  “Maybe. But I’m not sure she cared about that.”

  “Getting married.”

  Isabella nodded and looked down at her fingernails. The polish was red and starting to chip.

  “Did any of her boyfriends ever come to your store?”

  “No. Francesca’s private life? She would give us little clues, little tidbits, but really share nothing. She said she had once lived in a beautiful villa, but who knows if that’s the truth. Maybe it was.” She shrugged. “Maybe she was Mussolini’s mistress. Maybe she slept with the Germans.”

  “You think she was a collaborator during the war?” Serafina asked. She found it interesting that she, too, had briefly wondered the same thing yesterday about Cristina—about the whole family. From what Cristina had told her, however, the shopkeeper was mistaken: Francesca, Cristina said, had detested both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. She considered correcting the woman.

  “I think she had done things in her past that she was ashamed of,” Isabella said. “Otherwise she would have told us more. She would not have been so secretive.”

  “What about the other salesgirls? Maybe she told them something that might help us.”

  Isabella rolled her eyes and cackled. “My other salesgirls? There was Francesca and there is Sofia. Talk to Sofia when she gets here this afternoon. She won’t know anything more about Francesca than I do. I promise.”

  “Did Francesca tell you where she and this lawyer from Bologna were having dinner?”

  “Il Latini. Very elegant. Francesca made sure we knew that her lawyer friend was only taking her to the very best.”

  On her way out of the store, Serafina glanced at a red velvet sheath dress on a mannequin. She paused in front of it for a long moment, admiring the rhinestone flower at the bodice, and might have asked Isabella how much it cost. But then she saw how low-cut it was in the back and realized it wasn’t for her.

  A waiter at Il Latini recognized Francesca from a photograph and remembered her well. Apparently she had men take her there often. And while he couldn’t recall her companion’s name from her most recent visit, he described him as short but broad-shouldered and handsome. He had a thin mustache and a high forehead and was somewhere in his late thirties or early forties.

  When she got back to the office, however, she found that the description was unnecessary. Mario Spagnoli had read about Francesca Rosati’s death in the newspaper that morning and was coming to Florence that afternoon to share what he could with the police about the woman’s last night on this earth.

  “Can you imagine,” the coroner was saying to Serafina and Paolo as they stood beside the corpse on the angled autopsy table, “surgeons are starting to operate on the heart. In America—in Minnesota. In Germany. It’s … miraculous.” Alberto Carli had been a coroner in Florence since before the war—since before Mussolini—and spoke with the slow, mannered cadences of a more elegant era. He was a regal grandfather to everyone in the homicide unit, more benign (and more supportive) than an actual relative because he was so serenely nonjudgmental. He was almost completely bald but for a cowl of gray hair cut short along the back of his head and the great tufts of white in his ears. His eyes were a little watery with age, and his spectacles were American; the frames were thick and black. He had the long, graceful fingers of a pianist.

  “So,” Paolo asked, “the killer might have been a surgeon after all?”

  “No, the incisions were not that precise. They were rather ham-handed. Amateurish. But he had a surgeon’s tools. He began with a scalpel. He made a vertical incision down the chest, fourteen inches long. He plunged the scalpel very, very hard into the victim at the center of her collarbone—right here—and dragged it down the length of the sternum toward her navel. He dug it deep into the subcutaneous tissue. Then—and look at these marks, if you can, I want you to see the distinction I am making—he used a manual bone saw—”

  “A manual bone saw?” Serafina wondered.

  “Versus an electric one. We now have electric bone saws. Very speedy. But the smell? Awful. They create so much friction as they cut that they actually burn the bone. And burning bone smells a tiny bit like burning hair, but a thousand times worse. In any case, whoever removed this woman’s heart was using an old-fashioned one. He had to saw by hand down the sternum,” Alberto said, moving his right arm back and forth, up and down, as if he were sawing a piece of wood. “And although the heart wasn’t beating by then, our killer was going to have to work through an ungodly mess, an oozing chest wound. And then, of course, he had to spread the ribs—and it looks to me as if he had an actual rib spreader at his disposal. Let me show you.”

  He reached into one of the white cabinets behind him and pulled out a device that struck Serafina as the sort of thing an Inquisition torturer might have used in a stone dungeon hundreds of years ago. It looked barbaric. “As you can see, it’s basically just a retractor with a hinge and a couple of C-shaped cups. Turn this crank and it mechanically widens the arms with the cups, spreading apart the ribs.”

  “And the killer had one?” Paolo asked.

  “I think so,” Alberto said. He put the spreader down on the table beside Francesca. “There are marks on the ribs that suggest precisely this sort of instrument. And he would have found the heart right behind the sternum. Right … here. To remove it, he would have used scissors or a scalpel. If it was scissors, they were very sharp. I honestly can’t tell you which. But he severed the pulmonary artery here on the right and the aorta here on the left. At that moment, I suspect, there would have been an enormous release of blood. A torrent, most of which, it seems to me, wound up absorbed by her nightgown and puddling on the floor. Then he cut the superior vena cava at the top of the heart and the inferior vena cava at the bottom. And last but not least would be the four pulmonary veins at the rear of the organ.”

  “Eight cuts,” Serafina murmured.

  “That’s it. And then, presto, into the ashtray.”

  “But she was definitely dead when the chest was being opened,” Serafina said.

  “Oh, definitely. He was very thorough when he cut her throat.”

  “Did he use that scalpel?”

  “No, I think he used a knife with a serrated edge. A much thicker blade.”

  Paolo leaned against the wall and counted on his fingers. “So he had a knife. A scalpel. A bone saw. A rib spreader. And scissors.” He needed every one of his fingers.

  The coroner smiled. “Indeed. Whoever did this didn’t travel light.”

  “And still you’re sure the killer isn’t a physician?” Paolo asked. “It seems to me, only a doctor would know how to cut all those arteries and veins.”

  “I know their names and what they do. I think it’s likely the killer just kept cutting and cutting until he could pull out the heart.”

  “Could he be a medical student?”

  “Maybe.”

  “A coroner?”

  “Very funny,” Alberto said.

  “Are these sorts of tools hard to find?”

  “No. But maybe you’re on to something. While I don’t believe the killer is a physician, it’s possible that he works at a hospital. Maybe he … borrowed these instruments.”

  “I presume butchers use bone saws, too. Don’t they?” Serafina asked.

  “Yes, they do.”

  “So the killer could be a butcher.”

  “Could be?” the old coroner said. “It seems to me that regardless of what he does for a living, whoever did this most certainly was a butcher.”

  THE NEWSPAPERS WERE aghast, but they loved it. A woman found with her nightgown slashed down the front and her heart cut from her chest? Some suggested the killer was a spurned lover with a broken heart and—tragically for Francesca Rosati—a
psychotic streak. Others wondered if this was indeed going to be the start of a killing spree and Florence had a lunatic in its midst along the lines of London’s Jack the Ripper.

  In 1955, Jack the Ripper was the gold standard for homicidal maniacs, a frame of reference that made the unimaginable real. Only a decade earlier, in the Second World War, Marcel Petiot had been injecting cyanide into his victims in Paris, telling them it was a required Argentine inoculation before they escaped from occupied France and set off in secret for South America. He killed dozens—literally dozens!—of people, but there was so much confusion around his story that he never entered our consciousness the way Jack the Ripper did. When he was guillotined in May 1946, there were people who believed his story that he had only executated collaborators and was actually a part of the Resistance.

  But what interested many newspaper readers was the innuendo that surrounded Francesca Rosati’s descent. Her fall from life in a villa in the Tuscan countryside that may not have rivaled a Medici palace in opulence, but might have in square footage. The seemingly unbearable tragedies that beset the Rosati family in 1944. The things she saw that no wife and mother—even, in their opinion, Francesca—should have been forced to endure. To witness.

  I imagine her acquaintances in Florence were surprised by what they learned in the papers. I understand that she kept to herself. Even her lovers knew little about her, other than her rather forward-thinking assumption that sex might keep her depression at bay.

  So, how long between the first and the second execution? Given the time the press spent on Francesca’s past, once I had killed her mother-in-law, people would note the rather obvious connection. The police would see trails and tales worth pursuing.

  And though Marco and the children died during the war and Antonio soon after, that still left Beatrice Rosati—who, as I have told you, would be next—Vittore and his family, and Cristina.

  Cristina, like her mother, was all alone in the world. She would be last.

  I was younger then, of course, and presumed that I had a long life before me. I could wait. These were … errands, and as some Italians like to ask with a smile, Why do today what can be postponed until tomorrow?

  That all changed when Beatrice came to Florence. When I saw her, I realized that I had dramatically underestimated my zealousness and desire. I could not, in fact, wait—and I wouldn’t.

  1943

  IN ALL OF the Villa Chimera—an imposing residence with seven bedrooms, four of which overlooked the swimming pool, as well as separate quarters for the maid and the cook—only Antonio and Beatrice’s bed was bigger than Cristina’s. As the marchese’s daughter and the youngest child, Cristina was aware that she had always been treated as something of a princess. But she had never tried to hide her small privileges, and so tonight, as occurred on most evenings, her nephew and niece had swooped upon her room. She was reading aloud to them while Alessia played with her dolls beneath the bed’s salmon-colored canopy and Massimo moved his toy soldiers across the floor. Tonight she was reading the tale of a queen who was bewitched by fairies and gave birth to a son who appeared to all the world to be a pig. The story was easily four hundred years old, but Cristina and Francesca found the paintings of the creature in the book to be eerily contemporary: their own king, Victor Emmanuel III, stood barely five feet, had squat, misshapen legs, and was certainly not—to use one of Francesca’s favorite expressions—the sharpest knife in the cutting block. The Italian court, it seemed, had been as dogged by inbreeding as any other on the continent. The children, however, simply savored the way the fairy-tale pig would marry two women, both of whom would try to murder him in the night because he was a pig, and both of whom would wind up dead, speared in the smallest hours of the morning by his hooves. Eventually the pig would marry a woman who loved him as he was and returned his affections—and thus discovered that he was in fact a handsome prince.

  When Cristina had finished reading, she placed the book beside her and watched Massimo. The boy had put a pillow on the floor and upon the mountain of down he had set a group of soldiers in a circle facing out. Around the pillow he had wrapped her shawl, the teal of the sea. Aware that his young aunt was surveying his work, he said, “This is Sicily. They’re protecting Sicily.”

  And so he suspected, as they all did, that eventually the war was going to come to Italy. Tunis would fall and Sicily would be next. He understood that his father—her brother—would be one of those soldiers defending the island at the toe of the boot. Did he imagine him captured or killed? She doubted it. But she couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t precisely sure what even she envisioned would occur in the coming year. She thought of the newsreels she had seen in the cinema, especially the footage of the Italians who had been in Russia until the fiasco at Stalingrad, and as horrific as that was to watch, she suspected the reality was far worse than the sanitized footage that was shared with the people. She recalled the explosions and columns of smoke in the film, the skeletal frames of buildings that collapsed in the blasts.

  It occurred to her now—and she found this recognition troubling because it suggested just how spoiled she was—that the principal deprivation she had endured so far was this: she was lonely. She had no suitors. No lovers. When Francesca had been her age and the world had not been at war, there had been dances and balls. No more, at least not here in the country. The people who danced now were Nazis and Blackshirts and their women in Rome. In Florence. In Milan. And then there was her schooling—or, to be precise, her lack of schooling. The Rosatis had always been educated, even the women. Her mother had graduated from the university in Pisa. But Cristina’s education had ended abruptly last year because the teachers had been pressed into service. Even the professors in Pisa were fighting now. The dormitories were billeting soldiers.

  “We should make her a blue dress,” Alessia was murmuring, and she held up the princess doll with hair the color of poppies.

  She smiled down at the girl. “Why blue?”

  “I like blue. It’s the color of the sky. And you like the sky. You’re always looking up at the airplanes.”

  From his spot on the floor, her nephew glanced at them. “Our mother hates airplanes,” he muttered.

  Abruptly Alessia jumped from the bed, and, holding the doll as if it were an airplane, the princess’s arms as its wings, she flew it over the soldiers guarding the Sicilian coast. She circled them once, twice. Then, with absolutely no warning, she had the plane swoop down upon the men, attacking them, trying to replicate the sound of a machine gun with her mouth. And Massimo, much to Cristina’s surprise, played along: he added to the noise the sound of explosions, and then, with the back of his hand, he wiped his soldiers into the sea.

  The streetlamps still burned in Florence because no one believed the Allies would dare bomb the city. There were rumors, however, that any night now the lights would be dimmed and there would be a curfew. Just in case. But events had not yet become that dire. And so from the conference room window in the museum, Vittore could see the mongrel dog and the little boy who was trying to convince it to drink some water. The child had a small bowl made of tin, but the dog, so thin and wobbly that Vittore was shocked it could stand, didn’t seem interested. Still, it was easier for Vittore to watch the boy and the dog than to make eye contact with Lorenzetti. He was furious with the major and felt betrayed. It wasn’t merely that Lorenzetti and Decher had gone to the Villa Chimera that afternoon, as disturbing as that notion was; it was the fact that they had gone without telling him. He didn’t like the idea that a Blackshirt and a Nazi had been around his family, and he was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to warn his parents that they were coming. Nor did he approve of the pair wandering through the Etruscan tombs on the property. Picking at the artwork. A man like Decher was oblivious to the fragility of the remains on the walls.

  “What are the plans for those tombs after the war?” Decher was asking, and Vittore realized that the colonel was speaking to him. He turned away from the
boy and the dog. It was after ten and the meeting had begun to wind down. There were seven of them at the table, three Germans—including that young pup with the prosthetic foot—and four Italians. He’d never noticed it before, but Decher looked a bit like his adjutant. He was twelve years older than Strekker, but still the two could pass for siblings.

  “My family has already agreed to turn it over to the government,” Vittore answered. “It needs to be cared for. Preserved. And people will want to see it.”

  Decher smiled glibly. “You’re going to allow strangers to traipse across your land? Become an attraction for travelers? I can’t imagine your sister-in-law would be especially accommodating. I don’t suppose you would have been pleased today if you’d known ahead of time that Major Lorenzetti and I were going to drop by your estate.”

  “The access wouldn’t have to interfere with my family’s life or the business of the farm,” he said calmly, essentially ignoring the tenor of the colonel’s remarks.

  “Besides, there won’t ever be droves of tourists,” said Lorenzetti. “It’s a small site, and people don’t flock to Monte Volta. Expect students and archeologists. And the Villa Chimera isn’t exactly the most accessible of venues. I thought I was going to vomit on the road up to the estate.”

  “And the sarcophagi and vases are gone,” Vittore added. “The alabastron, the amphora, the cups. The plates. The pieces of the deity’s head. They’re all at the museum.”

  “I know an amphora is a kind of pot,” said Decher. “But what is an alabastron?”

  “A sort of flask,” Vittore answered. “They were used for oils and unguents and perfumes. Often, as you might expect, they were made of alabaster.”

  Decher seemed to think about this. “I want to see them—the artifacts.”

  Lorenzetti shrugged. “Why not? We can drive to Arezzo tomorrow. It’s not like there’s a war going on.”

  “Why aren’t they at the archeological museum here in Florence?”