The Light in the Ruins (13 page)

That afternoon Serafina emerged from the hospital through the side entrance, the one nearest the wing with the operating rooms, and walked down the long, shaded alley the ambulances used. When she finally emerged into the piazza, she was struck by the sunlight and the crowds. Over the past few summers she had noticed a marked increase in the number of tourists, as well as how likely she was now to hear French and English—the latter spoken with both British and American accents. The visit to the hospital had really been a waste, she decided, only corroborating what she had learned yesterday on the phone. Anyone could have taken the tools necessary to extract a human heart and anyone could have returned them. No one itemized bone saws and scalpels.

She slipped her sunglasses on as she crossed the cobblestones, the right earpiece balanced awkwardly on the deformed stub of cartilage, and thought about what Cristina had told her about the end of the war. She worked her way through the crowds and the pigeons and the great statues, most of them replicas, on her way back to the police station. The Nazi retreat, it was clear, had been an absolute cataclysm for the Rosati family. Cristina had a memory for dates, that was obvious, but it probably wasn’t difficult for most people to recall the precise moment when they watched their older brother being tortured by Nazis or when their nephew stepped on a land mine.

Certainly Serafina knew the dates when her own mother and father and, later, her brothers had been killed. Likewise, she knew the date in between when she met the band of partisans in the woods and resolved to fight and die with them. She had been seventeen then, a cauldron of rage.

But there was a limit, it seemed, to what the mind could—or
would—absorb. She could recall so much from the week when she had seen the old granary in Monte Volta fall, but so little from the precise day. She knew the granary had been blown up the morning before the firefight at the villa. But everything that occurred on the afternoon when she was forever scarred? The brief, violent battle itself? The details of her fight for survival? Nary a clue until she woke up in the hospital bed and realized the physician looking down at her was a British soldier.

She told herself that when she got to the office, she would go over with Paolo the notes she had taken while with Cristina that morning. Perhaps he would see something she’d overlooked; perhaps she herself would find a connection that hadn’t struck her as she had listened to Cristina because she’d been writing it all down—or at least writing down all that she could. She feared that she’d missed something, because there were so many parallels with her own story, and she could not help but see in her head the small memories her mind would offer as tantalizing, but—in the end—unsatisfying, glimpses of what may have occurred.

She guessed that tomorrow she would go to Rome to interview Cristina’s surviving brother, Vittore. She might even take two days and visit the Rosati villa in Monte Volta. Maybe she would learn something from its ghosts.

Paolo leaned back in his chair behind his desk and blew a smoke ring out the open window beside him. “So, 1944. How long had the Germans been using the estate?” he asked his partner, Serafina.

“Almost since the Allies had reclaimed Rome. The Allies marched into the city on June 4. Cristina says within days the Germans had commandeered the villa. The officers were in the main house, and at least five or six dozen soldiers were billeted in tents on the grounds.”

“Infantry?”

“No. Artillery. Big howitzers. Four of them. The Germans set them up on the hills facing south.”

“And the family? Let me guess—they were ordered to sleep in the cattle barn.”

“Not that bad,” Serafina said. “But I guess they could have taken some bedding and gone there. The soldiers had butchered the last of the cattle, so there was plenty of room.”

“Then where?”

“They were given the children’s bedroom, the big nursery that Francesca’s two children shared. All of them had to sleep there, including Antonio and Beatrice. They were squeezed like olives into the room.”

“I am sure the marchese and marchesa loved that. Sleeping on the floor. I am sure Cristina was thrilled.” Now he sat forward and took a pencil from a coffee cup and started writing down names. “Who was living in the villa at the time?”

“Well, the marchese and the marchesa, of course. Cristina. Francesca and her two children. So there were six of them, which isn’t a lot of people, unless you are living with Nazis and have to share a single bedroom.”

“Where were the brothers?”

“Vittore was still with the Germans here in Florence. At the Uffizi. And Marco, Francesca’s husband, was with a lot of the Italian officers who had failed to hold Sicily the previous summer. He was more or less slave labor. He was building fortifications for the Germans and filling the holes in the roads from the Allied bombs.”

“And the peasants who worked the estate?”

“First of all, there had never been a lot. At its largest, according to Beatrice, the estate had needed only a dozen farmhands, and they all lived in the village. Whoever was working on any given day would appear in a big truck or oxcart in the morning and leave at night. There were no tenant farms or tenant farmers.”

“It wasn’t like La Foce.”

“No. It was nowhere near that large. And by the summer of 1944, all of the farmhands were gone. Either the Germans had pressed them into service or they stopped coming when the Nazi
soldiers started pitching their tents. Besides, the animals had been slaughtered, and it was painfully clear there wasn’t going to be a grape or olive harvest that year.”

“And where were you?” Paolo smiled when he asked the question, but his eyes were dark and he stared at Serafina.

“In June, I was in the woods of Mount Amiata. But before the Germans occupied the estate, it sounds like other partisans went there and demanded food.”

“But not Enrico’s little band?”

“No.”

“Were the Rosatis … supportive?”

“It doesn’t sound like they were. They gave the groups food, but they probably didn’t have a choice. The problem for the Rosatis was the problem for lots of landowners once the Germans controlled Italy: if the Nazis believed they were feeding the partisans, they might have killed them; but if the landowners didn’t feed us, we might have killed them. You know that. It was chaos after Mussolini fell … and then it was anarchy once the Germans brought him back and propped him up.”

“As I recall, some of you were actual anarchists,” Paolo said, chuckling.

“Not my group.”

“No. Not your group. Tell me, when was the battle for Monte Volta? I’m guessing the middle of July.”

“It wasn’t much of a battle, at least in the town. Mostly it was just a withdrawal. The Nazis blew up the granary, packed up their big cannons, and tried to head north. But the British were already behind them, and so some of them retreated back inside the Rosati estate, outside the village. Right about then, Marco reappeared.”

“Deserted his work crew?”

“I guess that would be the term.”

“So now there were the seven of them.”

“Yes.”

“And where were you in the middle of July?”

“And this matters … why?”

“Because you don’t have a father or a mother to ask you these questions. You only have me.”

She folded her arms across her chest. She thought of her dead brothers as well as her dead father and mother. The Nazis had executed her parents because her father had been Dino Grandi’s assistant, and Grandi had led the coup against Mussolini in July 1943. Grandi had fled to Spain, however, the moment the Nazis had swooped in, and when they couldn’t kill him, they had murdered her father and mother instead. Called them both traitors. And so she and her brothers had fled north from Rome, hoping to find safety with her aunt and uncle near Chianciano. Instead they had linked up with a small group of partisans led by a friend of a friend. The assemblage was mostly communists and miners, and the siblings hadn’t planned on revealing that their father had once worked for Mussolini’s minister of justice, a man who on occasion had been a fierce opponent of the political left. But one of her brothers had slipped and the truth had come out. Instead of killing them, however, Enrico had welcomed them. Deduced right away that they weren’t Fascist spies. They were merely three young adults trying to stay alive, and generously he took them in. Was, in fact, grateful to have them. Besides, even if their father had not been innocent of Blackshirt crimes, he, like his boss, Dino Grandi, had grown disenchanted with Il Duce early in the war. He had always hated the Nazis, and now he had paid with his life.

Originally she and her brothers had stayed together among the partisans; her brothers hadn’t wanted her out of their sight. Five months after they had joined the band, however, the Germans surrounded the group in a combing operation along Mount Amiata, and the women and men had scattered in all directions. And she had lost sight of them both. For three days she and two men had hidden in the shed of a tenant farmer on the farthest outskirts of La Foce, the estate owned by a marchese and his expatriate British wife. She had hoped—had, in fact, believed—that her brothers were still alive. On the fourth day, Enrico had found them and they had returned to their camp on the mountain. The day after
that she had awoken, hungry and cold, to the news that her brothers were dead.

“So,” Paolo asked her again. “July 1944.”

She rolled her eyes and she answered, but only because he was her boss and she might as well humor him. “There was another villa, not the Villa Chimera, where we had been hiding for a few days that month. But it was not the Rosatis’. The villa we were using was near Trequanda.”

“And you’re positive you were not involved in the firefight?”

“I
was
involved in a firefight. You know that. Just not the one at the Villa Chimera.”

“And your conversation with Cristina brought back nothing.”

“Nothing,” she repeated.

He snuffed out his cigarette in a marble ashtray that looked like a turtle. The shell was hinged so that he could open it when he was smoking but then shut it tight when he was done, concealing the cigarette butts. It was by far the most opulent object on his desk.

“Did Cristina recall the names of any of the Germans who occupied the villa?” he asked.

“Yes. She gave me the name of the captain. Muller.”

“Any others?”

“A lieutenant named Bayer.”

“Do we know what happened to Captain Muller or Lieutenant Bayer?”

“Cristina thinks they might have died in the fighting at the estate. But she doesn’t know that for a fact. She never saw their bodies. Most of the Germans were killed or surrendered, but she’s pretty sure that at least some of the soldiers fought their way out.”

She saw that he had written down the names Muller and Bayer in a separate column from the Rosatis’. “Let’s come back to Francesca. And motive. Did she do anything to anyone in that period that might have … angered someone?”

“She hated the Germans.”

“A start. Maybe. Did Cristina mention anyone in particular—and anyone who might in return have hated Francesca?”

She nodded. “There were some men who worked with Vittore in the museum, and Francesca absolutely despised them.”

“Go on.”

“Two Germans and one Italian,” Serafina said, glancing down at her own notes. “There was a colonel named Erhard Decher. He was an architect. There was an Italian major named Giancarlo Lorenzetti. He was an art historian.”

“And the third?”

“Cristina said she didn’t recall his name.”

“But you doubt that, I can tell. You think she does.”

“Maybe. I think she regretted saying there were three instead of two.”

“And they worked together here in Florence.”

“Yes. But they had been coming to the Villa Chimera since 1943—for a year, in other words.”

“Because of Vittore?”

“And because of the ancient tombs on the property.”

“Etruscan?”

“Yes.”

“Did Francesca ever do anything to this Erhard Decher or this Giancarlo Lorenzetti?”

“Nothing, according to Cristina, that would have led them to cut out her heart eleven years later.”

He had written down the names of the German colonel and the Italian major on his notepad, and he gazed at the columns before him. “That’s the thing that makes Contucci question why this woman’s murder could have anything to do with the war,” he said, referring to Sergio Contucci, the prosecutor in charge of the case. “Me, too. I don’t want to be dismissive of your idea, but why would the killer wait eleven years? If Francesca did something so horrible in 1944, why would the killer wait until 1955 to slash her throat?”

“Maybe he couldn’t get to her sooner.”

“Because he was incapacitated? Because he was in jail?”

“That’s interesting—I didn’t think of jail.”

Paolo shrugged.

“But,” she went on, “you see the possibility. Maybe he simply was elsewhere. Maybe he didn’t know where Francesca was. Maybe he saw her in Florence or ran into her on the street and …”

“And decided to cut out her heart.”