The Light in the Ruins (15 page)

“The wounded and the maimed were everywhere when I was last home on leave. As common as children,” he went on. Then, trying to lighten the mood, he added quickly, “I fit right in!”

She peeked down at his feet. The glance had been an impulse and she wished that she had been able to restrain herself, because he had noticed. He brought his fingers underneath her chin and gently lifted her face toward his. “It was a joke, because it doesn’t bother me,” he told her. “And I don’t want it to bother you either. I mean that.”

“All right,” she said, her voice softer than she would have expected. Then she watched him close his eyes and lean into her, and so—much to her surprise—she found herself closing her eyes, too, and parting her lips for his.

The next day Friedrich ambled along the cobblestones beside the Arno and watched the crowd before him on the Ponte Vecchio. Though any moment now the Allies were likely to invade Sicily or the mainland itself, there was little panic in Florence. Food was growing scarce, but it had been all year. Fruit was getting hard to find, despite the season. So were most vegetables. A chicken demanded hundreds of lire, and a black market ham might go for a sterling silver place setting. But the wealthy and the Blackshirts and
the Germans were still shopping (he, in fact, was shopping), and they were drinking their ersatz espresso in the cafés. They were sunning themselves in the city’s great piazzas.

Nevertheless, despite the apparent normalcy he saw all around him in Florence, it took only a few moments of conversation to get a sense of the unease that flowed just below the surface here. Everyone was a little anxious, a little wary. A little hungry. Things could not continue as they were.

Now he stared into the window of the jewelry store on the bridge and wondered what sort of necklace would look best on Cristina. Against that spot on her collarbone where her slender neck started to slide into her chest. He gazed at the gold and silver, at the diamonds that he could not afford, and at the amethyst that he could. He saw a pair of delicate gold earrings that were shaped like bunches of grapes. In the midst of each was a green stone the size of a peppercorn. An emerald or a peridot. The earrings were small, and so, unlike a necklace, he might be able to afford them. A lot would depend on the jeweler and his feelings toward the Germans. He might loathe Friedrich on sight or he might see him as an ally. Or—perhaps his best hope if he wanted to leave the store with the jewelry—the owner might be frightened of him. Friedrich would prefer that he did not have to intimidate the fellow, but he was prepared to narrow his gaze and stand a little taller if he had to. He wanted those earrings.

It was interesting that Vittore thought he was such a child, when Vittore had never killed a man. Friedrich, of course, had. He had killed men and he had commanded men. He …

Quickly he cleared his mind of Vittore, literally shaking his head. The fellow had no interest in being his friend; that was fine. There was no reason to be angry right now.

Arguably, this whole errand was insane. He was buying a piece of jewelry for a woman he’d seen twice in his life and spent four hours with, total. But three of those hours were yesterday, when they had wandered alone around her family’s estate and held candles up to the ancient paintings on the walls of a tomb. As, afterward,
they had kissed for the first time, and then sat holding hands in the shade of a beech tree at the edge of the vineyard.

He ventured inside the store, the bell on the door tinkling like a wind chime, and he saw an old couple hunched over the counter with, Friedrich assumed, the owner. Friedrich guessed the jeweler was somewhere between his age and theirs. He was forty-five or fifty, a slight man with dark skin, wide ears, and thinning hair that was just starting to turn from black to white. All three of the Italians turned toward him when they heard the bell, and he knew instantly that he was going to be satisfied with whatever he took away with him when he left the shop. The jeweler and his customers seemed to think a hungry lion had just crossed the threshold, and they all shrank a little in stature at the mere sight of his German uniform. Still, he smiled at them, unblinking, and asked if he was interrupting. They seemed so intent on their transaction. As he shambled over to the counter, he understood why. The elderly couple was not buying something this morning; rather, they were trying to sell jewelry they owned. Their clothing—her floral print dress and shoes, his blazer and trousers—was tired and shabby. There were small tears in the seams of his jacket, and the hem on her dress was starting to sag. They were thin and gaunt and their skin had grown sallow. They needed food.

On a piece of felt on the counter he saw a string of pearls, a pair of diamond earrings, and a collection of silver bracelets that reminded him of the ones his mother had worn. She had been wearing them when she had left for the hospital for the last time, though not when she had come home. She had survived that final cancer surgery, but just barely, and then his father had brought her home to die. Most of the time she was either sleeping, thanks to the morphine, or in excruciating pain. Her last words to him?
Go. Just … go
. She was not quite conscious, and he was a boy on the cusp of adolescence. Her skin had grown pale as paper and looked to him a little like candle wax. Her bracelets were sitting on the nightstand like coasters.

“Can I help you?” It was the jeweler speaking to him. Already the fellow had whisked the old couple’s jewelry off to the side of the counter.

Friedrich said he was interested in the earrings with the green stones in the window. He said he hoped they were peridots.

“Emeralds,” the jeweler answered.

“That’s a shame,” Friedrich murmured, trying to affect a tone balanced perfectly between disappointment and subtle pressure. “I can’t afford emeralds.”

“But you want something green?” the old woman asked.

“I hadn’t thought about it that specifically. I just liked the earrings.”

She reached into a fraying velvet bag and pulled from it a slender gold necklace. At the center was a lustrous green stone. It was shaped like a rectangle, the corners tiered as if it were a miniature picture frame, and it must have been the size of the nail on his pinkie. The edges had a beveling that reminded him of the shapes on the pedestals he had seen in the tombs on the Rosati land, and of the bands of geometric shapes—specifically, two rows of
L
’s—that had bordered one of the images that remained on the tufa stone wall. It was even a little reminiscent of a necklace that had been painted onto one of the dancers he had glimpsed by candlelight in the ancient vault.

“It’s an emerald, too,” she said, as her husband looked away.

Instantly Friedrich could envision it around Cristina’s neck, the stone against the skin on her chest. He could imagine the way it would accent her lovely gray eyes. But he also knew he couldn’t afford it. There was a lot of gold and a lot of rock there. And so he said to the woman that it was beautiful, but it was even further beyond his means than those earrings.

She looked at him, studying him with her rheumy eyes. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“I would have guessed that. We have a grandson who is
twenty-two and a granddaughter who is twenty-four. They left Florence when they were teenagers—when our two sons moved to America.”

“Are they in America now?”

The woman nodded. “They are all in New York City. Thank God. They left Italy in 1936.”

Friedrich put his hand gently but firmly on her arm. He knew well that people—not only Vittore—often mistook his outward implacability for naïveté. He had used that perception to his advantage in the past, and he thought he might here. “Certainly they’ll be safer there,” he said, trying to smile sincerely. He thought again of the unsettling power of his uniform. “Your grandchildren, too.” He took his fingers off the woman’s arm and offered her husband his hand. “My name is Friedrich. Friedrich Strekker.”

The old man hesitated ever so slightly, but then he accepted it. “Stefano,” he said. “And this is my wife, Nicoletta.”

The woman picked up the necklace, and Friedrich worried that she was going to place it back in the small bag. Instead, however, she held it out to him. “It’s for your wife home in Germany, yes?” she asked him.

“No, it’s not. It’s for—” He broke off, unsure how he wanted to describe Cristina. And so he summarized their relationship as simply as he could. “I have an Italian associate at the Uffizi. And he has a younger sister. I was looking for something for her.”

“You want to marry her?”

He laughed. “I barely know her.”

“But she is pretty?”

“Oh, she is. She is very pretty.”

“And you work at the museum?”

“I do.”

“Tell me something.”

“Go on.”

“Have you ever done something you were ashamed of? Something you would be sure someday you would never, ever tell your daughter?”

“That’s an odd question,” he said, stalling, as he tried to guess at her agenda.

“But it’s not a difficult one to answer, is it?” She raised her eyebrows.

“No,” he said, and then he understood the hidden portent behind the inquiry. “I can tell you honestly, I’ve done my duty as a soldier in France and Greece and Russia. I have no regrets and no secrets.”

She nodded, and then suggested a price for the necklace. Friedrich found himself shocked at how little she wanted. He wondered whether it was hunger that was driving the number or whether this woman was merely a romantic he had charmed. He decided it was probably a little of both and the proper response was to ask if she was serious.

Nicoletta said that she was and repeated the figure. “I may never be able to give it to my granddaughter. I may never be able to give it to my grandson to give to whatever girl he falls in love with. But if I sell it to you? I’ll know at least that it helped to fire a romance.”

And so Friedrich agreed to buy the piece on the spot. But he had a thought. “I imagine your ration cards aren’t as helpful now as they were a few months ago,” he began. “I, on the other hand, seem to have access to meat and potatoes and sometimes even real coffee. The problem? I don’t have a kitchen where I’m billeted. And even if I had one, I really can’t cook. But let me send something special your way.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I want to. Give me your address. I want to thank you.”

Stefano and the jeweler looked at each other as if this young German had lost his mind, but Nicoletta volunteered the name of the street where they lived, and Friedrich scribbled the address on a scrap of paper he found in his wallet.

“I am a man of my word,” he told them. “I never forget a kindness—or a slight. I keep my promises. Keep your eyes out for a package.”

He was about to place the necklace unceremoniously in his
tunic pocket when the jeweler motioned him over. The fellow reached into a drawer in the tall wooden cabinet behind him and pulled out a felt-covered box with a snap at the front. When he handed it to Friedrich, he said, “This is a fitting presentation for a necklace so lovely.”

“Thank you.”

“Take good care of that Italian girl,” the jeweler said.

“I will.”

“May your love survive many years,” he added, a benediction of sorts.

Stefano glanced over at the jeweler and corrected him. “May it survive a single year,” he advised. Then he shrugged. “May we all survive a single year. My wife is an optimist. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her what’s coming.”

Just before dawn, Cristina tiptoed into the room the family still called the nursery, even though Massimo and Alessia were no longer toddlers. The children were both sound asleep in their beds, and Cristina knelt on the floor beside Alessia and kissed the girl on the cheek. The child’s skin smelled of lavender soap. When she opened her eyes and saw in the dim light that her aunt was already in her riding clothes, she started to speak, but Cristina shushed her, smiling, and led her downstairs. The night before, Cristina had laid out an outfit for Alessia, and now she helped the sleepy girl climb into her jodhpurs and, it seemed to Cristina, impossibly small boots. Then together they walked down the hill through the damp grass to the barn where the estate’s two remaining horses lived with the remnants of the Rosatis’ herd of Chianina cattle. Ilario and one of the other farmhands had already walked the cattle out to the hillside above the estate’s small pond for the day, so the barn was empty but for the horses: Arabella and her mother, Oriana.