The Light in the Ruins (24 page)

Well, you know what you imagine. I don’t
.

Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys. It’s as if the Uffizi is no longer enough. The Duomo and the tower and the Baptistery doors (they are replicas, you know; the real ones are kept safe from the elements in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) are less enticing than the notion that there’s a fiend in the shadows
.

But of course you are in danger only if you are related to a Rosati. So you can enjoy the thrill ride with no fear of falling yourself
.

I have always found it interesting that two women were executed for murder that summer, one just before I started my work and another very soon after. On June 3, the Americans sent Barbara Graham to the gas chamber in California. On July 13, the British hanged Ruth Ellis in London. And yet, curiously, no one in the Italian media conjectured that I might be female
.

Other news that summer of 1955? You’ll recall that the pope excommunicated Juan Perón in June. Eighty-three spectators died in a Le Mans race-car cataclysm. Antonio Segni formed a new government in Rome. In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park
.

And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman’s family. It made for a great story … and, I must confess, I did succumb to a giddy little narcissistic rush as I devoured the articles
.

Clearly the police would be watching Giulia Rosati and her girls, and so I considered taking a breather. I could travel to their little home on the outskirts of Vatican City in a week or a month or a year. As I have told you, there was no rush. I was feeling no insatiable compulsion
.

But then I read a quote from police detective Paolo Ficino in the newspaper: “Nothing will happen to either Cristina or Vittore Rosati—or to Vittore’s family. We will be there for them.”

Can you imagine? He was challenging me, goading me on
.

Well, I have never backed down from a challenge. I packed my valise and drove south to Rome
.

1943

CRISTINA STOOD IN the window in the hotel in Florence and wished either that Friedrich’s room were on a higher floor or that the building across the street were shorter so it wouldn’t obstruct her scrutiny of the moon as it began its descent. She presumed that Vittore’s room, which was two stories above her, might have a view, but Friedrich’s didn’t. Briefly she imagined her older brother standing by his window frame, too, his hands on the sill, scanning the sky. In all likelihood, however, he was sound asleep … somewhere else. It was not yet four a.m. and Vittore was doubtless unconscious—no one slept more deeply than he did—wherever it was that he had chosen to lay his head. But that bed wasn’t in this hotel. At first she had been so afraid that her brother would discover she was here with this German that she had been reluctant to come. But Friedrich had been right: it wasn’t simply that Vittore hadn’t set foot on this floor ever, as far as Friedrich could tell; he spent as many nights as he could away from the hotel. Although he had never spoken directly to Friedrich about where he went, it was common knowledge among that small cadre of officers at the Uffizi that Vittore was seeing a secretary named Giulia who worked at a radio station, and he was either with her or with her and her mother in Fiesole. Still, Cristina had made it clear to Friedrich that they had to be gone from the hotel before breakfast. Her mother and father and Vittore believed she was spending the weekend with a family friend named Donata, a woman Francesca’s age who always put romance before responsibility and—as Cristina
had expected—had been happy to cover for her once she had been introduced to the German lieutenant. Donata was the mistress of one of Mussolini’s generals and had a floor of his spectacular townhouse here in Florence to herself.

In the bed behind her she heard Friedrich stir, and she turned. His eyes were still shut, but his long arm had fallen onto the side of the mattress from which she had just risen. She watched him stretch his fingers and roll them aimlessly along the sheets and the edge of the pillow as he slowly woke up.

“What time is it?” he asked. He rubbed his fists against his eyes in a manner so boyish that she was reminded of her nephew back in Monte Volta.

“Four.”

“Come back to bed then.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“The hotel mattress?” he asked, his voice light. “Having to share a bed with a snoring German soldier?”

She smiled. “You weren’t snoring.”

“I’m relieved. I’ve been told that I do.”

“Not by other women, I hope.”

“No. Only by other German soldiers who really do snore.” He sat up, kicking his legs over the side of the bed, and motioned for her to come sit beside him. She did, and he pulled her toward him, against him, resting his hands on the small of her back. “So why couldn’t you sleep?” he asked.

She realized he was worried about her. He was afraid she had regrets, either because they had made love for the first time or because she had lied to her family. Or perhaps because she was in a man’s room in the small hours of the morning. But in fact she had no regrets at all. She felt suddenly like a grown woman. She was excited. This was the sort of romance and exhilaration that thus far the war had denied her. Yes, she had missed the sorts of galas and balls that Francesca had enjoyed when she had been eighteen and nineteen, but Cristina had something she decided now was much,
much better: she had a lover. She had beside her in this bed a man with whom she knew she was falling in love.

“Tell me,” Friedrich asked her again. “Please.”

She kissed him. “Because I like it here,” she murmured softly.

“In Florence?”

“With you. In your room. I guess I don’t want to sleep through the night.”

“I would take you dancing, but obviously nothing is open right now.”

As he spoke, she found herself starting to flinch, expecting the sentence to end differently:
I would take you dancing, but obviously I can’t dance
. She was aware right now of the way his shin ended in a club: his left foot was flat on the foor, while his right shin was hovering well above it. This was why he had beckoned her to him rather than rising and coming to her in the window. Earlier in the night, when they were making love and discovering the idiosyncrasies and imperfections that marked each other’s bodies, she had explored his legs and his disfigurement. She had caressed him and kissed him, determinedly overcoming her own squeamishness to run her fingertips over the stump—the skin hairless and glassy—where even now he said he felt only the odd tingle.

“You dance?” she asked, teasing him. Her forearms were draped on his shoulders, and she began to massage the back of his neck.

“I do. I am not as elegant on the dance floor as I once was. But I can still manage the occasional very precise gavotte.”

“Precision. That does matter to you Germans, doesn’t it?”

He smiled. “And I’m not even Prussian.”

“Someday you’ll show me how well you dance. Maybe even this weekend.”

“That would be wonderful, yes.”

Outside Friedrich’s room, along the hotel corridor, they heard doors opening and the sound of men running with great urgency. There was a sliver of light now beneath their door because someone
had turned on the hall sconces. And then there was the sound of someone knocking, pounding really, for Friedrich to wake up and join Colonel Decher downstairs. It was Jürgen Voss. Apparently the Allies had begun to invade Sicily.

Captain Marco Rosati’s first thought was that an animal carcass was rotating on a spit: he heard what he presumed was a crackling fire and the air was filled with the aroma of cooked meat. But as he opened his eyes, he understood that he was in that foggy moat between sleeping and waking, and his dream of a cooked pig or boar was quickly erased by the fact that his new adjutant was shaking him awake by his shoulder, the young man’s eyes wide with panic. He had been, it seemed, asleep in the chair by his desk in this modest second-story apartment in Gela, where he was billeted. He recalled ruefully that he had been writing another letter to Francesca.

Now he forced himself fully awake and stood and listened as this absolutely terrified fellow, whom everyone called Lungo, told him of enemy paratroopers between them and the airfield behind them, and the waves and waves of enemy landing craft that had been spotted off the Sicilian beach and were working their way through the waves. He was just reaching for his holster and pistol when there was a series of colossal explosions—behind him, beside them, before them; it was almost like dominoes—and he was hurled against the coatrack next to the writing table and then onto the floor. The lone light went out and the room was lit only by the moon. Marco felt plaster dust raining gently upon him when the shaking stopped. He saw that Lungo was trying to tell him something, but Marco’s ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear a single word. Then the fellow closed his eyes and rolled onto his back, and Marco saw that the adjutant’s shirt had been shredded by shrapnel, his abdomen all but scooped out, and his intestines were protruding like a nest of baby snakes. Marco leaned over him, stifling his gag reflex and wishing that he had the slightest idea
how to help him. But the engineer’s fear and sense of absolute helplessness lasted but a moment, because Lungo’s chest abruptly stopped heaving as the body stopped straining for air and the fellow expired. So Marco found where he had dropped his pistol and moved as quickly as he could through the debris and clutter that now marked the way from his room to the stairs. He bumped into furniture that had been upended and felt his way along walls that suddenly were pockmarked with holes. He was aware that his hearing was already starting to return, because now he could hear women and soldiers screaming alike, and the sound of machine-gun fire nearby. From the beach he heard the thunder of artillery fire, and he imagined the massive American and British battleships sitting safely at sea and pummeling his desperately frightened men in their wholly inadequate bunkers. Initially he had assumed it was a bomb that had ripped into his quarters and killed his adjutant, but it dawned on him now that it had probably been a shell hurled from those behemoths floating out in the waves, well beyond the range of the Italian guns on the beach. Still, this revelation passed almost instantly through his mind, whisked from consciousness because he heard the shrill whistle of another missile approaching. He was at the top of the building’s stairs and so he raced down them, leaping the last few steps as if he were jumping into the pool at the Villa Chimera, and though he landed awkwardly and twisted his ankle, he continued outside into the chaos of the piazza—into the stream of horrified women pulling their thin-legged children by their hands and the frightened men with their carbines trying to muster in the street for their officers—just as another building along the corniche seemed to evaporate in a deafening roar of smoke and hot ash.

Beatrice Rosati heard about the Allied invasion of Sicily from her husband, Antonio, who had heard the news from their overseer. Nunzio had learned of the attack from a villager who had been listening surreptitiously to the BBC while eating breakfast
and understood perhaps a third of the words on the airwaves. Immediately Nunzio had raced back up the hill to the villa to tell Antonio that there was a battle of some sort in Gela. The marchese, in turn, had switched on the radio the family kept hidden behind a shelf of old leather books in the library, and now he and Beatrice and Nunzio were crowded around the mahogany box with the gold fabric across the speaker, listening as that impeccably proper British voice droned on about the waves of Brits and Americans who had already captured the Sicilian port city. Antonio translated what he was hearing for the overseer while Beatrice gazed out the window at the blue sky and the clouds whiter than goat cheese. Her heart hurt. Her chest hurt. Somewhere in the midst of that news, in the midst of all those bullets and bombs, was her older son. Marco. Any moment now Francesca would return from the walk she had taken with the children, and Beatrice knew that she would have to tell her that the invasion had started, and it had come to the very city on the very island where her husband was stationed. It had come, in fact, to the very beach.