The Light in the Ruins (26 page)

Vittore’s gaze was not precisely forbidding, but he was scowling. He was exasperated, his patience gone. His skin, flushed from the fight, looked sunburned and raw, and his hair had fallen over his forehead.

“What are you doing?” Cristina asked him. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

“Look at him,” he said, referring to Friedrich. “Look at you. You’re …”

“Yes?”

Vittore glanced up at the soldiers on either side of him in the hotel lobby and put his hands out before him, palms up, in a gesture
of capitulation. “Are you finished?” one of the men asked him, grinning, and Vittore nodded that he was. The pair smiled at each other and took their hands off his shoulders, allowing him to rise from the chair in which they had confined him. It seemed to Cristina that Friedrich was about to say something to her brother—she didn’t like the way his eyes were still smoldering—and so she asked Friedrich to wait where he was.

“Is that really what you want?” he demanded, glaring at Vittore.

“Yes. That’s really what I want,” she said. “I want to talk to my brother alone.” Then she drew Vittore to a corner of the lobby where they could speak without every soldier and guest in the hotel reception area eavesdropping. Already crowds had begun milling about in search of news of the invasion, trying to separate the rumors, such as the notion that Allied paratroopers were already in Rome, from reality.

“I’m serious. Have you gone crazy?” Cristina inquired once more. “Why in the name of heaven would you attack a German lieutenant in the middle of Florence?”

He paused, and she could see that he was grinding his teeth, the sockets at the edge of his jaw ballooning the sides of his face. “Why in the name of heaven would you sleep with one?”

“It’s not like that.”

“No?”

“No. What we do is—”

“I just found my sister in a hotel with a Nazi,” he hissed, cutting her off. “I think my reaction was perfectly sane.”

She considered this, restraining the urge to slap him hard on the face because her family had already made a scene. And so instead she turned brusquely on her heels and started toward Friedrich, but Vittore caught her by the elbow and spun her back around so she was facing him.

“Cristina, don’t you see what the Germans are? They are even worse than our Fascists!” he said, his voice low but intense. “They
are taking over the country, they’re stealing our art. They hate us—they hate everyone who isn’t one of them! Who knows what they’re really doing to the Jews, who knows what—”

“Friedrich isn’t responsible for any of that. He—”

“They are loathsome. There is a reason the world is against them—and against us for losing our minds and siding with them. And now, you of all people—”

“You work with them! How dare you criticize me?”

“I work with them because I haven’t a choice. I work with them because I have a gun to my head.”

“You don’t. While our brother is right now fighting for his life in Sicily, you’re here in Florence dusting off pottery chips.” She spoke without thinking, and only when she had finished did she realize how deeply the remark might have hurt him. But he didn’t seem wounded. He lowered his eyes for just a moment and smirked, shaking his head.

“You are such a child,” he said, his voice softening with bemusement. “First of all, Marco is as much under the Germans’ thumb as I am. And he is every bit as disgusted by that reality, if not more. Why? Precisely because he is fighting for his life right now. But he hadn’t a choice either. Second, you have no idea what I do. None. I spend my life trying to prevent your boyfriend and his fellow Nazis from sending all of Florence or Arezzo to Berlin, or to some swaggering Prussian’s estate on the Baltic. Or even to the Gestapo in Rome. But fine. Fine. Really, why should I care if my little sister has become a Nazi’s whore?”

This time she didn’t worry that people were watching: she took her right hand and swung it, palm open, as hard as she could into her older brother’s cheek.

1955

ON SUNDAY, GIULIA Rosati kissed her children good night in the bedroom the siblings shared. The family’s home was on the second floor of an apartment building in the shadow of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo. Then she turned off the lamp and left the door open just enough to allow a sliver of light from the hallway to help them feel safe. She still had not told them that their grandmother was dead and that was why their father had suddenly rushed off to Florence. Nearly a week ago now, when she and Vittore had first learned that Francesca had been murdered, they’d both presumed that her death had resulted directly from her lifestyle. Giulia wasn’t as judgmental as Vittore, but she agreed that most likely it had been an angry or jealous lover who had killed the woman.

The death of Beatrice, however, seemed to suggest this was something very different.

When Giulia returned to the living room, the uniformed police officer was reading the newspaper. She gazed for a long moment at his holstered gun. He sensed she was watching him, bent down the top of the newspaper, and shrugged. He had a long face and a seemingly lipless mouth. She guessed he was, like her, in his late thirties.

“The babies asleep?” he asked.

“I think my four-year-old would not be happy to be called a baby,” Giulia told him lightly.

“She is headstrong then. Like my daughter.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “She is a bit headstrong.”

He put the newspaper down on the side table. “You’ll be fine,” he said after a moment. “Nothing is going to happen to you or your children. Not here in Rome.”

“Not anywhere.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Not anywhere.”

Giulia’s mother still lived just outside Florence, in Fiesole. She had told her daughter on the phone that all anyone in the city was talking about was the killer with the vendetta against the remnants of a Tuscan marchese’s family. She’d added that some people, it seemed, had gone from worrying about their own safety after Francesca had been killed—who was this madman who had cut the heart from a woman?—to viewing it more as an unbelievably interesting spectacle that didn’t concern them. After all, if you weren’t among the last of the Rosatis, you weren’t in danger.

“Would you like more coffee?” she asked the officer.

He nodded and handed her his cup and saucer. “Thank you,” he said. “You want me awake tonight.”

She passed the mirror that hung on the wall between the living room and the kitchen, but didn’t notice herself in the glass as much as she did the carvings of Venus and Mars at the base of the gilt wood frame. The mirror was just under five hundred years old, and according to Rosati family myth, it had once belonged to Piero de’ Medici. It had survived the shelling and then the looting at the Villa Chimera, when Beatrice herself had dug a hole in the high grass beyond the swimming pool and buried it.

Giulia had never seen the estate before it was charred trees and rubble. She had never seen the chimera. But she had seen pictures of the villa before the war had come to Monte Volta.

In the kitchen, she packed as much coffee as she possibly could into the espresso machine filter. She did indeed want to be sure that this policeman was awake until morning. She presumed she would be, too.

Chief Inspector Paolo Ficino tossed his own newspaper into the trash can on the sidewalk before climbing the stairs to his apartment. He knew his wife had already seen the latest articles Sunday afternoon about the butcher who was cutting the hearts from a Tuscan family in Florence, but there was no point in bringing those sorts of lurid headlines into their home for their sixteen-year-old daughter to read.

The reporters hadn’t yet made the leap that whoever had murdered the two Rosatis might have done so because of the war, and neither he nor the prosecutor had volunteered that theory when they had been interviewed. Maybe they never would. Because maybe there really was no connection. After all, Paolo kept asking himself, if this did go back to the war, why had the killer waited a decade to start his work? And it had been a decade. Paolo had looked into Antonio Rosati’s death, and the fellow had died of a heart attack on a sunny summer afternoon, walking through the Villa Borghese in Rome. There were witnesses galore. Paolo knew he was taking the idea that this vendetta had something to do with the war seriously only because of Serafina. Clearly the prosecutor, Sergio Contucci, gave very little credence to the notion.

When Serafina had returned from Monte Volta, she told him that she believed she had been to the Villa Chimera before. After the firefight in the summer of 1944, when the partisans had retreated from the hills outside Trequanda, they must have taken her to the Rosati estate. She had been hidden there, shielded inside the Etruscan tombs from the sun and the Nazis. But, Paolo wondered, did this have any bearing on the investigation? Again, he couldn’t imagine how. He hoped she was telling him everything, but he honestly wasn’t sure. So much of her life was a mystery to him and, he guessed, even to her. He recalled the intense, wounded sparrow who had come to him in 1947, wanting to be a detective. He would have dismissed the idea right away if he hadn’t noticed her neck and her ear; her disfigurements had been more obvious then. He knew, as young as she was, this wasn’t play-acting. He knew
she had a history and it was a history that might make her a worthy apprentice. A worthy pioneer. He discovered quickly how smart she was. And, at her insistence, what a good shot she was. He gave her a gun, suggested she not advertise that she had it. For years, almost nobody knew. Now those who did looked the other way.

Paolo considered whether he should be more worried about Beatrice’s sister in Naples or her niece’s little family in London, but his instinct told him that these murders had nothing to do with them. Still …

He stood for a moment and breathed in the night air, grateful that it was a little cooler, a little less humid than he had expected. Then he started up the narrow stairway to his wife and teenage daughter.

“Vittore and Cristina are planning to bury their mother and Francesca with the rest of the family at the estate in Monte Volta,” Serafina told Milton as their paths crossed in the kitchen in their apartment Monday morning. For breakfast Milton would have either coffee and a cigarette or a day-old chocolate pastry, if he happened to find a leftover one on the counter. It was pretty much how she started the day, too.

He seemed to think about this. He was holding a pair of neckties in his hands, and she pointed at the blue-and-gold one.

“Really? I’m wearing a gray suit today. I was leaning toward the red one.”

“The blue always looks good against your eyes,” she reminded him.

“Can’t argue with that,” he said. Then: “Will you be there?”

“At the funeral?”

“Uh-huh.” He draped the red necktie over a chair and started tying the blue one around his neck. He was using the chrome side of the toaster as a mirror. She’d bought him the toaster for Christmas last year, thinking he would want to heat bread in the morning
because he was an American, but he used it rarely and only, she presumed, because he loved her and wanted her to feel that he appreciated the gift.