The Light in the Ruins (27 page)

“Yes. I think Paolo and I will both go.”

“When is it?”

“Soon. Wednesday, I believe.”

“Family only?”

“What’s left of it. But Cristina says some villagers will probably come out of respect for the marchesa. And maybe some of the peasants who once worked on the farm.”

“Such as that delightful young man you told me about who’s now employed at the terra-cotta factory?”

“Ilario? Perhaps. We’ll see.”

He had finished with his necktie now and he took a puff from her cigarette. When he had replaced it in the ashtray, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms and asked, his voice firm, “And how are you? You’ve told me about some of the people you interviewed when you went to Monte Volta, but almost nothing about what it was like for you to be back there.”

“Maybe later.”

“Maybe later because it’s a long story or maybe later because it’s a wrenching one?”

“Just long.”

“You’re lying.”

She took his right hand off her arm and kissed it. “Yes, I am,” she said. Then she licked her fingers and wiped her lipstick off his skin. “But it’s a long story, too. And we both have to get to work.”

When Serafina arrived at the police station, she had a cable waiting from West Berlin. Friedrich Strekker was listed as missing and presumed dead. In October 1944 he had been promoted from lieutenant to captain and transferred to a newly formed Panzergrenadier combat division. The division had been almost entirely
wiped out in the battle for Budapest in the early months of 1945. No more than two or three hundred men escaped the city on February 13, and a one-legged captain was not among them.

“Serafina?”

She looked up and saw Paolo.

“The Rosatis are here,” he said.

“Thank you.” She put the wire into a folder. She wondered how she would tell Cristina.

Serafina and Paolo sat on one side of the table in the drab interview room down the hall from the detectives’ desks, and Vittore and Cristina sat on the other. Serafina hoped the Rosatis had each gotten a good night’s sleep, but based on the bags under their eyes, she doubted it.

“Have you given any more thought this weekend to who doesn’t like you?” Paolo asked. Then he focused his attention on Vittore. “The sooner you can give us any direction, the sooner we can apprehend this lunatic and your wife and children will be safe. Your aunt in Naples will be safe.”

Vittore sat back in the wooden chair, his hands in his lap. “Obviously people were jealous of us. But by 1944 they should have pitied us. Really, who lost as much as we did?”

Paolo shrugged. “But since the war? Did you offend someone at the Vatican? Did your mother—”

“Even if I did offend someone at the Vatican Museum,” he said, emphasizing the word
museum
, “why would he kill Francesca? Why not kill me? Besides, I spend my life examining and cataloging five-hundred-year-old pieces of sculpture. I design exhibits for tourists. I’m not sure it’s possible for me to offend someone.”

“Why did you lose interest in the Etruscans?”

“I didn’t. I lost interest in Arezzo and Florence and Tuscany. Giulia and I wanted to live in Rome. I work with Renaissance sculptures because I was able to get a job at the Vatican Museum. It’s not complicated.”

The older detective turned to Cristina. “And why did you and your parents move to Rome instead of remaining in Monte Volta?”

“After what our family endured there? That would be too painful. None of us could ever live there. Someday, perhaps, we’ll try to sell it. Besides, if you saw the villa …,” she said, her voice trailing off. She turned to Serafina and continued. “Remind him what you saw when you went there the other day.”

Paolo held up both hands. “I know your estate is in very bad shape. But why not take a place in the nearby village, where you had roots? If money is tight, I would think it would be much less expensive to live in Monte Volta than in Rome.”

“Our father was a marchese and our mother a marchesa,” Vittore answered. “Given their station, it would have been beneath them to live among the villagers.”

Cristina shook her head and smiled a little wanly. “Honestly, Vittore, you make them out to be such snobs. They weren’t. Especially Mother. My parents and I lived in Rome to be near Vittore and Giulia. Then, after Father died, my mother and I stayed there because Mother wanted to be near her grandchildren. It’s just that simple. She wanted to be near you and Giulia and the kids, especially after the loss of Massimo and Alessia.” Then she said to the two detectives, “We didn’t lose everything in the war. Obviously. We can afford our apartment in Rome.”

Serafina leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “A wire came in early this morning. From Germany.” She watched both siblings grow alert. “Your lieutenant, Cristina—Friedrich—died in the battle for Budapest. I don’t know if it matters, but he died a captain.”

Cristina nodded ever so slightly and breathed in deeply through her nose. Then she sighed. “Where is he buried?” she asked after a moment.

“We’ll never know. The body was never recovered. Let’s face it, Budapest was in ruins. A city of rubble by the time the Nazis and the Soviets were finished with it.”

“Maybe he was taken prisoner,” Cristina argued, but it was halfhearted.

“A captain? By then the Russians weren’t taking captains prisoner,” Vittore said, and although Serafina knew he was right, she wished he hadn’t been so blunt.

“I’m sorry,” she told Cristina. “I really am.”

“It is what I assumed all these years. Obviously.”

“It’s probably a relief to know, isn’t it?” Paolo added.

Instead of agreeing, however, Cristina looked directly at Serafina and said, a small hesitation in her voice, “My mother told me something interesting after she met you.”

Serafina waited. She had a sense of what was coming, and while Cristina probably wasn’t sharing it consciously as a quid pro quo—
This is what you get for confirming that my Friedrich is dead
—Serafina understood that on some level it was.

“She thought she knew you,” Cristina said. “She thought she had seen you before.”

“Serafina?” Paolo asked. “Your mother thought she knew Serafina?”

“Yes.”

“How?” he asked. “Where?”

Serafina sat unmoving, a hum in her ears. Inside her head. She thought of the birds amid the black clouds on the ceiling of the tomb and an Etruscan boy steering his small boat against maelstromlike seas. She saw them now from the stone floor where the partisans had placed her nearly ruined body. She recalled the agony of the burns and how she had noticed the painting—and yes, the sun behind the thunderclouds—first through her tears. She had had to blink them away to be sure that what she was seeing was not a hallucination. In her mind, she smelled the mushrooms.

“She said she thought you were the burned girl,” Cristina was saying. “The partisan burned girl. She thought you had died in the tombs.”

Serafina felt everyone at the table staring at her. “Did she tell you anything else?” she asked.

“About you?”

“Yes. About … me.”

“At first, on Wednesday, she honestly wasn’t sure where she had seen you before. But then on Thursday, when she saw you run out of Francesca’s apartment, she noticed your ear. And then she knew.”

“Go on.”

“My mother said she brought you the very last of our olive oil. She gave it to the men who carried you to the tombs. She even gave them the last of Francesca’s face cream. They took it, but mostly they wanted soap and rags they could boil. They wanted water. They really didn’t want my mother’s help. They were going to nurse you themselves.”

“Especially the woman,” Serafina said. She was thinking of Teresa, Enrico’s wife. Teresa was as capable of shooting a German officer as she was, but Teresa was eight years older. She was no longer a teenager and thus mothered their small band. She could be tender; she
was
tender. The men adored her and Serafina revered her. So much of what they did as a group was simply waiting—waiting for orders, waiting for food, waiting for dark—but Teresa seemed always to be moving. She cooked. She scouted. She wrote notes for the men who couldn’t read. Like her husband, she felt acutely every death and every defection. Now Serafina could imagine how hard she and Enrico must have worked to keep her alive.

“The woman,” Cristina agreed. “But the men, too.”

“And then the British arrived,” Serafina said. It was a statement, but she really wasn’t sure.

“Yes,” Vittore said. “Then the British arrived.”

“So you were in Monte Volta, too?” Serafina asked him.

“No, I was here—in Florence.”

“And where were you, Cristina?” Paolo asked. “Did you see Serafina when the partisans brought her to your estate?”

“I never saw your face. I only saw your … back,” she said, almost swallowing the last word as if it were an obscenity. As if seeing the wound had been a violation of sorts. “You were lying on the floor in the kitchen,” she continued after a moment.

“This wasn’t in the tombs?” Serafina asked.

“Not at first,” Cristina said. “The Germans had blown up the granary that morning before leaving and there was fighting in Trequanda, the next village over. I remember the ground literally shook from the granary blast, even at the Villa Chimera. That night the partisans came and you were brought to the house. But then the Germans returned. The British were already behind them and so the Nazis were going to make a last stand at the estate—they liked the high ground.” Then she looked right at Serafina. “And so my mother and father had me take you all to the underground tombs to hide. I think they expected you to leave in the middle of the night. Just disappear. At least that’s what they hoped.”

“But we wouldn’t leave,” Serafina said. “Because they were afraid to move me again.” She watched as Vittore draped his hand on his sister’s and squeezed it. Outside, a delivery van honked and someone yelled for a double-parked automobile to move off the street. She heard a motorcycle race through the congestion. And down the corridor, in the room with the detectives’ desks, she heard laughter and a typewriter. In her mind, she still couldn’t see Beatrice in 1944, she couldn’t recall the marchesa bringing them water and oil and lotion, but somewhere very far away she heard a man’s voice and she had a sense it was Antonio’s. He and Enrico were arguing, and they were arguing about her. The small band of partisans had refused to leave the estate, retreating only as far as the Etruscan tombs. It was in all likelihood the reason that she was alive today.

As the two of them left the police station for a bite to eat, Paolo surprised Serafina by offering her his elbow. She took it, but she was puzzled.

“So you think Captain Friedrich Strekker died in the battle for Budapest,” he said casually.

“I don’t think it. I know it. I have the cable from Berlin.”

“A one-legged man who has been out of combat more than two years is promoted to captain in a Panzergrenadier division.
That’s what you believe.” He motioned with his free hand at a lavender dress in a shop window. “I should buy that for my wife. The only thing stopping me? Many thousands of lire.”

“The Nazis were desperate for manpower by the end of the war,” she reminded him. “They were commandeering fifteen-year-old boys and fifty-five-year-old men. Think of the Volkssturm.”