The Light in the Ruins (29 page)

I PRESUMED I WOULD first execute the police officer. The guard.

But I rather hoped I wouldn’t have to. I took chloroform with me on the off chance that I could merely incapacitate him. Since I had not killed Francesca’s lover the night when I pulled her heart from her chest, it had become an odd point of honor for me. No one should die, if I could help it, other than the survivors of Antonio and Beatrice’s ugly little brood. This was not a hard-and-fast rule, mind you, and I was fully prepared to slaughter the guard if necessary. But in the interest of a certain moral tidiness, I was going to strive to spare him
.

In any case, I packed my tools into my valise and drove south to Rome. I presumed I would need two nights, the first to study the Rosatis’ apartment and see where the guard had positioned himself and the second to exact my revenge
.

When I arrived, it was midday, and the sun was searing the city as I stood on a bridge overlooking the Tiber River. An American family saw me alone, smoking a cigarette, and asked me to photograph them as they posed with the Castel Sant’Angelo in the background. There were six of them: a father, a mother, and four teenaged children. A pair of boys and a pair of girls. I guessed the oldest child might have been attending university. They were all very blond, and it was the father who asked me in heavily accented but enthusiastic Italian to please “capture” their picture. The camera was German and I knew the factory where it had been manufactured
.

I put my cigarette down on the railing, snapped two pictures, and then returned the camera. The American thanked me as I retrieved my cigarette. He pointed at my valise
.

“Are you a tourist, too?” he asked
.

“I am,” I said
.

He motioned toward the Via della Conciliazione, the wide concourse that links the Castel Sant’Angelo with the Piazza San Pietro and the Vatican. “Any idea how many more blocks to St. Peter’s? We’ve been on our feet since breakfast.”

“Once you’re a block from the bridge,” I answered, “look to your left. You’ll be able to see it.”

“So it’s close?”

“It is.”

“Tell me, if you don’t mind, what are you here to see? I always like to be sure I’ve done my homework.”

I spread wide my arms in agreement. “Me, too!”

“Okay, then: What’s most important? Obviously the Pantheon and the Colosseum and the Vatican. What else?”

“I am after the heart of this city,” I said, entertaining myself instead of really answering his question. I pointed in the general direction of Vittore Rosati’s apartment. “And I think I will find it just a few blocks from here.”

“So for you it’s St. Peter’s?”

I shrugged, smiled, and sent them on their way. Already in my mind I saw myself subduing the guard protecting Giulia Rosati and her two little girls and then mining their still-warm hearts
.

1944

VITTORE’S KNEES WERE sore and his back ached. For five hours he had been kneeling on a wooden platform before a wall of five-hundred-year-old frescoes behind the altar of a Florentine church, swaddling the images in tinfoil and glass wool—protection from the bombing and fires that loomed. He had been at it since dawn and he had barely made a dent in the stories. He was still protecting the Old Testament prophets. John the Baptist and Mary and Jesus remained a long, long way away. He was working by the light of an Italian army flashlight and already he had run through half a dozen batteries. He didn’t know how many he had left, but not enough to finish this project. If the sun would come out, there might be enough light for him to turn the flashlight off for a while, but it was an overcast summer day, the sky an endless sheet of pale gray.

When Vittore paused, craning his neck and stretching his back, he noticed Lorenzetti standing in the shadow of the scaffolding ten feet below him.

“Be sure to leave space between the painting and your covering. You don’t want there to be any mold,” he said to Vittore.

Frescoes were Lorenzetti’s specialty, and so Vittore was able to restrain his urge to snap at him. “I’m trying,” he said simply.

“After it rains, it can be very damp in here,” Lorenzetti went on. Then he added, “And be careful not to mar the patina.”

“I know.”

In another section of the church, Emilio was swaddling a mosaic in burlap to keep the small pieces in place. Outside, Moretti was piling sandbags around a Pazzi sculpture in the courtyard. The Allies were moving north quickly now that the Nazis had given them Rome. The Germans were fighting a rearguard action as they retreated up the Italian boot, and no one could say for sure when the fighting would reach Florence. But everyone did know this: the Nazis were going to make their last stand at what they were calling the Gothic Line, a string of entrenchments and defenses along the peaks of the Apennines a good twenty to twenty-five kilometers north of the city.

“They’re outside mining the bridges right now,” Lorenzetti said, referring to the Germans, his voice tired and disgusted. “I couldn’t watch anymore. Here we are trying to save as much as we can, and they’re planning to blow up the bridges across the Arno. Even the Bridge of Santa Trinità. Nearly four hundred years old. Francavilla’s magnificent statue of spring. And those philistines are going to dynamite it.”

Vittore swung his legs over the platform and sat there. That morning Decher had told him that he didn’t expect the British or Americans to reach Monte Volta for at least a week, and he didn’t believe the Germans would make much of a stand there. He presumed Oskar Muller, the captain in charge of the artillery unit billeted at the Villa Chimera, would pull up stakes and retreat toward Arezzo. There, he expected, they might make a brief fight. But Monte Volta? Not likely, Decher said. He had laughed cryptically and told Vittore that soon his family would have their little place back.

“And you?” Vittore had asked him. “Do you think you’ll miss Florence?” Decher had gotten what he wanted: he had been pressed into real service. Tomorrow he was leaving the Uffizi and a world of art historians and academics and going to join the fight. He had been ordered to Arezzo that evening and he was taking Friedrich with him, despite the fact that the lieutenant was crippled. Apparently
Friedrich had demanded that he be allowed to accompany the colonel.

“I doubt it,” Decher had answered. “I really won’t miss this city. I’m sorry to admit that, but that’s how it is. But you know something, Vittore? I will miss Monte Volta. You people are not meant for this sort of war or even this sort of world, but sometimes you build something special. And your family’s estate? It’s special.” Then Decher had turned and left. It wasn’t good-bye—not quite yet—but somehow it felt like it. Vittore had even expected him to extend his hand, and he honestly wasn’t sure if he would have accepted it; he didn’t like Decher, and he didn’t approve of the way his father had opened up the estate to the Germans over the past year and allowed Cristina to spend so much time with Friedrich. He presumed his father regretted that hospitality now; he had been thanked for his kindness and generosity by having a Wehrmacht company take over the villa and grounds and force the entire family to live in the nursery. And Cristina, the marchese Antonio Rosati’s only daughter? The whole world knew what she was doing with the Nazi lieutenant. No good could come from that once the Germans had retreated north of Florence. Still, at least the fellow would be out of his sister’s life now. Friedrich would no longer be dancing in the villa and sunbathing beside the swimming pool. No doubt sleeping with Cristina when they were ostensibly picnicking in the high grass near the tombs.

Below him Vittore heard Lorenzetti saying something, and so he looked down at the major. “Did you hear me?” Lorenzetti was asking him. “Those bastards are going to blow up the bridges! This is not going to be like Rome. They’re not just going to sneak away in the night with their tails between their legs.”

“But at least they’re going to leave,” Vittore said.

“Not without a fight. And mark my words, any minute now they are going to take away your glass wool and tinfoil and give you a rifle. Me, too. You and I are about to be forced into becoming honest-to-God soldiers.”

The grounds of the Villa Chimera had long been chewed up by the soldiers’ jackboots and tent pegs and the deep ruts from the wheels on their lorries and jeeps, and now the estate was awash in dust and grime as the Germans packed up their gear and the four massive howitzers and prepared to retreat toward Arezzo. Some of the drivers were trying to camouflage their vehicles, using rope and twine to attach scrub from the vineyard to truck roofs and half-tracks, since they were going to have to travel by daylight, but even Cristina knew that the Allied planes would spot them when the convoy tried to blend in by the side of the road. After all, she’d been watching the airplanes for years.

She had been waiting for days for Friedrich to return, and now he had come and the timing couldn’t have been worse. It was chaos, the soldiers barking orders back and forth and racing about like whirling dervishes. She knew that many of them were also pocketing whatever silver her mother hadn’t buried—which, after all the humiliations they had endured the last month, should have been the least of her concerns, but she found the petty theft the final indignity. These soldiers, even the officers, were nothing like Friedrich.

She turned her attention from the gardens along the front walkway, which had been trampled into a riot of weeds soon after the Nazis arrived, to her lieutenant. She decided she would take him to the meadow above the tombs, one of the few corners of the estate where even during the past month she and Friedrich had found a measure of privacy. When he reached her, he took her in his arms and held her for a long quiet moment.

“You are like a statue in the midst of a sandstorm,” he whispered into her ear, trying to make a small joke. She didn’t smile. Instead she burrowed deeper against him, as if she could hide in his jacket from the sounds of the men yelling and running and the occasional roar as another motorcycle or lorry growled to life. Once she thought she heard Arabella whinny in the distance, but her horse
would have to wait. Arabella and Oriana were the only animals remaining at the Villa Chimera. The last of the sheep and the cattle had been slaughtered the moment the Germans had encamped on the estate. The soldiers had burned many of the trees in the olive grove for cooking and bonfires soon after they’d arrived. When her mother heard the sound of the chopping, she had wept on the blankets where she was curled up on the floor of the nursery.

“You don’t need to worry,” he said. “The Americans and the British will treat you well. They are not like the Russians. They’re a civilized people.”

She considered telling him that she was relieved the other Germans were leaving and she wasn’t frightened in the slightest of the approaching armies. Now she felt the sort of rage toward his countrymen that Francesca had lived with daily for years.

“How long can you stay?” she asked finally.

“Not long.”

“Hours?”

He rubbed her back slowly. “Maybe one,” he answered after a moment.

“Then come with me,” she murmured, and she stood up straight, took him by the hand, and led him through the throngs of loud young men to the hillside above the tombs.