The Light in the Ruins (3 page)

The thin path opened upon a small cul-de-sac, the earthen and rock walls composing it little more than three meters high. Field grass grew along the roof of the tombs, and the roots and longer strands dangled over the archways like bangs. Altogether, two rectangular windows had been unearthed, and four arched doorways. And then there were the remains of the columns: one seven feet high, and a pair that barely would reach the knees of a grown man. Once the columns had helped to support a great sloping roof that in all likelihood had spanned the cul-de-sac. Now the roof was
gone and weeds climbed up between the stones. The artwork and ornamentation that long ago had graced this section had faded into nothingness over time, and it looked primitive—the home of cavemen, Cristina thought.

It was only when visitors ducked their heads and wandered underneath the archways, extending before them their flashlights or candles or lanterns, that they began to understand the magnificence of what had once been here. There were six tombs, the chambers cut deep into the hillside. Inside, the artwork was better protected from centuries of erosion and wasting and sun. Paintings of musicians and dancers, invariably in profile, ran along the walls and low ceilings, as did drawings of fruit trees and birds and, in a corner of one tomb, a young fisherman. From one entrance a visitor could walk smack into the short row of pedestals with saucerlike tops on which urns the size of thigh-high rosemary shrubs had once rested. From another entrance a person might discover the tomb with the long platforms on which the Rosatis had found the sarcophagi, two of them, both beautifully preserved, one with a sculpture of a young man atop the lid and the other with a man and a woman—a husband and a wife. And though the urns and the sarcophagi and the funeral artifacts had been exhumed and sent to the museum in Arezzo, the musicians and the dancers and the birds remained on the walls.

Cristina handed a candle to each of the officers and kept one for herself. She started to fumble with the matches, but the Italian major had a cigarette lighter and lit all three of the tapers in an instant. Then together they stooped and she led them through the middle archway, into the first of the rooms with the low ceilings where two and a half millennia earlier perhaps her very own ancestors had been laid to rest.

1955

IT FRUSTRATED SERAFINA BETTINI when the other detectives tried to spare her their stories from the worst of the crime scenes. She was the only woman in the small homicide unit in 1955, and despite her work with the partisans in 1943 and 1944—when, in fact, she was a teenager—the men still treated her with either ham-handed attempts at chivalry or outright condescension. Serafina honestly wasn’t sure which she found more exasperating. Most of the men in the Florence
polizia
didn’t even know that Paolo Ficino allowed her, against regulations, to stash a Beretta in her purse. They no longer asked her out, but that was largely because they had all come to the conclusion, much as it pained them, that she was probably going to marry that American banker with whom she was living. If only, the men sometimes said to her, feigning either wistfulness or disapproval, her mother and father were still alive. Still, no one ever commented on her right ear if a breeze blew aside her hair; no one mentioned her neck when she let down her guard and loosened the high collar of her blouse against the heat. For that she was grateful.

But she was a woman, and so, even though she was at her desk the afternoon that Francesca Rosati’s body was found in her small apartment on the Via Zara, Paolo Ficino almost didn’t take her with him. It was too grisly. The chief inspector put down the phone, thought back on what he himself had seen in the war—which was, in his opinion, blessedly limited, and mostly involved camouflaging firing platforms for arrogant, impressively cold-blooded Nazi
sharpshooters—and wondered if he should assign a different pair to this new crime scene. Paolo viewed Serafina a bit as he did his own daughter, and he sure as hell wouldn’t take his daughter to an apartment where someone had cut out the heart from a woman’s chest and left it beside the vanity mirror.
Good Lord, how do you even cut out a human heart?
he thought. What sorts of tools or surgical instruments did this crazy person carry about with him? But he and Serafina had the lightest caseload, and the men in the unit were investigating Florence’s more civilized, less gruesome murders or they were off for the day. Besides, she was his partner. That was the reality. She was his partner because he was the whole reason she had been allowed into the unit, and because no other man was going to work with a woman. So he grabbed his gun and his straw hat, and despite his reluctance told her to join him as he passed through the office.

“It won’t be pretty,” he said, looking up ever so slightly at Serafina as the two of them started down the sidewalk to his badly dinged little Fiat. Though he knew he was roughly Serafina’s height, the younger detective rarely wore a shoe with anything less than a two-inch heel. She was not an especially tall woman, but Paolo was—and this was being generous with his self-image—of only moderate height for a man. Serafina’s heels, he surmised rightly, were both a fashion statement and a reminder to the men in the unit that she was formidable, too.

“And it’s a woman?” she asked him, ducking her head and squeezing into the sweltering car.

“It is. The officer said her throat was cut and …”

“And?”

“Someone cut out her heart.”

Briefly, just as Paolo had, Serafina tried to imagine what kind of knife or bone saw someone was carrying around Florence. She guessed she would be offered an inkling in a few minutes. “And did someone take it?” she asked.

“No. He left it in the apartment.”

“Do we have a name?”

He nodded as he pulled out into the street, barely missing a young man who roared past them on a red Vespa. “Francesca Rosati. Thirty-nine years old, lived alone. Worked at a dress shop near the train station.”

“Children? A husband?”

“I don’t know. But she has a sister-in-law. Cristina. It was Cristina who found her. So at least at one point she had a husband. The officer said Cristina was supposed to have lunch with the victim today.”

Serafina lit a cigarette and gazed at the small flame for a long moment before blowing out the match. She thought of her own siblings. Two brothers. She recalled, as she always did when she first thought of them, where she had been when she learned that the Nazis had executed the pair. She was in the camp in the woods midway up Mount Amiata, waking up to the hunger that greeted all the partisans that winter; she hadn’t eaten dinner the night before, and there would be nothing for breakfast that morning. “Did she go to work today—Francesca?”

“All I know right now,” Paolo was saying, “is that this sister-in-law was supposed to meet her at the dress shop and Francesca wasn’t there. So she had not come to work today, to answer your question. Cristina went to Francesca’s apartment, and that’s when she found her.”

“So she was killed last night.”

“Unless she didn’t go to work yesterday either.”

“Are the two women from Florence?”

He shrugged. “I meant it—you now know just about every single detail that I do.”

“One more question.”

“Go ahead. But don’t expect a very satisfying answer.”

“Where is the woman’s heart? You said whoever killed her didn’t take it.”

Paolo glanced over at her and saw that she was staring straight ahead. She was, he had always assumed, responsible for a disconcerting number of the dead in the Tuscan hills to the south.
Granted, she had killed no one in a decade. Since the end of the war. But once she had been at least as proficient and hardhearted as those Germans he’d known whose job it was to put a bullet into the brain of any British or American with an officer’s bar on his uniform.

“It’s on her vanity,” he answered, after he had turned his attention back to the street. “It’s in an ashtray before the mirror. I told you, this isn’t going to be pretty.”

Whoever had opened Francesca Rosati’s sternum and pulled apart the ribs had not been a surgeon. Or if he had, he had not been especially concerned with tidiness when he had sawed through the bone and sliced the arteries and veins that sprang from the heart like tree roots. Blood had puddled inside the body cavity and plenty more had been sponged up by the woman’s nightgown, but two long streams, nearly black now that they had begun to congeal, ran along the otherwise imperceptible slope of the wooden floor, from just inside the front door back toward the small bedroom. More blood had splattered the living room side of the door, the beige raincoat that hung on the coat rack beside it, and the side of a very tired-looking blue couch. Meanwhile, the heart sat in a scallop-shaped ashtray in the apartment’s bedroom, just as Paolo had told her.

Three people were waiting for them inside the apartment: the building’s concierge, the dead woman’s sister-in-law, and the uniformed officer the concierge had found on the street when Cristina had pounded on his door, hysterical, to tell him that someone had killed Francesca. Cristina was sitting in a chair by the living room’s lone window, hunched over and staring down at the street, since it was the only view that wouldn’t include either her sister-in-law or her sister-in-law’s heart. Before Serafina went to talk to her—and the detective understood intuitively that the division of labor would involve Paolo questioning the concierge while she took the lead with the sister-in-law—she pulled the policeman aside. He
was a fellow her age, with a pencil-thin mustache, whose name was Nino, and she could sense that he was the sort who would make a pass at her even before she and Paolo had left the apartment.

“Tell me,” she said, “has the concierge said anything to you about the door to the building?”

“What about it?”

“There was a little glass window—rare in a front door. And the glass was gone in the pane by the lock. Did someone break it to get in? Or has the glass been missing for ages and people have been waltzing in and out of the building?”

“He found the glass broken this morning. He swept it up.”

“Did he report it? Call the police?”

“He said he guessed if someone had broken in and stolen something, one of the tenants would have told him. He said he was going to ask around as he saw the tenants, but he wasn’t alarmed.”

“And the glass is in the garbage?”

“One would presume.” The officer shrugged. “He figured it was just some kid. Or maybe a tenant who locked himself out.”

She nodded. She was a little surprised there wasn’t a crowd in the hallway, but she attributed this to the fact that it was early afternoon and most people were either at work or savoring their siesta. She would be sure to get a list of the tenants from the concierge, but she would also knock on some doors before leaving.

She turned back and saw Paolo squatting beside the corpse, staring at two flies that were resting on the dead woman’s hip. He sensed she was watching him and looked up at her. “I called for a photographer and someone to dust for prints before we left the office,” he said to her. “And the coroner.” Then he stood. “Let’s seal the room until they arrive.”