The Light in the Ruins (32 page)

“I was. I had to go to Florence sometimes. Siena, too. And sometimes they came to me.”

“The Germans.”

“The Germans, the Italians. Everyone who was interested in either looting or protecting our artistic heritage.”

“Did Vittore have enemies?”

He seemed to think about this. “Vittore’s still alive. It’s his mother and his sister-in-law who are dead. I think the better question is whether those two had enemies, don’t you?”

“I guess I mean the family. Did the Rosatis have enemies?”

“Who knows? Those were very messy years. We all made friends and we all made enemies. Most of us did whatever it took to stay alive. By 1944, if the Germans weren’t lining you up against a wall and shooting you for protecting the partisans, the partisans were lining you up against a wall and shooting you for collaborating with the Germans.”

“And you?”

“Me? I just tried to keep my head down.” He gazed for a long moment at the high collar of her blouse. At her neck. At the side of her face. “I have a sense, my dear, that you were not quite so fortunate.”

Reflexively she touched her head and discovered that the breeze from the fan had blown back her hair, exposing her ruined ear and the scars on her neck. Quickly she pulled her hair forward, pivoting in her seat so it wouldn’t happen again. “A birth defect,” she mumbled.

“No. Burned flesh,” he corrected her. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged and composed herself. Brought their conversation back to his war, not hers. “But you did allow the Germans to send some artifacts from the museum to the Gestapo chief in Rome,” she said. “True?”

He sat back. “I hate to play semantics, but I did not
allow
them. That would suggest I had a choice. I had none. And
allowing
a few Etruscan vases and pots to be sent to some fellow in Rome to help keep the peace? Let that be the worst of my crimes.”

“Have you been at a dig lately?” she asked him. “Off in the field?”

“Ah, I wish. There is a dig occurring right now near Volterra. But no, I am chained to my museum these days.” Then he motioned toward the shards on his worktable. “I insist that the
students and the professors at the site bring me back the occasional scraps. It’s a tease, but a welcome one.”

She considered pointing at his knapsack and tools but thought better of the idea. Other than the dustpan with its Rorschach of rust, everything, including that saw, was spotless.

Which, she decided, might mean everything … or nothing at all.

Giulia Rosati awoke in the night with a start. She was aware that the moon was low and guessed even before feeling for the clock on the nightstand and peering carefully at the numerals that it was two or three in the morning. It was, she saw once her eyes had adjusted, a few minutes past three. Beside her in her bed were both children. Elisabetta had been devastated by the idea that she would never see her
nonna
again, even if it meant that her grandmother was smiling at her from heaven with the angels. The four-year-old had howled when Giulia had told her, which, in turn, had set little Tatiana to wailing. The only way Giulia had been able to settle them down was to bring them into her and Vittore’s bedroom, which was, in fact, where they had slept the past two nights and where she had presumed they would sleep until Vittore returned. She had not wanted her girls out of her sight.

Nevertheless, last night she hadn’t expected that they would all have retreated to the bedroom quite so early.

Which, Giulia told herself, was why she had woken up now. She had already been in bed a long while.

She saw that both children were sleeping peacefully, Tatiana on her back with one small arm draped across her tummy and Elisabetta curled on her side, her face buried deeply in the pillow. They were all on top of the sheets. Giulia sighed, relieved that everyone was safe, and for a moment listened to the sound of their breathing. A floor below them, outside on the street, she heard a car—a cab, she presumed, at this hour of the night.

Only then did it dawn on her: the light in the hallway was off;
the lights in the living room were off. They were all supposed to be on. That idiot guard must have fallen asleep.

Furious, she climbed gingerly over Tatiana, careful not to wake her, and started across the bedroom toward the hallway. And then, in the doorway, she stopped dead in her tracks. The guard might have dozed off, but why would he have shut off the lights? It didn’t make sense.

She stood there, thinking, and then she felt it. The small, barely perceptible breeze. She and Vittore had lived in the apartment since before Elisabetta was born. She knew the drafts, the way the eddies of wind might cool their home during the night, and the way the heat from the kitchen when she was cooking might settle for hours in the living room; she could sense when a window was open or closed, which doors were ajar. And even before she had peered anxiously down the corridor, she knew that the front door was open. Wide open. She knew it—and all that anger turned instantly into terror.

1944

THE COUNTRY WAS not broken, and he was relieved. At least not all of it was. At least not yet. The sheer speed of the German retreat, Marco Rosati decided, was going to spare his beloved Crete Senesi, this land of vineyards and olive groves and endless fields of sunflowers south of Siena. Although the sun had been rising for easily forty-five minutes now, he continued to walk. In the night he had struggled up the long hill from San Quirico d’Orcia to Pienza, allowing himself in the smallest hours to actually traipse along the side of the road, where the travel was far easier than through the brush. One small convoy of German trucks had passed, but their arrival had been heralded by the sound of the engines struggling to make headway up the steep switchbacks, and Marco had had plenty of time to crawl into the broom and hide amid the yellow flowers.

About four in the morning, when he had reached the parapets on the outskirts of Pienza, he had murmured a small prayer of gratitude as he gazed up at the silhouette of the Duomo. Then he had detoured slightly to the west of the town, picking up the road to Monte Volta a kilometer beyond the arch that led to the piazza and the Corso il Rossellino. He had been walking for three nights, hiding and resting during the day, since he had managed to run away from the work crew somewhere to the southwest of Mount Amiata. He had been more or less slave labor for the past five months, repairing the roads and railway tracks the Allies had bombed or building fortifications it was clear the Nazis were never going to use. Instead they were going to make their stand, everyone
understood, much farther north, along the mountains that crossed the boot beyond Florence. And that, perhaps, was how he had been able to escape. The Germans were so fixated on staying ahead of the Allies that the guards had grown lax; self-preservation mattered more than ensuring that none of the Italian help slunk away in the night. He was one of three former Italian army officers who understood where they were and how they might be able to walk to their homes within days or weeks, and who had decided it was time to disappear into the countryside. They had slipped into the woods and then separated, and Marco had thought less and less about those other two soldiers, especially as he drew nearer to Francesca and Massimo and Alessia. He had not been able to communicate with his family since May. A German captain—like Marco, an engineer—was going to spend a few hours taking in the hot springs in Bagno Vignoni on a brief leave and took mercy on him. He agreed to drop by the Villa Chimera and reassure the Rosatis that Marco was alive and well—or, in any case, as well as any of the laborers could be, all of them working long hours in the summer sun with a daily bread ration that wouldn’t have filled the stomach of a toddler. When Marco told the captain that his younger sister was involved with a German lieutenant, the fellow had grown especially obliging.

Now Marco wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. Before him loomed no more than a dozen kilometers, though two of them were almost straight up. The last hill was the steep climb to Castelmuzio. Then he would pass the fountain with the statue of a wingless angel beside a toothless lion. This wasn’t war damage; the sculptures had been that way since well before he was born. From the summit on the far side of Castelmuzio, he would be able to see his beloved Villa Chimera and the cedars that marked the entrance and dotted the hillsides. He sighed and inhaled deeply. The morning air was still cool. Ahead of him was a small farm he recognized from his childhood. He didn’t know the peasants who lived there, but they would know him, or at least they would know his name. Marco, the marchese’s older son. He decided he would rest there.
He would knock on their door and sleep on whatever bed or straw they could offer. Then, after dark, he would go home. When his children awoke in the morning, he would be waiting.

Cristina sat on the ground and stared at the columns of black smoke and white dust as they curlicued together into the sky, her horse’s head on her knees. She was stroking the dead animal’s mane, but her eyes were on what was left of the medieval granary. A single tower. A moment ago there had been two.

Friedrich and Bayer stood perfectly still and watched the spiraling ash, too, suddenly oblivious to her and the fact that Bayer had just shot a healthy, beloved horse and one of his soldiers was down. But Schreiner, the private with at the very least a broken arm, managed to sit up. The other private looked at him and then went to stand beside the two lieutenants.

It was Bayer who spoke first. “How the hell is the one still standing?” he asked. It was as if, in the numbness that seemed to envelop them all after the blast, he had forgotten that he and Friedrich had been fighting.

“I gather the plan was to bring them both down?” Friedrich asked.

Bayer nodded. “Do you have any field glasses?”

“No.”

“It’s the damnedest thing,” Bayer said after a moment.

“What is?”

“These days,” Bayer said, “the Italians can’t do a damn thing right. But seven or eight hundred years ago? They could build a fucking granary we still can’t blow up.”

Friedrich turned away and knelt beside Cristina. Schreiner was looking down at the way his arm was hanging limply by his side.

“I’m sorry,” Friedrich said to her, his anger subsumed by his grief. He was aware of how small and impotent his words sounded.

She realized she was shaking. Her whole body was trembling
and she couldn’t stop crying. But she continued to gaze across the narrow valley that separated the estate from the village because she was afraid to look down into the eyes of her horse. The animal’s head was dead weight in her lap. She thought of the uncountable hours she had spent riding and brushing her. As the marchese’s daughter, Cristina had grown up in a rarefied and profoundly insular cocoon. She had not been friendless, precisely, but her world would have been far more lonely had it not been for Arabella. Likewise, the horse, Cristina knew, had trusted her. The horse had trusted her absolutely. And now? Now it had come to this. She felt Friedrich’s hand massaging the back of her neck where it met her shoulders, and she turned her attention from the smoldering remains of the granary to Bayer. Then she looked down and noticed Friedrich’s holstered pistol. A wisp of a thought came to her, vague but hungry, and she leaned against him, ducking beneath both his arms, and in one single, swift motion unsnapped the holster and pulled free the Walther pistol. He tried to grab her hands and stop her, but she was too fast. She rolled away from him and stood, aiming the gun at Bayer.