The Light in the Ruins (34 page)

“Where are your mother and Alessia?” he asked the boy.

“They’re in the kitchen. The leader is demanding food and medicine.”

“Good luck finding either,” Cristina said.

“Medicine,” Antonio repeated. “Are some of them hurt?”

The boy nodded. “One. A girl. She’s dying, for sure.”

Beatrice looked Massimo in the eye. “A girl? Your age?”

“No, I mean Aunt Cristina’s age. She’s a partisan, too.”

“Has she been shot?” Cristina asked.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know she’s dying?”

“They have her lying on her side and I saw her back,” he answered. “It was horrible. Alessia cried when she saw it.” Then he took his grandfather’s hand in both of his and started pulling him toward the path. Grimly, Cristina and Beatrice followed.

1955

GIULIA RETREATED BACK into the bedroom and pushed the door shut. Frantically she grabbed the wooden chair that sat before her vanity and angled it against the doorknob. Then she gazed at the dark room, at the shapes of her sleeping children. She tried to recall what there might be here that could serve as a weapon. In the kitchen there were knives, but she wasn’t in the kitchen. In the living room there was a wrought iron poker beside the fireplace, but likewise, she wasn’t in the living room. Some evenings she and Vittore had brought candles into the bedroom, but tonight the candlesticks were still on the dining room table. And the phone? It was on the other side of the apartment; it might just as well have been in another country.

She guessed that she could jump from the second-story window with Tatiana in her arms, but she was sure to break or sprain her ankle. And Elisabetta? She was four. Who knew how badly she might hurt herself in the leap to the cobblestone sidewalk? Besides, then what? She and the girls couldn’t possibly elude whoever had—and she told herself she was panicking as the vision lodged itself in her mind—cut the heart from the police officer who was supposed to be protecting her and her family.

But she could cry for help out the window. She could scream—and to protect her children, she was prepared to scream loud and long.

She pressed her ear against the door, the wood unexpectedly cool, listening. But there was nothing, only the rapid thrum of her
heart in her head. She breathed in through her nose, trying to calm herself, and she thought she detected a new aroma in the apartment. Lemons. Was it possible? She thought she might have had a lemon in the kitchen, but why would that scent come to her? Or was it her imagination? It must have been, she told herself, because if she smelled anything now, it wasn’t citrus; it was a gas, a rotten gas. Something putrid, perhaps wafting up from the street.

“Mama?”

She turned and saw the silhouette of Elisabetta sitting up in bed. Giulia opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She realized she was afraid to move away from the door.

“You should be sleeping.”

Serafina turned and pressed the tip of her cigarette into the ashtray. She was sitting before the glass doors to the terrace, just inside their apartment. She saw Milton leaning against the wall in his pajamas. She hadn’t heard him emerge from his bedroom. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said to him softly.

“No, not at all.”

“You’re lying,” she said. She had been sitting in the dark and watching three apartments across the Arno that still had their lights on. She assumed that the people who lived in each had fallen asleep with a lamp or two on, because she had seen no movement in any of them. “Do you think there are people awake across the river?” she asked.

He ignored her question and flipped on the sconce on the far wall. It wouldn’t be so bright that it would blind them, but it would allow him to see what he wanted. He pulled a chair around the table so he was sitting beside her. “So,” he said, pointing at the ashtray. “You’ve smoked two cigarettes.”

“I guess.”

“But—let’s see—there are seven matches in there.”

Serafina sighed but said nothing. She knew where this was going, and there was nothing to say. She watched him lean over
into her lap and very gently pull up the hem of her nightgown. Resigned, she put her hands on the sides of the seat for purchase and raised her hips ever so slightly, enabling him to settle her nightgown at her waist and expose her legs completely. She stared across the river at the three lights as he parted her thighs and then listened to him as he slowly counted to five. She didn’t have to look down to know what the burn marks looked like, especially once he brushed away the ash.

“Serafina,” he said tenderly, after he had sat up. He massaged her left shoulder, the corner of her back where she could tolerate being touched.

Without meeting his eyes she said, “Some people bite their fingernails. I do this.”

Across the river there was absolutely no sign of life. She nuzzled her face into Milton’s neck and wondered if she had ever in her life not been lonely.

In the morning Paolo had a long and entirely unsatisfying phone conversation with his counterpart in the police department in Rome, a tall fellow Paolo had met before with the oddly appropriate last name Torregrossa: tall tower. Paolo recalled Torregrossa as a rail with thinning brown hair and ears that seemed glued flat to the sides of his head.

“So the fellow has been fired?” Paolo asked him.

“He will be,” Torregrossa said. “At the moment he has merely been suspended while we investigate. The important thing is that the family is fine—that nothing happened to them.”

Paolo thought of the commedia dell’arte and the daggered, comic, and wholly ineffective Il Capitano. He and his wife had seen a performance two weeks ago not far from here. Five blocks, maybe. Last night must have been terrifying for Giulia Rosati and her little family, but in the light of day the big problem was that their guard was a stock character from a hyperbolic strain of Renaissance theater.

“Just how drunk was he when he was found?” Paolo asked. “Passed out, I assume.”

“No, actually. Only hung over. And he wasn’t found. He returned to the Rosatis’ apartment just before daybreak. By then everyone was gone.”

“Where are Giulia and the children now?”

“We took them to some family friends who live on the other side of the Vatican.”

Paolo tried to re-create the critical moments in his head: Giulia Rosati lowering her four-year-old to the ground in a bedsheet in the middle of the night and then climbing down that bedsheet herself with a toddler cradled against her chest. “Do you know what time the guard left the apartment?” he asked.

“It was early. Still light out. He says he didn’t leave the front door open. Insists a breeze must have opened it. He thought he was just going to run downstairs to a little place where he could buy a soda.”

“And instead he bought a grappa.”

Torregrossa chuckled. “He ran into friends. One thing led to another. The next thing he knew, he woke up, it was almost morning, and he was in the park by the castle.”

“Those are fine friends.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“The family has another guard now—at their friends’ apartment?”

“Yes. And this one will know not to excuse himself for a soda.”

“Or a grappa.”

“Indeed,” said Torregrossa. “Or a grappa.”

“When was the last time you saw Roberto Piredda?” Serafina asked Vittore that morning in his hotel’s small dining room. Vittore was visibly agitated about the ordeal his wife had endured last night, and Serafina found it difficult to keep him focused. He kept circling back to the ineptitude of the Rome police and his
desire to get on the road and drive home. He was not precisely chain-smoking, because he wasn’t finishing his cigarettes. But he was continually lighting them, one American Lucky Strike after another, taking a single deep puff, and then forgetting them until they had almost burned out. Then he would light another.

“I don’t know,” he told her. “It’s been years.”

“That’s what Piredda said. He didn’t think he had seen you in at least five years—and the last time was at a lecture at the University of Milan, where he just happened to run into you. I think he was a little hurt that he’s never met your children.”

“Please. People change. Times change.”

“But once he was like a mentor to you.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you cut ties with him?”

“Why do you think it was me? Maybe he cut the ties. Maybe neither of us did. Maybe life just intervened and we grew apart.”

“Was he correct about when you two saw each other last?”

“At the university? It’s possible. I don’t recall seeing him since. I barely recall seeing him at that lecture.”

“Did you two have a quarrel?”

“At the lecture?”

“Or before,” she said.

He reached for the smoldering cigarette, took a puff, and then extinguished it. “Look, we grew apart during the war. Before the war he was merely an archeologist. He understood the tombs on our property. I viewed him as a scholar. But during the war—during the occupation—he became something else.” He brought a fresh Lucky Strike to his lips, and Serafina watched the flame on his lighter when he raised it toward his face. After he had lit the cigarette, he continued, “He became a bootlicker. It was pathetic. Pathetic and sad. He gave away two-thousand-year-old artifacts to philistine Nazis. He encouraged this Ahnenerbe nonsense that there was some connection between Etruscans and Aryans. He was the worst of the toadies. But there was no explosion between us. I just felt dirty being around him.”

“Did you feel that way around your father?” Instantly, the moment the words had escaped her lips, she regretted them. She wondered if there was a way to retract them, to take them back. But they were out there between them now, and of course she couldn’t.

“My father and I had an agreement the last years of his life,” he said, his voice leaden. “Giulia made sure of that.”

“And that was?”

“I would abide his presence. I would be cognizant of the reality that he had lost almost everything—including, worst of all, his oldest son and his grandchildren.”

“But you didn’t forgive him.”

Vittore remained silent. He glanced at his watch.