The Light in the Ruins (42 page)

“Here I come!” Paolo called to him as he began his way down the steep incline, careful not to tumble over the rocks and roots that hid beneath the grass.

The driver paused and waited for him.

“Is everyone okay?” Paolo asked the fellow when he reached him.

“I think so,” he answered. “The older girl’s arm is broken. Maybe her foot, too.”

“And the baby?”

He shrugged. “She seems fine. Too little even to be scared. It was Elisabetta and her father who got the worst of it.”

“Vittore doesn’t look hurt.”

“You can’t see the side of his face from here. It’s a pretty bad cut.”

“And you?”

The officer pulled the handkerchief off his forehead. There was a long gash just above his eyebrow, but already the bleeding was starting to slow. Still, a welt that might soon rival the size of a bird’s egg already was forming. “I lived.”

“You might have a concussion,” Paolo said.

“I know. And I’ve done something to my ankle.”

“A sprain?”

“I guess.”

“What the hell happened?”

“That road is ridiculous. It’s meant for oxen and donkey carts, not automobiles.”

“No one sabotaged your car?”

“No.”

“And no one tried to run you off the road?”

He seemed to think about this. “Maybe I should tell people someone did. Maybe I should tell you that.”

“But it was just a bad road.”

He put the handkerchief back against his forehead and winced. “That’s right. It was just a very, very bad road. I’m from Rome, where we have modern roads.”

Paolo imagined him failing to navigate the tight turn and had to rein in his annoyance. In all likelihood, the man had been driving too damn fast. Poor Giulia. The other night she was climbing down a bedsheet with that little girl in her arms because a guard had left her for grappa. Now? This idiot before him had pretended he was racing in the Mille Miglia and nearly killed her and her children. Her husband, too. “I’m going to talk to the family,” he said finally. “I’ll see what Vittore wants to do about the burial. Can you make it back to the road?”

“Yes. I’ll be fine.”

“Good. Flag down a car. Go to the villa and tell everyone what happened. We were all starting to get worried.”

“I think that little girl and her father need to go to the hospital.”

“I think you do, too.”

“Then maybe I should go to the village instead and get a doctor for the Rosatis? I could call for an ambulance.”

“Let me talk to Vittore,” Paolo said. “You just get to the villa, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” he added, and then he continued down the hill to the family. As angry as he was at the officer, he was far more relieved that Vittore and his wife and children were
alive. Never before had a car accident—a
mere
car accident, even one this needless and stupid—made him happy.

A pillar of sunlight fell through a hole in the roof of the villa, and the thrum of voices—her aunt, the priest, the villagers who were there for her mother—began to recede for Cristina. She crossed the gravel driveway to the front steps of the house and stood there for a moment, lost in a memory. Once more she was holding in her hands her niece’s cloth dolls and the red and gold napkins that would become the gowns of Renaissance princesses. She gazed back at the small crowd and told herself that her brother and his family had to be fine, if only because the sheer logistics of killing or kidnapping them between the village and the estate seemed unmanageable. She reminded herself that they were being escorted by an officer with a gun. As her eyes wandered among the moldering ruins of her childhood home—the gardens, the terrace, and of course the villa itself—she recalled the thousands of hours she had spent beside the swimming pool. Slowly, almost like a sleepwalker, she walked to the edge of the hill and gazed down on it, the pool now but a cracked and dry cavity, weeds stretching up toward the sun through the tile. Still, she saw herself there in a white bathing suit and a towel. A German soldier in a gray-green uniform, his eyes a hyacinth blue. She reached for the stone at the center of the necklace he’d given her years and years ago and pressed it against the top of her sternum. Against her heart. She almost never wore it when she was going to see Vittore because it annoyed him: he said it meant she was still dreaming of a man long dead, but she knew he was also angry because Friedrich had been Decher’s adjutant and a German. But she wore it today. How could she not? She was returning to the place where Friedrich had given it to her.

For months after the war had finally ended, she had expected him to return to her. For most of 1945. It wasn’t until Christmas
Eve that she had finally lit a candle in his name. It was at the Duomo in Montepulciano. Her mother had stood beside her when she had set fire to the wick and then together they had knelt. Now her breath was a little short with grief for Beatrice. She was thirty years old, and she had lived with her mother every single day of her life. Even when, over the years, she had spent the night with a lover or with Francesca in Florence, the next day she had always gone home to the marchesa. She wiped her eyes and longed for stupor and shock—to feel only hollow inside—because it seemed whenever she was alone she cried.

She glanced back and saw that her aunt was chatting with the villagers and farmhands who had come to watch the caskets being lowered into the earth, and so she started down the hill toward the pool. She just kept walking. She imagined herself a woman walking off a cliff. She moved gingerly along the terrace, careful not to trip among the fragments and debris, and then she surprised herself and continued past the pool. She gazed at the brush that had overtaken the olive grove, at the copse of trees at the edge of the vineyard that were rising amid the stanchions that had once shouldered grapevines. Wild sunflowers were spreading along the knoll where the cattle had grazed. In the months after the war, all manner of squatters and refugees had tried to live on this land. The family hadn’t had the energy to run them off. Eventually they had all left on their own.

She paused before the foundation for the barn. The walls, shaken by the shelling that had rocked the estate for days, had collapsed. Even without the frame, however, Cristina knew exactly where the horse stalls had been. Where her beloved Arabella had slept. She stood for a long moment by the spot where the animal had been killed and where she had held Friedrich’s pistol and contemplated shooting a trio of German soldiers—everyone but her lieutenant. Then she knelt over the earth where she and her parents had buried the horse. As shallow as the grave was, it had never, as far as she knew, been disturbed. It was an almost indistinguishable
mound now, a ripple among the vast swells that rolled out from the barn in all directions.

When she rose, she brushed the grass off her knees and listened. She heard neither birds nor planes. She didn’t hear any vehicles back at the villa—no tires on the gravel, no car doors slamming shut—and so she continued on, veering off onto the tufa path. She honestly wasn’t sure whether she was going to the Etruscan ruins or to the cemetery, but they were so close it really didn’t matter.

It was a few minutes later, when she stood on the ground where once she and Francesca and the children had picnicked, that she remembered something: somewhere amid the ancient and the modern dead were supposed to be two detectives. Some fellow named Cassini and Serafina, who had gone after him. She wondered where in the world they were now, and despite the summer heat felt the hairs rise up along the back of her neck.

1944

DECHER STOOD ALONE and gazed down into the pit. He was aware of the summer sun on his back, even through his uniform tunic. The bodies, he saw, were bleeding out through their white blouses and red-check work shirts, turning the dry Tuscan dirt into mud. Pig slop. The dark eyes on many of the corpses were still open.

Enraged, he’d barked his orders in a voice that was manic and shrill, commanding his men to bayonet these idiot peasants, and his men had obeyed. They’d been as furious as he was, and not a soldier had even hinted that it would have been better to simply shoot the Italians. The partisans were cowards, and this was the only way to rein them in: kill their neighbors, kill their families—their mothers and fathers and children and friends. Were any of these civilians related to partisans? Decher had absolutely no idea. But that didn’t matter. The Allies were pushing north through Italy and seemed poised to break out from the Normandy beachhead in France. The Russians were nearing Warsaw. This was no time to allow the massacre of four German officers to go unpunished. The rule was six to one, and Decher had been ordered to round up twenty-four civilians. At some point one had slipped away—escaped. And that was the straw that had led Decher to order the remaining twenty-three to be bayoneted as they stood with their backs to the mass grave they had dug at gunpoint here at the edge of the olive grove.

He felt the sweat running down his spine and puddling just
above his belt in the small of his back. God, he hated this country. Loathed it. Then his eye caught something moving in the pit and he stared a little more carefully. Fingers. A hand. It was moving like a wounded, dying spider up and along the black fabric of … that fucking village priest’s cassock. It was the fucking village priest’s hand. The bastard wasn’t quite dead and his eyes were open, and for a moment he and Decher stared at each other as the priest’s fingers reached and then rested upon the large gold cross that lay flat against his still-beating heart.

Beside him Decher felt a presence, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off the priest. It was a contest, and he wouldn’t lose to this bastard. Turning away would be an admission of guilt, and he would not feel guilty. This priest and his traitorous peasant parishioners had brought this slaughter on themselves.

“Sir?”

Decher recognized the voice. It was Lieutenant Reinhardt.

“Sir,” Reinhardt said again, “should I gather a detail to bury the bodies, or would you prefer we have other peasants do it?”

He ignored the lieutenant and, without taking his eyes off the priest, unsnapped his holster and removed his pistol. Finally he had to blink so he could clear his eyes and focus. But then he raised the Walther, aimed it straight at the priest’s forehead, and fired. The body spasmed from the violence of the gunshot, and instantly a black hole appeared that almost matched the color of the cassock. Decher lowered his gun and then, much to his surprise, felt his stomach lurch the way it had that time he had ridden in an airplane and abruptly it had fallen a thousand feet in an air pocket. He put his hand to his mouth, a reflex, because he knew he was about to be sick.

“Sir?”

He glanced once at the lieutenant, started to nod that he was fine, he was fine. But he wasn’t. He fell to his knees and vomited at the edge of the pit.

“This heat,” Reinhardt murmured. “It gets to all of us.”

Decher spat and looked up at the young officer. At his obedient
blue eyes. Reinhardt was a powerful, heavyset young man who understood that the German nation was fighting for its life. He was, Decher decided, everything that Strekker wasn’t, and he thought to himself,
Thank God Strekker isn’t here
. He shuddered when he thought of what Strekker would have said about all … this. He probably would have to shoot the sanctimonious cretin for desertion if he ever showed up.

No, he wouldn’t shoot him. Because Strekker hadn’t deserted. He wasn’t the type. He was either dead somewhere on the road between here and the Villa Chimera—he imagined the vehicle he was in being strafed by the RAF—or working his way north as best he could. Strekker would have a legitimate reason for his absence.

“Before you bury them,” he told Reinhardt finally, “blow up the bodies.”

“Excuse me?”

“Put some explosives in the pit and blow them up. Bury whatever’s left.”

The lieutenant seemed to contemplate this idea. Then he shrugged and yelled at two privates to round up some charges they could bury among the bodies.