The Light in the Ruins (12 page)

Finally they all heard footsteps, the sound of heavy boots echoing on marble down the hallway. They were standing in the vast,
windowless corridor outside the room where the relics from the Villa Chimera were kept. When Cristina looked up, she saw a group of soldiers approaching, Germans as well as Italians. She saw Lorenzetti and Decher, the pair who had first come to see the tombs, before she saw her brother, because he was a few paces behind them. But then he was standing in front of her, grinning a little darkly, as Lorenzetti and Decher and four other men disappeared down a perpendicular corridor before reaching them. He embraced his parents and next wrapped his arms around Francesca and her two children. Only then did he turn his attention toward Cristina.

“You are as bad as those two,” he said to her, pointing at his nephew and niece. “I leave you alone in Monte Volta for a few months and look how you grow up!” She smiled, but before she could respond he was saying to their father, “That must have been some drive you had today. I’m so sorry.”

“Frustrating, disturbing, yes.”

“I fear it’s just a taste of what’s coming.”

Behind her brother Cristina saw another soldier approaching, a German. He was walking with a slight limp. He was about to veer off down the corridor where the other soldiers had gone when he noticed her and her family and paused for the briefest of seconds. Then he started toward them.

“So this is your family,” he said to Vittore. He was tall and slim, and his eyes were a blue so vivid she was reminded of the hyacinths that grew along the winding road up to the villa. He was smiling, his lips full and a little feminine. He removed his cap and wiped his bangs off his forehead. His hair was the color of mustard flowers. “I’m Lieutenant Strekker,” he began, extending his hand to her father. “I have the pleasure of working with Vittore.”

Her father took the young man’s hand awkwardly, surprised that the soldier had reached out to him. Cristina thought he was accepting it largely because it would have been unheard of for a man in her father’s position not to shake a hand that was offered.

“I just saw the artifacts from your villa,” the lieutenant said. “Wonderful. The chimera on that pot, it’s—”

“It’s not a pot. It’s a hydria,” Vittore said patiently. “It was used for carrying water.”

“Still, the beast is beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful. And the detail on the flames? Remarkable. I was sure it could breathe fire. I felt the heat on my skin. And then there were those dancers on that plate. I know Colonel Decher was very interested.”

Vittore looked away, unable to suppress a small, wry smirk. “His colonel thinks he saw the roots of fascism in a piece of plate and a pot,” he said. “Or perhaps a way to curry favor with the Gestapo in Rome.”

“So your colonel is Decher,” her father observed. “He was one of the officers who came to my house yesterday.”

“That’s right,” Strekker said.

The marchese nodded, but he looked a little exasperated. He introduced the rest of the family to the lieutenant. When he reached his daughter, Strekker bowed his head in her direction. “I love the name Cristina. It was my mother’s name, though I’m sure you spell yours differently. My mother’s version has a
z
. She was half Hungarian.”

“What happened to her?” she asked reflexively, and just as the words were escaping her mouth she worried that the question was far too personal.

“She died—but it was a long time ago.”

Before he could say more, Francesca was beside the two of them, telling the German in a whispered voice that nevertheless had a hint of venom, “Your uniform is frightening enough to my children. They’ve just seen a field of corpses. Please don’t make it worse by talking about how your mother died.”

“I understand completely,” he told Francesca, seemingly unperturbed by her anger. When Cristina glanced down at Massimo and Alessia, they were staring up at the lieutenant as if there were no other adults in the corridor.

“I only have a little while,” Vittore was telling their father. “There’s a café a block from here. We should go.”

“Would you like to join us?” Cristina asked the young soldier. “After all, you work with my brother.” She had proffered the invitation spontaneously, aware only after she had spoken how forward she must have sounded.

“It’s been a pleasure to work with Vittore—a gift to have an expert such as your brother show me Florence firsthand.”

Vittore looked at him quizzically. Then he remarked, “That’s me. I’m not an archeologist. I’m a tour guide for visiting Germans.”

“And every day you find something exquisite to share,” he said, his eyes on Cristina.

She wondered if she was blushing. “So you will come to the restaurant, Lieutenant—” She paused, trying to recall his name.

“It’s Strekker,” he said. “But please, you must call me Friedrich. And I would be honored to join you.”

Francesca was rolling her eyes in annoyance, but Cristina knew that her parents would never be so rude as to disinvite the lieutenant, even if he was a German. When they started from the museum, she was a little glad he walked with a limp; it meant that she could fall behind her family and get to know him a bit on her own.

1955

MIDMORNING, BEATRICE GAZED at the dresses and skirts in the armoire in her daughter-in-law’s bedroom in Florence. She did not recognize a stitch of clothing, but that didn’t surprise her. She hadn’t seen the woman in four and a half years. Still, she folded each piece carefully before placing it in one of the boxes for the church.

She had resolved to remain here in the bedroom while Cristina was once again at the police station, because she grew nauseated whenever she ventured into the living room and saw the chaotic splotches of cranberry on the walls near the front door and the way a great swath of the wood on the floor was stained reddish-brown. It was no longer a crime scene, but it was still horrifying.

Serafina had come by the hotel that morning and asked her and her daughter to tell her about what they had experienced in the war and whether the motive for Francesca’s death might have gone back that far. Once again Beatrice found herself gazing at the detective, at her sickle-moon eyebrows, so carefully plucked, above those dark, dark eyes. Her nose was dainty, her chin was small. Her hair fell in drapes. Beatrice had seen her somewhere before, she was quite sure of it. For that reason alone, she almost joined her daughter at the police station. But the truth was, she didn’t feel up to that conversation, and so Cristina and Serafina had ventured to the station without her.

Which meant that she had wound up alone at Francesca’s apartment on the Via Zara. The windows were open and she could hear
the occasional car or motorcycle roaring down the street, but the building itself was quiet. She would have turned on a radio, but it seemed that Francesca didn’t own one.

Finally, after almost an hour of work, she sat down on the bed and surveyed the room. The vanity. The mirror. The headboard beside her. How had it come to this? A dingy apartment—and it was dingy, with its walls the color of dirty bathwater, too few outlets for too few lights, and furniture that was inelegant and shoddy.

She sighed. She had loved Francesca, but she had never liked her. Her husband had. So had Cristina and Vittore. And, of course, Marco had adored her. But when Beatrice was honest with herself, she had never really liked the woman, even though she and her children had moved into the Villa Chimera as soon as Marco had left for the army. Francesca was simply too angry for Beatrice’s tastes—and, yes, too comfortable with her newfound status and wealth. Beatrice didn’t mind that her son had married beneath him, but she had always been a little annoyed at the way her daughter-in-law had grown accustomed so quickly to the small extravagances that came with her status—and then how she would complain when, over time, the war made those luxuries unobtainable.

Nevertheless, she had agreed in a heartbeat to have the body sent back to Monte Volta. There was no question in her mind; she was already anticipating that Francesca would be buried there even before Cristina had suggested that they make arrangements to have the woman returned (and that had been Cristina’s verb) to the Villa Chimera. Francesca should, and would, be interred beside her husband and children in the family plot Beatrice’s father-in-law had designed at the estate. Once it had been beautiful, with a small Roman temple overlooking the monuments and the flower beds and the great square slabs of marble that formed the courtyard. Now? Like everything else at the Villa Chimera, it was sad and dark and succumbing to ruin.

She wondered what Cristina would tell the detective about what the war had been like. She herself couldn’t imagine who from that era might have murdered Francesca. The woman was never
popular in Monte Volta, but what could she possibly have done that would drive someone to cut her throat and rip out her heart? Hadn’t she suffered enough? She had lost her husband and both of her children; she had been reduced to living in this shabby apartment and spending her nights with men who were never going to marry her.

She looked up when she thought she heard a noise in the apartment corridor. Or perhaps in the living room. A footstep. A floorboard groaning beneath the weight. She had left the front door ajar because there was an open window at the near end of the hallway and she wanted to get as much fresh air into the apartment as possible before the midday heat would force her to close the shutters. She guessed she heard Cristina, returning now from the police station, and she was glad. It was not merely depressing to be alone here in Francesca’s apartment, it was disturbing. She felt almost the way she had those few times she had wandered alone to the Etruscan tombs at the villa. The dead were too … present.

“Cristina?” she called out, more of a stage whisper than an actual shout. When no one answered, she called again, rising slowly from her spot on the bed. She peered into the living room, quite sure that she saw a shadow in the corridor outside the front door, and paused.

“Hello?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly small.

And while she told herself that her heart was racing because she was in the apartment of a woman who had been brutally murdered earlier that week, she could not deny the fact that suddenly she was scared. She was too old and she had seen too much to feel this way, but she did. She stepped back into the bedroom, two quick, silent steps, and closed the door. There she stared at the handle, wishing there were a lock. There wasn’t. Her eyes went to the window, and she realized that she was prepared to go to it and scream as if her life depended upon it—because perhaps it might.

She mouthed her daughter’s name one more time, both a prayer and a plea.
Cristina
, the
s
sibilant and long, the last syllable more expiration than exhalation. Now she was positive that someone
was on the other side of the wood, and for a long, long moment she stared at the doorknob, waiting perfectly still, aware of the way her heart seemed somehow to be beating between her ears. Whoever had mutilated her daughter-in-law had returned for a reason she couldn’t begin to fathom, but there he was, only a meter from her, breathing in the very same air.

She couldn’t have said for sure how long she had been standing there when she heard them. Two minutes? Three? She heard a pair of somber voices, Cristina’s and that female detective’s. Serafina’s.

She threw open the door and there they were, strolling into the apartment living room. They both looked a little flushed from the heat and the walk up the stairs.

“Mother?” Cristina began, taking her hands in hers. “Are you all right?”

She nodded.

“You look scared.”

“Was there someone in the hallway?” she asked her daughter.

“No,” Cristina said. “There was no one anywhere.”

“Did you see something?” Serafina asked in response. “Was there a reason you had the bedroom door closed?”

“A minute ago I thought someone was out there,” Beatrice said, and she watched, fascinated, as the detective pulled from inside her jacket a square pistol.

“Stay with your mother,” Serafina said to Cristina, and then she kicked off her heels and sprang into the hallway like a cat, leaving the two of them in Francesca’s apartment.

“Maybe it was just you and Serafina opening the front door to the building,” Beatrice said, but her daughter brought a finger to her mouth—actually pressing it lightly against her lips—and they stood there in absolute silence, listening, as the detective checked the corners and corridors on five floors of the building.

When she finally returned, Serafina said, “I didn’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t hear something. I didn’t knock on every apartment door. I may now. But there was no one else in the hallways or the stairwells. So tell me, what exactly did you hear?”

And Beatrice replied, her voice that of an old, old woman in her mind, “Nothing, really. I thought I heard footsteps. The floorboards. I thought I saw a shadow. But it must have been nothing. Nothing but my imagination.”