The Light in the Ruins (17 page)

And so now here she was in Monte Volta.

In another life, she thought.

In another life … what?

She had parked Milton’s BMW on the eastern side of the village and immediately walked the length of the small town. Since she was going to see no one today from Homicide, she was wearing flats, and she was glad. Tomorrow, in Rome, she would wear less sensible shoes. The walk took barely ten minutes. The village was largely unchanged from the place she remembered: one long street, barely wide enough for two cars to pass side by side, and a series of
even narrower ones winding their way up to the oldest neighborhood. The granary sat at the southwestern edge, its one remaining tower rearing up today against a cerulean-blue sky. A black kite was nesting along the chess piece–like masonry at the top, and for a moment she watched the bird circle, gliding on the high currents of wind, before abruptly plunging at its prey in the field beside the massive obelisk. Because the village had neither a duomo nor a museum, tourists from America and northern Europe had yet to discover Monte Volta the way they had some of the larger villages in southern Tuscany. Places like Pienza and Montepulciano. The main street had a police station, a butcher shop, a bakery, and two small cafés at one end and an unassuming school at the other. There was a pharmacy, a barbershop, and a small grocery smack in the middle. The main church existed up a slender street that wound its way to the highest point in the village.

Although she had called ahead, she checked in at the police station. The officer on duty couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three; he was slender, and his uniform hung badly off his shoulders. The poor kid was still fighting a losing battle with acne along his cheeks and neck. He was from Pienza and knew virtually nothing about the Rosatis. One time that spring he had wandered among the ruins of their estate, but it was only because it was a sunny day and he had had nothing else to do. He’d never met any of the family.

Outside, Serafina saw an old woman sweeping the front steps to her home and asked her what she recalled of the war, and the woman immediately told the story of how the Nazis had tried and failed to blow up the remaining granary tower.

“Did you know the Rosatis?” Serafina asked her. “The marchese and marchesa?”

“No. But I knew people who worked their land. My nephew was one of their farmhands,” she answered. Then she told Serafina about the overseer of the olive grove, now dead, and the fellow who had managed their vineyard, now employed by wine growers in Montalcino. She put her hands atop the handle of the broom,
not precisely leaning upon it but resting, and said, “My nephew works at the terra-cotta factory.”

“In Petroio? I passed it on the way here.”

“That’s the one. You should talk to him.”

“He knows something?”

“He might. He’s married now, of course. But as a boy, he had such a crush on that girl.”

“That girl? Francesca? Cristina?”

She nodded ruefully. “The younger one. The pretty one. Cristina—the one who slept with the Germans.”

Before leaving the village, Serafina spoke with a pair of old men sipping espresso in one of the cafés, as well as the pharmacist, the butcher, and a young mother pushing her baby in a stroller. None of them could add anything to what the first woman had told her of Cristina—or, to be precise, what that woman had alleged of Cristina—but the butcher admitted that some people had certainly been jealous of the Rosatis’ wealth. One of the old men she interviewed said there was a necropolis on the property but all of the artifacts had been confiscated by the Nazis; then his friend corrected him, insisting that the relics were given by the family to the museum in Arezzo long before the war, and there were far too few tombs to call it a necropolis anyway. They bickered until Serafina thanked them and moved on.

Finally there was the pharmacist. He sucked in deeply on his cigarette and said that he most certainly remembered Francesca: she had a fierce, wonderful tongue, he recalled. He wasn’t surprised that a marchese’s son had fallen in love with her; he said he thought she was the most interesting woman ever to walk the grounds of the estate. She actually belonged in a villa named after a beast that breathed fire.

“You liked her?”

“I did,” he said ruefully. “I really did.”

“Can you think of a reason why someone might have killed
her?” she pressed him. “Can you think of anyone who hated her enough to murder her?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Especially after what people say she went through. They say her husband died right in front of her eyes—in her arms. Marco, right?”

“Right.”

“And of course Francesca outlived her children. Was it three?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

He nodded. “They say she was at the villa when the children were killed in the fighting.”

“It was after the fighting,” she corrected him. “A land mine the Nazis had left behind.”

“That’s awful.”

“It was,” she agreed. “Did you know Marco?”

“I would have recognized him on the street. But he wouldn’t have known me.”

“So you can’t think of any reason why someone would have wanted to kill her.”

“No. Her family, maybe. But not her.”

“What do you mean, ‘her family’?”

“Well, the Blackshirts and the Nazis looked favorably upon the Rosatis. Obviously, that didn’t sit well with some people.”

“As I understand it, the Nazis commandeered the estate,” Serafina said.

He shrugged. “Commandeered it? Or were they welcomed? When a lot of people were hungry in the war, the Rosatis seemed to want for nothing.”

“Were they that close to the Fascists?”

“There were plenty of stories. And there were Nazis at the villa all the time in 1943 and 1944. The staff cars were always coming and going.”

She thought about what the old woman had alleged of Cristina. “What do you remember about the youngest of the marchese’s children? Cristina?”

He smiled a little wistfully. “She was such a young beauty.”

“She still is. How well did you know her?”

“I knew her better than Marco, because she would come into the shop as a little girl and then as a teenager. She was always with her mother or the cook or, later on, with Francesca.”

“What else?”

“There is no what else.”

“And Vittore? The middle child?”

“A bookish boy. A bookish man. A scholar of some sort.”

“An archeologist.”

“Where are they now? Vittore and Cristina?”

“In Rome.”

He sighed. “It’s a shame to see the villa in such disrepair. If they can’t afford to live there, they should sell it. Someone should fix it up. Maybe those Americans who are always coming to see Pienza. The tourists.”

“I gather repairing it would be an expensive proposition.”

“It would be,” he said.

The bell on the door behind them tinkled as a customer strolled in: another young mother, a little boy in shorts holding her hand. The pharmacist snuffed out his cigarette and turned to the woman, and so Serafina thanked him and left. She thought she would head up to the Villa Chimera; she wanted to wander around the grounds of the estate and still have time to interview the fellow at the terra-cotta factory before it closed for siesta.

Milton’s BMW groaned as it bounced its way up the twisting gravel driveway to the villa, and Serafina parked at a pull-off fifty meters from the main house and walked the rest of the way. The weeds were rampant and rose through the white rocks like wheat. Likewise, the lavender along the walkway to the villa was so overgrown that a person could barely see the stones. A tortoiseshell cat, rangy and feral, leapt through a broken window along the first floor of the once proud estate and raced down the hill toward the Tarantine marble hole that had been the swimming pool.

The front door was long gone and so she walked right in. Immediately the two pigeons that had been perched on a high shelf in the foyer dove through the entryway, nearly hitting her head on their way past, and flew up into the blue sky. They could, however, have escaped from the house even more easily through the enormous hole in the roof. She found the smell of cat urine almost overwhelming; clearly that tortoiseshell did not live here alone. She wondered how the birds and the cats cohabited in this shell of a house, and presumed the birds took the high ground and that was that. There was bird shit, some of it calcified, along the kitchen counter beneath a rafter and on the stone windowsills.

As Cristina had told her, most of the furniture was gone. Anything left inside the villa was broken and worthless. Still, she found a massive two-legged dining room table at roughly a forty-five-degree angle and a great pile of brown rags in the shadows. After a moment, she realized that once they had been white linen napkins and a tablecloth. There were colorful pieces of broken glass all along the floor in the kitchen and the pantry. Murano glass, she suspected. Wine goblets, based on what looked like a pair of stems. Two sconces dangled by their electrical wiring along one wall, and on the wall opposite them she saw two holes where another pair had been ripped out.

She walked around the corner into what she expected would be a living room or conservatory and was instantly bathed in sunlight: the exterior wall, all the way to the second floor ceiling, was gone. The fissure was easily eighteen to twenty feet high and perhaps a dozen feet wide. The sides were charred black. There was a small pile of rubble she navigated carefully, and once outdoors, she saw a much larger mound of debris shoveled to the side.

From here she could observe the olive grove, which was the same riot of growth as all the gardens and grass on the estate, and what she guessed were the rolling hills on which the sheep and the cattle had once grazed. Where Cristina had ridden her horse. In the far distance, she noted Mount Amiata. Much closer, no more than three kilometers distant, she could see the village of Monte
Volta and that hulking, iconic granary tower. The town was separated from the Villa Chimera by a deep valley. She walked farther into the grass and sat down, breathing in the aroma of the wildflowers and yellow broom. She stretched out her legs, and her mind moved back and forth between the stories Cristina had told her of Francesca’s children at play in that swimming pool and what she herself had experienced somewhere near here. Based on the vista and the angle of the granary, she guessed the villa where they had fought and where she had nearly been killed was a few kilometers to the west.

It couldn’t possibly have been here, she tried to assure herself. The views of the granary and the village were all wrong.

She sighed. She tried to recall what her mother and father had sounded like and she couldn’t. She tried to recall either of her brothers’ voices and those were gone, too.

Instead she heard in her head the imagined laughter of Francesca’s little boy and little girl as they amused themselves in that swimming pool. Massimo. Alessia. Cristina had told her that she used to make doll clothing for Alessia and they played together with the dolls on the tile and the chaise longues beside the water. But that vision wouldn’t linger either. Her mind kept roaming back to the sounds of the British rifle she had used throughout the summer of 1944; she felt once again the bruising, painful thud against her shoulder each time she fired it. It was either pathetic or grotesque, but while Cristina was playing dolls with her niece by that swimming pool, she was shooting German engineers at railheads or taking an ax to railroad ties. Her first assignment, in the late autumn of 1943, had been to slice the tires of Wehrmacht staff cars parked at an estate outside Pienza and cut the phone lines she found extending from the villa. A month after that she had helped ambush a trio of particularly despicable SS officers and their three guards when they were dining at a restaurant in Radicofani. In response the Germans had rounded up and executed thirty-six men, women, and children from the village—six Italians for each German who had been killed. They had lined them up against
the eastern wall of the church and emptied half a dozen machine guns into them. It was more or less what Enrico and Salvatore had hoped would occur: the SS officers would be dead and the Nazis would respond in a brutal, draconian fashion. Then, the two brothers expected, the area villagers would rise up against their occupiers. Instead, however, the Tuscans had remained sheep after the slaughter; their partisan band had actually lost volunteers. Five members defected, no longer trusting Enrico’s judgment, and went home. She, of course, had stayed. She had no home to return to. Besides, Enrico and Teresa and Salvatore were her family now. The Tarantolas. The miners and winemakers and a couple of renegades from the Italian army. A few girlfriends. A sister. A wife. At the group’s largest, there were forty of them. By the time she was nearly killed, they had scattered into detachments of five and six.