The Light in the Ruins (18 page)

Now she stared up into the cloudless sky, wishing she had brought her cola here from the car, and licked her lips against her thirst.

Mostly she had killed Germans in the war. But not entirely. Though she had never executed a collaborator, she had shot other Italians in one violent battle with a group of Blackshirts as the Fascists had retreated north with the Nazis in the summer of 1944. That would have been eleven years ago now.

And then there had been the brief, vicious skirmish not far from this very villa. It was an incendiary grenade that had almost killed her.

She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn’t. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.

A few years ago she had had a lover who was a physician, and he had examined the ruin that was the flesh on her back and neck and the side of her head and wondered how she had endured the pain when she had first been burned. He had guessed a lot of morphine. He’d told her it was possible the phosphorous had continued to smolder hours afterward.
Imagine
, he’d remarked, almost talking
to himself,
white smoke wafting into the air from your shoulder and side like a campfire the next morning
. He’d made a bad joke that he would have begged someone to shoot him. He had no idea that she had. Once, when they were making love, he had noticed the small, recent burn marks dotting the insides of her thighs. Each was the size of a match head. She had tried to convince him they were bug bites. He had begged her to stop.

In 1952 she had made an attempt to find Enrico, hoping he would tell her precisely what had happened. Aside from her, Enrico and Salvatore were the only members of their small brigade who hadn’t bothered with fake names. Even Enrico’s wife had made one up. They did this so that if they were ever captured, they couldn’t give the Germans real names and thus endanger real families. Neither she nor Enrico and his brother had any family, so it didn’t matter. And so it would not be until after that last firefight, when she woke up from whatever stupor had engulfed her—protected her, really—that she would change her name. Serafina. The burning one. Her new identity. It was and would be forever who she was. What she was.

She never did find Enrico. Even with the resources of the police at her disposal, she was unable to track him down. In all likelihood he had died in 1944 or 1945. Or perhaps he and Teresa had survived and moved to America. He’d sometimes fantasized about moving to New York City. Actually talked about the Statue of Liberty, which, like many Tuscans, he considered to have been inspired by Pio Fedi’s memorial for Giovanni Battista Niccolini in Santa Croce. Thought Fedi should have gotten more credit. Either way, dead or alive, Enrico and Teresa were gone.

She opened her eyes and focused on the granary tower. Its collapse, she feared, was forever going to be the last thing she would recall from that day.

Before leaving the estate, she went down the hill to try to find the tombs, following the directions Cristina had given her. She
walked gingerly along the prickly tufa. She passed the remnants of the grape arbors and then, as Cristina had instructed, turned to the left and felt as if she were descending into the earth. She worried briefly that she had made a mistake, especially when the ground had risen up around her on both sides and the crevice grew narrow. But then she arrived, almost suddenly, at the cul-de-sac. She counted four arched doorways and randomly selected one. She passed the remnants of the three columns, ducked her head, and went inside.

And swore. Her purse was back in Milton’s car, and that meant she had no matches to really see the burial chambers—or whatever was left of the chambers. The paintings on the walls of the dancers and musicians she’d been told about. The images of the fruit trees. Inside, it was not quite as cold as a cave, but the air was markedly cooler than it had been a dozen feet behind her. Here was a small world never to be warmed by the sun.

She felt before her as she moved in the dark because Cristina had warned her that the pedestals for the funerary urns in the first rooms were still present, as were the platforms for the sarcophagi, and she didn’t want to trip over them in the dark or crack her shins against them. In a moment she found one of the pedestals, touching it first with the toe of her shoe and then with her fingers, and sat down, staring back through the blackness at the window of daylight. If she breathed in deeply through her nose, she could smell faint vestiges of the ground above her—field grass and wildflowers—but mostly she smelled mold and dampness and something vaguely fetid. She thought of the corpses she had seen at the morgue and the odor of the polluted wounds from the war. The smell of her own back and skull as subcutaneous flesh fought infection and tried desperately to heal in that summer of 1944.

This odor was reminiscent of that, but also of something else. Something distantly familiar but nevertheless, like so much else in her life, unreachable.

One of the older partisans, a fellow who might have been forty (which, when she had been seventeen and eighteen years old, had
seemed downright geriatric; no more), had managed a vineyard and talked often about the flavors of wine. Wines, in his vocabulary, could have hints of blackcurrant or burned toast, of green olive or aged oak. Of spices and fruit trees and resins. Everything had an association.

Finally she rose and started back to the villa, frustrated with herself for having left her purse in the car.

The old woman’s nephew was named Ilario, and he was muscular and short and his black mustache was thick. He sat beside her in one of the wooden chairs the factory workers had placed in a copse of chestnut and fir trees. He explained that when they didn’t go home for siesta, some of the men would come to these chairs and sit and smoke in the shade. He said he was married, which she already knew, but he volunteered proudly that he was going to become a father for the first time that autumn. Serafina had guessed he was twenty-eight, and she was close. He said he had just turned twenty-seven.

“So why has a detective come all the way from Florence to talk to me? Should I be scared?” he asked, the otherwise casual remark made toxic by the flippancy of his tone.

“Unless you’ve done something wrong, I doubt it.”

He smirked a little lecherously and looked down at her legs. “You haven’t had a baby yet,” he said. “A man can tell.”

“Have you heard about Francesca Rosati?” she asked, ignoring him.

“I heard just this morning. People were talking about it when I got to work. No baby?”

“No baby. How well did you know Francesca?”

He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and pretended to rub at his biceps. In fact he was flexing it, showing it off. “I knew her. Not well. I didn’t have time for the likes of her. I had a job to do at the Villa Chimera. Many jobs, in fact. But mostly I helped manage their sheep and their cattle. Me and an idiot Sardinian twice my
age. I was only a teenager, you know. But still, I had real responsibility.”

“What do you mean by ‘the likes of her’?”

He looked Serafina in the eyes and said, “They said someone cut her throat and then cut out her heart. At least that was what people said was in the newspaper. Is that true?”

“It is.”

“Well, then, it was only a matter of time. She was … Oh, you’re a lady. A lady with a gun, maybe. But look at your dress, your shoes. I can tell you don’t use the word I would use to describe Francesca.”

“Try me.”

He shook his head. “I will say only this—she saw people as toys. Especially men. She thought she was better than all of us.”

“She wasn’t a good wife?”

He smiled and spread out his arms, palms up. “You misunderstand me. I presume she was a fine wife. What other man would have touched her? She was—forgive me—a bitch.” He said the word almost innocently. “Whoever killed her did it because she deserved it.”

“She deserved to be killed? You honestly believe that?”

“Okay, not killed. I give you that. But she was a bully. She bullied her family, she bullied men, she bullied me.”

“How?”

“She treated us all like donkeys. We were the brutes who did the heavy lifting and the farming and the milking and the pruning and the cutting. Never said a kind word. Never treated us like men. We were all donkeys to her, that’s all.”

“Did the other farmhands dislike her as much as you?”

“I think so. We all made fun of her.”

“Anyone hate her enough to kill her?”

“I’m sure someone did. Frankly, I was not especially fond of the marchese or the marchesa either. I worked for that family because I had to. But I didn’t really like any of them.”

Serafina thought of what Ilario’s aunt had told her about him.
“What about Cristina? The marchese’s only daughter? Did you hate her, too?”

He raised his eyebrows and then looked into the trees. “She was a traitor. And before that she was a—” He stopped midsentence.

“Your aunt said you had a crush on her.”

“My aunt said that?”

“Yes.”

He smirked. “Well, I did. I was stupid. Cristina Rosati was nice to me, but she was really just a … a tease. I am using that word because you’re a lady. But she was much worse than a tease.”

“She led you on?”

“She led us all on. Prancing about in a bathing suit with Francesca’s daughter like she was just an innocent five- or six-year-old, too. Wearing dresses that always caught the wind just right to show off her legs. Riding around in tight pants on that horse. She would sometimes bring us carafes of lemonade. How could I not have a crush on her? I was young and, yes, stupid. But she showed us her true colors. She showed us all her true colors. She started sleeping with a German. And not just any German. One of those spineless thieves who stole from the museums.”

“Do you recall his name?”

He sat back and took a breath. “Friedrich Strekker. He was a lieutenant. And a cripple.”

“What do you mean, he was a cripple?”

“The fellow was missing a foot.”

“And you know he was her lover.”

“I do.”

“How?”

“A man can tell.”

She stared at him, meeting his eyes. “Do I have a lover?”

“No,” he answered. “But you want people to think you do.”

Behind them, she heard the wide garage door opening, the signal that siesta was beginning and the other workers were about to descend upon them.

“Seriously, can you think of someone who might have had
such a deep grudge against Francesca that he was willing to kill her?”

“She dishonored men. She and Cristina both. If I’m surprised by anything, it’s that whoever killed the woman waited so long to cut her throat.”

“Okay, then, Ilario. Tell me one more thing. Where were you on Monday night?”

“Is that the night Francesca died?”

She watched a squirrel scramble up the trunk of one of the chestnut trees. “Technically, it was the early hours of Tuesday morning.”

He nodded. “I was home in Monte Volta with my beautiful wife, Detective. You can ask her. I promise you, as much as I hated that woman, it wasn’t worth the cost of a train ticket to Florence to kill her.”