The Light in the Ruins (21 page)

“Yes. He has no foot, but he has a driver. He has no knowledge of Italian art, but Decher is always sending him off to Pienza or Siena to bring some back. Me? I am in the museum protecting the collection from our vaunted ally. But here’s the damnedest thing—I actually think Strekker’s interest in my sister is growing … serious.”

“A marchese’s daughter? He’d better be serious. It’s not as if your sister is some slatternly Florentine secretary. You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat.”

“You’re selling yourself short.”

“I’ve just sold myself for rat meat,” she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.

While much of the estate was resting or asleep during siesta, Beatrice and Antonio braved the high summer sun and walked along the edge of the vineyard and surveyed the Sangiovese grape arbors.

“The Germans are taking some of the relics we gave to the museum in Arezzo. One of the amphoras and the hydria,” Antonio said when they came to a stop. He stood with his hands on the wooden fence, and Beatrice noted how he was gazing out at the long field as he spoke. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—meet her eyes. “That Major Lorenzetti told me.”

“Where are they taking them?” she asked. “Berlin?”

“No. Rome. Colonel Decher is giving them to some Gestapo liaison there. He wants him to see the triangles and what he insists are swastikas along the lip of the urn. He wants him to see the profiles of the revelers, the shape of their skulls. It’s a … a gift.”

Beatrice frowned. “I really don’t like that man.”

“Decher? He’s not the worst. He’s actually starting to grow on me. I found him rather clever the last time he was here. He was an architect before the war.”

“He likes our wine and our cheese. He likes the view from the terrace. That doesn’t make him clever.”

“He’s Vittore’s boss,” Antonio said. “Don’t forget that.”

“He’s a Nazi. Don’t you forget
that
.”

“I don’t.”

“So they are stealing Etruscan pottery from the museum and giving it away like hostess gifts,” she said, her tone vacillating between resignation and disgust. “What next? They’ll pinch a Botticelli for some field marshal in France?”

“At least the pottery is remaining in Italy.”

Somewhere in the brush at the edge of the vineyard they heard a wild boar snort. Beatrice thought the ground looked a little dry, even for this time of the year, but the leaves on the grapevines seemed healthy enough. “It won’t for long,” she said.

“Perhaps not,” Antonio agreed.

She looked at him. “There’s something more.”

“There is.”

“Go on.”

He resumed his stroll and so she did, too. “Decher and Lorenzetti want to bring that Gestapo fellow here—the one from Rome—so he can see the tombs for himself. It seems he is interested in Etruscan art.”

“We can’t allow that,” she said. “We can’t have Gestapo here.”

“I don’t think we really have much of a choice. Besides …”

She waited, but she feared she knew what he was going to say. “Besides,” he continued, “I think we need to be good citizens.
Loyal. We have to for Vittore’s sake and we have to for Marco’s sake. And let’s face it,” and here he paused and waved his hand over the vineyard and then in the direction of the olive grove and the fields where once there had been herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, “we have to if we want to hang on to all this.”

“They just keep coming,” she said, aware of how plaintive and desperate her tone suddenly sounded. “First it was the Nazis from Florence and then it was the Nazis from Arezzo. And now it’s these Nazis from Rome.”

“And then there is Cristina’s … friend. The lieutenant.”

“They’re losing the war, Antonio.”

“They’re?
We’re
losing the war, my dear.
We’re
losing the war.”

“And yet we seem to be getting in ever deeper with the Nazis.”

Overhead they heard the planes that so interested their daughter, and reflexively they both looked up. “I know,” her husband said. “I really do. But I don’t know what else to do.”

1955

SERAFINA KNELT CAREFULLY before the mushrooms, hoping to conjure a memory from 1944. She tried to focus, allowing her fears to trickle out, and held lit matches over the caps—a few the size of her fist—and the stems. Already she had examined the pedestals and the paintings in the tombs, concentrating on the Etruscan men with their angular Vandyke beards, some of whom were eerily reminiscent of the partisans with whom she had lived and fought. Now, even though the smell almost made her sick, she breathed in and out, hoping to resurrect a moment, any moment at all, from that awful summer.

Finally, angry at the way memory was failing her once again, she stood up and lit a cigarette. She walked once more through the different chambers, using matches to gaze at the paintings on the walls. And then she paused. Looked up. She climbed onto the pedestal so she was nearer the ceiling and brought the small flame close to the image there. There were birds. Seven, eight … nine of them. They were darting amid nearly black clouds, though there was also a portion of golden sun peering out from behind one of the thunderheads. And suddenly she knew that if she followed the sun’s rays across the vault’s ceiling, she would see that they were illuminating a boy in a boat, a young fisherman, who despite his age was manfully managing the small vessel against waves taller than he was.

She jumped off the pedestal and climbed onto the one beside it,
following the sunlight. Sure enough, there was the boy and there was his boat. And there were more birds.

She’d seen this ceiling before, and it was clear that it could have been at only one time in her life: when she was in the hallucinogenic agonies, in and out of consciousness, after she had nearly been burned to death in the firefight. Someone was holding her hand, telling her to be brave. Be brave. They were getting her help. She recalled a man’s voice. And a woman’s. She remembered them forcing her to drink whenever she awoke, the water tasting fetid and stale, but the burns had left her so dehydrated they were constantly trying to get fluids into her. And was it possible that they had a small fire at the edge of the chamber and were boiling water? They were draping wet rags on her wounds. Somewhere nearby was machine-gun fire. And explosions that she thought were grenades but might have been small artillery.

And, kept always on her side because of the way her back was an undulating swamp of seared flesh, by the light of a torch she had seen the birds and the boy and that sun whenever she had awoken and looked up.

It may have been hours and it may have been days, but at some point before the British had secured Monte Volta, the partisans had taken her away from the battle and out of the sun and hidden her here in an Etruscan home for the dead.

“Where is Vittore staying?” Serafina asked Paolo after she arrived at the police station Friday night and settled in with a cola on the other side of his desk.

“The Boccaccio. I moved Cristina there, too. I couldn’t let her stay in the hotel where her mother was killed. We have a man on the corridor of their floor and a man watching the lobby.”

“And his family in Rome?”

“There is a wife, Giulia, and a couple of little girls. They have a guard, too.”

“But we can’t watch them forever.”

He shrugged. “We’ll see. For all we know, they’re in no danger at all. Maybe whoever killed the marchesa just wants Vittore and Cristina.”

“He killed Francesca.”

“Point noted.”

“What about other relatives? Cousins, uncles, aunts?”

“The war and old age seem to have already taken many of them,” Paolo said.

“But not all.”

He reached for his notes and his eyeglasses and looked at the papers. “Let’s see. Beatrice had a brother and a sister. Her brother died in a car accident in 1928 in Bologna. No children. Her sister is a widow. She married in 1919 and her husband died of cancer last year. Her name is Elena and she lives in Naples. She and her husband had three children, two boys and a girl. The boys were killed in Greece in 1941 and Egypt in 1942. The daughter married a British soldier after the war and they now live in London. Her name is Bianca. They have a child who’s five. Antonio—the marchese—had a brother who died when they were boys. A hiking accident of some sort.”

“So there is Elena and Elena’s daughter’s family in London.”

“That’s right. At the moment, Elena has protection. Her daughter in London—that whole little family—does not.”

“Any progress on those names Cristina gave us?”

“Francesca’s lovers or those soldiers from the war?”

“I was thinking of the war, but I guess that’s just my bias right now.”

“Let’s start with Francesca’s lovers. We have come across no American museum curators or executives visiting Italy this week on business or pleasure. We have found two Aldos living in Florence who have criminal records, but I don’t see either as the sort whom Francesca would have dated—or, to be specific, the sort to have taken her to restaurants like Il Latini.”

“Any Giovannis?”

“With a criminal record? One. He is seventy-seven.”

“Not Francesca’s type.”

Paolo nodded and passed her his notebook so she could read in detail about the two felons named Aldo. One, she saw, was a young thief who lived with his mother and worked at a gas station at the edge of the city; the other was an accountant who once stole from his company. Now he worked for the municipal utility and lived with his wife and two children. Neither had ever done anything violent.

“What about the Italian major and the German colonel?” she asked. “I don’t see anything about them here.”

“Giancarlo Lorenzetti now teaches at the University of Milan.”

“And?”

“And it is the summer. He is at his wife’s family home in the hills outside Messina.”

“In Sicily.”

“Yes.”

“And we know he was there the night Francesca was killed?”

“That’s what he and his wife say.”

“And the German colonel?”

“Dead,” Paolo answered, and here he paused. “But it is interesting how he died—or rather, what he did in the days before he died. And maybe
interesting
is the wrong word. Perhaps I should say interesting and horrifying. In the middle of June 1944, Erhard Decher, like many of the Germans who had mostly been looting art, was pressed into real service. On July 14, days before the Germans withdrew north from Arezzo, he was among a group of Nazis who went to a village just south of the city and massacred twenty-three villagers, including the parish priest. It was a reprisal for a partisan attack. They took them to an olive grove and made them shovel a single very large grave. There they bayoneted them one by one, and then placed explosive charges among the bodies. When the British arrived, there were bits of bloody clothes—still damp, apparently—and human limbs dangling like fruit from the trees.”

“I remember hearing about that massacre in the autumn. When they started telling me what I had missed. The massacre wasn’t all that far from Monte Volta and Trequanda.”