The Light in the Ruins (23 page)

“That would have made for an interesting first date if she had.”

“She didn’t,” he grumbled.

“Did she say anything at all about the war?”

“Only what you’d expect on a first date. She talked a little about the marchese and the marchesa—their pretensions and affectations. She told him her children had died in the wake of the fighting at the villa. But no details.”

“No mention of any Germans.”

He shook his head. “No. No mention of any Germans.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to see if there is anyone left at the Uffizi who might have known them—Decher or Lorenzetti or this Friedrich Strekker.”

He looked up through the buildings at the starless sky and then adjusted his straw hat. “We should get some sleep,” he said. “Your boyfriend will not be happy with me if I never let you go home.”

Serafina woke early Saturday morning and went to the Uffizi, arriving there hours before it was open to the public and entering
through the office doors opposite the main entrance. There, in a windowless conference room, she met with an assistant director and an exhibits manager, both of whom had worked at the museum during what Florentines now referred to—a little disingenuously, in some cases—as the German occupation. For most Italians throughout most of the war, it was an alliance, not an occupation. In any case, neither fellow had seen Decher since July 1944, and they guessed, since the colonel had wanted so badly to be in combat, that he was probably dead. Strekker, too. They told her that Lorenzetti was thriving at the University of Milan, which she already knew, and that Ludwig Heydenreich and Jürgen Voss were both somewhere in Germany. The two of them had been part of the German Military Art Protection Front in Florence, the Nazi group responsible for crating up whatever paintings and sculptures it could and sending them north to be hidden in the salt mines near Heilbronn or displayed in some minister’s estate outside Berlin. In point of fact, the assistant director said, Heydenreich had undermined his superiors wherever possible and prevented the worst of the pillaging, even protecting Bernard Berenson’s collection in the Villa I Tatti from Hermann Göring. When Heydenreich had heard that German soldiers had mined the bridges across the Arno, like a madman he had photographed them all so there would be a record of Florence before the destruction.

“You know who you should really talk to?” the exhibits manager said finally. “Roberto Piredda. He works at the museum in Arezzo. He used to be here once or twice a month, or we used to see him in Arezzo.”

“He didn’t like the Rosatis?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m sure he liked them just fine. He was the one who went to that estate of theirs in Monte Volta before the war, when the family discovered the Etruscan tombs. He supervised the excavation. Over time he became a mentor for Vittore—Vittore really looked up to him. They may still be friends, or they may have lost touch. I couldn’t say for sure, because Vittore and I haven’t seen each other in years. But Piredda might be able to tell you more
about”—and here he glanced quickly at his associate, smiling at what was clearly an inside joke—“the old gang.”

“I knew I was going to make my life here eleven years ago. It was June 4, 1944,” Milton was saying on Saturday night to the group of American and Italian bankers and their girlfriends and wives gathered at the private room in the back of the restaurant. There were sixteen people, eight women and eight bankers, including the bank president from New York City. Serafina had heard Milton tell this story before—the liberation of Rome by the Americans and the wondrous, welcoming response of the Italians—but tonight he was using it because the American and Italian banks together were financing the massive Kariba hydroelectric dam in Africa. And the tale, she knew, allowed him both to praise his European host nation and to celebrate the friendship that now existed between the two countries. He was standing at the head of the table, holding a glass of prosecco.

“The irony, of course, is that two days after we entered Rome, my compatriots—as well as a great many Brits and Canadians—landed in Normandy, and so the liberation of the Eternal City very soon was eclipsed and relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers,” he said. “But, my God, was it exciting for us—and for me personally. Rome is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And while I didn’t get to spend long there that June, I spent enough time for my fondness for your country—and, of course, for your wine—to grow even deeper. So it is with that small introduction that tonight I will, as I have hundreds of times this past decade, raise a glass to our friendship. To the United States, and to Italy!”

They toasted, and as Milton sat down, the fellow on Serafina’s right, an Italian named Vincenzo with an impressive mop of barely groomed silver hair, an equally hoary mustache, and weathered, deeply brown Sicilian skin, said, “Milton tells me you’re a detective.”

“That’s right.”

“Not easy work for a beautiful young lady.”

“Or, I would imagine, a handsome young man.”

“Excellent—well put.” He chuckled. “I must admit, I have never met a female detective.”

“I’m the only one.”

He nodded, digesting this information. Then: “How long have you and Milton been dating?”

“Two and a half years.”

A pair of waiters began placing on the settings before each of them a small plate with delicately fried squash blossoms filled with goat cheese.

“What does he think of your … work?”

“He doesn’t mind.”

“And why are two such delightful young adults not married? You should be.”

“Someday.”

“I probably sound like your father. Forgive me,” he said, and he cut into the first of his squash blossoms.

“No forgiveness is necessary.”

“We like Milton very much. That’s all.”

“I do, too.”

“What kind of detective are you?”

“A very good one.”

Again he laughed. She glanced at Milton’s end of the table and saw that he was charming the women to both sides of him.

“Seriously,” the banker went on, “what do you investigate? I have a feeling you do more than find stray kittens and bring home lost babies.”

“Murder.”

His face went grave. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

“We have female detectives and they’re investigating murders? Right here in Florence?”

“We do. Me.”

“Do you …”

“Go on.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “How did this happen? How did you wind up carrying a gun and looking for killers?”

“I asked.”

“Really?”

“In the war, I picked up special … skills. It would have been a shame not to put them to use. And so I went to Paolo Ficino and asked for a job.”

“The chief inspector?”

“That’s right.”

“It was just that simple?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing is ever that simple.”

“But that’s all you’re going to tell me.”

“Inspector Ficino is a very good man. He knew I needed to work and he took me under his wing. He took a risk.”

“I would not want my daughter doing what you do. But I have a feeling you are quite capable.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you know anything about that poor woman—excuse me, those poor women who had their hearts cut from their chests?”

“A little.” She smiled wryly, flirting really, and asked, “Do you?”

He put down his fork and raised his hands. “Innocent, I promise you.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“But you can’t talk about it.”

“No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I never met the marchese,” he said, “but I knew people who knew Antonio.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I have no—what is that American expression?—smoking gun.”

“What did people say about him?”

“He was a good man and deserved his title. He looked out for his commune and the peasants who worked his land. But then came the war, and like everyone else, he made compromises.”

“Such as?”

“Well, he sold out to Germans. But then, didn’t we all?”

“No. We all didn’t.”

He grinned as if he were a proud grandfather and said, “Okay, I may have no smoking gun, but you—and I think this is how the Americans use this word for a sharp woman—are a pistol.” Then he raised his glass with the last of the prosecco and clinked it against hers.

“What do you mean, he sold out to the Germans?”

“I shouldn’t have said anything. Really, all I have is rumor and innuendo.”

She reached over and for a long second placed two of her fingers on the back of his hand and gazed at him. “You must tell me. Please. For all you know, what you have heard may help me save a life.” She feared briefly after she had spoken that she had taken the flirtation too far, but when he looked back at her, she knew he was going to open up like a cooked mussel.

“Well,” he said, his voice a little ruminative, “we surrendered in North Africa in May 1943. The Allies invaded Sicily two months later. Early July. They bombed Rome for the first time a week or two after that. And it was clear by then that it was over. It really was. Everyone knew it but the Germans. So we arrested Mussolini. You remember. By the end of the month we had even kicked out the Blackshirts. And we all know how well that worked out.”

She nodded. She thought of her mother and father. Their execution. The new Badoglio government initially pledged its loyalty to Berlin but by early September had surrendered to the Allies. Within days the Germans had occupied Rome, rescued Mussolini from the ski resort in the Apennine Mountains where he was being held prisoner, and reestablished a puppet Fascist government with Il Duce as the figurehead. And she and her brothers were on the run.

“It was like a civil war in the midst of the world war,” he was
saying. “And Antonio Rosati, people said, made the mistake of siding too long and too often with the Nazis and their Blackshirt lapdogs. Either he couldn’t see the future or he wouldn’t.”

“What did he do? Specifically?”

“While the rest of us were starving, people said his estate never lacked for honey and beef. Never. His grandchildren always had milk. And throughout the second half of 1943 and 1944, while Italian patriots were fighting the Germans in the woods behind their lines, Antonio was matchmaking, trying to arrange marriages between his daughters and Nazi officers. He held a Christmas ball in December 1943 for the Germans at the Villa Chimera—his estate.”

She thought of the rooms she had seen there that now were rubble. “He had only one daughter,” she said, not so much because she wanted to defend Antonio as because she wanted to see if this clarification might jog Vincenzo’s memory. “He had two sons, one of whom was married to Francesca.”

A waiter cleared away the plates that had held the squash blossoms and brought them bowls of thick ribollita, the tomatoes and carrots in the soup conspiring to give it a beautiful, orange terra-cotta hue.

The banker sat back and seemed to be surveying the next course. Then: “That’s right. But the one girl. Cristina, right?”

“Right.”

“She was a friend of many Germans, they say. And one of the brothers was, too. Didn’t he help the Nazis loot Florence?”

“Or, arguably, he tried to prevent them from looting the city.” He tasted his soup. “You barely touched the squash blossoms. This is delicious. I think you’ll like it.” He took another spoonful and then went on. “I know this—Antonio and Beatrice Rosati entertained Nazis and Blackshirts throughout 1943 and 1944. They billeted German officers in their home after Rome fell. I’m sure Antonio was not happy about the fact that his friends from the north decided to make their last stand at the Villa Chimera, but he had no one to blame but himself.”

She glanced toward Milton, and he winked at her. She smiled at him and then turned back to the Italian banker beside her. “And what did you do during the war?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Not enough,” he said, his tone a little rueful. “Not nearly enough.”

THE MURDERS OF the Rosati women gave the tourists who descended on Tuscany something to think about other than wine and cheese and tasteless little trinkets of Michelangelo’s
David.
The elegant Boboli Gardens at the Pitti Palace look very different if you are imagining satanic rituals in the woods behind the amphitheater and a murderer cutting the hearts from his victims. The Via de’ Tornabuoni becomes more than a mere tony shopping street. You glance casually up at the apartments above the lingerie and dress stores, the shops that sell chocolate and leather, and you imagine …