The Light in the Ruins (37 page)

It was a statement, not a question, but nevertheless she nodded. She realized he suspected she was a partisan and so she added quickly, “I’m the marchese’s daughter.”

“What are you doing outside right now?”

She paused, her mind strangely frozen as she tried desperately to find any explanation that was better than the real one.

“Now! Tell me!” he ordered.

“I was looking for mushrooms,” she lied, stammering. “I was looking for anything we could eat.”

“In the dark?”

“When I started, it was light out.”

He shook his head in annoyance and slung his rifle back over his shoulder. For a brief second she thought he was going to help her up, but instead he continued on his way, running to the other side of the pool and up the stairs to the terrace.

There were two soldiers, and the first one nearly stepped on Massimo in the dark. The soldier screamed at the boy in German to get out, to move, and then, after noticing Alessia and Francesca on the bed, he yelled at them, too. Though blinded by the soldier’s flashlight, Francesca scurried to the edge of the mattress and lifted Alessia into her arms. She had started to say something—in her mind, she was going to ask them to be careful, to please leave her children alone—when the first German took the butt of his rifle and smashed it through the half-open window, sending a spray of glass onto the tiles below. Alessia screamed and she felt Massimo grasping her leg through her skirt, his small fingernails seeming to dig their way through the linen and into the flesh on her thigh. She retreated to the doorway, her daughter’s face buried against her neck, the child’s tears running down her collarbone and between her breasts, and watched as the soldiers ripped the drapes from their mounts and tore the louvered shutters from their hinges. It took no more than half a minute. Then, as they caught their breath, one of them noticed that she and her children were still there, watching in mute horror as they destroyed the bedroom.

Again the first soldier screamed at her in German. He took his hands, including the one with the rifle, and motioned for her to shoo, to leave them alone. Then, his eyes wide in the moonlight
that was streaming in through the window, he said,
“Il britannico!”
and pretended to fire his rifle out toward the courtyard.
“Il britannico!”
he repeated.

She nodded. Her children’s bedroom was now the high ground for riflemen. She held Alessia against her with one arm and reached down for Massimo’s hand. Then she raced across the hall and down the stairs, yelling for Antonio and Beatrice and Cristina. They had to find a place to take cover.

1955

SERAFINA STOOD BESIDE Paolo at the edge of the terrace at the Villa Chimera in a suitably high-collared black dress and gazed up into the late morning sun. She closed her eyes and savored the warmth on her face. At breakfast Milton had given her a gold brooch to pin to the dress: an eagle with colored beads for the eyes and the tips of the wings. It was, he told her, based on an Etruscan design and so he thought it would be fitting for the day. He’d seen it at a jewelry store and immediately thought of her.

“This place must have been gorgeous twenty years ago,” Paolo was saying.

“I’m sure it was even eleven or twelve years ago,” she corrected him. The two of them had made such good time driving to Monte Volta that she had suggested they stop at the Rosatis’ crumbling estate before continuing on into the village for the church service.

“Indeed,” he murmured. He was looking back at the side of the villa that had collapsed and the small mesa of rubble where once there had been a wall. He was wearing a dark suit today for the funeral, and a gray homburg instead of his usual straw boater. “Can you show me the tombs and the paintings you saw there?”

“Do you want to see them because you suddenly have an interest in Etruscan art or because you think it will be helpful to the investigation?” she asked.

“Neither, really.” He smiled at her, his hands clasped behind his back. “Maybe it will help me understand you.”

She watched a lizard race across the hot tile. “I don’t understand me.”

He ignored the remark and asked, “The tombs are near where the marchesa and her daughter-in-law will be buried, right?”

“The family plot is on a hill across from the entrance to them. Maybe thirty-five or forty meters away. No more than that.”

“Interesting.”

“The proximity?”

He nodded.

“It’s just a coincidence,” she told him. “The marchese’s family has been buried there since the early part of the century—decades before the family discovered the vaults.”

He glanced at his watch and then motioned at the village. “I don’t imagine the Rosatis or their escort have arrived yet,” he said, referring to the two police officers from Rome who were driving Cristina, Vittore, and his family to Monte Volta. In addition, Paolo was bringing a third officer from Florence, Luciano Cassini, although Cassini was going straight to the villa. His primary task would be to inspect the area near the Rosati cemetery for spots where assassins might hide. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already a few reporters at the church.”

“I agree.”

“So what do you think? Will there be more reporters or more of us?”

“I give the edge to the press,” said Serafina. “After all, there will only be five of us, including the two fellows from Rome. There could be easily twice that many reporters.”

“And the size of the crowd?”

“Do you mean the mourners?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She recalled her day in the village and what people had said about the Rosatis. She thought about the pharmacist and the old men and Ilario. “It will be small. I have a sense that by the end of the war, the marchese and his family were not especially popular. And why should they be? They had cast their lot with the Nazis.”

“From what you’ve told me, it was more complicated than that. The girl was only—”

“The girl was the same age I was. And I wasn’t dating Nazi lieutenants. Besides …”

“Go on.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about Cristina. Really, I wasn’t. I like her. I was thinking about her father, the marchese. The way Antonio entertained the Germans. The way he used this place for parties,” she said, waving her arm behind her.

“I’m sure a lot of the village cast their lot with the Nazis. As I recall, they were our allies.”

“A lot of us never viewed them that way.”

“Actually, a lot of us did—most of us, as a matter of fact. Including, for a time, your own father. Now, you and your friends had the moral high ground. I grant you that. But you were among the few. Remember, ‘Mussolini is always right,’ ” he said, reciting one of the classic Blackshirt maxims.

She smiled at him a little grimly and replied with another, equally popular Fascist motto:
“Me ne frego,”
she said.
I don’t give a damn
.

As they were about to climb into Paolo’s car and leave the villa, Luciano Cassini arrived. He was a small, heavy man with salt-and-pepper hair, a sunburned complexion, and clothes that always looked uncomfortably tight. Serafina knew that he had never approved of her. He was one of the older officers who thought Paolo had lost his mind allowing a woman to join the
polizia
. But he was calm and competent and knew what he was doing. The first thing he did was ask to see the Rosati cemetery.

“I think we have time,” Serafina said to the two men. “The service doesn’t begin for another forty-five minutes. But we should be quick.”

“Is it far?” Cassini asked.

“Not really,” she said as they started away from the villa. “It’s
actually rather modest. When I was here the other day, I counted thirteen small headstones around a stone cross. Some small pots for flowers. There are rows of cypress on three sides. It’s pretty.”

“Let me guess,” Paolo said. “At least some of those small pots are not your typical terra-cotta, are they?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

“What are you getting at?” Cassini asked Paolo.

“Don’t be surprised if the pots are rather valuable—Etruscan.”

“They’re using museum artifacts as flowerpots?”

“We’ll see,” Paolo said. “From what Cristina told us, when they unearthed the tombs, the pots were like seashells at the beach. The valuable ones they gave to the museum in Arezzo. The others? The marchesa decorated with them.”

“It must have been nice to have been the marchesa,” said Cassini.

“Not at the end,” Paolo corrected him.

“No,” Cassini agreed. “Not at the end.”

By noon a small crowd had assembled inside the church in Monte Volta. The church sat halfway up a hill, nestled between ancient brick homes on one of the narrow, winding cobblestone roads that rose up from the village center. Cristina and Vittore and his family had still not arrived from Rome, however, and so Serafina excused herself from the rear pew and went outside for a cigarette. As she had expected, the funeral was small; no more than thirty people were inside the church.

She stared for a moment at the matching pair of long black Lancia Aurelias with gold trim in the windows that dominated the street. Inside each had been a casket, the hearts restored to the cadavers. Now the coffins were at the front of the church. The other cars, including Paolo’s Fiat, were parked down the hill, in a lot at the edge of the village. She guessed that most of those vehicles were from Florence or Rome, or in one case Arezzo. The
Arezzo exception? Inside the church, she had spied the museum director, Roberto Piredda.

She was not convinced the killer was here, either among the mourners or lurking somewhere back at the Villa Chimera with a rifle with a scope. But she was still glad that Cassini was with them, as well as the two officers who were coming from Rome. Cassini was not the sort who would leave them for a grappa, and she had to believe that the pair from Rome would be just as conscientious.

Now she leaned against the brick wall of the building beside the church and lit a Serraglio, restraining the urge to run the matchstick flame under her thumb, and inhaled the smoke deeply.