A Noble Radiance (2 page)

Occasionally he asked
one of the men to hand him a bone, and he studied it for a moment before
bending to place it somewhere on the plastic sheet. Twice he corrected himself,
once bending to move a small bone from the right side to the left, and another
time, with a muttered exclamation, moving another from below the metatarsal to
the end of what had once been a wrist.

At ten, Doctor Litfin
arrived, having been alerted the previous evening to the discovery in his
garden and having driven through the night from Munich. He parked in front of
his house and pulled himself stiffly from the driver's seat. Beyond the house,
he saw the countless deep tracks cut into the new grass he had planted with
such simple joy three weeks before. But then he saw the three men standing in
the field off in the distance, almost as far away as the patch of young raspberry
plants he had brought down from Germany and planted at the same time. He
started across the destroyed lawn but stopped in his tracks at a shouted
command that came from somewhere off to his right He looked around but saw
nothing except the three ancient apple trees that had grown up around the
ruined well. Seeing no one, he started again towards the three men in the
field. He had taken only a few steps before two men dressed in the ominous
black uniforms of the
Carabinieri
burst out from under the nearest
of the apple trees, machine guns aimed at him.

Doctor Litfin had
survived the Russian occupation of Berlin, and though that had happened fifty
years before, his body remembered the sight of armed men in uniform. He put
both of his hands above his head and stood rock-still.

They came out fully
from the shadows then, and the doctor had a hallucinogenic moment of seeing the
contrast of their death-black uniforms against the innocent backdrop of pink
apple blossom. Their glossy boots trampled across a carpet of fresh-fallen
petals as they approached him.

^‘
What are you doing here?' the first one demanded.

'Who are you?' the
other asked in the same angry tone.

In Italian made
clumsy by fear, he began, ‘I’m Doctor Litfin. I'm the . . ‘ he said but stopped
to search for the appropriate term. ‘I’m the
padrone
here.'

The
Carabinieri
had
been told that the new owner was a German, and the accent sounded real enough,
so they lowered their guns, though they kept their fingers near the triggers.
Litfin took this as permission to lower his hands, though he did that very
slowly. Because he was German, he knew that guns were always superior to any
claim to legal rights, and so he waited for them to approach him, but this did
not prevent him from turning his attention momentarily back to the three men
who stood in the newly ploughed earth, they now as motionless as he, their
attention on him and the approaching
Carabinieri.

The two officers,
suddenly diffident in the face of the person who could afford the restorations
to house and land evident all around them, approached Doctor Litfin, and as
they drew nearer, the balance of power changed. Litfin perceived this, and
seized the moment.

'What is all of
this?' he asked, pointing across the field and leaving it to the policemen to
infer whether he meant his ruined lawn or the three men who stood at the other
side of it.

There's a body in
your field’ the first officer answered.

‘I know that, but what’s
all this...?' he sought the proper word and came up only with
'distruzione'.

The marks of the tyre
treads seemed actually to grow deeper as the three men studied them, until
finally one of the policemen said, 'We had to drive down into the field’

Though this was an
obvious lie, Litfin ignored it. He turned away from the two officers and
started to walk towards the other three men so quickly that neither of the
officers tried to stop him. When he got to the end of the first deep trench, he
called across to the man who was obviously in charge,

'What is it?'

'Are you Doctor
Litfin?' asked the other doctor, who had already been told about the German,
what he had paid for the house, and how much he had spent so far on
restorations.

Litfin nodded and
when the other man was slow to answer, asked again, 'What is it?'

'I'd say it was a man
in his twenties’ Doctor Bortot answered and then, turning back to his assistants,
motioned them to continue with their work.

It took Litfin a
moment to recover from the brusqueness of the reply, but when he did, he
stepped on to the ploughed earth and went to stand beside the other doctor.
Neither man said anything for a long time as they stood side by side and
watched the two men in the trench scrape away slowly at the dirt.

After a few minutes,
one of the men handed Doctor Bortot another bone, which, with a quick glance,
he bent and placed at the end of the other wrist. Two more bones; two more
quick placements.

'There, on your left,
Pizzetti,' Bortot said, pointing to a tiny white knob that lay exposed on the
far side of the trench. The man he spoke to glanced at it, bent and picked it
from the earth, and handed it up to the doctor. Bortot studied it for a moment,
holding it delicately between his first two fingers, then turned to the German.
'Lateral cuneiform?' he asked.

Litfin pursed his
lips as he looked at the bone. Even before the German could speak, Bortot
handed it to him. Litfin turned it in his hands for a moment, then glanced down
at the pieces of bone laid out on the plastic at their feet. 'That, or it might
be the intermediate’ he answered, more comfortable with the Latin than the
Italian.

‘Yes, yes, it could
be,' Bortot replied. He waved his hand down towards the plastic sheet, and
Litfin stooped to place it at the end of the long bone leading to the foot. He
stood up and both men looked at it.
']a,
Ja’
Litfin muttered;
Bortot nodded.

And so for the next
hour the two men stood together beside the trench left by the tractor, first
one and then the other taking a bone from the two men who continued to sift the
rich earth through the tilted screen. Occasionally they conferred about a
fragment or sliver, but generally they agreed about the identity of what was
passed up to them by the two diggers.

The spring sun poured
down on them; off in the distance, a cuckoo began his mating call, repeating it
until the four men were no longer aware of it. As it grew hotter, they began to
peel off their coats and then their jackets, all of which ended up hung on the
lower branches of the trees running along the side of the field to mark the end
of the property.

To pass the time,
Bortot asked a few questions about the house, and Litfin explained that the
exterior restorations were finished; there remained the interior work, which he
estimated would take much of the summer. When Bortot asked the other doctor why
he spoke Italian so well, Litfin explained that he had been coming to Italy on
vacation for twenty years and, during the last, to prepare himself for the
move, had been taking classes three times a week. The bells from the village
above them rang out twelve times.

I think that might be
all, Dottore’ one of the men in the trench said and, to emphasize it, struck
his shovel deep into the ground and rested his elbow on it. He took out a pack
of cigarettes and lit one. The other man stopped as well, took out a handkerchief
and wiped his face.

Bortot looked down at
the patch of excavated earth, now about three metres square, then down at the
bones and shrivelled organs spread out on the plastic sheeting.

Litfin suddenly
asked, 'Why did you think it’s a young man?'

Before answering,
Bortot bent down and picked up the skull. 'The teeth,' he said, handing it to
the other man.

But instead of
looking at the teeth, which were in good condition and with no sign of the
wearing-away of age, Litfin, with a, small grunt of surprise, turned the skull
to expose the back. In the centre,  just above the indentation that would fit
around the still-missing final vertebra, there was a small round hole. He had
seen enough of skulls and of violent death that he was neither shocked nor
disturbed.

'But why male?' he
asked, handing the skull back to Bortot.

Before he answered,
Bortot knelt and placed the skull back in its place at the top of the other
bones. 'This: it was near the skull’ he said as he stood, taking something
from his jacket pocket and handing it to Litfin. 'I don't think a woman would
wear that.'

The ring he handed
Litfin was a thick gold band that flared out into a round, flat surface. Litfin
put the ring on to the palm of his left hand and turned

it over with the
index finger of his right The design was so worn away that at first he could
distinguish nothing, but then it slowly came into focus: carved in low relief
was an intricate design of an eagle rampant holding a flag in its left claw, a
sword in its right. ‘I forget the Italian word’ Litfin said as he looked at the
ring. 'A family crest?'

'Stemma’  
Bortot supplied.

'Si,
stemma’  
Litfin
repeated and then asked, 'Do you recognize it?'

Bortot nodded.

'What is it?'

If s the crest of the
Lorenzoni family.'

Litfin shook his
head. He'd never heard of them. 'Are they from around here?'

This time Bortot
shook his head.

As he handed back the
ring, Litfin asked, 'Where are they from?'

'Venice.'

3

Not only Doctor
Bortot, but just about anyone in the Veneto region, would recognize the name
Lorenzoni. Students of history would recall the Count of that name who
accompanied the blind Doge Dandolo at the sack of Constantinople in 1204; legend
has it that it was Lorenzoni who handed the old man his sword as they scrambled
over the wall of the city. Musicians would recall that the principal
contributor to the building of the first opera theatre in Venice bore the name
of Lorenzoni. Bibliophiles recognized the name as that of the man who had lent
Aldus Manutius the money to set up his first printing press in the city in
1495. But these are the memories of specialists and historians, people who have
reason to recall the glories of the city and of the family. Ordinary Venetians
recall it as the name of the man who, in 1944, provided the SS with the chance
to discover the names and addresses of the Jews living in the city.

Of the 256 Venetian
Jews who had been living in the city, eight survived the war. But that is only
one way of looking at the fact and at the numbers. More crudely put, it means
that 248 people, citizens of Italy and residents of what had once been the Most
Serene Republic of Venice, were taken forcibly from their homes and eventually
murdered.

Italians are nothing
if not pragmatic, so many people believed that, if it had not been Pietro
Lorenzoni, the father of the present count, it would have been someone else who
revealed the hiding place of the head of the Jewish community to the SS. Others
suggested that he must have been threatened into doing it: after all, since the
end of the war the members of the various branches of the family had certainly
devoted themselves to the good of the city, not only by their many acts of charity
and generosity to public and private institutions, but by their having filled
various civic posts - once even that of mayor, though for only six months - and
having served with distinction, as the phrase has it, in many public
capacities. One Lorenzoni had been the Rector of the University; another
organized the Biennale for a period of time in the Sixties; and yet another
had, upon his death, left his collection of Islamic miniatures to the Correr
Museum.

Even if they didn't
remember any of these things, much of the population of the city recalled the
name as that of the young man who had been kidnapped two years ago, taken by
two masked men from beside his girlfriend while they were parked in front of
the gates of the family villa outside Treviso. The girl had first called the
police, not the family, and so the Lorenzonis' assets had been frozen
immediately, even before the family learned of the crime. The first ransom
note, when it came, demanded seven billion lire, and at the time there was much
speculation about whether the Lorenzonis could find that much money. The next
note, which came three days after the first, lowered the sum to five billion.