The Light in the Ruins (4 page)

Serafina led Cristina downstairs and down the block to a small café that had two dingy tables outside, one beneath an umbrella faded almost white by the sun. She suggested that the woman sit at the table with the shade. On the way there, Cristina explained
to her that Francesca had been married to her brother Marco, who had died in the war.

There were no customers at the café, either inside or out, but Serafina spied an old woman at the glass counter, with a line of liquor bottles and an espresso machine behind her. There was a metal tray with a white linen napkin and half a dozen biscotti on the counter.

“Espresso?” she asked Cristina, and the woman nodded halfheartedly. “Cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” she said, her voice a little numb.

“Okay,” Serafina said, and she went and ordered for the two of them, opening a fresh pack of Serraglios and lighting a cigarette for herself while the old woman made them their coffee.

“So, where are you from?” she asked when she rejoined Cristina, placing the two small cups and saucers on the table. When she took her seat, she was careful to sit so the rear of the chair didn’t graze the right side of her back. “Florence?”

“No. I live in Rome. With my mother. But I grew up in Monte Volta. It’s near Pienza.”

“I know where Monte Volta is. I was nearby when the Nazis blew up that old granary when they were retreating.”

Cristina smirked ever so slightly. “They only blew up half of it. It had two towers. Only one fell.”

Serafina nodded but said nothing. She and the other partisans had witnessed it crumbling from a distance. She had been standing between Enrico Tarantola and his wife, Teresa, on a hill on the outskirts of the village.

“It was built in the fifteenth century,” Cristina went on. “They modeled it after the tower in Siena. Maybe because it wasn’t going to be as tall as Siena’s, they decided to build two. Who knows? Anyway, the Nazis were using them as spotting towers, and claimed they had to blow them up so the Allies couldn’t use them the same way. But really they were just trying to punish us. And they failed. Only knocking down one of the towers? Pathetic.”

“Monte Volta is beautiful.”

“My family used to have a villa there. Technically, we still do. You can see it from that old tower—from that granary. It was a farm. Not huge: we had no tenant farmers. But we had an olive grove, a small vineyard. We had sheep and cattle and a couple of horses. We called it the Villa Chimera.”

“After the … creature?”

Cristina nodded. “We even had a statue of one in a garden. We had Venus and we had a fire-breathing monster.”

Serafina tried to recall the three animals that made up a chimera. She knew a lion was one and perhaps a snake was another. But the third? No idea.

“Ours—the one my grandfather had sculpted—resembled the Chimera of Arezzo,” Cristina was saying. “But our goat wasn’t quite as fierce. And I never understood a goat anyway. Goats are cute. They’re silly. They give us cheese.”

“Why would your grandfather have named your estate after a monster?”

“I think it was more about magic. And my family had always suspected the Etruscans had once lived on our land.” She sipped her coffee. “Of course, you can’t live in the villa these days. Not that my family ever would. It would be too painful. And the animals are long gone.”

“The war?”

“The Germans—and the partisans. But mostly the Germans.”

Serafina had no recollection of commandeering food or supplies from a villa in Monte Volta. They tended to descend upon the properties closer to Mount Amiata. But there had been one farm near that village where some of her partisan band had hidden from the Nazis for a few days in 1944. And of course there had been the brutal firefight at that beautiful villa near Monte Volta, just hours after the granary fell, where she had been wounded. But hadn’t that been in Trequanda? The Germans were moving north and Enrico had decided they should try to block their retreat. Stall them so the British or the Americans could catch them. But he had underestimated badly the fight left in the Germans, as well as the
firepower they had with them. The partisans had fallen back to the villa. It was a wonder that everyone in their small group hadn’t been killed; it was certainly a miracle, a physician said to her later, that she was still alive.

As she listened to Cristina, she couldn’t help but speculate whether this woman’s family had in fact been German sympathizers—supporters of Mussolini, even as late as 1944—and if that was why the partisans had raided their farm for provisions. Perhaps they were exacting a measure of revenge. She hoped the family had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, because she wanted to like Cristina. It always made things easier if you liked the victim’s family. The truth was, the last two years of the conflict had been a near civil war in Tuscany, with small bands of partisans sprouting like mushrooms. They supported the Allies—in some cases were supplied by the Allies—and did battle with both the Germans and the Italians who continued to champion the Fascist cause. They were peasants and aristocrats, communists and monarchists. Sometimes they were mere opportunists. All that most shared was a hatred for the way the Blackshirts and the Nazis had led their country into a ruinous war.

“The villa is rubble?” Serafina asked Cristina.

“Not all of it. But it’s certainly not livable. Whole walls are gone. Big holes in the roof. It needs more work than my mother and I can afford to put into it, or Vittore would be willing to put into it.”

“Vittore?”

“My other brother.”

Serafina tasted her espresso. Then: “So you drove all the way up here for lunch? It must be a nine-hour round-trip from Rome.”

“If I was tired, I would have napped at Francesca’s. Either I’d nap during siesta or I’d spend the night and drive home tomorrow. I’ve done that before.”

“Spent the night.”

“Yes.”

“Any idea who killed your sister-in-law?”

Cristina shook her head. She was a slender young woman, small and almost skinny, with eyes the gray of a moonstone. She was using her sunglasses like a headband, keeping a sleek mane of ash-brown hair off her face. She was pretty, and Serafina tried not to be jealous of the way the woman could wear earrings or simply pull her hair back behind her ears. “No,” Cristina said. “I don’t.”

“Was she seeing someone? Did she have a new man in her life?”

“She always had men in her life after Marco died. But none were serious and she never introduced me to them.”

“Can you give me some names?”

She shrugged. “Pick names from the phone book. I could give you eleven first names and they’d all be correct.”

“What about her parents? Where are they?”

“Her father died years and years ago, when she was a little girl. Her mother died in 1941—no, 1942.”

“Sisters? Brothers?”

“Francesca was an only child.”

“I presume she doesn’t have any children.”

“She had two. A boy and a girl.”

“With your brother Marco?”

“Yes.”

Serafina analyzed Cristina’s use of the past tense. She felt a twinge of apprehension when she asked her next question: “Where are they now?”

“In heaven,” Cristina answered.

Serafina nodded. “I’m very sorry,” she said. She thought of the dead children she had seen in the war and the dead twins she had seen on a case her second year here in Florence. Those boys had been killed by their father, after he had shot their mother. Then, with one final bullet, he had taken his own life. In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping—though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.

“Well, at least now they have their mother again,” Cristina
said, folding her arms across her chest and sitting back in her chair. “They have both their parents. And my sister-in-law is no longer alone.”

“You’re trying to find a silver lining in Francesca’s murder?”

“No. But at least they’re all together now.”

“Tell me how they died—your niece, your nephew, and your brother,” Serafina said.

“It was during the war. We knew the Germans had mined the roads. We didn’t know they had mined parts of the estate. We thought the children would be safe near the tombs.”

“The tombs?”

Overhead they heard an airplane, and Cristina brought her hand to her eyebrows like a visor and followed it for a moment. Then she turned her attention back to the detective and said, “Some people called it a necropolis—a city of the dead. But that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t nearly that large. But it was a burial vault for some powerful Etruscan family. We found it on our estate years after my grandfather died, and it’s a testimony to his … instincts. He knew the property was Etruscan, and he was right.” She paused. Then: “Who knows? Maybe he was on to something when he named the estate after a monster.”

I HAD NO compulsion, no perversion, no need. I did not saw through the sternum because I had to
.

I did it because it gave people a reason to suppose I am more disturbed and violent than in fact I am—than in fact I ever was. I wanted to be sure that everyone knew I was not merely another in a long line of secretly pathetic serial killers. (I have read that psychiatrists and “profilers” presume that most serial killers are impotent. They really do. In their opinion, the men are likely to be failures. Obsessed with their mothers. They are disappointments and malcontents and losers acting out.)

And so instead I cut out their hearts. Trust me, that’s rare, even by the standards of the truly psychotic
.

Besides, I was not randomly choosing my victims. I was not looking for whores in the shadows of Florence or noblewomen whose morals had fallen as far as their status. There was nothing arbitrary about what I was doing, and soon that would be clear. Even the Italian police—a group that gives life to clichés about Italian ineptitude, corruption, and sloth—would see the connections soon enough
.

I considered leaving my first victim’s heart at the scene and taking a bite out of it. Making sure that the shape of a human mouth was unmistakable. But I didn’t. The gesture of consuming, cannibal-like, even a mouthful of human organ meat would have been animalistic and bizarre—beneath me
.

I have standards
.

And of course my first was Francesca. Her heart was, in my mind and in my experience, far more than mere organ meat
.

Think of the Italian phrase
“Il mio cuore e per voi.”

In English? My heart is for you
.

It’s an expression of profound, limitless desire—not one diner offering to share his entrée with a companion
.

So I lifted the heart from Francesca’s chest and placed it totemically on her vanity. Then I left her tawdry little apartment and began to plan how I would kill her mother-in-law. Beatrice Rosati, the marchesa herself, would be next
.

1943

AFTER THE TWO army officers had left the Villa Chimera, Cristina went upstairs and drew herself a bath. The children were awake by then, and her little niece sat on the tile floor by the side of the deep porcelain tub and chattered away as Cristina watched the dust from the tombs lift off her skin and float upon the surface of the water. Alessia was annoyed that the grown-ups had gone to the ruins without her. She viewed the site as her own private playground, even though she was not allowed to venture there without an adult to see to her safety—and to the safety of the ancient artwork on the ceilings and walls.

“When my father comes home, we are going to camp there,” she was informing Cristina. “We are going to play hide-and-seek and have a picnic, and I am going to paint whatever I want on the walls. I am going to add pictures of me dancing. I can draw one of you, too, if you’d like.”

“You’re sweet. But you know that none of us are allowed to touch the walls. Besides, I’d rather have a drawing like that on paper, so I can hang it in my bedroom. You know how I love your pictures.” Then she closed her eyes and stretched her legs so that her feet emerged from the water at the far end of the tub. She wondered what it was at the site that those two officers had wanted to see. They’d been evasive when she’d asked.

“But the walls in the caves are magic,” Alessia was saying. “Drawings there last forever, you know.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” she corrected the child, but she opened her eyes and tilted her head toward the girl, smiling as she spoke.

“Next time you go, I want to come. Don’t go when I’m napping. Please?”

“I’ll take you tomorrow,” Cristina said.

“I’ll bring my dolls!”

Cristina wished there were a phone in the corridor of the hotel in Florence where her brother Vittore was billeted. She wanted to ask him how he knew this Major Giancarlo Lorenzetti. Vittore called every fourth or fifth day from the hotel lobby, and he had phoned the house yesterday, which meant that he wouldn’t ring them again for at least another two days. And he never called them from the museum. She guessed she could phone him there, but what if Lorenzetti or one of the Germans was in the room? What if the Gestapo or the Italian Fascists were listening in on the line?