The Light in the Ruins Read Free Page B

flashlights or candles or lanterns, that they began to understand the magnificence of what had once been here. There were six tombs, the chambers cut deep into the hillside. Inside, the artwork was better protected from centuries of erosion and wasting and sun. Paintings of musicians and dancers, invariably in profile, ran along the walls and low ceilings, as did drawings of fruit trees and birds and, in a corner of one tomb, a young fisherman. From one entrance a visitor could walk smack into the short row of pedestals with saucerlike tops on which urns the size of thigh-high rosemary shrubs had once rested. From another entrance a person might discover the tomb with the long platforms on which the Rosatis had found the sarcophagi, two of them, both beautifully preserved, one with a sculpture of a young man atop the lid and the other with a man and a woman—a husband and a wife. And though the urns and the sarcophagi and the funeral artifacts had been exhumed and sent to the museum in Arezzo, the musicians and the dancers and the birds remained on the walls.
    Cristina handed a candle to each of the officers and kept one for herself. She started to fumble with the matches, but the Italian major had a cigarette lighter and lit all three of the tapers in an instant. Then together they stooped and she led them through the middle archway, into the first of the rooms with the low ceilings where two and a half millennia earlier perhaps her very own ancestors had been laid to rest.

1955

    IT FRUSTRATED SERAFINA BETTINI when the other detectives tried to spare her their stories from the worst of the crime scenes. She was the only woman in the small homicide unit in 1955, and despite her work with the partisans in 1943 and 1944—when, in fact, she was a teenager—the men still treated her with either ham-handed attempts at chivalry or outright condescension. Serafina honestly wasn’t sure which she found more exasperating. Most of the men in the Florence polizia didn’t even know that Paolo Ficino allowed her, against regulations, to stash a Beretta in her purse. They no longer asked her out, but that was largely because they had all come to the conclusion, much as it pained them, that she was probably going to marry that American banker with whom she was living. If only, the men sometimes said to her, feigning either wistfulness or disapproval, her mother and father were still alive. Still, no one ever commented on her right ear if a breeze blew aside her hair; no one mentioned her neck when she let down her guard and loosened the high collar of her blouse against the heat. For that she was grateful.
    But she was a woman, and so, even though she was at her desk the afternoon that Francesca Rosati’s body was found in her small apartment on the Via Zara, Paolo Ficino almost didn’t take her with him. It was too grisly. The chief inspector put down the phone, thought back on what he himself had seen in the war—which was, in his opinion, blessedly limited, and mostly involved camouflaging firing platforms for arrogant, impressively cold-blooded Nazisharpshooters—and wondered if he should assign a different pair to this new crime scene. Paolo viewed Serafina a bit as he did his own daughter, and he sure as hell wouldn’t take his daughter to an apartment where someone had cut out the heart from a woman’s chest and left it beside the vanity mirror. Good Lord, how do you even cut out a human heart? he thought. What sorts of tools or surgical instruments did this crazy person carry about with him? But he and Serafina had the lightest caseload, and the men in the unit were investigating Florence’s more civilized, less gruesome murders or they were off for the day. Besides, she was his partner. That was the reality. She was his partner because he was the whole reason she had been allowed into the unit, and because no other man was going to work with a woman. So he grabbed his gun and his straw hat, and despite his reluctance