The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page A

grief since the war.
    And while Serafina and Paolo could joke that whoever had ripped out Francesca’s heart wasn’t a surgeon because the crime scene had been such a cataclysmic mess, the reality was that whoever had killed the woman had indeed used a bone saw—or a tool very much like a bone saw. So it wasn’t inconceivable that the murderer worked in a hospital or a morgue.
    Behind her she heard the apartment’s front door open and recognized the sound of Milton’s keys falling upon the glass-toppedtable in the entryway, and then his footsteps as he strolled through the living room to the terrace. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, and she could smell a vestigial trace of the sandalwood lotion he had rubbed on his face after shaving that morning.
    “So, any mayhem and madness today?” he asked in Italian. “Or were the Florentines too done in by this heat to kill one another?”
    “I saw a human heart.”
    “Where?”
    “In an ashtray.”
    “That’s disgusting.”
    “The rest of the body was far worse.”
    He sat in the chair beside her, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.
    “Is that a new suit?” she asked. It was a summer-weight gray pinstripe, the lapels cut into deep, sharp triangles just below his collarbone.
    “It is. Do you like it?”
    “I do. Very much.”
    “Tell me all about your day,” he said gently. “Clearly yours was far more grisly than mine.”

    Serafina was back at Francesca Rosati’s apartment house the next morning by seven, knocking on doors. By nine she had spoken with everyone in the building she had missed yesterday, asking them to tell her all that they knew about the dead woman, her lovers and friends. Francesca, everyone agreed, kept to herself; when she didn’t, when she ran into her neighbors in the stairway or along the thin corridor, she was acerbic or aloof. Either she would allow herself a sardonic passing remark on the walls’ desperate need for a paint job or she barely would nod. No one knew much about her past, even though she had lived on the Via Zara almost a year and a half, but everyone assumed that once she had been rather spoiled and well off—no doubt, they surmised, because she had been some Blackshirt’s mistress. A kept woman. The sort who’d never married.She had not, in her neighbors’ opinions, grown accustomed to her diminished social standing and genteel poverty. They knew she had different men come to her apartment, but they knew also that she worked in a dress shop, and no one thought she was a prostitute.
    The closest Serafina had come to a helpful lead was offered by an old woman who had one of the other two apartments on Francesca’s floor. The woman was a widow who, like everyone else in the building, had no idea that Francesca had lost a husband and both of her children in the war. But she did tell Serafina this: about a month ago, Francesca had asked her for the name of a good locksmith in the neighborhood. She had come straight home to the apartment from the dress shop where she worked and was uncharacteristically agitated when they met on the front steps.
    “She saw someone she recognized whom she didn’t like—someone who frightened her. I didn’t think that woman could be scared of anyone,” the old widow had told Serafina. And while she had recommended a locksmith a few blocks to the west, as far as she knew, Francesca had never gotten around to contacting the fellow or putting a more substantial lock on her door.

    The dress shop was called the Sunflower, and although it was near the train station, it had a largely local clientele, Florentine women who could not afford to shop at the tonier boutiques along the Via de’ Tornabuoni or the Via dei Calzaiuoli. The owner was a gaunt woman in her sixties with a haughty face, thin lips, and a sheen of cold cream across her forehead. Her name was Isabella and she reminded Serafina of the grandmother of a fellow she’d dated a few years ago, a woman who