The Light in the Ruins Read Online Free PDF

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