Earthquake I.D. (15 page)

No, Barbara hadn't given the gypsy a second glance, that afternoon at the hospital. Nor Kahlberg either; she'd tuned the officer out as he began to make arrangements for the morning. He started right in working the cell phone, and he did quite a job, the mother had to admit. Apparently the Lieutenant Major had pull with the Consulate. Between sunset and breakfast he got his entire North American et cetera to put pressure on the editors and producers of the local and national news, reining in the media a bit, allowing the family some recovery space in the coming days. Barbara didn't want to think about the quid pro quo. Rather she pictured Kahlberg's arrangements as a wrestling match between titans. The aging but powerful Captain Red White & Blue took down, with effort, the young but dangerous Mass Communication, Master of Disaster. She pictured it as a comics panel, a fairy tale—the sort of thing she'd read to Paul that very night, once she got him into bed. She sat down beside the boy with the anthology on her lap, the big book of fairy tales she'd brought from Bridgeport. She'd known he'd want to hear them sometime, her Mr. Paul, her fairy child.

The mother could still play Mother Goose. That night she picked a favorite from a land far away, the story of the Irish Queen Bab.

As for the Gypsy Queen, the dark young lovely restored to her feet, who could say when John Junior had noticed her? Perhaps it had happened up in the Center's chapel, in the sweltering purple aftermath of the riot. His Michelangelo lips had taken on a fresh shape, as he looked the girl over. Then the next morning Kahlberg had taken the family far away. They'd gone out to Capua, due north.

The liaison showed shrewdness, typical, in his choice for their first daytrip. They began at the beginning, on a site where Etruscan war parties had taken over an earlier settlement still, Neolithic. Though Chris nitpicked about the choice. That was another shred in the moil of this past near-week; the officer and the fifteen-year-old couldn't get onto the highway without a disagreement. On this first day following the second healing, Silky pointed out the castle at the highest point in the Vomero, Castel Sant'Elmo. Next thing he knew, he was in an argument over something called “St. Elmo's fire.” Chris insisted that the stuff wasn't actually fire and Elmo wasn't the saint's real name.

“Now son,” the Lieutenant Major said, “I don't know as there's any place in Naples that has what you'd call its real name.”

Yeah, okay. But Chris went on to claim that around here, recorded history didn't begin out at Capua, in the foothills of the Appenines. Rather things had started along the coast, at Cumae. There the Greeks had set up their first temples and shops.

“Mn,” the liaison replied, “you know a hundred years before
that
, the Greeks were out on the islands.”

“Sure, the islands,” Chris said. “The Sirens.”

But what Barbara wanted to hear about, once the family reached their destination, was the time-blackened artifact known as
arrangiarsi
, making arrangements—a business less than legal and yet embedded all over greater Naples. Anyone who stuck a hand under the table, in this city, could always find another one down there. There was always somebody who'd read the day's Duty Roster, willing to swap a secret for one of the prettier banknotes. How else could Romy have wound up here beneath the Capua Duomo? How except by Camorra-dot-com?

She lounged against a church pillar that had gone up well before Christ was a carpenter, a column left over from an Etruscan temple that had first occupied this ground. Sunlight glinted off her gypsy array, the bracelets of tarnished silver and sparkle-dusted plastic, and the sequins sewn into her halter top. The outfit revealed so much olive-dark midriff that at first Barbara thought, with relief, the priests wouldn't let Romy in the church. But then as soon as Kahlberg had finished his transactions over the documents and satchels, John Junior had jumped out in front of the family's little crowd (from the first, the NATO man never brought along fewer than three bodyguards). Romeo had offered Juliet the long-sleeved windbreaker he always kept knotted,
moda Americana
, around his slim midfielder's hips.

So never mind that Barb had deprived the priest of his nap. She brought the subject back to this girl and today. “I should take her for an enemy, shouldn't I? An enemy or an accident waiting to happen. Her looks alone, that should—”

“Beh, don't exaggerate.” Cesare crossed his arms and knees the other way. “Don't talk like a bourgeois. What worries you about that girl is, you don't actually worry about her. ‘Should,' you say, ‘should.' You believe you
should
worry.”

Barb started to nod, almost getting it.

“You believe this—what would we call it, espionage? Espionage, the way the girl keeps sussing out your daily rounds? You believe this should worry you, but in fact it leaves you entirely impressed.”

The mother tried for more solid ground. “There's also what's happened with John Junior, don't forget. It's puppy love at full yap.”

Romy and JJ generated waves of attraction that Barbara could swear rustled the petals of any flowers nearby. There was a breeze even in the heat of mid-June, the most breathless urban canyon. The lovebirds rode the air currents with acrobatic balance, without so much as a glance at Silky's gunmen. They had the mother trying to pull off the same, for a moment or two; they set her cuddling up with Paul or one of the girls and drifting off into Dimension Infatuation. But Barb was too much the adult to get so carried away, to believe herself beyond the reach of a stray bullet or a secret she'd rather leave buried.

“Full yap,” she repeated, as Cesare broke into a smile. “It doesn't matter that JJ hasn't gotten under her clothes.”

The old man gave her the eyebrow again. Earlier that week he'd let Barbara know that, as part of his ministry among the displaced and the
clandestini
, he carried a secret stash of condoms.

“Father, Cesare, those two, there's no way they've gotten that far. Ask our friend the Lieutenant Major, you think he isn't watching? So far as that guy's concerned, the kissy-face stuff is bad enough.” Once more she massaged the beads through her purse-leather, settling into confession. “Myself, the truth is—I am impressed with her, aren't I?” And she added, halting, each word another bead, that she believed it was good for the kids to have the distraction.

“I know, I know,” she went on, “where do I get off, worrying that the kids might get hurt? It's tangled logic, I realize. But, tangled, Father, that's where I live.”

Anyway she was glad the children had something else to occupy their wondering heads. During these five or six days since the Refugee Center, Barbara imagined, the last thing on the kids' minds had been whatever trouble they sensed between the two ends of the dinner table. To them the ‘rents must've always seemed on the prickly side. Jay and Barb must've seemed like another part of the Greater New York Immigrant Bicker, the spectrum from Lucy and Desi to Tony and Carmela. And now that Barbara was through with the role, she was sick of it, she'd come to notice that there'd been a few advance indicators. There'd been a significant disturbance or two over the past year, and the kids had picked up on these, the way they made the family gyro wobble. Back in Bridgeport, in the months before the trip, everyone from JJ down to the twins had preferred to hole up at home. In the case of the oldest boy, this had put a dent in his social life; the girls at his high school used to come up with all sorts of ideas for a Saturday night. But these days, in Naples, what JJ felt for Romy was much more of a show than the varsity co-captain had ever put on in the States. With no more than a hug and a bit of a backrub, he and the gypsy could send tremors through the thick camellias of mid-June. A valuable distraction.

Cesare yawned, flagrantly. “Well, is that it? You came banging at my door to tell me you're tangled? Tell me in rather a tangled fashion, I might add.”

“I'm saying it's been that way for years. Everybody else, they've been free.”

“Don't exaggerate, signora. Don't talk to me about lack of freedom until you come down to dell'Ovo. Down in the castle, don't you know Mrs. Lulucita, you might well find the fulfillment you seek. I daresay Christ is there.”

“Maybe,” Barb said. “But so's our busy Lieutenant Major.”

“Well, when your husband came…”

“Tell me, at some point or another, did Kahlberg and Jay go off somewhere? Somewhere alone, behind closed doors? I bet they did.”

Cesare lifted his chin, his wattles. “Signora, I ask you formally. Have you any proof that your husband is involved in some secret arrangement with NATO?”

She didn't bother shaking her head. “Listen, whatever's going on between those two, what it's saying for me is, God didn't send me the hunger strikers. He sent me this girl, Romy. He sent me Romy and whatever she has to tell me about my family and the weirdo in the ice-cream suits.”

“The girl is simply a lost sheep. She was lost and now she is found.”

“All right, but after that, why'd she turn around and find us?”

“Signora, you see the hand of God in this? You're the mother of a healthy young man, one who finds himself in southern Italy in springtime. You should be grateful it's a girl such as this, a girl of some shall we say
practicality
. Heaven help your Junior if he'd fallen instead for one of the pampered rich kids around this neighborhood. One of Berlusconi's Army, don't you know.”

She took the man in, his black and gray itself a penance, on a hot afternoon. Nettie had taught Barbara a thing or two about Cesare's order; she'd taken vows with the Maryknoll Sisters before coming out of the closet. The brotherhood was one of the most orthodox. You weren't supposed to find a Dominican carrying condoms. On top of that he had the Dublin schooling, Jesuit, steel-trap.

“Listen,” she said evenly, “here's the news. Kahlberg's not content with spreading nasty rumors, anymore. He wants me to put my foot down.”

The priest's narrowing eyes revealed a new set of crow's feet.

“That was today, I'm saying. Mr. Lieutenant Major Mojo gave me an order. ‘Tell that boy the little whore has got to go.'”

This morning's visit had been to the ruins under San Lorenzo Maggiore, one of the foremost downtown churches, with at least five layers of edifice on the same spot: Postwar on Baroque on Gothic on Roman on Greek. The liaison man had used the word “palimpsest,” dropping his Southern accent in order to enunciate precisely, then pausing to eyeball Chris. But the second-oldest had wanted to see the place, and Barbara too. It was jam-packed yet vaulted stone like that, temple on church mounting far over her head, that tended to exercise her God-muscle.

“But,” she said now, “this morning Romy told us there's neater stuff right across the piazza.
Napoli Sotterraneo
, there.”

“Neater stuff? The
Sotterraneo's
been closed since the quake, Mrs. Lulucita. Closed for good reason.”

“Yeah, but can you imagine how it sounded to my kids? All these caverns and cisterns and tiny passageways. Romy said it's like Indiana Jones down there.”

“Please. The figure who comes to my mind is Dante.”

“Well, Father, give or take an obscenity or two, that's just what Kahlberg said.”

At some point her gaze had shifted to the po-mo altar. The red flecks of stone or ceramic recalled the NATO man's aggravated face. “The only people who'd been down there lately, he kept saying—well I believe he called them lowlife scum.” Shouting and gesticulating, Kahlberg had let his jacket fly open. He hadn't cared if anyone saw his shoulder holster. Barbara, even after he'd punched the remote to open the van doors, could only sit and stare for a minute or so. She took in his carrying on, strange as it seems, with a distinct touch of envy. She could've used a tantrum herself

“He said that the girl was scum too,” she went on, turning again to the priest, “scum lowlife and a born crook. And a menace, he said. The man put his finger in her face and screamed that she was trying to lure us into a, a compromising situation.”

The liaison had fallen into Orgspeak, the final elastic binder on his self-control. Barbara had to wonder what would've happened if there hadn't been an audience. Various non-combatants had gathered at the bottom of San Lorenzo's steps, jogging up behind the NATO van (a smaller model, a Fiat, for the trip into the old downtown). The usual needy ten or a dozen, with their medallions—but if there hadn't been so many witnesses, would the family have seen some gunplay?

“You know,” she added after a moment, “it's strange that Jay should wind up working with a guy like that. Because Jay's your basic open book. I'm saying, when the Jaybird's upset, he might not come up with the right words, but you always know pretty much how he's feeling.”

The priest went on frowning.

“But don't you see, our friend from NATO, he's just the opposite, he's got a ton of talk but zero information. Don't you see he's been a spook, for two weeks now? I'm saying, that girl, this morning, she got the closest I've ever seen anybody get to the naked truth about Officer Kahlberg. And all she did was, she surprised him.”

The girl had popped up beside the liaison man before he'd finished handing over the day's papers. “The rest of us were still in the van. Chris makes some crack to JJ, ‘where's your girlfriend?' And then like that, there she is, right there next to our NATO mojo. Can you believe she jumped right in there between the guys who have to check Silky's papers? That gypsy, she must've known one of those two Italians is there for protection. One of ‘em's got to have a gun, you know? But she jumps right in.”

“Are you suggesting, do you mean…” The old man's eyebrows, white and fluttering, might've been another variety of Naples tassel. “Was this espionage again, Mrs. Lulucita? The girl was trying to catch the officer off guard, so that she might discover something?”