Earthquake I.D. (24 page)

By noon that same day, while Paul was still in the bath, a squad car had swung by the house. Two officers and a woman in plainclothes together managed to round up Maria Elena, after no more than a minute or two of spine-flaying screams. The screams of a baby, really. One last time the little girl tore around the downstairs, quick for her age but no match for the grownups, yanking off her soaked clothing and offering her disfigured crotch.

Nettie and Trudy, over the weeks that followed, had called in every favor they'd been owed. The Sisters felt responsible, to be sure; they had their own consciences to clear. More than that, it became apparent that they genuinely cared about their lay colleague. They didn't want to lose what Barbara Lulucita contributed to the Center. A sweet discovery, that was: proof that the Sisters hadn't just lobbed the mother a few softball duties in order to keep those monthly checks rolling in. A silver lining, that was, maybe. Nonetheless Barbara wouldn't say she ever got over the final glimpses, the final ear-splitting pleas, of her temporary additional child. Nor could she forget how troubled Paul had looked, that first afternoon in Samaritan Center. The first of Trudy's and Nettie's good turns had been getting Children's Services to shuttle their people over to Holy Name. The Sisters arranged for the boy to work in a familiar setting.

As for Jay, he'd contacted the UN earthquake-relief agencies after his and Barb's initial session. Springtime grew busy. The family threw together the move across the Atlantic. Something like twenty-five days in a row, the mother went to confession, and with that and with Nettie making so much time for her, she could begin to sound like Chris, saying that Maria Elena was better off thanks to Barbara Lulucita. Or she could sound like some honor-haunted Sicilian, insisting without the least chill of hypocrisy that Jay's mother should never know. Or she could echo Paul's CS counselor, who proposed that the boy's trauma might actually result in long-term psychosexual health. Given the right treatment, the counselor suggested, Paul might develop an exceptional comprehension of physical affection. He might grow up into one of those men who was good at intimacy; he might “achieve”—Barb repeated the expression though she never understood it—”all manner of sympathetic anomalies.”

After Maria Elena had been taken away, Barbara had found comfort in the words others gave her. The difference here in Naples, as she allowed Paul the sort of bathroom break he might need for the rest of his life, was that the mother had worked out something of her own to say. She'd forged her own absolution.

Back in the closet, Barbara shut the door. The chair's plastic seat was as warm as the last time. “Your father and I,” she began, “you guys must've noticed.”

She looked at the shelves, the scraps of homes destroyed a thousand years ago.

“Pop's told me all about it,” John Junior said.

Barb figured that if she lost control before Paul returned, if she told the others everything, maybe that would be for the best. Maybe Paul should hear it one on one.

“Mom,” her oldest went on, “he says you've been way hard to live with. After Maria Elena, what choice did he have except, I mean, something totally drastic?”

“Aw,” Chris said. “He talks to me too, JJ. I've heard all this stuff. And Pop also says, like, two-way street.”

‘Yeah, but he says
Mom
won't say that. Whatever Mom wants, she gets, but she'll never admit it.”

“He says he isn't perfect either. He says that's why he was at Castel dell'Ovo, because he'd sinned.”

“Guys,” Dora piped up, “what are you talking about?”

“We're talking,” Barbara said, “about me and your father. About how things have been going between us.”

Say it, Owl Girl. See Naples and die.

“Till now,” she said, “I've been holding off because, because—”

The closet door slammed open. The shelves rattled, a terrible racket, and there stood Kahlberg with his gun out. “The girl,” he said. “She's got Paul.”

The weapon was in one hand and from the other dangled some kind of clothing, hard to see with the way he was blocking the gallery light. He gestured with the gun.

“The
girl”
Silky repeated. “The goddamn gypsy. She went after Paul and the guide and now Umberto's down and we don't know where she took the boy.”

Barb's two oldest were off the trunk already, sneakers squeaking. The mother's thinking split in wild directions, confession and memory and Mafia movies. She asked, “He's—Umberto, he's down?”

Silky frowned and hoisted the other hand, which turned out to hold a gray blazer. “Got him right upside the head.” He rotated the jacket to reveal, sketched along one lapel, a slant hieroglyph of blood.

With the coat, the gun, and the carrying case still slung across his chest, the officer blocked Chris and John Junior from getting past. “I tried to tell y'all,” he said. “Tried to warn you about that girl.”

JJ stepped closer, inside the man's gun-hand. “Yeah well, she says
you're
crooked. Says you've been making deals.”

Across the liaison's expression flickered something close to the honest contempt that Barbara had glimpsed earlier.

“My girl says she's going to catch you any day now. You're going to be making some crooked deal and she'll
nail
you.”

“Big shooter,” Kahlberg said, “right now all I know is, I've got your brother missing and a man down.”

Yet if Silky wasn't about making deals, why did the next ten minutes or so—it couldn't have gone on long, before the gunshots—feel to Barbara like nothing but
arrangiarsi?
She seemed to spend the entire time striking interior deals, each bargain more one-sided than the last. First she jumped to her feet beside her remaining boys. Do something, blared her nervous system,
do something:
a need so fierce it might've been what she'd wanted all along. She leapt up ready to knock over the Farnese Bull. Yet immediately she had to settle for less. The liaison officer kept his iron between them and the rest of the museum. He declared that there was no way in hell that he could allow a bunch of overexcited civilians to run around loose after an armed kidnapping.

“Listen,” he repeated, “that girl took Umberto right upside the
head
. Like back when Jay was hit.”

Kahlberg wouldn't hear any objections. John Junior started to shove and get loud, but he wasn't nearly so loud as the click of the safety on the Lieutenant Major's pistol.

The family wound up in the museum gift shop. On the way downstairs the galleries threw their footsteps back at them, stony reverberations that widened the time since Barbara had last seen her middle child. Overhead the PA system ordered everyone else out of the building, repeating the command in—was it five languages? Was it ten? Then down in the shop her dealing grew more desperate. She tried to get Kahlberg to stay with them, the “non-essential personnel.” The mother wanted him where she could keep an eye on him. But again she didn't get what she wanted. The liaison hadn't taken out his gun just so he could play babysitter, he had the troopers for that. He told the biggest of the powder-blues to stand in the shop door.

“Wait, but,
wait.”
Barbara put an elbow in the guard's ribs, reaching past him to hook the strap of Kahlberg's carryall. “Last I saw, the girl was with you.”

Silky actually bared his teeth. “She went after them before Umberto and Paul got ten steps. I'm surprised you didn't notice.”

Barbara remembered only bureaucrat and boy.

“Seems to me,” the Lieutenant Major said, “I should've taken precautionary measures right then.”

“This is
so bogus!”
John Junior shouted.

“Listen,” Barb said, “listen, be careful.”

“Hey! If my girl went after Paul, she was trying to
protect
him!”

“Please, be careful.”

The PR man wriggled free, loping away into the first-floor galleries. He was loping, eager, and the mother was left to seek another arrangement, still less favorable. She backed away from the door, away from her shouting oldest and the other three clustered about him, and ducked between two standing racks of postcards. Perhaps that itself was the bargain Barbara hoped to strike, simply to be left alone among those glossy reproductions of museum pieces—every picture now somehow the same, a slant hieroglyph of blood—so that she could pray. Perhaps prayer had become the only negotiation she had left. Certainly nobody else appeared likely to help. Even the tourists were leaving. Barbara could see them beyond the shop's glass wall, filing out of the Nazionale one a time, presenting their I.D. to a pair of cops at the door. A backup Silky must've called in. Barbara, watching, with her rosary beads dangling from her fist, believed that she herself was trying to do the same: to expose the image of her inmost heart and have it approved.

She never had a doubt about the gunshots. Onetwo-threefourfive, they came, a rushed and untrained cluster.

JJ got loud again: “What was
that?”
But Barbara was already into her first stride, her rosary looped around her knuckles. She never had a doubt.

In Brooklyn, as she'd grown older and her neighborhood had gotten worse, she'd heard shots once or twice. At night the traffic petered out in a way it didn't over in Manhattan (and anyway she'd seen less and less of her mother's family, as she'd grown older), but other noises came on that much more distinctly. The next morning neighbors would claim, /
thought it was a truck backfiring
, but that didn't fool the teenage Barbara Cantasola. She'd always known a gunshot at once, and at once her organs of hearing had seemed to relocate to the rabbitty center of her chest. Today, the same. Today in the Nazionale, she understood at first shot and she counted all five, meanwhile bristling with fresh capacity and muscles in new places. The mother calculated where the shots had come from and she had a plan for the soldier at the door. In another moment she hit the trooper just right, using her beaded fist to catch him on his exposed jaw while he was speaking into the walkie-talkie on the other shoulder. She busted past him and shrugged off the children.

A different sort of policeman ran by, a Naples cop, with a revolver in one hand. Barb broke into a run herself, never mind the last-moment swipe by the NATO trooper, so rough that it clawed the bra strap off one shoulder and briefly recalled the pummeling she'd taken from Maria Elena. She knew the trooper couldn't leave his post. Anyway there was John Junior yelling behind her, and Chris and the girls too, a handful for any soldier. It took a moment to recognize the heat where the man had pawed her, the bruising. And if Paul went down, who would be her healer? Who would be his, who? Not Barbara, certainly—not this mother with her eyes on the stars, or on the Good Samaritan, or on another Hail Mary Full of Crap—with her eyes forever on anything but her own stuttering balsa-wood boy.

Her lungs grew hot too, as she raced alongside racing policemen, three or four uniforms and plainclothes making it clear that she'd been right about where the shots came from. Though she remained a stranger here; the cops believed she was one of them. In their boot-falls she kept hearing a pattern, onetwo-threefourfive.

Then Barb and the others were into some backstage area, a space for deliveries. Her eye was drawn first to the sunlight, the loading dock and its half-open rollaway door. Only after that, within the brightness, did she see the body. Face down, knees up, a man's body. She'd visited enough Catholic charity homes to know at first sight. This was a full-grown man, no preteen.

The guy's arms were spread wide across the dock's concrete floor, stretched out unbent towards the street. With his knees beneath him and his head towards the sulfur-scented glare he looked like a worshipper before an urban sun-god, the Sacred Light in the Alley. Prostrating himself, salaam. Barbara didn't see his gun, either. He'd been carrying a gun, Kahlberg, him with his Botticelli hair, ruffling now in the traffic winds through the door's partial opening. She had to look for the thing, the iron handful, and when she found it the pistol looked harmless enough, though it lay well within reach, just beyond one unmoving arm. Its skid across the dock floor had been halted by the spill from his open bag, the loose papers. Also Barbara lost a few shredded seconds frowning over the liaison's clothes, their uncharacteristic sloppy fit, bunching along the shoulders and around the shoulder strap. The wrinkles poked up, snowdrifts, almost, out of a widening bloodstain. It appeared that all five shots had hit the Lieutenant Major between chest and groin. Barbara detected no movement across the upper body, there where the heart and lungs are, no stirring out of the man at all except for the occasional ruffle of his hair. That hair again, the limit of the mother's ability to think. Otherwise the kneeling remains, the wrinkled bleeding spill for whom prayer had been the last negotiation, only left her low and sorry and afraid. Her shoulder and breast burned, burned and ached, and Barbara couldn't come any closer to the man but couldn't back away either. Some unknown cop had to touch her before she turned and saw Paul.

The boy stood in a corner, in the arms of a policewoman. His narrow shoulders quivering, his head was cradled in the woman's chest. Again, in a woman's chest.

The cop knew enough to keep him turned from the corpse. Over the top of the boy's small head, over the half-combed hair, there ran a blue scarf thickly knotted at the back. A blindfold? Barbara couldn't handle the question. She couldn't say how long it took to move his way. At last she got a hand on Paul and realized that his shoulders were shaking because he was crying, only crying, and he had no injury, no further abuse, he was all right—and Mother of God, the
sunshine
under that delivery door! The
racket
of cars and trucks beyond!