Earthquake I.D. (36 page)

Barbara's footage, in other words, was only another item for the local closets. After all, what city in the world was so full of discards? She remembered the trunk in the Nazionale, and she wondered just which shelf or cellar would wind up storing the business on Whitman's screen. This longhaired
artiste
had composed another storytelling platter, on which was depicted a slender hero who, despite his frail youth and stark robes, possessed the touch that could restore life. He was the Anti-Siren, this creature. But after he dropped in, after he sent the shock of recovery through a few broken bodies, he went away. Paul would go away, him and his well-intentioned family, and Barb couldn't have found a more powerful proof than this: his face collapsing to fit into a file within a file. Lively as their Neapolitan crisis might've seemed, in the end it was only another scrap for the display case, catalogued and wired to an alarm.

A storytelling platter, Barbara thought, or another version of the movie cliché. Another couple of Anglos felt a bit better about themselves, thanks to their trip to Italy.

PAUL: The only one, really, the only wuh, one I've really been a-able to talk to, uhh, talk to about it is Ruh, Ruh. (
swallows
) It's Romy.

BARBARA (
straightening
)
:
She talks to you?

PAUL: I used to, used to talk to her. (
twitches
) She knows a-about the lick, the licking and flowing and all. I, I used to, a-and she said when she, when she st-still had her broken back, she could sit in her wheelchair and feel the rest of her, really, like flowing. She sat there, and she said it was like she was a, a s-seabird, a seabird who'd gone over the land a-and tried to dive for food in a, in a well. She was a seabird in a well, can't you just feel it? A well isn't for seabirds, it's too, she can't—

BARBARA: She's been tricked. The things she trusted, now they hurt her.

PAUL: Oh, oh, okay.

BARBARA: The things she trusted, suddenly they left her useless. She felt like she was no good to anyone, I'm saying. Just baggage, garbage.

PAUL: But she, Mom—that's not, not it. No. She wasn't g-garbage, she was, she was still a bird. R-Romy I mean. Garbage? She w-was still a, a bird, she could feel it, she could even, even h-hear it. She heard her like feathers, the, the rustling. The wind.

DIPIO (
off-screen
)
:
The body remembers.
Come si dice
, the limb like a ghost?

PAUL: Romy, Romy understands. She was a-always flying. And we, we've a-always got that, I'm saying, we've all got that ex, ex, extra rustle a-and flowing.

(
Blinks at BARBARA, at camera, lowers head. BARBARA touches boy's shoulder. Inaudible murmur
.)

PAUL: We've all got them, ah, always, really. Alter, alter, like feathers and wings, a-alternative body parts. You know? Alter, alter… they're flowing a-and it's all this life, a-always. (
head comes up, eyes enlarged
) It's never gar, garbage. Never you, useless. It's always w-whispering and a-alive and coming on, like a, a thousand words a-at once. If you tried you, you could feel it. You could a-all feel it.

(
to BARBARA
) You said, you said there've been o-others, p-people like me. (
waves arm
) There been lots of others, y-you said. Which means, which means, we l-live with the crowds, all, all the time. Why, why don't you feel it?

DIPIO: (
sound of scratching
)

“A masterpiece,” Whitman announced. “
81/2
.”

How much had he left for the older boys? Fifteen minutes? She almost dropped the DVD Whitman handed her, then let the scan-disk stick slip through her fingers.

The filmmaker picked it up, then spoke her name with maximum musicality. “Honey,” he asked, “what about streaming the video?” The young man tossed his hair. “You wouldn't be able to drop the footage if we posted it directly to your sons' site.”

His hair was lovely, the curls classic, the DNA out of Africa. Barb had to wonder again about the late Lieutenant-Major, whether he'd gone for men. And so what if he had?
Silky's Secrets
—if that were a book, it would've been a doorstop. Plus when it came to this particular secret, around his Organization, the rule was don't ask, don't tell. On top of that, if there'd ever been a man who preferred life in the closet, it was Officer Kahlberg. He would've savored every irony in playing it straight.

The mother turned the scan-disk between her fingers. Chris and JJ had their secrets too, tucked away in their “project.”

“Those boys of yours,” Whitman went on, “haven't they got something set up for visitors? A guestbook or a blog or something?”

If they had a guestbook, they were hiding something under it. When Aurora had asked what the boys wanted for a present, recently—she always made a big, romantic deal about summer solstice—Chris and JJ had requested a standing screen to set up around their desk. They'd wanted to make sure they weren't surprised by anyone who neglected to knock. Aurora had come through with a typically extravagant gewgaw, a triptych of young love, set against a background of a fire-breathing Vesuvius and adorable broken temple columns. The girls showed a lot of petticoat, the men wore buckled shoes, and the old playgirl, in choosing such a screen, gave the boys a nudge and a wink. She let them know she was all for love amid the ruins.

Not that JJ and Chris, in accepting the garish piece, had revealed that they got the message. They'd offered nothing beyond the usual teenage grumbles of thanks. Whatever they were up to, it mattered more than returning their grandmother's secret OK. Just as, Barb would bet, their documentary mattered more than finding Romy and John Junior a room with a bed. So far as she could tell, the gypsy and her oldest were still drawing the line at a kiss and a cuddle. That's what the mother concluded from a close study of her boy, from the tightness in his long legs and the sparkle in his one-liners. The evidence might be circumstantial, but many a parent had built a winning case on far less. Barbara would bet that her two goodhearted young Americans had a nobler purpose than helping one of them get laid. More than likely they had a notion that they could clear the girl of Silky's murder, in some public forum…

She shifted to face Whitman, their knees knocking.

“It's all on the web.” Barbara ignored his shuffling beneath the table. “They've got everything right there on the web.”

When the skinny auteur narrowed his eyes, his thick-lashed eyes, he looked more like King David than ever. He looked so haughty and aware that for a moment Barb thought he knew what she wanted. Of course he didn't know, he was only swayed by the reverberant waves of her intensity, but no sooner had Barbara put it into words—they should crack into her sons' materials—than Whitman agreed. She didn't have to come up with an excuse.

“Oh, honey.” He gave a lippy grin. “This is going to be
sweet.”

She'd offered an extra fifty, when she'd asked, but Barbara got the impression that her companion would've done this for nothing. The way Whitman faced the screen, grinning and flexing his striped chest, you'd think he got a kick out of poking through the heteros' dirty laundry. Or did he merely enjoy the challenge? In any case he was whiz enough to at once isolate that part of the boys' site labeled “Under Construction.” As Whitman had done with his own film, Chris and JJ had made five minutes of footage available as a sampler. Also they'd set up additional “rushes” in a file for which they'd given the rest of the family the password. A dummy file—look Ma no secrets.

But what was under “Under Construction?” Seeking a way in, the mother gave the campy wonk birth-dates and middle names. He pecked in variations, the digits in European order instead of American, the words abbreviated or syllables reversed. After the first five or six suggestions Barbara detected a throb in the same intangible space where a meaningful Communion usually touched her. Of all the unlikely…but didn't she know the sensation when she felt it? Hadn't she just realized that Paul had the same perplexing talent? She wondered if those thoughts about her middle child, about the here-and-gone fragility of the whole Naples experience, had brought this on. Or it might've been this bitty production room, this kitchen-sink Warner Brothers; the set-up wasn't much different from a confession booth. Barbara frowned and stayed on-task, sharing her maiden name with the stranger beside her. She told him her wedding anniversary. When those didn't work she drew a breath.

“Try divorce,” she said. “Or Naples divorce.”

After variations in Italian and English, handled without once meeting Whitman's eyes, she added ‘Angry Mama.” Next, “Crazy Mama.”

She could see that the boho was glancing at her, his long hair shifting in the corner of her eye. Still he never hesitated to sling a new set of letters and digits across the screen. They worked like skipping stones, setting off the ripple of windows popping open. The central box always read the same,
Invalid
, and Barbara came to think that some of her excitement was entirely ordinary. What mother doesn't get a little thrill out of checking her kids' pockets? As each potential password came to mind, however, she kept sensing that deeper release. What would you call this, if not confession in code? She rose and paced, wheeling between the worktable and the air conditioner, and Whitman had to ask that she speak more slowly. His English couldn't keep up.

When they hit on the password, she was facing the air conditioner, and for a while she stayed there, letting the freon tickle her neck. The Open Sesame to the boys' private footage had nothing to do with her. The choice must've been John Junior's.

“My ro,” Whitman said, drawing out the pronunciation as the unedited files appeared on the screen. “From Romy.”

Children grow, they grow away. How many reminders did she need?

“Looks like there aren't too many files.” When the young man pointed at the screen, his silver snake-ring turned blue. “One two, three four five.”

Not many yet, Barb thought. Not when the children were only starting out. She returned to her chair, still savoring traces of exhilaration. Maybe she should consider today another trial methodology. Onscreen she saw four files whose labels included either “Npls” or “hstry,” and one more, with the simple name “INNOCENT.”

“Innocent,” Barbara said.

Whitman set up the link to the video player. The window on the software opened, and at its bottom a set of concentric circles shrank and grew, shrank and grew, a visual cue for establishing the connection—or perhaps the blinking and thickly outlined eye of the gypsy girl, one of those Mongol-goddess eyes, never so fierce and burning as when they suddenly took over the player's window. Romy had got a tan, some impossible tan that lent her skin a lush hint of violet. Her gypsy trimmings worked as well, the earrings full of shadows and the scarf electric with tinsel. She was made for this, precisely the sort of dark and voluptuous fairy the technology needed to open its box of secrets, and John Junior stuck with the talking-head arrangement for the first few minutes. He and his girl had found some privacy in a grove of trees off a highland roadway. From time to time you could hear the whine of a
motorino
, and see that Romy delivered this appeal from well above city and Bay. The faraway water behind her glimmered a chromium blue that picked up the hints in her face. The trees were umbrella pine and the gray shreds in one corner of the sky must've come from the volcano.

The gypsy began: “I am innocent of Silky Kahlberg's murder. Like, it was almost the other way around.”

John Junior interrupted, in a voice the mother couldn't make out, more restrained than she was used to from him. Romy shifted places in a blink, reappearing framed between tree trunks. Her hair had been tied back too.

“I did not shoot Lieutenant-Major L-Loius Kahlberg,” she repeated. “I am innocent, and for sure, it could've been the other way around. Could've been him still running around and me…”

The gypsy lowered her head, trailing a fingernail down her glittering scarf.

“I knew that he was dealing in fake ID's,” she went on finally. “In counterfeits, officer Kahlberg. Also he knew that I knew. For sure, we both knew the signs, like—”

JJ interrupted again, and Romy reappeared in better posture. With this third take she got across that, at the Museo Nazionale, the liaison officer had planned to kill her.

“I warn the Lieutenant-Major that I will expose him. On the streets there are ways.” Her smile was bitter, the shape of the noise of another passing bike. “The normies never know, the signs we use. Like the SMS, the message on the
telefonino
. Only better, because Kahlberg, he got it right away, and he knew he had to get rid of me.”

Her stare gathered force. “The man played me, at the Museo. He
played
me.”

Girl, thought Barbara, join the club.

“Officer Kahlberg,” Romy was saying, “he set it up, he will get rid of me and like, he will look like a hero same time.” Her chin lifted, her confidence growing. “The way the man played it, he will be on top both ways. On top out on the streets, so nobody could take him down, and on top in old Babylon too, in NATO.”

So far as the “play” was concerned, the Lieutenant Major's plan to get this girl out of his silky hair, Barbara had heard all she needed. The museum visit had always struck her as a dubious trip. And when she'd asked for time alone with the kids, that afternoon, the liaison and his Umberto had run through their bebop repertoire, all those significant looks. What they'd needed was the opportunity to get the gypsy alone. The mother's request had given them the chance to improvise.

“He was looking forward to it,” said the girl onscreen. “That gun of his, he couldn't wait to use that.”