Earthquake I.D. (46 page)

The Shell member closest to Barbara, the one from the Balkans, shifted position. That got her attention, even as Jay went into a one-of-a-kind tantrum, his body stock-still while he said things like, “you fucking fuck, I mean, fuck you!” His gun hand never wavered so much as half an inch, and the weapon was pointed at the gut rather than the heart or head. After a moment Barbara extended one of her own hands in front of the next-nearest pistol, the white kidnapper's. She found she could curl her palm over the open end of the barrel. When the man looked to his moon-scarred commander, Barb did the same, and once more she put a stern finger in Fond's hairless face. She still had the nerve she'd discovered earlier; coolly she thought through how this must look to him. The former film major would grasp easily enough that the new arrivals weren't cops, nor mobsters either, and it was likewise obvious they had some history with the Lulucitas. Now the tarty scippatoro, his gel-curls dropping as he dipped his head, was telling Jay that he and his “fellow sinner” would do whatever it took to “resurrect our soul.”

At this the other one spoke up. “We sin against the
miracolosi
, only the
miracolosi
wash us clean.”

“Give me a break. You came in here ready to kill somebody.” The Jaybird looked pointedly at the .38, still trained on Fond's henchman. Otherwise however the husband remained motionless, a manner of speaking that Barbara wouldn't have believed he was capable of “Same as when you jumped up and popped old Silky.”

The darker sciapptoro raised his overgrown head, perplexed.

“You two shot the NATO man.” Jay moved at last, raising a hand to indicate the late Lieutenant Major's long hair. “You caught him by surprise in the Museo Nazionale and, bang bang, goodbye.”

The farther of the two, lighter-skinned and unarmed, was the one to groan agreement. He admitted to the shooting and then went into a whispering prayer, his head down. The one with the gun, however, must've come here knowing the news was out. He played it tough, baring his teeth at Fond and his soldiers.

“So you murdered him,” the husband said. “And today, I mean, you come here ready to kill a few more. This is how you save your soul?”

The wife broke into the staring match. “Fond,” she asked, “what about you? “What do you think you look like, holding a gun on you own brothers?”

Balefully the clandestino leader met her gaze, saying nothing. His head tottered above Barbara like a weight about to drop. Nonetheless she let her irritation show, lifting her hand from the kidnapper's gun-barrel, spelling out her point: what Jay was telling his two muggers applied equally to Fond and his crew. “You talk about spectacle, think about this one. Think about what it would look like, if you put a bullet in another poor boy from the South.”

Actually she couldn't say where the whiter scippatoro came from. In New York she would've guessed he was Puerto Rican, with zits like those, with that single wooly eyebrow over a sleepless stare.

“We shoot or we don't shoot,” the darker one repeated. “As you desire.”

The mother began to give her dress a tug, then dropped her hand, frowning. Enough with fretting over the clothes she wore, the dreary old bindings. “Fond,” she went on, “just relax and let me handle this.”

She faced the femmy of the two and extended her hand, palm up. “As I desire?” she said. “All right, give me the gun.”

Taken aback, looking to his companion, the man showed her an elaborate earring. Wavy silver strands in a jellyfish design, too delicate for such a hole in the wall.

“You want to wash your soul clean?” She stepped closer.

“Barb,” said Jay.

“Let me handle this.”

The queen was looking over Fond and his backups, his glance nervous and the others likewise twitchy.

“Absolution,” Barbara said, “isn't that what you want?” She ventured a smile. “You want to wash away the bad old past, so your soul can be renewed, you can be born again—isn't that it? Okay, let's start. Why don't you tell me your name?”

Over his revolver, the lithe young man began to blink back tears. He choked out, “Men say I am The Moll.”

“The Moll?” Barbara's smile changed shape. “Where did you learn gangster slang from a hundred years ago?”

“It's the cinema,” said Fond, “the gigantic prayer that crosses every border.”

“The Moll has committed great
sin
,” said the scippatoro with the gun. “Sin against the
miracolosi
.”

“Only the
miracolosi
,” said the other, “wash clean our—”

“You guys,” Barbara said. “Think about it. Look at this family, and think about that ‘great sin.' You've been stalking us all this time. You know we're doing fine.”

“But you are to divorce!”

The little guy was quite the package, wasn't he? A whore with a bleeding heart, a trembling gun, and all their secrets.
“Mama santa, Papa santa
, you divorce.”

The Jaybird was the first to object—“Forget about it!”—and the mother began to say the same, making the sort of denials that her husband had back in Roebuck's office. Well…there'd been strains, between she and Jay, a lot of stress…But this felt like the wrong tack to take, a smear of hypocrisy across a conversation that should be entirely frank and aboveboard. Barbara fell silent and once more took in the whole group, jittery, dusty, the crossed beams of their flashlights looking like they'd lost juice. Fond's Albanian appeared the most dangerous, both arms raised, both hands on his gun. He paid no mind to Jay's weapon at his head. And the other two were ready to jump in wherever they'd do the most damage. Barbara looked away, finding the deepest dark she could beyond everyone's scowling heads, then hefted chest and shoulders in a Neapolitan shrug. She admitted that for some time she'd believed that she and Jay had to divorce.

“I'm saying, I wanted to end everything. How long did it go on, a month?”

Jay could recognize the right move when he heard it, though Barb couldn't think of what she was saying, unvarnished and from the heart, as a “move.” Anyway the big man held his peace. Barb kept her eyes on The Moll but noticed that the Albanian had slackened a bit; his aim was lower. “But those hard feelings between my Jay and me,” she went on, “it's history. It's ancient history, the divorce.”

Waving towards her husband—her hand open, slow, harmless—she asserted that the renewed connection between them was obvious. “If we were still at each other's throats,” Barbara said, “wouldn't that come out now?” She worked to keep her English free of therapy-speak, telling the former stickup man to think about the anger in this hole. “The tension, Moll. Tension like this, now, I'm saying if Jay and I still wanted to divorce, you'd be hearing it.”

The scippatori appeared to get the point, their shared glances crackling, their appraisals of the Jaybird easy to read. The husband reached out to Barbara, the fingers of his free hand finding her panties' waistband at first touch and lingering there, another good move that wasn't a move. When Barb asked if Jay's attackers believed her, she wouldn't take a simple nod for an answer. She figured everyone in the three-thousand-year-old quarry needed to hear one of these two say yes, out loud, to the preservation of the marriage. Indeed, as soon as The Moll acknowledged that
la Mama
was right, his words halting but unmistakable, the Shell member still holding a gun relaxed visibly. His aim sagged another notch. The other Crab soldier meantime went back on his heels, and Barbara knew what to do next.

She started by asking the same thing her husband had asked Fond—whether the scippatori realized the kind of firepower likely be waiting upstairs.

The Moll looked a little offended. “For sure. The cavalry to the rescue.”

The cavalry? Where did he get this stuff? “Yes, that's right.”

“But we have a gat. We will defend you, everywhere, down here and—”

“Stop, don't. Wait.” Barbara ran another check around the group, making sure of Fond in particular. She declared that she was going to get something from her purse. “And you all know,” she said, “I don't carry a weapon.” The clandestino leader waggled his head, perhaps giving her the go-ahead. Barb bent and pulled out her passport.

“Here you go.” She held the blue booklet out to The Moll. “You take the passport, and I get your weapon.”

The mugger's stare was so bewildered, and his friend bubbled so excitedly (
“Mille Euro, mille
!”), that at first Barbara didn't notice Jay speaking up behind her. The husband grew noisy, he even jerked his gun-hand a time or two, and he didn't bother with simple English. The first words Barbara heard had to do with debts. “Any tourist off a cruise ship,” Jay was saying, “could tell you:” the scippatori carried the debt; they'd struck the first blow. At this Barb started to object, but Jay kept on, talking over her—he knew his Owl Girl. He knew she wasn't on a cruise. “For you, I mean, this is all about the lost sheep.” For her, what these two outcasts had done back at the beginning of June didn't matter. “It's, hey, we
forgive
our debtors.”

Barb heard him, the need in him. She didn't interrupt as the husband went on more quietly, acknowledging that one way or another, a passport with a woman's name would be useful for The Moll. Jay could see that. He'd had his eyes opened here in Naples, and he could see as well that the scippatori had been victims themselves. “Must've gotten a pretty bad smacking around, these two, working with old Silky.

“Owl, I mean, I'm with you that far. I guess I can go along with you. It's a plan.”

The Jaybird's tone was conversational again. His gun-hand had settled. He got a slow breath and asked if Barbara had thought about the possible legal issues. “You realize, a document like that, it could get complicated?”

“Come on, Jay.” Sure as she was of herself, Barbara nonetheless hadn't expected to sound so easy-going. “Are you saying, Roebuck can't cut through the paperwork? She can't have two new passports by the end of the week?”

“Hey, Roebuck can do all kinds of—what? What?
Two
passports?”

“I give mine to The Moll and you give yours to Fond's guy, here.”

Her arm still extended towards the scippatoro, she nodded towards the remaining gunman. Meantime she couldn't miss the possibility of relief, of safety, that flooded her husband's looks. The deal wasn't one for one but two for two, and then all the weapons would be in friendly hands.

“We'll be back in the Consulate anyway,” murmured the former VP for Sales,

“Back in the Consulate,” Barbara said, letting him think. Letting him fill in the blanks: “A day like today, hey, there's a million ways we could've lost them.” But more than that, she could see how he needed this to end. When he'd left the house this morning, he'd believed that come dinnertime he'd be riding back home on the funiculare.

The Albanian had something to say, his first words since they were up outside Cesare's. “A pass-port? American pass-port, is mine?”

Then The Moll: “We, how can we take from you? We, our lives, are for
you
.”

Fond got a hand on his second-in-command, the unarmed African, and they murmured in their shared tongue as they watched Jay pull the pamphlet from his wallet pocket. Like Barbara, the husband had wanted it with him every day, so already the thing was curled and wrinkled. Barb however had to check Fond again; she needed him speaking in English. “Fond,” she said, “look at it. Look at how beat up it is. Hard to believe, isn't it? Hard to believe something like that could save your man's life.”

The deep-thinking renegade frowned down at her, so close he might believe that he and his friend had a decent chance of jumping in and snatching away both Jay's automatic and The Moll's revolver.

“This morning, you know,” Barbara went on, “I saw my son on a screen, and I saw him fold up just like that passport. I watched my boy fold up and disappear.”

“The Shell of the Hermit Crab,” Fond said, “is not a criminal organization.”

“Well, Jay and I aren't criminals either.” He was the one to worry about, all right. “And like Jay says, giving away our I.D., we're taking a risk, it could be trouble.”

But whatever came of this underground exchange, iron for paper, sooner or later that story too going to fold up and be finished. “It's going to be put on the shelf,” Barbara said, “the Jaybird and I, all our drama, plus you and your Hermit Crab too. Isn't that Naples, where you're always running into some old drama? Old prayers, mashed flat and stuck to a wall? Down in Pompeii they were flattened in the middle of dinner.”

“The past in all its folly.
La comédie humaine
.”

She watched him, not the passports. “And one day, isn't someone going to run into our leftovers, on the shelf, on the wall? Isn't that Naples?”

“Assez, assez
,” Fond said. He dipped his chin, this scarred and lanky visitor from the fringes of the desert, he gave the least sign of assent, and with that the exchange took place too quick for Barb to see it. By the time she spotted Jay again, he had guns in both hands. Once more her elation ruffled up, an interior match for the thrill that played across the face of the white Shell member. The folder in his hand was worth
mille Euro
; the sensation in Barbara's heart had her grinning wildly up at Fond.

But he was looking over her shoulder. The Moll still hadn't gone for it.

“We are prepared,” the scippatoro was saying, “to lay down our
life
.”

“Lay down your life?” Barb tried to rein in her smile. “Isn't that the opposite of a miracle?”

But her reasoning got nowhere, it choked her, because the femme with the memorable bandanna slipped the paper from her hand. She hadn't realized how stiffly she'd been holding her arm. It didn't drop at all, at the weight of the revolver.