Earthquake I.D. (16 page)

Now there was a question. The morning's uproar, for Barbara, had concerned other sorts of secrets, the personalities in play. Now the old Jesuit had to wait while she tugged at an armpit. Finally: “I can say this, the two Italians there, the ones that had to check our authorization, they didn't like the girl either.”

The Italians might've come here from the Office of Antiquities, but they lost control as badly as the Lieutenant Major. Angrily they'd shoved her away, and for a moment Romy had somebody's hand at her throat. A minute or so later, after Silky had popped the van doors—he'd wanted the family to know what he thought of the girl—the Neapolitans were still shouting at her in dialect, threats or obscenities or both.

“I'm telling you, Father, Cesare, I thought we were going to see gunplay.”

Eventually the bureaucrat on the scene, along with his security man, had disappeared back into San Lorenzo. Before they had, however, they'd scowled blackly down the steps at the folks waiting for Paul. Now that Barbara thought about it, she might even have seen the American officer restrain the two. This had happened earlier, just after Romy had taken the men by surprise. Barb might've seen Kahlberg slap an extended arm across his cohorts.

Her chosen priest, meanwhile, took care to raise a different possibility. Kahlberg and his fellow-officials might've had reason to keep the gypsy at a distance. “If the girl is indeed some sort of crook, they had good reason. Since the
terremoto
, don't you know, there's been no hotter contraband than stolen or forged papers.”

“I realize that, Cesare. Don't you think that's what Kahlberg said?”

Using his position at the top of the stairs to face down John Junior—the boy had leapt from the van—the liaison had loudly reiterated what everyone knew already. The quake had left a lot of people without documents, important documents.
And don't you think
, he'd gone on,
a known criminal associate like this would love to procure some fresh papers for her friends'?
With one hand he'd swept back his fallen hair, and with the other he'd stabbed a finger at the gypsy.
Fresh documents, easy to fix?
Barbara, for her part, had preferred to look at Romy. Once she'd recovered from getting flung across the church fronting, the gypsy had sneered and stiffened her back like the Goddess of War. On your knees, puny NATO Man.

“I know what I saw,” Barbara told the priest. “And if that girl was trying to catch Silky at something, she did it.”

On top of that, Romy had seemed determined to rub it in. The first time the Lieutenant Major paused for breath, the girl had cut off any retort from JJ's with a sweeping gesture, almost the pose of a model, tossing her head and extending one arm. She pointed across the piazza to the boarded-up entrance of
Napoli Sotterraneo
. When she spoke, she addressed the youngest on the scene, the twins, all the while acting as if Kahlberg weren't standing within reach of her frail throat.
Oh, there's a place you girls really want to see
. Romy dropped her warrior look, too; she put on a wide smile.
Napoli Sotterraneo, totally neat stuff, not another dumb old church. Like, all these caves and secret passageways
.

The gypsy might've fallen in love, the kind of love an adult had to stand back and envy, a thing of the spirit and yet powerful enough to raise blisters. But she hadn't forgotten how to tease.

Like, who needs all this dumb old paperwork
.

“This morning,” Barbara told Cesare, “that girl, whatever else she was up to, she had her fun. She made a game of it, Freak Out the White Man.”

“And you admire her.”

She laughed, briefly. If she couldn't have a tantrum, if she couldn't do whatever it was Romy had done—whatever—she might as well laugh. When she let her head drop back against the pew, the small thump felt good, actually. A reality check. “Cesare, that girl, this morning, you'd have admired her too. Don't you see how it helps to talk about it? Don't you see how much you help? I'm saying, she got to that man so bad, he stormed off”

“Stormed off? The officer left you?”

“Well, first, he gave me an earful.”
The little whore has got to go
. “An ultimatum, is that what you'd call it? Kahlberg told me, if Romy was part of the deal,”
if you insist on treating this trash like a member of the family
, “then he wasn't going to arrange any more excursions. The Lulucitas, he said, we'd have to do without, what was it? ‘The benefits that the Organization offers.'”

“The… benefits? The obscene cornucopia of Empire, he intends to cut you off?”

“That was today, Cesare. He said it was the Organization or the girl.”

“Oh, the fellow's a Master of the Universe.” The lines on the priest's face deepened. “The rest of us, all the children of God, we're cast out of the garden.”

“But you hear what I'm saying? We stayed there, the rest of us, in San Lorenzo.”

“Yes, and good for you, Mrs. Lulucita. Furthermore, let me assure you, I appreciate that you came here and told me. I understand your irritation with this, this Lieutenant Major.”

“Well, we stayed, we had Chris. We had the girl too, she knows a lot…”

Barbara let the story drop, losing herself at the wooden ceiling, a classic ceiling for any church without a dome. Slat-thin panels, railroad-tie rafters. In her mind's eye lingered other sets of lines, the stone fittings where the roof of one ancient sanctuary, beneath San Lorenzo, met the floor of the next generation above it. Then there were the seams across Cesare's face. The man's voice sounded seamy too. He was repeating himself, prompting the mother: “The girl, you admire her.”

There was some echo she hadn't noticed before. She thought of the strays Cesare had taken in, the two
clandestini
camped out in his church cellar, a simple hollow compared to what she'd seen downtown. Then with her next blink all today's lines came together, they knotted so that their ends stretched off to the echoing cool corners of the stone. And Barb had an idea. The notion triggered a flashing along her spine, a trembling, yet at the same time it cleared away the fog or whatever it was that had clogged her spirit since Paul's second miracle. Yes, and she'd needed a church in order to get to this point, never mind whether it had a dome or not. Yes—she knew what she had to do in order to prove that Silky and Jay had a deal.

“You wish you could be like that girl.” The priest knew her better than anyone in Naples but he hadn't noticed the change. ‘Young again and stronger than you ever dreamed.”

The gypsy had shown her the way, no point denying it. Even Barbara's disrespectful posture, slumped in the pew with her dress above her knees, seemed like something Romy had taught her. The girl couldn't so much as shift her weight without exposing some hot flesh.

“Like Samson among the Philistines, don't you know.”

The mother had a different image for what the girl had taught her. She pictured a kiss full of disease, a nasty surprise for an unfaithful lover. Surprise, that was the key.

“Mrs. Lulucita, are you there? First you wake me up and then you take a
riposo?”

Barb shook her head, rolled her shoulders, pulled an apologetic smile. But she sat up knowing what she was doing next, holding down the hem of her dress. Also she got her bearings from the old man's strong eyebrows and nose. His looks remained potent, a good front for a protest poster or a call to the people. Now Barbara had joined him in the revolution. Telling Jay that they were through, that had been just for starters. Today the gypsy had carried her to the next level, where every action would cast enormous shadows against antique pale stone. And the kids would be safe, sure. The place was wall-to-wall security, the kids would be fine, and the fact that the mother needed them along actually bore out the seriousness of what she was up to. The children proved again and better that she was no mad housewife.

“Is that it, then, signora? Is your soul at rest concerning today, the choice you made?”

“Well.” She gave another breathless laugh. “Well, my soul!”

This morning, the Lieutenant Major wouldn't be joining them. His absence made it happen, Barbara's plan, her revolution. After all, yesterday she'd heard the man loud and clear: him or Romy. Today then the officer would follow through. But on the other hand he'd set up the day's itinerary a week ago now; everyone in the family had gotten the printout. The liaison man couldn't go breaking those arrangements out of the clear blue, not while he still had others to answer to. But he could refuse to go along, depriving the Lulucitas of his “benefits.” So Barb had her opportunity, her surprise.

Silky Kahlberg would learn what she'd done via the city's murmurous website—the
ojetti
on the chapel walls, the bulging hammered metal, could all be receiver units. And when the officer did get the news, it would shake him up worse than Romy had on the steps of San Lorenzo. The mother would loom like a whole new ferocity, out of nowhere. Barbarian.

Though she wasn't about to dip her hair in blood, nothing like that. The kids would be safe. Under Cesare's church ceiling, her inspiration had amounted to nothing more than the right place at the right time. If it worked, she would rip off all the Lieutenant Major's masks at once, and Jay's too. And if it didn't? Naturally the mother had her doubts, those moments when her breasts felt as heavy and as roughly packaged as groceries for two teenage boys and three other kids besides. After she'd left the Vomero church, after one of the NATO farm-boys had as always walked her down to her home palazzo and checked out the lobby and elevator, Barbara was grateful for the few moments alone in the creaking lift. She spent the time studying herself in the mirrored door. Had the woman in the reflection in fact developed new muscles of the spirit? Strength enough to trip up the overgrown tennis brat who'd been swatting her family all over town? Or was this afternoon only another pivot of the inner whipsaw? Barbara might've been fooled by how tough her skin had grown, leathery, after twenty days in the
Mezzogiorno
. The country of permanent noon. Local women resorted to cosmetics she'd never heard of, and there were mineral baths out on the islands.

The lift stopped and her reflection split apart. In another ten minutes Barbara was planting her idea in her children's heads.

Not that she had to force anything. She wasn't the first to bring up the hunger strikers, not by a long chalk. While Barbara took the chair by the door and swapped her street shoes for house slippers, Chris sat just beyond the entry's archway, before an IBM clone out of some valley up by the Alps—a machine provided free of charge, along with a fat and speedy internet connection. The boy had pulled up a page about the castles of Naples, and he went straight into an announcement about dell'Ovo. He knew his brothers and sisters would want to hear it. Loudly Chris explained that what was going on down by the waterfront was history in action; it was the first time in hundreds of years they'd kept prisoners in the old safe-house.

Barbara had already heard as much from her priest. Most convicts did their time in another penitentiary, inland, a complex a mere couple of centuries old. But these strikers had set themselves apart, defining themselves as a group, The Shell of the Hermit Crab. They proudly claimed a Catholic heritage, the same liberation theology as Cesare, and their published statements set forth twin goals:
“Unum
, a fixed European identity;
Duo
, the opportunity for individual potential.” The particulars of that agenda remained murky, as near as Barbara could tell, as did its connection to hermit crabs. Also the size of the Shell's membership hadn't been perfectly ascertained, as yet. But the core group remained small, clearly, and likewise anyone could understand that what they sought was better legal standing in Italy—and that they made the authorities nervous. They'd come under police scrutiny, this little crew, before they'd begun to refuse food. Unlike the vast majority of illegal aliens in-country, members in the Shell didn't just take their under-the-table payout and keep quiet about it. Rather they shared Cesare's fervor to speak out, to make others notice, bred in the neglected missions of upriver Africa or the isolated parishes of the Balkan hills.

In one demonstration, inside the Archeological Museum, the Shells had posed themselves beside the plaster-cast corpses of Pompeii. The next month they'd chained themselves to the statues of the kings of Naples, in the alcoves that lined the Royal Palace. That case, following their arrest, had been the first when the Shell were kept separate from other prisoners. The police pretext for this was the same as used in Guantanamo and other such places: suspicion of terrorism. And after the group—just five scrawny young men, it appeared—had been let go, in another week they lined up in the largest piazza in town. They pulled from under their battered denim jackets a full-size cardboard cutout of the Sword of Islam. These weapons were decorated oddly, in purple, with patterns of lines that didn't make sense, but the Shell five-some had waved their swords overhead, showing their teeth and crying Allah
akbar
. Then once they'd drawn a crowd, including puzzled police and a few cameras, with a practiced and video-ready movement each man had folded his sword origami-style so that it formed, instead, the harmless purple rectangle that was the Italian passport.

If you asked Barb, that last public action sounded like a good one, an easy one to understand. But once more the cops had pulled out the handcuffs. As the Shell Five were hauled away, the noisiest of the bunch, a sub-Saharan runaway who might've been the leader, had explained at the top of his lungs:
But that's your choice, the sword or the paperwork! That's your only choice!
Fresh charges against the group had taken a couple of days to draw up, and according to Barbara's chosen priest, they “weren't worth the letterhead they'd been printed on.” Nonetheless the Shell of the Hermit Crab still had neither proper representation nor a trial date set, their case had gotten hung up in Parliament, when they starting doing without food.