Earthquake I.D. (48 page)

Barbara's hands began to itch and burn. Her breathing grew full of phlegm and the flashlight between her breasts kept thumping her jaw:
shouldadone, shouldadone
. She tried thinking of faraway business, the new doctor she would get back in the States. A woman would be best, an older woman, sixty at least. With that Aurora came to mind, no doctor but somehow, in this burrow, triggering a spasm of fellow-feeling. Nettie was more like it, with her diplomas and her no-nonsense brush-cut, and Barbara also recalled a well-weathered and sharp-tongued tutor in Language Arts, back at Sacred Heart Elementary. A former schoolteacher some ten years past retirement, the old girl had seemed such good company that Barb had volunteered in Language Arts herself She'd read one circle of second-graders the Alice-in-Wonderland sequence twice in a row. For the life of her, she couldn't understand what these mouthy and assertive American Brownie Scouts saw in that pampered and over-polite English girly-girl.

Four or five times during the climb, Fond called a halt and juggled up his cell phone. He tried to call his man in the restaurant basement, as Barb peeked down past her hips (as soon as they'd come into the tunnel, she'd decided not to worry about what, if anything, Maddalena's former boyfriend might glimpse under her dress). From that angle the phone's number pad would turn him briefly into the Clandestino from Another Planet, casting a green speckle across his face. But Fond could never get a signal; he'd gone too far underground.

When she first picked up a shadow cast from above, a faint stippling, she thought it was only a trick of the sweat in her eyes. But then it turned up again: a cloud-over-cloud effect. After that came the stink of the ruined wine.

Coming into the basement from behind the barrels—and free, this time, of a chloroform doping—Barb could see the quake damage better. Some casks had sprung their staves, and others were cracked and leaking. Of course she still suffered a wooze, a stab, as she emerged into unlikely brightness. A surprising amount of light came in from the street, dazzling to Barbara, like sunshine after a matinee. She knew it must be late, and she could make out a loose plank or two still covering the basement hatchway, across the room from where, at last, she stood again at full height. But this was the time of year when the sun lasted into the Italian dinner hour, dawdling as it sank between the Gulf islands. Twilight went on forever.

Behind her, Fond spoke at conversational level but with a hoarse insistence. “
C
'
est moi
,
c
'
est moi. Ne vous derangez-vous pas
.”

The space was larger than she remembered, too. As Barbara stepped around the wine rack, drawn towards the light, she realized that Fond would have headroom here. Some headroom anyway, under most of the sagging ceiling. There was air enough for the smell of sulfur to pierce the cellar mold, the fermentation. From the street descended a noise of raucous normality, the unmuffled rasp of Vespas and Suzukis. Barbara, taking a long step sideways for the sake of the two big men still unfolding out of the tunnel, pulled the flashlight from inside her dress and let it plop into a wine-puddle. She indulged herself in a terrific shake, triggering yet another sweet rush, her most intense yet, of reviving spirits. The doubts of her up-tunnel laboring fell away. At her first lung-full of air she could've sworn that the matchstick odor coughed up by Vesuvius had turned sweet, in some improbable chemical reaction with the spilled
Lacrima Christi
.

Then Jay: “Is that a blue light? Revolving blue light?”

Barbara gave herself another shake, more businesslike, getting her wits about her. The Jaybird knew the cops when he saw them. The revolving light of a police car, maybe more than one in fact, shot an intermittent darker hue between the planks over the hatchway. Hardly glaring, the blue had Barbara squinting nonetheless, thinking again of the warnings that she and Jay had raised down in the
Sotterraneo
. To her they'd all sounded bogus half the time: the cavalry to the rescue.

“Hey, Fond, you see? There it is, man, happy ending. People we can talk to.”

The police weren't stupid and the system worked. The sun was shining. Barbara kept shedding her long day's burdens, the weights that had pinched every encounter, and she was slow to translate the amplified voice that began to cut through the traffic noise. A bullhorn, this was:
Pronto
,
pronto. Senta, senta
? Testing, testing, listen…and with that she spotted the man to whom the authorities were speaking. In the hatchway squatted Fond's lookout, the third of the crew who'd snatched her and Jay off the church steps. The refugee had kept himself hidden on the stairwell's bottom step.

Big guy, small guy? Skin tone, hair style? Barb couldn't remember a thing from up in the Vomero, and down here she couldn't see much besides his gun. Another sleek automatic, standard issue for the Shell of the Hermit Crab. The lookout wasted no time sizing up the situation: the cops on the doorstep and the
Commendatore
held hostage. Barbara was still feeling optimistic when the man spun in a crouch and put her in the middle of another worst-case scenario, an easy target in the middle of the room.

“Hey!” said Jay, raising his empty hands.

“Arrêter
shouted Fond. “
Relâche
!”

The lookout's eyes appeared hypnotically enlarged, and Barbara thought again how little sleep the Shell must've been getting. Behind him continued the amplified hollering, and she wondered how much he could hear of what was said in the cellar.

“Fond,” Jay said. “Talk to him. Last thing we need, here”

Barbara knew she was scared, the light and air hadn't made her crazy, but she experienced, as well, a sustaining levelheadedness. She put out her arms as if to corral an overexcited kid at a party. Was it the guns she'd faced earlier that left her so cool now? Was it another product of her long afternoon's revival?
Well
, she'd once told Cesare,
my soul…
Yet she remained worn to a frazzle, flinching each time the bullhorn cut on. What she was trying to accomplish had nothing amplified about it: no playacting. Fond spoke up again, perhaps using the man's name. He sounded so gentle Barb didn't need to know the language.

The cellar's plaster dust gave a queer shiver—a sideways jerk, impossible to miss in the blue-gold air.

“Talk to him,” Barbara said. “We're all going back up into the city.”

The man's arm shivered too. Was he beginning to lower his weapon? Barbara hoped so, she prayed so, even as she noticed another bobble or tremor in the room's dust, slashing this way and that around his wavering fistful of iron. Also fresh cement- or mortar-powder sprinkled down from overhead. When a sudden
crack
sounded across the basement, Barb knew it was no gunshot. She'd never taken her eyes from the man's weapon, she knew his aim hadn't dropped below her gut, and anyway the crack or snap had a different feel entirely, the splintering resonance of wood. Now the noise came again; now the whole basement gave a shake, and as Barbara lurched from foot to foot she glimpsed the wine rack coming apart, the barrels that had survived the last earthquake tumbling out of their shelves. The Jaybird too tottered and spread his stance, trying to catch some prop or balance with one arm and flailing after Barb with the other. As the next tremors got to her, as the eruptive dust stung her eyes shut, she pictured a goofy day with the kids, the yelly interference that threw off every move.

You'd think the cellar itself had gotten into the wine, staggering, drooling. When Barbara opened her eyes again she found the long-boned Fond out of commission, rolling through the plaster-spotted puddles with his head cradled. He might've been some essential Naples potful, a tangle of squid, a heap of discarded
ojetti
. Then Jay got a hand on her, but it did no good, he only snagged a bra-strap and popped her breast out of its holster. Everyone in the room was undone and flopping around, now heaved towards the tunnel that led back underground and now thrown, with a bellowing red splash, towards the hatchway stairs. Everyone was shrieking and getting hurt.

Yet the worst noise came from up on the street. Somebody out there took the horn and started to shout, and one word echoed clearly across the cobblestones.

“Terramoto
!
Ter-ra-mo-to
!”

The light and dust gave everyone in the basement a whole-body Afro, a ghostly weedy fringe. Barbara was half-blinded or worse and she gagged from the murk, the upheaval, the tickle inside her shirt. She couldn't see where the lookout had gone, him and his slashy weapon, but she knew she had to get herself braced somewhere. She knew the hatch lay just ahead and there was a scaffold at the top of the steps, extra reinforcement. She pitched that way, groaning a Hail Mary,
nowandatthehourof-ourdeath
, her arms wide open and hands outstretched.

The clandestino Fond had left behind turned up against one side of the stairwell, huddling against the concrete but jerked around as badly as the rest of them. As the woman loomed above him the gun went off Just went off, it had to be an accident, or such was the scrap of a thought that passed through Barbara's head along with the tiny yet shattering pain. She couldn't even be sure she'd heard the shot, before the shock of the wound spiraled outward from her collar to yank her away into a deepening distance, ever more lightless and yet blue.

Underwater, the soft Mediterranean water,
morbido
in Italian, down in this death-soft water in the wine-dark sea that made a blind poet of anyone who plunged deep enough, down where you're blind also to whether these are poems or prayers, she knew she could find her mother. It was only a matter of the right shell. The sea floor was volcanic and crowded but her hands were alert, some people had fingers that could read the words right off the tongue, could read the braille that rolled off the tongue of the blind poet, and among the vapor leaks of the sea-bottom, the shoots of steam flecked with flame, each shell had its song. Each was another humpbacked vehicle in the night, from which arose the persistent voicings of the singers who'd fallen and drowned, a music half-birdlike, the ululations still alive amid the traffic of weeds and small fry, a song in play for thousands of years. A runaway mother might dart from shell to shell, she might duck under one high dome of a tomb after another, its calcareous edges sharp enough to pierce a side or cut open a head, to open the very dome of the brain, but once the refugee knelt under that shell the singing inside was altered, a living voice came into the ghost choir, a sinning heart sent its dissonance through the harmony of the saints. It was only a matter catching the voice out of place. Already her searching alert fingers had tuned in something like that, a rushed and unpracticed tempo, one, two, threefourfive, and either the wrong person had died or the person under the wrinkled clothes of this particular shell was a deceiver, playing games, and indeed whatever lay under the dented fenders of this oyster wasn't to be trusted, you could see that in the weeds that poked up around its hem, thrusting up long and thick and stiff
against the current
. The flame-speckled bottom waters rose and the wine-dark top waters fell, yet despite the sea's whipsaw confusion this studly erect tissue should never be confused with her mother. Nor was the diver thrown off when her discovery turned out to possess a certain viciousness. The creature shot out of its horny lodging shaped like a tomahawk and flew into her face, but she could handle this too, she understood that her little attacker was merely traumatized by its displacement, like all the living down here, and she wouldn't have made this voyage in the first place if she hadn't done her coursework in submarine vocabulary, so that the other could read her words right off her tongue, so that all she needed to do in order to begin the dialogue, to explore the issues around her mother, was get the tomahawk's clinging wet feathers out of her mouth—that was the real danger, the thing's childish need for her mouth, the feathers clogging her nose and throat—and filthy besides, after so much time under wraps amid the bottom-traffic…

Choking, spluttering, Barbara woke. Dust cluttered her throat, dust and something thicker. She flung herself up on her elbows.

Round her arms and waist lay a swill of wine, discolored by chunks of ceiling. Round her head burst a phenomenal outcry, a sighing and bawling that might've been scraped from the walls of the gut. A din out of the Old Testament, its first comprehensible word was
God
. “God, thank God!” Then still more sighing, tumultuous, half-vocalized, and full of joy.

She wondered about the echo in the battered underground space. The nearest support pillar stood at an unnerving tilt, angled her way above one shoulder. But down closer to her stood Jay, the first person she noticed, and he was the one who sang out the most extravagantly, wringing every last remnant of breath from his thanks. He'd been crying but he didn't wipe his face, his handsome head and face, still worth a look when it was bruised in five places. His hands were occupied with his two oldest, grown boys who were making less noise than he but appeared more out of control. JJ and Chris grimaced and wobbled from foot to foot, leaking tears, figures out of a midsummer night's drunk. As for the two girls, each stood knotted around a different brother's leg, mewling wetly and yet helping their father keep the two teens from falling on Mom.

Down at everyone's feet huddled Paul. The eleven-year-old had his head sunk on his folded arms; he peeked at her over wine-stained shirtsleeves.

Barbara, working against the uproar, tried to concentrate on the boy. Stained sleeves? Also her middle child wasn't crying Hosanna, but he was crying a bit, and now he yanked up his collar and wiped his nose on it. He might've pulled his shirt untucked. The mother of course understood what he'd done, she sat there unwounded, actually refreshed, but she wasn't sure whether she still knew this child. Paul remained her prettiest; The Moll would envy those eyelashes, and the thick and pet-able curls that covered his preteen head. He must've looked like a doll, Mr. Paul, even when he'd had his fingers in Mama's mouth. But now those fingers dripped doughy clots of plaster, steeped in juice-like blood.