Earthquake I.D. (9 page)

Also here and there played shadows, children still intent on their games. The ones who'd climbed into the sunlight, the flat space surrounding the van, tended to be the parents or grandparents. Their crumpled faces came in a dozen shades of black, under unkempt Afros or wobbly dreadlocks.

The mother had a question. “These are mostly illegals, right?” She looked to Kahlberg. “I'm saying, do they even have a work visa?”

The officer went on checking the crowd. “The epicenter was outside the city, in the periphery. That's where you get the more transient population.”

“And the—the radicals? On the hunger strike?”

The liaison shot her a glance. “One has to expect,” he said slowly, “a certain amount of political tension in marginalized populations. One has to consider, as well, that many of these people arrive on these shores with criminal intent. Their sole purpose for being in Italy is to generate as much income as they can. Chris, big shooter. You know what the old Silk-man's talking about, don't you?”

The shifts of tone sounded doubly spooky under the blurred shouts from outside.

“Libya used to be an Italian colony,” Chris said. “Ethiopia too.”

“And Ethiopia—” Barbara began.

“See,” Chris said. “Mussolini was all fired up about a new Roman Empire.”

“Chris, Ethiopia is
starving.”
Barbara tried not to glare.

“A seriously depressed economy, big shooter, over a disturbingly long term.”

“That's what I'm saying.” She concentrated on the Lieutenant-Major. “So far as the folks outside are concerned, Naples is the land of milk and honey.”

Kahlberg stared back mildly.

“You know,” John Junior said, “when Mom was a kid, she couldn't tell the difference between the pictures of Jesus and the pictures of Che Guevara.”

“Stop
it, stop
it.” Barbara whipped around; the teens were grinning, slapping hands. “If I hear one more stupid sarky remark—”

“There's Papa!” shouted Sylvia. “Papa, right there!”

Right there. Jay changed the whole shape of the scene beyond the windows. The man had his vice-president's swagger even here, and as he approached the Humvee you could see he was bigger than nine tenths of the brown crowd around him. Plus he wore a chef's baggy dress whites and a white long-visored cap, an outfit more bright and bleached and complete than anything among the faded dashikis and tourist T-shirts surrounding him. The
terremotati
appeared happy to see the Jaybird, including a few lighter-skinned folk Barb spotted now. Italians, these might have been, but more likely they'd drifted here out of the jigsaw nationalities across the Adriatic. A face or two out there looked Arab, as well. In any case everyone smiled as they made way for the
capo
. One of the blackest of the refugees, a man whose seamy face called to mind the folds in Father Cesare's robe, mouthed what must've been some sort of wisecrack. His eyes, though they were hardly more than glints in a cracked rock, glowed with obvious warmth. Barb's husband matched joke for joke, meantime. He shot a smirk one way and, glancing the other direction, tapped the peeling brim of a baseball cap. This was a person who would do nothing rash, a person with no hard feelings.

Barbara on the other hand was startled just to see her husband slide open the van's door. She hadn't known they were unlocked.

“Hey,” Jay said. “Have I been looking forward to
this.”

“Papa,” Dora said, “you look so sharp!”

“Well I feel sharp. Feel real good, baby doll. Feel good all the time, because I know I'm helping people.”

The father tugged the long bill of his cap. Barbara looked over the bandage by his ear. Jay's bruise had faded, the scar had shrunk, but he was careful about keeping the spot protected. Now he found her eyes.

“We're helping a lot of kids here, too,” he said. “A lot of these boys and girls, without us they'd have no chance.”

Around his gleaming bulk came the smell of the crowd, unwashed and sun-blasted. The family stepped out into chock-full air, as much as into the flap of tenting, the creak of plank pathways, or the singing of the aluminum poles each time the breeze picked up. Jay led the group down through the jumble to his central tent-offices, stopping several times for introductions and more banter. He took into account, as well, how the NATO guardsmen affected the refugees. The
poveri
hadn't even had time to grow accustomed to his own armed tagalong, and now the family had arrived with two more. The campers who were made the most nervous appeared to be the most African, with tribal scarring and brimless sequined caps. Their steep-cheeked faces fell, when these men and women spotted the extra brace of gunslingers, both of them blonde and pale to boot, down from the European North. The tent-dwellers from the deepest South gave the troopers the widest berth, backing into the mud that bordered the plank byways, never mind that they were barefoot or, at best, in plastic flip-flops. Everyone in camp, really, backed away from the pair in uniform. The mother was grateful that the soldiers had slipped off their padded bulletproofing, and grateful too that Jay adjusted his patter. The man started to sound like a schoolteacher. He made it clear that he would never have brought his family to the camp if he believed there were any possibility of trouble.

“The heavy artillery,” he said, “that wasn't my idea.”

As they went, Barbara and the kids also learned about the camp's layout, a wider semi-circle that sloped down to a smaller one. It was an amphitheater, and down at the stage lay the important setups, including jay's beloved kitchens. Papa directed a staff of twenty-plus, something else the wife hadn't realized. Besides that, the Jaybird was the lone worker from the U.S. He had his Coordinator's work cut out for him, needing to communicate across several varieties of anti-American resentment. Barb thought of the electronic misunderstandings that JJ and Chris got into over the internet.

Yet she alone seemed to understand the difficulty, and to see through the upbeat charade. Barbara alone, the half-out-the-door wife, seemed to be the only one who worried for the
capo
, even as he struck poses that implied he was everybody's friend. But how could these
poveri
connect finally with this transplanted food-industry exec? Most of them spoke a mangled Italian, and more than once she heard them break down into pidgin French or a sub-Saharan patter. From underfoot, meanwhile, came the suck and pop of the walkway boards in pockets of mud. Not that it had rained, out here; the water was the run-off from the hose-and-coat-hanger showers—if not from some less sanitary facility. Plus chalky clouds of pesticide would waft across the family's path every now and then. Lice powder, Jay explained. The Site had a doctor come in and dispense a fresh dose every week. But for Barbara the acid-flavored dust only reinforced her unhappy take on the place, as bad as that first day down in the original city, a reeking underworld in which you could barely speak with the ghosts.

After the group reached the center of the camp, the mother tried twice to point the way back to the parking area. Wrong each time. The Jaybird corrected her, stepping in front of her and thrusting out his chest.

“Listen,” Barb said, “I'm not sure the kids can—”

“Kids,” Jay said, “I'll tell you what to look for. If you're ever lost in here, just look for your family.”

He pointed at something closer by. At the corner of a broad tent hung a wide and ornately framed photograph, another group shot, a rough match to the one up by the parking area. The portrait itself, now that Barbara looked at it, held several heads in the surreal fixity of the Sears Roebuck studio. One of those heads however was impossibly enlarged, some kind of trick with the copier. For this was a copy, a doctored full-color scan of a shot Barb had seen before. This was her and the children, in a free portrait she'd won at a church raffle a year ago. The enlarged head was her own, mushrooming above the kids' as if she were the family Vesuvius.

“I don't ask this guy about the technology,” Jay announced, waving a hand at Silky Kahlberg. “I don't want to know.”

“No,” the Lieutenant-Major said. “You don't want to know.”

He was fluttering his lapels, getting some air under his pretty jacket. Not that you could see what he might have in the armpit.

Jay went on with the story. A number of the refugee families, he explained, had arrived at the site with, of all things, a hefty self-portrait. “Hey,” the father said, “everybody wants a picture of themselves. Think about it, it's like I.D.” In the camp, however, the ungainly squares and ovals took up space in tents already crowded. In a couple of cases, the odd item of salvage made the neighbors jealous. So after a few days of getting to know his site, The Boss had hit on a plan for community building.

“It was time,” Jay said, “we had some
signage.”

Circulating with his least-busy staff members, he'd labeled and cataloged all the larger, more garish frames—and Barb for one realized what that part of the process was about, community building among his colleagues, tunneling through their built-up suspicions when it came to Americans. Jay had insisted, too, that the records be kept in English, Italian, and French. Then he'd rounded up volunteers from around the camp.

“Oh,” Barbara said, “I get it. You—”

“Now this next part,” Kahlberg said, “this is the miracle part, if you ask me.”

Jay's volunteer homeless had gone around collecting the catalogued pieces. The families had let Barbara's smiling but still-unknown husband remove their family photos and take the fittings, though often it was their sole possession of any value. The Center took them away peaceably, with nothing but a piece of paper in return.

“I just figured,” Jay said, “the Site could be a city and a nation. A nation, it says somewhere, is just the same people living in the same place.”

Again, Barb understood better. She could appreciate how the
Americano's
fair business practices had mattered less to the people in camp than the picture of his family. At the same time as he'd asked for their frames, he'd shown them what he had at stake, in Naples: his own little band of runaways, smiling and airbrushed. He'd shown them what he'd given up.

The mother tried to explain. “These
clandestini
, for them it's probably been years since they saw anything like this.”

“That's just technology,” Jay said. “Silky does it in the NATO shop.”

“No, I'm saying, the way we look, it must've seemed like we come from—”

“The liaison officer,” Silky said, “has access to all document functions.”

He went on smiling, between the tips of his hair, tucked back and poking from under his ears. Meanwhile, Jay pointed towards the reshaped portrait overhead. Even the NATO guards looked up at it, letting their rifles hang slack.

“Signage,” Jay said. “Now everybody's got an
address.”

The light through the blue plastic visor made the mother's mushroomed head all the stranger. Barb recalled that she'd been a nervous wreck on the day of the shot, still been trying to make a go of it with Maria Elena, their Mexican ward. At least she'd known better than to spring that girl on the folks at the photo studio.

“We-ird,” Sylvia said. “It's like the stuff Chris shows us on the web.”

“But that's so we can
find
it,” Dora said. “Right Papa? If we're lost, we just look for the weird stuff.”

“Hey, you got it,” Jay said. “Smart girls. You got it.” Then as he gave the photo another look, did Barbara see him shake off a chill?

The way Jay put it was, so long as he had the extra hands, he was going to put them to work. Kitchen duties for the girls, carpentry assignments for the boys. But when Barb asked where she fit in, her husband dropped his eyes.
Wherever you like
, he said, scrubbing his forehead with a calloused palm. The wife, aware she was under NATO scrutiny, briskly declared she'd make herself useful in the camp chapel.

Good thing, too. Best to look busy when, it turns out, the family's Public Relations Department has arranged for the media. The reporters joined them after the Lulucitas moved into the community kitchen. Cooking took place in an open-sided tent, where standing fans whirred between the ropes, but even so a patch of heat-fog lay between the broad steel stoves. Jay handed out smocks and gloves, and the girls fitted on each other's hairnets, refusing Mama's help. Then the air got closer still. Along one open wall gathered another knot of visitors, white folks.

“Well,
meno male,”
said Silky.
“Meno male.”

Chris was the first to translate: “less bad,” acceptable. Among the new arrivals, a couple of the men were getting out notepads, and the lone woman clicked on her video-camera. Five reporters, altogether, everyone wearing the Southern Italian version of business casual, a lightweight dress shirt. They all knew Silky and seemed comfortable with his Dixiefied Italian. Indeed as the liaison made the introductions, including the names of the newspapers and the TV stations, he might've laid on the compone more thickly than usual. Might've played to the stereotype, keeping the press comfortable.

Not that the refugees trusted the man, whatever his accent. Barbara, checking around the kitchen, realized that the campers tended to allow Kahlberg the same space as they gave his gunmen. But the
poveri
at once proved great fans of the press, especially the two with cameras. Several crowded in behind the reporters, and beyond the kitchen's floor-fans, outside, you saw fresh clusters of naked feet. Inside, the posing quickly turned shameless, the Africans even popping their eyes. The most animated cluster gathered around the woman, a young woman, good-looking. She was new at TV work, if her gloves were any indication. Fingerless thoroughbred leather protected the girl's hands, and she kept adjusting her grip.