Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  “Listen,” he repeated, “that girl took Umberto right upside the head. Like back when Jay was hit.”

  Kahlberg wouldn’t hear any objections. John Junior started to shove and get loud, but he wasn’t nearly so loud as the click of the safety on the Lieutenant Major’s pistol.

  The family wound up in the museum gift shop. On the way downstairs the galleries threw their footsteps back at them, stony reverberations that widened the time since Barbara had last seen her middle child. Overhead the PA system ordered everyone else out of the building, repeating the command in—was it five languages? Was it ten? Then down in the shop her dealing grew more desperate. She tried to get Kahlberg to stay with them, the “non-essential personnel.” The mother wanted him where she could keep an eye on him. But again she didn’t get what she wanted. The liaison hadn’t taken out his gun just so he could play babysitter, he had the troopers for that. He told the biggest of the powder-blues to stand in the shop door.

  “Wait, but, wait.” Barbara put an elbow in the guard’s ribs, reaching past him to hook the strap of Kahlberg’s carryall. “Last I saw, the girl was with you.”

  Silky actually bared his teeth. “She went after them before Umberto and Paul got ten steps. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

  Barbara remembered only bureaucrat and boy.

  “Seems to me,” the Lieutenant Major said, “I should’ve taken precautionary measures right then.”

  “This is so bogus!” John Junior shouted.

  “Listen,” Barb said, “listen, be careful.”

  “Hey! If my girl went after Paul, she was trying to protect him!”

  “Please, be careful.”

  The PR man wriggled free, loping away into the first-floor galleries. He was loping, eager, and the mother was left to seek another arrangement, still less favorable. She backed away from the door, away from her shouting oldest and the other three clustered about him, and ducked between two standing racks of postcards. Perhaps that itself was the bargain Barbara hoped to strike, simply to be left alone among those glossy reproductions of museum pieces—every picture now somehow the same, a slant hieroglyph of blood—so that she could pray. Perhaps prayer had become the only negotiation she had left. Certainly nobody else appeared likely to help. Even the tourists were leaving. Barbara could see them beyond the shop’s glass wall, filing out of the Nazionale one a time, presenting their I.D. to a pair of cops at the door. A backup Silky must’ve called in. Barbara, watching, with her rosary beads dangling from her fist, believed that she herself was trying to do the same: to expose the image of her inmost heart and have it approved.

  She never had a doubt about the gunshots. Onetwo-threefourfive, they came, a rushed and untrained cluster.

  JJ got loud again: “What was that?” But Barbara was already into her first stride, her rosary looped around her knuckles. She never had a doubt.

  In Brooklyn, as she’d grown older and her neighborhood had gotten worse, she’d heard shots once or twice. At night the traffic petered out in a way it didn’t over in Manhattan (and anyway she’d seen less and less of her mother’s family, as she’d grown older), but other noises came on that much more distinctly. The next morning neighbors would claim, / thought it was a truck backfiring, but that didn’t fool the teenage Barbara Cantasola. She’d always known a gunshot at once, and at once her organs of hearing had seemed to relocate to the rabbitty center of her chest. Today, the same. Today in the Nazionale, she understood at first shot and she counted all five, meanwhile bristling with fresh capacity and muscles in new places. The mother calculated where the shots had come from and she had a plan for the soldier at the door. In another moment she hit the trooper just right, using her beaded fist to catch him on his exposed jaw while he was speaking into the walkie-talkie on the other shoulder. She busted past him and shrugged off the children.

  A different sort of policeman ran by, a Naples cop, with a revolver in one hand. Barb broke into a run herself, never mind the last-moment swipe by the NATO trooper, so rough that it clawed the bra strap off one shoulder and briefly recalled the pummeling she’d taken from Maria Elena. She knew the trooper couldn’t leave his post. Anyway there was John Junior yelling behind her, and Chris and the girls too, a handful for any soldier. It took a moment to recognize the heat where the man had pawed her, the bruising. And if Paul went down, who would be her healer? Who would be his, who? Not Barbara, certainly—not this mother with her eyes on the stars, or on the Good Samaritan, or on another Hail Mary Full of Crap—with her eyes forever on anything but her own stuttering balsa-wood boy.

  Her lungs grew hot too, as she raced alongside racing policemen, three or four uniforms and plainclothes making it clear that she’d been right about where the shots came from. Though she remained a stranger here; the cops believed she was one of them. In their boot-falls she kept hearing a pattern, onetwo-threefourfive.

  Then Barb and the others were into some backstage area, a space for deliveries. Her eye was drawn first to the sunlight, the loading dock and its half-open rollaway door. Only after that, within the brightness, did she see the body. Face down, knees up, a man’s body. She’d visited enough Catholic charity homes to know at first sight. This was a full-grown man, no preteen.

  The guy’s arms were spread wide across the dock’s concrete floor, stretched out unbent towards the street. With his knees beneath him and his head towards the sulfur-scented glare he looked like a worshipper before an urban sun-god, the Sacred Light in the Alley. Prostrating himself, salaam. Barbara didn’t see his gun, either. He’d been carrying a gun, Kahlberg, him with his Botticelli hair, ruffling now in the traffic winds through the door’s partial opening. She had to look for the thing, the iron handful, and when she found it the pistol looked harmless enough, though it lay well within reach, just beyond one unmoving arm. Its skid across the dock floor had been halted by the spill from his open bag, the loose papers. Also Barbara lost a few shredded seconds frowning over the liaison’s clothes, their uncharacteristic sloppy fit, bunching along the shoulders and around the shoulder strap. The wrinkles poked up, snowdrifts, almost, out of a widening bloodstain. It appeared that all five shots had hit the Lieutenant Major between chest and groin. Barbara detected no movement across the upper body, there where the heart and lungs are, no stirring out of the man at all except for the occasional ruffle of his hair. That hair again, the limit of the mother’s ability to think. Otherwise the kneeling remains, the wrinkled bleeding spill for whom prayer had been the last negotiation, only left her low and sorry and afraid. Her shoulder and breast burned, burned and ached, and Barbara couldn’t come any closer to the man but couldn’t back away either. Some unknown cop had to touch her before she turned and saw Paul.

  The boy stood in a corner, in the arms of a policewoman. His narrow shoulders quivering, his head was cradled in the woman’s chest. Again, in a woman’s chest.

  The cop knew enough to keep him turned from the corpse. Over the top of the boy’s small head, over the half-combed hair, there ran a blue scarf thickly knotted at the back. A blindfold? Barbara couldn’t handle the question. She couldn’t say how long it took to move his way. At last she got a hand on Paul and realized that his shoulders were shaking because he was crying, only crying, and he had no injury, no further abuse, he was all right—and Mother of God, the sunshine under that delivery door! The racket of cars and trucks beyond!

  There was a racket in here, too, someone shouting. “Dottore! Un dottore!” The mother, in so far as she could think at all, could only think this was a fantasy. The word had to come straight out of her celebrating unconscious. Yes, the dottore was in. The doctor, healer, miracolino.

  “Un dottore! Signora—you, please.”

  Barb lifted her other hand, the one with the rosary round it. The beads seemed to hoist her right mind into place too; she knew where she was and what she heard. But to find out who was shouting, that had to wait, yet. First she had to pull her boy out of the policewoman’s embrace and int
o her own. She had to plant a kiss on his forehead, over the blindfold, and give the cop a calming word or two.

  “Hatnno ‘mazzatto! Hanno ‘maz-zaa’!”

  Now that phrase got her attention, no matter who was doing the shouting,. They’ve murdered him—Barbara couldn’t help but give that some thought. They, not she. Not Romy. Taking care that Mr. Paul saw nothing of the carnage on the loading dock, the mother tried to size up the scene more sensibly.

  “Signora Lulucita!”

  The speaker was Umberto. Wounded, weakened, the museum guide scuttled out of an unlit corner on his bony knees. “You, please, you see the tenente. They have killed him. I am—I must have a doctor.”

  Whoever this guy was, he didn’t look like a useful witness. He cradled one arm, a mess, the elbow shattered and pumping blood. Then as Barbara’s eyes adjusted, she realized the elbow was his only wound. Umberto’s head was fine.

  “Signora, please. You see, yes? You understand, yes?”

  No, she didn’t. The man’s head didn’t have a scratch. Then what was that story about getting hit, and the blood on his blazer? What—Silky’s last Shuck’ n’ Jive?

  Chapter Eight

  Barbara began to have doubts as soon as she met Mrs. Roebuck, Attaché to the American Consulate and the family’s unasked-for “new liaison to the overseas community.” The introduction took place hardly twenty-five hours after the mother had stumbled onto Silky Kahlberg’s final salaam. Fast work, and either NATO or the Consulate set limits on the police investigation as well. After the city cops had finished their first round of questions, at the loading dock and in the gift shop, they hadn’t been allowed anywhere near the Lulucitas. Nor was there media access. A work crew set up sawhorses around the stoop of the Vomero palazzo, and the Attaché rushed out faxes and e-mails. The American citizen volunteers would have no statement for the press until they’d had a chance to review their rights and obligations with representatives of American authority. The very next afternoon, Barbara and Jay were whisked up to the third floor of the Consulate, a cube of sober granite from the turn of the previous century. And five minutes into the conversation, the mother began to think she could no more trust this woman Roebuck than she had the Lieutenant Major. It made no difference that the Consular official had put together a very different look from that of the NATO PR man. A woman of about sixty, without military rank, Roebuck welcomed them to her office in a skirt-suit of wintry and unremarkable gray. Nevertheless, before the three of them had worked through the small talk, Barbara found herself reaching for her husband, pinching the waistband of his underwear through his shirt.

  “And the boy?” the Attaché asked. “Paul? How’s he holding up?”

  The Jaybird allowed himself a word or two, around a glance at Barb.

  “You know,” Roebuck said, “it’s a blessing he was blindfolded.”

  Barbara’s touch remained out of sight, since the three of them were still on their feet and Jay had worn a jacket. She kept her knuckles at her husband’s hip a moment longer. This woman with the Consulate proved unsettling, for starters, in how powerfully she suggested the Alpha Moms of greater Catholic metro New York. Women like this had come strutting across her path from time to time, for instance when the kids kept Barbara waiting in the Holy Name parking lot. But even the Alphas with names like Deltino or Sorrenillo offered her little more than a smile of strictly molded corporate plastic. They had two-children homes and husbands in banking or law.

  Here in the Consulate over the waterfront, meanwhile, Mrs. Roebuck was saying she’d found time to consult with Dr. DiPio. The old medico had stressed how good it was (“a blessing, honestly”) that Paul hadn’t actually witnessed the murder. “A boy that age,” the Attaché went on. “Well. He’s had a difficult time of it already. If he’s exposed to some sort of major trauma…”

  “He’s all right,” Barbara said. “Cesare’s talking with him. My priest.”

  “But no counseling, have I got that right? You’ve requested there be no…”

  “There’s my Mom,” Jay said. “You know she flew in yesterday.”

  When Roebuck nodded, Barb caught sight of her own reflection, upside-down in the older woman’s bifocals. She must’ve seemed topsy-turvy to the Alpha Moms as well. She must’ve looked as if she ran a baby factory. Then there was her husband, practically coming home with grease under his nails, working with food and trucks and warehouse dollies. Their family had no diplomas on the wall. One grandmother was a runaway and the other might as well have been, she was such a scandal.

  Roebuck was asking about the other children.

  “They’re all fine,” Barbara said. “They have the priest, the doctor. And like Jay’s saying, now there’s his mother.”

  “I guess they’re kind of worried about this meeting,” Jay said. “The kids.”

  Barb’s reflection disappeared as the older woman turned to the husband.

  “Roebuck, you’ve got to admit this is pretty quick. Everybody’s still reeling.”

  “Well. Reeling. Certainly we intend to help.”

  Certainly the woman’s office felt a world away from the kinds of places where Silky had done most of his talking, or double-talking. No guns, no dust. Someone had arranged the chairs so that, now as they all took a seat, they shared the same semi-oval around a low glass table. The Attaché would do without her desk, executive-weight, set up before an office window that wrapped around its corner. The segmented turret of thick glass showed 180 degrees of the Bay and the islands, but Barbara turned her back. She’d agreed to come, to give this a chance. Across the knee-high table she faced an empty fourth chair, and before it a laptop computer, so sleek it must’ve been designed by an Italian. The keyboard unfolded like a pair of hands in a linked gesture.

  Jay ignored the hardware, still eyeing the woman who’d invited them downtown. He reiterated that yesterday’s uproar had left the family shaken.

  “Certainly,” Roebuck said. “That’s why, well. A meeting seems called for. Now if you’ll just be patient a moment…”

  There was a knock, but the man came in without being invited. He wore a suit as unseasonable as the Attaché’s, a three-piece. His Arabian nose and skin, the color of the walls of dell’Ovo, set Barbara staring. She knew this guy—the representative from the UN, the one who’d shared the ride to the Vomero the night after the attack on Jay. The one who’d handed out the Earthquake I.D. This Roebuck woman had the same friends as the late Officer Kahlberg, and Barbara had to wonder if today were another cranking haul back up to the peak at the start of the roller-coaster.

  She missed the introductions, but Roebuck kept smiling. “I believe you’ll like,” she said, “what this fellow’s brought for you.”

  Heard that before, too, and Barbara believed she knew what the UN man had in his hand, a clutch of blue-backed papers. He wasted no time about it, anyway, wordlessly dropping the passports onto the glass oval before them. Fresh and glossy passports, midnight indigo, they seemed of a piece with the shapely computer.

  “There,” declared the Consulate woman. “Isn’t that a piece of better news.”

  Barb had come downtown with some idea of what to expect—she and Jay had talked—but neither of them had thought of this. Bending over the skinny blue booklets, she lingered over the kids’. Those were the faces she remembered, yes. They refused to budge under the lamination no matter how often she ran her fingers over the photo. In time Barbara fanned them out before her, a poker hand she needed to think about.

  “It can be an emotional moment,” Roebuck was saying, more quietly. “For an American, certainly. Emotional.”

  Jay’s chin was in his chest. Wetly he caught his breath, trembling, squeaking. Barbara blinked up at the big man, slow about it, her mind’s eye full of passport photos. Jay was supposed to the one with self-control. He’d worked out a strategy five minutes after the call from the Consulate. Barb touched the man’s hip again, his hefty and shuddering trunk.

  “Then the
re’s Silky,” Jay croaked. “Hey. Never. Never so close like that.”

  Barb took her hand off him.

  “Never had it happen to anyone so close. Never anything like that. Jesus. All I ever did was sell pasta.”

  Barbara wondered if her husband would’ve broken down like this before his mother had arrived. “Sorry,” he snuffled, “I’m sorry.” The rep from UN tugged at the tops of his vest, his British disdain showing as clearly it had that first night. Roebuck, though she kept a hand on her laptop, looked a bit dewy.

  “I feel your pain,” the woman said.

  “Oh, give me a break.” Her Jaybird was sitting there crying, and the rep had his lip curled. “Officer Roebuck, officer or whatever you are. Give me a goddamn break. What do you know about pain?”

  Jay shifted her way, his fingers starting at her ribcage.

  “I’m saying, the pain Jay and I have to deal with, what do you know about it?” Around the Alpha Moms, Barbara had never allowed herself an outburst like this. “You and this messenger boy here, both.” She faced the UN man, giving him sneer for sneer.

  “I’ll tell you what you two know about,” she went on, “you know about Silky and Jay. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the guys who signed off on the arrangement.” She leaned away from her husband, another grownup who hadn’t bothered to control himself “You put us in danger, you put my kids in danger.”

  “Mrs. Lulucita.” Roebuck stabbed at the keyboard. “Really, well. Where do I begin? Do I even dignify your allegations with—”

  “Allegations? I know everything.”

  “Barbara.” Jay was sober again. “We talked about this.”

  “What we talked about was, no more secrets. No more lying.” The machinery of Barbara’s anger included a ticking clock: hardly twenty-five hours since the shooting. “With your mother standing there, we said, no more.”

  Jay scrubbed his face and looked to Roebuck. “Barbara knows everything,” he said. “Whatever arrangement we make today, I mean. Got to be on a different basis.”