by John Domini
“The Earthquake I.D. He must’ve had some left over.”
The wife didn’t respond, surprised by the priest’s rooms. In Brooklyn and Bridgeport, the spaces behind the altar wall had looked more churchy, deep brown, a lot of oak. Cesare’s was mostly fungus-gray, steel-drab, as modern as the rest of the building. The old man stood at the desk, pulling open a drawer he hadn’t bothered to lock. First he brought out four or five vials of communion wine, the kind used for bedside visits, and these gave Barb a unexpected pang. Out of the blue she recalled the last time she’d seen her father. The grown Barbarella had spent an evening with fumble-mouthed old Dad, on his condo’s tiny deck in Vero Beach. They’d drunk the wine she’d picked up during the flight, the little bottles of red.
Then the priest brought out something else. Paper, that’s all: a sheaf of blank paper hardly pinkie-thick.
“The scippatori,” he croaked, at last showing the effort of getting here.
Jay frowned. “What? I wasn’t carrying anything like this.”
For Cesare, raising his eyes seemed suddenly an enormous effort. His forehead crumpled; his grimace deepened. Barbara tried to look encouraging, she fingered her Madonna out from under her neckline, but she didn’t have a clue so far as the papers were concerned. The priest tapped a finger against the stuff, then as husband and wife bent over the desktop, he collapsed into his chair. The mother turned, worried; never mind the papers. She noticed how heavily the old man was sweating, the stains showing through his black cotton. He sprawled across the chair almost as feebly as he had (was it only an hour ago?) across Barbara’s sofa. By the time she could be sure that Cesare was breathing decently, Jay had begun to speak.
“It’s about the paper,” her husband was saying. “The paper itself.”
Barb felt crowded again, there between one man’s rickety splay and the other’s barrel build. The Jaybird held up two sheets of the stationery, a heavyweight bond. A specialty bond, with the roughage of an old scar, in which faint blue threads came together in a watermark.
“Are you saying….” Barb looked from the husband to the priest and back again. “Jay, those aren’t the I.D. There’s nothing—”
“They aren’t the I.D.,” Jay said. “There’s nothing there. This is about the paper.”
“Are you saying, the actual stuff? The stock, the, the bond?”
“Look at it. Think about it. Kahlberg, I mean, this is what the guy needed.”
Barbara settled a hand on her husband’s shoulder, thumbing the strap of his undershirt as she began to understand. Why, Jaybird. Look what we found. Roebuck couldn’t find them, not even with the F-16s just a touch of a button away. But now all the facts were in, they were here on a desk belonging to Barbara’s priest, and while they added up to nothing you’d call good news, they were easy enough to understand. Another folder came open, onscreen, and a dead man popped up with a grin.
Jay looked pained, dripping sweat as he fingered the paper—like the last guy who must’ve handled the stuff There were smudges across the bond’s watermark and wrinkles in several sheets, and this damage must’ve been done by the first day’s scippatori, the two Cesare had been hiding. The NATO liaison would’ve kept his materials pristine. This was his I.D. stock, the most valuable stuff in his over-the-shoulder bag. The clandestini, on the other hand, had been strictly smash-&-grab.
“Kahlberg,” Jay repeated. “Hey, he was already in the shop. The print facility.”
“He told us,” Barbara said. “He bragged about his access.”
“The forms, the logo, he didn’t need that. The NATO logo, the UN, forget about it. Hey. If that guy kept forms around, the whole forms, ready for signature?”
Jay’s eyes grew large, and Barb was already nodding. Everybody had it wrong, both in the offices of the Consulate and in the dens of the Camorra. Everybody was trying to find where Kahlberg had hidden his forms. But a stash like that, lying around waiting for someone to fill in the blanks, would’ve constituted too much of a tangle for the Silk-Man. One more thing to worry about. Rather, whenever he had five minutes alone in the printing facility, he could dummy up an I.D. template.
“This is about the paper,” Barbara said.
“Plus one of the hitters was queer.”
Puzzled, she met her husband’s eyes a moment, then suffered a chill she couldn’t place. She turned to the priest, but he still looked useless, sprawling like an injured crow in a box. Or was the rectory the box, too small for its complications?
“Outside, Owl, hey? You told me. One of our guys swung to the left.”
Barb found no clue to her husband’s thinking in his look, but once again she couldn’t face him for long.
“See, Silky, I mean. He knew what he needed. Time we got to Naples, he knew.”
Her hand came away from Jay’s shoulder, in a zero-G drift. Barbara found her purse, then through the skin of the purse the vertebra of her rosary.
“That guy. Lord of the Underworld. Any angle he could play—”
“Holy Mary,” Barbara said, “Mother of God.”
The Jaybird’s stare offered little comfort. What she mostly detected was willpower, a determination not unlike what she’d picked up in his expression in their bedroom, during these recent nights when she’d been too dry for loving.
“You’re saying,” she said “this is about Kahlberg, what he needed. And by the time we got to Naples, he had it all worked out.”
“Barb, it’s got to be. He had the plan, he had the guys. The right guys, a couple of poor sad creeps, plus one who Silky could really do a number on—”
“All by the time we got to Naples.”
He eyes fell again on the I.D. bond, flesh-colored: flesh once dead but now erupting in fresh sweat and goose-bumps. If she could’ve said more she would’ve agreed with Jay, it had to be. Only one explanation had room for all the folders now open onscreen, and this was that the late Lieutenant Major Player had known the Lulucitas were coming downtown with all the documents required for a family overseas. He’d arranged for the necessary sort of emergency, the kind that would allow him into the high-security cabinet where they kept the watermark bond for the Earthquake I.D. He’d set it up: Americans down, white folks, executive class, and he’d selected the timeframe and street corner—plus the right sort of accomplices.
“One of those guys anyway.” Jay kept his voice low, not wanting to interrupt a prayer. “Kahlberg, I mean. He had one of them wrapped around his finger.”
Now came the sound of the wheels beneath Cesare’s chair. The old man toed closer, first eyeing the papers, then looking up to Barb. How long had he had these things? His destitute guests must’ve brought him this veiny ragstock the way a cat would bring its owner a dead mouse. But that was about as far as she could take her thinking, otherwise tripped up by mounting anger. In her mind’s eye Barbara pictured the Lieutenant Major during his lone moment of sincerity, back in the museum. He must’ve worn the same honest sneer the night he’d shown these million-dollar blanks to his nigger-bitch scippatoro.
“Signora,” Cesare said, “I was bound by the Church, by the Order, don’t you—”
“The church?” she snapped. “You mean, like a sanctuary? A home?”
Jay spread his hands and motioned as if pressing down the air.
“Are you saying,” she went on, “this is a home, here? A place where a person can count on hearing the truth?”
When her husband touched her, Barbara jerked away so hard that the back of her head slammed against a bookshelf.
“Oh, pleas-s-se.” Hissing, wincing, she lifted a hand to her head. “Jay, you’re just as bad.”
“Owl Girl. Hey. Me and you, we were both part of—”
“Oh, don’t, don’t! Are you saying, that first day, it wasn’t all about you and him and the itinerary? Or are you just stupid, Jay? Are you so stupid, you’ve forgotten about the itinerary? That pervert knew exactly where we were going.”
On a bookshelf over one shoulde
r, on the side where her head hurt, a clock and Bible blurred into figures. They looked the terra-cotta imposters of a Neapolitan crèche, a shepherd and a Moorish king. It was yet another first encounter with the city, the instant version, to go with yet another abortive spell of echolalia:… hey, all I ever did… how else was I going to get around…
“You did what he told you!” she barked. “You went where he told you!”
Then there was the priest, him who had care of her soul. Cesare had laid a long middle finger over puckered lips—and wasn’t that an obscene revision of the crucifix? A depravity, like his endless talk about doing something for the helpless and the clandestine? Mother of God, these men in charge.
“No more,” Barbara said. “No more of this ever. I was right in the first place.”
These men were all the same, their startled heads cocking in synch.
“I’m saying, I want a divorce.”
“Owl Girl, I mean. Not again, babe. We’ve been there.”
“Been there, where? A house full of lies? I had no idea!”
The priest dropped his hand to the chair-arm, readying himself to stand.
“Don’t bother, Cesare. Father. When I think of all the yadda-yadda I had to sit through, that meandering Dublin yadda-yadda. It’s over, Fa-ther. The End.”
Jay tried for her waist and she wound up whacking her head again.
“Don’t,” she groaned, “don’t. What are you going to say, we’ll work on this? We’ll rebuild trust? Listen, from now on, there’s nothing to rebuild, ever. You, all you men, you’re gone, so far as I’m concerned. You’re history.”
“Owl,” Jay said. “Think about it. I mean, the day you’ve had.”
“This isn’t about today.” She found the door. “It’s about forever!”
She turned and bolted. The dash down the long sanctuary felt wonderful, the blood singing in her ears as she plunged into the big room’s cool. She couldn’t hear whatever was behind her. Anyway after the first few strides all that mattered was the goal ahead, where she was going—the kids. The kids needed the truth. They had to learn about her and Jay, about Silky and his paper chase, about Cesare and the night visitors. Even the older boys and Romy, the others had to hear about that as well, another working piece in the whole truth. And Barbara was the one to lay all the pieces out, because at last she’d come to see how to live in the truth. Before she’d gotten halfway through the church she understood where safety began, perfect safety and freedom from any confusion whatsoever. It was squatters’ rights, simple as that. Just hunker down and refuse to budge.
The back pew sat empty. Her bodyguard had wandered off, leaving behind a dirty comic book. Barbara couldn’t miss the page to which the book had fallen open, a man and woman in a naked embrace. But she’d hit her stride now, heading for home. She had to gather herself for the door to the street. Jay and the priest couldn’t be far behind, so she had to get ready to grab the thing and yank. Barbara whipped out into the city air, the stone and salt, the volcano and diesel and sun.
Three men fell on her. Three guys who’d been waiting on the stoop, one black and two white—she got that much from a single dumbfounded look before one of them slapped a cloth over her mouth. The rag had an awful taste and a chemical odor, yet another tang in the air, searing and new. Barbara might’ve smelled something like it in one of DiPio’s hospital wards.
There was a blinding moment when her arm felt ripped out of her socket, and the stranger’s head against hers proved more heated and sweat-soaked than her own. Only one of the men had hold of her, the African, but his fingers were tough as bridge cables. He had no trouble keeping the cloth over her face and pinning her wrist between her shoulder blades. It hurt in spite of whatever they’d poured into the cloth, and she wanted to scream, especially when one of the other attackers stopped the hard-charging Jay by putting a gun to her head. The Jaybird, seeing that as soon as he was out the church door, tripped and fell and wound up with a gun on him too. Swiftly the two Americans were wrestled into a car, the husband getting his own taste of chloroformed cloth. When the priest loomed on the steps behind them, his shouts were nebulous, no more substantial than the local or two who’d stopped to watch.
It was broad daylight, the end of riposo. But the car stood close, on the same spot where the police had pulled up on the day when Jay had been kidnapped.
Chapter Thirteen
From the church to the waterfront seemed a single downward acceleration. The whining transmission and the lumpish embrace—she was pinned against Jay, head down, sinuses burning from the kidnappers’ crude anesthetics—all this took Barbara back to her mother’s cousin’s, in lower Manhattan. The cramp recalled the sofa-bed above Lafayette Street. That thump against her hip might’ve been the cousin, trying to cheer up little Barbarella, a woman with a touch clumsier than Mama’s. But no. That was a gun, nudging Barbara’s love-handle, and she remained in a fog even after she was freed from the Fiat’s back seat. Jay didn’t appear any better off, staggering, groaning. Husband and wife were prodded under a low opening into a dank hatchway. There was another whine, wood on metal maybe, and Barb may have seen a crowbar at work, planks coming off. The smell was rust and mold, a reek that after a moment woke her enough to discover she still carried her purse. Her cash was where she’d put it, and her new passport too. She wondered about Jay’s wallet.
Once husband and wife stamped the life back into their legs and cleared the fuzz from their sight, they discovered themselves in a low cellar. A few leaky barrels of wine remained racked against one wall. An eatery in the centro storico, condemned after the quake—Barb struggled with the logic, working against a headache and pinpricks and the renewed aggravation of her interior whipsaw. Up in Cesare’s she’d been screaming again. Again it was all about the end of everything. Meanwhile, two of her captors came up with flashlights. Nobody let go of his gun, but they got the lights switched on and began to nudge the shambling Americans towards the darkest part of the basement, behind the racked barrels. The Jaybird put up a muddled resistance, shoving, wobbling, the wine-softened earth noisy underfoot. Then however came the distinct click of a pistol’s safety switch. After that the five began another descent, difficult, backwards. They clambered down a narrow tunnel hacked into the city bedrock.
The Jaybird had to move on all fours, his groggy eyes on his wife above him. His shoulders scraped the walls of the passageway, and the scattershot beams of the flashlights caught white crumbles of stone in the chest-hairs that poked out of his collar. Years ago the kids had splashed him like that, leaving dribbles of spit-up after a feeding…
But what was Barb dreaming about now? What, how good this guy had been when the kids were babies? Strangers were forcing her at gunpoint down into a hole. They had her on a sloping mole-run. The temperature kept dropping, the stink of Vesuvius was replaced by the prickle of limestone, and the walls were toothy with pick-and-shovel work. Barbara knew where they were headed, the Sotterraneo. Just the place for kidnappers’ hideout. The Late Lieutenant Major, now, he hadn’t needed to get his hands dirty. He’d had the printers, the NATO facility, and he’d had his clandestini. No doubt he’d laid out the cash for their motorcycle too.
Yet as the mother found one toehold after another (the tunnel was roughly laddered), she came to believe that the liaison man had nonetheless kept some lair down in the vaults and warrens beneath the city. He would’ve liked that, a stony and hurtful love-nest. Come to think of it, the exercise was proving good for her too. As Barbara felt her way into the cold, her head kept clearing. She recalled a nasty tale of Italian revenge, one that featured a cellar like this. Some poor bastard was lured underground, then clapped in chains and walled up, still wearing his clown’s cap and bells. The story was one of those she’d read to the boys, only; the girls weren’t old enough. She herself wasn’t old enough, not in a skirt and pumps like this, the clothes she’d worn to meet a movie director. Still she knew something about the Sotterraneo, and not just from rea
ding Edgar Allen Poe. Chris said that the first quarries had been cut by the Greeks. The tufa was perfect for building, cool in summer and holding the heat in winter. The work had been done by slaves, of course, a lot of them children.
At length the Americans and their captors emerged from of the tunnel. Barb straightened up to see a flashlight beam playing along high and strictly cornered walls. She recalled more of the history, the secret churches carved out by the early Christians, the bomb shelters built by the Fascists.
But today wasn’t that kind of excursion. One of the kidnappers put his gun against Barbara’s shoulder, almost resting it there. A slant automatic like Kahlberg’s. Meantime the African, the one who’d first laid hands on her, sent two or three echoing shouts into the black.
The word sounded familiar, a name perhaps, short with a long vowel. Barb might’ve recognized their language too, a pidgin French. But once her captors realized that they were alone, someone they’d expected hadn’t yet arrived, they confined their talk to whispers. The African appeared to call the shots, he did most of the talking, and he directed the others when they turned and herded the Lulucitas across the dark. The floor, Barbara discovered, was cut in herringbone. Then ahead, along one side of the cubicle vault, the flashlights picked out what looked like the entrance to another shrunken tunnel. But this proved to be no more than a hole in the wall, a step-down storage area or sleeping compartment. Even before the flashlights illuminated the space, the redoubled lime odor suggested how small it was. The mother’s head bumped the jagged ceiling. Then before she could get a look around she was yanked to the floor, her purse stripped away, her arms forced together behind her back.
So that’s how it would be, tied up in a stone burrow, tied up. One of the white guys had a ponytail, she remembered after a moment; his leather hair-band secured her wrists. As for Jay, with him the crooks used his own sturdy belt, $50 at Bridgeport Leathers, and the big man didn’t make it easy. He swore and kicked until he was stilled by a couple of swats with a sound like an Atlas slapping shut. A pistol-whipping? Anywhere near the temple? Barbara saw nothing but shadows, though there was no mistaking how her husband went limp, sagging against the wall with a groan.
