Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  “Jay?” She swung his way, in the crowded hole. “Jaybird?”

  “We don’ need him,” one of the kidnappers said, out of the cell’s backlit opening.

  “What?” she asked. “What are you saying?”

  “You the one, Missus. Him, man, we don’ need.”

  “What—what are you thinking?” The flashlight beam shifted and she noticed the purse at her hip, still shut, snaps fastened. “What do you want?

  “Oh, listen,” she went on, “anyway, really, whatever it is you want, forget about it. This will get you nowhere. You’ll be lucky if they don’t send you to Abu Ghraib.”

  Tough talk. Barbarian talk, surging up anew after the discovery in Cesare ’s back room. “Maybe,” she went on, “maybe Abu Ghraib is what you’re scared of? You’re facing prison, deportation?” This seemed the likeliest possibility. “You’re facing deportation and you think, with Jay and me, you can negotiate a deal. You think, the Americans can make a difference for you. Mother of God, do you really believe…”

  The kidnappers moved away without responding. The lights cast a wan back-glow, and the sandal-shuffle echoed a bit longer. Barb was left in a dark so thick that her staring had a lozenge pattern, a ripple of snakeskin. She sneezed, chilled. Still she couldn’t shake the clarifying anger that had sprouted in her, a sense that she had the nerve to handle this. Until a year ago she wouldn’t have dared to take on a challenge like Maria Elena, and since then Barbara had grown that much stronger.

  Beside her Jay stirred, finding his voice with another obscenity or two. She tried to imagine an escape. They would sit back to back, pick off each other’s…

  “Barb?” Jay asked. “Hey?”

  “Right here, Jaybird.” Was he talking into a wall? “I guess,” she went on, “I’m more angry than anything else. I’m not hurt.”

  She had to wait for his response, “…angry…,” then wait again.

  “Well I’m hurt,” he said finally. “The fucks whacked me in the head. I’ve got to wonder, where’s Paul when I need him?”

  The best she could manage was a smile he couldn’t see. “Try a few deep breaths,” she said. “The air’s supposed to be good for you.”

  “Smells like lemon.” He seemed to be extending his legs. “Lime and lemon.”

  “The rock’s supposed to have this great stuff in it, the vitamins and minerals for the whole region. It’s in the fruits and vegetables, it’s in the mozzarella.”

  “The waters. The healing spa waters.”

  It would do no good to look concerned. “Jaybird, really. They hit you.”

  “I’m okay, Owl Girl. Between a headache and a broken head, hey. I guess I know the difference.”

  No good to nod, either. She nudged backwards with one shoulder, and there he was, his heaving ribcage. He spoke again: “Just, what would be nice, about now? I mean. Would be nice if we had a clue, here.”

  He gave a sigh, her elbow lifting against his chest.

  “You notice they didn’t bother to tie our feet,” he said.

  Barbara wanted to talk about something else. “Jay, have you noticed how, in this city, everywhere you go triggers another round of starting over?” She sat up, losing touch of him. She explained that where they found themselves now was a case in point; they were back at the beginning of things, for Naples.

  Jay took his time responding. “At least,” he said, “the money’s no problem.”

  “Huh? Jay, look at where we are.” She almost laughed at the expression: look. “It’s the Sotterraneo. It’s back to the raw materials.”

  “The ransom, forget about it. Roebuck, I mean. She’s got it in petty cash.”

  “Jay, would you listen? Anyway, can’t you see this isn’t about money?”

  He sighed in a way she’d always hated, as if she was ten years old.

  “Jay, haven’t you still got your wallet? Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’ve gone off to get somebody, and he’s going to tell us what this is about. Now, for once, stop this, the tough guy. Stop and think about what I’m telling you. Ever since the first morning in town, this family’s had to stop, step back, and start over.”

  She’d never brought the idea up to him, not even at bedtime. “I’m not saying we’re not at the age. Middle age, aren’t you always getting turned around? Isn’t there always something that takes you back twenty years? Always something makes you think you have to start over. But around here, it’s not just about our age.

  “Around here, also we’re tripped up by this incredible Naples past.” She’d never told him, between the urges to obliterate and the efforts to repair. “The city goes back three thousand years. And it triggers a kind of syndrome, it takes us back too, so that…”

  “Jesus, Owl. Are you telling me how you feel?”

  The contempt she heard—that might’ve been the echo.

  “Telling me how you feel. Let’s see if I got it. We’re all getting nowhere.”

  “Jay, don’t.” She had the nerve for him too, now. “I’m talking about emotions.”

  “I mean, it’s beautiful. We’ll just sit here talking emotions, since whatever we try, hey. We’ll get nowhere.”

  “It’s better than sitting here babbling about money. If you’d done half the work I did at the Sam Center—”

  “Aw, not again. Sam Center, Holy of Holies. Give me a break.”

  “If you’d done half the work I did, you’d realize there’s nothing more dangerous than a personality that’s stuck in old patterns.’’

  “Okay, Doctor. How about this, okay? If we’re all the time winding up back at Square One, think of it this way.” He might’ve sat up. “Doesn’t have to mean we’re stuck. Maybe it means just the opposite. Hey, how about that?”

  She flexed her bound wrists till they burned.

  “How about, we might go anywhere? We’re back to Day One, this godforsaken hole, okay. But then, how about, somebody does some actual work?”

  “Mother of God.”

  “Barb, I mean. It comes to work, you haven’t got a clue. The sacrifices.”

  “Listen Jay, here’s a clue. You talk about sacrifice, but you love it. Your work, all the politics and the deal-making, you love it. Swapping favors—”

  “Oh, here it comes. Everybody’s dirty except Barbara.” She heard a scrape, and his knee bumped hers. “Everybody else is some kind of bottom feeder.”

  “You’re saying, I play the saint? Jay, if it were up to you, the kids and me, we’d have built you a shrine by now.”

  “Hey. All I ever did was sell pasta. That’s your—your husband.”

  “We’d have a shrine, Saint of the Holy Paycheck. Martyr of the working man.”

  “Angry Barb. Angry, angry, angry Barb.”

  She jerked herself around, banging her fists against a wall. “Well it gets old, it gets very old, when every day, it’s all about money.” She might’ve cut her hand against a spur in the rock. “All you ever want is money and a good car—”

  “Hey, what do you know about it? Never earned a nickel in your life. We had to come here to Naples to help the poor, holy of holies, and still you weren’t willing to earn a nickel to make it happen. Didn’t matter who you hurt, didn’t matter even if you hurt your own children, because—”

  Barbara began to scream. She had to scream, her cuts burning and full of grit, and she heaved herself across the scaly floor towards the man’s growl. She had to get her hands on him. Seizing Jay by his soaked jacket, getting a fistful of chest-hair too, she set him bellowing. The man struggled to throw her off, his hips bucking and his midsection twisting, humped over still-bound hands. Now grunting, now louder. With the harsh words the two of them spat out, liar, witch, with their choking and hissing amplified around the hollow, what? your hands?, she would’ve thought that the kidnappers could hear. The din seemed enormous, a monster in an alley. At least one of their captors should’ve heard, the man who’d tied her up. He should’ve kept an ear cocked, after using such a cheap s
crap of leather on her. One good spur in the tufa had been all she needed in order to tear free. Yet the crooks didn’t show, while Barbara and Jay scuffled around the hole, two arms against none. The two of them might’ve been having this blowout in a bedroom a few hundred feet overhead.

  They went unheard and they fought unfairly. Jay couldn’t lift a finger. But then again, Barb had spent most of her day in a carnival Scrambler, flung from one side of the car to another. In no time she wore out. She went limp so soon, she wondered what would’ve happened if her husband been able to get a hand on her when she’d attacked, a hand for instance at her panty-line. As it was the wife lost the heart for fighting halfway into a fresh insult. She swallowed what she was saying and slumped against his cook’s uniform, her cheek to its slick synthetic weave. With that, Jay too quit the struggle. His next word slackened into a moan. And the wife couldn’t pull herself off him. Instead, she found the Jaybird a useful prop, a loosely-packed duffel on which she could rest. Then this blinking and cooling, curled into him and herself both, rewarded Barbara with a terrific relief: a sense that she’d heaved off years of something or other weighing her down. She’d flung it off either just now in this semi-crypt or over the tussling course of the last five weeks. With that she spread her hands against him, believing they could bring healing. She could offer them both an ultimate healing, with no recurrence of this particular pain at least.

  Also Barbara lay her overheated ear in the center of her husband’s chest. The thudding behind his ribs seemed the loudest thing in the hole, audible through even the groans and chuckling that followed. A patchwork laughter erupted from them both, ragged and short of breath.

  Jay was the first to bring off actual words. “How’d you do that?”

  Barb had to sneeze again, drenched in sweat and powdered with rock-dust. Eventually she explained, concluding that the man must’ve bought the thong on the street. “You know the kind of thing,” she said, “leather and beads.”

  “Leather and beads,” the Jaybird said.

  Barb ran her itching hands through the man’s chest hair, then risked a lick of her cuts. Nothing special, salt and chalk, but she’d skinned herself badly. She’d let herself go. The wounds could use another lick, and this time she let her tongue stray to Jay as well, his skin a more familiar taste. Then the next lick was just for him.

  “Another time for that,” he said. “Owl Grr-irl. Another day.”

  The big man needed Barbara’s help to sit up. Scooting behind him, she felt her way to Jay’s wrists, the belt wrapped together round them.

  “Hey,” he said, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t about you. I felt helpless.”

  Her own voice caught at the first syllable of a reply. The way her hands closed around his bindings, as he kept up the apologies, she might’ve been at prayer.

  “Jaybird.” She coughed and snuffled. “If anyone should say they’re sorry—”

  “But you were right, up there. Up at Cesare’s, you called it. I did tell the man. Kahlberg. We talked about that first day. I gave him the whole itinerary.”

  “I know. Honey, I know.”

  “The errands we needed to run. The first errand, the second. He got it all.”

  “But there’s no way it’s your fault. All this, no way.”

  “Fucking guy. He even told me the street. Of historical interest, he told me.”

  “Jay, please. There’s something else, listen. I’m the one. I should apologize.” She fingered his bindings but couldn’t find where to begin. “Listen, Jay, I’ll just say it, I need to get a job.”

  She felt him start to speak, then check himself

  “The work at the Samaritan Center,” she went on, “that’s been great. At DiPio’s too, just great while it lasted. But otherwise I—this is nuts, what I’ve been putting us through. I need to get a life, an adult life.”

  And when she did undo the belt, she didn’t know it until Jay’s rump started scuffing the floor as he turned to face her. “You want a job,” he said.

  “Maybe I had something to prove by being a Mom. Maybe I did, once upon a time. But I’m saying, I’ve done that. Five times now, been there done that.”

  He rubbed his wrists noisily. “Talking a degree, you know. Hey? A Master’s.”

  That took her by surprise. She’d had all these explanations lined up ready to go.

  “Talking an MSW. The program in Danbury. Then there’s certification.”

  “I think I’m talking a green card.” Barbara settled against a wall. “It’s like I’ve got to immigrate into my own adult life.”

  “Got to be on a new basis.”

  “All I need to do is get over the water and become a citizen. But meanwhile, I’ve been driving us all crazy because I’ve been scared to get on the boat.”

  “That’s okay, Barb. We’ve done the apologies. A little on both sides, okay.”

  “You called it, the program in Danbury. That’s the one, that’s the future, and now I’m thinking of child care, it’s not a problem. We have the boys. We have Aurora.”

  Neither of them was trying to find the exit.

  “I hear that. With this, starting fresh, you’ll be a better mother anyway. Happier person. Plus Mom, yeah. I mean, a weekend now and then. It’s a plan.”

  The Jaybird gave another groan, different, relieved, and maybe he got a good stretch. Barb was reminded of their scuffle. It felt as if the punching and name-calling had taken place in another life, already a long-ago life, and yet the thought gave her a shiver. What could it do, such craziness, except make her shiver?

  “You know,” she said, “speaking of middle age. There’s menopause.”

  “Barb, hey. Problems, I can think of a million problems. But now we’ve talked, we’ve got it on the table, a good plan.”

  She squinted, trying to make him out. The dark showed her nothing but the lozenge pattern.

  “Good plan,” she said.

  It wasn’t much longer before they picked up the noise from the outer room. There was talk, there was movement, and after that came the faint unfolding petals of electric light. Jay and Barbara discovered they sat opposite the hole’s egg-shaped opening. As they put up their empty hands, Barb had to fight down another shiver at the blood on her wrists and hands. She’d marked up Jay’s uniform too.

  The first man in carried no light, and when he stooped to enter, the beam behind him blinded her. Barb glimpsed only a shaved brown head and another pair of stringy sandals. The same flimsy footwear as the others—the same as you’d have found on the slaves who’d hacked out these cellars. Then the one with the light squatted at the opening, the space grew bright and hot, and after more blinking and squinting Barb recognized the man these crooks had gone to get. Fond.

  If that was the name he still went by, this handsome and moon-scarred beneficiary of Paul’s most dramatic healing. The guy was so reed-like and flexible he had no trouble slipping into the cave, but his smell carried something different, a hint of wildflowers. And whatever you chose to call the man, refugee Lazarus or yippie guerilla, postcolonial hiccup or the last free-standing exponent of non-violence—whatever, it hadn’t lowered his status with his crew. Fond carried no weapon, yet with a single raised hand he held back the men outside the chamber. The closest might’ve been the African again, though she couldn’t make out his face. Not that she had any trouble understanding the way he shifted his light from hand to hand. He didn’t like finding the Americans untied.

  “Easy,” Jay said. “I mean, look at us. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Fond,” Barbara said, pronouncing it English-style. “Great, oh, Fond! What a load that is off our minds.”

  The clandestino leader, folded mantis-style, crooked his narrow head.

  “If it’s you,” Barb said, “we know we can talk.”

  “Barb’s right,” Jay said. “Guy like you, no problem. We can work it out.”

  Lazarus gave a snort, not too encouraging. But he allowed them out of the cell, and in the p
rocess he made sure of everyone’s accessories: Jay’s wallet, the mother’s purse, his own telefonino. Out in the larger room, as Barbara came upright, she smiled at the blood-rush. A rush of revival—the same ferocity as she’d rediscovered up in Cesare’s plus, after that last round of talking in the dark, a renewed faith in what she and the Jaybird could accomplish.

  She took a moment to reacquaint herself with the high square walls, the herringbone floor. She looked over Fond’s two backups, whaddyacallem, henchmen, subalterns. In any case they’d left one of their number behind, a lookout at the next exit perhaps. Now as she studied these two, she came to think that the white one, the lighter one, had been one of the beggars in the shade of her apartment stoop, this afternoon. Seemed more than possible, a couple of feelers out from under the Shell of Hermit Crab, poking around the Vomero. They’d been tailing the family for a couple of weeks now, hadn’t they? By the time today’s opportunity came up, they’d learned how easy it was to lure away her bodyguard.

  She had a clue, as Jay would say. But the Girl Detective wasn’t much help here, not with those two guns in plain view, one raised and tacking slowly between her and Jay, the other jammed in a henchman’s belt. Then there was the equipment Fond carried, a digital videocamera, state-of-the-web.

  The camera was the Hermit Crab’s next concern, as soon as it was obvious that the two captives weren’t going to try anything. Fond and his soldiers bent over the technology, grumbling in French, in Italian, in English. Barb picked out enough to understand that the kidnappers hadn’t found the boss waiting for them, when they’d first arrived at the hideout, because he’d never counted on rounding up his own equipment. He’d expected Maddalena to take care of that. But the girlfriend had realized that today’s caper would get her in far worse trouble than leaping a police sawhorse. That business in the piazza a week ago, leaping and pleading with la Mama while somewhere a camera rolled, that had been another step up the media ladder. But when Fond had suggested the woman pose for a scarier picture, a violation of international law, he couldn’t get a callback. The celebrity renegade had been reduced to haggling on the black market.