by John Domini
“Come on, Jay.” Sure as she was of herself, Barbara nonetheless hadn’t expected to sound so easy-going. “Are you saying, Roebuck can’t cut through the paperwork? She can’t have two new passports by the end of the week?”
“Hey, Roebuck can do all kinds of—what? What? Two passports?”
“I give mine to The Moll and you give yours to Fond’s guy, here.”
Her arm still extended towards the scippatoro, she nodded towards the remaining gunman. Meantime she couldn’t miss the possibility of relief, of safety, that flooded her husband’s looks. The deal wasn’t one for one but two for two, and then all the weapons would be in friendly hands.
“We’ll be back in the Consulate anyway,” murmured the former VP for Sales,
“Back in the Consulate,” Barbara said, letting him think. Letting him fill in the blanks: “A day like today, hey, there’s a million ways we could’ve lost them.” But more than that, she could see how he needed this to end. When he’d left the house this morning, he’d believed that come dinnertime he’d be riding back home on the funiculare.
The Albanian had something to say, his first words since they were up outside Cesare’s. “A pass-port? American pass-port, is mine?”
Then The Moll: “We, how can we take from you? We, our lives, are for you.”
Fond got a hand on his second-in-command, the unarmed African, and they murmured in their shared tongue as they watched Jay pull the pamphlet from his wallet pocket. Like Barbara, the husband had wanted it with him every day, so already the thing was curled and wrinkled. Barb however had to check Fond again; she needed him speaking in English. “Fond,” she said, “look at it. Look at how beat up it is. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe something like that could save your man’s life.”
The deep-thinking renegade frowned down at her, so close he might believe that he and his friend had a decent chance of jumping in and snatching away both Jay’s automatic and The Moll’s revolver.
“This morning, you know,” Barbara went on, “I saw my son on a screen, and I saw him fold up just like that passport. I watched my boy fold up and disappear.”
“The Shell of the Hermit Crab,” Fond said, “is not a criminal organization.”
“Well, Jay and I aren’t criminals either.” He was the one to worry about, all right. “And like Jay says, giving away our I.D., we’re taking a risk, it could be trouble.”
But whatever came of this underground exchange, iron for paper, sooner or later that story too going to fold up and be finished. “It’s going to be put on the shelf,” Barbara said, “the Jaybird and I, all our drama, plus you and your Hermit Crab too. Isn’t that Naples, where you’re always running into some old drama? Old prayers, mashed flat and stuck to a wall? Down in Pompeii they were flattened in the middle of dinner.”
“The past in all its folly. La comédie humaine.”
She watched him, not the passports. “And one day, isn’t someone going to run into our leftovers, on the shelf, on the wall? Isn’t that Naples?”
“Assez, assez,” Fond said. He dipped his chin, this scarred and lanky visitor from the fringes of the desert, he gave the least sign of assent, and with that the exchange took place too quick for Barb to see it. By the time she spotted Jay again, he had guns in both hands. Once more her elation ruffled up, an interior match for the thrill that played across the face of the white Shell member. The folder in his hand was worth mille Euro; the sensation in Barbara’s heart had her grinning wildly up at Fond.
But he was looking over her shoulder. The Moll still hadn’t gone for it.
“We are prepared,” the scippatoro was saying, “to lay down our life.”
“Lay down your life?” Barb tried to rein in her smile. “Isn’t that the opposite of a miracle?”
But her reasoning got nowhere, it choked her, because the femme with the memorable bandanna slipped the paper from her hand. She hadn’t realized how stiffly she’d been holding her arm. It didn’t drop at all, at the weight of the revolver.
Chapter Fifteen
The Refugee Lazarus had come back to his idea about a video. “Our arrangement, madame?” Barbara couldn’t follow him at first, instead staring at his long-toed feet, before which Jay had turtled down over the automatics, indulging himself in a one-man Demolition Derby. The husband sent black bits and pieces sailing through the flashlight’s dwindling glow, the magazines in one direction and the bodies in another. Barb understood, she approved, but when the metal landed it clattered like tin, as if somehow she’d wound up in a space without dimension. When Barbara once more took in the outlaws around her, keeping her own gun cradled against her hip, the five young men appeared like sketches on a clay vase. The two scippatori, huddled over her passport, might’ve been heroes of Troy consulting a map. She was back on the second floor in the Nazionale, cruising the display cases of kitchenware. Then on one of the kraters or serving bowls, one of the figures began to speak.
“Madame? You recall our arrangement, the prayer on-camera?”
Barb slid the revolver behind her, tucking it against her spine. With her whipsaw turned to feathers, with her eyes and ears likewise playing tricks, she wondered about the meager word “relief” She needed some word out of a fairy tale, an incantation.
The rangy clandestino looked a bit like a celebrity again, lifting his chin, regaining his swagger. “The video, Mrs. Lulucita? You are listening, please? I will tell you now how this film will be made.”
“Oh, Fond.” She suffered fresh tenderness towards him even as she shook her head. “No more playacting, I just can’t.”
“But, playacting, what is the relevance? My project is never merely artistic.”
“No more movies, no screens or media. From now on it’s real life, face to face.”
Jay was back on his feet, stepping up behind her. He put one hand on her panties’ waistline, the other on the gun.
“But, face to face, just so. Just so will be our video statement, much better enabled back up on the street. Up there, it will be the NATO, yes, but also the news.”
“The—news.” Barbara, trying to think, became aware of the limestone in her scalp. “There’ll be cameras, you’re saying. You’re saying you and I can talk face to face, like human beings. And the newspeople, they’ll make the video.”
“Works for me,” said Jay, a bit loud. “Hey. Sooner we’re back to sea level, I figure, sooner we can make this right.”
Fond frowned at that, his gaze dropping. He stared at Barbara’s belly as if he could see through it to Jay’s busy fingers, trying to take her weapon. The leader of the Shell grumbled that, here in Naples, they couldn’t make much “right”—the real problems were down in the Sahel.
“Don’t go there,” Jay said. “Don’t go back there, squabbling, trouble. We’ve been there and we just saw better, a lot better, a beautiful thing.”
The handsome skin-and-bones went on frowning. “La vie est ailleurs,” he said.
“Whatever. Pont is, I mean. We all just saw the same thing down here.”
Then why was the Jaybird still trying to take Barbara’s weapon? She gave him a look, over her shoulder, then told her kidnapper to speak English.
“Life is elsewhere.” He perked up, sounding prideful. “From 1968.”
Jay remained at Barbara’s back, close enough to make the snatch, as once more he acknowledged that he liked Fond’s idea. “They’re the pros, up there, the newspeople. It comes to spectacle, I mean, that’s what they do.” Jay wasn’t just telling the man what he wanted to hear, either. Also the husband reiterated that a trip to Mali didn’t seem realistic. The problem wasn’t only that the Lulucitas had family issues, he pointed out; on top of that, the authorities might question their security. “Hey, never mind Africa, they might not let us back into New York.”
“But I will say the rosary with you,” added Barbara.
The young man squinted down at her, picking at his low beltline.
“Fond, you know me.
You know I’ll have to get those beads out.”
“I know, yes. For this reason, I am making the plan with my lieutenant.”
Barbara remembered: the two Africans murmuring cheek to cheek as the exchange of weapons hung in the balance. “So, I’m saying, it’ll happen the way you want, up in front of the cameras. I’ll say a Hail Mary for you and you people.”
No more playacting, Barbara had told him, and she wasn’t playing now. She could hear the difference when Jay did the talking. She was in love with the big Jaybird, no question—tickled afresh by that love, both in a half a hundred familiar ways and in ways she’d never felt before. Nonetheless she could hear the difference, the long-ingrained dissembling of the salesman. But then Jay had a lot to handle, even without the gun, he had a wife with a goofy smile and feathers in her ribcage. Barb was a mess, to boot, as crumpled and stained as the Jaybird’s bartered I.D. She began to think about the ibuprofen she carried for cramping. She began to think of Cesare, the priest she’d chosen for her work in Naples. Another university man who’d been all over the map, Cesare would’ve proven useful down here.
The least she could do was mention the time. Jay had called it, said Barbara: the longer they stayed in the Sotterraneo, the worse things were likely to be upstairs.
“Think about it,” she said. “Roebuck will call in the hovercraft—” and she broke into a chuckle, though she managed to disguise it as a clearing of the throat. How could she talk so silly? Hovercraft? But Fond massaged his long neck seriously. He said there was something else the Lulucitas needed to know. Whatever else might be up outside the condemned restaurant, in the wine cellar they would find another member of the Shell.
“Perhaps you are remembering, earlier, there is another man with us—”
“I remember,” said Jay.
Fond picked at his cell phone, head down, explaining that he’d posted this man in the restaurant basement as a lookout. “He has a weapon, too,” said the commandante, “but I will reach him.”
He snapped the phone off his belt-loop. “As you go up, there comes the signal.”
Barbara’s impulse to laugh drained away. Jay was the first to respond, looking from Fond to her, thinking aloud about what it would look like when they came out into the wine cellar. “First there’s us coming out,” he said, “second there’s Fond, okay so far. This lookout, hey, he knows us. But do we want anyone else climbing up…?”
“But, ‘anyone else?’ Who else, monsieur? Truly, you must realize, I will be the only one to return with you to the streets.”
Barb let her gun-hand drop to her side. “Of course.”
“Is this not the significance,” Fond went on, “when you are giving away your documents? These soldiers of mine, these friends of yours, they are free to go.”
“Friends of ours?” Jay put it. “These two? I don’t think so.”
“Of course,” Barbara repeated, “yes. We knew what we were doing, when we gave away our passports.”
Fond showed her a youthful smile, wide-eyed, without the lemon wedges that that she’d found so hard to take in Castel dell’Ovo. As for her husband, when he stood this close she could see how many of his chin-hairs had gone white, a white that had nothing to do with the limestone—but her aging husband too appeared comfortable with the idea.
“Hey,” he told her, “didn’t I just say, we don’t want to go back there?”
The Jaybird must’ve figured out the consequences of handing over the I.D. the same time as the two Africans. “Less we have to squabble about,” he said, “the fewer complications on our way out, the better.”
“I must insist, I alone am returning upstairs.” Fond too sounded offended. “Only in that way is my project enabled.”
Barbara got a look at the others. Neither the scippatori nor the soldiers had failed to grasp the exit strategy. As they jawed over their books, one pointed off towards Germany, another towards the U.S.
“Upstairs, when I am speaking for my brothers and sisters without a roof over their heads, I am knowing that these down here have their mobility.”
Barbara could think of no better way to prove that she was with the man than to squat down and, propping the purse open before her, shake the bullets from her revolver into the bag. She found the barrel release at once. Maybe a cop had shown her once, back in Carroll Gardens, or maybe an uncle in the East Village. Jay uttered a moment’s objection, a garble, a yawp, but he made no move to stop her. She would swear that what she heard was the sound of a man conceding the point—the safest way out was to go unarmed. Perhaps however she only heard the soft thump of the rounds falling into in the bag. They landed against the rosary at the top of her goods. After that the iron was nothing but a paperweight, and a considerably lighter one at that. As Barbara straightened back up she had no trouble tossing the thing off into the darkness. She didn’t have to check the scippatori again, or the Shell members either. Everybody held their peace.
She faced Fond and asked if there were anything else.
Fond turned to his soldiers, still practically at his shoulder, and conferred in a murmur. Barb and Jay couldn’t have heard even if they’d known the language. After a moment, the husband took the opportunity for a private talk of his own. “Owl, I mean, it’s a risk.” His gaze showed off his deepening crow’s feet. “There’s, what, a hundred things? A hundred things could go wrong.”
Jaybird, a thousand. Barbara touched his hip and cast a glance at the scippatori, starting to say that at least The Moll and his friend would be watching their back. But the femme of the two jumped to his feet as soon as she turned his way. He moved with a revived charisma, like Fond, though this clandestino had curls to toss.
“Yes,” declared The Moll. “We go free, so that you are forever safe.”
The thief blinked, long-lashed, pretty. “We go free, all over the world, and we are watching for you. Maybe we are over in New York, and we are watching.”
He summoned up an unlikely smile, at once imp-like and dignified, and broke into song: “Every mo-ove you make, we be wa-atching you.”
Barbara thought of JJ, his one-liners. You learn that from Silky? Still, the song made the wiry youngster seem more real-world, a pop reference from after 1930s. The Jaybird followed up accordingly, telling The Moll it was time he started watching out for himself. “I mean,” Jay said, and hesitated. Barbara could see his problem, needing to say it without recourse to New York shorthand.
“Jay’s right,” she said. “You and your friend have helped us enough.”
“You’ve helped us enough,” Jay said. “Any bad stuff this family went through, because of you, it’s over now.” He gave the washing-hands gesture. “Capisce?”
“You already saved our lives. Today, you saved us.” Barbara recalled the museum, too, but thought better of mentioning it.
“Basta cosi. Capisce? Finito.”
She was impressed by Jay’s Italian, emphatic as a native’s. Nonetheless she couldn’t be sure how well he was getting across. The Moll went on blinking slowly, thinking it over—and then the man was back in darkness. Fond had picked up the nearest flashlight, shining it at the tunnel wall. In the stone, the ridges and shadows of the chisel-marks looked like pieces of skeleton.
“Just take care of yourself,” said Barbara, to the black patch that had almost killed her husband. “Take care.” By the time she turned to follow Jay’s tugging, she couldn’t help but wonder how it should turn out this way—that the two richest and most powerful people in this underground had wound up, when all was said and done, better off than anyone else down here. The American visitors were climbing back towards the best neighborhood in town, Jay with his wallet and Barb with her purse, while the hand-to-mouth outsiders scuttled back into the rocks and gloom, with no more to show for the encounter than an extra piece of paper. Barbara had done all she could to make that trade-off happen, a comforting one for her and her husband. And now she had to wonder about it, as first she, then Fond, then Jay bent into the
laddered and sloping crawl-space. She had to ask herself, as honestly as her aching and weariness allowed, if she was any better than the others who’d simply seized what they wanted from these hardscrabble souls, whether it was the late Lieutenant Major or, way back, a kingpin out of Rhodes or Corinth with a well-disciplined phalanx of swordsmen. Barbara tried to assure herself with thoughts of the program in Danbury, the Master’s in Social Work. But this prompted further questions, nagging, unsettling. Even after she got the training she needed, and she did what she could for an unwed mother in Bridgeport, or for a victim of abuse in Ansonia, would those good deeds extend via some improbable karmic reach to sore-boned and uneducated creatures like these, used and discarded in a chilly and lightless maze? Could Barbara matter, ever? Could she actually help to create better? She needed to think, and, once more, to believe.
Back before the quake, tourists who’d bought tickets for the Sotterraneo had visited via staircases cut in the 1990s, with rails and wide cornering. This tunnel on the other hand was fit only for slaves. It triggered shivers of claustrophobia, the limey walls too close for a day-tripper. From time to time Barbara could barely grip the steps, the toeholds, their edges so ruggedly spurred that you’d think they’d been hacked out yesterday. She recalled that, for years now, she’d made one of the older boys take on any chore that involved a stepladder. Plus today, as first in line, she carried the flashlight as well as the purse. A few minutes up into the tunnel, she tucked the heavy cylinder down the top of her dress, between her breasts. The bulb housing bumped her chin, and her head got in the way of the light, but there was only one direction to go after all. There was only the hand-over-hand, each upward move another realm of doubt. Soon everything about the return to street level started to feel likewise sketchy. The entire arrangement, from handguns to prayers, might’ve been a scaffold cinched with bobby pins, swaying across a deep and sudden chasm.
