Earthquake I.D. (25 page)

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 into 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?

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 there'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.”

The rep was sitting at attention, his eyes on the wall. The Consulate woman tapped the keyboard. You noticed her nails, a sticky red, surprisingly flashy. “You must understand,” she said finally. “No one on our end expected anything like this.”

Why shouldn't Barbara grin at that? Why shouldn't she feel proud of her counterespionage?

“No one expected gunplay and a media circus. Certainly.”

In fact, since yesterday people like Roebuck had been getting more attention than the family. Naturally a knot of media types had continued to come and go under Barb's and Jay's Vomero balcony, even with the sawhorses in place. But the press wasn't wasting time trying to turn up a murderer among the Lulucitas. The mother had managed only a distracted sampling of the TV and the morning paper, distracted and second-hand, but she could understand that much. The press was looking elsewhere, for the dishy angle. They were far more interested in
Tenente
Kahlberg and whatever he'd had going.

“Honestly,” the Attaché was saying. “In every other instance I can think of, when one of our people was asked to gather information, well.”

But when it came to the late Lieutenant Major, Barbara knew more than any of the talking heads on Berlusconi's news shows. She knew more than anyone writing for the
Mattino
as well. Now why shouldn't she grin about that?

“They gathered information, thank you. Thank you, and goodbye.”

Basking a bit seemed a much better use for Barbara's energy than shouting at these two bureaucrats. She recalled the way JJ and Romy used to strut and preen, after a kiss and a cuddle. Why shouldn't Barbara enjoy a little of that, and take hold of her husband's hand while she was at it? She and the Jaybird twined their fingers so easily, you would think the two of them did it in front of strangers every day.

Roebuck never stopped talking…
heightened potential for terrorist activity…American interests have a right…
. “But you do realize, both of you, that our country has a considerable presence in Naples? A considerable strategic stake, yes indeed. So you mustn't think that everyone in NATO, the Consulate and the UN relief agencies, are tarred by the same brush as our late colleague in Public Relations.”

When Jay squeezed Barbara's hand, it wasn't about romance. Rather he had a question: are you hearing what I'm hearing?

“Myself,” the Attaché went on, “well, I knew Louis Kahlberg. Certainly. And I knew that some people thought very highly of him. Some people thought of him as one of the rising stars in our community. But what we do—” she waved her nails at the suit from the UN—“and what he did, it's entirely separate. Two very different operations.”

Jay's squeeze was sign language: These people are frightened. When Barbara met the older woman's eyes, again she found her own reflection, and at this angle she looked, in fact, like an owl. A carnivore, Barb recalled, a bird of prey.

“So,” she said, “you knew old
Silky.”

“I did.” Tap, tap. “I did, and I don't mind admitting that I liked the man. I felt as though he spoke my language.”