by Alex A King
Like Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese, my knowledge of the Italian language was limited to food, and I didn’t think asking for the bathroom-ccine was going to help.
I held up one finger. “Excuse me.” Then I stuck my head outside and asked Marika how she’d broached the bathroom subject. Young Italians spoke decent or better English, but this guy was middle-aged when Pompeii went under.
“Like this.” Marika pointed to her crotch and did the gotta-pee dance. When Marika wiggled, all of Marika wiggled.
Yeah, no. I wasn’t doing that.
I went back in, looked at the elderly man, and tried to look desperate and friendly. “May I please borrow your bathroom?”
The human pressed-sandwich stared at me for a moment, then he wordlessly pointed to the back of the shop.
Two minutes later I walked out a newer, more terrified woman. Peeing went well, but then I’d caught sight of Bloody Mary in the mirror.
The storekeeper looked up from his open book. “Better?” he asked in accented English. Hallelujah.
I nodded and thanked him profusely.
“You are welcome.” Dark, yellowing eyes peered at me over spectacles. “Do you want to buy a book?”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
He shook his head. “Americans. You think everywhere is McDonalds.”
Indignation washed over me. “I’d buy a book but everything is in Italian, which I can’t read. Not only that, but I don’t have any money. Zero. Zip. Zilch.” I grabbed my skirt hem, gave it a shake, revealed a mile of leg and gun.
To quote Scooby Doo: Ruh roh!
Panini Face ogled the weapon, or maybe just my legs. His attitude changed instantly, from indignation and European superiority to faint disgust and deference. “Your package is in the back.”
I scrambled to pull my dress back into place. “Package?”
“You are Mario’s girl—yes?”
“Mario?”
He wagged his finger. “Very good. Discreet. I can see why he sent you. You will not need to use that—” he nodded to the secret strapped to my leg “—here. Everything is in order.”
“Huh? Mario? Package?”
“Wait. I will get it for you.”
A smart person, having concluded their business, would have excused herself and exited the bookstore. Not me. Apparently I was a special kind of idiot, so I stuck around. Less than thirty seconds later he reappeared with what looked like a brown paper-wrapped brick tied with jute twine. Very retro.
“Tell Mario—” he started.
The bell over the door tinkled as trouble burst into the shop. I knew it was trouble because I instantly recognized the two bozos, and I was sure neither was here for a book. Baked Potato zeroed in on the elderly shopkeeper. He rattled off something in Italian, then his gaze slide sideways and bashed into me.
“You!” Baked Potato said, not looking happy to see me. “What are you doing here?”
“She is Mario’s girl,” said the shopkeeper. “She came for the package.”
They all looked at me.
The rest of the conversation happened in Italian. Probably it went something like this:
“Mario doesn’t have a girl, unless it’s a working girl,” Baked Potato possibly said.
“Or a dead working girl in his basement,” Beaver probably said.
“Sure he does,” the shopkeeper might have said. “That is her right there.”
Here they looked at me again, and the way they looked at me wasn’t hospitable. It was downright Persians staring down King Leonidas at Thermopylae.
Baked Potato and Beaver didn’t have guns.
Baked Potato and Beaver had knives that managed to gleam, even in the thin light.
I had a gun.
In a game of Knives, Guns, and Other Assorted Weapons, a gun beat knives.
But I couldn’t do it. My hand froze at my hip as cautionary tales floated to the surface. Toddlers accidentally gunning down friends and family. Evil feigning crazy to slay kids in schools, in movie theaters, in clubs.
I could outrun a knife. They couldn’t outrun a gun in this tight space.
Heart dancing in my throat, I said, “Be seein’ ya.”
Stealing Mario’s—whoever he was—package wasn’t part of the plan. It just sort of happened that way. That flight-or-fight response makes a body do crazy things, like race out of a bookstore in Italy with a stolen package under one arm when there are knives slashing the air to dusty ribbons.
Across the narrow street, Marika spotted me. Her eyes slid to the package under my arm, the desperation on my face. She elbowed Donk. “Run!”
They ran. Donk loped away on his teenage sticks with Marika in hot pursuit.
Without checking to see if I was being chased by Baked Potato and Beaver, I took off after them.
Once upon a time I’d fantasized about visiting Italy.
This trip was nothing like that fantasy. There was too much running and not nearly enough eating.
CHAPTER 5
Marika plastered herself to the side of a bank, panting. “I have to stop. Go on without me. Save yourselves.”
I stopped. A quick glance around revealed no sign of our pursuers, if they’d even tried. “I think we’re good.”
Up ahead, Donk stopped, too. He pulled off his ball cap, smoothed his hair, stuffed it back on his head, bill artfully twisted to the back. Trying to look cool, he slouched over to see what was “s’up.”
Marika eyed the package under my arm. “Food?”
“Could be,” I said. “Probably it’s books.”
“Books,” she said. “I ran for books?”
“What kind of books?” Donk wanted to know.
“Italian books, most likely. Do you read?” Because Donk didn’t strike me as someone who’d ever picked up a book.
“All the time,” he said.
I stared at him.
“What?”
I shook my head. “What do you read?”
He shrugged. “Everything.”
The world never failed to surprise me.
“Hurry up,” Marika said.
Around us the city was coming to life. Coming to life meant more people. More people meant we could get lost more easily in a crowd, but the number of eyes on us would increase exponentially.
I tore open one end of the package. Stacked inside, packed tightly, I discovered bundles of euros, banded together. I pulled a couple out, inspected them. Crisp. New. Recently printed in someone’s basement.
Donk whistled.
“The good news is that we’ve got money,” I told them. “The bad news is that I don’t think it’s real.”
“Looks real to me,” Marika said, peering at the stack of freshly printed bills. “I bet the train station will believe it is real, too.”
“We can’t spend it!” I hissed.
“Why not?”
“Because there are laws about that kind of thing! If the cops find out we’ll go to prison—possibly forever.” I’d heard stories about Greek prisons. They were dank, dire places where it was standing room only and there was a curious absence of rats.
Marika looked miffed. “Airport?”
“They’ll shoot us on the spot.”
“Bus station?”
“Too risky.”
“That’s a lot of Ben-ja-mins,” Donk said, eyeing the Monopoly money. “We could buy a car.”
Marika flicked his ear. “That is a great idea—except, no it is not. That is the worst idea I have ever heard.”
It wasn’t any worse than her train station idea, but I kept my mouth shut. “No identification,” I told Donk. “And if the cops stop us we’re screwed.”
He folded his arms and put on a snooty know-it-all expression. “There are ways to buy a car without identification. You think I’m just a kid, yes? I have ears and eyes. I watch movies. Give me some of that money and I will get a car for us.”
Some crazy person—possibly me—wordlessly handed him a short stack.
There had to be ten thousand fake euros there—easy. Plenty of cash to score a semi-decent vehicle from a shady character hawking contraband from under a bridge, or wherever dodgy Italians did their dirty deals.
“Go forth and prosper, young Padawan,” I told him.
He stuffed the money into his pocket, saluted me, and took off.
Marika didn’t look happy. “We will never see that money or him again.”
“I have faith in him.”
“That makes one of us—the stupid one.”
“The kid managed to stowaway on a plane, and not just any plane but one doing spy work.”
“My sons could do that.”
“I bet they could buy a car illegally, too.”
Her eyes shined with maternal pride. “I bet they could, too. They are so much like their father.”
I shuddered at the thought. Takis is one of those people who should have been shoved off the family tree’s tire swing. “He’ll be back with a car.”
“What are we going to do until then?” Her gaze bounced from the money to my eyes and back down again. “I plan better on a full stomach.”
She had a point. “I guess Mario wouldn’t mind too much if we used some of his money. It’s not like it’s real anyway.”
#
Thirty minutes later we were back to waiting for Donk to show up with a car, only this time we were waiting with food and hot coffee. My tiny handful of former lovers—and my shitty ex-fiancé—would be horrified to know this Italian coffee was the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth. And this pastry I was cramming into my mouth? Otherworldly. Grandma could take lessons, and she was no slouch in the kitchen.
Grandma. Thinking about how she was in the hospital while I was stuck here made me halt my chewing, but only for a second. I wouldn’t be any use to her if I passed out, weak from hunger.
“How long does it take to get scurvy or beriberi?” I asked Marika.
“What is that? I have never heard of those things.”
I filled her in, with all the gory details. None of it slowed down her eating. When it came to food, a probably-pregnant Marika was a well-oiled eating machine.
“That is disgusting,” she said, hand diving into the paper bag for another gooey pastry. She looked at the confection in her hand. “What is this? Do not answer that. All that matters is sugar.”
I looked around for our benefactor, the Armani Hobo, but he wasn’t around. Not that I could see, anyway. He’d vanished after bequeathing me his gun, which, now that I thought about it, couldn’t be good. What if it was a murder weapon? There could be a dead body out there, riddled with this gun’s bullets.
Maybe he wanted to frame me. Who better to pin a crime on than an illegal immigrant?
A car horn beeped. Naples was a city where there was more honking than a flock of zombie geese, but this one stood out. Probably because it belonged to the most perfect specimen of fiberglass and metal I’d ever laid eyes on. It was Italian. A sports car. A fast one.
My gaze cut to the driver.
Yikes!
My heart dropped into my pretty espadrilles. Somehow—and it couldn’t be a good somehow—Donk had procured a Ferrari.
“Get in,” he called out to us. “The fat one sits in the back.”
Marika hopped up. “This food is so good, I do not even care that he just called me fat.”
A somebody-please-love-me smile appeared on the teenager’s face. “You like?”
Like? No. Love? Hell yes. I just wanted to pet the smooth, red paint job. I wanted to lay across it in a bikini and devour a bacon cheeseburger while someone off-screen sprayed me with a hose.
He shone when I told him so, omitting the part about the cheeseburger and hose.
“How did you get a Ferrari?” I asked, thinking it was a prudent question. “Did you steal it?”
“No!”
“Did you pay for it?”
Guilt flashed across his face. “Maybe ...”
“So then it’s stolen?”
“Do you have to say it like that? It makes me sound like a bad person. You told me to get a car.”
My mouth dropped open, then snapped shut. “I told you to buy a car.”
“That’s not what you—”
I held up my hand, palm facing him. Technically I gave him what Greeks call the moutsa, which has a dual meaning. One on the hand you could be rubbing poop in their faces; on the other you could be accusing them of having a chronic self-love problem of the masturbatory kind. I wasn’t doing either; my open palm meant talk to the hand. He could flap his teenage gums all he wanted—I wasn’t listening.
“I’m driving,” I told him. His face fell. “Do you want to go to prison when this car is reported stolen—if it hasn’t been already—and the cops pull us over?”
“But—” he started.
“Back seat. Now.”
He mumbled something under his breath, in the place spouses and parents call the danger zone.
“Don’t start with me,” I barked. It struck me that, with or without kids, I was turning into my mother. That cheered me up. It meant the Makris side didn’t have the monopoly on my DNA. The shady side wasn’t inevitable, even though they had great cookies.
We piled into the Ferrari.
I glanced at my passengers. “Let’s ride.”
#
Five minutes later ...
“Let’s ride,” I said from the passenger seat.
Donk jammed his foot on the gas, ground through the gears. Like a cat meeting bathwater, the ultimate sports car shot up the street.
The Ferrari had a transmission designed to repel the average American driver. America is a country that produces drivers used to three choices on a gearshift: D, R, and P. A lot of us don’t know what the 1, 2, or N are there for. Decoration, probably. Pedals? Two was plenty. Stop and go. What more did we need? The Ferrari had too many numbers on the gearshift and, apart from the R, a conspicuous absence of the alphabet.
“This is too much like math,” I’d said before sliding out of the driver’s seat.
A cop rode past on a bicycle.
“They are coming for us!” Marika screamed from the back.
I glanced back. The cop vanished down the street without a second look. “Not that one.”
The dashboard came equipped with GPS. I was scrolling through the map, trying to recall the name of the area just outside of Naples where wannabe counterfeiters went to learn their trade.
Marika stuck her head between the front seats. “What are you looking for?” When I told her she gasped. “Are you crazy?”
“Do you really think Hera and her merry band of douche-bags are going to let me back into Greece?”
“What is a douche-bag?”
I did my best to explain it.
In the driver’s seat, Donk nodded. “My mama buys those in bulk.”
We looked at him. Donk’s mother was in porn. She probably bought a lot of things in bulk, like plastic sheets and antibiotics.
“The NIS is determined to get its way, which is why you two are dropping me off in ...” I jabbed a finger at the GPS. “ ...Giugliano in Campania. As long as I stay here and do Hera’s bidding, you two should be able to get home just fine. When you get there the Family can decide what to do.” Send a rescue team, hopefully.
Fear stabbed me in the chest again. Grandma was the head of the Family, the decision-maker. With her in the hospital, who was making the decisions? Last time she’d left me in charge. Not only had I managed to keep things running smoothish, but I also sorted out an argument between two sheep lovers. They’d sent me a huge woolen sweater as recompense. Now every time I saw the sweater thoughts of bestiality danced through my head. When I counted sheep, their fuzzy faces looked worried.
“No.”
That was Marika. She looked less than happy and not even remotely cooperative, what with her arms crossed and her chin stuck out.
“Yes.”
“No. I am your bodyguard. Where you go, I
go. The boy can go home alone.”
“Forget it,” Donk said. “I like Italy. They make good cars and beautiful women.”
“Greece makes cars,” Marika said. “They are called donkeys.”
I programmed the GPS and sat back. “This isn’t a debate. This is how it is.” I pointed at Marika first, then Donk. “I don’t want to be responsible for your safety, so I’m taking you both out of the picture.” The truth is I would have loved the company, but they were a liability. With them around I would always be calculating the odds of them getting hurt into my every word and move. Besides, I was the one on Hera’s shit list. She wouldn’t care about Marika and Donk swinging back into Greece, as long as I remained behind to be her good doggie.
This was my problem. I had to solve it alone.
“Drive to Giugliano in Campania,” I said.
#
Goodbye, Naples. Hello, Giugliano in Campania.
Okay, it was technically part of Naples. It’s not that I’m brilliant and all knowing; I was armed with GPS, that’s all.
Giugliano in Campania was clean, neat, beautiful.
Just kidding. It was a slum. The outer suburb of Naples was trash-central. Tumbleweeds of garbage rolling down the streets. Local artwork by graffiti artists. Strays with crooked teeth and crazy eyes. And that was just the dogs.
None of us had spoken since we’d blasted out of Naples proper. For sound effects we had the rustling of paper as we devoured every last scrap of food we’d procured in Naples. It felt good to be full again. On a full stomach I could do this—whatever this was.
Before long, Donk said, “Where now?”
Good question. “Anywhere.”
He nodded and pulled the Ferrari over in a cobbled street near a bank of parked mopeds and motorcycles.
Heart heavy, stomach filled with rocks, I got out. I leaned on the open window.