by John Domini
Hear me, my people! You know you can trust the Boss.
Around the still-steamy tent, the refugees turned towards the husband. Never mind that it was Kahlberg who spoke the language most of them understood. Here and there members of the congregation found a chair, almost reverent in how they looked up at Jay. The gypsy cut off her interview, shaking a finger.
With the Boss, there can be no question. And now you know his family.
Barbara’s only distraction was the doctor at her side, asking if there was pain.
Now you know about the Boss and you know his family. Everything is clear, and everything is good.
Chapter Five
“Signora, I do realize, your life seems to have confronted you with nothing but strangers. As if the very image in the mirror were a stranger.”
Seductively, or almost, the priest cocked an eyebrow.
“But at the head of the host,” he went on, “there’s Paul.”
“Yes.” She began to nod. “Paul.”
Cesare’s look turned sober again, and the mother stopped nodding. God knows, today’s visit must seem strange. It wasn’t a week yet since the Refugee Center, the second “healing episode,” and every evening before dinner Barbara had arranged for time with the old man. Today they occupied their usual pew, a couple of rows back from the altar to the New Age, and the priest lounged as comfortably as his robes allowed. Nonetheless this must’ve seemed like something different. Barb had come poking at the front intercom during the afternoon riposo, when even a rabble-rouser like Cesare shut up shop for a couple of hours. By the time the father answered the buzz she’d actually pulled off one of her flats, preparing to rap the heel on a window somewhere, and—a stranger to herself—she’d found herself leaking tears too.
She must’ve been a sight, through the viewing slot. She had to wonder, was this menopause? Was it time she took a serious look at the possibility?
What had brought her to the church today, wet-eyed and unshod and flushed from climbing, was hardly a tragedy. Her family excursion had been cut short, that’s all. In the morning Barb and the kids had headed out with the Lieutenant Major, him and his army, and then they’d come back early and liaison-free.
Cesare returned to his point. “I do realize that what I’ve asked of you and Paul, it might seem like overmuch, just now. The straw that broke the owl’s back.”
She reached to tug an armpit, then let her hand drop. “Oh, listen. The least I could expect was that you’d try to enlist us in your cause.”
“Well I won’t withdraw my request. I want you to stay on in Naples.”
Through the thin leather of her purse, she could feel the vertebra of her rosary.
“Forgive me for saying so, but I believe it’s what Christ wants too.”
“All right. I told you already, when I ask myself what I’m still doing here, that’s always one of the answers I come up with. We can do a lot of good in this city.”
“Indeed yes, but it may be that you’ve already done enough. You speak of my ‘cause,’ now. Yet as for that, hasn’t your husband already done enough? Just the other day, didn’t he minister to the lost sheep down in Castel dell’Ovo?”
The hunger strikers, the old man’s pet project. As for Jay’s visit down to the security ward, a new holding pen in an old waterfront castle, the most Barb felt she could offer was a Neapolitan shrug.
“Signora, I do recognize, even I, that what’s good for the starving protesti may not be good for you. As you say, you’re the one who’s had five children.”
“Is that how you’d prefer me?” Barbara asked, “Just another unhappy wife?”
The lines around his squint lengthened.
“Cesare, am I saying anything about what Jay did, down at dell’Ovo the other day? Today is about today. That’s what I’m here for, today and this girl again, this gypsy. She doesn’t take Kahlberg’s shit. Excuse me, but I have to call a spade a—”
“It’s as clear as the cross on the wall, Mrs. Lulucita. Quite brilliantly clear, don’t you know. You feel as if, yourself, day after day you swallow that man’s shite.”
“Well he’s my Lieutenant Major, isn’t he? My tax dollars at work.”
“And you swallow any disgusting business he slaps on your plate, while this girl picks it up and heaves it back in his face.”
“You’ve got it, that’s what I’m saying. Romy, this teenager, this orphan, a week ago she was a quadriplegic. Still she’s got Kahlberg looking over his shoulder. Today, you should’ve seen what she did. She comes out of nowhere and in another minute…”
“Oh now, signora, you know where Romy came from. You know perfectly well where she gets her information. ‘Na clandestina, that one.”
Barbara shook her head. Not that she denied the allegations about Gypsy Romy, especially not when it was the good Father who brought them. The girl must’ve had criminal contacts, going back to a criminal past—the poor girl. And wasn’t that a good reason for a mother to shake her head?
“Of course,” the priest went on, “these days it’s no great a challenge to find you, signora. You’re a regular traveling circus, the Flying Lulucitas.”
That stiffened her neck. Barbara pointed out that the resurrected gypsy did more than merely catch up with the family entourage, once they all arrived somewhere. “The girl’s always there first. She’s waiting for us.”
“Quite right. We must assume she has her spies.”
But Barb didn’t like to think about spies, either. Spies and spying—the cloak-and-dagger which must’ve been some part of Jay’s and Silky’s arrangement—that was more or less why she kept rushing back to this Dominican Jesuit. Everybody around her seemed to have made a place for that arrangement, in their new Mediterranean lives. And Barbara knew what she’d seen out at the Centro Rifugiati. She had evidence enough to show the same backbone, to take her own life back to Long Island Sound. But here she sat, Mother Maybe-Maybe-Not.
Whenever she thought about her terrible hour or so at Jay’s worksite—the family had actually spent more time at the hospital afterwards, with DiPio and a fresh wave of media—some new uncertainty started sawing at her backbone. The idea that Jay and the NATO man were trading favors had started to seem dubious as soon as Barbara had stumbled out of the chapel shadows. The camp plank-way beneath their feet revealed splinters, mud, blotches of pesticide. The stink had gotten worse as the sun rose higher, and the campers who lined the walk remained battered, hand-to-mouth, and impossible to talk to. What sort of a favor was this?
Later she reminded herself that the job wasn’t the favor—the family’s cushy Vomero setup was the favor. But then she had to ask another question. Just what sort of service, she had to wonder, could the Jaybird provide for Kahlberg? What names could the husband have heard, through the nylon walls? Any criminal activity in the camp had to be nickel and dime. Nobody was scheming to tunnel into Langley, Virginia. Nobody had any way to hijack the next trainload of Euros down from Milan. Jay had Muslims in the camp, to be sure, but not nearly room enough for a madrassa, nor anything like weapons either. Spoons and brooms, that’s what they had, like the clandestini who’d tried to kidnap the American Boss. And as for that ragtag group, a four- or five-some, they posed no threat to international security.
Really, what could Barbara’s husband do for NATO? Kahlberg’s people must’ve had plenty of stool pigeons already.
She knew better than to expect answers from her husband, anyway. The wife watched what he said, closely; she flipped over every evasion and poked at its underbelly. The day Jay paid a visit to the strikers down in Castel dell’Ovo, though she didn’t know what she might be looking for, she’d scrutinized the clips on the TV news. Over the past week, though, Barbara found herself looking more and more for help from the Samaritan Center. Not that she sent an email, much less made a phone call. She felt too shaken for actual contact, too much in the wrong. But the mother went back to her web research, the sites where she’d learned a thing or two ab
out screening cases for counseling. Library work always had a calming effect, for Barbara. More soothing still was the file folder she’d insisted on bringing from Bridgeport, the one labeled Sam C//Nettie, which held printouts and clippings marked up by her mentor. Every line highlighted in orange, every backwards jotting and five-pointed star, seemed to strengthen Barb’s better judgment. She paid special attention to the verbal cues or body language that might reveal what a person had on her mind. On his mind, rather—the Jaybird’s mind.
Meantime, Silky Kahlberg took over the family arrangements so smoothly you would’ve thought he’d been expecting the job. The morning after the second “episode,” at the same time as Jay and his guard set off once more for the Refugee Center, the Lieutenant Major arrived at the palazzo with a couple more blueboys and a day’s itinerary on NATO letterhead. Heard you tell DiPio at the hospital y’all weren’t gonna let this run you off…. Also the liaison accompanied the family on every trip, with the obvious exception of the day he joined the husband down in the waterfront security ward. Whatever other business Kahlberg had, he ran it from his cell phone. This morning too, he’d started out with Barbara and the kids.
This morning too, she’d gone along with it. Her energy felt tied in slipknots, now wound around Jay at midnight, now bunched before her file folder or computer screen, now unraveled in single file behind the Lieutenant Major. She’d taken the man’s printout, the itinerary of their NATO-approved Tour of Campania, and gone along.
The liaison had scheduled them into the coming weeks, a trip every day almost till the end of June. And wouldn’t you know it, he proved an excellent guide, thoroughly boned up on local arcana. For every trip Kahlberg arranged a professor’s worth of paperwork, in a fuddy-duddy accordion satchel. From this he would hoist up whole chapters copied from guidebooks and histories. Of course, he handed the same materials to Dora and Sylvia as he did to their mother; he hadn’t thought of everything. But then the man wasn’t a professor. Rather, you saw him in his element when it came time to deal with Italian bureaucracy. The Lieutenant Major’s baggy carryall also held, for every trip, a sheaf of documents that granted high-level clearance at the site. The liaison would climb out of the van first in order to get these papers approved, while the family and driver and guards watched through tinted windows. The transaction always required a meeting with at least two others, once there’d been three, but in every case the NATO man handled the process with as much efficiency as the system allowed. He ignored the men who were there for protection, bull-bodied and cow-faced. He went straight to the actual gatekeeper, and as that man looked over the authorizations, the liaison officer fielded any questions with a smile sweet as a Georgia peach.
As for the factotum whose job it was to approve or reject the family’s clearance, to say yea or nay to Kahlberg’s paperwork, he tended to take his sweet bureaucratic time. Those guys would pore over the stuff, testing it between finger and thumb. Only after the documents had gone into their bag (the Italians tended to carry the classic bureaucrat’s attaché) would Barb and the others be allowed out of the vehicle.
Once that was over with, however, everyone onsite would act as if they and the Lulucitas had been friends since confirmation class. The family was allowed to linger as long as they liked, and no matter how busy the place might get, Barb and the kids were kept separate from other tourists by yards of gunswept space. Restricted areas were unlocked for them and additional guides provided. It could all seem like too much, in fact. Whenever Barbara succeeded at approximating tough-mindedness and clarity, for a moment, she would wonder at all the fuss. The very slickness of what this officer arranged for the family reinforced her suspicions that he’d finagled something with Jay. Yet even at moments like these, the mother had to admit that Silky offered valuable fun. The past as he presented it came in rich package deals—why not think of Neapolitan ice cream, its layers of flavors? Also Barbara liked to see her kids fascinated by history, an exception to the American-clod stereotype. She liked better still the emotional repairs that took place among the children. A stay-at-home mother noticed at once: as they poked around the region’s stony hands-on classroom, Paul and the others recovered from the strains of the previous days. You could see it in their faces, Paul’s in particular, as his eyes regained their glitter and his curiosity overcame his stutter. Naturally Barb had thought of Chris as the museum buff, the one who’d get the most out of what she’d come to call “the educational aspects of the trip.” But in the younger brother too, this week, there burgeoned the same affinity. Nothing like your mainstream clod.
The black-and-white child was intrigued most of all by Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries. The Villa frescos portrayed, room-by-room, a young woman’s sexual initiation; the presiding god was Dionysius, and the process was largely unclothed and touched by frenzy. As the Lulucitas circulated the rooms, Paul pumped the guide for ever-more-uncomfortable details. In the final room of the sequence, the initiate reaches for the drape that veils an immense erection. The shape is unmistakable, shroom-like, and in that room Paul asked questions that left their guide speechless, staring at the mother. Signora, what…?
Barb knew she only had to wait.
“Paulie,” Chris said after a moment, “duh.”
The mother would’ve preferred something less harsh. “Easy, Chris…”
“You remember,” the older brother went on, “crazy Maria Elena? The girl Mom brought home. Like, what do you think she went through back in Mexico?”
She would’ve preferred something else altogether. Barbara was left with mouth ajar, and when she cast around for help she felt as flat and out of touch as the initiate on the walls. The mother’s first clear thought was of a question she had to ask Cesare, Am I a good person?—a question she never did put to the old cleric, not in so many words, though she could feel its weight bearing down on their give and take inside the Vomero church. In the Villa of Mysteries, same thing, Barbara couldn’t find her voice before her fifteen-year-old finished his explanations. Her second-born loved to play the professor, during these day-trips. How often, for instance, had they heard his lecture about the bricks and stones? If it’s bricks it’s Roman, guys, and if it’s stones it’s Greek. Also the excursions under the NATO flag allowed Chris to develop a broader expertise, not limited to the empires before Christ. The family and their escort also vanpooled east to Nola, where a fifth-century saint had hung the original rack of church bells and so provided their name: campanile, after Campania. It’s like, every time you hear a church bell, you’re hearing Naples.
On another day the boy and his students, plus of course their bodyguards, rode out to Caserta. They toured a behemoth of a palace, eleganza, the country estate of the Borbon king. Chris delighted in pointing out that it had been put up during the same years when Americans were throwing out their own king. The boy loved his parallels, his ironies. Outside the windows sculpted waterfalls sparkled, notched like silverwork into terraced gardens, while between those vistas wall-wide portraits linked the dynasty to Old Testament heroes. Chris had something to say about those as well, explaining for instance why the monster Leviathan kept turning up. But his sisters were barely paying attention by this point, distracted by the bed curtains. These were tasseled velvet, more eleganza, drapery strung from canopy bedposts, along doorways and windows and even as a curtain on the occasional armoire. Dora and Syl, thanks to Kalhberg’s paper-trading on arrival, were allowed to fiddle with the stuff. Hands-on classroom, emotional repair. In the biggest of the royal bedrooms, Barb’s two youngest claimed the tassels and drapes recalled the decorations that, up in Papa’s worksite, used to hang along the wheelchair of the injured gypsy.
The girl herself—without ID, she preferred the name Romy—smiled with an uncharacteristic shyness. She let Paul do the talking; he agreed with Dora and Syl.
“In a, in another life,” he said, “you must’ve been Qu-Qu-Queen of Naples.”
John Junior looked at him sharply, mock-sharply, cu
tting off the girls’ laughter. “What do you mean,” he asked, “another life?”
He took Romy’s chin and, right there in front of his Mom and siblings and their official escort, he kissed her.
The two kept their mouths shut, meno male. The girl’s lipstick, though thick and showy, didn’t leave a mark. Barbara noted every detail, even as she was astonished again at her lack of response. Things would never have gone this far between Romy and her oldest if the mother had been anything like her old self. These daytrips themselves would never have gone so far, even with the pressure from her seventeen-year-old. JJ appeared to be the child who’d gotten the most out of these five or six days since Romy’s healing. The boy’s internal repairs might seem small, on the one hand an easy-going acceptance of his younger brother’s lectures, and on the other a kiss with a PG rating. Indeed, Barbara felt confident that a peck on the lips remained the extent of John Junior’s sex life, in Naples at least. In Naples, her sense of the big teen didn’t depend on snooping around his desk or listening outside his door; on top of that, she had NATO surveillance.
No, JJ and the former paraplegic didn’t appear to have much going on. Yet it was he, the oldest, who’d announced one evening over salad with lemon and pastaron vongole that it would be “better for everything” if the family stayed in Naples.
“Hey.” His face set, JJ looked every inch the co-captain of varsity soccer. “I’m with doctor DiPio. DiPio and your priest there, Mom.”
What kind of Christians were they, he went on, what kind of good works did they have in mind, if they turned tail and ran as soon as things got a little strange?
Then the second-oldest fell in behind his brother, quick to take advantage of the parents’ silence. That’s the pattern here, you know. The rich and powerful, they like, jet in and jet out. Make a mess and goodbye.
“The rich and powerful,” Barbara repeated now for Cesare, alone with him in the still-locked church. “My Chris, he believes that’s us.”