Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  “A case like this, Fond, you know. They come in with very good shooters. Case like this, NATO gets involved, they come in with the Elite Forces.”

  The clandestino leader tried to ease his man’s concern, putting on a rickety smile.

  “Don’t, Fond,” said Barbara. “Don’t. Lying to your friends, that’s not you. Or are you saying, these two didn’t realize the danger?”

  Jay let the question sink in a moment, then pointed out that if one of the NATO Elites saw an illegal alien carrying a gun, he wasn’t going to wait and watch a video.

  “Plus, ask yourself, ask your buddy there too.” When Jay gestured at the nameless African, he backed Fond away a step. “Do you really believe this place is so secret? Do you really believe nobody can find you?”

  All three kidnappers eased back. Now the light at their feet only-caught the brighter bits: the undone buttons, the lowered gun.

  The Jaybird was more interested in Fond’s cell phone. He said that the signal might not reach this far underground, but then again, NATO had the best tracking technology in the world. “Anyway, could be, they don’t need the technology. We’ve been down here, what, an hour now? Hey, the story’s got to be all over the street.”

  Another noise sounded beyond the quarry-room, a tumble of scree. The African spun round, his weapon raised, but Barbara thought of earthquakes. She pictured the walls collapsing; she got her fingers on her purse, the outline of her beads.

  “It’s got to be all over the street,” Jay repeated, “and Fond, think about this.” He brought up the wine cellar overhead, where he and Barbara had first been wrestled underground. “I mean, place like that, how long did it take you guys to find it? Place used to be a restaurant, right, lots of business. How long’d it take?”

  She picked up on Jay’s charisma, too. The husband could’ve been the one onstage, in the spotlight.

  “Fond, hey, you know what you’re going to be facing up there. You know they’re going to have the kids with them. They want the kids for the negotiation.”

  Off in the shadow, the man in charge and his next in command put their heads together. They reverted to whatever homeland tongue they’d spoken before.

  “That’s right, talk it over. Whatever we do down here, Fond, you and your guys are going to be facing the same thing up there. The kids and the very good shooters.”

  “Listen,” the mother put in loudly, “you already beat one suicide.”

  Fond looked angry when he stepped back into the light. “The starvation is nothing so bad,” he told her.

  The subterranean air itself sent mixed messages, cool as October and yet full of odors, like high summer. “And a bullet,” the man went on, “this is even easier. You should be seeing what happens when the guinea worm took Maman.”

  Barbara wanted to ask about the virus, she thought it’d been wiped out in a recent World Health initiative, but then Fond gave an order. Another word Barb didn’t know, but plainly an order, echoing round the stony cube. The darker henchman had been expecting it; in the next moment he stepped past his commander and turned his gun butt-end out. He handed the weapon to Jay—handed it over, a sleek gray Italic of a pistol, the kind of iron Silky Kahlberg might’ve carried. Barbara’s husband, too, looked as if he’d known what would happen. He hardly missed a beat in taking the thing, his movement so smooth that his kidnapper’s caramel-colored hand remained extended, empty, long enough for the Jaybird to put his own into it for a confirming shake.

  The lanky radical over Barbara meantime had more to say about dying. Fond declared that he was willing to risk a lot worse than standing in the crosshairs of some Marine with an infrared scope. Barb didn’t catch it all, nor what Jay was telling the sidekick, either. She noticed her husband’s tone, reassuring, even fatherly. It sent a pang of remorse through her, since even today she hadn’t quite believed in his pitch. To her, for years now, Jay had always come across as a bit of a con, wheedling, angling. She had to get over that, but just now Barbara couldn’t catch everything he said, not with all this elation ruffling up, so intense it made her drop the purse. She seemed to forget to breathe; the air burst from her heavy chest with half a laugh, half a shout. Hey there, Mr. Paul—what do say to these healing hands? Her husband had one gun, and now the Albanian or whatever, the whiter Shell, was about to offer the mother his. The man was slower about it than the African, taking more time than he needed to yank the pistol from under his belt. He needed to double-check the order, looking up at Fond narrowly. Anyway Barbara wasn’t ready to take the thing. If she couldn’t manage her heart and lungs, how could know what to do with her hands? She tried smiling at the guy, and she hoped she had a finger raised.

  She still hadn’t touched the weapon when the two scippatori rushed in, and one of them had a gun too, the nose up and pointed at Fond.

  Chapter Fourteen

  If she’d thought for a moment that these two were anything other than the scippatori from their first morning in town, if it so much as crossed her mind that they were cops or Camorra, Barbara couldn’t remember. It seemed as if at once she’d put together the clues, if you could call them clues. She’d picked out the blue bandanna before the two scrawny creatures came entirely into the light. She’d seen the unmatched skin, one brown and the other butter. She’d noticed the eyeliner and gloss that one was wearing, the darker one, and the sashay in his approach. He was the one with the gun, and that too branded them as the original scippatori. The queer would’ve been the one to work with the late liaison man, and Silky would’ve loved to teach his boys about guns.

  Quickly she was on her feet. “Don’t,” she said, her arms coming up with hands open, one extended towards Jay and the other towards the two men who’d split his head. “Don’t, no shooting. Non sparate.”

  Back in Brooklyn, she remembered, she’d never thought that gunplay sounded like a truck backfiring.

  “Everything’s all right,” she said. “Tutt’ a posto.” The scippatoro was pointing his pistol at Fond, the lighter-skinned soldier was pointing his back, and Jay shifted his from one to the other. “I’m saying, we’re all safe. Non sparate, nessuno.”

  In Brooklyn, as a girl, she’d learned her Italian. She’d learned to recognize a revolver like the one this queen was carrying, a .38, the kind they issued the police.

  “Nobody shoot,” she said. “Nobody, it’s safe.”

  As a girl she’d wondered how it felt, pointing a gun and then hesitating. You saw it often enough in the movies, they took aim and then—they hesitated.

  “Sans blague,” murmured Fond. “Quentin Tarantino, sans blague.”

  “Shut up, Fond.” The American Boss. “Hey. Trying to save your life here.”

  “It’s all good, all safe, listen, tutto sicuro.” Barb’s legs and arms were tingling, she’d been down on the floor so long. “Don’t shoot, nobody shoot.”

  “We shoot or we don’t shoot,” said the darker scippatoro, “it is as you desire. Miracolosa, santissima, it is only as you want.”

  Barbara risked a look at Jay. Had he understood? Her husband appeared to be working on the translation, the connection, frowning and up on one knee. He kept his automatic leveled on Fond’s man.

  “Mama santissima, our entire life, its is as you desire.”

  The Jaybird eased up onto his feet, giving a groan that may have been an act, a pretense of normalcy, as if he were getting out of the living-room sofa. Once he was standing again, once he could be sure that all the nearby bullets remained in their chambers, he looked to Barbara. “Owl Girl, these guys, are they who I think they are?”

  “Our soul,” said the queen with the gun, “is in your hands. Tell us as you desire.”

  “Buddy boy,” Jay said. “I mean. Why don’t you tell us something?”

  “Papa santissima, Mama santissima. Restore our souls.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” His voice gone gravelly, his gun now trained on the scippatoro, Barb’s husband swiftly confirmed with her who these two we
re. “Hey, who else? Got the Monsters’ Ball down here.” He mentioned the Vomero church—it sounded like a distant constellation—then turned again to the painted wisp before him. “Except, hey, asshole.” Jay scowled, his bruises stretching like the skin of spoiled fruit. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  The Shell member closest to Barbara, the one from the Balkans, shifted position. That got her attention, even as Jay went into a one-of-a-kind tantrum, his body stock-still while he said things like, “you fucking fuck, I mean, fuck you!” His gun hand never wavered so much as half an inch, and the weapon was pointed at the gut rather than the heart or head. After a moment Barbara extended one of her own hands in front of the next-nearest pistol, the white kidnapper’s. She found she could curl her palm over the open end of the barrel. When the man looked to his moon-scarred commander, Barb did the same, and once more she put a stern finger in Fond’s hairless face. She still had the nerve she’d discovered earlier; coolly she thought through how this must look to him. The former film major would grasp easily enough that the new arrivals weren’t cops, nor mobsters either, and it was likewise obvious they had some history with the Lulucitas. Now the tarty scippatoro, his gel-curls dropping as he dipped his head, was telling Jay that he and his “fellow sinner” would do whatever it took to “resurrect our soul.”

  At this the other one spoke up. “We sin against the miracolosi, only the miracolosi wash us clean.”

  “Give me a break. You came in here ready to kill somebody.” The Jaybird looked pointedly at the .38, still trained on Fond’s henchman. Otherwise however the husband remained motionless, a manner of speaking that Barbara wouldn’t have believed he was capable of “Same as when you jumped up and popped old Silky.”

  The darker sciapptoro raised his overgrown head, perplexed.

  “You two shot the NATO man.” Jay moved at last, raising a hand to indicate the late Lieutenant Major’s long hair. “You caught him by surprise in the Museo Nazionale and, bang bang, goodbye.”

  The farther of the two, lighter-skinned and unarmed, was the one to groan agreement. He admitted to the shooting and then went into a whispering prayer, his head down. The one with the gun, however, must’ve come here knowing the news was out. He played it tough, baring his teeth at Fond and his soldiers.

  “So you murdered him,” the husband said. “And today, I mean, you come here ready to kill a few more. This is how you save your soul?”

  The wife broke into the staring match. “Fond,” she asked, “what about you? “What do you think you look like, holding a gun on you own brothers?”

  Balefully the clandestino leader met her gaze, saying nothing. His head tottered above Barbara like a weight about to drop. Nonetheless she let her irritation show, lifting her hand from the kidnapper’s gun-barrel, spelling out her point: what Jay was telling his two muggers applied equally to Fond and his crew. “You talk about spectacle, think about this one. Think about what it would look like, if you put a bullet in another poor boy from the South.”

  Actually she couldn’t say where the whiter scippatoro came from. In New York she would’ve guessed he was Puerto Rican, with zits like those, with that single wooly eyebrow over a sleepless stare.

  “We shoot or we don’t shoot,” the darker one repeated. “As you desire.”

  The mother began to give her dress a tug, then dropped her hand, frowning. Enough with fretting over the clothes she wore, the dreary old bindings. “Fond,” she went on, “just relax and let me handle this.”

  She faced the femmy of the two and extended her hand, palm up. “As I desire?” she said. “All right, give me the gun.”

  Taken aback, looking to his companion, the man showed her an elaborate earring. Wavy silver strands in a jellyfish design, too delicate for such a hole in the wall.

  “You want to wash your soul clean?” She stepped closer.

  “Barb,” said Jay.

  “Let me handle this.”

  The queen was looking over Fond and his backups, his glance nervous and the others likewise twitchy.

  “Absolution,” Barbara said, “isn’t that what you want?” She ventured a smile. “You want to wash away the bad old past, so your soul can be renewed, you can be born again—isn’t that it? Okay, let’s start. Why don’t you tell me your name?”

  Over his revolver, the lithe young man began to blink back tears. He choked out, “Men say I am The Moll.”

  “The Moll?” Barbara’s smile changed shape. “Where did you learn gangster slang from a hundred years ago?”

  “It’s the cinema,” said Fond, “the gigantic prayer that crosses every border.”

  “The Moll has committed great sin,” said the scippatoro with the gun. “Sin against the miracolosi.”

  “Only the miracolosi,” said the other, “wash clean our—”

  “You guys,” Barbara said. “Think about it. Look at this family, and think about that ‘great sin.’ You’ve been stalking us all this time. You know we’re doing fine.”

  “But you are to divorce!”

  The little guy was quite the package, wasn’t he? A whore with a bleeding heart, a trembling gun, and all their secrets. “Mama santa, Papa santa, you divorce.”

  The Jaybird was the first to object—“Forget about it!”—and the mother began to say the same, making the sort of denials that her husband had back in Roebuck’s office. Well…there’d been strains, between she and Jay, a lot of stress…But this felt like the wrong tack to take, a smear of hypocrisy across a conversation that should be entirely frank and aboveboard. Barbara fell silent and once more took in the whole group, jittery, dusty, the crossed beams of their flashlights looking like they’d lost juice. Fond’s Albanian appeared the most dangerous, both arms raised, both hands on his gun. He paid no mind to Jay’s weapon at his head. And the other two were ready to jump in wherever they’d do the most damage. Barbara looked away, finding the deepest dark she could beyond everyone’s scowling heads, then hefted chest and shoulders in a Neapolitan shrug. She admitted that for some time she’d believed that she and Jay had to divorce.

  “I’m saying, I wanted to end everything. How long did it go on, a month?”

  Jay could recognize the right move when he heard it, though Barb couldn’t think of what she was saying, unvarnished and from the heart, as a “move.” Anyway the big man held his peace. Barb kept her eyes on The Moll but noticed that the Albanian had slackened a bit; his aim was lower. “But those hard feelings between my Jay and me,” she went on, “it’s history. It’s ancient history, the divorce.”

  Waving towards her husband—her hand open, slow, harmless—she asserted that the renewed connection between them was obvious. “If we were still at each other’s throats,” Barbara said, “wouldn’t that come out now?” She worked to keep her English free of therapy-speak, telling the former stickup man to think about the anger in this hole. “The tension, Moll. Tension like this, now, I’m saying if Jay and I still wanted to divorce, you’d be hearing it.”

  The scippatori appeared to get the point, their shared glances crackling, their appraisals of the Jaybird easy to read. The husband reached out to Barbara, the fingers of his free hand finding her panties’ waistband at first touch and lingering there, another good move that wasn’t a move. When Barb asked if Jay’s attackers believed her, she wouldn’t take a simple nod for an answer. She figured everyone in the three-thousand-year-old quarry needed to hear one of these two say yes, out loud, to the preservation of the marriage. Indeed, as soon as The Moll acknowledged that la Mama was right, his words halting but unmistakable, the Shell member still holding a gun relaxed visibly. His aim sagged another notch. The other Crab soldier meantime went back on his heels, and Barbara knew what to do next.

  She started by asking the same thing her husband had asked Fond—whether the scippatori realized the kind of firepower likely be waiting upstairs.

  The Moll looked a little offended. “For sure. The cavalry to the rescue.”

  The
cavalry? Where did he get this stuff? “Yes, that’s right.”

  “But we have a gat. We will defend you, everywhere, down here and—”

  “Stop, don’t. Wait.” Barbara ran another check around the group, making sure of Fond in particular. She declared that she was going to get something from her purse. “And you all know,” she said, “I don’t carry a weapon.” The clandestino leader waggled his head, perhaps giving her the go-ahead. Barb bent and pulled out her passport.

  “Here you go.” She held the blue booklet out to The Moll. “You take the passport, and I get your weapon.”

  The mugger’s stare was so bewildered, and his friend bubbled so excitedly (“Mille Euro, mille!”), that at first Barbara didn’t notice Jay speaking up behind her. The husband grew noisy, he even jerked his gun-hand a time or two, and he didn’t bother with simple English. The first words Barbara heard had to do with debts. “Any tourist off a cruise ship,” Jay was saying, “could tell you:” the scippatori carried the debt; they’d struck the first blow. At this Barb started to object, but Jay kept on, talking over her—he knew his Owl Girl. He knew she wasn’t on a cruise. “For you, I mean, this is all about the lost sheep.” For her, what these two outcasts had done back at the beginning of June didn’t matter. “It’s, hey, we forgive our debtors.”

  Barb heard him, the need in him. She didn’t interrupt as the husband went on more quietly, acknowledging that one way or another, a passport with a woman’s name would be useful for The Moll. Jay could see that. He’d had his eyes opened here in Naples, and he could see as well that the scippatori had been victims themselves. “Must’ve gotten a pretty bad smacking around, these two, working with old Silky.

  “Owl, I mean, I’m with you that far. I guess I can go along with you. It’s a plan.”

  The Jaybird’s tone was conversational again. His gun-hand had settled. He got a slow breath and asked if Barbara had thought about the possible legal issues. “You realize, a document like that, it could get complicated?”