Earthquake I.D. (21 page)

These were five days complicated further by a media circus, in which some cameraman was set up under the balcony every time the mother looked and newspaper stringers appeared never to need so much as a coffee break (anyway, in the Vomero you didn't need to go far to find a good café). The ringmaster, however, wasn't any journalist or production chief. Rather it was the revived African hunger striker who dominated the scene on the piazza out front of the family's place, a young man still little more than skin and bone but nonetheless capable of such intensity that Barbara could feel his staring from five floors up. And soon enough, beside the
not-so-clandestino
, there appeared the enterprising Maddalena. The woman might've been a rookie reporter, but she'd learned long ago what it meant to have youth and good looks. At once she grasped the advantage in coming round to the front of the camera, especially buddied up beside a young man who'd been pretty lucky himself when it came to lips and eyes and bone structure. The would-be suicide, as he returned to his natural physical bearing, turned out to be a stirring package of lightsome and hard-packed, a coppery spokesmodel for The South. His color fell midway between the dun of Maddalena's skin and the black of her hair, and this range of tones made them all the more eye-catching. Cuter still was the way they would help each other with their English, as they went on the air with repeated thanks to “these so special Americans who reach out to the poor and hopeless.” These video clips were replayed a hundred times, and every day either Barbara or Jay had to stand up against the photogenic young couple's pressure for some sort of a press event with Paul. Either Barb or the Jaybird had to repeatedly refuse, while a small but respectable fraction of the world's attention was drawn to this “refugee Lazarus” (the headline writers had a great time). By the end of his third day back on his feet the former illegal alien regained, with the help of Amnesty International and the Italian Green Party and the rock star Sting, his right to walk the streets.

At the same time, too, his colleagues in the Shell of the Hermit Crab were let out of the castle's security ward, and none showed the least compunction about tearing into the local mozzarella, or a sprightly octopus salad. Apparently Maddalena's pretty African, this man Barbara had tried to pray over, held some sort of command status. And on that same third day MTV Europe threw its weight behind the evanescent brown star, not sixty hours removed from almost dying in prison without a trial. Via a notarized and certified letter to the Lulucitas, the network promised the children new CDs, DVDs, X-box goodies and jeanswear, plus full-access passes to a half-dozen upcoming concerts in Rome and Milan and Florence, including travel, lodging, and two meals a day. All the family had to do in return was grant the station's local affiliate an exclusive interview with Paul and an on-air meeting between him and the African, now going by the name Fond (the word tended to get the English pronunciation on TV and the radio, but the young man himself preferred the French).

The parents held firm: No. No new denim, no hanging out with the rock stars. No way. But the very next morning that champion wrestler Mass Media, the Mangler, the Murgatroyd, threw a new move at the family. The mother had to contend with MTV on the phone, a VJ calling her at home, thanks to the old technology, hand-to-pocket and mouth-to-ear. Barbara picked up the receiver only to get her ear split by a moaning dual-speaker feedback, a warped girlish chirping—because the call was live and on the air, from Rome, and Chris and JJ, desperate for something to do after breakfast, had tuned in the webcast. The MTV-ette who'd made the call looked like an ice princess, her hair as bleached as bone, and after Barbara got the boys to mute the computer, she found the VJ's tone unnervingly cheerful. The girl sounded far too bubbly for the way she was putting on the pressure:
Why do you stay there in Naples if you don't want the good things you can get from staying? All we want to do is give you more of the good sweet things you have already, like this nice big apartment in which to live and…

These were five days with one moment of doubt on top of another. The midnight traffic offered its relief, now and again, and before going to bed Barbara always got her hour or so of reading aloud. The daily down time allowed her to take a certain pride in how she'd protected the kids. She could see herself like an angel in one of the fairy tales, skating her children safely across the swarming Neapolitan surface tension, and motherly pride would shroom up in her chest. Once she even felt confident enough to shoo Chris and JJ off the computer and compose an email for Nettie, back at the Samaritan Center.

Barbara's mentor from the Holy Name was conscientious as ever about getting back, and she didn't seem at all disturbed by the mother's questions—on the contrary, Nettie had studied cases like Paul's. While pursuing her Master's, her email explained, the former nun had written a paper on healing episodes. Research had established that the phenomena occurred most commonly in children entering puberty, and the counselor listed a handful of informational websites, “reliable scientific sites, none of that Christian balderdash.” She mentioned a couple of books too, and summarized what she recalled from her Master's work, saying that healing such as Paul's tended to be “situational”—that is, the “acting out” was rooted in earlier trauma—and “its incidence is never defined geographically.” That last left Barbara frowning at the screen, recalling other times when her guru had slipped into a koan, too much Zen and not enough plain English. The mother sent a follow-up and Nettie proved to be still online. Briskly she clarified: miracle cures, “so-called,” were never limited to a particular place. A child might begin laying on hands in the middle of Kansas, but after that he or she could do it over any rainbow and down any yellow brick road; “what matters isn't the physical environment, but rather the continuing vulnerability to the root psychosis.” So whatever energy was at work in Paul, these days, it would travel with him. Barbara nodded at the screen, and yet after a moment the voice in her head wasn't Nettie's but Jay's. Barb could hear her soon-to-be-ex as clearly as if he were crouched beside her, reading the mail.
Owl Girl, hey. This means New York would be worse, for Mr. Paul. If he's still going to be doing this kind of thing, back in New York? In the media capital? Forget about it
.

These were her five days, plus a transatlantic call on Father's Day. Her quiet Dad had a one-bedroom in Boca Raton. Then Barbara went meekly to the
Museo Nazionale
.

Not the boys, though. Paul wasn't the only one who'd gotten a little stir-crazy. Before the family went down to the Humvee, while Barbara was setting out the laundry on the balcony, John Junior had claimed he didn't want to be seen with the PR man. The big teen claimed he'd “almost rather stay home” than follow Kahlberg around again. “I mean,” JJ had said, gulping down his second orange juice, “after what my girl told me.”
My girl
. As for Chris, he'd come out spoiling for a fight. Once the press gathered round, out on the museum steps, Barb's second-oldest began to pick at Silky.

“The Borbons were monsters,” Chris insisted, there in front of the cameras. In another moment he and the officer were squabbling over kings and queens dead and gone for nearly two hundred years. The Borbon dynasty seemed admirable to Kahlberg; he waved his fat briefcase at the front pillars, braced by scaffolding, and reiterated that the museum was a Borbon legacy from the eighteenth century. In those days Naples had been the most dazzling stop on the Grand Tour. “Goethe came to visit, you heard of him? Mozart, he wrote some of his greatest—”

“Yeah yeah,” Chris said. “But for the average person, what good did that do? Like, so what if they had a few celebrities at the palace?”

Silky played his annoyance for laughs. “If I
may
continue. The present structure, as you see, is painted Pompeiian red—”

“Exactly. The new monsters imitated the old monsters.”

Barbara tried to follow, anything to distract her from the spineless way she held her place in the photo lineup. Chris argued that the Nazionale didn't fit the standard notion of a major museum, since it had only a few major pieces. “There's like, for instance, the Farnese Bull.” Rather Naples offered a slice of life, two- and three-thousand-year-old life, thanks to an unmatched collection of kitchenware and bedroom accessories, sifted from the buried homes at the foot of Vesuvius. Barbara gave a nod, thoughtful. What she was trying to think of, however, was something else again: how to escape at last, and for good, from her own time-worn kitchen and bedroom. Her fifteen-year-old had mentioned a bull, and some big creature like that, a monster really, had been clomping around her home for almost a month now. But the mother still hadn't figured out how to harness the beast. This morning she could see that her hard feelings had rubbed off on Chris and John Junior, and even with all the bedtime reading, the aggravation must be getting to the others as well. But when was she going to tell them the truth? Just tell her children and get the awful business underway?

Here on the steps of the Nazionale, in full view of the press and the supplicants and assorted tourists, Chris was the one upsetting the applecart. The boy fingered his glasses up his nose and claimed that the best pieces from Pompeii and Herculaneum, “like, the five-star items,” had been stolen by the British or the French.

“Mn,” said Kahlberg. “I see where you're going, big shooter. This is all about those big nasty-damn superpowers, pushing around the poor and the helpless.”

“Sure.” Chris explained that the nasty-damn powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had raped the newly unearthed ruins. “They took the major items. They took the emperor's head.” But the Naples collection represented a kind of revenge. Once the foreigners had hauled off their booty, locals had a free hand with the smaller stuff.

“The real stuff,” Chris said. “The collection here, it isn't about the emperor's head. It's a slice of life. Like, the toolshed, the table arrangements.”

“Arrangements,” Romy put in. “This sounds like Naples for sure.”

Romy, for sure. Ignoring the hoots of the construction workers, she'd been waiting on the steps when the family arrived. Her wisecrack drew a terrific laugh from JJ, rocking him out of the family lineup, freeing him from the need to come up with some sarky remark of his own. The older boy and the gypsy shared a soft kiss.

Once more the workers hooted and the cameras went off. What Barb noticed was how Kahlberg's pale face grew heavy, and she knew how the man felt. The idea made the mother slip her fingers through Dora's hair, at her hip, but there was no denying it: she had a pretty good idea what this officer was feeling. He had to stand there bombarded by static when the whole time the Off switch lay in easy reach. About the dell'Ovo escapade, too, Kahlberg had had to remain polite and aboveboard. He'd said no more than the obvious.
We can't have that, Mrs. Lulucita. Mrs. Lulucita, I've been assigned to this family by my superiors, and your safety is my first concern
. Then too, the mother had to admit that, insofar as anyone had kept the attentions of the press under control, it had been Captain America.

Besides, this morning Kahlberg had no objection to Romy tagging along. You would've thought that his screaming fit outside San Lorenzo had never happened. Not that the liaison didn't find a moment to slip in a nasty word about John Junior's exotic crush. As the family climbed out of the van, Silky muttered to Barbara: “Knew that little skank wouldn't have any trouble finding
this
place.” But otherwise he ignored the girl. On the museum steps, Chris and the Lieutenant Major jawed back and forth as though Romy weren't there. Barb wondered if, by setting up a visit at the best-known tourist destination in town, the PR man were offering a truce.

Maybe the man was making changes. Actual changes…

Also the Lieutenant Major didn't try to keep the gypsy from coming in, and once the little group was into the cool of old marble and high ceilings, Barbara's concern shifted to Paul. She laid her fingers against his cheek, his neck, before he nudged away and a woman from the museum staff stepped forward with two photos to bless. Baby photos, these were, a little girl to judge from the color of her pj's. One was for Barb and the other for the
miracolino
. Both Mother and Child were in demand now. Believers hadn't failed to notice—of course they hadn't—that before each healing
la Mama Americana
had said a prayer. Supplicants had reached out to Barbara outside her church and, after Paul got through shouting at her, along the sidelines of the children's soccer outing up in the Vomero.

Now Paul handled the baby's photo with the same efficient goodwill he'd shown since the first. The mother gave the quiet blessing she'd come up with:
Una pregheria
.

Meanwhile Kahlberg was handing over today's documents, the authorizations signed off by officials from NATO and the UN relief. Checking the papers was a member of the security, in the standard grey blazer and red tie—though on second glance this rent-a-cop revealed a touch of the bad boy. The man had a stringy mustache and a jaunty set to his hips; he might've been a lounge singer. After he slipped the documents into his attaché (what else?), he put on a cheesy grin while Kahlberg introduced him, Umberto. After that the officer turned to Chris.

“Big shooter, Umberto here, he knows what's in all the closets. He knows where the Nazionale keeps the bodies buried.”

The liaison was talking as if cameras had followed them inside. “You want to know what's in the closet, around here? You want to, son?”

Kahlberg was sounding bad-boy himself, but he passed out the usual handful of study aides, and Umberto took one too. The NATO trooper who'd accompanied the family inside, off the steps, was left posted by the entryway. The family moved into the galleries with only plainclothes protection, and either Kahlberg or Umberto would offer occasional explanation among the initial ranks of statuary. Neither had much to say, in any case, and the visit felt more restrained, more subdued, than any the family had made before. This was one corner of Naples where people had something like American notions of personal space. Not that everyone was from the U.S. (though you saw the Stateside lumpiness, the go-to-hell vacation duds), and not that the other museum-goers could resist staring, what with the gypsy in her clingy pastel Capris, the Lieutenant Major in his dandy's whites. The morning crowd also included four or five who approached Barbara and Paul. But by and large the Lulucitas circulated unbothered, and maybe having a guide besides Kahlberg made Chris confine himself to quiet asides for his brothers and sisters. Or maybe it was that they were all still kids—still prey to Museum Awe.