Earthquake I.D. (26 page)

Jay had changed the sign: Stay cool, honey.

“But Mrs. Lulucita, do calm yourself You mustn't go seeing wrack and ruin everywhere. That's the reason we invited you here today, or one of them. We wanted to reassure you, we are your Consulate, your countrymen. We're not the Camorra.”

Jay gave it moment. “And on our side, Roebuck, I mean. Let's put it this way. Barb and me, we're not about to join the Shell of the Hermit Crab.”

Roebuck dismissed the idea with an Italian gesture, waggling thumb and index finger. “We never had you two under surveillance, certainly.” She went on to promise that the murder would get a thorough investigation. “You have my word, you two. Full cooperation, absolutely, between this community and the local authorities.”

“Okay.” The husband gave a dismissive wave himself, letting go of Barbara. “One time or another, we all saw Silky with his gun out. A guy like that, we all saw it coming. Sooner or later, you're talking the last scene in
Scarface.”

The Attaché worked up a regretful smile. Barbara tried not to grind her back teeth.

“But that's in the past,” Jay said. “That's, we're all to blame, there. Whatever. But the problem now isn't that Silky was dirty. That's not what Barb and I need to know now.” As if he did it all the time, he retook his wife's hand. “What we need to know is, what was the man into?”

This, she'd been expecting. “That's what we need to know,” Barbara said. “Why did someone have to shoot him?”

“Why, hey? What kind of mess was he into?”

The way the Attaché picked at the lip of her keyboard, with a sound like trying to strike a wet match, made it plain that the woman had some degree of discretion, in this office anyway. Here Roebuck had room to improvise.

“We don't think you're the Mafia,” her husband said.

“Certainly.”

“We don't think it was Romy either,” Barb said. “Romy couldn't kill anyone.”

“Well I wish I shared your confidence, Mrs. Lulucita.” Roebuck found it a relief to be talking about someone other than her former colleague in Public Relations. “You have to admit it doesn't look good for the girl. She did flee the scene.”

“But, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you, with bullets flying?”

Jay let go of her again, instead signaling out of the corner of his eye. Go, Owl.

“Since when does that make her a criminal mastermind,” Barbara went on, “fleeing the scene?”

“Well, a criminal mastermind…”

“Roebuck, we don't even know if she was on that loading dock.”

Jay nodded with his entire upper body. “Barb's right. Hey, our Paul, he got that girl out of that wheelchair. The last thing she'd want is to put him in harm's way.”

The way Roebuck shook her head was just the opposite, restrained, a ticking. “I can't see why you two are so quick to defend the girl. You especially, Mrs. Lulucita. The way she feels about John Junior, I would think you'd find it a threat.”

“But that's what I'm saying. That's what Jay and I both are saying. With John Junior in her life, the last thing the girl would do is pick up a gun.”

“There's an eyewitness who puts her at the scene.”

“Eyewitness.” Barbara gave her the same sour face she'd used on the liaison man. “That Umberto, or whatever his name is. Roebuck, you talk about the Camorra—even before I left the loading dock, the guy admitted he was a crook.”

“Well. I can't say what was in his statement to the police, Mrs. Lulucita. But I believe all he told you was, he wasn't on the staff of the Nazionale.”

“Hey. Okay. Say the girl was on the dock. Say we trust this guy, impersonating a security guard and carrying an unregistered handgun. Okay. But, I mean. Romy would've known what would happen next. The cops would come after the gypsy.”

“And they'd be doing their job. The girl has known criminal associates.”

“Mary, Mother of God! You people are just full of things we already know. You're saying, Silky bent the rules and Romy used to turn a trick or two? Is that what you brought us down here to tell us?”

“What I'm trying to tell you,” Roebuck said, “is that at this point, your great friend Romy is as much of an unknown as the late Lieutenant Major.”

“Unknown?” Jay leaned the woman's way again, a move that put the two of them practically nose to nose. “He's an unknown, Silky? No way, Roebuck. No way, not to you people. You and this cigar-store Indian here. You know what old Silky was into.”

The Attaché didn't shrink, squaresville. Barb recalled that Kahlberg, on the other hand, always had another move. He'd been all dart and flutter.

‘You know,” Jay went on, “the way we used to do it at Viccieco and Sons, we used to share what we had.” The man had resigned as Vice President of Sales, in charge of New York and New England. “The way it worked, in order to get something, we would give up something. Sound good to you?”

“In principle, Mr. Lulucita. Though I'd prefer to keep the tenor of this—”

“In principle, exactly. You'd prefer, you'd prefer to deal. Better that than a lawsuit.” Jay's gestures kept everyone else back from the table. “I mean, that's your worst case, right? You hauled us in here before they've even finished mopping up the bloodstains because, worst case, Barb and I would call a lawyer.”

The UN rep appeared to have lost his disdain, one eye narrowing.

“Hey. Barb and I and the kids, that's an innocent family, there.”

The mother wanted to follow up, to agree, but she was too tight in the chest.

“Well,” Roebuck said. “No one in this office put your children in harm's way.”

“Yeah. Okay. But it looks bad anyway, Roebuck. Looks like a mess.”

Five minutes after the Consulate had called, yesterday evening, the man had worked out a strategy. He'd asked Barbara out onto the balcony, and she'd asked Aurora to keep the kids inside—maybe the one time Barb had managed to look her mother-in-law in the eye. Out there above the cameras, husband and wife had shared a bottle of pale Italian beer. At a couple of the Jaybird's suggestions, she'd actually broken into a grin and raised a toast.

Upstairs in the Consulate, today, he kept on. “But, I mean. You people wouldn't bring us all the way down here just to beg. You know, to beg? ‘Please, you guys, please don't make a bad thing worse.'”

“Mr. Lulucita, really. No one in this office has it in mind to beg.”

“Sure. Nobody wants that. Barb and me, coming down here, we didn't want that. What we wanted to hear was, what've you got for us? I mean. There's got to be something else on the table. Hey? Something in return for our cooperation.”

The Attaché showed the suit beside her an unsubtle look, something else you'd never see from Officer Kahlberg.

“Think about it. What we offer, Barb and me, our family.” Jay spoke more slowly. “It's not just, you don't want us to hurt you. It's also how we can help you. Think about the way this family can
represent.”

Roebuck turned back to her laptop, some sort of decision obvious in how she gathered her fingers over the keyboard. Barbara waited out the black thought of slamming the screen down on the woman's knuckles.

“And all we ask, hey. It's got to be on a different basis, this time.”

“Tell me something,” Roebuck said. “Have you two seen your web site?”

Now there was a bit of Silky, sleight of hand, and they had to wait a moment or two while the wireless hookup came on. But Barbara's husband, the Cool-bird, shifted his weight so smoothly that the leather beneath him didn't creak.

“I suppose you have,” Roebuck went on. “It sounds like you've thought this through pretty thoroughly.”

The laptop screen, its back to Barbara, spilled colors over Roebuck's hand. You would've thought the woman had pulled a curtain back from a stained-glass window. Then the machine turned out to sit on a Lazy Susan swivel, wouldn't you know it. When the Attaché spun the thing around, the display appeared to be all saints and angels.

“I'm sure you already realize,” Roebuck said, “what people make of this family.”

Saints and angels, that's what. Across the small screen sprawled a radiant media collage with the Lulucitas at its center. Around a colorized newspaper photo of parents and children, themselves arranged around a twice-his-size Paul, there spiraled scanned-in headlines and smaller photos, plus catch-phrases and clip-art taken out of other web toolboxes. There were even a few words in a vaguely Cyrillic lettering.

Barb had never taken a good look at the site before. At most she'd had a glance at this home page, their “internet presence.” Of course Chris and JJ got on the site a couple of times a day, and they visited all the links to which Roebuck was now taking Barbara and Jay. But whenever her two oldest had called Mama to the computer, either she'd been in no mood to see something that made her marriage look good or she hadn't wanted to find Paul looking any stranger than he did already. This business on the web was only another media
spettacolo
, after all, more of the same circus as beneath her balcony. Today, however, as Roebuck lingered now at this page and now at that, Barbara had to acknowledge that the site's designers came to the circus with a supernatural new menagerie. Even when Barbara spotted an image she recognized, from the papers or TV, it was so altered by electronic surgery as to suggest another animal entirely.

The reconfigurations appeared far trickier than the portraits mounted out at the Refugee Center, the effects the Lieutenant Major had pulled off in the NATO print shop. On every page, to begin with, there snaked a scrap of that Cyrillic-looking font. The lettering called to mind old cartoons, Disney, the sign swinging over the door to the shop of the fortune-teller from Transylvania. The text fit into the screen every which way, an eerie shadow. But then the rest of whatever was on the page, the doctored photographs, were eerie to begin with. In one, their middle child had been enlarged and given a full-body halo. That much was a no-brainer, an obvious touch, but the divine aura had been rendered so brightly that Mom and Pop and the siblings were reduced to ghosts by comparison. Also the heads and shoulders of the rest of the family, against the lower curves of the Paul's overheated corona, had been sculpted so that they composed the local skyline. Barbara herself served as Vesuvius, her head jammed into her chest, further down than any owl's. Nor was this page the strangest, the most baroque.

Another portrayed Paul with one hand up in the Pope's two-finger wave, while a wild range of photo-images and cartoon figures knelt around him in prayer. Barb couldn't tell if the assorted worshippers had been derived from pictures of the family or not. She saw a satanic Mafioso with horns, a tail, a black suit, and a sawed-off shotgun (an accessorized Jaybird, perhaps?); a woman in a skirt suit much tighter and shorter than Roebuck's, her stockings showing garters (could this be Barb herself, slimmed down?), her head framed by headphones and a mike; a Brit-looking pair in old-style knickers and caps, possibly Tweedledum and Tweedledee, except these two would turn and exchange a deep kiss every few seconds (God knows who the designer had in mind); a big decaying leper or zombie (maybe JJ) with a lover's rose between all-but-lipless teeth; a bearded guerilla-scholar (in glasses more or less like Chris's), one arm bent around a camo-colored Uzi and the other around a stack of books; Uncle Sam in his striped top hat and tails (might've been old Aurora, in drag); a pizza cook in an apron (Dora?), her head bent over a pie on a massive oven-spatula; and a mermaid with wings, fluttering just enough to keep herself perched on her coiled fishtail (Sylvia?).

“Quality graphics,” declared Roebuck.

A fascinating design, the day after a murder. Jay looked it over with a small, canny smile, the same as he'd shown the family whenever he brought home some new, shelf-ready sauce or entrée. The ingredients on today's box, however, were peppered with local slang. The site had been developed in Naples. Also most pages again called to mind the Nativity scenes, the
presepi
, sold on the nearby saint-streets. The Christmas-morning figurines might be sculpted in three dimensions, out of old-fashioned terra-cotta, but they too were sometimes adapted from the news. Come to think of it, statuettes of the American
miracolino
, adapted for a crèche, might already be on sale in the city. For years now Italian politicians had provided the face for the Good Shepherd or the malignant Herod. The dark-skinned refugees from across the Mediterranean had become shepherds, or gypsies.

And on the web the most pervasive foreign touch was that Cyrillic weirdness. Barbara bent closer to the screen, narrowing her eyes.

As for Jay, he wouldn't be put off Raising his eyes, he reiterated how the family could “represent,” gesturing at the busy screen. Then he brought up the cost.

“When you think of what the taxpayers spend on foreign aid, I mean. And then you see all this goodwill, here.” He gestured at the laptop again, his hand brushing Barbara's lowered head. “Goodwill towards Americans, for once. All over the worldwide web. Think what that's worth.”

Hard to believe this was the same man who'd burst into tears over getting his passport back. Yet yesterday, five minutes after the phone call from the Consulate, he'd taken Barb out on the balcony to explain the quid pro quo. While Jay had talked the sun had finished setting, but the balcony railings still held the heat of midday—and so did Barbara, apparently, so distracted by the rough and tumble at the museum she hadn't realized the opportunity presented by tonight's call. It hadn't even occurred to her that if the Lulucitas stayed in town, that would amount to chocolate and champagne, in terms of public relations. The family offered a ready-for-prime-time validation of the American presence abroad.