Earthquake I.D. (44 page)

She had a clue, as Jay would say. But the Girl Detective wasn't much help here, not with those two guns in plain view, one raised and tacking slowly between her and Jay, the other jammed in a henchman's belt. Then there was the equipment Fond carried, a digital videocamera, state-of-the-web.

The camera was the Hermit Crab's next concern, as soon as it was obvious that the two captives weren't going to try anything. Fond and his soldiers bent over the technology, grumbling in French, in Italian, in English. Barb picked out enough to understand that the kidnappers hadn't found the boss waiting for them, when they'd first arrived at the hideout, because he'd never counted on rounding up his own equipment. He'd expected Maddalena to take care of that. But the girlfriend had realized that today's caper would get her in far worse trouble than leaping a police sawhorse. That business in the piazza a week ago, leaping and pleading with
la Mama
while somewhere a camera rolled, that had been another step up the media ladder. But when Fond had suggested the woman pose for a scarier picture, a violation of international law, he couldn't get a callback. The celebrity renegade had been reduced to haggling on the black market.

They think I
'
m rich
, Fond may have muttered now.
They don't understand, our movement isn
‘
t about money
.

The guy had been sending mixed signals since back in dell'Ovo, when Barb had squeezed his hand. The hand itself, she'd thought then, had meant he would die young. But she knew today's code better.

Still, when Fond took up the camera and punched it on, his movements so loose and easy you thought of a dancer, the obliterating white of the spot had her turning away. The gun was worse, its barrel a hole in the brightness.

“Ow,” said the Jaybird. “Can't we wait a minute on that? Can't we talk first?”

Barb gathered herself and faced around again. She put a hand to her throat, showing the worst of her wounds. “Fond,” she said, “be sure to get the blood in the picture. Everyone needs to see how you've hurt us.”

When Jay glanced at her, his look showed more than reflected light.

“Everyone needs to see,” the wife went on.

“That Maddalena, hey,” Jay said. “She knows what people want to see. She'll put the blood front and center.”

Barb couldn't suppress another smile. “You understand, Fond? We're saying, what do you want to tell people, when you put your pictures on the web?”

She was quiet, speaking without an echo. Jay was the better negotiator when it came to the office, or a maneuverer like Roebuck. But Fond was another matter.

“We know you don't want money.” She hoisted her purse, its leather freshly scuffed. “You, your movement, we understand, you want something better.”

“Barb's right,” Jay said, a bit too hearty.

“You want to change the world. You want to do that with this video, and with us two, right here, and in the next ten minutes.”

By the time she'd finished, Fond had lowered the camera. He spoke with his black second-in-command, using yet another language, something from the far side of the Mediterranean. Barbara couldn't let that go, not with the fresh audacity she'd come to. After the first exchange between the clandestini she stepped up to stick a finger in Fond's face. She ignored the other man's pistol, at the corner of her eye.

“You talk to
us
,” she snapped. “The people you grabbed off the street.”

Fond's smell remained wildly out of place, a perfume from a five-star hotel.

Jay closed in too, touching her shoulder. “Owl.”

“I said a rosary over this guy. I said a Hail Mary for his soul.”

This tall and mediagenic blade, this hint of
la dolce vita
—he'd come a long way from stinking up the security ward in dell'Ovo. And that was his problem, Barbara realized. The man was struggling to get fresh bearings, after spending too long in a scented Jacuzzi, with mint tea and crème brioche by the tub. Fond had become a soul-brother to old Cesare, the priest driven mad in the presence of sybaritic Aurora. But today Cesare had gotten his head on straight again.

“Fond, listen. I'm just saying, this kind of strong-arm business was unnecessary.”

“Playground stuff! All it does it cause a lot of hard feeling.”

She turned to her husband.

“Plus,” Jay added, “remember how you found us here. Hey. Our hands were free.”

Turning back: “Fond, you've got our attention. Now what are you trying to say?”

“Except first you've got to lose the guns. I mean, guns? Forget about it.”

“I can see,” Barb tried, “how you thought we'd never talk to you. I can see how that was for you. You kept showing up on TV, you kept asking. And, nothing.”

“Talking about emotion, Fond. We feel your pain. We can see you were getting desperate. But guns, forget about it. I mean, today, this, what you're trying to say, it's not just for you, it's for all the brothers out there—”

“Assez
,
assez
,” said Fond.

He set his arms akimbo, calling attention to his rap-star clothing, the plaid boxers bagged over low-slungjeans. He wore his cell phone clipped above his crotch. “Enough, for pity's sake,” he said.

His eyes were on Barbara. “I want to bring you and your Paul to the
Republique du Mali
. To the Sahel.”

Once the former hunger striker went into his appeal, the parents confined their responses to a word here or there. Anyway Fond began by telling them things they knew already. He assured Barb and Jay that he hadn't ordered the kidnapping in order to hurt anybody or “acquire personal gain of any kind.” Rather all he wanted, today, was a brief statement on-camera. In this the parents would agree to bring Paul and the rest of the family down to equatorial Africa, and then the mother would recite the rosary, as she had when Fond could barely hear her or see her, lying in what he'd believed would be his deathbed. Since then the
clandestino
leader had been unable to shake his faith in her prayers, even as he'd enjoyed five nights in the penthouse at Hotel Parthenope, the guest of the rock star Sting. How could he forget the Hail Mary of Signora Lulucita, shaky but determined? He believed “the sorrows in the homeland” would begin to heal as soon as Barbara's recitation was put on the web and streamed worldwide.

At least Fond spared them more than a thumbnail description of how bad things had gotten in his part of Mali. The widening drought and the Saharan gang-war were all over the news. Rather he emphasized that, as soon as Barbara appeared on the first screen down at the desert's edge, her and her “quite awesome prayer,” his home country “will take a turn towards a betterment.”

Barbara remembered plenty of people around Naples who'd come a lot closer to her praying than that, lately, with no discernible betterment. But she figured she'd soon enough get the opportunity to wipe the stars from this boy's eyes. Soon enough she'd go to work, especially, on the man's well-nigh infantile belief in the power of television. For Fond also believed that once he got the agreement on video—plus the prayer, he reiterated—he'd have no trouble with the authorities. Once he got the material onto the internet, multimedia proof of his good intentions, he and the other Shell members could return to street level without consequences. Everything, declared the young West African, would be perfectly fine.

By now Barbara and Jay had settled on the floor at the edge of the flashlight's halo. Fond remained up and stalking about, from time to time spreading both arms and all ten fingers for emphasis. The rap star, he even had stage lighting, a flashlight on its end at his feet. He assured them he didn't intend the family's visit to the South to go on very long. He hoped the trip would save a few lives, to be sure, but more than that he intended to help his country claim “a better place in the Imperial feast.” Nothing could accomplish this, he felt certain, more quickly than decent exposure on television. Once the Republic and its suffering began to play across the dinner tables and living rooms of the United States, not to mention the web broadcasts in their children's bedrooms, everything would swiftly “take a turn towards a betterment.” Fond was confident that their work would be done by the start of the American school year.

“Your children,” he said then, “they begin school, mm,
a Settembre
,
non
?”

Barb nodded, less than enthusiastic. She hoped he was wrapping this up.

“You do intend to return to America,
non
?” Again his eyes were on her. “You have always intended this, this goodwill visit—it was always to be brief?”

That got her angry. She'd already had this glum epiphany, watching Paul's face zip into its files, on the oversized screen in the editing booth. The mother had seen the whole Naples trip looking pointless, zipped into a box and deleted. The recollection must've started her frowning, because Jay sharply cut off whatever she had in mind to say. Again he brought up the guns.

“I mean, before you go calling us
tourists
, let's talk about those guns. Before you go getting insulting. ‘Goodwill visit,' give me a break.”

The backup with his pistol in his pants, the white man more or less, noticed Jay's tone and put his hand on the handle of his weapon.

“You walk around packing iron, hey. You're the tourists. Anyone carrying a gun, he's in and out fast.”

The leader of the crew dropped his arms, looking hurt, struggling to understand. Jay pressed ahead, arguing that so long as Fond kept threatening to “put a bullet” in the two Americans, any statement they made wouldn't be worth a thing. “I mean, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace?' How's that going to come off? Just, for starters, think how it's going to sound to the cops.”

“But,
sans blague
, I cannot foresee any significant charge against me.”

Fond smiled, a slim ebony Buddha. “Once the authorities are witness that video, I cannot see how my brothers or I will have any legal charge that will, will stand.”

Jay looked to Barb, his question so obvious that the lanky radical went on at once, assuring them he wasn't crazy. The police knew him, he argued; they understood he was no Bin Laden. He apologized again,
“de tout mon coeur
,” for the extreme measures he'd been forced to take today. And did the Lulucitas realize that before coming to Naples he'd held a fellowship in Philosophy of Cinema at the university in Bamako? Did they understand that the actions of his Shell amounted to a natural extension of his research into the sociopolitical ramifications of Spectacle?

“I know you're a smart guy,” Jay said. “And movies, hey, I'll sit and talk about the movies all night. Just as soon as you lose the guns.”

“But you must understand, today is never been an act of violence. Today is a performance and a, a credo.”

During the fifteen months he'd been able to afford at the university, Fond explained, he'd developed a thesis on “the politicization inherent in representations of the Foreign,” as it occurred in the work out of Hollywood. Then later still, after his mother had died of the guinea worm and he'd paid to for a passage to Salerno in a shipping crate—he and a Nigerian who never recovered from the dehydration—Fond had come to see greater metropolitan Naples as a rare opportunity for applied learning. “For are you seeing how the American cinema treats the experience of Italy?”

Jay looked like he was about to erupt, to bark an order like the American Boss, but Barbara held up a finger. There had to be a thread here, glimmering on the labyrinth floor, something she and her husband could pick up and follow.

“Are you seeing what happens to you Americans, their signification in the cinema, whenever a representative character comes to Italy?”

“I've—seen the movies,” she tried.

“You Americans,” the young man continued, “you are fascinated with Italy, and cinema provides the signifier for this fascination. The cinema makes spectacle of the secret dreaming, to
l'anime
of a society at large. Thus what appears as spectacle should be understood as confession. The culture presents its case to God.”

Now there was a possible thread. “Are you saying you believe in God?” she asked. “Because if you believe it's God at work in our Paul, you don't understand—”

“Ah, Signora. If you would only have responded to my initial request on the MTV, we could've spoken comfortably of everything. Of this God as well.”

“Well, on MTV, in front of fifty million viewers, I would've said the same thing. You don't
understand
about Paul. You want to talk about a spectacle? I would've looked straight into the camera and said, our Paul, when he, when he has an episode—he can't do it on demand.”

“Barb's right.”

“Dr. DiPio,” she went on, “he already tried this kind of thing, you know. As much as I let him, he tried it. He put Paul together with a couple of the
terremotati
.”

“I mean, you must've seen it,” Jay said. “Even in dell'Ovo they had a TV We could take Paul down to the desert and, hey, you'd still get nothing.”

Barbara, meantime, let her gaze shift away from their keeper's sleek face. One of the other
clandestini
was acting as if he'd heard something, throwing the flashlight beam around the room, but Barb stared elsewhere, into the dark. She didn't want to think about asking more of her eleven-year-old.

“Ah
oui
.” The outlaw was saying. “This I do understand, the boy's visit may come to nothing.” Nevertheless, he went on, he believed he'd detected something about Barbara's prayers that had eluded everyone else.

“It is been the spectacle, in every case,” he declared.

Barbara faced him, frowning. “Prayers—it's private. It's you and God.”