Earthquake I.D. (45 page)

“But when there is the betterment, it is been on the video, in every case. The miracle with the boy, with your Paul, it is beginning on the TV,
toujours
. His mother is saying her rosary on the TV.”

And Fond squeezed her shoulder. Barbara startled, drawing in a leg. At least he kept it brief, correct, French.

“Are you saying, every healing episode is on account of me?”

The refugee
philosophe
stepped back again, his subalterns nodding to either side of him. “I am saying, it is beginning with you. You, the spectacular image.”

The man's perfume had faded; maybe that's why she hadn't noticed him bending closer.

Fond waved a hand at the ceiling and walls, his smile the same gleaming business that had worked so well between hip-hop videos. “The prayer on television, what shall we say, it is the image on the walls of the caveman? The painting and the dance, which is bringing good fortune in the hunt?”

Mother of God, who was this guy, to talk crazy one minute and then the next.

“Fond,” Jay said, “hey, maybe you got something there.”

“Seulement le logique
.”

The next minute, the guy came up with an idea no one else had thought of. Barbara, looking for a hole in Fond's theory, realized the clandestino leader couldn't have known about Cesare—but then again, she and her rosary had gone on-camera with the old Jesuit Dominican, too. Her last favor for Maddalena.

Jay appeared to be going through the same thought process, taking a while before speaking again. “It's like we said before: with you, we know we can talk.”

But why shouldn't this hand-to-mouth intellectual have come up with a decent idea? Above his bright smile his eyes were wedges, as they'd been a couple of weeks ago, packed in cotton. He'd seen a lot worse than either of the Americans, no denying. And when Barbara pictured her and her priest bent over a string of beads, their camel-backed shadow cast across thousands of screens, she realized that she couldn't begin to say what her prayers might be capable of. Hadn't they gone jaywalking, those prayers? Darting about in heavy traffic?

“Fond, I mean, I'm impressed. Me and Barbara both. It's a plan.”

The husband eased forward as he spoke, leaning into the inverted cone of light. You couldn't help but notice how he'd begun to bruise.

“You're a smart guy,” the Jaybird said, “that's obvious, very smart.”

The worst, purple already, was under the eyes. Fond couldn't help but notice. As he stared he went from the head of the class to boy who always got picked on.

“You, you get it. Smart guy like you. Talk about making a spectacle…”

Fond used a local gesture, nothing like a rap star, pressing together his flat hands and waggling them before his chest. A pleading gesture.

“Lose the guns, Fond. This isn't you. I mean, whacking people around.”

The young skin-and-bones looked to his African sub-commander, then dropped his eyes. In a different voice, halting, he admitted that (“just as
le père
is saying”) lately he hadn't been himself. “After your son is made me well, for some several days, I am thinking I am signed onto another social contract altogether.” He'd soaked in two separate bathtubs, both in a single suite; he'd stroked the endless silken hair of a blonde. “I am thinking I am moved into this new paradise, to which all the hetero-glottic world is coming.” In the hotel penthouse, with every pleasure of the North at his fingertips, the former clandestino had seemed to vanquish divisions of faith, skin color, or “the nation-state.” So long as the expense account held up, he'd lost his bearings.

“Yet there came a morning I came down from this paradise,” he went on. “When I did, I found my brothers and sisters living still in the inferno. An inferno where we are sleeping still in the boxes, the boxes of durable paper. Like the hermit crab, we live. Always we must be finding another
shell
!”

He stamped the floor, setting off an echo. “What God is it that excludes my brothers, when He is so sweetly embracing me?”

Barbara wobbled in an undertow of Samaritan impulse. Maria Elena came again to mind, shrieking to split the roof the day that Children's Services took her away. The mother tugged at an armpit, glad for the Jaybird beside her, refusing to go soft and distracted. He argued that any man who could set up today's kidnapping knew perfectly well what God watched over Naples these days.

“Hey, this city, it's still about the nation-state. Nation-state even with the United Nations in town. They've all got laws, the UN too, and you broke the laws.”

When Fond met the father's look, Barbara could see that she wasn't the only one wobbling. “Today is a performance,” said the Hermit Crab leader. “An enactment of violence, only, today will bring into being, down in the South, a turn towards—”

“Yeah, yeah, that's nice.” The way Jay shook his head, you'd think he was showing off his bruises. ‘“Turn to the better,' very nice, except it's a broken record. Broken record, Fond, you know—repeating and repeating and getting nowhere.”

“I mean,” Jay went on, “you're way too smart to go on kidding yourself, about what's going to happen upstairs.”

Briskly the former VP summarized what was in store for the remaining Shell of the Hermit Crab. It wouldn't matter what their captured Americans said on the video. When Jay mentioned “deportation,” the eyes of the other African grew bigger than they'd been all afternoon. He scowled up at his boss. The Jaybird didn't miss it, and he switched to simpler English.

“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.

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 were. “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
.”