Earthquake I.D. Page 13

  Barbara had already heard as much from her priest. Most convicts did their time in another penitentiary, inland, a complex a mere couple of centuries old. But these strikers had set themselves apart, defining themselves as a group, The Shell of the Hermit Crab. They proudly claimed a Catholic heritage, the same liberation theology as Cesare, and their published statements set forth twin goals: “Unum, a fixed European identity; Duo, the opportunity for individual potential.” The particulars of that agenda remained murky, as near as Barbara could tell, as did its connection to hermit crabs. Also the size of the Shell’s membership hadn’t been perfectly ascertained, as yet. But the core group remained small, clearly, and likewise anyone could understand that what they sought was better legal standing in Italy—and that they made the authorities nervous. They’d come under police scrutiny, this little crew, before they’d begun to refuse food. Unlike the vast majority of illegal aliens in-country, members in the Shell didn’t just take their under-the-table payout and keep quiet about it. Rather they shared Cesare’s fervor to speak out, to make others notice, bred in the neglected missions of upriver Africa or the isolated parishes of the Balkan hills.

  In one demonstration, inside the Archeological Museum, the Shells had posed themselves beside the plaster-cast corpses of Pompeii. The next month they’d chained themselves to the statues of the kings of Naples, in the alcoves that lined the Royal Palace. That case, following their arrest, had been the first when the Shell were kept separate from other prisoners. The police pretext for this was the same as used in Guantanamo and other such places: suspicion of terrorism. And after the group—just five scrawny young men, it appeared—had been let go, in another week they lined up in the largest piazza in town. They pulled from under their battered denim jackets a full-size cardboard cutout of the Sword of Islam. These weapons were decorated oddly, in purple, with patterns of lines that didn’t make sense, but the Shell five-some had waved their swords overhead, showing their teeth and crying Allah akbar. Then once they’d drawn a crowd, including puzzled police and a few cameras, with a practiced and video-ready movement each man had folded his sword origami-style so that it formed, instead, the harmless purple rectangle that was the Italian passport.

  If you asked Barb, that last public action sounded like a good one, an easy one to understand. But once more the cops had pulled out the handcuffs. As the Shell Five were hauled away, the noisiest of the bunch, a sub-Saharan runaway who might’ve been the leader, had explained at the top of his lungs: But that’s your choice, the sword or the paperwork! That’s your only choice! Fresh charges against the group had taken a couple of days to draw up, and according to Barbara’s chosen priest, they “weren’t worth the letterhead they’d been printed on.” Nonetheless the Shell of the Hermit Crab still had neither proper representation nor a trial date set, their case had gotten hung up in Parliament, when they starting doing without food.

  A holding cell hadn’t been easy to come by, in a close-packed metropolis riddled, soterraneo, by tunnels. Then too, the recent quake had registered near seven on the Richter. So the most intact and manageable penal alternative in town turned out to be the oldest, Castel dell’Ovo, a hulking keep from the era of Robin Hood. This stood on a promontory in the Bay—the peninsular spot of tongue at the center of the map’s sickbed kiss. The narrow quay between fortress and mainland made policing easy.

  Also anyone visiting would be perfectly safe. All in all Barbara had an easy time planting the idea. She needed no manipulations, only a word or two while watching the news with Chris and JJ, waiting for Jay’s little armada to rumble back home. A couple of hours later she mentioned something as she folded back the pima coverlets on the girls’ beds. Then again at breakfast, after Papa went to work, she spoke of the starving clandestini while she opened the doors to the dining-room balcony. When she turned to face the children, she found them all looking up, thoughtful, not even wrinkling their noses at the morning scent of sulfur.

  Paul too. The boy had been gooping up his grapefruit juice with DiPio’s prescribed daily protein packet, but now he stared somewhere over her shoulder, his long-lashed eyes narrowing. Barb turned away quickly. Laundry.

  Then the Hummer in the piazza, Kahlberg-free. The driver made the explanations, unnecessary explanations, as everyone slid into the air conditioning. The tenente had many important duties; the tenente wouldn’t be coming.

  But the Lulucitas could see what was on the itinerary: a trip down the coast to the town where Barbara’s mother had been born. “Torre del Greco,” the driver announced. “Where they make the cameos.”

  The man’s smile was pretty puny. He didn’t use the vehicle sound-system, instead turning to face the family without undoing his seatbelt. Barb shot a look at JJ; he was the one to get things started.

  “Hey,” the boy said. “Who needs the ten-nenn-tay? Only reason I’ll go where he has in mind is, I know my girl’ll find us.”

  The mother didn’t much care for that My girl, but never mind.

  JJ went on, “Hey, we could go wherever we wanted, and she’ll find us.”

  The driver was too much of a flunky to drop his smile, but he turned away and geared up. Barbara reminded herself: right time, right place. “Dora, Syl,” she began, “I just can’t stop thinking about those men on their hunger strike. Down in the castle.”

  “Yeah,” Dora said. “That’s sad.”

  “Sad,” said Syl. “Some people have been badly abused.”

  “I can’t stop wishing we could do more for them,” Barb said. ‘You know, something like what Papa did.”

  “That’s what I’ve been wishing too, Mama.”

  “Last night we lay in bed wishing,” Sylvia said. “It’s like Jesus.”

  Barbara wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew what would happen once Dora and Sylvia came up with questions. Already her second oldest was taking on his lecturer’s look, avid, almost charismatic. Chris’s eyes were his best feature, no bookworm’s goggle. In another minute you would’ve thought he’d taken over the Humvee’s address system.

  “Guys, can you imagine the scene down there? Incredible, I mean like, totally.”

  His body English set the vinyl squeaking beneath him. “I mean, on the one hand it’s up to the minute. It’s satellite feeds and state-of-the-art machine guns.”

  “Okay, bro.” JJ didn’t sound like he was making a crack. “Rock’n’roll.”

  “Yeah but, on the other hand, all this is happening in a castle that’s a thousand years old. Like, from the Crusades.”

  “Rock’n’roll,” the older brother repeated. “Next stop, dell’Ovo.”

  Barb was getting so good at insinuation, she was practically Neapolitan. “Now wait a minute, you two. I realize we’ve been talking about this, but, wait a minute.” Careful of her tone. “But I’ve got to say, down there, with men in their condition, it won’t be pretty. Are you sure you want to…”

  The kids came back like something out of a Jell-O commercial. Yeah please, come on please. Yeah!

  “Mom,” Chris said, “where else could we do good like we’d do there? Have you thought about that? Torre del Greco, that would be like, merely personal.”

  “Where your Mom grew up,” JJ said, “that’s totally personal. Hey, none of us ever knew her.”

  Careful of her frown, her posture.

  “Plus, I mean. Where does it say we have to obey the tenente?”

  “Ten and—” said Syl—”ten antennas? What?”

  “It’s not ten antennas,” Dora whispered loudly. “The most anybody ever had was one antenna. Or maybe two.”

  “Plus,” Chris said, “back in Bridgeport, like, you took us to the nursing home.”

  JJ was wagging a couple of fingers at the NATO tag-alongs, two in the seats farthest back and one riding shotgun. “I’d say we’re safer here than in Bridgeport.”

  “I hear you,” Barbara said. “But what about Paul?” If this was a commercial, the stage blocking called for her to face th
e boy. “Mr. Paul, honey, how do you feel?”

  He shrugged, the Italian child. “I’m, I’m tired of doing what K-Kahlberg says.”

  Barb went on: “You know there’ll be sick people there? Like in the hospitals?”

  When the boy waved a hand, the gesture looked decidedly more effeminate than JJ’s. Mr. Paul remained unfazed: hospitals, whatever. Barb realized, too, that one reason her middle child could take the possibility in stride was that, in so far as she could, she’d kept him out of the sick wards and the trauma centers. Taking the children to visit St. Anthony’s Rest back in Bridgeport had been one thing, a learning experience and a Christian duty. They’d brought flowers, and once Paul and the girls had performed a St. Patrick’s Day number. But here, both she and Jay had figured Paul didn’t need any additional exposure to the halt and the sick. They’d got that much right. For instance on the afternoon following the second episode, Romy’s episode, Dr. DiPio had steered the slender eleven-year-old into a room with a couple of bad cases from the quake. The old medico had laid the boy’s hand on one of the patient’s heads, so swaddled in gauze you couldn’t tell whether this was a man or a woman. But that was as far as the little experiment went. In the next moment Barb and Jay had spotted DiPio and the boy, and they’d come barreling into the room, barking at the man (yes, the Jaybird had been barking too; give him credit).

  The evening after that, the evening of the Capua trip, the doctor had made a formal proposal. He’d showed up at the Lulucitas’ palazzo—only a few blocks from his own, it turned out—and asked if he could take Paul to a nearby center for physical therapy. This time the father had almost knocked his handsome head against DiPio’s, he had to say no so often and so emphatically. The old doctor was in the grip of a vision; he saw the lame throwing off their crutches all over Naples.

  Barbara, for her part, had done some research into faith healing. An easy business so long as she was on the web anyway, a matter of half an hour’s extra trolling. But what she read in those sites and downloads seemed like another sequence of mental slipknots. Nobody had reliable conclusions. Also the mother took one or two of her visits with Cesare as an opportunity to discuss Paul’s case. She was working up to complete honesty about the boy, she thought she would tell the priest everything, but on the day she’d come closest there were others in the sanctuary. The old Jesuit hadn’t paid her much attention, confining his responses to monosyllables, and Barbara understood that these visitors might be the clandestini. There were two of them, actually prostrated before the altar, their faces on a bandanna spread across the floor. The dark couldn’t hide the shabbiness of their sandals.

  Anyway, this morning Paul no longer looked like a kid who required extra research or outside counseling. “I’m with, with them.” To see him nod towards his brothers, you would’ve thought he was a normal bubbly inarticulate American preteen. “Like, wh-who needs all this dumb, dumb old p-paperwork?”

  Chris again: “Guys, it’s like, unreal, down there. Everything’s way up to date and way old at the same time.”

  John Junior undid his seatbelt and leaned close to the driver. When he spoke, he was the man of the house. “Castel dell Huevos.”

  “Guys, it’s like, the only thing of its kind on the planet.”

  “Like Jesus,” said Dora.

  “Like Jesus,” said Sylvia. “This whole family is very good.”

  The first to acquiesce was the soldier nearest Barb. He gave a slow nod, a stolid bit of body-talk typical of the Organization’s Dutch boys. Barbara could read his Teutonic mind, though. He had to be giving himself the same reassurances as she did: the castle was crawling with cops. Dell’Ovo, more than likely, offered tighter security than the hometown of Barbara’s runaway mom.

  And this soldier appeared to hold rank. Following his wordless okay, the other two nodded as well, nodded and shrugged. Then there was the driver. This man waved John Junior off his shoulder and, at the next clutch of traffic, he found Barbara in his rear-view mirror.

  “We change, signora…we don’t the itinerario?”

  Barbara gave him a frown: What part of this don’t you understand?

  “The tenente, Kahlberg…he doesn’t know.”

  “Castel dell’Ovo,” she snapped.

  “I am never without orders from the—”

  “The hunger strike. Right this minute.”

  The driver went so far as to pick up his cell phone. But the Lieutenant Major couldn’t be reached just now—wasn’t that the point of today’s arrangements? Meantime the wild young Americans had broken into a war chant: Dell-oh-voh! Dell-oh-voh! The man at the wheel slapped down the phone, perhaps he left a page, and then he wrenched the van into a U-turn. The chant was joined by the squawks of car-horns.

  Barb didn’t waste her energy on celebration. Her opening had proved a winner, yes, but now she’d better brace herself She might accomplish nothing more than jerking the liaison man around a bit. She might leave him a little sore, e basta. Yet wouldn’t that alone be worth it? To make this unsought Wizard rush out from behind the curtain, like the lying slob he was, wouldn’t that be worth the effort? As for the gashes of guilt, Barbara would’ve had to endure those anyway. Anyway, bottom line, she couldn’t help but believe that with today’s surprise, she’d do better. She’d startle the PR man into showing her the smoking gun, and establish once and for all that the marriage was dead. The mother studied herself in the tinted window, putting on her game face. Beyond her reflection she enjoyed the 180-degree whirl of one cliff-side switchback after another. The driver didn’t need the beltway to get down to the Bay, and here and there Barbara caught glimpses of the age-old market theater, the hawkers in the museum.

  The drive bottomed out onto the harbor straightaway, along breakwaters of heaped stone. Moored to iron hoops sat fat low boats, wooden boats mostly, brightly trimmed. Motionless, they made you think the weather was off the Sahara. But once everyone piled out, the two girls started cooing at the breeze. Dora and Sylvia liked the whole scene: the waddly fisher-craft, the strings of plastic pennants above them, the flags’ goo-goo colors in constant flutter. The eight-year-olds were too quick for Barbara, rushing out onto one of the plank walkways over the breakwaters. The girls hopscotched along the bouncy flats, giggling and delighted till they were quieted by their first good look at the castle.

  Dell’Ovo rose like some outgrowth of the stones beneath the twins’ feet. It seemed like base material, a heap of pockmarked sand, and at first you didn’t notice the windows and doorways. There were only the elephantine walls, rough-cut manmade cliffs, ugly dirt-yellow, the whole effect so spongy you got the impression it could swallow incoming cannonballs. The stronghold looked nothing like an egg. The name had to do with something else, a story Chris started to tell as the group approached the quay’s security gate. The boy launched into “the earliest story, anyway,” one with Virgil in it. Here the Roman poet, under a full moon, had seen a mystic vision: an immense egg rising from the sea, and in it a new epic, a new life.

  “Though the egg just turned out to be a big rock,” Chris said. “Maybe this rock. The kind of rock where you could put up buildings and people could live.”

  Dora pouted. “Buildings and people? What’s so magic about that?”

  “Dora, the guy was a poet.”

  John Junior let his brother talk. Barbara knew there was more to the castle’s name, a story about an egg hidden inside somewhere; so long as the egg remained un-cracked, Naples would never fall to pieces. But she didn’t interrupt her second-oldest, and the rangy oldest couldn’t be bothered either, turning this way and that to search the marina. By the time the family and their gunmen reached the castle quay, JJ lagged several steps behind. When he craned his neck, Barbara could see where his beard had begun to come in. And even with her subterfuge underway, moving along nicely, she felt sorry for the boy. Mama understands, Primo. Mama made this happen, a trip where your girl couldn’t find us.

  Barbara had worried about the gyp
sy’s interference, in fact. She’d worried even more about how far she’d get without the liaison and his papers. Yet the castle’s first checkpoint turned out to pose no problem. The police in the booth seemed, if anything, as if they’d been expecting the family: first the father had come, and now the rest. The troopers, as for them, were colleagues in the law-and-order business, never mind that they wore helmets rather than caps. Once the gatekeepers on the mainland end of the castle pier got busy on their walkie-talkies, it was less than ten minutes before they were passing the clipboard for sign-ins. Just the kind of improvisation Barb had hoped would come into play: more arrangiarsi. She did have to deal with one delay, brief but troubling, though it had nothing to do with getting security clearance. She had to wait while a policeman asked for Paul’s blessing. One of the cops never got off the phone, but the other went down on one knee, stripping off his semi-automatic and pulling out, from between the buttons of his uniform, one of those Franciscan T’s.

  With that the check-in felt dangerous. The family was exposed; the cops were neglecting their weapons. Barb saw terrorists roaring out of the closest alleyway, the Sword of Islam in the hands of scippatori. She had to be out of her mind to pull a stunt like this, counter-espionage.

  Yet once again Paul handled it without a ruffle. The boy broke into a smile at the familiar slant T, the wood pale with use. Paul pushed back the crisp cuffs of his white shirt and gave the icon a spirited two-handed clasp. He and the cop could’ve been two Little Leaguers doing a pre-game touch-and-go. And around the middle child, the others appeared likewise pumped up. John Junior, after he stopped expecting the impossible of Romy, pressed quickly to the front of the group. The way he was bouncing in his cross-trainers, how could his Mama be out of her mind? What was it with her zigs and zags, now dread, now confidence? The castle was locked down tight and the kids were having a ball. Dora and Syl, next on the sign-in sheet, were trying their hand at cursive.