John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Meantime, Silky Kahlberg took over the family arrangements so smoothly you would’ve thought he’d been expecting the job. The morning after the second “episode,” at the same time as Jay and his guard set off once more for the Refugee Center, the Lieutenant Major arrived at the palazzo with a couple more blueboys and a day’s itinerary on NATO letterhead. Heard you tell DiPio at the hospital y’all weren’t gonna let this run you off… . Also the liaison accompanied the family on every trip, with the obvious exception of the day he joined the husband down in the waterfront security ward. Whatever other business Kahlberg had, he ran it from his cell phone. This morning too, he’d started out with Barbara and the kids.

This morning too, she’d gone along with it. Her energy felt tied in slipknots, now wound around Jay at midnight, now bunched before her file folder or computer screen, now unraveled in single file behind the Lieutenant Major. She’d taken the man’s printout, the itinerary of their NATO-approved Tour of Campania, and gone along.

The liaison had scheduled them into the coming weeks, a trip every day almost till the end of June. And wouldn’t you know it, he proved an excellent guide, thoroughly boned up on local arcana. For every trip Kahlberg arranged a professor’s worth of paperwork, in a fuddy-duddy accordion satchel. From this he would hoist up whole chapters copied from guidebooks and histories. Of course, he handed the same materials to Dora and Sylvia as he did to their mother; he hadn’t thought of everything. But then the man wasn’t a professor. Rather, you saw him in his element when it came time to deal with Italian bureaucracy. The Lieutenant Major’s baggy carryall also held, for every trip, a sheaf of documents that granted high-level clearance at the site. The liaison would climb out of the van first in order to get these papers approved, while the family and driver and guards watched through tinted windows. The transaction always required a meeting with at least two others, once there’d been three, but in every case the NATO man handled the process with as much efficiency as the system allowed. He ignored the men who were there for protection, bull-bodied and cow-faced. He went straight to the actual gatekeeper, and as that man looked over the authorizations, the liaison officer fielded any questions with a smile sweet as a Georgia peach.

As for the factotum whose job it was to approve or reject the family’s clearance, to say yea or nay to Kahlberg’s paperwork, he tended to take his sweet bureaucratic time. Those guys would pore over the stuff, testing it between finger and thumb. Only after the documents had gone into their bag (the Italians tended to carry the classic bureaucrat’s attaché) would Barb and the others be allowed out of the vehicle.

Once that was over with, however, everyone onsite would act as if they and the Lulucitas had been friends since confirmation class. The family was allowed to linger as long as they liked, and no matter how busy the place might get, Barb and the kids were kept separate from other tourists by yards of gunswept space. Restricted areas were unlocked for them and additional guides provided. It could all seem like too much, in fact. Whenever Barbara succeeded at approximating tough-mindedness and clarity, for a moment, she would wonder at all the fuss. The very slickness of what this officer arranged for the family reinforced her suspicions that he’d finagled something with Jay. Yet even at moments like these, the mother had to admit that Silky offered valuable fun. The past as he presented it came in rich package deals — why not think of Neapolitan ice cream, its layers of flavors? Also Barbara liked to see her kids fascinated by history, an exception to the American-clod stereotype. She liked better still the emotional repairs that took place among the children. A stay-at-home mother noticed at once: as they poked around the region’s stony hands-on classroom, Paul and the others recovered from the strains of the previous days. You could see it in their faces, Paul’s in particular, as his eyes regained their glitter and his curiosity overcame his stutter. Naturally Barb had thought of Chris as the museum buff, the one who’d get the most out of what she’d come to call “the educational aspects of the trip.” But in the younger brother too, this week, there burgeoned the same affinity. Nothing like your mainstream clod.

The black-and-white child was intrigued most of all by Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries. The Villa frescos portrayed, room-by-room, a young woman’s sexual initiation; the presiding god was Dionysius, and the process was largely unclothed and touched by frenzy. As the Lulucitas circulated the rooms, Paul pumped the guide for ever-more-uncomfortable details. In the final room of the sequence, the initiate reaches for the drape that veils an immense erection. The shape is unmistakable, shroom-like, and in that room Paul asked questions that left their guide speechless, staring at the mother. Signora, what…?

Barb knew she only had to wait.

“Paulie,” Chris said after a moment, “duh.”

The mother would’ve preferred something less harsh. “Easy, Chris…”

“You remember,” the older brother went on, “crazy Maria Elena? The girl Mom brought home. Like, what do you think she went through back in Mexico?”

She would’ve preferred something else altogether. Barbara was left with mouth ajar, and when she cast around for help she felt as flat and out of touch as the initiate on the walls. The mother’s first clear thought was of a question she had to ask Cesare, Am I a good person? — a question she never did put to the old cleric, not in so many words, though she could feel its weight bearing down on their give and take inside the Vomero church. In the Villa of Mysteries, same thing, Barbara couldn’t find her voice before her fifteen-year-old finished his explanations. Her second-born loved to play the professor, during these day-trips. How often, for instance, had they heard his lecture about the bricks and stones? If it’s bricks it’s Roman, guys, and if it’s stones it’s Greek . Also the excursions under the NATO flag allowed Chris to develop a broader expertise, not limited to the empires before Christ. The family and their escort also vanpooled east to Nola, where a fifth-century saint had hung the original rack of church bells and so provided their name: campanile, after Campania. It’s like, every time you hear a church bell, you’re hearing Naples .

On another day the boy and his students, plus of course their bodyguards, rode out to Caserta. They toured a behemoth of a palace, eleganza, the country estate of the Borbon king. Chris delighted in pointing out that it had been put up during the same years when Americans were throwing out their own king. The boy loved his parallels, his ironies. Outside the windows sculpted waterfalls sparkled, notched like silverwork into terraced gardens, while between those vistas wall-wide portraits linked the dynasty to Old Testament heroes. Chris had something to say about those as well, explaining for instance why the monster Leviathan kept turning up. But his sisters were barely paying attention by this point, distracted by the bed curtains. These were tasseled velvet, more eleganza, drapery strung from canopy bedposts, along doorways and windows and even as a curtain on the occasional armoire. Dora and Syl, thanks to Kalhberg’s paper-trading on arrival, were allowed to fiddle with the stuff. Hands-on classroom, emotional repair. In the biggest of the royal bedrooms, Barb’s two youngest claimed the tassels and drapes recalled the decorations that, up in Papa’s worksite, used to hang along the wheelchair of the injured gypsy.

The girl herself — without ID, she preferred the name Romy — smiled with an uncharacteristic shyness. She let Paul do the talking; he agreed with Dora and Syl.