John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

If the girl were bad for the family, then she would be good for the liaison officer. She’d strengthen Silky’s manipulations, somehow, and the Lieutenant Major would act accordingly. He’d treat the doll-face as an ally. But so far as Barbara could see, Kahlberg never missed an opportunity to attack the girl.

“Romy,” he would say, sneering, “Romy, or whatever she’s calling herself now.”

He remained blunt and nasty about how she’d made a living before the quake. “That girl didn’t care if you were American, Italian, Somali, whatever. All she cared about was what was in your wallet.”

On top of that, whenever the liaison had some more shit in his pocket to throw, he made sure that he and the mother were alone. He didn’t want any of the kids to butt in, to undermine his slander, because of course his filthy talk was all about control. About maintaining his Svengali hand. The Lieutenant Major was trying to forge a secret bond with the person he took to be the second most powerful on the scene. But then too, the way Silky whispered, he had to be worried about the gypsy herself, her calling his bluff somehow. The man was the closest Barb had come to James Bond, but he was afraid of a former wheelchair case.

Anyway, no matter how dirty the brush with which the NATO man tried to tar the girl, in one respect she remained spotless. A few hours after her healing, in the hospital closest to the Refugee Center, dottore DiPio had put Romy through a battery of tests. He’d checked everything from her muscle responses to her blood, and he’d checked her again in his downtown clinic the following evening (the following morning , of course, the girl had had a conflicting appointment, a surprise meeting with the Flying Lulucitas). The gypsy had come through every exam as clean as a whistle. Was she merely lucky, or had she been more careful than the NATO liaison would like to have everyone believe? Had she been, perhaps, no whore to begin with? DiPio’s tests didn’t reveal anything conclusive about the young woman’s history, and Romy herself wasn’t saying. For all Barbara knew, the family’s new companion might’ve had all her sins washed clean at once, as soon as Mr. Paul had touched her.

Nevertheless the mother didn’t believe Romy had lived a life of purity. In the years before the gypsy had spent two and a half days trapped beneath a collapsed apartment building, out on the city’s periferia , she must’ve made her living as a shady operator of one kind or another. And it didn’t help, so far as Barbara’s suspicions were concerned, that Romy bore an eerie resemblance to the bad girls of her un-gentrified childhood Brooklyn. If the estranged wife had any image for the toughness she wanted to achieve, she’d picked it up from the skanks in Carroll Gardens. The dropouts from Sacred Heart. The sluts always had a mongrel quality, as if their clothes were so skimpy because they fell between types, as if they needed all that makeup to pull the eyes and mouth into their assigned places. Romy’s eyes still seemed like something off the far Asian steppes, and her complexion remained unfiltered honey, and this much together suggested Baghdad or Tel Aviv. But her sharp brow and nose, her tight and uplifted shape, these suggested London or St. Tropez. Granted, the gypsy’s legs would grow stubby in another fifteen or twenty years. They weren’t so shapely just now, either, still recovering bulk and muscle. But at Romy’s age — perhaps within a year of John Junior’s age — she turned everything to teasy combinations. Even in this skin-full corner of Italy, among the low-rise Capris and the billboards full of breasts, she had men gazing sidelong and puckering in thought.

But it wasn’t just the gypsy’s looks that made Barbara believe she used to be a criminal. It wasn’t anything Silky Kahlberg had to say either. The evidence that mattered was the way that, no matter where the family’s excursions took them, Romy was always waiting when they arrived. She was there before they set up the Big Top, and she did it her first day out of the chair.

That morning Kahlberg had begun trying to create the illusion that Barbara’s family was no different from the other Americans in Italy. They were bonding amid the ruins, he’d wanted them to think, just like everyone else. And by the end of the trip the Lulucitas had also attracted the usual cluster of supplicants, with their martyrs and rosaries. But the gypsy had been there waiting for them. She’d tuned into a different information system, side of the mouth.

Back on the day she was healed, the girl had pretty much dropped off Barbara’s radar once everyone got to the hospital. Rather the mother had paid attention to Paul, on whom DiPio of course ran the same tests as he did on Romy, plus a couple more. As the stunned afternoon wore on into evening, too, the doctor more than once pulled Jay and Barbara aside with beard-scratching requests “not to do nothing all of a suddenly.” He clutched his neckwear and pleaded with her “to stay in this place where the child demonstrates this power, and where we have him under observation from the first.” Meanwhile the boy was passing all his tests and looking fresh. He caught a cat-nap during the ride from the camp. He suffered no crying episodes, either, not even when Jay and Barb ducked into a storage room for a quick hissy fit. Mother and father worked through a bout of mutual recriminations, their words barely emerging from the backs of their throats, and then they’d stepped out from the closet to confront a blasé boy in re-tucked black and white. Mr. Paul was unfazed. What was the big deal, if he’d become a child saint? He knew the drill by now, the role was a Mediterranean classic anyway, and it hadn’t escaped his notice that the fast-rising Maddalena had made another video. He knew about the crowds, the competing packs of TV units and miracle-seekers, first outside the hospital and later in the Vomero. He didn’t see what Mama was so worried about, keeping a hand on his head — her fingers actually threaded through his hair — till they were back inside the apartment. He didn’t see why she had to keep his big brothers breathing down his neck, one at each shoulder.

No, Barbara hadn’t given the gypsy a second glance, that afternoon at the hospital. Nor Kahlberg either; she’d tuned the officer out as he began to make arrangements for the morning. He started right in working the cell phone, and he did quite a job, the mother had to admit. Apparently the Lieutenant Major had pull with the Consulate. Between sunset and breakfast he got his entire North American et cetera to put pressure on the editors and producers of the local and national news, reining in the media a bit, allowing the family some recovery space in the coming days. Barbara didn’t want to think about the quid pro quo. Rather she pictured Kahlberg’s arrangements as a wrestling match between titans. The aging but powerful Captain Red White & Blue took down, with effort, the young but dangerous Mass Communication, Master of Disaster. She pictured it as a comics panel, a fairy tale — the sort of thing she’d read to Paul that very night, once she got him into bed. She sat down beside the boy with the anthology on her lap, the big book of fairy tales she’d brought from Bridgeport. She’d known he’d want to hear them sometime, her Mr. Paul, her fairy child.

The mother could still play Mother Goose. That night she picked a favorite from a land far away, the story of the Irish Queen Bab.

As for the Gypsy Queen, the dark young lovely restored to her feet, who could say when John Junior had noticed her? Perhaps it had happened up in the Center’s chapel, in the sweltering purple aftermath of the riot. His Michelangelo lips had taken on a fresh shape, as he looked the girl over. Then the next morning Kahlberg had taken the family far away. They’d gone out to Capua, due north.