John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

The gypsy might’ve fallen in love, the kind of love an adult had to stand back and envy, a thing of the spirit and yet powerful enough to raise blisters. But she hadn’t forgotten how to tease.

Like, who needs all this dumb old paperwork .

“This morning,” Barbara told Cesare, “that girl, whatever else she was up to, she had her fun. She made a game of it, Freak Out the White Man.”

“And you admire her.”

She laughed, briefly. If she couldn’t have a tantrum, if she couldn’t do whatever it was Romy had done — whatever — she might as well laugh. When she let her head drop back against the pew, the small thump felt good, actually. A reality check. “Cesare, that girl, this morning, you’d have admired her too. Don’t you see how it helps to talk about it? Don’t you see how much you help? I’m saying, she got to that man so bad, he stormed off”

“Stormed off? The officer left you?”

“Well, first, he gave me an earful.” The little whore has got to go . “An ultimatum, is that what you’d call it? Kahlberg told me, if Romy was part of the deal,” if you insist on treating this trash like a member of the family , “then he wasn’t going to arrange any more excursions. The Lulucitas, he said, we’d have to do without, what was it? ‘The benefits that the Organization offers.’”

“The… benefits? The obscene cornucopia of Empire, he intends to cut you off?”

“That was today, Cesare. He said it was the Organization or the girl.”

“Oh, the fellow’s a Master of the Universe.” The lines on the priest’s face deepened. “The rest of us, all the children of God, we’re cast out of the garden.”

“But you hear what I’m saying? We stayed there, the rest of us, in San Lorenzo.”

“Yes, and good for you, Mrs. Lulucita. Furthermore, let me assure you, I appreciate that you came here and told me. I understand your irritation with this, this Lieutenant Major.”

“Well, we stayed, we had Chris. We had the girl too, she knows a lot…”

Barbara let the story drop, losing herself at the wooden ceiling, a classic ceiling for any church without a dome. Slat-thin panels, railroad-tie rafters. In her mind’s eye lingered other sets of lines, the stone fittings where the roof of one ancient sanctuary, beneath San Lorenzo, met the floor of the next generation above it. Then there were the seams across Cesare’s face. The man’s voice sounded seamy too. He was repeating himself, prompting the mother: “The girl, you admire her.”

There was some echo she hadn’t noticed before. She thought of the strays Cesare had taken in, the two clandestini camped out in his church cellar, a simple hollow compared to what she’d seen downtown. Then with her next blink all today’s lines came together, they knotted so that their ends stretched off to the echoing cool corners of the stone. And Barb had an idea. The notion triggered a flashing along her spine, a trembling, yet at the same time it cleared away the fog or whatever it was that had clogged her spirit since Paul’s second miracle. Yes, and she’d needed a church in order to get to this point, never mind whether it had a dome or not. Yes — she knew what she had to do in order to prove that Silky and Jay had a deal.

“You wish you could be like that girl.” The priest knew her better than anyone in Naples but he hadn’t noticed the change. ‘Young again and stronger than you ever dreamed.”

The gypsy had shown her the way, no point denying it. Even Barbara’s disrespectful posture, slumped in the pew with her dress above her knees, seemed like something Romy had taught her. The girl couldn’t so much as shift her weight without exposing some hot flesh.

“Like Samson among the Philistines, don’t you know.”

The mother had a different image for what the girl had taught her. She pictured a kiss full of disease, a nasty surprise for an unfaithful lover. Surprise, that was the key.

“Mrs. Lulucita, are you there? First you wake me up and then you take a riposo?”

Barb shook her head, rolled her shoulders, pulled an apologetic smile. But she sat up knowing what she was doing next, holding down the hem of her dress. Also she got her bearings from the old man’s strong eyebrows and nose. His looks remained potent, a good front for a protest poster or a call to the people. Now Barbara had joined him in the revolution. Telling Jay that they were through, that had been just for starters. Today the gypsy had carried her to the next level, where every action would cast enormous shadows against antique pale stone. And the kids would be safe, sure. The place was wall-to-wall security, the kids would be fine, and the fact that the mother needed them along actually bore out the seriousness of what she was up to. The children proved again and better that she was no mad housewife.

“Is that it, then, signora? Is your soul at rest concerning today, the choice you made?”

“Well.” She gave another breathless laugh. “Well, my soul!”

This morning, the Lieutenant Major wouldn’t be joining them. His absence made it happen, Barbara’s plan, her revolution. After all, yesterday she’d heard the man loud and clear: him or Romy. Today then the officer would follow through. But on the other hand he’d set up the day’s itinerary a week ago now; everyone in the family had gotten the printout. The liaison man couldn’t go breaking those arrangements out of the clear blue, not while he still had others to answer to. But he could refuse to go along, depriving the Lulucitas of his “benefits.” So Barb had her opportunity, her surprise.

Silky Kahlberg would learn what she’d done via the city’s murmurous website — the ojetti on the chapel walls, the bulging hammered metal, could all be receiver units. And when the officer did get the news, it would shake him up worse than Romy had on the steps of San Lorenzo. The mother would loom like a whole new ferocity, out of nowhere. Barbarian.

Though she wasn’t about to dip her hair in blood, nothing like that. The kids would be safe. Under Cesare’s church ceiling, her inspiration had amounted to nothing more than the right place at the right time. If it worked, she would rip off all the Lieutenant Major’s masks at once, and Jay’s too. And if it didn’t? Naturally the mother had her doubts, those moments when her breasts felt as heavy and as roughly packaged as groceries for two teenage boys and three other kids besides. After she’d left the Vomero church, after one of the NATO farm-boys had as always walked her down to her home palazzo and checked out the lobby and elevator, Barbara was grateful for the few moments alone in the creaking lift. She spent the time studying herself in the mirrored door. Had the woman in the reflection in fact developed new muscles of the spirit? Strength enough to trip up the overgrown tennis brat who’d been swatting her family all over town? Or was this afternoon only another pivot of the inner whipsaw? Barbara might’ve been fooled by how tough her skin had grown, leathery, after twenty days in the Mezzogiorno . The country of permanent noon. Local women resorted to cosmetics she’d never heard of, and there were mineral baths out on the islands.

The lift stopped and her reflection split apart. In another ten minutes Barbara was planting her idea in her children’s heads.

Not that she had to force anything. She wasn’t the first to bring up the hunger strikers, not by a long chalk. While Barbara took the chair by the door and swapped her street shoes for house slippers, Chris sat just beyond the entry’s archway, before an IBM clone out of some valley up by the Alps — a machine provided free of charge, along with a fat and speedy internet connection. The boy had pulled up a page about the castles of Naples, and he went straight into an announcement about dell’Ovo. He knew his brothers and sisters would want to hear it. Loudly Chris explained that what was going on down by the waterfront was history in action; it was the first time in hundreds of years they’d kept prisoners in the old safe-house.