John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Why, hey? What kind of mess was he into?”

The way the Attaché picked at the lip of her keyboard, with a sound like trying to strike a wet match, made it plain that the woman had some degree of discretion, in this office anyway. Here Roebuck had room to improvise.

“We don’t think you’re the Mafia,” her husband said.

“Certainly.”

“We don’t think it was Romy either,” Barb said. “Romy couldn’t kill anyone.”

“Well I wish I shared your confidence, Mrs. Lulucita.” Roebuck found it a relief to be talking about someone other than her former colleague in Public Relations. “You have to admit it doesn’t look good for the girl. She did flee the scene.”

“But, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, with bullets flying?”

Jay let go of her again, instead signaling out of the corner of his eye. Go, Owl.

“Since when does that make her a criminal mastermind,” Barbara went on, “fleeing the scene?”

“Well, a criminal mastermind…”

“Roebuck, we don’t even know if she was on that loading dock.”

Jay nodded with his entire upper body. “Barb’s right. Hey, our Paul, he got that girl out of that wheelchair. The last thing she’d want is to put him in harm’s way.”

The way Roebuck shook her head was just the opposite, restrained, a ticking. “I can’t see why you two are so quick to defend the girl. You especially, Mrs. Lulucita. The way she feels about John Junior, I would think you’d find it a threat.”

“But that’s what I’m saying. That’s what Jay and I both are saying. With John Junior in her life, the last thing the girl would do is pick up a gun.”

“There’s an eyewitness who puts her at the scene.”

“Eyewitness.” Barbara gave her the same sour face she’d used on the liaison man. “That Umberto, or whatever his name is. Roebuck, you talk about the Camorra — even before I left the loading dock, the guy admitted he was a crook.”

“Well. I can’t say what was in his statement to the police, Mrs. Lulucita. But I believe all he told you was, he wasn’t on the staff of the Nazionale.”

“Hey. Okay. Say the girl was on the dock. Say we trust this guy, impersonating a security guard and carrying an unregistered handgun. Okay. But, I mean. Romy would’ve known what would happen next. The cops would come after the gypsy.”

“And they’d be doing their job. The girl has known criminal associates.”

“Mary, Mother of God! You people are just full of things we already know. You’re saying, Silky bent the rules and Romy used to turn a trick or two? Is that what you brought us down here to tell us?”

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Roebuck said, “is that at this point, your great friend Romy is as much of an unknown as the late Lieutenant Major.”

“Unknown?” Jay leaned the woman’s way again, a move that put the two of them practically nose to nose. “He’s an unknown, Silky? No way, Roebuck. No way, not to you people. You and this cigar-store Indian here. You know what old Silky was into.”

The Attaché didn’t shrink, squaresville. Barb recalled that Kahlberg, on the other hand, always had another move. He’d been all dart and flutter.

‘You know,” Jay went on, “the way we used to do it at Viccieco and Sons, we used to share what we had.” The man had resigned as Vice President of Sales, in charge of New York and New England. “The way it worked, in order to get something, we would give up something. Sound good to you?”

“In principle, Mr. Lulucita. Though I’d prefer to keep the tenor of this—”

“In principle, exactly. You’d prefer, you’d prefer to deal. Better that than a lawsuit.” Jay’s gestures kept everyone else back from the table. “I mean, that’s your worst case, right? You hauled us in here before they’ve even finished mopping up the bloodstains because, worst case, Barb and I would call a lawyer.”

The UN rep appeared to have lost his disdain, one eye narrowing.

“Hey. Barb and I and the kids, that’s an innocent family, there.”

The mother wanted to follow up, to agree, but she was too tight in the chest.

“Well,” Roebuck said. “No one in this office put your children in harm’s way.”

“Yeah. Okay. But it looks bad anyway, Roebuck. Looks like a mess.”

Five minutes after the Consulate had called, yesterday evening, the man had worked out a strategy. He’d asked Barbara out onto the balcony, and she’d asked Aurora to keep the kids inside — maybe the one time Barb had managed to look her mother-in-law in the eye. Out there above the cameras, husband and wife had shared a bottle of pale Italian beer. At a couple of the Jaybird’s suggestions, she’d actually broken into a grin and raised a toast.

Upstairs in the Consulate, today, he kept on. “But, I mean. You people wouldn’t bring us all the way down here just to beg. You know, to beg? ‘Please, you guys, please don’t make a bad thing worse.’”

“Mr. Lulucita, really. No one in this office has it in mind to beg.”

“Sure. Nobody wants that. Barb and me, coming down here, we didn’t want that. What we wanted to hear was, what’ve you got for us? I mean. There’s got to be something else on the table. Hey? Something in return for our cooperation.”

The Attaché showed the suit beside her an unsubtle look, something else you’d never see from Officer Kahlberg.

“Think about it. What we offer, Barb and me, our family.” Jay spoke more slowly. “It’s not just, you don’t want us to hurt you. It’s also how we can help you. Think about the way this family can represent.”

Roebuck turned back to her laptop, some sort of decision obvious in how she gathered her fingers over the keyboard. Barbara waited out the black thought of slamming the screen down on the woman’s knuckles.

“And all we ask, hey. It’s got to be on a different basis, this time.”

“Tell me something,” Roebuck said. “Have you two seen your web site?”

Now there was a bit of Silky, sleight of hand, and they had to wait a moment or two while the wireless hookup came on. But Barbara’s husband, the Cool-bird, shifted his weight so smoothly that the leather beneath him didn’t creak.

“I suppose you have,” Roebuck went on. “It sounds like you’ve thought this through pretty thoroughly.”

The laptop screen, its back to Barbara, spilled colors over Roebuck’s hand. You would’ve thought the woman had pulled a curtain back from a stained-glass window. Then the machine turned out to sit on a Lazy Susan swivel, wouldn’t you know it. When the Attaché spun the thing around, the display appeared to be all saints and angels.

“I’m sure you already realize,” Roebuck said, “what people make of this family.”

Saints and angels, that’s what. Across the small screen sprawled a radiant media collage with the Lulucitas at its center. Around a colorized newspaper photo of parents and children, themselves arranged around a twice-his-size Paul, there spiraled scanned-in headlines and smaller photos, plus catch-phrases and clip-art taken out of other web toolboxes. There were even a few words in a vaguely Cyrillic lettering.

Barb had never taken a good look at the site before. At most she’d had a glance at this home page, their “internet presence.” Of course Chris and JJ got on the site a couple of times a day, and they visited all the links to which Roebuck was now taking Barbara and Jay. But whenever her two oldest had called Mama to the computer, either she’d been in no mood to see something that made her marriage look good or she hadn’t wanted to find Paul looking any stranger than he did already. This business on the web was only another media spettacolo , after all, more of the same circus as beneath her balcony. Today, however, as Roebuck lingered now at this page and now at that, Barbara had to acknowledge that the site’s designers came to the circus with a supernatural new menagerie. Even when Barbara spotted an image she recognized, from the papers or TV, it was so altered by electronic surgery as to suggest another animal entirely.