John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

The reconfigurations appeared far trickier than the portraits mounted out at the Refugee Center, the effects the Lieutenant Major had pulled off in the NATO print shop. On every page, to begin with, there snaked a scrap of that Cyrillic-looking font. The lettering called to mind old cartoons, Disney, the sign swinging over the door to the shop of the fortune-teller from Transylvania. The text fit into the screen every which way, an eerie shadow. But then the rest of whatever was on the page, the doctored photographs, were eerie to begin with. In one, their middle child had been enlarged and given a full-body halo. That much was a no-brainer, an obvious touch, but the divine aura had been rendered so brightly that Mom and Pop and the siblings were reduced to ghosts by comparison. Also the heads and shoulders of the rest of the family, against the lower curves of the Paul’s overheated corona, had been sculpted so that they composed the local skyline. Barbara herself served as Vesuvius, her head jammed into her chest, further down than any owl’s. Nor was this page the strangest, the most baroque.

Another portrayed Paul with one hand up in the Pope’s two-finger wave, while a wild range of photo-images and cartoon figures knelt around him in prayer. Barb couldn’t tell if the assorted worshippers had been derived from pictures of the family or not. She saw a satanic Mafioso with horns, a tail, a black suit, and a sawed-off shotgun (an accessorized Jaybird, perhaps?); a woman in a skirt suit much tighter and shorter than Roebuck’s, her stockings showing garters (could this be Barb herself, slimmed down?), her head framed by headphones and a mike; a Brit-looking pair in old-style knickers and caps, possibly Tweedledum and Tweedledee, except these two would turn and exchange a deep kiss every few seconds (God knows who the designer had in mind); a big decaying leper or zombie (maybe JJ) with a lover’s rose between all-but-lipless teeth; a bearded guerilla-scholar (in glasses more or less like Chris’s), one arm bent around a camo-colored Uzi and the other around a stack of books; Uncle Sam in his striped top hat and tails (might’ve been old Aurora, in drag); a pizza cook in an apron (Dora?), her head bent over a pie on a massive oven-spatula; and a mermaid with wings, fluttering just enough to keep herself perched on her coiled fishtail (Sylvia?).

“Quality graphics,” declared Roebuck.

A fascinating design, the day after a murder. Jay looked it over with a small, canny smile, the same as he’d shown the family whenever he brought home some new, shelf-ready sauce or entrée. The ingredients on today’s box, however, were peppered with local slang. The site had been developed in Naples. Also most pages again called to mind the Nativity scenes, the presepi , sold on the nearby saint-streets. The Christmas-morning figurines might be sculpted in three dimensions, out of old-fashioned terra-cotta, but they too were sometimes adapted from the news. Come to think of it, statuettes of the American miracolino , adapted for a crèche, might already be on sale in the city. For years now Italian politicians had provided the face for the Good Shepherd or the malignant Herod. The dark-skinned refugees from across the Mediterranean had become shepherds, or gypsies.

And on the web the most pervasive foreign touch was that Cyrillic weirdness. Barbara bent closer to the screen, narrowing her eyes.

As for Jay, he wouldn’t be put off Raising his eyes, he reiterated how the family could “represent,” gesturing at the busy screen. Then he brought up the cost.

“When you think of what the taxpayers spend on foreign aid, I mean. And then you see all this goodwill, here.” He gestured at the laptop again, his hand brushing Barbara’s lowered head. “Goodwill towards Americans, for once. All over the worldwide web. Think what that’s worth.”

Hard to believe this was the same man who’d burst into tears over getting his passport back. Yet yesterday, five minutes after the phone call from the Consulate, he’d taken Barb out on the balcony to explain the quid pro quo. While Jay had talked the sun had finished setting, but the balcony railings still held the heat of midday — and so did Barbara, apparently, so distracted by the rough and tumble at the museum she hadn’t realized the opportunity presented by tonight’s call. It hadn’t even occurred to her that if the Lulucitas stayed in town, that would amount to chocolate and champagne, in terms of public relations. The family offered a ready-for-prime-time validation of the American presence abroad.

And you thought MTV put a sweet deal on the table? the husband had asked her. Compared to these people, forget about it .

Out on the balcony, for an air-headed moment, Barbara had believed that the Consulate’s offer was the primary consideration in whether or not the family stayed in town. Her former VP of Sales had turned her head around; she’d seen what he was getting at. To see through it, she’d needed another pull of beer. The Jaybird’s strategy had another goal, too, much as he might be right about this meeting at the Consulate. The conference with the Attaché, if it went the way the husband wanted, would also keep his wife in place. Barbara saw that too, after another swallow of summer-light Peroni. But she’d gone along with the man nonetheless; she’d told him what he needed to hear. Glancing through the balcony doors into the dining room, checking on Aurora and the girls playing ponies and birds under the table, Barbara had assured her husband that she hardly intended to hop a flight for New York right this minute. She could hardly abandon Paul and the other kids when they’d strayed this close to the line of fire. It wasn’t the kids’ fault that Aurora had chosen such a moment to breeze into town.

Button-mouthed, slow to take back the beer, Jay had eyed her. He’d revealed something like softness that had overcome him at seeing the passports.

Owl Girl , he’d said finally, it’s your call .

After that, while he’d roughed up an estimate of how much they might ask for at the Consulate, the husband had sounded clipped, reined in. Nothing like the Jaybird who held forth in Roebuck’s office, this afternoon, his voice ringing off the wraparound block glass in the far corner. So far he’d been right about everything except the passports. All business, he laid out “the kind of help my family could use,” and fended off Roebuck’s objections (“I mean, it’s not just about tuition, when a guy like JJ or Chris gets an internship”). Barb was let alone, free to concentrate on the screen. On this page the Cyrillic lettering was wedged above Paul’s upraised blessing. The s’s were like snakes, the t’s like fangs. Most people, seeing that, would think of gypsies.

Yet the language, Barb came to see, was more or less English. The saint of fire whistles while he burns , she read, tu too tu .

But Roebuck was tapping again, the tabletop this time. “Our organizations can guarantee absolute security,” the Attaché said. “Nobody could reach you. That’s twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Nobody whatsoever.”

Oh, another guarantee. Barbara looked back at the black, contorted words. Today, as it happened, was Tuesday, and the meeting had started at two.

“Now you know,” Jay said, “we’re talking a bigger crew, at home these days. We’re talking my mother, too.”

“Certainly. Your mother can count on the same protection.”

Barbara extended a finger and dragged the cursor to another link.

“Yes, do take a look, Mrs. Lulucita,” Roebuck said. “By all means, do. You’ve been an inspiration to these people.”

“Then there’s the Center,” Jay said. “I don’t know what they know, out there…”