John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

‘You two. One would think you’d been married to the man.”

“No,” said Barbara. ‘You still don’t get it. Wrong connection. It’s that Silky could’ve been one of our kids.”

“Well.” The woman gave a tiny shrug, nothing Italian. “The evidence thus far points clearly towards trafficking in false documentation. False papers.”

The UN rep looked more disapproving than ever.

“Earthquake I.D.,” Jay said.

“Counterfeit, yes. Certainly there’s a market.”

Barbara found herself imagining that it was she who’d left the Arab so disappointed. She’d let this man down, and a lot of other people too, because she should have guessed this weeks ago.

“The evidence appears pretty convincing,” the Attaché went on. Kahlberg appeared to have gotten hold of a template for the new documents of identification.

“He did it himself,” Barbara put in, loud and exasperated. “He did it himself, he ran the things off in the print shop. How could we not have guessed?”

“Well, it’s not that simple, Mrs. Lulucita.”

“Jay, you remember, he even bragged about it. He told us, the public relations officer has access to the facilities for—”

“It’s not that simple. These are official documentation, watermarked and notarized. You can’t simply run them off.”

Barbara heard Jay sighing, struggling the same as she, unable to fathom how he’d failed to notice the giveaways. His wife had told him often enough about the Lieutenant Major’s sheaf of “authorizations,” coming out of his bag each time the family arrived at another tourist site. The Attaché meantime acknowledged that, “in keeping with his position,” Kahlberg had already been issued a notary stamp. The template for the new I.D., in the same way, would’ve been a simple enough business for an officer who wore two hats, or was it five? “All he needed was a single key and a four-digit combination.” The Lieutenant Major could pick up the template when he needed, and no one in the Organization would be the wiser.

“But the stock, the paper,” Roebuck went on, “well. That was another matter. It wasn’t as if the man could simply open a cabinet, thank you and goodbye. All the investigation has turned up so far is, the officer somehow got his hands on something like a ream. With that, he could run off the counterfeits as they were needed.”

“You’re saying, he didn’t keep a stash around?” Barbara kept her tone conversational. “He waited till, till someone asked, and then he printed off—?”

“Well, I’m not ‘saying.’ We don’t have all the facts, Mrs. Lulucita. I can only tell you what the evidence suggests.”

Jay raised his chin. “At the museum, he had the bag with him.”

“Yes . He’d come prepared to make a deal, it would appear. But as your wife will recall, the papers were left lying on the dock.”

Barb remembered: paper that rustled more noisily than the hair on the corpse.

Jay stuck to the subject, pointing out that Kahlberg “always had an angle,” and he wouldn’t have left home with his entire stash in his bag. “Bag like that, hey. Easy pickings.” Instead the liaison man had probably set aside a number of the counterfeits, somewhere safe, all signed and ready to go. “Like guys who keep four or five hundred in the sock drawer.”

Roebuck shook her head. “It’s not my place to speculate.”

“But, I mean. Chances are. There’s more of them out there somewhere.”

Barbara returned to her recollections of the crooked soldier-boy at work. He’d met his contacts right under her nose, and more often than not, that very evening the mother had told Jay all about it. She’d wondered aloud, in particular, about the men who’d looked over the so-called authorizations. Some of Kahlberg’s inspectors had hardly looked official, and she’d never understood why they’d always needed a gunman standing by (in plainclothes, but a gunman, anyone could see). Then yesterday there’d been that Umberto. He hadn’t been Silky’s buyer, Barb would guess, but rather the middleman, the gofer. Either way, it was one more reason you couldn’t trust the “museum guide” as a witness. Besides, the killers hadn’t been in the business; they’d ignored Umberto once he was down and they’d left the fake I.D. — for just one of which 500 Euros would be a bargain rate — scattered across the loading dock. All this came to Barbara so quickly, so transparently, here in the Consulate. Here a long way from her bed up in the Vomero, or her walks around the ancient centro .

“Now, I must reiterate,” Roebuck was saying. “I must make it quite perfectly clear, this man operated on his own. Entirely autonomous.”

“Autonomous, hey.” Jay broke into a smirk. “I think I like what they call them in the movies, a rogue agent.”

“I’m quite serious, Mr. Lulucita. It’s as you said, this man always had an angle.”

So many angles that Barb began to wish she could get another look at the coded message on the computer screen, now facing away. She thought of Saint Joan of Arc. Joan had died in a fire. But so had a lot of others, and the mother knew what it would look like if she spun the computer and studied the website again. Meanwhile Jay was conceding the Attaché’s point — Silky had run a one-man shop. His documents business had nothing to do with NATO, the UN, or the Consulate.

“Well . Thank you for saying so at last. And for my part, let me once more offer the sincerest apology, from everyone in our community…”

“It’s okay, Roebuck. I mean, nobody’s perfect. Barb and me, you heard about our ups and downs, here. We’re not saints.”

Roebuck allowed herself a tepid joke: if the Lulucitas hadn’t been saints when they’d arrived in Naples, then dealing with a Tempter like the late Lieutenant Major had made them holy. Certainly.

“Oh, look,” Barbara said. “What matters is, whoever Silky’s connections were, they won’t come after us.”

The older woman nodded firmly, bending over the keyboard. As she logged off and shut down, Roebuck assured her visitors that any criminal interest in their family was now “moot.” It had died with officer Kahlberg.

“You merely served as the front for the officer. The cover story.”

“Not a player, not a target,” Jay said. “I hear that. But, while we’re talking about safety, I mean, also. Three weeks ago somebody tried to kidnap me.”

“Ah, that was a separate matter, Mr. Lulucita.” Kahlberg’s under-the-table operations had taken place at economic levels far above those of the desperate clandestini who’d briefly manhandled Jay.

“But, I mean. Now you offer a guarantee. Everywhere we go, we’re safe.”

Roebuck gave a small smile, then made a remark about “acts of God.” She reminded Barbara and Jay that they lived in a land of earthquakes. “Vesuvius, well. She’s listed as an active volcano.” Her eyes, even behind bifocals, revealed a sharpening glitter. “But Mr. Lulucita, since you bring this business up, I must add. Your near-kidnapping would seem to have justified returning at once to New York. Three weeks ago, just as you say. You had a tailor-made excuse for breaking your contract, and yet you remained in Naples. You and your wife both.”

Barbara didn’t realize she was reaching for her husband, for the elastic under his shirt, till her fingers touched his waistline.

‘You come in here,” the Attaché said, “and you question our motives.”

To see Roebuck lash back was a help, actually. Barbara left off fretting about Romy and JJ, keeping her hand at the Jaybird’s hip while he ignored the other woman’s implication, once more bringing up yesterday’s murder. “That investigation of yours, I mean. You’ve still got a lot of holes.”