John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Try divorce,” she said. “Or Naples divorce.”

After variations in Italian and English, handled without once meeting Whitman’s eyes, she added ‘Angry Mama.” Next, “Crazy Mama.”

She could see that the boho was glancing at her, his long hair shifting in the corner of her eye. Still he never hesitated to sling a new set of letters and digits across the screen. They worked like skipping stones, setting off the ripple of windows popping open. The central box always read the same, Invalid , and Barbara came to think that some of her excitement was entirely ordinary. What mother doesn’t get a little thrill out of checking her kids’ pockets? As each potential password came to mind, however, she kept sensing that deeper release. What would you call this, if not confession in code? She rose and paced, wheeling between the worktable and the air conditioner, and Whitman had to ask that she speak more slowly. His English couldn’t keep up.

When they hit on the password, she was facing the air conditioner, and for a while she stayed there, letting the freon tickle her neck. The Open Sesame to the boys’ private footage had nothing to do with her. The choice must’ve been John Junior’s.

“My ro,” Whitman said, drawing out the pronunciation as the unedited files appeared on the screen. “From Romy.”

Children grow, they grow away. How many reminders did she need?

“Looks like there aren’t too many files.” When the young man pointed at the screen, his silver snake-ring turned blue. “One two, three four five.”

Not many yet, Barb thought. Not when the children were only starting out. She returned to her chair, still savoring traces of exhilaration. Maybe she should consider today another trial methodology. Onscreen she saw four files whose labels included either “Npls” or “hstry,” and one more, with the simple name “INNOCENT.”

“Innocent,” Barbara said.

Whitman set up the link to the video player. The window on the software opened, and at its bottom a set of concentric circles shrank and grew, shrank and grew, a visual cue for establishing the connection — or perhaps the blinking and thickly outlined eye of the gypsy girl, one of those Mongol-goddess eyes, never so fierce and burning as when they suddenly took over the player’s window. Romy had got a tan, some impossible tan that lent her skin a lush hint of violet. Her gypsy trimmings worked as well, the earrings full of shadows and the scarf electric with tinsel. She was made for this, precisely the sort of dark and voluptuous fairy the technology needed to open its box of secrets, and John Junior stuck with the talking-head arrangement for the first few minutes. He and his girl had found some privacy in a grove of trees off a highland roadway. From time to time you could hear the whine of a motorino , and see that Romy delivered this appeal from well above city and Bay. The faraway water behind her glimmered a chromium blue that picked up the hints in her face. The trees were umbrella pine and the gray shreds in one corner of the sky must’ve come from the volcano.

The gypsy began: “I am innocent of Silky Kahlberg’s murder. Like, it was almost the other way around.”

John Junior interrupted, in a voice the mother couldn’t make out, more restrained than she was used to from him. Romy shifted places in a blink, reappearing framed between tree trunks. Her hair had been tied back too.

“I did not shoot Lieutenant-Major L–Loius Kahlberg,” she repeated. “I am innocent, and for sure, it could’ve been the other way around. Could’ve been him still running around and me…”

The gypsy lowered her head, trailing a fingernail down her glittering scarf.

“I knew that he was dealing in fake ID’s,” she went on finally. “In counterfeits, officer Kahlberg. Also he knew that I knew. For sure, we both knew the signs, like—”

JJ interrupted again, and Romy reappeared in better posture. With this third take she got across that, at the Museo Nazionale, the liaison officer had planned to kill her.

“I warn the Lieutenant-Major that I will expose him. On the streets there are ways.” Her smile was bitter, the shape of the noise of another passing bike. “The normies never know, the signs we use. Like the SMS, the message on the telefonino . Only better, because Kahlberg, he got it right away, and he knew he had to get rid of me.”

Her stare gathered force. “The man played me, at the Museo. He played me.”

Girl, thought Barbara, join the club.

“Officer Kahlberg,” Romy was saying, “he set it up, he will get rid of me and like, he will look like a hero same time.” Her chin lifted, her confidence growing. “The way the man played it, he will be on top both ways. On top out on the streets, so nobody could take him down, and on top in old Babylon too, in NATO.”

So far as the “play” was concerned, the Lieutenant Major’s plan to get this girl out of his silky hair, Barbara had heard all she needed. The museum visit had always struck her as a dubious trip. And when she’d asked for time alone with the kids, that afternoon, the liaison and his Umberto had run through their bebop repertoire, all those significant looks. What they’d needed was the opportunity to get the gypsy alone. The mother’s request had given them the chance to improvise.

“He was looking forward to it,” said the girl onscreen. “That gun of his, he couldn’t wait to use that.”

Barb was nodding, getting it. She even believed she understood why the liaison had thrown in the tall tale about Romy getting violent: she went right upside his head .

“I knew the man, for sure. But I never expected trouble at the museum.”

Neither the gypsy nor anyone else had cracked Umberto’s head, before the Lieutenant Major went down. But Silky must’ve had it in mind to smack his flunky a good one. Umberto would need a wound to match the story told by his boss. Being boss mattered a lot to the Lieutenant Major, Barbara could see that now. So the liaison must’ve intended first to put a bullet or two in JJ’s girlfriend — or five or ten. Then to top off his afternoon, and to make a point for his colleagues in the Camorra, he’d have given Umberto a pistol-whipping. The NATO man might also have thrown in a bit of groping, a bit of grinding, letting the so-called museum guide know what an American officer kept beneath his Palm Beach whites. He would’ve enjoyed that.

The charade became transparent to Barbara, like a Christmas crèche in which the terra cotta melted away to reveal frames of barbed wire. Meanwhile the fruitiness of Whitman’s shampoo grew stronger, and the girl onscreen, recalling that morning at the Nazionale, looked ever more frightened. The lone stabilizing influence was John Junior, running his set like a pro. Like an adult, leaving the choice of time and place to Romy (the gypsy knew the good hiding places), but meantime taking charge of the larger project. The password, the purpose of the interview — that must’ve been all JJ. And every time you heard Barb’s oldest, through the speakers mounted on the walls, you heard genuine caring, but also restraint. A good deal less histrionic than his mother, lately. JJ’s sweet sanity might in fact make as much of a difference for the former cripple, over time, as his younger brother’s healing hands. Before the picture onscreen jumped again, Romy had broken into a more open smile.

Then JJ went to a whole-body shot, and you could see that the girl had toned down her look. Her jeans fit more loosely, and she toyed with what looked like a childish prop, a thin, smooth length of wood. Was it a sawed-off broomstick? Where had she found that?

She flipped the stick from hand to hand, her tone of voice playful. “I have to show you this. Pinocchio.”