John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

O.S.: The paper? What’s the big deal with that?

( ROMY frowns )

O.S: I mean, Silky was in the NATO shop. He had high-level access—

ROMY: No, my J-bud. Listen to yourself, how you are talking, just another American, you don’t know the street. Another American who thinks the Sixth Fleet has some kind of super magic machines. You think only NATO has the access. JJ, for sure, I could go downtown right now, and I could buy a printing machine.

( shrugs ) They come in every day. They come from Japan, and they go to the trucks. You think we can’t get into those trucks? You think we can’t like, do the printing in a basement somewhere? ( shades eyes, squints past camera )

O.S.: Okay, okay. You’re saying what Silky had, that no one else had, was the paper stock. So maybe if he left any of the counterfeits behind, if we find those—

ROMY: How long has that clandestino been up there? ( points away, but looks into camera ) Honey, why can’t you be more like your brother?

( CUT )

As her driver ferried her back through the city, Barbara was thinking about love and romance. About men and women, keeping their clothes on and otherwise — she had time. She was picking up Jay at DiPio’s clinic, and she’d made sure to have the older boys stay out of the apartment, out where they wouldn’t open their laptop and doctor the evidence. She’d arranged it with a single call to the security who’d gone out with the older boys today; she set up a meeting down in the Vomero piazza. At the gelateria , Barbara had said. She’d asked that Aurora join them, as well, if anyone knew where to find the old playgirl. The whole family would gather at the tables clustered alongside the piazza, where Chris and JJ wouldn’t dare to get into their film files.

What was on those files was no small accomplishment, the mother had to admit. Just getting around the security team had taken some doing. Barbara especially respected the older boy, keeping his Vesuvius in his pants. But things had reached a point that called to mind the message Romy had posted, ten days ago, on the family site: too, too, too. Barbara wasn’t going to waste time with her bodyguard, either, though she found him sitting over pictures of half-clad women. Out in the studio’s front room, the plump young security man had found a set of promotional 8xl0’s, glossies of Italian starlets. The mother didn’t say a word, holding out a hand for his phone. As for Whitman, he got twice the extra payment they’d agreed to, and Barbara counted off the bills slowly, making sure the sailor-suited blade didn’t miss her look. He was an artist; he knew how to keep his mouth shut. She left the production company feeling as if her hilltop surprise would come off She began thinking about love and romance.

This might be the subject about which Barb had learned the most, during the afternoon’s private screening. The mother had no more than half a notion of just what she would say to her seventeen-year-old, once she got him back into the apartment, but she understood, through and through, the dynamics between him and Romy. She saw how the crush suffered strains beyond the obvious, the skin color and the socio-economico what-have-you. Also Barbara’s big American wasn’t so stupid after all. He hadn’t failed to notice the way the gypsy’s hands were forever double-checking something or other, compulsively, and he hadn’t failed to make the connection to his youngest brother. The manhandling that Romy had suffered must’ve saddled her with the same sort of unease, and JJ had been smart enough to realize coming too close might leave him likewise bruised. Then there was the girl’s end of the dynamics: she’d never had a John like John Junior. She’d never had to deal tender for tender. The gypsy too, Barbara would bet, had gotten skittish whenever the hugging and kissing went on too long.

As her driver poked through the gathering afternoon traffic, Barbara could extrapolate. She could apply the teenagers’ problems to a far older pair, Aurora and Cesare. Barb could practically pick up of the vibrations of Merry Widow and Gloomy Cleric, two rhythms woefully out of synch. Yet she doubted Aurora would prove as smart as her oldest grandson, should she and the priest ever share that first kiss.

Barbara could hear, as well, how Cesare would speak of such differences. The guerilla Jesuit would sound a little like Romy, calling for revolution in the streets, raging about skin color and the socioeconomic. And Barbara knew what she’d say in reply, too. She’d say that Franz Fanon and Karl Marx didn’t know JJ and Romy. Fanon and Marx couldn’t tear their eyes from their own pet projects, worked to death on their private screens, but if they did, they’d make out the new freedoms available at this cracked and upended moment in history. Border-crossing hooking up, Barbara would say, was the inevitable future. Border-crossing, skin-blurring, bank-account-tangling — all of that was coming on at digital speed, a message texted to the entire phone book, wireless and instantaneous. Plus this was Naples, where it wasn’t just the Twenty-first Century of Our Lord, but something like the thirty-first century of multi-culti barter. In this theater of operations, more than in most, the young and hormonal were free to try on any role they felt like. When Barbara’s priest started dithering over which lover had the fatter wallet or the kinkier hair, he sounded as if he still thinking Montagues and Capulets.

Now if a person wanted to talk about relationships as business, as politics, the case in point was Silky Kahlberg. The late Lieutenant Major, too, had a place in Barbara’s meditations on her way back into the city. According to today’s news flash, the White Shadow had preferred his sex man-on-man, and Barb had figured out already that he must’ve been just the opposite of someone like Whitman. Kahlberg would’ve preferred the kind of dynamics you found in prison, where every man’s forehead was stamped either Boss or Bitch. After all, even when he’d been dealing with Jay, a quintessential Kinsey Zero, the NATO officer had manipulated the situation in order to achieve all the additional clout he could. Therefore whenever the liaison man had found a more ambivalent business partner, he must’ve gleefully gone for every advantage, private as well as public. He must’ve run roughshod over the guy.

Now Barbara was into some roughness herself, as the Fiat jostled onto the stones of downtown. They swung around the San Carlo opera house, where the backstage wall used to open onto the Royal Gardens. The singers had performed love songs by Mozart out among the birds and the bees.

Barbara didn’t want to think about it. Love songs, basta —because she still lacked a strategy, a way to begin, once the family got back to the apartment. All things considered, she’d prefer it if Aurora weren’t home. After picking up Jay, it was easy enough to fill him in, though with the driver in mind the wife stripped her explanation down to shorthand. Still, it wasn’t difficult to share the information, thanks to the code of the long-married. In words of one syllable, Jay had agreed they needed the meeting, and in the Vomero gelateria there was no sign of Aurora.

Better yet, the kids were behaving themselves. Nobody appeared all sugared up, though Dora and Sylvia had each gotten a free scoop, the usual treat for the “American dolls.” So Jay and the boys went into the palazzo before Barb and the girls, best to leave any gelato mess out on the stoop, and the mother could use a stretch anyway. In the elevator Barbara laid her hands on her girls’ heads, with a silent prayer for help.

But as soon as she reached her landing, even before the cage clanked open, Chris showed her worse trouble.