John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

The back pew sat empty. Her bodyguard had wandered off, leaving behind a dirty comic book. Barbara couldn’t miss the page to which the book had fallen open, a man and woman in a naked embrace. But she’d hit her stride now, heading for home. She had to gather herself for the door to the street. Jay and the priest couldn’t be far behind, so she had to get ready to grab the thing and yank. Barbara whipped out into the city air, the stone and salt, the volcano and diesel and sun.

Three men fell on her. Three guys who’d been waiting on the stoop, one black and two white — she got that much from a single dumbfounded look before one of them slapped a cloth over her mouth. The rag had an awful taste and a chemical odor, yet another tang in the air, searing and new. Barbara might’ve smelled something like it in one of DiPio’s hospital wards.

There was a blinding moment when her arm felt ripped out of her socket, and the stranger’s head against hers proved more heated and sweat-soaked than her own. Only one of the men had hold of her, the African, but his fingers were tough as bridge cables. He had no trouble keeping the cloth over her face and pinning her wrist between her shoulder blades. It hurt in spite of whatever they’d poured into the cloth, and she wanted to scream, especially when one of the other attackers stopped the hard-charging Jay by putting a gun to her head. The Jaybird, seeing that as soon as he was out the church door, tripped and fell and wound up with a gun on him too. Swiftly the two Americans were wrestled into a car, the husband getting his own taste of chloroformed cloth. When the priest loomed on the steps behind them, his shouts were nebulous, no more substantial than the local or two who’d stopped to watch.

It was broad daylight, the end of riposo . But the car stood close, on the same spot where the police had pulled up on the day when Jay had been kidnapped.

From the church to the waterfront seemed a single downward acceleration. The whining transmission and the lumpish embrace — she was pinned against Jay, head down, sinuses burning from the kidnappers’ crude anesthetics — all this took Barbara back to her mother’s cousin’s, in lower Manhattan. The cramp recalled the sofa-bed above Lafayette Street. That thump against her hip might’ve been the cousin, trying to cheer up little Barbarella, a woman with a touch clumsier than Mama’s. But no. That was a gun, nudging Barbara’s love-handle, and she remained in a fog even after she was freed from the Fiat’s back seat. Jay didn’t appear any better off, staggering, groaning. Husband and wife were prodded under a low opening into a dank hatchway. There was another whine, wood on metal maybe, and Barb may have seen a crowbar at work, planks coming off. The smell was rust and mold, a reek that after a moment woke her enough to discover she still carried her purse. Her cash was where she’d put it, and her new passport too. She wondered about Jay’s wallet.

Once husband and wife stamped the life back into their legs and cleared the fuzz from their sight, they discovered themselves in a low cellar. A few leaky barrels of wine remained racked against one wall. An eatery in the centro storico , condemned after the quake — Barb struggled with the logic, working against a headache and pinpricks and the renewed aggravation of her interior whipsaw. Up in Cesare’s she’d been screaming again. Again it was all about the end of everything. Meanwhile, two of her captors came up with flashlights. Nobody let go of his gun, but they got the lights switched on and began to nudge the shambling Americans towards the darkest part of the basement, behind the racked barrels. The Jaybird put up a muddled resistance, shoving, wobbling, the wine-softened earth noisy underfoot. Then however came the distinct click of a pistol’s safety switch. After that the five began another descent, difficult, backwards. They clambered down a narrow tunnel hacked into the city bedrock.

The Jaybird had to move on all fours, his groggy eyes on his wife above him. His shoulders scraped the walls of the passageway, and the scattershot beams of the flashlights caught white crumbles of stone in the chest-hairs that poked out of his collar. Years ago the kids had splashed him like that, leaving dribbles of spit-up after a feeding…

But what was Barb dreaming about now? What, how good this guy had been when the kids were babies? Strangers were forcing her at gunpoint down into a hole. They had her on a sloping mole-run. The temperature kept dropping, the stink of Vesuvius was replaced by the prickle of limestone, and the walls were toothy with pick-and-shovel work. Barbara knew where they were headed, the Sotterraneo . Just the place for kidnappers’ hideout. The Late Lieutenant Major, now, he hadn’t needed to get his hands dirty. He’d had the printers, the NATO facility, and he’d had his clandestini . No doubt he’d laid out the cash for their motorcycle too.

Yet as the mother found one toehold after another (the tunnel was roughly laddered), she came to believe that the liaison man had nonetheless kept some lair down in the vaults and warrens beneath the city. He would’ve liked that, a stony and hurtful love-nest. Come to think of it, the exercise was proving good for her too. As Barbara felt her way into the cold, her head kept clearing. She recalled a nasty tale of Italian revenge, one that featured a cellar like this. Some poor bastard was lured underground, then clapped in chains and walled up, still wearing his clown’s cap and bells. The story was one of those she’d read to the boys, only; the girls weren’t old enough. She herself wasn’t old enough, not in a skirt and pumps like this, the clothes she’d worn to meet a movie director. Still she knew something about the Sotterraneo, and not just from reading Edgar Allen Poe. Chris said that the first quarries had been cut by the Greeks. The tufa was perfect for building, cool in summer and holding the heat in winter. The work had been done by slaves, of course, a lot of them children.

At length the Americans and their captors emerged from of the tunnel. Barb straightened up to see a flashlight beam playing along high and strictly cornered walls. She recalled more of the history, the secret churches carved out by the early Christians, the bomb shelters built by the Fascists.

But today wasn’t that kind of excursion. One of the kidnappers put his gun against Barbara’s shoulder, almost resting it there. A slant automatic like Kahlberg’s. Meantime the African, the one who’d first laid hands on her, sent two or three echoing shouts into the black.

The word sounded familiar, a name perhaps, short with a long vowel. Barb might’ve recognized their language too, a pidgin French. But once her captors realized that they were alone, someone they’d expected hadn’t yet arrived, they confined their talk to whispers. The African appeared to call the shots, he did most of the talking, and he directed the others when they turned and herded the Lulucitas across the dark. The floor, Barbara discovered, was cut in herringbone. Then ahead, along one side of the cubicle vault, the flashlights picked out what looked like the entrance to another shrunken tunnel. But this proved to be no more than a hole in the wall, a step-down storage area or sleeping compartment. Even before the flashlights illuminated the space, the redoubled lime odor suggested how small it was. The mother’s head bumped the jagged ceiling. Then before she could get a look around she was yanked to the floor, her purse stripped away, her arms forced together behind her back.

So that’s how it would be, tied up in a stone burrow, tied up . One of the white guys had a ponytail, she remembered after a moment; his leather hair-band secured her wrists. As for Jay, with him the crooks used his own sturdy belt, $50 at Bridgeport Leathers, and the big man didn’t make it easy. He swore and kicked until he was stilled by a couple of swats with a sound like an Atlas slapping shut. A pistol-whipping? Anywhere near the temple? Barbara saw nothing but shadows, though there was no mistaking how her husband went limp, sagging against the wall with a groan.