John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

The Jaybird’s tone was conversational again. His gun-hand had settled. He got a slow breath and asked if Barbara had thought about the possible legal issues. “You realize, a document like that, it could get complicated?”

“Come on, Jay.” Sure as she was of herself, Barbara nonetheless hadn’t expected to sound so easy-going. “Are you saying, Roebuck can’t cut through the paperwork? She can’t have two new passports by the end of the week?”

“Hey, Roebuck can do all kinds of — what? What? Two passports?”

“I give mine to The Moll and you give yours to Fond’s guy, here.”

Her arm still extended towards the scippatoro, she nodded towards the remaining gunman. Meantime she couldn’t miss the possibility of relief, of safety, that flooded her husband’s looks. The deal wasn’t one for one but two for two, and then all the weapons would be in friendly hands.

“We’ll be back in the Consulate anyway,” murmured the former VP for Sales,

“Back in the Consulate,” Barbara said, letting him think. Letting him fill in the blanks: “A day like today, hey, there’s a million ways we could’ve lost them.” But more than that, she could see how he needed this to end. When he’d left the house this morning, he’d believed that come dinnertime he’d be riding back home on the funiculare.

The Albanian had something to say, his first words since they were up outside Cesare’s. “A pass-port? American pass-port, is mine?”

Then The Moll: “We, how can we take from you? We, our lives, are for you .”

Fond got a hand on his second-in-command, the unarmed African, and they murmured in their shared tongue as they watched Jay pull the pamphlet from his wallet pocket. Like Barbara, the husband had wanted it with him every day, so already the thing was curled and wrinkled. Barb however had to check Fond again; she needed him speaking in English. “Fond,” she said, “look at it. Look at how beat up it is. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe something like that could save your man’s life.”

The deep-thinking renegade frowned down at her, so close he might believe that he and his friend had a decent chance of jumping in and snatching away both Jay’s automatic and The Moll’s revolver.

“This morning, you know,” Barbara went on, “I saw my son on a screen, and I saw him fold up just like that passport. I watched my boy fold up and disappear.”

“The Shell of the Hermit Crab,” Fond said, “is not a criminal organization.”

“Well, Jay and I aren’t criminals either.” He was the one to worry about, all right. “And like Jay says, giving away our I.D., we’re taking a risk, it could be trouble.”

But whatever came of this underground exchange, iron for paper, sooner or later that story too going to fold up and be finished. “It’s going to be put on the shelf,” Barbara said, “the Jaybird and I, all our drama, plus you and your Hermit Crab too. Isn’t that Naples, where you’re always running into some old drama? Old prayers, mashed flat and stuck to a wall? Down in Pompeii they were flattened in the middle of dinner.”

“The past in all its folly. La comédie humaine .”

She watched him, not the passports. “And one day, isn’t someone going to run into our leftovers, on the shelf, on the wall? Isn’t that Naples?”

“Assez, assez ,” Fond said. He dipped his chin, this scarred and lanky visitor from the fringes of the desert, he gave the least sign of assent, and with that the exchange took place too quick for Barb to see it. By the time she spotted Jay again, he had guns in both hands. Once more her elation ruffled up, an interior match for the thrill that played across the face of the white Shell member. The folder in his hand was worth mille Euro ; the sensation in Barbara’s heart had her grinning wildly up at Fond.

But he was looking over her shoulder. The Moll still hadn’t gone for it.

“We are prepared,” the scippatoro was saying, “to lay down our life .”

“Lay down your life?” Barb tried to rein in her smile. “Isn’t that the opposite of a miracle?”

But her reasoning got nowhere, it choked her, because the femme with the memorable bandanna slipped the paper from her hand. She hadn’t realized how stiffly she’d been holding her arm. It didn’t drop at all, at the weight of the revolver.

The Refugee Lazarus had come back to his idea about a video. “Our arrangement, madame?” Barbara couldn’t follow him at first, instead staring at his long-toed feet, before which Jay had turtled down over the automatics, indulging himself in a one-man Demolition Derby. The husband sent black bits and pieces sailing through the flashlight’s dwindling glow, the magazines in one direction and the bodies in another. Barb understood, she approved, but when the metal landed it clattered like tin, as if somehow she’d wound up in a space without dimension. When Barbara once more took in the outlaws around her, keeping her own gun cradled against her hip, the five young men appeared like sketches on a clay vase. The two scippatori, huddled over her passport, might’ve been heroes of Troy consulting a map. She was back on the second floor in the Nazionale, cruising the display cases of kitchenware. Then on one of the kraters or serving bowls, one of the figures began to speak.

“Madame ? You recall our arrangement, the prayer on-camera?”

Barb slid the revolver behind her, tucking it against her spine. With her whipsaw turned to feathers, with her eyes and ears likewise playing tricks, she wondered about the meager word “relief” She needed some word out of a fairy tale, an incantation.

The rangy clandestino looked a bit like a celebrity again, lifting his chin, regaining his swagger. “The video, Mrs. Lulucita? You are listening, please? I will tell you now how this film will be made.”

“Oh, Fond.” She suffered fresh tenderness towards him even as she shook her head. “No more playacting, I just can’t.”

“But, playacting , what is the relevance? My project is never merely artistic.”

“No more movies, no screens or media. From now on it’s real life, face to face.”

Jay was back on his feet, stepping up behind her. He put one hand on her panties’ waistline, the other on the gun.

“But, face to face, just so. Just so will be our video statement, much better enabled back up on the street. Up there, it will be the NATO, yes, but also the news.”

“The — news.” Barbara, trying to think, became aware of the limestone in her scalp. “There’ll be cameras, you’re saying. You’re saying you and I can talk face to face, like human beings. And the newspeople, they ’ ll make the video.”

“Works for me,” said Jay, a bit loud. “Hey. Sooner we’re back to sea level, I figure, sooner we can make this right.”

Fond frowned at that, his gaze dropping. He stared at Barbara’s belly as if he could see through it to Jay’s busy fingers, trying to take her weapon. The leader of the Shell grumbled that, here in Naples, they couldn’t make much “right”—the real problems were down in the Sahel.

“Don’t go there,” Jay said. “Don’t go back there, squabbling, trouble. We’ve been there and we just saw better, a lot better, a beautiful thing.”

The handsome skin-and-bones went on frowning. “La vie est ailleurs,” he said.

“Whatever. Pont is, I mean. We all just saw the same thing down here.”

Then why was the Jaybird still trying to take Barbara’s weapon? She gave him a look, over her shoulder, then told her kidnapper to speak English.

“Life is elsewhere.” He perked up, sounding prideful. “From 1968.”