John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Basta cosi. Capisce? Finito .”

She was impressed by Jay’s Italian, emphatic as a native’s. Nonetheless she couldn’t be sure how well he was getting across. The Moll went on blinking slowly, thinking it over — and then the man was back in darkness. Fond had picked up the nearest flashlight, shining it at the tunnel wall. In the stone, the ridges and shadows of the chisel-marks looked like pieces of skeleton.

“Just take care of yourself,” said Barbara, to the black patch that had almost killed her husband. “Take care.” By the time she turned to follow Jay’s tugging, she couldn’t help but wonder how it should turn out this way — that the two richest and most powerful people in this underground had wound up, when all was said and done, better off than anyone else down here. The American visitors were climbing back towards the best neighborhood in town, Jay with his wallet and Barb with her purse, while the hand-to-mouth outsiders scuttled back into the rocks and gloom, with no more to show for the encounter than an extra piece of paper. Barbara had done all she could to make that trade-off happen, a comforting one for her and her husband. And now she had to wonder about it, as first she, then Fond, then Jay bent into the laddered and sloping crawl-space. She had to ask herself, as honestly as her aching and weariness allowed, if she was any better than the others who’d simply seized what they wanted from these hardscrabble souls, whether it was the late Lieutenant Major or, way back, a kingpin out of Rhodes or Corinth with a well-disciplined phalanx of swordsmen. Barbara tried to assure herself with thoughts of the program in Danbury, the Master’s in Social Work. But this prompted further questions, nagging, unsettling. Even after she got the training she needed, and she did what she could for an unwed mother in Bridgeport, or for a victim of abuse in Ansonia, would those good deeds extend via some improbable karmic reach to sore-boned and uneducated creatures like these, used and discarded in a chilly and lightless maze? Could Barbara matter, ever? Could she actually help to create better? She needed to think, and, once more, to believe.

Back before the quake, tourists who’d bought tickets for the Sotterraneo had visited via staircases cut in the 1990s, with rails and wide cornering. This tunnel on the other hand was fit only for slaves. It triggered shivers of claustrophobia, the limey walls too close for a day-tripper. From time to time Barbara could barely grip the steps, the toeholds, their edges so ruggedly spurred that you’d think they’d been hacked out yesterday. She recalled that, for years now, she’d made one of the older boys take on any chore that involved a stepladder. Plus today, as first in line, she carried the flashlight as well as the purse. A few minutes up into the tunnel, she tucked the heavy cylinder down the top of her dress, between her breasts. The bulb housing bumped her chin, and her head got in the way of the light, but there was only one direction to go after all. There was only the hand-over-hand, each upward move another realm of doubt. Soon everything about the return to street level started to feel likewise sketchy. The entire arrangement, from handguns to prayers, might’ve been a scaffold cinched with bobby pins, swaying across a deep and sudden chasm.

Barbara’s hands began to itch and burn. Her breathing grew full of phlegm and the flashlight between her breasts kept thumping her jaw: shouldadone, shouldadone . She tried thinking of faraway business, the new doctor she would get back in the States. A woman would be best, an older woman, sixty at least. With that Aurora came to mind, no doctor but somehow, in this burrow, triggering a spasm of fellow-feeling. Nettie was more like it, with her diplomas and her no-nonsense brush-cut, and Barbara also recalled a well-weathered and sharp-tongued tutor in Language Arts, back at Sacred Heart Elementary. A former schoolteacher some ten years past retirement, the old girl had seemed such good company that Barb had volunteered in Language Arts herself She’d read one circle of second-graders the Alice-in-Wonderland sequence twice in a row. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand what these mouthy and assertive American Brownie Scouts saw in that pampered and over-polite English girly-girl.

Four or five times during the climb, Fond called a halt and juggled up his cell phone. He tried to call his man in the restaurant basement, as Barb peeked down past her hips (as soon as they’d come into the tunnel, she’d decided not to worry about what, if anything, Maddalena’s former boyfriend might glimpse under her dress). From that angle the phone’s number pad would turn him briefly into the Clandestino from Another Planet, casting a green speckle across his face. But Fond could never get a signal; he’d gone too far underground.

When she first picked up a shadow cast from above, a faint stippling, she thought it was only a trick of the sweat in her eyes. But then it turned up again: a cloud-over-cloud effect. After that came the stink of the ruined wine.

Coming into the basement from behind the barrels — and free, this time, of a chloroform doping — Barb could see the quake damage better. Some casks had sprung their staves, and others were cracked and leaking. Of course she still suffered a wooze, a stab, as she emerged into unlikely brightness. A surprising amount of light came in from the street, dazzling to Barbara, like sunshine after a matinee. She knew it must be late, and she could make out a loose plank or two still covering the basement hatchway, across the room from where, at last, she stood again at full height. But this was the time of year when the sun lasted into the Italian dinner hour, dawdling as it sank between the Gulf islands. Twilight went on forever.

Behind her, Fond spoke at conversational level but with a hoarse insistence. “ C ’ est moi, c ’ est moi. Ne vous derangez-vous pas .”

The space was larger than she remembered, too. As Barbara stepped around the wine rack, drawn towards the light, she realized that Fond would have headroom here. Some headroom anyway, under most of the sagging ceiling. There was air enough for the smell of sulfur to pierce the cellar mold, the fermentation. From the street descended a noise of raucous normality, the unmuffled rasp of Vespas and Suzukis. Barbara, taking a long step sideways for the sake of the two big men still unfolding out of the tunnel, pulled the flashlight from inside her dress and let it plop into a wine-puddle. She indulged herself in a terrific shake, triggering yet another sweet rush, her most intense yet, of reviving spirits. The doubts of her up-tunnel laboring fell away. At her first lung-full of air she could’ve sworn that the matchstick odor coughed up by Vesuvius had turned sweet, in some improbable chemical reaction with the spilled Lacrima Christi .

Then Jay: “Is that a blue light? Revolving blue light?”

Barbara gave herself another shake, more businesslike, getting her wits about her. The Jaybird knew the cops when he saw them. The revolving light of a police car, maybe more than one in fact, shot an intermittent darker hue between the planks over the hatchway. Hardly glaring, the blue had Barbara squinting nonetheless, thinking again of the warnings that she and Jay had raised down in the Sotterraneo . To her they’d all sounded bogus half the time: the cavalry to the rescue.

“Hey, Fond, you see? There it is, man, happy ending. People we can talk to.”

The police weren’t stupid and the system worked. The sun was shining. Barbara kept shedding her long day’s burdens, the weights that had pinched every encounter, and she was slow to translate the amplified voice that began to cut through the traffic noise. A bullhorn, this was: Pronto, pronto. Senta, senta ? Testing, testing, listen…and with that she spotted the man to whom the authorities were speaking. In the hatchway squatted Fond’s lookout, the third of the crew who’d snatched her and Jay off the church steps. The refugee had kept himself hidden on the stairwell’s bottom step.