“E un ostaggio, signore Jay.” This came from a trooper who’d moved into the holding cell with them. The scent of his gun oil cut through the closeness.
“Che brutti, ipoveri.”
Barb looked up at their new protector, his uniform piping and chest strap. She concentrated on the translation: apparently the brutes, the poor out at Jay’s Center, had made a move on the big American. As soon as the news had come from the camp, the law had rounded up the wife and children. They didn’t want another ostaggio, a hostage; the quake had left desperate animali everywhere, even in this neighborhood.
“Animali, i poveri.”
The next to speak up was Dora, always the more adult of the girls. “Mister, hey. Nobody could possibly hurt our Papa.”
The trooper in the room was the one with the great lips. But the smile he offered appeared so smudged and vacant, it could’ve have been one of the downtown prayer offerings, ten years after it was hung on the chapel wall.
“You don’t know about this family,” Dora said. “You don’t know anything about Mama and Papa and us.”
Barbara worked on her own smile.
“Mama is a very, very good person. You don’t know, she works in a church.”
Barbara stepped over beside the girls and put her fingers in that petal-soft hair. Now Sylvia had taken up the argument. “Mama works with children,” she said. “Some children have been badly abused.”
“Some children have been badly abused. Mama brought home a DVD.”
The two eight-year-olds were possessed by such a dreamlike seriousness that they must have worked these ideas out at bedtime, after the adults had left them alone.
“That’s why we moved to Italy.”
“That’s why we moved. Back in America, sometimes she even yelled at Papa about it. ‘Don’t you care about suffering children?’ she yelled.”
“All right,” Barbara started, “all right now you two…”
“That’s why,” Sylvia said, “Paul was able to bring Papa back from the dead.”
“That’s why no one can ever hurt Papa now,” Dora insisted, raising a finger. “Mama turned Papa into someone like her. Like, a saint.”
Barbara seemed to choke on her objections, like Jay had choked a week ago — the last time he’d come up against the poveri. Once more she looked over her children, first the two big teenagers in primary-color soccer gear, then the two stocky fourth-graders-to-be in crayon-bright jumpers and tees (easy to spot in case they got separated), and last the odd, fragile, not quite adolescent boy in black and white. Paul was staring at the girls, thinking it over. The mother had by no means ignored the boy, these last few days; both she and the Jaybird had sat down with him, their riddle-some middle child. What’s more, both had come away with the same understanding, on one point at least. They agreed that Paul didn’t know what he’d accomplished over his father’s choking body. But Mr. Paul needed better than that; if Mama was a saint, she had to do better.
The cell door opened, not far, not even halfway. Another carabiniero called the first into the hall. The two conferred in a whisper, but they couldn’t hide anything from Barbara. She could read the pretty boy’s smile, full Elvis all of a sudden.
“E sicuro, Jay?” she barked. “Tutto skuro?”
The man who’d come to door met her look. He didn’t smile, or not quite, but he gave a very different sort of shrug from what she’d seen downtown.
“Your father’s safe, guys.” Barb made it a point to catch Paul’s eye first. “The man is safe.”
Now both the policemen were nodding.
“And as soon as we can,” she went on, “we are all of us going out to the Refugee Center. It could be tomorrow, it could be the next day, but we are going to get some backup from NATO and ride out to Papa’s place.”
The middle child was grinning more broadly than either of the carabinieri. He thrust a pair of fingers inside his open collar, exposing an inch more of hairless chest.
“It’s time,” Barbara went on, “we stop playing around.”
Chapter Four
“Water buffalo?” Dora said. “Like in Africa?”
“This isn’t Africa,” Sylvia said, forcing a laugh. “This is Italy. Don’t try to tell us they’ve got water buffalo.”
JJ went on pointing out the Humvee window. “Guys, hey. Even I wouldn’t try to confuse you about what continent we’re on.”
“Girls, look, what do you think those things are?” Chris was pointing too. “Moose? The mozzarella, like, the cheese? That’s where it comes from.”
Around them the landscape seesawed, here a scabbed, balsitic ridge and there the grass velvet of a creek plain. Across the more level areas sauntered the buffalo, hefty-shouldered and brick-brown, their horns like question marks. The NATO caravan had first taken the family through the Phlegrean Fields, north of the city — a low-rising outbreak of the same magma that underlay Vesuvius to the south. In the Fields the ground turned to dust around smoking fumaroles, mounds of pale flinders, like smoking dumps of extracted teeth. Two thousand, three thousand years ago, these badlands were said to house a gateway to the Underworld, the poisoned spring where Ulysses spoke with the dead. Yet soon enough the gravel and chalk gave way to actual fields, rippling with mid-June vitality. Low hillsides sprouted mixed greens in mouthwatering layers, while others flowered lavender, crimson, milk-white. Vest-pocket orchards and grape arbors cut rows and terraces across the flatter spaces, squeezing every workable inch of the nutrient-rich soil. Farther inland still, between the vine-rows and fruit trees, there began to appear the small herds of buffalo.
“Mozzarella?” Dora was asking.
“Best mozzarella in the world,” Silky Kahlberg said. “Da bufalo, know what I mean? Vera da bufalo.”
“Sure,” said JJ. “The truth comes from buffalos. Old Neapolitan saying.”
The NATO man chuckled, paternal, or the movie version.
“Yeah well,” Chris said, “JJ, if the choice was between asking you and asking a water buffalo.…”
Kahlberg chuckled again, and Barbara allowed herself a laugh as well. She was going to have to learn to relax around the Lieutenant-Major. Certainly she enjoyed the benefits that came with having him somehow on call. She liked his van’s state-of-the-art air conditioning, for starters, a terrific relief on a morning when she’d woken up itching. Last night Jay had put something extra into his thrusts; he’d wanted to kindle a special glow for today’s visit. Then too, the mother was glad they didn’t have to share the ride with a machine gun. Instead Kahlberg had arranged for a pair of soldiers in a second vehicle. This escort looked serious, bulked up in powder-blue helmets and vests, with a semi-automatic and a pistol each. But Barbara and the kids rode weapon-free. So it appeared, anyway; the mother couldn’t help wondering about what the liaison man wore under his jacket. A white jacket, this time, and before the abbreviated caravan set off, as he’d huddled with the soldiers, he’d kept touching his lapel. His lapel or whatever he carried under it.
“Actually,” the man was saying now, “out in your father’s camp you’ll find some folks believe that kind of thing. These people, they’ll fall for every kind of superstition you could name.”
These people? Barbara looked to Paul, but he’d cupped his eyes against the tinted window. Her Lakota child, following the buffalo.