“For this population,” Kahlberg continued, “a lot of them anyway, the quake set off, mn, millennial fever. You understand?”
Chris turned from the window. “They thought it was like, The Rapture?”
‘You got it, son. Some of these old boys, they figured it was the end of the world. That quake, it did leave them at the end of their ropes, anyhow.”
Was that a reference to Jay’s near-kidnap? A desperate stunt at the end of someone’s rope, the day before yesterday?
Barb and Kahlberg had been circling the subject since she’d first gotten in touch to set up the visit. This morning too, though the mother had taken care not to sound nervous in front of the children, she’d fished for a guarantee that she wasn’t exposing them to real danger. Give the liaison credit, he’d said all the right things. He’d echoed the children’s father almost word for word.
Papa swore that the worst weapon brandished against him had been a piece of kitchenware. Also his would-be kidnappers never even got off the campgrounds, let alone came close to a getaway car — and not because the former Fordham lineman had put up much of a struggle, either. Rather, Jay explained, other Center refugees had stepped in. The people on the Jaybird’s side had far outnumbered the troublemakers, a handful of clandestini only. Five or six young men, no more, claimed they acted out of solidarity with a downtown group on hunger strike.
Pretty strange, hey?, the father had said. A hunger strike in Naples.
Barbara, listening, sensed a different sort of urgency in her man’s chatter. His hope for the marriage, that’s what she heard, a hope bucked up by the mere mention of a family trip to the Center. So his storytelling came across as one part brag, one part gee-whiz, and overall nothing to be frightened of During the brief struggle, he assured them, a crowd of refugees had surrounded the would-be abductors and made sure il capo Americano never suffered a scratch. By the time the carabinieri had picked up Barbara outside the church, the worst was over. By the time Jay was through talking, that night, the whole business had dwindled to nothing more than another story about Papa’s job. And like all such stories it came with a moral.
My people in the tents, the husband declared, they’ve seen enough destruction.
At the opposite end of the table, Barbara drained her wine. She liked the taste anyway, a local vintage, the Tears of Christ.
Destruction, Jay went on, that’s never the answer.
Yet here she was two mornings later, en route to her husband’s worksite. It hadn’t escaped Barbara’s notice, either, that the Jaybird had traveled with an armed guard these last couple of mornings. His helmet-ck-vest shared the same car. Plus what did it tell her when their NATO liaison suggested that the mother and the kids wait a couple of hours after the father left, before they headed to the camp themselves? Nevertheless here she sat, ignoring the itch between her legs, more of her husband’s recklessness. She sat there and allowed the kids to ride out past the gate to Hades.
If she intended to destroy this family, she had to make the trip. She had to get a whiff of the air outside their cliff-top bubble.
But how was Barbara going to clear her head here at the Refugee Center? At this a lake of rippling nylon, spread across one of the broader hollows in the landscape — nylon or some other faded synthetic, all of it rippling from the neediness beneath the fabric? Again a crowd greeted the van. Again the gang gathered with hands in the air, waving, seeking, and one or two thumped the vehicle’s windows and panels. There were shouts, too, rough open syllables, vaguely Italian. Barb couldn’t pick out the words at first. Faced with a crowd like this, it took an effort just to realize that no one held up any bits or pieces for Paul to bless. No one carried church bric-a-brac. Yet the terremotati filled the parking lot, a patch of flattened grass. From there the tent city ran down-slope, here and there revealing a nylon cord or an aluminum pole, or a scrap of ground the color of driftwood, or — something else again — a flutter of laundry in party colors. Barbara thought of the old-city warrens in which she’d spent her mornings, this past week. From an occasional tent-corner there trailed a few bright ribbons, as colorful as the laundry. The mother even spotted something like one of the prayer ojetti, perhaps halfway downhill. This appeared to be a group photograph, a collage in an ornate frame, under a corrugated plastic rain cover of dirty turquoise.
Also here and there played shadows, children still intent on their games. The ones who’d climbed into the sunlight, the flat space surrounding the van, tended to be the parents or grandparents. Their crumpled faces came in a dozen shades of black, under unkempt Afros or wobbly dreadlocks.
The mother had a question. “These are mostly illegals, right?” She looked to Kahlberg. “I’m saying, do they even have a work visa?”
The officer went on checking the crowd. “The epicenter was outside the city, in the periphery. That’s where you get the more transient population.”
“And the — the radicals? On the hunger strike?”
The liaison shot her a glance. “One has to expect,” he said slowly, “a certain amount of political tension in marginalized populations. One has to consider, as well, that many of these people arrive on these shores with criminal intent. Their sole purpose for being in Italy is to generate as much income as they can. Chris, big shooter. You know what the old Silk-man’s talking about, don’t you?”
The shifts of tone sounded doubly spooky under the blurred shouts from outside.
“Libya used to be an Italian colony,” Chris said. “Ethiopia too.”
“And Ethiopia—” Barbara began.
“See,” Chris said. “Mussolini was all fired up about a new Roman Empire.”
“Chris, Ethiopia is starving.” Barbara tried not to glare.
“A seriously depressed economy, big shooter, over a disturbingly long term.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” She concentrated on the Lieutenant-Major. “So far as the folks outside are concerned, Naples is the land of milk and honey.”
Kahlberg stared back mildly.
“You know,” John Junior said, “when Mom was a kid, she couldn’t tell the difference between the pictures of Jesus and the pictures of Che Guevara.”
“Stop it, stop it.” Barbara whipped around; the teens were grinning, slapping hands. “If I hear one more stupid sarky remark—”
“There’s Papa!” shouted Sylvia. “Papa, right there!”
Right there. Jay changed the whole shape of the scene beyond the windows. The man had his vice-president’s swagger even here, and as he approached the Humvee you could see he was bigger than nine tenths of the brown crowd around him. Plus he wore a chef’s baggy dress whites and a white long-visored cap, an outfit more bright and bleached and complete than anything among the faded dashikis and tourist T-shirts surrounding him. The terremotati appeared happy to see the Jaybird, including a few lighter-skinned folk Barb spotted now. Italians, these might have been, but more likely they’d drifted here out of the jigsaw nationalities across the Adriatic. A face or two out there looked Arab, as well. In any case everyone smiled as they made way for the capo. One of the blackest of the refugees, a man whose seamy face called to mind the folds in Father Cesare’s robe, mouthed what must’ve been some sort of wisecrack. His eyes, though they were hardly more than glints in a cracked rock, glowed with obvious warmth. Barb’s husband matched joke for joke, meantime. He shot a smirk one way and, glancing the other direction, tapped the peeling brim of a baseball cap. This was a person who would do nothing rash, a person with no hard feelings.