Nevertheless the mother didn’t believe Romy had lived a life of purity. In the years before the gypsy had spent two and a half days trapped beneath a collapsed apartment building, out on the city’s periferia, she must’ve made her living as a shady operator of one kind or another. And it didn’t help, so far as Barbara’s suspicions were concerned, that Romy bore an eerie resemblance to the bad girls of her un-gentrified childhood Brooklyn. If the estranged wife had any image for the toughness she wanted to achieve, she’d picked it up from the skanks in Carroll Gardens. The dropouts from Sacred Heart. The sluts always had a mongrel quality, as if their clothes were so skimpy because they fell between types, as if they needed all that makeup to pull the eyes and mouth into their assigned places. Romy’s eyes still seemed like something off the far Asian steppes, and her complexion remained unfiltered honey, and this much together suggested Baghdad or Tel Aviv. But her sharp brow and nose, her tight and uplifted shape, these suggested London or St. Tropez. Granted, the gypsy’s legs would grow stubby in another fifteen or twenty years. They weren’t so shapely just now, either, still recovering bulk and muscle. But at Romy’s age — perhaps within a year of John Junior’s age — she turned everything to teasy combinations. Even in this skin-full corner of Italy, among the low-rise Capris and the billboards full of breasts, she had men gazing sidelong and puckering in thought.
But it wasn’t just the gypsy’s looks that made Barbara believe she used to be a criminal. It wasn’t anything Silky Kahlberg had to say either. The evidence that mattered was the way that, no matter where the family’s excursions took them, Romy was always waiting when they arrived. She was there before they set up the Big Top, and she did it her first day out of the chair.
That morning Kahlberg had begun trying to create the illusion that Barbara’s family was no different from the other Americans in Italy. They were bonding amid the ruins, he’d wanted them to think, just like everyone else. And by the end of the trip the Lulucitas had also attracted the usual cluster of supplicants, with their martyrs and rosaries. But the gypsy had been there waiting for them. She’d tuned into a different information system, side of the mouth.
Back on the day she was healed, the girl had pretty much dropped off Barbara’s radar once everyone got to the hospital. Rather the mother had paid attention to Paul, on whom DiPio of course ran the same tests as he did on Romy, plus a couple more. As the stunned afternoon wore on into evening, too, the doctor more than once pulled Jay and Barbara aside with beard-scratching requests “not to do nothing all of a suddenly.” He clutched his neckwear and pleaded with her “to stay in this place where the child demonstrates this power, and where we have him under observation from the first.” Meanwhile the boy was passing all his tests and looking fresh. He caught a cat-nap during the ride from the camp. He suffered no crying episodes, either, not even when Jay and Barb ducked into a storage room for a quick hissy fit. Mother and father worked through a bout of mutual recriminations, their words barely emerging from the backs of their throats, and then they’d stepped out from the closet to confront a blasé boy in re-tucked black and white. Mr. Paul was unfazed. What was the big deal, if he’d become a child saint? He knew the drill by now, the role was a Mediterranean classic anyway, and it hadn’t escaped his notice that the fast-rising Maddalena had made another video. He knew about the crowds, the competing packs of TV units and miracle-seekers, first outside the hospital and later in the Vomero. He didn’t see what Mama was so worried about, keeping a hand on his head — her fingers actually threaded through his hair — till they were back inside the apartment. He didn’t see why she had to keep his big brothers breathing down his neck, one at each shoulder.
No, Barbara hadn’t given the gypsy a second glance, that afternoon at the hospital. Nor Kahlberg either; she’d tuned the officer out as he began to make arrangements for the morning. He started right in working the cell phone, and he did quite a job, the mother had to admit. Apparently the Lieutenant Major had pull with the Consulate. Between sunset and breakfast he got his entire North American et cetera to put pressure on the editors and producers of the local and national news, reining in the media a bit, allowing the family some recovery space in the coming days. Barbara didn’t want to think about the quid pro quo. Rather she pictured Kahlberg’s arrangements as a wrestling match between titans. The aging but powerful Captain Red White & Blue took down, with effort, the young but dangerous Mass Communication, Master of Disaster. She pictured it as a comics panel, a fairy tale — the sort of thing she’d read to Paul that very night, once she got him into bed. She sat down beside the boy with the anthology on her lap, the big book of fairy tales she’d brought from Bridgeport. She’d known he’d want to hear them sometime, her Mr. Paul, her fairy child.
The mother could still play Mother Goose. That night she picked a favorite from a land far away, the story of the Irish Queen Bab.
As for the Gypsy Queen, the dark young lovely restored to her feet, who could say when John Junior had noticed her? Perhaps it had happened up in the Center’s chapel, in the sweltering purple aftermath of the riot. His Michelangelo lips had taken on a fresh shape, as he looked the girl over. Then the next morning Kahlberg had taken the family far away. They’d gone out to Capua, due north.
The liaison showed shrewdness, typical, in his choice for their first daytrip. They began at the beginning, on a site where Etruscan war parties had taken over an earlier settlement still, Neolithic. Though Chris nitpicked about the choice. That was another shred in the moil of this past near-week; the officer and the fifteen-year-old couldn’t get onto the highway without a disagreement. On this first day following the second healing, Silky pointed out the castle at the highest point in the Vomero, Castel Sant’Elmo. Next thing he knew, he was in an argument over something called “St. Elmo’s fire.” Chris insisted that the stuff wasn’t actually fire and Elmo wasn’t the saint’s real name.
“Now son,” the Lieutenant Major said, “I don’t know as there’s any place in Naples that has what you’d call its real name.”
Yeah, okay. But Chris went on to claim that around here, recorded history didn’t begin out at Capua, in the foothills of the Appenines. Rather things had started along the coast, at Cumae. There the Greeks had set up their first temples and shops.
“Mn,” the liaison replied, “you know a hundred years before that, the Greeks were out on the islands.”
“Sure, the islands,” Chris said. “The Sirens.”
But what Barbara wanted to hear about, once the family reached their destination, was the time-blackened artifact known as arrangiarsi, making arrangements — a business less than legal and yet embedded all over greater Naples. Anyone who stuck a hand under the table, in this city, could always find another one down there. There was always somebody who’d read the day’s Duty Roster, willing to swap a secret for one of the prettier banknotes. How else could Romy have wound up here beneath the Capua Duomo? How except by Camorra-dot-com?