She lounged against a church pillar that had gone up well before Christ was a carpenter, a column left over from an Etruscan temple that had first occupied this ground. Sunlight glinted off her gypsy array, the bracelets of tarnished silver and sparkle-dusted plastic, and the sequins sewn into her halter top. The outfit revealed so much olive-dark midriff that at first Barbara thought, with relief, the priests wouldn’t let Romy in the church. But then as soon as Kahlberg had finished his transactions over the documents and satchels, John Junior had jumped out in front of the family’s little crowd (from the first, the NATO man never brought along fewer than three bodyguards). Romeo had offered Juliet the long-sleeved windbreaker he always kept knotted, moda Americana, around his slim midfielder’s hips.
So never mind that Barb had deprived the priest of his nap. She brought the subject back to this girl and today. “I should take her for an enemy, shouldn’t I? An enemy or an accident waiting to happen. Her looks alone, that should—”
“Beh, don’t exaggerate.” Cesare crossed his arms and knees the other way. “Don’t talk like a bourgeois. What worries you about that girl is, you don’t actually worry about her. ‘Should,’ you say, ‘should.’ You believe you should worry.”
Barb started to nod, almost getting it.
“You believe this — what would we call it, espionage? Espionage, the way the girl keeps sussing out your daily rounds? You believe this should worry you, but in fact it leaves you entirely impressed.”
The mother tried for more solid ground. “There’s also what’s happened with John Junior, don’t forget. It’s puppy love at full yap.”
Romy and JJ generated waves of attraction that Barbara could swear rustled the petals of any flowers nearby. There was a breeze even in the heat of mid-June, the most breathless urban canyon. The lovebirds rode the air currents with acrobatic balance, without so much as a glance at Silky’s gunmen. They had the mother trying to pull off the same, for a moment or two; they set her cuddling up with Paul or one of the girls and drifting off into Dimension Infatuation. But Barb was too much the adult to get so carried away, to believe herself beyond the reach of a stray bullet or a secret she’d rather leave buried.
“Full yap,” she repeated, as Cesare broke into a smile. “It doesn’t matter that JJ hasn’t gotten under her clothes.”
The old man gave her the eyebrow again. Earlier that week he’d let Barbara know that, as part of his ministry among the displaced and the clandestini, he carried a secret stash of condoms.
“Father, Cesare, those two, there’s no way they’ve gotten that far. Ask our friend the Lieutenant Major, you think he isn’t watching? So far as that guy’s concerned, the kissy-face stuff is bad enough.” Once more she massaged the beads through her purse-leather, settling into confession. “Myself, the truth is — I am impressed with her, aren’t I?” And she added, halting, each word another bead, that she believed it was good for the kids to have the distraction.
“I know, I know,” she went on, “where do I get off, worrying that the kids might get hurt? It’s tangled logic, I realize. But, tangled, Father, that’s where I live.”
Anyway she was glad the children had something else to occupy their wondering heads. During these five or six days since the Refugee Center, Barbara imagined, the last thing on the kids’ minds had been whatever trouble they sensed between the two ends of the dinner table. To them the ‘rents must’ve always seemed on the prickly side. Jay and Barb must’ve seemed like another part of the Greater New York Immigrant Bicker, the spectrum from Lucy and Desi to Tony and Carmela. And now that Barbara was through with the role, she was sick of it, she’d come to notice that there’d been a few advance indicators. There’d been a significant disturbance or two over the past year, and the kids had picked up on these, the way they made the family gyro wobble. Back in Bridgeport, in the months before the trip, everyone from JJ down to the twins had preferred to hole up at home. In the case of the oldest boy, this had put a dent in his social life; the girls at his high school used to come up with all sorts of ideas for a Saturday night. But these days, in Naples, what JJ felt for Romy was much more of a show than the varsity co-captain had ever put on in the States. With no more than a hug and a bit of a backrub, he and the gypsy could send tremors through the thick camellias of mid-June. A valuable distraction.
Cesare yawned, flagrantly. “Well, is that it? You came banging at my door to tell me you’re tangled? Tell me in rather a tangled fashion, I might add.”
“I’m saying it’s been that way for years. Everybody else, they’ve been free.”
“Don’t exaggerate, signora. Don’t talk to me about lack of freedom until you come down to dell’Ovo. Down in the castle, don’t you know Mrs. Lulucita, you might well find the fulfillment you seek. I daresay Christ is there.”
“Maybe,” Barb said. “But so’s our busy Lieutenant Major.”
“Well, when your husband came…”
“Tell me, at some point or another, did Kahlberg and Jay go off somewhere? Somewhere alone, behind closed doors? I bet they did.”
Cesare lifted his chin, his wattles. “Signora, I ask you formally. Have you any proof that your husband is involved in some secret arrangement with NATO?”
She didn’t bother shaking her head. “Listen, whatever’s going on between those two, what it’s saying for me is, God didn’t send me the hunger strikers. He sent me this girl, Romy. He sent me Romy and whatever she has to tell me about my family and the weirdo in the ice-cream suits.”
“The girl is simply a lost sheep. She was lost and now she is found.”
“All right, but after that, why’d she turn around and find us?”
“Signora, you see the hand of God in this? You’re the mother of a healthy young man, one who finds himself in southern Italy in springtime. You should be grateful it’s a girl such as this, a girl of some shall we say practicality. Heaven help your Junior if he’d fallen instead for one of the pampered rich kids around this neighborhood. One of Berlusconi’s Army, don’t you know.”
She took the man in, his black and gray itself a penance, on a hot afternoon. Nettie had taught Barbara a thing or two about Cesare’s order; she’d taken vows with the Maryknoll Sisters before coming out of the closet. The brotherhood was one of the most orthodox. You weren’t supposed to find a Dominican carrying condoms. On top of that he had the Dublin schooling, Jesuit, steel-trap.
“Listen,” she said evenly, “here’s the news. Kahlberg’s not content with spreading nasty rumors, anymore. He wants me to put my foot down.”
The priest’s narrowing eyes revealed a new set of crow’s feet.
“That was today, I’m saying. Mr. Lieutenant Major Mojo gave me an order. ‘Tell that boy the little whore has got to go.’”
This morning’s visit had been to the ruins under San Lorenzo Maggiore, one of the foremost downtown churches, with at least five layers of edifice on the same spot: Postwar on Baroque on Gothic on Roman on Greek. The liaison man had used the word “palimpsest,” dropping his Southern accent in order to enunciate precisely, then pausing to eyeball Chris. But the second-oldest had wanted to see the place, and Barbara too. It was jam-packed yet vaulted stone like that, temple on church mounting far over her head, that tended to exercise her God-muscle.
“But,” she said now, “this morning Romy told us there’s neater stuff right across the piazza. Napoli Sotterraneo, there.”