Barbara had worried about the gypsy’s interference, in fact. She’d worried even more about how far she’d get without the liaison and his papers. Yet the castle’s first checkpoint turned out to pose no problem. The police in the booth seemed, if anything, as if they’d been expecting the family: first the father had come, and now the rest. The troopers, as for them, were colleagues in the law-and-order business, never mind that they wore helmets rather than caps. Once the gatekeepers on the mainland end of the castle pier got busy on their walkie-talkies, it was less than ten minutes before they were passing the clipboard for sign-ins. Just the kind of improvisation Barb had hoped would come into play: more arrangiarsi. She did have to deal with one delay, brief but troubling, though it had nothing to do with getting security clearance. She had to wait while a policeman asked for Paul’s blessing. One of the cops never got off the phone, but the other went down on one knee, stripping off his semi-automatic and pulling out, from between the buttons of his uniform, one of those Franciscan T’s.
With that the check-in felt dangerous. The family was exposed; the cops were neglecting their weapons. Barb saw terrorists roaring out of the closest alleyway, the Sword of Islam in the hands of scippatori. She had to be out of her mind to pull a stunt like this, counter-espionage.
Yet once again Paul handled it without a ruffle. The boy broke into a smile at the familiar slant T, the wood pale with use. Paul pushed back the crisp cuffs of his white shirt and gave the icon a spirited two-handed clasp. He and the cop could’ve been two Little Leaguers doing a pre-game touch-and-go. And around the middle child, the others appeared likewise pumped up. John Junior, after he stopped expecting the impossible of Romy, pressed quickly to the front of the group. The way he was bouncing in his cross-trainers, how could his Mama be out of her mind? What was it with her zigs and zags, now dread, now confidence? The castle was locked down tight and the kids were having a ball. Dora and Syl, next on the sign-in sheet, were trying their hand at cursive.
“Everybody’s having a ball,” Barbara said.
The girls needed some time, over the clipboard, and as they worked a TV broadcast unit pulled to a screeching halt on the marina boulevard. One of the news programs must’ve had a stringer posted by the castle. The first out of the vehicle was a woman, limber and young with a lot of hair — who else but Maddalena? She hoisted a camera to one shoulder, in fingerless gloves. Barbara didn’t need to think about it. As Maddalena approached the checkpoint, the mother huddled with the Franciscan cop, making sure the camerawoman too would be allowed inside. When the twins started prodding Mama with the clipboard, she made sure to sign on-camera.
“Also NATO needs to know,” Barbara told the cops loudly, while passing the board to the reporter. “You be sure to call NATO.”
“Si, certo.” The policeman was trying for eye contact with Maddalena. “Don’t worry, signora. There is nothing inside that can harm you.”
Easy for him to say, out here in the sun. Once the family was past the security gate, dell’Ovo appeared gloomier than ever. For the last two or three hundred years the castle had been a husk, little more than a postcard backdrop, but still it cast an oppressive shadow. The walk into the fortress gate took Barb and the others between dingy guardhouse rooks that bristled up top with guns. Their footsteps echoed beneath the twitter of radiophones. Farther on, even with a policeman leading the way, the castle passages kept forcing john Junior to duck and Maddelena to protect her camera. Also the place gave off a stink, now sulfur, now sea-sewage, now the sweat of unhealthy bodies. The holding cell for the strikers was up on the second floor, or maybe the third.
Or maybe — where? The mother should’ve gotten used to this by now, the sensation that she was starting over, taking her first steps into the city. Was dell’Ovo the third recurrence of the nightmare? The fifth? Barbara hardly seemed able to count, as she stood before the ward’s metal detector. She tumbled back into muzzy jetlag and all she could be sure of was that she’d found the source of the castle’s stink, the gates of a plague-ridden city.
In time it occurred to her that the smell might’ve triggered her flashback. That first day, there’d been Jay’s spatter and drool, his exposed brain. She blinked, she spoke up. “Maybe the girls, my little girls…they should wait outside?”
Her answer came from within the ward, people she couldn’t see, with accents she couldn’t place. Men, men’s voices. They were saying something about therapy.
“Please,” she said. “One thing at a time.”
Therapy, they replied. Grief management: the men beyond the metal detectors had the same vocabulary as Barbara had picked up at the Sam Center. She caught the phrase “International Red Cross,” then “interaction with children.” Maybe she recalled hearing that nothing helped to keep up a person’s spirits so much as playing with children, or maybe she heard it now, from the Shell of the Hermit Crab. Dogs were also good, and items from home, the kind of souvenirs these guys had received from her husband. Barbara didn’t so much nod as try to shake off the déjà vu, the wrinkles in her thinking, and she couldn’t fail to notice the mini-cam at her shoulder. The oblong silver box whirred in her ear.
Maddalena remained quick on the uptake as ever, and the hunger strikers were eager for attention. What better press than pictures with children? Now too Barbara felt additional pressure, a jostling from behind the camerawoman. Felt like John Junior, poking her shoulder blade.
“Hey,” he said. “Chris and me, we got the girls.”
Barb gathered herself and moved in, noticing first the rigging underfoot, the floor pads and extension cords. As for the layout of the kitchen-sink hospice, that eluded her a while. The gray prison blankets turned the beds to ojetti votivi, though in their case the point of the praying was hard to decipher. The IV units seemed more of the same, dangling shapes that might be hearts, might be mittens, might be masks. Also the mother’s revived bewilderment called up images of the Underworld, a catacomb beneath the Roman Naples. One of the strikers had his bed set high, like a head of household front and center in the family crypt.
Later Barbara wondered about how quickly she’d headed for that raised bed. She wondered how her urgency had affected the children. Paul and the others had hesitated, once they got inside the metal detector. She could understand that she’d wanted to get away from the cops and the camera. As for the doctors, she hardly saw them; she’d come to the castle to make things happen. Still she wondered at how quick she was to lay hands on an unconscious African who looked half mummified.
The man must’ve started starving before the others. The apocalyptic reek came worst from him, and Barb recalled something out of her schoolgirl reading about missionary work, something about how the glands broke down as the body lost fuel. She could feel the patient’s breaking down when she took his hand. The palm was moist but cool, and up at the elbows the skin bunched like the sleeves of a long john. His hospital shirt couldn’t hide the fence-lines of ribs and shoulder, and the bones of the face were prominent as well. He might’ve been handsome a week ago. Now his features had darkened like a gum-caked penny and, even as he took this morning riposo, his scooped cheeks stretched his lips to the point of exposing his teeth. And there was another pressure on his face too, a stranger business. Fist-sized packs of cotton had been taped against the corners of the striker’s eyes.