Earthquake I.D. Read Online Free Page A

touching somebody else the old man was fingering this bric-a-brac, though in time he impressed Barbara with a formality of bearing at odds with his free-handedness. After a couple of hours in the man’s clinic, she had to conclude he had little in common with her sensualist in-law. He might be Neapolitan but he was no teeming Sophia Loren, nor any hot-lipped stud, aglow before a pizza oven. Rather, the family’s new caregiver was so God-minded, he’d fingered his Mr. Christopher until it was flat and dark.
    And Barbara couldn’t help but think of the God she herself had in mind, her change of spirit, toughening now like the spatter from Jay’s wound turned to scabs on her shirtfront. Her notion of the divine no longer seemed to dwell in high-minded and softhearted figures, the canon of saints she’d grown up with. Years ago, after her mother had run away, young Barbara had worked through a full five hundred rosaries each for Sister Teresa and Brother Francis. She’d kept the tally in her fifth-grade composition book. But this morning she’d seen such gentle profiles hacked off the church frieze. She’d hacked them off herself, with each blow of the hammer and chisel swearing allegiance instead to the sexed-up monster of the ancient temples. A god with lightning down his pants, and pitiless once he got started.
    DiPio’s beard, kinky, bobbing, presented a thousand miniature question marks. Herself, she no longer had the patience.
    She didn’t like the confusion about her name, either. Today everyone Barbara spoke with, not just the doctor but also the police, turned their name into something she’d never heard before. In the States the word tended to sound Hispanic, starting like Ricky Ricardo calling his wife and then coming down hard on the next-to-last syllable, that lascivious “si.” Or you got something flat and Midwestern, cramming “lullaby” and “cheetah” into a wet growl. In Naples however the name took the emphasis on its second syllable, which sweetened and lengthened and sang out from the whole mouth. Around DiPio’s downtown clinic, everyone used the new pronunciation, L’-looo-shee-tah.
    To Barbara, it sounded like babytalk.
    â€œSignora L’looo-she-tah,” asked a detective in plainclothes, “do you know the word scippatori? Here in Naples it means a thief on the street. Ship-pah-torr…”
    The mother thought of slapping the man’s solicitous face and shouting the filthiest slang Italian she knew. She’d gone through six time zones in two days. Anyway the whole point of the policeman’s patronizing blather was that the investigation would likely get nowhere. The detective went on to say that the attackers must’ve been rookies at this sort of thing. A job like this morning’s would’ve been too risky for anyone experienced at the smash-and-grab—anyone connected to the Camorra .
    â€œHere in Naples, do you know signora, the Mafia is the Camorra?”
    â€œA professional,” another cop put in, “a camorrista, he would never have hit your husband so badly. You understand? He would not wish a murder.”
    â€œAnd he would never be so stupid as to, to do injury an American.”
    Did Signora L’loo-she-tah understand that in Naples, a person can see at once if you are American? “We can see it in the shoes or the makeup, in the way you carry your hands.” And did she understand that, if an American is hurt, the NATO might get involved? The Sixth Fleet is quartered here, signora. The NATO. Also these days we have the UN Relief, more Americans…
    John Junior, bless him, cut the man short. “So Pop was hit by amateurs?”
    The attack looked like the work of amateurs, yes, and therefore the authorities couldn’t count on their usual stool pigeons. “Also, signora, think of it. In Naples now 15,000 are terramotati . They are without homes, for