“Do you think everything will die down soon?” asked Laura, and we all knew she was talking about the protests.
“Who knows?” said Rita, who was trying to pick up a shell with her toes. “But thank God Manzoni had already reopened the commissary before all this shit hit the fan.”
Everyone agreed.
“What will happen to all those poor guys?” Laura asked, and it took me a minute to realize she meant the guys who’d been yanked off the sub.
“Do you really feel sorry for them?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” she said.
“What if they’d had an accident?”
“But they didn’t,” she insisted.
“Do you think they’ll be court-martialed?” asked Rita.
“Tim says most of the sailors will probably get a letter of reprimand,” said Bev. “But whoever distributed the drugs is in big trouble, plus any officers who knew what was happening and didn’t blow the whistle. Or, God forbid, participated.”
“How’d they even figure it out?” asked Rita.
“Bobby told me it was just one sailor who got caught with weed while they were underway. He went to captain’s mast and rolled on everyone else.”
“Jesus,” said Rita.
Daniel Bornemann and Janine Greer floated past us, and we waved. When they were out of earshot, Bev asked, “Do you think there’s something going on with them?”
We all glanced in their direction. It was pretty obvious we were talking about them, but they were in the middle of something and weren’t paying attention to us.
“You think?” said Rita.
“No way,” said Laura, but then we watched Janine stand up and, with no warning, start to wade toward the shore.
“Lovers’ tiff?” I said, joking around.
“Hey, Daniel,” called Bev, and like a well-trained golden retriever, he dog-paddled over to us.
I swear, I thought Bev was going to ask him about Janine and why she’d stormed off, but instead she went after Angela.
“What is your wife doing wearing a skirt suit out here?”
He glanced back at the beach and laughed. “It’s not my place to question the boss.”
75.
PAUL HAD DUTYthe night of the Feast of Santa Maria Magdalena, so Francesca and Bernardo invited me to tag along with them. “We are not particularly religious,” she explained as we wandered through the throngs of people on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. “But this is not to be missed.”
When we arrived at the little piazza in front of the church, my mouth dropped. It had been converted into the equivalent of an outdoor amphitheater, with rows upon rows of folding chairs facing the church. On the steps, someone had constructed a temporary altar, wired for sound and decorated with extravagant bouquets of flowers and strings of twinkling blue lights.
“This is beautiful,” I said to Francesca.
“Just wait,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the Piazza Rossa, where a procession of clergymen and city officials was assembling in front of a giant statue of a woman whom I could only assume was Mary Magdalene.
I tried to dredge up what little I’d learned about Mary Magdalene in Sunday school. I knew she had been a follower of Jesus and that the prostitute thing was likely a myth. That she had witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion and also his resurrection. And that she had gone on to share the message of his salvation. But what I didn’t know was why the Maddalenini liked her so much.
Francesca said it was because Mary Magdalene had been delivered from evil, but I’ve heard other explanations over the years. She was born and raised in Magdala, a tiny fishing village on the Sea of Galilee, and at one time Magdala was referred to as Magdala Nunayya, which literally translates to Tower of Fishes. I suspect that the fishermen who settled La Maddalena in the early seventeen hundreds knew their Bible and wanted a guarantee that the fish would keep biting.
Regardless of why the island had been named for her, Mary Magdalenewas revered, and I watched four portatori carefully hoist her statue, which had been installed in the center of a small wooden platform teeming with fresh flowers, onto their shoulders.
