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little thing. “Lorenzo,” I’d said, “I think I’m starting contractions. Ask him where we can find a hospital.”
    Lorenzo, of course, knew exactly what I was doing. If I’d been having contractions, I’d have been screaming and on the verge of giving birth. I’m not one to put up with long labor. We barely got to the delivery room last time.
    “Now, now, cara mia ,” he said soothingly. “Don’t upset yourself.” Then he turned to the traffic cop. “See what you’ve done. You’ve upset my pregnant wife.”
    The fellow stared at my stomach and then at the two sleeping children in the back seat. “A million apologies, little mother,” he cried. “What a fine family you have. You must be from the south.”
    Just careless, I thought, not that I begrudged my little product of forgetfulness his life. And I didn’t tell the policeman that we came from Rome. The Neapolitans and their southern neighbors sometimes envy our hosting the pope and having all the beauties of the papal city. And why not? Naples was a disaster since the war, a modern disaster with a history of foreign kings and stupid peasants, so unlike the glory of Rome. “Many thanks, sergeant,” I said to the policeman with a motherly smile.
    He protested that he had not yet reached so high a rank. Then he offered to escort us to the hospital, and I told him that perhaps the baby was simply restless and telling his mother she needed to lie down and rest. Naturally we parted amicably without the citation he had meant to give Lorenzo.
    “What are you thinking?” Carolyn asked curiously.
    “Oh, just that, from what I’ve seen, the Sorrento police will need all the help we can give them.”
    We smiled at one another, a conspiracy of women, as Carolyn said, “The lieutenant in charge did seem more excitable and melodramatic than logical.”

6
    Scientists Incoming
     
     
     
Carolyn
     
    The first event of the meeting in the accompanying persons’ packet I had received at Hotel Reception when I arrived was to be a cocktail party at seven, followed by a dinner. The program did not say where, but I feared it might be this hotel with its thoroughly boring entrees. It distressed me to think that Paolina’s last dinner had been duck, tough, greasy, and overcooked, with a skin like hard plastic. She had tapped her knife against the offending skin and been rewarded with a sharp, cracking sound.
    Jason had neither called nor arrived, although he was usually more considerate than to leave me uninformed. Was I expected to present myself, unaccompanied, for the evening’s events? I could hardly plead exhaustion. I’d been here two days and had, after lunch, finished the Hazzard book about Graham Greene on Capri while sitting on my balcony in a comfortably padded chair with the gorgeous blue green water of the Bay of Naples before me. Capri no doubt lay somewhere in the distance, overhung with the rain-bloated clouds that shrouded the peak of Vesuvius and the bay. Or was Capri in the other direction? When the wind picked up later in the afternoon and ruffled the pages of my book, I went inside for a refreshing nap.
    I had tried to get CNN or some other news program that might have information on the French airport strike, but had, instead, happened upon a pornographic movie, three sweaty people, a woman and two men, in a tangle of limbs. Naturally I turned the set off immediately and called the desk to complain. The young woman seemed more amused than sympathetic, even when I suggested that people with children, of whom there seemed to be a fair number, would not want their children to see such things. The desk clerk told me that children were not allowed to use the television remotes or ride the elevators or use the pools if unattended by a responsible adult. Then she gave me the names of the channels she thought might offend me. There seemed to be quite a few, and if I was not mistaken, one had been a cooking channel I had clicked over just before I