Black Souls

by Gioacchino Criaco

  Everyone wanted to get straight and emerge from the shadows. The children of the forest relaxed their defenses and started to own assets and companies under their own names; they drove around in their luxurious cars with their real driver’s licenses. They believed they would be accepted, finally, as legitimate Italians, the children of a noble nation.

  Then came the summer of the World Cup, with its magical nights. We went out en masse to cheer for Italy. Everyone thought the honeymoon had been extended.

  But it was over. We lost the World Cup. That fall, little attention was paid to the issuance of Presidential Decree 309/90, the new law on drugs, and the changes that began to undermine the guarantee mechanism of the new legal code.

  Luciano was among the very few to keep his guard up. He explained that aggravated penalties for drug dealers were expanding dramatically, and alternative processes could now be implemented to obtain an easy confession from the defendant and a guilty verdict. No one yet understood the lethal trap presented by wiretapping and its admission as evidence in a trial. The old regime was trying to save itself with those new laws. Few sensed the imminent collapse of a power system that had gripped the nation for half a century.

  Luciano forced us to adhere to the precautions we’d adopted in the eighties. He preached his warnings to others, but he was speaking to the wind. He also put Rino and his friends on notice; he’d been familiarizing himself with certain political circles and the educated and moralistic world that fueled them. Even in roaring Milan, where most people were determined to enjoy the good life, there were, he said, powerful groups that swelled with horror at the thought of the burgeoning drug trade. They couldn’t bear to go to restaurants, stadiums, concerts, and be relegated to waiting behind stinking peasants and shepherds who had grown rich from their delinquency, or to watch the ascent of arrogant and ignorant politicians who were in league with the former. The so-called cultured classes, imbued with moralism and in union with political circles eager to seize power in short order, were ready to launch their offensive.

  But there was a general lack of suspicion about the coming storm, a widespread headiness, a sense of omnipotence and, of course, an intolerable arrogance. No one bothered to consider the evidence.

  Rino repeated Luciano’s warning to his friends, yet his words were drowned out by their laughter; the people were with them, they said; they were making ordinary people feel more at home than ever in the Republic. They felt untouchable.

  Undaunted, we continued to grind coke and make billions. We received thousands of packages that gave off a sweet, caramelized scent of peaches and violets. The white, unlike the dark, did not inspire fear. When we opened it, the crystals burst with elation, tufts of aromatic talc rose up, and it immediately dissolved between our fingertips, leaving behind a light, oily patina. The dark stuff stank of something wild, the stench of a beast, of poisonous oleander; it was difficult to get rid of, it was a dirty brown color, and it had to be melted with fire. With heroin you immediately saw blood, and it was intimidating. Coke adhered peacefully to the nasal mucosa, it seemed harmless, and left no marks on the body.

  The children of the forest carried on, living like birds of prey in Milan, a paradigm of Western Europe. In the beginning, they had been aware that they were foreigners in this northern land, and they respected their surroundings. They had known that their wealth was stolen, and therefore they shared it. Now, though, they had convinced themselves that the money was all theirs, and they began to behave badly, all-powerfully. When they emerged from the shadows, they revealed the evil they carried in their bodies, and showed the worst of themselves. The enchantment of our Italian honeymoon was marred by their dark shadows.

  The new drug had lost the momentum of its early years, and fun became diseased, a thing of the past. Instead of selling cocaine, the boys began to use it. They dealt just enough to cover their personal vices. They started arriving late for meetings and then forgot about them entirely. In order to meet someone, you had to get him out of bed, or wait for nighttime. They all lived from dusk to dawn.

  It was no fun spending time with the children of the forest anymore. They nonchalantly recounted their incredible hallucinations, they saw cops everywhere and traitors in their best friends. They began to shoot at each other over imagined slights, and when they pulled out their guns they were often so baked that innocent bystanders suffered the worst.

  We started to dislike the game more and more.

  We weeded out our less reliable customers, restricting the circle of dealers we worked with, or their number of visits.

  It was around that time when a strange bacterium suddenly started to spread around Milan, causing attacks of dysentery and manifesting itself in hundreds of red dots on faces and chests. At the bars where we met our customers we could barely finish a conversation, and the lines for the bathrooms were substantial. With a smile on his lips, Luciano recited the names of every plague. Only we and a few other boys seemed to be immune to the disease.

  When the bacterium had been dominating the city for over a week, we all went out to dinner together. I laughed when Luigi and Sasà arrived, their faces burning like infants with rubella. Tonino and Luciano grew livid, and launched into a malicious rant against them. There was a tension between us that had never existed before. Then I understood why.

  “If you start using,” said Luciano, “we’re finished.” The marshal, Santoro, and I made a concerted effort to restore calm at the table and understand what had happened: it had been Tonino’s idea, but only Luciano’s scientific knowledge had made the practical joke possible.

  The fact that almost everyone who dealt coke also used it was apparent from their change in character, habits, punctuality, and precision. Of course, everyone denied the obvious, and belittled other users.

  “You know like they do with robberies, when they fill bags of money with paint and let them burst all over the thieves’ faces? What if we could color the users’ faces the same way? We’d shame them all,” Tonino had commented to Luciano as they waited for a no-show customer in Piazzale Lodi. Liking the suggestion, Luciano opened a discreet number of packages and sprinkled a bacterium inside, the effects of which only lasted a few days. He resealed everything and took up a pen and paper, noting which of our business contacts showed up with the mark of vice.

  Sasà and Luigi swore up and down they had never touched the stuff, and offered an explanation: they claimed they’d realized a package had been opened and closed badly and cut it open to check its contents. When they did, the package broke and its contents dispersed in a cloud over the table. That must have been why they’d inhaled the stuff by accident. Now their backsides were in flames from the constant wiping, all because of those two ballbreakers, Luciano and Tonino.

  We wanted to believe it was true; after all, I’d also felt lightheaded sometimes after opening packages to check them. Still, as of that day, a malignance insinuated its way into our union.

  The joke was out, and for some time people suddenly had to leave Milan for work. Customers started to observe the effects of the drug on other people before inhaling any white that came from us.

  To put the spat behind us, Sasà took us with him to Paris.

  We were still allocating a large part of our earnings to his Arab friends; we’d gotten our start thanks to them and it seemed right to go on like this.

  Sasà was en route to Paris to handle an arms supply. We arrived at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport dressed like businessmen and took two taxis to Avenue Montaigne; we checked into two splendid suites at the Plaza Athénée, next to the princely love nest of a well-known Lebanese businessman, who closed the deal with Sasà over an animated dispute. While the two of them argued, we ate voraciously and stripped the beautiful Moor waitresses with our eyes. When the two stopped arguing and shook hands, the Lebanese man left us to have our way with his attendants.

  The next day we
played tourist, exploring Paris with our cameras—the Champs Élysées, Place Vendôme, Place de la Concorde, Les Invalides, the Louvre, the Trocadéro. In the evening, already a little tipsy, we concluded our holiday in a nightclub on George V. It took us some time to notice that the waitresses and all the women on stage were transvestites. Only men occupied the other tables, and they eyed us lustfully. By the time we realized, it was too late to stop Tonino.

  We jokingly called him Tonino, a little boy’s nickname, but his real nickname was the Doberman. Nearly six foot five, he had to be kept on a short leash, because he would go on the attack if he thought other people found him ridiculous, and it was always a disaster.

  After Tonino flipped the first two tables, the queens reacted quickly. A hoard of them came at us, and we fended off a few before eventually succumbing. It was a massacre, but the worst was yet to come, when the fearsome metropolitan police, the flics, arrived in their black jackets and took all of us to the station opposite Concorde-Lafayette and tortured us until dawn. Then they issued us expulsion orders for being undesirables and loaded us into a big Peugeot van. We passed through airport customs and boarded an Air France flight to Rome-Fiumicino. Once we landed, we were booked and released.

  We laughed for months imagining the faces of the Frenchmen’s wives when they heard that their husbands, whose advances we’d warded off, had spent a night in jail for a brawl in a men’s only establishment in downtown Paris.

  It wasn’t funny to everyone; back in Milan, unsuspecting French tourists who came within earshot of Tonino and made the mistake of answering his distorted question of “Vu sette franses?” with a “oui” found themselves facing down an angry bull. For months, peaceful transalpine citizens filed complaints of inexplicable assaults with the service inspector at the San Sepolcro Commissariat.

  That trip put things right between us. But our work became increasingly difficult as people like us became the cops’ main focus. Not a day passed without a raid that led to the arrest of dozens. Increasingly stringent legislation and modern technologies rendered the children of the forest—no longer predators as much as they were puppets—easy prey to repression.

  Everyone was working on the go. The boys had three or four cell phones each; the phones had appeared some years earlier with the false assurance that calls couldn’t be tapped, so everyone spoke freely, scheduling meetings that the law also managed to attend. Between telephone records and fuzzy conversations picked up by the bugs installed in our vehicles, the cops had enough evidence to hold up any charges that might be filed.

  The right-minded folk had suddenly awakened, as if they hadn’t been feasting with us for years; they demanded and obtained increasingly harsher anti-drug laws. We were a cancer, according to public opinion, and we must be eradicated.

  Newspaper and TV narratives advocated for an erosion of the legal defense guarantees established by the laws of the former regime. From the prisons, bosses ordered their people on the outside to lay low, but there was no preventing panic and deaths mounted all over Italy. Under the circumstances, we should have all done our best to lead quiet, uneventful lives, and yet strangely, people committed senseless acts of violence that drew attention to themselves instead. Acts that would lead to our demise.

  Our group’s way of operating, the way we covered ourselves, had spared us from the carnage of daily arrests. We had never used landlines, let alone cell phones. When the bugs started to appear, we went out into the open countryside to discuss work; we no longer frequented the bars, and before making any new moves, we would disappear completely from circulation.

  We lived more and more of our lives in the shadows.

  Santoro, who had become a captain in the force, continuously provided us with lists of informants and ongoing investigations. Our friends in other police departments did the same for a fee.

  But it was a game of cat-and-mouse, and only the deluded could have believed they would win against the means and men of the state, which had decided to wipe us out.

  The countdown had begun, and the only difference between us was how long each would last. The people on our heels could waste all the time they wanted, their paychecks would arrive at the end of the month just the same, they had an easy job, they were protected, they had nothing to lose. Their mistakes had no serious consequences, while a slip-up on our part could mean thirty years in prison.

  Our group was luckier than the others; we had friendships, an ocean of money; we were well-versed in how the cops worked, where they placed the bugs, how they made their preliminary identifications, their random checks, the type of cameras they affixed to the lampposts. All we had to do was cut the cord and leave them empty-handed.

  But in order to interrupt the mechanism that granted us so much wealth and power, we would have needed the kind of willpower that only Luciano still possessed. We made sure to stamp any such determination out of him. We didn’t give it all up; on the contrary, we grew increasingly bitter toward our enemies.

  One day Sasà announced he had to take care of something that he “couldn’t get out of,” as he put it, his eyes downcast. And so we prepared for a new journey. We were caught up in an operation whose ramifications we pretended not to understand, but on which our past had depended and our future would be decided.

  A Bulgarian agent and defector had found refuge in an embassy on via Veneto in Rome. For decades, he had acted as the link between Italian informants and the higher-ups at his agency behind the curtain. He had information on thirty years of misdeeds in our beautiful country, and now he was spilling everything. It would have caused an earthquake in certain political circles and destroyed several budding projects.

  Our alibis ended there. In truth, our game was transparent, and we could no longer pretend that we didn’t understand. But Sasà begged us not to ask questions; he said we had to trust him. It was essential to our salvation.

  The marshal procured two military police cars and we left for Rome. In addition to the cars, Sasà had requested a colonel’s uniform. At the mouth of via Veneto, we activated our sirens and flashing lights and got out of the cars in front of the embassy, leaving the doors open. Our very own Colonel Arenghi, a supposed member of the anti-terrorism squad, ordered our colleagues standing guard at the site to follow us inside: there had been a very reliable bomb threat, and we had to carry out a preliminary check before the alerted bomb squad intervened.

  We knew all the procedures, and no one was alarmed. The embassy’s internal security officers unsuspectingly accompanied the colonel, who carefully explained the details of the operations in perfect English. After we inspected the offices, the colonel entered the Bulgarian ambassador’s private quarters—alone, in the name of discretion—while I stood by the half-closed door. When I heard a slight commotion, I rushed in. Sasà had already taken care of his target and his escort, and was holding a small 22mm to the forehead of the diplomat, whom he proceeded to immobilize.

  We calmly left; it had been a false alarm. Our colleagues returned to their posts, and the colonel relieved them of their reporting duties, insisting that he would personally send a note to his department.

  We returned to Milan without incident. News of the event didn’t appear that day or in the days thereafter. It had all been a dream. Very real, on the other hand, were the cutting words that Luciano shouted at Sasà and Luigi as he drove us home. They were in the back, while I was in the passenger seat next to Luciano.

  He stopped the car at a service area, turned around, and laid into them, pouring out everything he had been keeping inside for years. He addressed Luigi first: “Do you have anything in that fucking head of yours besides money? Do you have any feelings? A single passion? Do you think about anything besides business? We’ve been attached at the hip for a lifetime and I’ve never seen a single tear in your eye. You wouldn’t even cry over our dead bodies, you’d just kneel to take our wallets.” Then he turned to Sasà: “Do y
ou think you’re the only one with a people, a cause? Our people are progeny of a warrior lineage. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Spaniards, they all tried to take the Aspromonte and never made it past the foothills. No empire has ever conquered the children of the forest. This was the last of the dirty work we’ll ever do for your friends. We aren’t tin soldiers, and we’re not taking orders from anyone. Tell them we’re our own masters and let them do whatever the fuck they want about it.” No one opened his mouth again for the rest of the trip.

  Our world was crumbling fast.

  Dealers and gangsters began to clear their consciences, mostly by confessing the sins of others. At first there were only a few rats, but a mass desertion soon followed.

  We already had a list of names of the first informants to roll—or “repent.” Denunciations that had been kept in the dark for years were now forced into the light of day before the prosecutors. The informants had to be sworn in at the courtrooms, with their backs to the full defendant’s cages.

  It was a bloodbath. At first, while Sicilian and Campanian mafiosi decimated their own ranks, taking out the rats and trying to short-circuit the arrests, the children of the forest held out; their families would have disowned any traitors. But they were weakened by too many vices, and eventually the defections began.

  The truly repentant informants would sign anything; the more self-serving never shared everything they knew, and they never told the unadulterated truth, but would begin by ruining their personal enemies, making them out to be more important than they were, attributing all misdeeds to those already serving jail sentences, and in reality sacrificing very few of their own friends.