The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  A short while later, it was Don Vittorio in person who came downstairs. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have done it: he was in violation of his house arrest, and if they caught him, they’d throw him back in prison in the blink of an eye. Especially considering how much work it had been to secure house arrest. But he wanted to come downstairs, so he did, just waiting long enough for Cicognone to warn the lookouts to make sure there was no law enforcement in the area.

  “La Cicogna e l’Aucelluzzo,” said L’Arcangelo. The Stork and the Dirty Bird, “we’ve got more wings in here than at Capodichino Airport.”

  Aucelluzzo didn’t feel like laughing, but a smile came to his lips anyway. “I heard you defended Gabriele, I heard someone had insulted him on the Internet.” He grabbed him by the shoulder and took him down under the apartment house’s staircase. There was a low, sheet-metal door, which L’Arcangelo opened with the keys that he was carrying in his pocket. He screwed a hose onto a faucet, took Aucelluzzo’s hands, and put them under the water, washing away the blood. He held Aucelluzzo’s right hand in his, while his left hand held the hose. He cleaned the bloodied palm using only his thumb, delicately. First the right hand, then the left, even though the left hand hadn’t been wrapped in bandages and therefore the knuckles were more swollen but less torn up. “Didn’t you have a knuckleduster?” Aucelluzzo didn’t understand what he was referring to. But anything that seemed to resemble an answer “no” embarrassed him, just as this scene was embarrassing him. He and L’Arcangelo in almost complete darkness, in that space so tight and narrow that he could smell the man’s aftershave. L’Arcangelo asked again: “Didn’t you have a knuckleduster? You know, a knuckleduster, the, what do you call it? A pair of knucks. Brass knuckles.”

  Aucelluzzo shook his head and told him the story: “No, I put euro coins on my knuckles and then bandaged up.”

  “Ah, right, of course, because these days they’ll search you. With a knuckleduster, when I was your age, I shattered plenty of cheeks.” He paused and turned off the faucet. He dried the back of his hand on his trousers and then went on: “I thank you for having defended Gabriele. The insults from those shitheads, I can always imagine, keep him from resting in peace. But you should have asked me first. That way I would have told you, you could just have left him dead on the ground, no fooling around. If you leave him alive, you just give him a chance to hurt you. Someone you beat senseless is just someone you’re giving a second chance. Maybe you love this guy.”

  “No, absolutely the opposite.”

  “Then why didn’t you kill him? Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “Because ’o Cicognone won’t let anyone talk to you.”

  “Here in this quarter, you’re all children of mine.”

  This was the moment. He’d pulled all that insanity to get here, where he was now, face-to-face with Don Vittorio. Now or never.

  “Eh, Don Vitto’, I have a favor to ask you.”

  The boss sat in silence, as if inviting him to speak.

  “May I ask you?”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Nicolas, who’s a guy in the Forcella System, the guaglione who practically saved my life when the guy from the paranza of the Capelloni was shooting at me, asked if he could talk to you about something urgent, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”

  “Tell him to come,” said L’Arcangelo, “tell him that I’ll send him a new face, a contact who’ll explain what he needs to do. In a couple of days, I’ll send him a new face, in Piazza Bellini.”

  Aucelluzzo, incredulous, thanked L’Arcangelo: “Grazie, Don Vittorio,” and bowed down his head, to his knees, sketching out a sort of bow. Don Vittorio took his cheeks between his fingers, the way any good grandfather would have done, and they went back out into the light. Cicognone was waiting for them with both hands behind his back, but it was clear that he was pissed off. Bust’ ’e Latte, on the other hand, was looking around in utter confusion. How the hell did I wind up here? he was wondering.

  “Take care of yourself, guagliu’,” said L’Arcangelo, and then headed for the front door, but after a couple of short steps, he turned around: “Aucellu’, fifty percent.”

  “That is to say? Don Vitto’, I don’t understand you…” Aucelluzzo already had one foot in the parking lot, and he was telling himself that once he got out of that situation, he’d rush home and OD on X-Men for a week.

  “Fifty percent.”

  “Don Vitto’, forgive me, but I keep not understanding you…”

  “What did I tell you before? Here, you’re all children of mine, and no child of mine gives a damn about his own life. It’s not like, just because someone was enough of an ass to save your life, that you give him whatever he wants.”

  Aucelluzzo squinted his good eye, as if he wanted to see in L’Arcangelo’s words the point of what he was driving at.

  “Sure he gave you approval to sell in his zone. Sure you can sell our shit there. Fifty percent of everything you earn, you pay it here,” and he patted his trousers pocket twice, “the other thirty percent you pay to the market boss. Whatever’s left over you can keep for yourself. What he promised you was too important, in fact so important that you actually provoked the insult to Gabriele. Take revenge and restore my honor, that’s the way you do it, Aucellu’.”

  All this mess and now Aucelluzzo was left empty-handed. Before this new agreement, he was allowed to keep whatever he sold outside of the authorized streets for himself, as long as he gave thirty percent to the Conocal market boss. But now he was going to have to pay a tax directly to Don Vittorio. Aucelluzzo bowed his head, crushed, and lifted it again only when he saw Cicognone’s long shadow coming toward him: “You pay it to me, every two months, and if I figure out that you’re scraping a little off the top, I’ll really get pissed off. I keep all the bricks carefully counted. If you take something off the top, I’ll slice off your balls.”

  “At this point, it would have been better if I’d just let ’o White kill me directly,” Aucelluzzo muttered as he got onto his Vespa.

  Cicognone looked at him the way you’d look at someone who has no hope of learning a thing from even the finest teachers: “Listen, Don Vittorio just saved your life, pisciazza.” Once again, Aucelluzzo failed to understand. “Strunzo, if you started earning money under the authorization of the people in Forcella, then you would have been taking in money, and there were only two alternatives: either the guaglioni here in Conocal were going to rub you out so they could go and sell in the city center, or else they’d start looking for other ways of going to sell in the center. That would mean no one would be selling around here anymore, and then I’d have to kill you myself.” And he left him there in the parking lot, with a swollen eye that looked even more badly bruised in his pale face.

  It was the end of a hard day. Before starting his scooter back up, Aucelluzzo pulled out his cell phone. He found calls from his mother, and just as many calls from his market boss, Totore, who knew he’d been to the stadium and had then wound up at L’Arcangelo’s place. So Totore wanted to understand whether Aucelluzzo had broken some basic rule, and most of all, whether he himself was going to have to pay the consequences for whatever Aucelluzzo had done.

  “Everything’s taken care of,” he wrote to his mother.

  “Everything’s taken care of,” he wrote to Totore.

  “Everything’s taken care of,” he wrote to Maraja.

  Everything’s taken care of: a universal expression. The very picture of everything going in accordance with established order. Everything was taken care of for his mother, who wanted to know why he hadn’t sent her word after the soccer match. Everything was taken care of for his market boss: he wasn’t going to have to pay anything, in fact, if anything, he was going to earn more now. Everything was taken care of for the aspiring paranza capo who wanted to obtain the protection of an old boss who was no longer a player in the game.

  “Everything’s taken care of.” That’s the way things were supposed to wo
rk.

  LAIR

  Drago’ took them to the apartment on Via dei Carbonari. It stood on the fourth floor of a tumbledown apartment house, where the same last names had lived for centuries now. Fruit vendor the ancestor, fruit vendor the current occupant. Smugglers the ancestors, armed robbers the current occupants. There were no new tenants, except for the occasional African dope dealer who was allowed to live with the family.

  There Drago’ had an apartment at his disposal: “This place, guagliu’, is one thing the cops didn’t take. It’s still part of the Striano family, the good part. My grandfather used to own it, ’o Sovrano, and he would give it to the people who worked with him, on a temporary basis.”

  In fact, in the place you could clearly see the influence of the old families: it was furnished like an apartment from the eighties, and from that time forward it had gradually just emptied out. Become forgotten. Or better yet, been preserved. As if practically forty years ago someone had spread a slipcover over the furniture to protect it from the passage of time and had only just removed it.

  Everything was lower and shorter in that apartment. The tables, the sofas, the television set. It seemed like the residence of people who just a few decades ago barely reached an average height of five and a half feet. For the boys, everything was shin height, and they had immediately converted that strange glass food cart that stood right in front of the brown leather sofa into a foot rest. An immense lamp with a flower-pattern shade stood between two armchairs, brown like the sofa. And then there were shelves, a vast profusion of shelves, loaded with things that none of them had ever seen. There were even VHS cassettes with white labels, upon which someone had hastily written the year of an international soccer match. But the most delightful object in the place was the television set. It stood atop another table that was pushed back against a wall papered in blue and white stripes. It looked like a cube and must have weighed at least a hundred pounds. The screen bulged out in a curve and reflected the faded images of the room. Dentino approached it cautiously as if it were a dangerous animal, and leaning in from what seemed like a safe distance, he pushed what looked to be the ON button; it snapped back with the sound of a spring finally released after a century of inactivity.

  “Nothing’s happening,” said Nicolas. But then a faint red light appeared, contradicting his statement. “In the old days, members of the family would hide out here,” Drago’ continued. “Every so often Feliciano ’o Nobile would come here to screw some woman or other. Chest’è casa ’e nisciuno.” No man’s home. No-man’s-land.

  “Fine,” said Nicolas, “I like ‘no-man’s-land.’ It’s going to become our lair.”

  That word made people smile.

  “Lair?” asked Agostino. “What’s a lair?”

  “Our lair, where we hole up, where we meet, where we play, where we split up everything we take.”

  “Well, then, the first thing we need is an Xbox,” Agostino said.

  Nicolas went on: “This is going to be everyone’s home, so there are going to have to be some rules. The first is that we don’t bring females in here.”

  “Uààà.” Stavodicendo immediately expressed his disappointment. “I wasn’t expecting that, Maraja!”

  “If we bring women here it’ll turn into a bordello, a mess. Just us, and no one else. Not even our friends. Just us and that’s all. Also,” he added, “not a word to a soul about this place. This place exists for us and no one else.”

  “The first rule about Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club,” said Briato’.

  “Right!” said Lollipop.

  “Sure, but still people will see us come in and out, Maraja,” said Drago’.

  “It’s one thing for people to see us, it’s another thing if we tell them.”

  * * *

  It was called Via dei Carbonari. It’s still called Via dei Carbonari: it’s still there, in Forcella. The name was well suited to this group of kids who knew nothing about the historical Carbonari and yet who resembled them, without their noble intentions, but still with the same willingness to sacrifice, the blind abnegation that led them to ignore the world and its signals, to listen only to their own will as an objective demonstration of the justness of their actions.

  “This is the lair, guagliu’. We need to come here, here we smoke, here we play, here we spend our time. Drago’ is in agreement. Copacabana knows nothing. This belongs to us.”

  Nicolas knew that everything needed to start from an apartment, a place where they could meet and talk without interference. It was a way of uniting them. That’s exactly what he said: “’A ccà s’adda partì.” This is where we start from.

  Biscottino was the only one who hadn’t yet spoken, as he stared at the tips of his brand-new gleaming white Adidas. He seemed determined at all costs to find a spot on them somewhere.

  “Biscotti’, aren’t you happy?” Maraja asked.

  Biscottino finally looked up. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Nico’?”

  Nico’, not Maraja, and the head turned back down to look at the Adidas.

  The others didn’t even notice that the two of them had moved into the bedroom. They were too busy exploring the time machine.

  Right away, Biscottino said: “Nico’, are you sure that it’s a good thing to operate out of the apartment of a turncoat?”

  Maraja came close enough for the other to smell his breath, and he placed both his shoes atop the toes of Biscottino’s shoes. “A turncoat is a turncoat, not someone who has the blood of a turncoat in their veins. Capito? And after all, it wasn’t Drago’s father who talked. Now, let’s go back to the other room. Everything’s okay.” He took his shoes off Biscottino’s shoes and then said it again: “’A ccà s’adda partì.”

  Only he and Drago’ had the keys. And when the others wanted to get in touch with them, they’d send a text: “Are you at home?” The lair was the beginning of everything, according to Nicolas, a home for all of them, every little kid’s dream. A place to take the money from their monthly earnings, a place to hide it in the nooks and crannies, in envelopes, among the old newspapers. To be able to hide the money there, count it, and especially pile it up. Maraja knew this exactly: that everything would get started only once the money was all piled up together, when they were truly united, when the place they started out from in their business really was held in common. That’s how you create a family. That’s how you achieved his dream: the paranza.

  ADDA MURÌ MAMMÀ

  “We need to build a paranza that’s all ours. Nun amm’ ’a appartené a nisciuno, sulo a nuje. We won’t belong to anyone, just to us. We’ve got to report to no one but ourselves.”

  Everyone looked at Nicolas in silence. They were waiting to learn how they’d be able to break free without resources, without a fucking penny to their name. They had no power, and their facial features—the features of children—only seemed to confirm it, to dispel any doubt on the matter.

  People called them children and children is what they actually were. And just like anyone who hasn’t begun to live, they were afraid of nothing, they considered old people to be dead already, buried already, history already. The only weapon they possessed was the feral nature man-cubs still preserved. Small animals that act on instinct. They bare their teeth and snarl, and that’s enough to make those they encounter shit their pants in fear.

  They needed to become ferocious, that’s the only way that those who struck fear and respect into them would ever deign to give them consideration. Children, yes, but children with a pair of balls on them. Create disarray and reign over that disarray: disorder and chaos for a kingdom without geographic coordinates.

  “They think we’re just kids, but we’ve got this … and we also have this.”

  And with his right hand, Nicolas pulled out the pistol he had tucked down his pants. He hooked his forefinger into the trigger guard and spun the weapon as if it were light as a feather, while with his left hand he pointed to his junk, his dick, his balls. We
have weapons and we have balls, that was the concept.

  “Nicolas…” Agostino interrupted him, someone had to do it, and Nicolas expected it. He was waiting for it like the kiss that would identify Christ to the legionaries. He needed someone to take the doubt and the guilt of thinking: a scapegoat, so that it would become clear that there was no alternative, that you couldn’t decide whether to be inside or outside. The paranza had to breathe in unison, and the respiration that needed to serve as the metronome for everybody else’s need for oxygen was his.

  “… Nico’, but it’s never happened like this, that we could just create a paranza, all alone, right away, like this. Adda murì mammà, Nico’, we need to ask permission. Now of all times, when people think there’s no one left in Forcella, if we know how to act with the Capelloni, then we can work for them. Each of us will get a salary and maybe, in a while, we’ll even get a market all our own. A piazza.”