The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  Then the morning had finally come. Nicolas went to the hardware store, got the keys and a candle, and paid what he owed, soothing the shopkeeper’s concerns. He savored the fear he could sense in people whenever he went into a place of business, always worried they were about to be robbed or subjected to some abuse or shakedown. He stopped by the deli and purchased bread and wine. Then he went to the lair and began his preparations: he turned out all the lights, then he took a section of candle, lit it, and set it on the table, letting it stand in a puddle of its own wax that he’d melted onto a candleholder until it hardened, fixing it in place. He pulled the baguette out of the paper bag and broke it into sections with his hands. He put on a sweatshirt and pulled the hoodie over his head.

  Showing up in dribs and drabs, two, three, then four guaglioni arrived. Nicolas opened the door for each of them: Pesce Moscio, Dentino, Drago’, who came in without knocking—he already had the keys to the lair—then Drone, Stavodicendo, Tucano, Biscottino, Briato’, and Lollipop.

  “What’s all this darkness?” asked Stavodicendo.

  “Let’s have a little silence,” said Nicolas, trying to create some atmosphere.

  “You look like Arno in Assassin’s Creed,” Drone told him. Nicolas wasted little time confirming that he had in fact taken his inspiration from that character. Then he sat down at the table and bowed his head.

  “Aho, scassi proprio i cessi,” said Biscottino. “You are too damned cool.”

  Nicolas ignored him and went on: “I baptize this place just as our three elders did. If they baptized with irons and chains, I baptize it with irons and chains.” Then he paused and turned his eyes up to the ceiling. “I turn my eyes to the sky and I see the North Star.” And he lifted his chin, uncovering his face. He’d started to grow a beard, the first thick beard that his age allowed him. “And this club is baptized! With words of omertà our society is formed.”

  He asked the first of them to step forward. No one budged. One of them stared at the tips of his shoes, another concealed a smile of embarrassment in the presence of that all-too-familiar scene they’d viewed so many times on YouTube, a third stood teetering on tiptoes. At last, one figure broke away from the crowd: Dentino.

  Nicolas asked him: “What are you in search of?”

  And he said: “Of my qualification as a young man of honor.”

  “How much does a picciotto weigh?” Nicolas asked.

  “As much as a feather scattered by the wind!” replied Dentino. He knew all the lines by heart, and he trotted them out with perfect timing, and with the right intonation.

  “And what does a picciotto represent?”

  “A sentinel of omertà who turns and turns again, and that which he sees and earns, he brings back to the society.”

  Then Nicolas picked up a piece of bread and handed it to him: “If you betray, this bread will become lead.” Dentino put it in his mouth, chewing slowly, softening it with his saliva. Nicolas poured some wine into a plastic cup, handed it to him, and said: “And this wine will become poison. If before I knew you as a young man of honor, from this moment on I recognize you as a picciotto belonging to this corps of the society.”

  Lying open in front of him was also the Bible that he’d taken from his mother’s dresser drawer. Then he pulled out his switchblade knife. The powerful springloaded blade with the black bone handle had been his favorite weapon up until that moment. He released the safety, pushed the button, and snapped open the blade. Dentino cried: “No! No, no, not the knife!”

  “We must all put in our blood,” said Nicolas, grabbing Dentino’s hand in his own. “Give me your arm.” He made a small cut precisely on the wrist, a small cut that was certainly much shorter and shallower than the one that Ben Gazzara makes in the movie. He squeezed out a beading drop of blood, just enough. After which, at the same place on his arm, Nicolas cut himself in turn. “Our blood is mingled, not the blood that comes from the same mother.” They took each other’s forearm and pressed them together, to mingle their blood.

  Dentino rejoined the group and Briato’ took a step forward. He practically had tears in his eyes. This was a genuine first communion, confirmation, and wedding all at once.

  He presented himself to Nicolas, who asked him the same questions: “Tell me, guaglio’, what are you in search of?”

  Briato’ had his mouth hanging open, but no words came out, whereupon Nicolas tried to help him out, like a high school teacher trying to rescue his student: “Of … of my…”

  “Life as a young man of honor!”

  “No, for fuck’s sake! Of my qualification as a young man of honor.”

  “Of my qualification as a young man of honor!”

  “How much does a picciotto weigh?” Nicolas asked him.

  “As much as the wind…”

  Someone suggested from the back, in a low voice: “As much as a feather scattered by the wind.”

  “And what does a picciotto represent?”

  “A soldier of omertà…”

  From the back of the room someone corrected him: “Sentinel!”

  Briato’ pretended not to notice and went on: “Who brings money to the society.”

  Nicolas repeated the phrase for him: “No, you’re supposed to say that what he sees and hears and earns, he brings back to the society!”

  Whereupon Briato’ blurted out: “Adda murì mammà, if you’d told me yesterday, I would have watched the movie again. Who the fuck can remember it, with all the words.”

  “Ua’, for real,” Stavodicendo commented, “adda murì mammà, I knew every word by heart.”

  Nicolas tried to restore a little seriousness to the atmosphere. He handed him the bread: “If you betray, this bread will become lead. And this wine will become poison.”

  Baptism after baptism the cut became shallower, because Nicolas’s wrist was starting to hurt. Last of all came Tucano’s turn, and he said: “Listen, though, Nico’, we’re supposed to mingle our blood. There’s no bleeding here, you barely scratched me.”

  And so Nicolas took his arm and cut again. Tucano wanted to carry that scratch with him, see it over and over again for the days to come: “If before I knew you as a young man of honor, from this moment on I recognize you as a picciotto belonging to the corps of the society.” Tucano couldn’t resist the temptation, and after the exchange of blood and the rubbing of forearms he pulled Nicolas close to him and kissed him full on the lips. “Ricchio’!” said Nicolas, calling him a faggot, and with that last line the rite was complete.

  Now in the apartment all the young guaglioni had become blood brothers. A blood brother is something you never turn back from. Your fate is bound up with the rules. You live or you die according to your ability to abide by those rules. The Camorra has always made a sharp contrast between blood brothers and brothers of sin, that is, the brother that your mother gives you by sinning with your father, as opposed to the brother that you choose, the brother who has nothing to do with biology, that does not come to you from a womb, from a sperm cell. The brother that is born in blood.

  “Let’s just hope you all don’t have AIDS, ’cause we’ve all mixed our blood,” said Nicolas. Now that the ceremony was finished, he was hanging out with all the others, like in a family.

  “Eh, that’s Ciro, who screws sick girls in the ass!” said Biscottino.

  “Oh, go fuck yourself,” Pesce Moscio replied in a thunderous voice.

  “At the very most,” said Dentino, “he screws fat girls, but only with a floppy fish!”

  Dentino was telling an old story: the story that had baptized Ciro Somma for all time as Pesce Moscio—Floppy Fish. It dated back to the days when they’d occupied the Arts High School, when a picture of one of his girlfriends, naked and really big, had made the circuit of every smartphone in the school. He really liked that girl a lot, but he’d let himself be dissuaded by the idiotic insults of his classmates, and so he started defending himself by admitting, yes, it was true, he’d had sex with her. But not real
, proper sex, instead it had been with his dick kind of hanging at half mast, like a floppy fish.

  “It’s unbelievable,” said Stavodicendo, who was palpating his body all over as if he’d just stepped out of a miraculous fountain, “I feel like a new man, but really and truly.”

  Tucano fell into line: “True, so do I.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re new men,” said Dentino, “because whoever you were before, you were both just a filthy mess … Maybe this one will be an improvement!”

  For decades now these rituals had been abandoned in Forcella. Actually, Forcella had always been particularly resistant to the rites of criminal affiliation because it was opposed to Raffaele Cutolo, who had first introduced them to Naples in the eighties. Don Feliciano Nobile had once been invited to join Cosa Nostra—many Neapolitans formed alliances with the Sicilians and underwent the rite of pungitura, literally, pricking, allowing the tip of your forefinger to be pricked with a needle, so that the blood dripped on a picture of the Madonna, and then you burned the holy card in your hand. The Palermitans had explained the rite to him, and they’d told him that he would have to be pungiuto, or pricked, and his response was still remembered to that day: “I’ll prick you all in the ass. I don’t need any of this bullshit, it’s good for Sicilian and Calabrian sheepherders. Under Mount Vesuvius, a man’s word is all you need.”

  And yet the paranza only felt like a real paranza after the ritual: united, one single body. Nicolas had seen clearly. “Now we’re a paranza, really and truly a paranza. Do you realize that?”

  “Absolutely great-t-t-t-t-t!” The cheering started with Drago’. They all shouted in Nicolas’s direction: “Si’ ’o ras, si’ ’o ras!” They all repeated the words—“You’re the ras, you’re the ras”—not in chorus, but almost one by one, as if they wanted to pay tribute to him individually, and that if they all merged their voices together, they would lose power. ’O ras … had become the most important compliment that could be paid, from Forcella to the Spanish Quarter. Who can say out of what recesses of memory an Ethiopian honorary title, second only to the supreme title of Negus, had become a term of honor for young men who didn’t even know Ethiopia existed. ’O ras came from Amharic, but it had become Neapolitan. Titles and monickers that, in this city, preserved stratified sediment that dated back to the days of Ottoman piracy, an era that had left such a marked heritage in the language and on the facial features of that city.

  Nicolas restored silence by clapping his hands sharply. The new members fell silent and only then did they notice that Nicolas had a bag between his legs. He picked it up and tossed it onto the table. The impact produced a sound of metal, and for a moment the whole paranza imagined that the bag contained weapons and bullets. If only that’s what it had been, was their thought, once they realized that it was just a bag of keys.

  “These are the keys to the lair. Every one of us can come in and leave whenever they like. Whoever belongs to the paranza has to have his own set of keys: the keys to the paranza. But you can only leave the paranza, adda murì mammà, feetfirst, the only way out is in a coffin.”

  “For real. Adda murì mammà,” said Pesce Moscio, “but if I want to work at Copacabana’s hotel, can I go? Even if I’m in the paranza?”

  “You can do whatever the fuck you want, but you’re still part of the paranza. You can’t leave the paranza, whether you’re working in Brazil or in Germany, but even there you can come in handy for the interests of the paranza.”

  “Great, that’s the way I like it!” said Stavodicendo.

  “Tutt’ ’e sorde s’hann’a purtà ccà.” He outlined the basic principle: all the money comes to the paranza. “We divvy up in equal parts. No side deals, no skimming off the top. Every penny: armed robberies, the dope we deal, every one of us gets a monthly take and then the money for any special mission!”

  “Mission! Mission! Mission!”

  “And now that we’re a paranza, do you know what’s left to do?”

  “Get the weapons we don’t have, ’o Maraja,” ventured Dentino.

  “That’s exactly right. I promised you guns, and guns are what we’re going to get.”

  “Mo’ però dobbiamo avere la benedizione d’ ’a Maronna,” said Tucano. “Now we need the Madonna’s blessing. How much money do we all have?”

  At the name of the Madonna, some kicked in five euros, some kicked in ten, Nicolas put in twenty. Tucano gathered up all the cash.

  “Amm’ ’a accattà ’nu cero. We’ve got to get a candle. A big one. And we’ll consecrate it to the Madonna.”

  “Good,” said Dentino.

  Nicolas was indifferent to this detail. They all left the lair together and headed for the store that sold devotional candles.

  “Here we are. In the priests’ shop.”

  All ten of them went in. The shopkeeper grew uneasy at the sight of his shop filling up so suddenly. And he was astonished when they pointed to the biggest candles. They selected an enormous one, more than three feet tall. They put their money down on the counter, all crumpled up. It took the shopkeeper a few minutes to count the money, but by then they’d already left. Without waiting for the receipt or the small amount of change due to them.

  They went into the Church of Santa Maria Egiziaca in Forcella. Nearly all of them had been baptized there or else in Naples Cathedral. They crossed themselves. Their feet grew lighter as they walked down the nave; they weren’t wearing leather shoes that might echo, but Air Jordans. When they were standing in front of the immense painting of the titular St. Mary of Egypt, they crossed themselves again. There wasn’t room enough to squeeze in that enormous candle, and so Pesce Moscio took his lighter and started melting the base of it.

  “What are you doing?” said Dentino.

  “Oh, nothing, we’ll just stick it here on the floor. There’s nowhere else to put it,” said Pesce Moscio, and suited action to words.

  While Pesce Moscio was making sure the candle was solidly fixed to the floor, Tucano opened his knife and started carving their name down the side, like a carpenter inlaying a piece of wood.

  He wrote PARANZA in big letters.

  “It looks like you’ve written PaPanza,” said Biscottino.

  “Like fuck it does,” Tucano replied, taking a slap on the back of the head from Dentino.

  “In front of the Madonna, you talk like that?!”

  Tucano glanced up at the big painting of the Madonna and said, “Forgive me,” then he bore down harder with the knife blade on the leg of the capital R. And then he read it out aloud: “PARANZA.” And the word paranza echoed down the length of the nave.

  A paranza that comes from the sea but now belongs to the land. A paranza that descends from the city’s quarters that look out over the Bay of Naples, marching in formation, filling the streets.

  Now it was their turn to go do some fishing.

  ZOO

  Maraja was ecstatic. He’d obtained exactly what he wanted: Don Vittorio in person had recognized thatb he had the makings of a paranza boss, but more important, he’d given him access to the gang’s arsenal. He was bouncing up and down on the motor scooter as if some enormous energy were building up inside him, like a tightly coiled spring, as he zipped along rapidly back to the center of town, and with a smile stamped on his face. He sent a text to the chat on WhatsApp:

  Maraja

  Guagliù, we did it: we got our wings!

  Lollipop

  Adda murì mammà!

  Drago’

  He’ scassat i ciesse!

  Biscottino

  Fantastic

  Tucano

  You’re better than a can of Red Bull!

  He was so electrified and anxious he would never have been able to go to see Letizia or to the lair, much less return home, so he decided to end that day by getting another tattoo. He already had one on his right forearm with his initials and Letizia’s intertwined with a thorny rose, while on his chest, pride of place was enjoyed by a script rendition of his na
me, “Maraja,” surrounded by curlicues, flourishes, and a hand grenade. Now he already had a clear idea of exactly what design he wanted inked on him, and where.

  He stopped at Totò Ronaldinho’s tattoo shop and barged in the way he usually did, even though the proprietor was working on another customer: “Ua’, Totò! You need to give me a pair of wings!”

  “What?”

  “You need to give me a pair of wings, a pair of wings back here,” and he pointed to his back, waving his hand in broad gestures to indicate that he wanted his whole back covered by the tattoo.

  “What kind of wings?”

  “Archangel wings.”

  “Angel wings?”

  “No, not angel wings: archangel wings.”

  Nicolas knew the difference clearly, because his art history textbook overflowed and abounded with Annunciations and altarpieces depicting archangels with broad flaming wings, and during the class trip to Florence a few months ago, he’d even seen them in real life, those cheerful wings that, however, even put the fear of God into dragons.