The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  Maraja turned serious, like the face of a mime when they play at running their hand up and down over their face, first with a smile, and then, once the hand swipes down over the face, with a dead-serious expression. “Where are you going, Drone? First the punishment, and only then can you go home to mammà.”

  “Take it from me,” Lollipop joked, “the best punishment would be to get Rocco Siffredi to come over and fuck him in the ass.” There was an explosion of laughter.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s a good idea,” said Maraja. “That’s exactly what I want to suggest to you. You have a sister, don’t you?”

  Drone had his hand on the door handle, ready to leave, still convinced he was in the middle of a skit. But that word—sister—fired point-blank like that, made him whirl around: “What about it?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, what about it? Do you remember that movie The Professor? Do you remember when that one guaglione says, ‘If you ask me, the professor was a little bit of a faggot’?”

  “So, what about it?”

  “Hold on. Let me explain. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And do you remember what the professor asks?”

  “What does he ask?”

  “Eh, he asks, ‘That girl who comes to see you is your sister, isn’t she?’ Now your punishment is you have to bring me your sister. That’s exactly what you have to do. But you’re not just going to have to bring her to me, because you didn’t just insult me by stealing that pistol. You’re going to have to bring her to the whole paranza.”

  “What are you saying, Maraja? Are you joking around?”

  A silence fell over the guys in the paranza that was the calm before the decision.

  “So now you bring us your sister, and she’ll have to give a chionzo—a blow job—to everyone, to all the dicks in the paranza.”

  Drone took off like a rocket, racing past Nicolas, and the whole paranza stepped aside to let him pass. No one stopped him because no one had guessed at his real objective: the pilfered pistol that he had left on the windowsill in the bedroom of the lair. He grabbed the Beretta, yanked the slide to chamber a round, and aimed it right at Maraja’s face.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!” shouted Drago’.

  Maraja looked at him with narrowed eyes: “Go on, nice work, just shoot. You all see this, guagliu’? Anyone who steals from the paranza, this is what they want to do. He wanted to screw us. It makes sense, it makes sense that you wanted to screw me, Dro’. Now let’s see, come on, pull the trigger and then someone can put it on your YouTube channel.”

  Drone indulged in the thought of really pulling the trigger, putting an end to this stalemate and spattering blood all over the shocked faces of the paranza. Spatter that whole crowd of faces that were being held in gelatin by their state of shock. There wasn’t another film plot to wind up this scene, or if there was, it didn’t occur to him, because when he thought about it, there was no paranza in his head, he just thought about his sister, Annalisa, who was a whole different matter. He was gripping the Beretta tight, too tight not to think of it as a luxury, and that luxury had to come to an end. He lowered the pistol and sat down. The room was shrouded in total silence. “Mo’ quello che devi fare,” Maraja went on pitilessly in dialect, “è convincere soreta a venì ccà e ce lo deve succhià a tutti!” Now what you’ve got to do is convince your sister to come here and suck us all off.

  “Even me?” Biscottino’s voice asked from the far end of the room.

  “Sure, if you can get it up, even you.”

  “I can get it up, I can get it up,” Biscottino replied.

  “All right,” Briato’ shouted.

  “This thing … I wasn’t expecting it. We’re going to have a bukkake,” Dentino commented. That exotic word produced just one image in the minds of the paranza: a circle of men ejaculating on a kneeling woman. Their entire education had taken place on PornHub, and they’d been watching bukkake for as long as they could remember, dreaming of it as an unattainable chimera. Tucano was super-excited now, and he adjusted the elastic strap on his underwear to relieve the pressure. Drago’ wanted to help Drone, so what he said was: “I’m not going to let her suck me off. We can decide, right, Maraja? Or do I absolutely have to stick my dick in her mouth? I’ve known her for a long time, Annalisa, I couldn’t do it.”

  “Do whatever you want. After all, this is a punishment that he has to take.”

  “I like this thing,” said Pesce Moscio. “It means that all of us will have to learn not to fuck up.”

  “No, but I’ve already learned that lesson,” Maraja pointed out. “I don’t need to be taught, I already know who we are. Otherwise we’re just a group of fools.” Nicolas had a vision of the paranza as a sampling of something that already existed. He liked the fact that, aside from Drago’, none of them came from Camorra backgrounds. He liked the fact that he’d plucked them from people who would never have thought of belonging to a group. His friends, fated to belong to the paranza, weren’t people he’d need to transform, they were only people he needed to single out and bring in. Drone took the pistol by the barrel and handed it to Maraja: “Go ahead and shoot me,” he said. And then, looking around at all the others: “Shoot me, go on, that would be better for me … it’s better! Damn me that I bothered to save you all! Gang of assholes! Banda ’e strunze!”

  “Don’t worry,” Nicolas replied. “If you don’t make sure your sister comes here, then we’ll shoot you. You’re in the paranza—if you make a mistake, you die.”

  Drone had the taste of tears in his mouth, and like a real child he stormed out the door, slamming it behind him.

  * * *

  The next morning at school, he’d evaluated his options. He wondered if he could just quit the paranza, give back the keys to the lair, and vamoose. Or did he really have to give them his sister on a silver platter? How would he be able to convince her? And what if his sister agreed to do it? He might find that even more disgusting. What explanation could he give to his girlfriend if word got out? And what about his parents? He’d even tried to imagine himself talking to his folks when they came to visit him in prison; he’d envisioned them standing in front of his headstone in the boneyard. But it had never occurred to him that his father would say: “You made your sister give blow jobs!” That was something he simply couldn’t imagine. And for the first time the romantic thought that assails so many teenagers, but that had never occurred to him before, appeared in the possibilities arrayed before him: suicide. It was only a rapid passing thought, it grazed his mind, and Drone filed it away immediately in disgust. He also thought about some way of taking revenge: sure, he’d made a mistake, but not such a serious one as to justify this kind of humiliation.

  In the afternoon he summoned Drago’ to his house.

  Drone was pacing back and forth in the few yards of space in his bedroom. He kept his eyes focused on the floor, as if in search of some option he hadn’t yet considered, only every so often he looked up to make sure that his drones lined up on the shelves were still where they belonged.

  “Drone,” said Drago’, stretched out on his friend’s bed, “this is a symbolic punishment. This thing isn’t against you, against your sister, or against us. It’s a way of making it clear that nobody should ever steal a weapon.”

  “But what if I just don’t do it? What if I just quit the paranza?”

  “’O Dro’, those guys will kill you, he’ll shoot you. He’ll target you, for sure.”

  “So much the better.”

  “Don’t talk bullshit,” said Drago’. He stretched and got up from the bed, went over to turn up the volume on the stereo, so that motherly ears couldn’t hear them, and stood in front of the S.S.C. Napoli 2013–2014 poster. “In the end, this punishment is designed to make sure the paranza gets stronger, and so no one will pull any more fuckups with weapons.”

  Deep down, Drago’ had accepted Maraja’s way of thinking. Drone had no allies. After his pointless conversatio
n with Drago’, Drone started posting pictures of him and of Nicolas on Facebook, it was his way of increasing his protection, it was like taking out an insurance policy on his life. If anything happened to him, it would become that much easier to associate his fate with Nicolas, he thought, or maybe it would actually push the investigators away from his friends and toward his enemies. Still, somewhere inside he still fostered the abiding hope that if Nicolas saw them, he might be moved to compassion.

  But the passing days only increased his anxiety. The hours were a continuous torment that kept him from acting. He couldn’t get any sleep and he walked around the apartment like a soul suffering damnation. The words bounced off him when his family spoke to him. His mother was pointlessly alarmed, like all mothers who hope to figure out what’s going on by asking questions: “What’s happening to you? Antonio, what’s happening to you?” As if in the throes of a fever, Drone was consumed by indecision. Food nauseated him, as did all odors. His sister and his mother, one evening after dinner, walked into his bedroom: “Anto’, what on earth has happened? Have you had a fight with Marianna?”

  “No, of course not. I haven’t seen Marianna for six months. Nothing’s happened.” That was his only answer.

  “No, impossible that nothing’s happened, everywhere you go you look so sad. Something must have happened. You’ve stopped eating. Did it happen at school?” On she went with her naïve attempt to list the possible causes for his misery, almost as if once she ran down the list and hit the right item he’d open up like a slot machine with three cherries in a row. The ding ding ding of bells. The rush of coins. And happier than ever before. But Drone was armor-plated against all disclosures like a teenage boy, and they were guessing at the heartaches and sorrows of a little boy. Inside him, though, were the sorrows of wartime. The idea of disappointing his father humiliated him even more than the idea of dragging his sister into it. Or, almost. His father admired the fact that he was a nerd, even if he wouldn’t have used that word to describe him, but Drone did help him on the job, helped fix and maintain his computer and tablet. And the only phrase that hammered in Drone’s head was “You made your sister give blow jobs.”

  “Let me sleep!” on the other hand, was the only answer that he gave his sister and mother pestering him for explanations. He’d get over it and come back to them. One night, though, he got an idea. On his cell phone he had a few videos of the paranza, which he transferred to his Mac. He decided to open a YouTube account, and made sure it couldn’t be traced back to his own ID: he wanted to upload the video of them shooting. He knew they’d arrest them all, including him. You could see their faces clearly, he’d filmed them all. But would that save his sister from humiliation? He wasn’t certain. His forefinger hovered over the SEND button, it looked like the pendulum of a clock. He was sweating, he felt ill. He shut the laptop. In his head, the words of Drago’, “those guys will kill you,” but when had they become “those guys”? They’d always been “us.” And instead, now, to describe the paranza they used “those guys.” Then—that meant—he’d already been kicked out of the paranza, and in that case, why comply with their punishment? If only he’d just kept the pistol in his backpack … He knew how to use it, he’d even managed to neutralize that squad car and the cops in it …

  The next morning, he couldn’t manage to get out of bed when his mother tried to wake him, his forehead was burning up: he had a fever. On his phone he saw that several members of the paranza had been looking for him, even Maraja had texted him several times. He didn’t answer all morning. He heard the home phone ring and a minute later his sister answer: “Yes, hi, Nicolas!” Drone catapulted out of the bed and grabbed the receiver out of his sister’s hand. “Don’t you ever dare to call my sister again, you got that?” And he hung up. “But what’s going on…?” Annalisa guessed that the sorrow hanging over her brother had something to do with the circle he’d drifted into, a group of kids the family had just started to notice, but she’d understood and hadn’t said a thing, in part because she wasn’t really sorry to see that, now, because of that group, her brother counted for something instead of spending his life uploading videos and focusing for obsessive hours on GamePlayer. The light of the paranza could even lend her some reflected luster.

  Drone went back to the haven of his room. She followed him: “Mo’, amm’ ’a parlà,” she told him. Now we have to talk, using the voice of when they were little, when she placed the burden of her role as an elder sister upon him. She pulled out everything, even too much, because she got him to say things he shouldn’t have. He said those things pacing back and forth the way he had with Drago’, only this time, instead of a brother lying on his bed, now there was his sister, who sat up as she listened, her hands joined together, fingers knitted, on her legs.

  “I’m in the paranza of Forcella. It’s me, Nicolas, Drago’…” And so he went on, until he’d told the whole story of the firearms training on the rooftops. He heard Annalisa saying over and over again how crazy they were: “Vuje site pazze, voi site pazze.” He took the hands that Annalisa clasped together in his, then released them and told her: “Annali’, if you talk, if you so much as whisper a word of this to Mammà, you’re dead.”

  Those words echoed off the S.S.C. Napoli poster, the gigantic drawing of Rayman, the selfies stapled to a corkboard hanging on the wall, selfies with Drone’s favorite YouTubers. And then those little model drones, scattered everywhere, that he was so fixated on. Those other words—death, machine guns, bullets—had nothing to do with that bedroom.

  Then he gathered his courage. He drank some water and, without even bothering to look at his sister again, he told her what had happened, and described the punishment they wanted to inflict on him for the mess he’d gotten himself into. Annalisa leaped to her feet: “You make me sick! You and your friends. You make me so sick! Do you still have the gun? The gun you used to shoot at the policemen? Then use it to shoot yourself. You can all shoot yourselves, or else just you shoot yourself.” And she stormed out of the room, red-faced. How could she have felt proud of him until just half an hour ago?

  Drone was in a state of despair. His sister’s words struck him as a premonition, he knew that’s how it would end. And in a way, that’s how he hoped it would end.

  * * *

  In the days that followed, as if she’d been infected by her brother, Annalisa, too, showed an aversion to food and sleep. She did a better job, however, of concealing her malaise from her parents. She thought of all the solutions imaginable, and in the end her ideas, even the most radical and reckless ones, eventually ran down the rails of action—which are always the same, if you were raised in a certain territory. She started mulling over the best way to take revenge. Who could strike back against the people who had imposed this order on her brother? Deep down, Nicolas had to know that he’d levied too heavy a punishment for the crime committed. If someone had stolen that pistol, then he needed to be killed, Annalisa mused. But if the same person who had stolen it had also saved them all from arrest, then it wasn’t fair to subject him to a punishment like this one. Pure logic. The thing to do wasn’t to find a solution within that perimeter, instead she needed to jump outside it, the way you’d jump outside a circle of fire. But the two siblings never thought for even an instant about the possibility of moving outside the box. Annalisa was convinced there had to be some strategy for sidestepping the extortion. Reporting her brother for having committed a crime, in her mind, didn’t mean winning justice. Instead it meant forming an alliance with someone: you ally yourself with the paranza, against the paranza, or with another paranza. They had demanded something of her that filled her with disgust. Worse still, something that seemed deeply unjust to her. If Drone had killed someone else’s brother, if he’d caused them all to be arrested, all right, in that case Annalisa might have considered such a punishment deserved.

  She was thinking as if she, too, were in the paranza. Everyone was in the paranza without realizing it. The laws were the laws of
the paranza.

  Annalisa was pretty certain, at this point. Perhaps she could go to see Micione, or ask advice of some friend who was a policeman. Or else get down on her knees and service the paranza. A prospect that was even more humiliating and dolorous than the thought that her brother was a weakling, a chiacchiello. For a fleeting instant she wished that Drone were more like Nicolas ’o Maraja, that he was like White. Instead, he was just Drone, a nerd who had dreamed of redemption by joining a group. Her eyes welled up with tears. It was all a filthy mess. No matter where you turned your eyes. She couldn’t confide in anyone, not even her closest girlfriend, because if she opened her mouth then there was a risk of others deciding for her. It would take so little, for someone to speak with a parent, with a carabiniere, or a family friend who happened to be a judge at some dinner party: and then she’d no longer be the mistress of her fate.

  * * *

  Annalisa stayed out as long as she possibly could and then, exhausted and with her thoughts torn and tattered, she decided to return home. At the entrance, she found her whole family assembled. On the garage someone had written Mariuolo—scoundrel—and a childish drawing of an erect penis. The metal roller shutter had been kicked repeatedly. They were going to have to replace it.

  “Why would anyone have written such a thing?!” asked the father, turning to his son as if he knew something about it. In his head he was guessing the boy might have gotten up to his usual tricks with his computers, maybe he stole someone’s password, or defrauded some online store that didn’t have adequate systems of protection. And so he shouted at him.

  “Well? What have you done, then?” In that case, the mother was standing up for her son’s innocence, and before the next few days were up, Drone found himself facing another trial.