“Maraja,” said Drago’, “Tucano and Lollipop are right. We’re running out of product. Before long, we’re going to lose these guys.”
“Let’s just kill them all,” Briato’ weighed in. “That’s how they do it, right? When someone sells someone else’s product without authorization, they need to be shot.”
“That’s just the way it is on the piazzas,” said Drone. “Either you sell drugs for a boss or else you have to pay taxes to that boss. They aren’t paying us any taxes, and we’re running out of drugs.”
“Nico’, let’s call them all in to the club and then let’s gas them,” suggested Briato’, unleashing the paranza’s laughter. Nicolas could only manage a grimace, and they were off again, joking and bullshitting.
“Maraja and me,” Pesce Moscio started telling a story, “were there, on Piazza Bellini, you know. There were these chiattilli, preppies in polo shirts. They were staring at us, I already had my hand on my gat. And then these assholes come over to us, I look at Maraja and he shrugs his shoulders.”
“Pesce Moscio,” said Drone, “what kind of a story are you telling? You sound like Piero Angela!”
“One of them says that he’s from the news,” Pesce Moscio went on as if nothing had happened, “and he wants to know if he can interview us, right, Maraja?”
The seven silhouettes turned toward Nicolas, but not a word came from the throne. Drago’ stood up, slithered around Lollipop, who had guessed his intentions, and switched on the lights.
Nicolas Maraja had left the building.
STOP CRYING
He headed back to Forcella, riding the TMAX the same unhurried way he had on the trip out. The throttle at half speed, never a line over or under, the occasional tap on the brake when necessary. The meeting at the New Maharaja hadn’t done a lot of good, other than to reassure him that there weren’t any signs of an impending coup. It was as if his brothers hadn’t noticed that something had stopped working inside him, that he felt somehow blurred. Even worse: he felt as if he was in that old movie that his teacher Signor De Marino had shown the class: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Soon enough they were sure to notice that there was nothing actually left of him but an empty shell. Guided by force of habit, the TMAX turned onto Via Vicaria Vecchia, then angled into a gentle rightward curve. Via dei Carbonari. He was home.
What the fuck kind of thoughts do I have in my mind, wondered Nicolas. It was all the fault of that clot that had formed in the back of his neck since he’d awakened that morning, a clot that was tormenting him with a feeling he’d never experienced before in his life. The sensation that he was no longer good for nothing.
Eyes downcast, he parked the scooter and left the vicolo on foot. How long had it been since he’d walked through his city?
Before he even realized it, he arrived on Via Mezzocannone. A couple of university students called him by his name. Who knows, maybe they were old customers from the times when he used to deal for Copacabana. He ignored them, kept going, by now Forcella was behind him, and with it, the murals of San Gennaro. He lengthened his stride, eyeing every intersection, every street corner, every shop out of that need of his to size up the territory—a need that had by now been transformed into an instinct. The jagged gap in the bronze gate of the Maschio Angioino was there to remind him that, just a few years earlier, while strolling past with Letizia, he had taken an oath that one day he too would leave his mark on the city, on its stones, on its people.
By the time he reached Castel dell’Ovo he was out of breath. He was panting, as if he were drowning. He climbed the steps and walked out onto the balcony. He leaned against the wall, shoulders pressed into the tufa, knees gathered up to his chest. In front of him was the sea. A shiver of pleasure made the hairs on his arms stand up. The sea. That’s what he needed, that was the antidote to those thoughts. That inexhaustible blue asked nothing of him and never could. Alone in front of the sea, he could manage to stop thinking, stop planning, perhaps because all that horizon left him free to wander aimlessly, freed of all calculations.
He felt better, but there was still something missing. He pulled out his iPhone, and, indifferent to the missed calls and the stacks of texts, he wrote to Letizia:
Nicolas
I’m at the usual place, looking out over the sea.
When Letizia arrived, Nicolas was still in the same position. He barely turned to look at her, and all she did was sit down beside him, laying her head on his shoulder. They looked like what they were: an eighteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl. The wind was teasing Letizia’s hair out over Nicolas’s face, but he didn’t recoil, he let the hair whip his face, fill his mouth, and then he sat waiting for the next gust. He let his eyes abandon the deep blue of the sea, which by now had taken on the same coloration as the sky at sunset, and he kissed her. At first on the eyelids, and then on the chin, then he lingered for a while on the lips, and then moved on to her earlobes. He had exposed his neck and Letizia dived in, kissing him, nipping at his neck with her teeth.
“Every time I kiss you on the neck,” she said to him, “I see Christian, because I read his name.”
Nicolas’s mouth, soft with kisses, twisted into a grimace.
“You need to forget about his name” was all he said.
Letizia tied her hair back with a scrunchie, and the magic of a moment earlier had evaporated. “But I feel there’s a thief in my body—mi sento ’o mariuolo in cuorpo—as if we were the ones who did it…”
Nicolas had been trying to come to terms with that thief in the body for months now, and he wanted to say so to Letizia.
“Ma accirelo a stu mariuolo,” he said instead. “Just kill that thief. I was the one who didn’t know how to defend him. When Scignacane told me he wanted to kill Dumbo, I should have had the balls to kill Dumbo myself, and Dentino, too. I left the job half done, and they took half of myself away from me. My brother. Fratemo.”
Letizia shook her head, flinging her ponytail back and forth.
“Nico’, I don’t want to know these things.”
“Then why the fuck are you telling me about a thief in your body? Just don’t say a word. If you don’t want to know, then these things shouldn’t exist for you, that’s the way it has to be.”
Letizia stood up, she didn’t want to feel Nicolas’s body anymore, his legs seeking hers. She took a few steps back and leaned against the wall. He let her be.
If she didn’t want to know, then she could get the hell out of there.
“Why this pineapple at the end of the n in Christian, right here, on the back of your neck?” asked Letizia, restoring a tone of affection in her voice.
“That’s a hand grenade,” said Nicolas without looking around.
“I know, silly. I know these things,” she said, but as she said it, she lightly caressed his neck. Gently. “But why this ugly thing near your brother’s beautiful name?”
“That ugly thing is to remind me that the people who killed him need to die. All of them.”
“You can’t tell me these things, I already told you that, they scare me. Tienatelle pe’ tte. Keep them to yourself.”
“Then don’t ask me things, mind your own fucking business.”
“Maro’, Nico’: Madonna, when you talk like that, you’re like an animal…”
“No, an animal would know how to defend his brother. Shut that toilet mouth of yours. Just shut the fuck up.”
“You know that you’re a sewer rat, Nico’? Go fuck yourself!” The words came out in a tremulous voice. She’d never spoken like that to Nicolas, never with that violence, but he hadn’t turned a hair. This indifference between them was a new thing, too.
She felt like crying, but she didn’t want to let him see that she was hurt, and frightened.
Before heading down the stairs and leaving, she raised her middle finger to Nicolas’s back, as he continued to stare out at the sea.
* * *
He rolled the street back up like a ribbon. Castel dell’Ovo,
Maschio Angioino, Via Medina, San Biagio, Mezzocannone. Forcella. Home. From downstairs he could see the wide-open kitchen window, a clear indicator that Mena was home, that she hadn’t lost her deeply ingrained habit of letting fresh air into the apartment morning and evening, not even after Christian’s death. She’d shut down everything else, Mena had, but she hadn’t given up light and air.
He found her folding freshly laundered T-shirts. She lifted those bundles of fabric, then a quick snap of the wrists and the T-shirts regained their shape. Those wrists twisted under the armpits of the T-shirts, then a last fold leading to the final transformation: a perfect rectangle.
Nicolas waited for his mother to finish with that basket of laundry before saying: “Ciao, Ma.”
She needed only a quick glance at his face to glimpse the burden he was carrying inside him.
“Have you been to the beach?” she asked him.
He nodded. He didn’t particularly want to talk, but he felt the need to hear her talk, as if since he’d awakened that morning all he’d been doing was wandering the city in order to wind up there. To come back home to his mother, to appear in the presence of the tribunal that would finally shout out his failure, his inadequacy. He approached the table and set one hand down on the T-shirt on the top of the pile. On it was a picture of the London Eye. Christian had given it to him, in exchange for the promise that one day, Nicolas really would take him to London with their pockets full of cash, and that they’d take a ride together on that panoramic Ferris wheel. “And from up there, we’ll piss on the heads of all the Arab oil tycoons in London,” he had told Christian. He looked at the T-shirt and he felt as if it, too, were trying to accuse him of the absence of the once-living body that had occupied that T-shirt just a few months ago. He took his hand off the pile and clenched it until he could feel the fingernails biting into the palm of his hand.
“You see all the things Christian had?” his mother asked with a gentle smile. “It’s unbelievable, you never even notice all the things that revolve around a person, and some of those things are useless, eh? Things that aren’t needed at all. All these T-shirts, all these shoes, all these toys … and you wouldn’t even have time to wear all these things.” She ran her fingers through her hair, locks that had whitened at her temples in lifeless strands. He looked at the floor, unable to bring himself even to nod, his fingers still clutching as if his hand were holding the pistol he’d been unable to use, dangling useless at his side.
“Nicolas,” his mother summoned him back to her. When she uttered his entire name, neither Nicolino nor Nico’, it meant that a speech was in the offing. “I’m not sure I’m happy with how I see you, Nicolas,” she said, using his full name again as she set down the steam iron, standing perpendicular to the surface of the ironing board, and ran her fingers through his hair now, the way she used to when he was small, smaller than Christian had been.
“I’m just fine, Ma,” he replied in a tone of voice that he tried to make sound confident.
“You don’t seem fine to me. You seem gloomy, sad … Listen to me. They’re things people say, but they’re true, too: A mother knows. A mother knows her handsome son has been to the beach. A mother knows that her son is carrying a burden that’s eating him alive. A mother always knows everything, Nico’.”
“Mammà,” Nicolas tried to say, but there wasn’t enough air in his lungs.
“And for a mother,” Mena continued, looking closely at him with the eyes of a woman who had nothing left to lose, “for a mother, all her children are the same. But that’s not true for me. Christian was my heart and soul, you know that, but you’ve always been different. Christian was my puppy. You’re my limited edition. I coddled him too much, and I coddled you too little. I made that mistake, it’s my fault.”
Pause. A voice from downstairs, the voice of someone looking for someone, and then more silence.
“I’m the one who just didn’t pay attention, who didn’t know how to protect him. I thought I could see everything, that your father didn’t understand a thing but that I could … after all, though, what good did it do to understand what you both were doing? Where was I looking? I was just fooling myself.”
“Mammà…”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Nicolas, I’m telling you. Someone else killed our boy. He hadn’t done anything wrong, you were always careful to keep him out of it. He was as innocent as an angel. Their little boy is an angel, just the same. Comm’ ’o puo’ ammazzà ’n’angiulillo? How can you kill a little angel? You can’t, Nico’, I’m here to tell you. You can’t kill an angel.”
Nicolas felt his body turn soft and the clot at the back of his neck turn hot, as if the blood had finally started to circulate again, free to flow.
“Mammà, so you knew about Dentino’s son, I…”
“A mother knows everything, Nico’, I told you that. When you were small, you remember? When the nuns were taking care of you and you walked around the palm tree in the courtyard. And then, just like that, you started smacking your little friend. Do you remember?”
He just lifted his head and sucked out a flat “no,” in dialect, “’nzù.” He couldn’t stop thinking of that angel. No, he could never kill the angel. His mother was right. It was simple enough, that’s why—and the more often he said it, the more he started to feel like himself again.
“Mother Lucilla, a capa ’e pezze, the raghead, the nun, you remember? She called me and you were all angry. And when I asked you why you would have done such a terrible thing, you told me: ‘Mammà, one time that kid beat me up and so I beat him up, because anyone who’s hurt me once should never hurt me again.’ Nico’, you were just small and already you were the strongest one. You’re still the strongest one. You’ve always walked on your own two legs, you’ve never hesitated, and even when you made mistakes, you did it for the right reason. You’ve always been a man, even when you were small. More of a man than your father.” She got up from the chair and went over to the window. A light breeze had closed the shutter and she leaned out to hook it open. Then she turned to look at him with the faint light of the vicolo behind her. She looked like a saint in a painting. “You did what you needed to do, Nico’. Anything that sons do, the mothers are guilty of. Even when they lose a son, the mothers are to blame.”
Mena stepped close to him again, and that same gentle smile appeared on her face. “I never paid enough attention to you, but a mother should always be close to her children. Maybe I didn’t give you many things, but what you needed you took for yourself. The things I didn’t give you, you just took for yourself. Well, if you want to take everything for yourself, then go ahead, but take them for real. There’s no point shedding tears, here. And I say the same thing to myself, Nico’. No more tears, Mena. If the path of goodness brought us nothing, maybe the path of evil will be more fruitful. You’re a special son. You’re eighteen, you’re a man now. So do what you have to do, and do it right. Whoever took Christian away from us? S’adda fà male. They need to be hurt badly.”
Nicolas felt like laying his head on her breast, the way he used to do when he was five and he’d hide in the armoire and then call her to come find him. But that only lasted a second. He was a man now; in fact, he’d always been a man. He felt uneasy. On the one hand, it seemed to him that his mother’s words somehow protected him, but on the other he could tell that the mandate she was imparting to him, her approval, was a bad thing, as if he needed a mother’s orders to do what he needed to, as if he couldn’t do it of his own accord. He tried to overcome that confusion in the only way he knew how: “Mammà, I love you.”
“And I love you, too, Nicolas.” She took his face in her hands and brushed her lips over his forehead. “I’m always with you. Now more than ever.” Then she unplugged the iron and moved off toward the bedroom with the stack of T-shirts. “The one who hurt us must never again be able to hurt us,” he heard her whisper.
JACK OF HEARTS
Before he reached the border of the Pontice
lli neighborhood, it had really been a lovely day. It was warm out, even though they were in the heart of the fall, and the sun was beating down hard on Nicolas’s freshly shaven head, but a breath of breeze was blowing behind him; it almost seemed to be pushing the TMAX along.
That morning, he had told his brothers, reappearing out of the empty air just as he’d vanished: “To get out of the quicksand, I need to talk to Don Vittorio today.” Nicolas had summoned them to their lair, and the paranza, present down to every last member, had nodded their approval, that’s right, accussì s’adda fà. No one had breathed a word about the failure of the incursion at the hospital, and anyway, by now he understood that the vendetta would follow different paths. He’d gone back to being Maraja, and he gazed into their eyes, his men—one by one, from Biscottino to Drago’. The sky was the limit.
He wanted to arrive at the Conocal from behind, instead of getting there directly from Ponticelli, just to savor that air. It was an air that cleared everything else away, and it did it kindly, as if warding off the bad thoughts, leading them away by the hand.
It had been a while since he’d gone to see L’Arcangelo, he’d covered a lot of miles since then, and the money in his pockets was there as proof, pressing against his thighs.
He saw Micione’s men from a distance, because they and they alone could be just sitting there nonchalantly rolling a joint, perched on the hood of a Mercedes-Benz. They were exuding the confidence of guards taking an important prisoner to solitary confinement. Nicolas tried other ways in: he explored the entire perimeter of the neighborhood, he circumnavigated the Lotto Zero neighborhood (two other men, this time on motorcycles), he brushed the boundary with San Giorgio a Cremano, confident that on that side the security would be a little more lax. Instead, he found himself face-to-face with an SUV with tinted glass windows.
Savage Kiss Page 3
