Dentino shouted as if those words could turn into bullets and lodge in Nicolas’s body. And at last he fell suddenly silent. And pulled the trigger.
Nicolas didn’t wait to hear the bullets from the Kalashnikov, he tore out of the kitchen overlooking the street, ran with Skunk hurrying after him into his mother’s bedroom, lifted her bodily and threw her, diving after her, onto the floor at the center of the apartment. He counted seventeen bullets striking the building, he heard a window shatter, and almost immediately a siren, then another shout—the voice, now unrecognizable, deformed, of the young man who had once been his friend—and then it was all over. He lay on the floor a little longer, just to be safe, then got up and went to look out the kitchen window, just in time to see Dentino shaking the Kalashnikov in the direction of the police, as if to squeeze the last shots out of it. He tried to slam in a new magazine, but he was tackled and knocked to the pavement by two policemen, who yanked his arms behind his back.
Nicolas leaned out into the void, craning his neck, to pick out every detail, and so did dozens of other people, out of every window, like so many turtles.
The cop car tore away with a screech of rubber, and Nicolas let himself slide back against the wall. “Asshole,” he muttered to himself, smacking himself in the forehead with a fist. “Asshole.”
Mena put a hand on his head. “Get out of here,” she said.
Nicolas nodded, a gesture that was a mark of gratitude and a plea to be careful with the cops when they questioned her, and then he started up the stairs that led to the attic areas and the roof. He could hear the voices of policemen, down in the atrium, telling people to stay inside, in the safety of the apartments, they’d go door to door themselves.
The whole neighborhood had been shut down. From up there, the streets seemed battened down as if in wartime. Police squad cars were blocking the points of access, and there was even a helicopter whirling and clattering overhead: Dentino’s hail of gunfire had been taken seriously, and not as the isolated case of a madman in search of vendetta.
Putting an inexperienced and unarmed kid in charge of guarding the arsenal had been an unforgivably careless act. And now he was paying the price. Dentino could easily have killed his mother!
He checked his smartphone. Scignacane had called him a dozen times, but he hadn’t answered. The heroin supply was the last thing on his mind.
He went downstairs. Police checkpoints everywhere, even the army with submachine guns. He looked up at the façade of his building. Dentino might have scraped the inside of his skull clean, but he could still aim a gun, Nicolas thought to himself. At least five bullets had hit within the radius of a yard from the window of his kitchen. Not bad for a guy riding a beat-up old scooter going fifty with the police after him. The shattered glass belonged to the upstairs neighbors; later he’d stop by and give them some money to get the window repaired.
The news of the shooting had reached everyone, and among the dozens of messages he’d received (especially from Letizia), he’d managed to read one, from Scignacane.
Scignacane
I’m waiting for you at the university.
And one more:
It’s urgent.
And then another one:
Get moving.
What does that asshole want? Nicolas wondered, before diving into the paranza’s chat. They all knew, and they knew confusedly, that before swinging by Nicolas’s house, Dentino had tried to rub out Scignacane.
Scignacane was waiting for him in an alley right behind the university, as he’d written. He was leaning against the side of an ambulance and was still wearing the jeans he’d had on when he was shot. His T-shirt was slung to one side, torn, and his jeans had a patch of curdled blood on one thigh. The gauze on his left ear had fallen away and was dangling from a few Band-Aids. When he tried to slap it back into place with swats of his hand, the sound was like a boot sinking into a deep mud puddle.
“We need to take him out,” said Nicolas, or at least he tried to, because Scignacane was paying him no attention.
“This is all your fault,” he shrilled unexpectedly. “I want your fucking paranza out of my hair. You kids. You muschilli. You guagliuncelli. Enough’s enough. I’ve had it. All you know how to do is stand around with your dicks in your hands and sell hash. You don’t know how to manage your own people. We’re done. What are you trying to do, be Pablo Escobar? You don’t know how to do a fucking thing.”
“Scignaca’,” said Nicolas, “that kid doesn’t belong to the paranza. That little bastard killed my brother. And now he’s tried to rub out you and me. Our business dealings have nothing the fuck to do with this whole thing.”
Anesthetized by the shit he’d shot into his veins before meeting Nicolas, Scignacane went on with his rant: “You muschilli,” he spat out, “you guagliuncelli. You think you’re the new Camorra. Enough’s enough! You’re nothing!”
Nicolas laid a hand on his arm, firm and reassuring, like a doctor speaking to a hysterical patient, and said only: “Now calm down—” and Scignacane subsided. They stood there looking at each other in silence for a while, then Nicolas said again: “We’ve got to kill him.”
“They’re going to put him behind bars,” said Scignacane. What remained of his ear was pulsating at the accelerated rhythm of his heart. “By now he’s under guard. He took off one of my ears, and if I do it inside after the bedlam he unleashed, they’ll give me life imprisonment without parole.”
“If you kill him, I’m indebted to you.” But then he emphasized: “Remember, though, it’s going to have to hurt him.”
Scignacane went behind the ambulance and put his hand on the door handle.
“Maraja,” he said, “you don’t want to understand.”
“Oh, I understand. But he has to pay, Scignaca’.”
“He’ll pay,” said Scignacane, and half opened the door. The interior of the counterfeit ambulance he moved around in was furnished with a bed and computer. It looked like a mobile office. He cleared his throat and spat out a clump of red. “I’ll turn him into a living ghost, worse than death.”
“Worse?” asked Nicolas, his voice midway between doubtful and curious.
“You’re just a kid, you don’t know that there are much worse things than death.”
PIRANHAS
I Capelloni, the Longhairs, were in the clubhouse, the lair used by ’o White’s men—one-third tobacconist, one-third bar, one-third Punto Sisal, or lottery window. There was the usual back-and-forth, comings and goings, the shouts of the bettors and the cries of those ordering an amaro at the bar’s greasy, wood-faced counter, and there was also ’o White himself, wireless earbuds in his ears, jerking his head to some unknown beat. Rap or heroin? his men asked themselves, but they didn’t dare step close to him: under that apparent normality they could sense a tension pushing to the surface that had never subsided since Roipnol’s death. Nothing had happened since then—no warning shots, not even a muttered word—and that was what they found unsettling, more than anything else. The samurai knot that ’o White wore at the back of his side-shaven skull stopped without warning, in full silence. Mauriziuccio ’o Pagliaccio had entered the room, and the sheer weight of his importance had sucked all the bedlam out of the room. ’O Pagliaccio rapped his knuckles twice on the pool table, but ’o White had resumed his stationary dance, eyes still shut.
“’O White!” said ’o Pagliaccio.
“Oh, Mauriziu’. What are you doing here?” he asked, slowly removing his earbuds.
“I came by to see how the face on top of your dickhead neck was wearing over time. And it’s pretty worn out!” He burst into a thunderous laugh. ’O Pagliaccio had two dense shrubs of reddish curls, one on either side of his skull, and on the top of his head glittered the reflection of the room’s overhead fluorescent lights. A third shoal of tangled curls clung stubbornly to his forehead. He was the spitting image of Krusty the Clown, and since the day someone had pointed out the resemblance, Maurizio Viscardi had b
ecome Mauriziuccio ’o Pagliaccio.
“You need to come to San Giovanni.”
“Wait, you want me to come to—”
“No. You all need to come. Your whole paranza. To Micione’s house. Tomorrow morning.”
“I got it,” said ’o White. “But has something happened?”
’O Pagliaccio ignored the question. “All right, then, around ten in the morning. Because after that Micione has things to do. Take care of yourself, guagliu’.”
As soon as ’o Pagliaccio was out of the room, the place emerged from its hibernation and began jumping again. Orso Ted and ’o Selvaggio were churning around ’o White.
“Oh, the fact that he came all the way out here … that’s definitely not a good sign. But, ’o White, tomorrow it’s not like ’o Pagliaccio is going to sentence us all to death, is it?” asked Orso Ted.
“Or else do you think they finally made you king of Forcella and tomorrow they’re going to hold your coronation?” said ’o Selvaggio.
“Oh. Enough with these stupid questions,”’o White snapped. “You’ve busted my balls. No doubt, whatever it is, it’s serious, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent ’o Pagliaccio, they’d have sent a kid. ’Nu guaglione. ’Nu muschillo…”
“Then why did they send him especially?” asked Orso Ted.
“Because you can’t say no to ’o Pagliaccio,” replied ’o White.
“I’d never met this guy ’o Pagliaccio,” Orso Ted went on, “but the minute he set foot in here, I got scared!”
“Uaaa’. You really are a lightweight,” said ’o White, brash and bold, “if ’o Pagliaccio scares you!”
“He scares me, too,” said Chicchirichì.
“He doesn’t scare me in the fucking slightest!” said ’o Selvaggio. “But he does look like a professional killer, I’ll say that.”
“That’s some bullshit. Now you can glance at a guy and say he looks like a professional killer! If someone looked like a professional killer, then everyone would be able to tell you were a professional killer first thing, and you wouldn’t be good for a single job,”’o White snapped. Could he be outdone in ferocity by someone who looked like Krusty the Clown?
“No, no,” said Chicchirichì, “he definitely has the face of a professional killer. And after all, what does that have to do with it, ’o White. If a guy has the face of a professional killer, then everyone’s just going to respect him.”
“So you know what that professional killer does for a living now? He’s cornered the market on Japanese motorcycles in Italy. He’s the biggest dealership. And I’m not saying the biggest in Naples. In all of Italy!”
“But I thought he was the guy who carried out Micione’s executions?” Chicchirichì asked.
“Sure, he killed people, alongside ’o Tigrotto,” said ’o Selvaggio. He’d walked into the center of the cluster of Longhairs, he had something important to say: “And nobody suspected him. That means he had a pair of balls on him. If all you do is sell motorcycles, then you’re a businessman. If all you do is kill people, then you’re a professional killer. If you do both, then you know how to be a boss.”
“So what are we doing now, reciting ’o Pagliaccio’s biography? Come on, let’s start a Wikipedia page for him…”’o White interrupted him. The discussion had gone on too long now. The king of Forcella had summoned them, that alone was enough to set his imagination aflame. “It’s about time they gave me Furcella, I mean what the fuck! After Don Feliciano turned state’s witness, and Copacabana’s behind bars, and now they’ve rubbed out Roipnol…”
“’O White, the tournament of Furcella is something you have to win, no one’s going to give it to you—” said ’o Selvaggio. ’O White’s hands seized ’o Selvaggio’s throat and squeezed tight.
“No one ever gave me a thing in my life!” hissed ’o White. “When you speak my name, you need to gargle first with Tantum Verde mouthwash, you filthy lòuta!” He loosened his grip just enough to allow ’o Selvaggio to get a word out.
“’O White, no one in our paranza has a piazza. We’re all on salaries. All we do is protect the piazzas, and do whatever Micione tells us. In the meantime, the Piranhas are supplying the whole city with shit.”
“Bullshit. They give them a handful of fleas.”
“Eh, like hell, a handful of fleas!” snarled ’o Selvaggio.
’O White met the gaze of all his other men.
Orso Ted said: “’O White, don’t get mad. But the piazzas are all selling the Piranhas’ shit.”
“Okay, it’s true,” said ’o White, “so we’ll settle the matter, at Micione’s place.”
“You see? We always have to go talk to someone to settle a matter.”
“Shut your mouth.” And he lifted his finger to the tip of his nose, to impose silence.
* * *
Via Sorrento in San Giovanni a Teduccio is a strip of asphalt lined with big apartment buildings, warehouses, and a mini-soccer field where the grass no longer grows. Micione lived there, on the top floor of an apartment house, and from there, from one of the countless outlying districts of Naples, he controlled the city’s historical center. The road that runs from Forcella up to San Giovanni a Teduccio runs straight almost the whole way. You keep the sea on your right and in fifteen minutes, if there’s no traffic, you’re there. From the palazzi of the seventeenth century to big blocky apartment buildings in just minutes.
The Longhairs had crowded into ’o White’s VW Golf, and the minute it crossed the boundary into San Giovanni he switched the engine off. He had no other instructions and he was in foreign territory. He hadn’t ventured out of the historic center of Naples in more than a year: walking away from business for even just a handful of days is a dangerous thing, it means becoming a target.
Three scooters pulled up next to the car, surrounding it. A glance inside, another at the license plate, and finally a pair of knuckles knocking on the hood. “Stop when you get to the elementary school,” said one of the guys on a scooter, and then roared off with the others.
* * *
Outside the elementary school a guy wearing jeans and denim a jacket waved him over. “Turn in here,” he said to ’o White, opening the car door. “From here on I’ll be driving.”
The VW Golf pulled a U-turn and accelerated in the direction the Longhairs had come from.
“Oh, wait, now we’re going back?”
“That’s how it works … There are only four people who can approach the Faellas’ house with a car. I’m one of the four.”
“Well, what about if Amazon wants to deliver a package…?”
“Ah, go blow yourself, you and Amazòn.”
In the murky seabed of San Giovanni, the only security system was to allow access only to certain motorists, who, like maritime pilots, knew the low tides, the shoals, the reefs.
They arrived in a small open space surrounded by a horseshoe of public housing structures. The top floor of the three apartment buildings sutured together belonged to the Faellas, thousands of square feet of floor space that, viewed from the sidewalk, seemed like nothing more than depressingly normal apartments.
The Longhairs were ushered out of the car and lined up against the building’s wall.
“Guagliu’, undress,” said the man who had conducted them there. ’O White set a good example for his men and dropped a Beretta M9, his personal favorite, onto the reddish tile pavement. The others followed suit, all except for Orso Ted, who declared he wasn’t carrying. The driver ordered them to take their shoes off, too; if they went up to see Micione with even a razor blade hidden in a sock, then he’d be a dead man. But they were all fine, they could go in. They caught a freight elevator that opened out onto a hallway that seemed to stretch out endlessly. The white walls were decked with antique view paintings of Naples in a faint sepia tone and, at regular intervals, a series of modern ottomans, these too sepia-hued. It looked like a waiting room, or the aisle of a church, so great was the solemnity it emanated. A narrow-plank parque
t floor extended down the hallway, only to come to a sudden stop: beyond that point, you continued walking on a sort of plexiglass catwalk, but the LED can lighting overhead reflected a glare off the surface, producing a sort of fata morgana to the eyes of the Longhairs.
“Hold it right there,” said Micione’s man, and with long strides he walked away, vanishing into the distance.
“’O White,” said Chicchirichì, “is it true that Micione looks like the Cheshire Cat?”
“Like who?”’O White had raised his hands to his forehead to ward off the glare of the spotlights, and in the meantime he ventured a few steps to get past the parquet.
“The Cheshire Cat!”
“What the fuck is that?”
“The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland…” And then, seeing ’o White’s baffled expression, he specified: “The cartoon.”
“Ah, go fuck yourself…” But he never finished the phrase, because the sight of what lay beneath his feet had silenced him. A stream of rushing water flowed past under the transparent floor. It felt as if he was in one of those paintings of the miracles of Jesus; his grandmother had a holy image identical to this on her nightstand. Only here the sea was real, tropical, with seaweed, rocks, garishly colored fish, even a stingray that was swimming along with its belly glued to the thin transparent barrier separating it from ’o White’s appalled face. “Oh, there’s real water under here, and no kidding!” he said, and was immediately joined by the others, who got down on all fours, their heads swiveling to follow the clownfish and surgeonfish. Jaws hanging open, like four children visiting the Genoa aquarium.
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