Savage Kiss

by Roberto Saviano

  After a somewhat awkward exchange of greetings, she sat down and showed him the papers from the bank: “You see?” she said. “It’s all taken care of. Paid in full. Even the part of the mortgage that hadn’t been paid, all that’s needed here are a couple of signatures.”

  He flopped down on the sofa and undid a button on his shirt. Mena, on the other hand, was fiercely proud of her son, the way you’d carry a saint in a procession.

  “No,” he said, after building up a sufficient supply of oxygen in his lungs. “I’ll never accept.”

  Mena’s lips twisted. She headed for the door, without a word of farewell, then she turned and said: “Look, they accepted them all, every last one. You’re the only one missing, you and that other idiot woman who lives in the basso. Think it over carefully.” And she slammed the door behind her, violently.

  * * *

  The security guard had a very simple directive—“never set foot outside the bank”—but there was something about the guy who’d been walking back and forth for nearly an hour that just didn’t seem right to him. At first he’d thought the guy might be a nutjob, his hand constantly in his hair as if trying to suppress a thought, and that mouth that never closed in silence. He was talking to himself, and seemed to be caught up in a complicated line of reasoning. Every so often he peered into the bank, going so far as to shade his eyes from the light with the palms of both hands. But he was too inept to be the lookout for a gang of bank robbers, the security guard told himself, and he regained his equanimity once he saw that the man was finally leaving.

  Just half an hour after Mena had left, Nicolas’s father pulled out his cell phone and stood there staring at it for a good long while, undecided as to whether he should call his son, whom he hadn’t talked to in months now, or even Mena herself, to tell her that he’d changed his mind. But had he, really, changed his mind? He’d come all the way over to the bank, and he was standing outside, finally discovering that no, nothing was going to turn him aside from that refusal, that rejection of terms. He looked up, recovering the fierce pride that had held him together—since the day that he’d lost everything, Christian and everything else in his life—and he found himself looking at a well-dressed, elegantly groomed woman who was heading for the bank with the same hesitant stride that had just carried him there, too. It was as if she was expecting someone and, at the same time, was afraid of an unpleasant surprise.

  Nicolas’s father ran a quick hand over his hair, happy about that apparition: he’d seen Greta only once before, he couldn’t even remember where, and she’d struck him as different from the others.

  There was only one way to find out: “Are you here to pick up the winnings from the lotto that our children bought tickets for?” he asked.

  Greta smiled and then turned serious again. “You’re the father of…”

  “That’s right, I’m the father of Nicolas Fiorillo … the father of Maraja.”

  “I’m Eduardo’s mother,” said Greta, and she added nothing else, because it cost her too much grief and pain to utter that other name, it was bound up too tightly with the pistol she’d found under the bed. “You know, I didn’t even believe in this story of the mortgages. I just came to check it out. And so you, too, have found that it’s true.” She twisted her hands, and then gazed at him as if he were a doctor who was about to give her a diagnosis: “What should we do, Professo’?” There they were, not thirty feet away from a signature that would have taken care of them for the rest of their lives. And Greta was asking his advice as a father and a family man, in the stead of that dead husband with whom she could no longer discuss matters, but also as a more highly educated person than her.

  “We’re reaping what we’ve sown,” he replied.

  “So you think we ought to take this money?”

  “No, I don’t think so, we can’t become a paranza ourselves,” he said, the words coming out in a rush. He realized that he needed to be clear with this woman, and he returned to the decisive tone of voice he’d used with Mena. “If we’ve come to this point, it’s because we’ve sown the seeds of evil.”

  “Sure, but this money … I have three children, Professo’. And you can’t raise children on nothing but good manners, education, and empty words. You also need this damned money.” Greta adjusted the strap of her purse over her shoulder and then took a step toward the entrance to the bank.

  “I used to have two sons, two children, of my own, and it’s precisely because I couldn’t convince them to stay away from this money that now I have only one, or maybe I don’t even have him anymore.” He took a step, too, but only to reduce the distance between him and Greta.

  “That’s true,” she said, and gave up her attempt to get farther away from him. “But now, with this money, I’ll take them away from here. I’ll move house, away from this city. We’ll leave, but we won’t be running, we’ll leave by the light of day.”

  “Signora, do you know how they made this money—”

  “’O ssaccio buono,” she interrupted him: I know very well. Raising her voice a little, she went on: “But there’s something else I know. If I dress them warm and decent, if I make sure they get enough to eat at every meal, if I let them travel, if I keep them safe, if I make sure they study, then this money from the devil? I’m spending it the way God Almighty would spend it.”

  Nicolas’s father stopped short—another few feet and he would have been walking with her through the front door of the bank. “What can I tell you, signo’?” Greta was already rummaging through her handbag for metal objects to put in the tray before entering and, without the courage to even look him in the eyes, asked: “So you’re sure you won’t go in?” An attempt to split the guilt, and feel its burden a little less. Or perhaps even one last attempt to let herself be convinced not to go in.

  He said nothing, just turned his back on her and the bank, and walked away.

  CHICCHIRICHÌ

  “I caught him.”

  Not a “Can I talk to you?” and not even an “I come in peace, Maraja.” Chicchirichì hadn’t even looked him in the eyes, he’d simply uttered those words, “I caught him,” and Nicolas had lengthened his stride, leaving him behind him, standing there, outside his house. He had no time to waste on that jackoff, he told himself. Chicchirichì had been in the Longhairs forever, he might even be older than ’o White, and he still was basically serving as a guaglione, a foot soldier. In the past, he would have taken the unannounced appearance of the Longhairs’ bagman as a clumsy attempt at an ambush, but the truce that had ended hostilities in Forcella was crucially necessary to the paranzas: a dead man in the street in the center of the city would have unleashed complete chaos.

  The next day, he found him there again, and he repeated the same words, but with an addition that convinced him to give him a hearing.

  “I caught Agostino,” he said.

  Agostino ’o Cerino. How long had it been since he’d been kicked out of the paranza? Since the day of his ejection, he’d simply erased him.

  He leaned in close to Chicchirichì: “Caught him doing what?”

  “Taking messages to Micione … The messages that Copacabana smuggles out of Poggioreale Prison? That bastard takes them to Micione.”

  Chicchirichì was holding his head low, and Nicolas grabbed his mohawk. “Look me in the face when you speak to me,” he said, jerking his head up with violence. Chicchirichì’s eyes spoke eloquently of sleepless nights, of tormented thoughts. “Have you read what they’re writing to each other?”

  “No, I barely got it.” Then, rummaging in all directions with his glance to make sure there was no one within earshot, he added: “’O White doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even know I’m here right now.”

  Nicolas weighed that confession without releasing Chicchirichì’s mohawk, then decided he could afford to give him ten minutes.

  He took him up to his apartment and made him comfortable in an armchair. Then he rolled a joint and offered it to his guest. He looked
like a zombie. After three hits, though, his tongue loosened.

  “So they’re right across from each other, right?” Chicchirichì began, and Nicolas nodded in confirmation, though he actually had no idea.

  “So they haven’t given Copacabana the forty-one bis,” the so-called hard-prison regime, a sort of extreme solitary confinement. “That bastard. There are friends of Copacabana who get their girlfriends to put their hands on their dicks, right? And basically the minute the guard sees it, he’s ‘Hands on the table, hands on the table,’ and at that exact moment, under the table, they exchange shoes. Agostino gives his shoes to Copacabana and Copacabana gives his to Agostino. And that bastard Copacabana puts the letter in his shoes.”

  Just a few seconds of distraction, but quite enough time for Copacabana to get his pizzino, his Mafia letter, out of the prison. Once the visit was over, Agostino would shuffle away in Copacabana’s size 10 shoes toward the exit, while the prisoner returned to his cell in Agostino’s size 7½s.

  “Ah, so Agostino’ o Cerino is basically a mailbag,” said Nicolas, who rolled the tip of the joint in cocaine and then offered it to Chicchirichì. “But are you sure?”

  “I’m telling you. He’s taking the messages to Micione.”

  “Which messages?” Nicolas asked. He was trying to figure out whether the paranza of the Longhairs had sent Chicchirichì to pretend to sell him out.

  “I told you, I haven’t read them. But I followed him, and I do know that they’re getting ready to screw us … they’re planning to sell Forcella to outsiders again.”

  “So you really think Copacabana is that much of an asshole?”

  “If you ask me, yes, he is!”

  “So why did you start following Cerino in the first place?”

  Chicchirichì lifted his knuckles to his eyes and started digging. Furiously. When he turned to look at Nicolas again, under the burst capillaries, you could glimpse a glistening veil of moisture, and his voice now sounded like that of a young man who’d understood that there was no future for him. He’d expected money, Chicchirichì: a crumb of power, but instead, he’d got nothing. He’d remained ’o White’s personal slave, while all the others pursued careers. And so he’d gone to his boss with the story of Agostino and he’d suggested calling Maraja, to ask him for help. ’O White had spat on his shoes and then told him to go take a walk. And to come back when he had less bullshit to spew.

  “Maraja, I took that walk, and it led me to you,” said Chicchirichì. “Forcella is our property.”

  “Is Forcella your property or our property?”

  “Maraja, Forcella belongs to whoever can take it. But now it’s our turn. I’m sick and tired of getting my balls busted. The piazzas need to belong to us. Now I want to graduate to the major leagues. I’ve had it with being left behind.”

  “So you and me together, a sort of recycling.”

  “I’ve been stuck in the minor leagues for too damned long. Now Copacabana needs to understand that it’s our turn.”

  “You mean we need to get a turn to play?”

  “You and us both. No way they’re going to farm it out. The center of Naples belongs to the people who were born there. Now you guys have the piazzas. But for how much longer? If Micione and Copacabana decide to install another one of their men, after Roipnol?”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Nicolas. He’d stood up to rekindle Chicchirichì’s joint, which was drawing no smoke by now. “I’m supposed to solve the problem of Agostino for ’o White because he doesn’t have the balls to solve it for himself? And then what? It’s a gift package, a courtesy service we provide? Or really, a gift outright, to you.”

  “Maraja, do you want to be under Micione’s command?”

  “Micione can blow me,” Nicolas replied. “But what’s your objective here? You’re not some kind of Luca Brasi, are you, sent by the Corleone family to sell out to the Turk?”

  “Luca who? Who the fuck knows him?” said Chicchirichì, who wasn’t a big Godfather fan.

  Chicchirichì reached up and touched his mohawk, straightening the tip, which was hanging limply to one side, and then laid out his demand: “I want the piazza at the train station. I sold there for years. You can even ask Stavodicendo, who used to work there with me, when he was just a kid. So anyone who sells there, I manage them. The shit that’s sold there, I get to buy it. That becomes my piazza.”

  “Good job, Chicchirichì, now you got what was eating at you out into the open,” Nicolas said, with a fleeting smile that faded as fast as it had appeared. “And what the fuck do I care if you want the station? You’re not in my paranza. You don’t belong to me. You belong with the Longhairs.”

  “I report to ’o White. But if ’o White loses this battle, you lose it every bit as much.”

  “I don’t lose, Chicchirichì. We have the shit, we have the piazzas, we own Forcella. We have the heart of Naples in our grip. Whoever’s on top now will be under later. Game over.”

  “But if you ask me, we lose the game if we play against Brazil.”

  Nicolas no longer followed what he was saying.

  Chicchirichì had stuck a hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper, which he then handed to Nicolas. Maraja sat there staring at the scrap of white dangling from his hand, and for an instant he felt as if they were playing Capture the Flag. Then Nicolas grabbed the piece of paper and set it down on one knee to smooth it out. It was the conclusion of a lengthy line of reasoning that had begun who knows how long ago. It sanctioned a new king for Forcella, in fact, a queen. Copacabana’s wife, Fernanda.

  Chicchirichì had lied, he’d read the note, he just hadn’t admitted it right away.

  “It’s true, Maraja, what I told you was bullshit, I read the message!” Nicolas continued puffing at his joint, made of a cigarette emptied of its tobacco then refilled with hash and a portion of the original tobacco filling.

  “You see how they’re sticking it up our ass?” Chicchirichì went on.

  Nicolas balled up the note again and flicked it at Chicchirichì, hitting him square in the forehead. “So what? So they want to put Copacabana’s wife in command, the Brazilian slut? Who gives a fuck? We’ll cut her head off, too.” But he said it without conviction. “So where did you get this note? Have you become a magician? How do I know that you didn’t write it yourself, asshole?! Get out of here.”

  “Maraja, just listen to me.”

  “How did you get this note?”

  “The guy was over at Micione’s house,” he explained, “he spends lots of time there fucking with his girlfriend. While they were yanking out Carlito’s Way’s teeth, and everyone was there, ’o Micione, ’o Pagliaccio, ’a Ranfona, I managed to get my hand into the pocket of the jacket that was lying there, on the table, and I stole the letter. That’s what I did, while Carlito’s Way was spitting blood and shrieking like nothing I’ve ever heard before, Maraja. In the meantime, ’o Cerino was just standing there laughing and saying: ‘How nicely Carlito’s sings.’”

  Chicchirichì looked up; his eyes were welling over, the memory had shaken him deeply.

  “Thanks for the visit and the message, Chicchirichì,” said Nicolas as he stood up. “Now we’ll decide … what we need to do next.”

  VIDEO

  The video that Nicolas received from Scignacane lasted just two minutes and fifty-eight seconds. One of his men had filmed it at Nisida Reform School with an old Samsung that Scignacane had given him in person.

  At first, Nicolas thought the video was a prank, some sort of flash mob in a prison setting. You could see a hallway, lined with flaking paint, and a double file of boys walking toward the video camera. Then another boy entered the frame, his back to the camera, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt that left uncovered his skeletal shoulder blades and a pair of basketball shorts that extended to the middle of his calves. When he went past, all the others turned their faces to the wall; only once he’d gone past did they resume their march.

/>   Fade to black for a couple of seconds, and cut to the next scene, which begins in a cell. The guy on the bed, lying on his back and staring at the springs of the bunk above him, no doubt about it, was Dentino. He’d lost weight, his beard had grown out, there were dark circles under his eyes, but it was him, there was no mistaking those rabbit incisors. He was dressed like the boy who at the beginning of the video was walking against the stream of inmates in the prison hallway.

  Nicolas turned the volume up all the way, but the video had been recorded without audio. In the footage, Dentino got up from the bed and left the cell, heading over to two other inmates who were talking together, and trying to join the conversation. The two inmates went on talking without even looking at him. So Dentino walked past them, but he started to be bodychecked by anybody in his path, and yet the others went on as if nothing at all had happened. Dentino walked up to another convict and tried to talk to him, too, but all he got in return was a glance that penetrated his body. He was a phantom surrounded by human beings in flesh and blood who couldn’t see him. He didn’t exist for anyone there.

  Another gap, two more seconds, and then a public shower. Dentino was soaping himself with slow, dreamy movements, always in the same area of his chest, dazed, and then a corpulent convict grabbed the bar of soap out of his hand, just as naturally as if he’d taken it from a soap dish. He scrubbed his dick with it, long and thoroughly, and then put the bar of soap right back where he’d found it, in Dentino’s hand.

  The red dot that marked the progression of the video had almost reached the far right. Another cut and then the final scene, five seconds long. Dentino, naked in his cell, banging his head against the wall. Body rigid, hands at his sides, no movement but the rocking of his neck, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.