“Ah, how much fun we had…” said Micione, troweling it on. “Then Feliciano pulled the fucked-up move that he pulled.” And he tightened the sash on his dressing gown, shaking his head as he did. “But even if the party’s over, all the good that your grandpa ’o Sovrano did, the balls that ’o Viceré, your father has, all of this can’t be wiped out by a traitor, it can’t be erased by a turncoat who ruined everything, Luigi’,” Micione said. He’d stuck a hand into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a rectangular plastic object. He rubbed it a couple of times over the red satin and then he said: “Lui’, do you remember your grandpa?”
“Not much…” Drago’ replied.
Micione snapped the rectangle of plastic he was holding and extended it right in front of his eyes. “Look here. Who do you see?”
Drago’ fell silent. In that little hand mirror he saw a reflection of his father, his grandfather, he saw the faces that he’d admired in the photographs.
“You see?” asked Micione, nodding at that silence as if it were an admission. “You only need to glance in the mirror to see it.” He snapped the hand mirror shut and put it away in the pocket of his dressing gown. “Now let me show you another creature who had plenty of heart, and fears nothing, just like your grandpa, another king of the earth.”
He walked over to a double glass door and waved for Drago’ to follow him into the elevator.
They stepped out into what once must have been the garage. Micione had gutted the place. Gone were the individual stalls, gone the partition walls, gone the roof that separated them from a small garden. Replacing them now were cages for animals, and a plexiglass ceiling to let the sun filter through. The air reeked with the stench of excrement. It felt as if they were in a subterranean zoo. Micione placed his arm around Drago’s shoulders and led him past several empty cages, while Drago’ wondered whether the man kept racehorses down there, or what.
“Look here,” said Micione, taking his arm back. Drago’ grabbed the bars and stuck his head through, but he could see only bales of hay piled up and a giant food bowl, still dirty. He was about to ask how long he was going to have to wait to get to know this other king of the earth, when a lion emerged from behind the wall of hay bales, heading for the bathtub that he used as a drinking trough. Drago’ leaped backward, fetching up against Micione’s belly.
“Ua’, that’s so cool,” he said, excited and scared at the same time.
“Let me introduce you to Genghis Khan, the white lion. This is my son.”
Drago’ leaned toward the bars.
“You know the name? You know who Genghis Khan is?” Micione asked him.
“I do know,” Drago’ replied. “I know. A king, the best king of all of them. The king of Mongolia.” He’d been infected with Nicolas’s passion for the History Channel, because, Nicolas always said, if you’re going to learn something, you might as well learn it from the greatest. And who had ever been greater than Genghis Khan? Not even the ancient Romans had built an empire as vast as his. He, no doubt about it, had been the king of the world.
“And do you have the balls to go in there?” asked Micione.
“If you give me a club, sure,” he said, starting to laugh.
But he realized right away that it hadn’t been meant as a joke.
“Why, does the lion have a club?” Micione asked him, in fact. “What he was born with is what he uses to defend himself. So what you were born with, use that to defend yourself. You need to fight on equal terms.”
Drago’ went back to staring at the lion, which by now had started to pace in circles. The cage was broad and deep, but it was clear that Genghis Khan felt cramped in there. He would pace to one end of the cage, then he’d pace back, and so on. He’d certainly appreciate a little unprogrammed entertainment.
“Well, so, do you or don’t you have the balls to get to know the emperor up close?”
“Are you trying to get me eaten by Genghis Khan?” Drago’ was striving to keep a little lighthearted banter in his voice, but deep down he was shitting his pants.
“Don’t be ridiculous! Genghis can tell the difference between people he should eat and people he should lick. Go on, get in, don’t wet your undies.”
He stuck the key into the lock and pulled open the door to the cage. Genghis took a step back, trying to determine whether Drago’ constituted a threat. Drago’, too, took a step back, frozen with fear. In the meantime, Micione had stepped into the cage and was petting Genghis’s back. He ran his hand with the coat and then against it, roughing up the lion’s white mantle. He grabbed his head and pulled it close to his own, as if begging him to start purring. Micione the kitty cat and his micione—his kitty cat, thought Drago’, and he felt a little safer.
“Ja’, just pet him,” the other man cajoled him.
At that point, Drago’ sidled over to the lion the way you’d sidle up to a dog if you were terrified of it. He brushed the lion’s hindquarters and then moved his hand up to the middle of its back, following the curve of the spinal cord. He could sense the repressed tension, the power ready to lunge. And kill. He increased the pressure; now he was stroking the lion the way you might a tame, well-behaved Labrador. “Genghis,” he whispered breathlessly.
“So you like the conqueror?” Micione asked him.
Drago’ nodded: “He’s beautiful. Can I take a selfie?”
He pulled out his iPhone and raised it to frame as much as he could get into the shot. He inhaled the odors he remembered smelling when as a child his father took him to the circus, and he wrapped his arms around the lion’s head. That head was so large that in order to embrace it fully, he was forced to press his face against Genghis’s whiskers, cheek to cheek. He smelled the rank breath, and his arm around the lion’s neck went up and down with the animal’s heartbeat. He stretched out his free arm to snap the selfie, but he was trembling too much, it was bound to come out blurry, so instead he started recording a video. “The lions of San Giovanni,” he said, and then he stopped recording because Genghis was starting to show some signs of irritability.
“He’s a lion because he was born a lion,” said Micione. “You were born a lion, and now you’re just being a sheepdog. If you were born a lion, you can’t turn into a sheepdog.”
Drago’s face twisted, and his eyes filled with suspicion. “I’ve got to go now,” he said, and he darted quickly out of the cage, as if escaping a trap. “Ciao, Genghis, I’m sorry they have to lock you up in this aquarium.”
* * *
They rode back up in silence, and ’o Pagliaccio and Viola were gone now. Micione took off the dressing gown that he wore over his clothing and carefully folded it and put it away. This was the signal that the visit was about to end, and in fact his expression, too, was no longer cheerful.
“You need to take the Piranhas in hand,” Micione said to him, without any beating about the bush, as he took his seat behind the desk. “Naples is under the control of the guaglioni, and the guaglioni don’t want to be under my control. The Longhairs’ paranza doesn’t have the balls for this. And Copacabana, all he’s ever worried about is leading la bonne bonne vie, going bowling … how can a self-respecting boss spend time in a bowling alley? Throwing a ball at a bunch of pins. It means you’re gay or a child, right?”
Drago’ said nothing; the conversation wasn’t over.
“Now he’s locked up at Poggi Poggi,” he said, referencing Poggioreale Prison, “so he’s no good to anybody anymore. Children want to be commanded by children. And you have the blood to command.”
“In the Piranhas we’re all in command, we’re all brothers,” said Drago’.
“Drago’, Forcella is yours by right of blood!” He slammed a fist down on the desktop.
“Micio’,” Drago’ replied, “Forcella belongs to the paranza: you need to just pull out of the center of Naples. Those streets belong to us, we took them over one by one.”
“That’s where you’re mistaken: those streets belong to Nicolas Maraja. You just
bring him pastries, he takes them and eats them.”
“That’s not true,” Drago’ retorted, raising his voice. “We aren’t like the old Camorra. Each of us has a piazza all our own, and everything we earn we share equally. We’re not like you. We’re true brothers.”
“And you believe that?” asked Micione, regaining the same comfortable tone of voice with which he’d first greeted him on his arrival.
“No, it’s not that I believe it, it really is like that. That’s the way it is,” Drago’ said again. His family lived on Vicolo dei Carbonari, not in San Giovanni a Teduccio.
“There are only two positions in a paranza,” Micione said. “There’s the people who give the orders, and the people who take them. Do you see that chair over there?” And he pointed to a golden throne in the far corner of the room. “That’s the throne of Francis the Second of Bourbon, the last king of Naples, and it seats only one. God summoned him to that throne. Now the family has summoned you. Think it over.”
Then Micione picked up his phone: “’O Pagliaccio, he’s coming downstairs.”
The excursion was over.
A PERFECT SHAVE
There were two things in life that Copacabana loved unreservedly: the ass of a Brazilian girl, and getting a barbershop shave. He’d married a fine Brazilian ass and, after ten years of marriage, he’d never found another one like it, and that was considering that in all his time in Rio, while running his hotels, he’d enjoyed his fair share.
He would never give up his shave with hot lather and a straight blade, not even in prison, and especially before any meeting with his lawyer. It was a sort of family tradition for him: his father had been a barber, and so had his grandfather before him. Both of them, when he was a youngster and had decided to grow his first goatee, took him aside and remonstrated with him: “Pasqua’, what do you think, is your face like your dick, that you’d let hair grow on it?”
Copacabana laughed at the recollection, as he sat in his cell in Poggioreale Prison, while his trusted barber, Peppe, another convict in his early fifties, was finishing off a sideburn. Peppe was famed throughout the house of detention. He’d stolen a Luca Giordano painting from a museum and shot two security guards. He’d only meant to kneecap them, but the bullets had severed both men’s femoral arteries.
“What do you say, you like it, signo’?”
Copacabana looked at himself in the mirror. Peppe knew what he was doing, he had to admit it.
“But I haven’t seen your cousin lately,” Peppe went on, “the kid with the red hair.”
“Eh, no, he can’t come anymore. Health problems.”
“What kind?”
“Problems with his feet…” said Copacabana. “Now do the other sideburn.” And he handed back the mirror and returned to the shave and his own personal thoughts. They’d caught Agostino ’o Cerino, and he hadn’t been replaced yet. It had happened before, couriers had been picked up or rubbed out, but usually in no more than twenty-four hours they were promptly replaced, as a sign of unaltered trust. Not this time, though. Micione’s message was unmistakable: Copacabana’s wife, Fernanda, was not going to become the queen of Forcella, and he, Don Pasquale Sarnataro aka Copacabana, was going to rot in his cell in Poggioreale. End of relationship. That’s why he’d requested an urgent meeting with his lawyer. He hadn’t had time to prepare for the meeting, and that meant he was going to have to improvise. Copacabana didn’t really know how to improvise, though.
“Counselor, things aren’t going well,” Copacabana said. “I need to get out. Once again half the city is shooting at the other half, and if we don’t get rid of the paranzas, we’re going to wind up like a firecracker with a wet fuse. They’re all rabid animals, we just need to put them out of their misery, one after the other.” This was the first time he’d told his lawyer the way things stood, without camouflaging his meaning or couching his terms in disguises and half measures.
The lawyer didn’t appreciate the straight talk: “Signor Sarnataro, I’m afraid I must warn you that if you continue to speak to me in these terms, I’ll be forced to withdraw my services as your legal counsel. I fully realize just how tough life can be behind bars, but I don’t subscribe to a single word of what you’ve just told me. If you wanted a Camorrista lawyer, you could have found a hundred thousand of them. I am working strictly on the legal aspects of your trial. And let me point out, while we’re on the subject, that the fact that you haven’t been subjected to the forty-one bis regime isn’t merely a victory: it’s an absolute triumph of the lawyer’s profession. If you can only impose a measure of self-discipline, then we’ll also be able to take care of this trial, and you won’t be forced to sit in this cell until you’re a bent and feeble old man.”
Copacabana leaped from his seat, the few hairs that still dotted his balding cranium pointing in all directions. He started shouting at the lawyer, explaining that half the judges in the country checked into and out of his hotels, along with all the political kingpins of the right, the left, the up, the down, who knelt down before him to ask him for votes. They were all friends of his, all listed, with their phone numbers, in his address book, and if he owed a speck of gratitude to anyone or anything for having been spared the sheer torture of the forty-one bis regime, what he owed it to was his own fucking address book. He was ready to eat that lawyer alive, swallow him whole, but a guard had stepped in to take him back to his cell. “Courts are just so much theater,” said Copacabana as he was being led through the steel-reinforced door to his wing of the prison, “but the script is written elsewhere. You have to believe that, if you want to be a good actor!”
He returned to his cell even more desperate and terrified than before. He started smacking the walls with open-handed blows, as if he were beating the whole prison of Poggioreale. No one looked out from any of the neighboring cells, not even when Copacabana started yelling that he was a big-time businessman who had transformed a village in Brazil into the Naples of South America. “I was born to appreciate beauty,” he ranted. “There are butchers to take care of the business of killing.”
Peppe. He needed Peppe. It had only been a few hours since his shave, but when he ran his hand over his cheek, he could already feel a faint fuzz starting to sprout. Plus, Peppe had always appreciated his thoughts about beauty.
“Your skin is looking irritated, Don Pasqua’,” Peppe said to him, before tossing the cape over his chest and fastening it around his neck.
“Will you put a hot towel on my face?” asked Copacabana, and the young man replied that he’d be glad to. “You’re just too good-hearted, signo’, you’ve never killed anyone, and these people take advantage. Don Pasquale, you simply fly too high, too close to the sun.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Copacabana, and he shut his eyes and settled back to enjoy the warmth on his cheeks. “How many years do you still have in here?” he asked.
“Another twenty, signo’, the road is long,” Peppe replied.
“At least you’re behind bars because you were searching for beauty.”
“What beauty? They would have paid me four million for a Luca Giordano…”
And with his straight razor, he slit Copacabana’s carotid artery. The man who had guided Peppe’s hand on the day of the theft in the museum had today guided his hand directly onto Copacabana’s throat. And that man was Micione.
DRIVING SCHOOL
The paranza’s new cars were having their maiden run, a baptism by rubber along Via Posillipo to Marechiaro, and back. They never went any farther, because it would have meant disturbing the shoals of Nisida. “That bitch Nisida never gave in to Posillipo, instead she jumped into the sea,” as Nicolas had told the story rooted in ancient mythology.
Briato’ showed up at the New Maharaja in a fire-engine-red Porsche Cayenne brand new from the dealership.
“Ua’, let’s try this car out!” Lollipop suggested immediately.
Back and forth, the members of the paranza took turns taming the Cayenne
; even Susamiello claimed his run, but that privilege was still denied to the little ones. “Did you wash your hands?” Briato’ asked them.
Nicolas alone stayed off to one side, punching words into his smartphone, indifferent to everything that was going on in the parking lot of the New Maharaja.
“Nico’,” Briato’ shouted, “it’s your turn. Nico’!”
Nicolas shook his head and pointed to his Rolex. There was no time, he still had to hand out the monthly paychecks and then go by to pick up Letizia. “Maternity class,” he explained, pointing an imaginary pistol at his temple and pulling the imaginary trigger.
In about half an hour, Nicolas divvied up the cash and said goodbye to his men, but before he could hop on his TMAX, Drago’ came over to him: “Hold up, Nico’, let’s drive part of the way together.”
They rolled along, scooters side by side, in silence, until Drago’ asked: “So, have you ever driven a car?” Nicolas sped up, putting a good fifty yards between them, but then he let Drago’ catch up with him. It would do no good to lie.
“Then let’s set up this driving school, ja’,” said Drago’ in such an inviting tone that Nicolas found himself obliged to accept.
The first stop was at a hardware store; they needed a drill bit and a roll of duct tape. It was simple physics: if they used the butt of a pistol to break a car’s side window, it would make a tremendous racket. If they taped the drill bit to the pistol butt, and then hit the window with it, the glass simply imploded. A nice clean piece of work.
“Maraja, choose the car!”
They buzzed along Via Nuova Marina and pulled over by the cars to consider them. They felt like they were in Grand Theft Auto. Drago’ knocked on the driver’s window of a big sedan and signaled for the guy to roll it down. The guy was so fat that the transmission was completely hidden.
“Is that an automatic?” he asked him.
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