The ski masks all turned toward the young man who had retracted his leadership. Nicolas knew that this answer could be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it would attract the investigators of the district attorney’s office, and on the other it would make it clear to anyone else who was watching that they decided the good and bad weather in that city.
“What can I tell you? If you set foot on our streets, you’ll always find us,” said Nicolas.
“Excuse me, how do you mean?” the journalist asked.
“We’re here. If you set foot on our streets, you’ll always find us.”
The cameraman narrowed the shot until those dark eyes filled the frame. The interview was over.
The journalist had left just a few minutes earlier when Drone, still wearing his Mephisto ski mask, went over to Nicolas.
“Nico’,” he said in a worried tone, “you wait and see, now everyone’s going to come after us.”
“Guagliu’,” Drago’ weighed in. “We need to put our gats somewhere else, at home, anywhere else, so we don’t get caught with them.”
Nicolas hoped for an incursion and search. It would be a reaction, proof that everyone was afraid of the paranza. He was sick and tired of seeing the old myth live on in the minds of judges, policemen, carabinieri, and financial police, the legend that children can’t command the underworld, that that kind of power is vested exclusively in the old bosses, mature men. Maturity, Nicolas decided, leads to fear, and fear leads to death. They were the Piranhas, the only ones capable of managing power in their own time, here, immediately, without a thought for tomorrow.
That very same night, all the members of the paranza received house calls from the police.
“Please, come right in,” said Nicolas’s mother. “And all this uproar is for what? For a boy?”
“Mamma mia, what is all this? Are you busting into the house of an ISIS terrorist?” asked Drone’s father.
Pesce Moscio’s father, on the other hand, rushed right over to his son and slapped him in the face. “What have you done now?”
“Me? Nothing!” his son retorted.
In response to those questions, the police offered the same weary formulation: “We’re just doing our job. Sit down and we’ll leave as soon as we’re done.”
The officers turned the place upside down. They searched under the beds, in the clothes closets, in the dresser drawers, inside the household appliances. They found nothing, not even a chunk of hash, and they left with a handful of paper, their short after-action reports.
The Italian police left those homes amid a hail of insults from the families of the members of the paranza, and climbed into their squad cars, passing bike racks and flowerpots just a few dozen yards from the apartment buildings. Bike racks and flowerpots where the Piranhas had hidden their everyday weapons.
THE PARANZA COMES FROM THE SEA
“On Tuesday we’re going fishing in Salerno.”
They were sitting around a table in a Mexican restaurant that had recently opened to great acclaim: El Pueblo, sombreros and ponchos hanging on the walls, with pictures that might have been thought to conjure up an atmosphere of warmth, including photographs of chili peppers, bulls, and shatteringly blue seas. Tucano had insisted on going; after all, at this point there was a table ready for them in any club or restaurant in the city, and he wanted to try them all. In the end, Nicolas had given in: “All right, let’s hold this summit at El Pueblo.”
As the bottles of Moët started taking effect (“But do they even drink moetta in Mexico?” Pesce Moscio had wondered aloud), the restaurant also started emptying out.
“All of this stuff has the symbol of Arcangelo on it. That’s what ’o Bross told me,” Nicolas told them.
“And what did you say to him, Maraja?” Briato’ asked, stuffing his face with a fajita. It was the fourth time Nicolas had been asked the question.
“I told him that I’d be changing that, and that I’d be putting an F on it all.”
“And then?”
“And then he asked me: ‘F for Fiorillo?’ ‘No,’ I told him, ‘F for Forcella.’”
And off they went with another toast: “To Forcella!” they shouted to the clinking of crystal. “The sky’s the limit!”
“Ua’, you know how Biscottino would have liked this party?” Drone said, and Tucano shot back promptly: “If you look to the past, you’re going to get passed by.”
Drago’ slammed down his glass, noisily. “No, that’s not the past,” he said, “that’s not the past at all. Biscottino should have been here. I never believed he was a traitor.”
Nicolas decided that it was best not to overlook that comment: “The fact that we’re here, the fact that we have all this under our control, is all due to the fact that we sweep all suspicions aside. Just one suspicion, and we’re flat on our asses. That guy had the squad cars after him, he wasn’t right for this paranza. He was our brother, but he isn’t anymore.”
“It’s tough, but that’s the way it is,” said Drago’, as he put a hand on Drone’s shoulder.
“That’s the way it is, guagliu’,” said Tucano definitively, as he raised his glass: “To Forcella.”
* * *
The first shipment was due to dock at the port of Salerno in five days; that Saturday, with a hot sun that had set an hour ago but was still somehow shedding light, the paranza was perched around the liquefied petroleum gas pumps at a service station overlooking the port. From high in the hills, they were able to keep an eye on the container ships coming in and going out, with the aid of a pair of military binoculars Lollipop had obtained through a trusted Ukrainian he employed on his piazza.
“There she is, that’s the ship!” shouted Briato’. Nicolas grabbed the binoculars from his hands, but gave them right back to him after a quick look.
“Nzù,” he said, dismissively. “I don’t know.”’O Bross hadn’t given him instructions on how to identify the cargo, he’d just assured him that he’d recognize it. “Does this thing have night vision, too?” Nicolas asked.
Lollipop fiddled with it, turning it over in his hands as if it were an alien object, and then, at last, said that it was all set.
“Maraja,” shouted Tucano, “it’s that one! Look close!”
“Nzù,” Nicolas said again, dubiously, but this time he held on to the binoculars. He was starting to be sick and tired of this game. If the ship ’o Bross had promised him never came into port, he’d have lost everything: credibility, cash, power, the city itself. The confederation project with the Longhairs would be dead on arrival and the old men buried in their houses, shuttered in their armor-plated quarters, would go on giving the orders and calling the shots. His own paranza, maybe with no place to go, might well disintegrate.
Nicolas clenched the binoculars as tightly as his hands could grip. The floodlights poured into the lenses in greenish bursts, while on either side of him he could hear the others seething with impatience prolonged by their imposed immobility. Mario ’o Bross had guaranteed that the tripulantes aboard the freighter would take care to send him a signal. And he’d made a point of specifying: “The tripulantes are the ones who convey the shit from Point A to Point B. Without them, you’re not worth a fucking thing.”
“So this ship, is it arriving or isn’t it, Maraja?” asked Drago’.
Nzù, he was ready to answer him again, but then he saw them. Four shipping containers on a cargo ship that had just entered the port. On each container, an enormous F. That was the signal.
Nicolas tossed the binoculars to Lollipop and ordered the others to get moving. “It’s here, guagliu’, our shit has sailed into port!”
Down at the port, a rubber dinghy was waiting for them, with the propeller turning and a Maghrebi of few words and many grunts at the helm.
“Wait, you’re a scafista!” Tucano exclaimed enthusiastically the minute he saw him, using the slang term for people smuggler.
“Are you the tripulantes?” Nicolas asked him.
The only answer was the sound of the propeller. And then, almost impossible to hear over the lapping of the water, his voice: “Silence.”
He was taking them under the sheer hull of the container ship at demented speed, lights out, in order to lessen the odds of being intercepted in that narrow stretch of water. The engine made the bow of the boat rear up, and then periodically bellyflop, showering the passengers with spray. Nicolas took the spray in his face and smiled, drinking it in; the salt water sweetened everything he’d had to put up with over the past few weeks.
“Forcella! Forcella! Forcella!” the paranza started chanting in low voices, in the bass timbre of a clandestine cheer. The Maghrebi once again issued his order to remain silent, but by now Nicolas felt as if he were fully and legitimately Maraja. We are the Piranhas, he said to himself, and we always will be.
The Maghrebi silenced the motor and let the rubber dinghy pitch and roll until it was just a few yards from the hull of the cargo ship. Lollipop leaned out to touch it, feeling for a ladder to climb up to the deck, but the Maghrebi yanked on his T-shirt, making him tumble back among the seats, and lifted a finger to his lips.
“Silence,” Maraja said, too, and he lifted his finger and pointed it at his ear.
In that horizonless darkness, a dull, muffled sound. Splash. And the dinghy started rocking a little more heavily.
They all whipped around in surprise; something had fallen into the water behind them.
Splash, splash. To their right. Two more heavy thuds.
Splash, splash, splash, splash. Now they were raining down in all directions.
They started searching for the bricks, sweeping the beams of their flashlights over the water around them, and trying to fish them out with their arms. In the excitement of that treasure hunt, Lollipop was the first to lose his balance, and after him, Drone plunged in headfirst, followed by Pesce Moscio and Drago’. They started splashing one another, ripping off their T-shirts and pulling one another under the surface, improvising flips and races. Then, when Tucano took his clothes off, and even his underpants, the Maghrebi, completely disgusted, abandoned any efforts to reduce them to silence. He cursed them in his language and started shouting himself, berating them for the assholes they were, for the mere children they were, and they replied in chorus that of course that’s what they were, they were the Piranhas, and everyone knew it. At that point, the man threatened to leave, abandoning them there, and went back to the helm, but he changed his mind when he saw that the ones aboard the dinghy were helping the others back aboard, even though in the process Briato’ pushed Lollipop back into the water, unleashing a burst of hilarity.
Once order had more or less been restored, the tripulantes opened an ice chest and gave each of them a fishing net. “Fish for them,” he said.
The packets that they hauled aboard looked just like the ones they’d seen plenty of times before, but these were heavier, and protected by a waterproof wrapping. They fished out fifty or so, competing to see who could catch the biggest haul, as if they were at an amusement park. The Maghrebi was resigned to it by now, and he watched them with his arms crossed.
Nicolas, Drago’, Pesce Moscio, Briato’, Lollipop, Drone, Tucano. They’d all regressed to middle school, when all it took was any old piece of bullshit to amuse them. They looked around in search of others laughing and swapped hilarity each with the other. It was fine to be brothers again, it was fine to be a paranza. Since the burning of the lair, since the death of Biscottino, this was the first time they could remember sharing that feeling.
They returned to port, they said farewell to the pilot—“Allahu akbar”—and they hopped into their cars, heading toward the nearby quarries of Cernicchiara, where they would store the drugs before transporting them the rest of the way into the city in the days that followed. ’O Bross had told Nicolas that the most dangerous part of the whole operation would in fact not be the storage, but the final stage. They needed to think of a safe place not far from the piazzas: close enough to ensure a rapid resupply but far enough to avoid arousing suspicions.
“A gym,” Nicolas had said.
“A gym?”’o Bross had asked, cocking a skeptical eyebrow.
“A gym in a school, at night, when no one’s around.”
“You learn fast, Fiorillo.” And for once he’d nodded.
The members of the paranza concealed the narcotics in an abandoned secondary tunnel, under a tarp, but Nicolas kept a brick of cocaine for himself. “This, brothers,” he said, “is just for us.” He cut it crosswise and scattered the white powder on a steel counter.
FULL METAL JACKET
Oxygen. Nicolas Fiorillo Maraja had become the master of oxygen. And oxygen is like Google: free of charge, and vitally necessary to one and all. ’O Bross’s drugs kept coming, punctually, as promised to the managers of the piazzas. Now Nicolas Fiorillo was God. He imparted life. He imparted air for every human being to breathe. And the first act of God had been free of charge. Just like Google, in fact. First to his paranza, infusing them with new blood and sweeping away doubts and fragilities. Then to the paranza of the Longhairs, to cement the alliance with the strongest bond there is, the bond of air that allows you to live.
Nicolas had given drugs to one and all, and they had all taken it around, given it to others, as if it were His word. And Susamiello, Risvoltino, and Pachi had taken him at his word. They had printed out a photo of Nicolas, and from that they had made a thousand reproductions, a thousand saint cards with his image that they distributed as they made their deliveries. At first Nicolas had lost his temper, because along with those saint cards, word had spread that he issued mortgages to whoever asked, found work for those who needed it, and even gave PlayStations to those who prayed to his brother, Christian, the martyr. Then he realized that holiness and saintliness could come in handy. Because a saint always has a flock of worshipful followers.
Then he had even distributed with a free hand to ’o White and his men a few of the weapons from the arsenal, to protect the drugs and to bind them even more tightly to him.
They had been to the beach at Bagnoli a thousand times, on outings and field trips. Now the Naples City of Science was being rebuilt, but that stony little beach was still there.
’O White lined them up before him. Illuminated by the light of the full moon alone, they seemed even paler than they were: a down-at-the-heels platoon of survivors and junkies. Carlito’s Way still bore the scars of Micione’s torture session—a scar at the corners of his mouth that widened his smile like the Joker’s, and a broken nose, shoved to one side, like a boxer who’d had his bell rung once too often—but he didn’t seem too troubled about it. Ever since he’d substituted the teeth that had been forcibly extracted with new gold teeth, he spent half his time running his tongue over his incisors, as if he was trying to polish them. ’O Selvaggio had been exercising the muscles he used to play foosball, and Orso Ted had grown even fatter, if possible, and with his head shaven clean he was the spitting image of Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket.
We’re a squad of dead men walking, ’o White thought to himself, but that thought vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Ever since the speech that Nicolas had delivered on the roof of the clubhouse, ’o White had no longer questioned the inevitability of the confederation: “Better to be the tail of the gray mullet than the head of the anchovy.” He saw himself as the head of the confederation just a few years in the future, with Nicolas filling his glass with Moët & Chandon. He just needed to be patient, send Maraja on ahead, let him do the dirty work.
In the meantime, he needed to get his paranza in line. They needed to start shooting again, become dangerous again. Then he’d climb over Nicolas, and he, ’o White, would show them all that he was the real boss, and the only time you’re a real boss is when you’re not afraid to die.
He reviewed his Longhairs. He gave Orso Ted a pat on his straining belly, and ordered ’o Selvaggio to stand up straight. Carlito’s Way had snapped to attention and done a do
wnward cutaway salute. ’O White smoothed out his samurai ponytail in a sign of approval.
Orso Ted still had the backpack full of weapons slung over his shoulder. ’O White pulled open the zipper just wide enough to stick an arm in, then he went back and stood in front of his troops, holding a grenade in one hand. He tossed it into the air and caught it as it fell, confidently. He pulled the pin and tossed the hand grenade into the distance, deafening his men for a short while. He went and got another grenade: “Think quick,” he said, and tossed the hand grenade toward ’o Selvaggio, who unexpectedly leaped forward and caught it with both hands.
“Almost wet your pants, didn’t you, eh?” said ’o White. His grinning teeth splayed open in the moonlight. “On your feet! I said, up on your feet!” He wasn’t muttering, his voice was flat and brisk and martial, and ’o Selvaggio decided that his boss had become a boss when someone else told him he never would be one. He got to his feet and clutched the hand grenade tight to his belly, as if it might explode from one minute to the next.
“Let’s see how many minutes you hold it,” said ’o White. “Pull the pin.”
’O Selvaggio looked at Carlito’s Way and Orso Ted, but they were gazing off at the horizon like good soldiers. He stuck his finger into the ring holding the pin and yanked it, without pulling it entirely out. Orso Ted and Carlito’s Way dropped to the ground cursing, while ’o Selvaggio got rid of the hand grenade by hurling it into the sea the way you’d get rid of a jellyfish that was wrapped around your calf. The hand grenade went plop and sank into the black waves.
“That time you really did shit your pants, Selva’.”’O White laughed. He walked over to Orso Ted and once again stuck his arm into the backpack. Another hand grenade.
“Look here, guagliu’,” and he walked into the water. He’d read on the Internet that the detonator on that hand grenade—an MK2—went off after six seconds. He pulled the pin, let the handle fly, and started counting in a loud voice.
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