That very same day, toward evening, he’d received the first message updating him on the outside world. It announced the umpteenth name to cross off: “They arrested Lollipop for the old man’s murder. Nisida Reform School.” The videos of the murder taken in that discotheque that was fairly bristling with online video cameras had already gone viral, according to the handwriting on that scrap of paper. Then they sent him the front pages of the newspapers. For the first time he appeared, with pictures and his full name. All things that gave luster and purpose to his time on the run.
Without Lollipop, now, the ones who remained were Tucano, Briato’, and Drone. There were also still a few Longhairs, and then there were the paranzielli, he knew, the youngsters of the paranza like Susamiello, Risvoltino, and Pachi, hard workers who would do anything to become full-fledged members. Even if they weren’t quite ready yet, as had been clear with Pesce Moscio. They needed to be educated, they had to be brought up to their new responsibilities. It was only natural, Nicolas kept telling himself, living things renew themselves, rejuvenate, and the Piranhas had to belong to kids. The old are put in the world to die, the young to take command, that had always been his imperative. Still, shut up in that cage, he’d been reminded of L’Arcangelo, confined not that far away from the walled-up neighborhood. The truth was that lately Don Vittorio struck him as younger, cockier, but that was only thanks to the “Google strategy,” he knew that … no, in any case, he’d never become his own jailer. He’d never be overwhelmed by the fugitive’s anxiety: you have all the time you need to relive things, and not enough to live.
To keep faith with the promise he’d made, in those four months, Nicolas had stuck to a strict program. Out of bed, breakfasting on the food left over from the day before, then physical exercise. Up and down the stairs of the apartment building, knees high, like a U.S. marine at boot camp. After which, he’d go back to his apartment, wait for the hands from outside to remove a couple of bricks and shove in food (always cold, occasionally a bowl of pasta, mostly sandwiches), and eat a meal, relaxing with the PlayStation as he ate. He’d spend the afternoon playing Grand Theft Auto and penalty kicks between Napoli of the nineties and some other domestic team. When he was sick of games, he’d switch on his Motorola StarTAC and get some work done. He’d issue orders, sending out his digital pizzini—the short notes of a mafioso—like a real old-time boss. Before dinner—another sandwich, washed down with still mineral water—he’d call Letizia. Her belly was growing. She said that she felt ugly as sin. He retorted that she was simply gorgeous. I love you, Nico’. I love you, Leti’.
From the last farewell to his wife to the moment when the generator turned off was exactly fifty-three minutes. Nicolas would start the countdown on his iPhone and begin his exploration: that was the only activity that could keep his mind off the impending night.
The place was a museum. In the apartments he was able to gain access to, abandoned objects glittered with life, with the lives of dozens and dozens of fugitives from the law who had occupied those rooms before Nicolas. Geological stratifications of walled-in criminals on the lam. Porn DVDs, a rifle broken in half, a waterbed, ripped open, that must have offered a taste of luxury in the two hundred square feet of that cell. A whole life, frozen in place, that reminded Nicolas of the lives immortalized forever in Pompeii and Herculaneum. A coffee table with a hand of cards lying on it, left in the middle of a round of solitaire, women’s panties the fugitive must have sniffed until he’d worn out their smell, a painting of the sea, the freedom of water. But the thing that had enchanted him most were the writings scribbled on the walls: the names of children, wives, surrounded by timid hearts, unconfessable feelings revealed on the walls of a man’s cell. One time, Nicolas had found a pencil stub and had sharpened the point by rubbing it against the wall, and then he had written the letter C. Christian or Cristiana, a memory of the past or an announcement of the future, even he couldn’t say. Then he’d hurled the stub against the far wall. He’d get out of there, eventually. When it was five minutes until dark, he’d race back to his apartment and curl up in his bed. Soon the generator would switch off and the nightmare would begin.
Rats. They emerged in the darkness and filled the hollow spaces between walls, scurried along the baseboards, squeaking out those high notes, filthy creatures that they were. At first he had believed that those vibrations and thumps from inside the walls merely indicated a structural weakness, and that had frightened him; he’d ventured out onto the staircases to check it out, and as he climbed one flight of stairs he’d slipped on something soft and slimy at the same time. A rat. That’s how he had discovered them. Nicolas had always hated rats. How many of them he’d shot, how many he’d crushed, he’d even blown one or two of them up. And now they were having their revenge, now that he was defenseless, now that he couldn’t even see them. In that darkness, they seemed to be immaterial, ghostly, a form of torture designed to deprive him of sleep. Even the walls in those nights lost the reality that established the perimeter of his days, and they drew in on him, so that every space became claustrophobic, suffocating.
It was hours before Nicolas managed to get to sleep, and in his dreams, the rats were gnawing right and left, even chewing into his skull. When he reawakened, he checked himself all over for bite marks. After which, he left the night behind him as if he were destined never to return to it, and his last thought was of the stupid mistake he’d made, that bullet he’d fired into the cranium of some random asshole. But the guy had looked at him, he’d stared at him, as if he’d raped him. Those eyes ought to have been lowered: if you let them look at you, then you’ve lost from the outset.
The nights all followed the same terrible script and the days rolled on monotonously, except for the business he needed to handle from there. It wasn’t bad, giving orders from a distance, but he missed his paranza, the admiration of the youngsters, and that sensation of being recognized on the street. He consoled himself with the thought of what his return would be like.
One afternoon, though, Letizia intruded into his solitude.
“My water has broken,” she told him over the phone. She was heading for the hospital with her mother.
Nicolas kept his cool as he did in all emergency situations, and given the distance, it was easier, in that case. He reassured her, then he called Tucano and told him to escort her and stand guard, to make sure that no one got it into their head to do what he’d tried with Dentino’s son.
Then he called Letizia and stayed on the phone with her until the generator turned off.
It was only the next morning that the usual hand that brought him food also stuck an A4 sheet of paper through the hole, printed with a photograph: Letizia and Cristiana were beautiful.
He had the sensation that this new life of his was taking something away from him, that he had lost something that he really would never be able to get back, and for the first time he thought back to the words his father had spoken, at the cemetery.
THE HIDING PLACE
Aza had wept only once in her life, when her mother had died, and then she’d promised herself she’d never do it again, because how could there ever be a greater sorrow, a harsher pain?
The signora had died in her sleep, after letting out a scream that had awakened her. Aza had raced into her bedroom, she’d seen her motionless as usual, and, seized by a presentiment, she’d lowered her ear to the signora’s chest. Nothing, and not a breath from her mouth. She’d left the room afraid, and then she’d felt tears roll down her cheeks, salt on her lips. The taste of her mother.
Before calling the ambulance and the signora’s children, Aza had taken the time to say a prayer. They’d loved each other, Aza and the signora, in spite of the Alzheimer’s tireless efforts to delete their relationship. Aza had mothered her, right up to the end.
The signora’s children showed up the next day, by which time Aza had already made all the arrangements. She didn’t trust those three ungrateful wretches who had made no more effort th
an a weekly phone call, at least not since Aza had taken up her duties: “Everything okay, Mammà?”
The heirs entered the apartment with the gait of someone finally taking possession of a territory. The two sons were accompanied by their wives; they barely said hello to Aza and then headed for the bed where their mother had slept for almost her entire life, but they didn’t sit down next to it. They brushed the dead woman, with either a sleeve or the back of a hand, but none of them bent over to give her a kiss. Worried she might be an unwelcome presence, Aza went back to the kitchen, where the youngest daughter was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette. She was clearly working up her nerve to go into the bedroom, or maybe she just wanted to be alone when she saw her mother; she didn’t get along well with her sisters-in-law. As soon as she looked up at Aza, she asked whether her mother had said any final words before dying.
“Your mother hasn’t said a word in months,” Aza replied politely.
“Ah” was all she said, and then she made up her mind to enter the bedroom.
After not even five minutes the sons and the daughters-in-law were already sifting attentively through cabinets and drawers, rummaging at first discreetly and then with increasing gusto, eyes narrowed like someone hoping to unearth buried treasure.
Aza stayed in the kitchen, looking out the window as she waited for the hearse to arrive from the undertakers’. Only the undertakers would be able to silence those jackals, as they pawed over the dead, she raged inwardly. She was furious, she wished she could kick them all out of the apartment; in fact, she was tempted to pull out one of the weapons that she was watching over for Nicolas and mow them all down in the living room. She froze, gripped the window casement, and berated herself for her stupidity. The weapons! How could she have failed to think of it? She’d had a whole day to make the weapons disappear, and now the apartment was full of people poking and prying in every corner.
While the signora’s children were busy in the living room, keeping an eye on one another, she slipped into the hiding place, stood on tiptoe, and glimpsed a corner of the green duffel bag. That was enough to reassure her. In the living room, she found the children sitting on the sofa with unhappy looks on their faces: they hadn’t even bothered to shut the drawers, to tidy up in the aftermath of their revolting treasure hunt. Which still wasn’t finished.
“Mammà promised me that she would give the apartment to my daughter Giorgia,” said one of the daughters-in-law.
“What are you talking about?” the signora’s daughter rebelled. “Mammà promised it to me.”
“Sweetheart,” the other brother said acidly, both hands in his pockets, a serious expression on his face. “Mammà was sick and didn’t leave a will.”
“Teresa,” the other brother drove in, “you don’t have any children. What would you even do with Mamma’s apartment?”
The doorbell interrupted them. The undertakers, at last. Aza got up to answer the door while the others went on arguing about lawyers, notaries, and inheritance taxes. She ushered the four men through the front door, and, hats in hand over their belt buckles and in silence, they approached the heirs.
“Our sincerest condolences,” said one of the undertakers, a guy with a pair of legs as long as stilts, so that he looked like an oversized wading bird.
The children and the daughters-in-law murmured “grazie” a couple of times, but it was obvious that they’d been interrupted and just wanted to get back to their discussion. The men from the undertaker exchanged embarrassed glances, whereupon the tall skinny one said: “We’re here to take care of the signora.”
The tension still showed no sign of subsiding, and Aza spoke before she even realized she’d done it. “A moment of silence for the signora,” she said, without anger, in the tone of a priest inviting the faithful to kneel. They all turned inward in a brief moment of prayer, then the heirs left the apartment with the excuse that they couldn’t stand being there for the closing of the coffin.
Aza showed the men the way to the bedroom where the dead woman lay and remained with them as they gently lifted the signora’s withered little corpse and delicately laid it in the coffin. They’d hold the wake in one of the rooms designated for that purpose at the funeral parlor.
Transporting the coffin down the stairs was hard work. Aza helped the three pallbearers carrying the casket by giving them directions: “Higher, look out for the railing, hold on, careful.” Down in the street, the signora’s family had resumed their earlier discussion, and it was only at the very last that they even noticed the coffin being placed in the hearse.
In the chilly little room, under the anguished eyes of a Madonna painted on a pennant, Aza went on praying, for herself, for the dead woman, and to hold at bay her unhappy thoughts about her own future: Now what would she do? Where would she find another position, another job? And to bring down a benediction on those big green duffel bags that, she hoped, would still be there upon her return. She’d been a very capable custodian of them all this time, Nicolas would have to recognize that much at least.
She came back on the bus nearly three hours later, and she hurried straight over to the hiding place. The bags were gone. She pulled out her cell phone and angrily texted Nicolas.
Aza
The signora’s children. Those pigs took everything and carried it off.
FROM EARTH AND SKY
One morning, Nicolas heard a sound he’d never heard before, coming from outside. The police? Impossible. They wouldn’t have made all that noise. Those were scooters, and there had to be hundreds of them, maybe thousands. The roar seemed to emanate from the earth itself, like the rumble of a tsunami about to slam into the walled-up apartment building.
Nicolas lay flat on his belly, his ear glued to a crack between the floor tiles. “Motor scooters, sure enough, I wasn’t mistaken,” he said aloud. Then the noise suddenly stopped. He pressed his ear back against the floor. “Maraja! Maraja! Maraja!” A chorus of voices. I’ve lost my mind, he thought. He got up off the floor as if to move away from that hallucination, but even so, standing in the middle of the room, he could hear his name, “Maraja! Maraja! Maraja!” chanted faster and faster. Then he saw dust and chunks of plaster falling from a wall, and finally the tip of a pick penetrating the walled-up door. His hand darted rapidly to his pistol, but the light was already pouring in from outside, and his eyes were so unaccustomed to the sun that it took him a while before they could withstand the intensely blazing light. The shouting voices continued to chant his name, and more and more light filtered through his eyelashes: there was now a big hole in the wall. And then there was a crowd of young men outside, all on scooters, singing Maraja’s praises. Among them, he was able to identify Susamiello.
“You see?” the youngster said to him. “We came to get you.” Nicolas squinted and tried to focus. They each had both hands raised and crossed. Their fingers were bent to make a symbol. The left forefinger was pointing at the sky, the right forefinger and middle finger were raised in a V for victory, but held horizontally, intersecting with the nail of the left forefinger. Those three fingers were forming an F. F for Forcella.
It was time to go back to the city. Escorted by hundreds of scooters: his army. The army of children who hadn’t betrayed him. His army, an army that feared no one.
* * *
Drone’s garage was like a warehouse of discarded technology. The shelves were piled high with hard drives and modems, the floor was cluttered with dusty monitors that progress had made obsolete. Nicolas walked in and for a moment he almost missed the walled-up neighborhood.
“I have to see Cristiana,” he told Tucano, even before greeting him after all those months. The apartment in Vomero would be the first place they’d look for him, so Tucano convinced him to wait. “Too dangerous.” At first Nicolas put up some resistance: How dare he tell him what he could or couldn’t do? Whether he could or couldn’t see his baby girl? He started shouting, he didn’t give a fuck whether his voice echoed through the garage and d
own the apartment building’s hallways.
“L’Arcangelo wants to see you. Tomorrow,” Briato’ said in a flat tone, and Nicolas quieted down.
“I have to go see the arsenal, I have to understand,” he said, and he wouldn’t brook objections on that point.
They arrived in Gianturco with Nicolas concealed in the trunk of Briato’s Cayenne, while Orso Ted and Carlito’s Way went ahead to scout things out. Aza confirmed what she’d texted two days earlier, and Nicolas couldn’t get any contradictory information out of her; the young Eritrean woman was telling the truth. At a certain point she threw herself at Nicolas’s feet, and he helped her back up: “It’s all right,” he told her, but the glance he shot at Briato’ and Tucano conveyed the very opposite.
* * *
Drone heard the sound of helicopter blades. It was exactly the same as in Call of Duty, there was no mistaking it. He emerged from his room and ran down the stairs; he had to find some way of warning Nicolas that they were coming to get him. But Nicolas had already figured it out: that helicopter kicking up a wind had already made him run far away.
Savage Kiss Page 36
