The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “Copacabana … you see, I’d gladly give up all this money, but really, for us…”

  Copacabana gestured with the back of his hand as if waving away the air from in front of his face. There was nothing left for him to do. “We’re finished here.” Angry and offended, he left the room. The kids tagged after him like hungry pups chasing after their mother.

  Nicolas and the others were positive it was just a tactical retreat, that Copacabana was going to come back, even more pissed off, with his eyes redder than before, to smash Oscar’s face in, or else with a pistol hidden somewhere on his person, which he’d pull out and use to kneecap Oscar. No such luck, though. He got back into the Fiat Fiorino. He leaned out the window and said: “You’ll hear from me. We’re going to hold this wedding in Sorrento: we can only have our own guaglioni as waiters, we can’t go through any agencies, or they’ll just go ahead and send over the financial police.”

  Copacabana headed off to Sorrento, where he put together the wedding between the two royal families. “Ua’, they’re throwing a mega-galactic wedding on the Coast, but when we get married, sweets, it’ll be even better!!!” Nicolas wrote to Letizia; but she still had it in for him on account of what happened with Renatino and answered him only after an hour, with a “So what makes you think I’ll marry you?” Nicolas didn’t think it, he knew it. That ceremony in Sorrento kindled his dreams, pushing him to write back with a string of messages, each of them full of increasingly sumptuous details, overflowing with promise. They’d taken each other for love, the two of them, love and nothing more, and now he needed to take all the rest, starting with his admission into the world that mattered—by way of the tradesman’s entrance—a world he was determined to become part of, even though it was a world on which the sun was setting.

  Feliciano Striano was in prison. His brother was in prison. His daughter had decided to marry Diego Faella, aka Micione. The Faellas of San Giovanni a Teduccio were formidably powerful in the fields of shakedowns, cement, votes, and the distribution of foodstuffs. They controlled an enormous market. The duty-free shops in airports in Eastern Europe belonged to them. Diego Faella was extremely strict: everyone had to pay, even the newsstands, the strolling vendors, everyone had to pay into the coffers of the clan, everyone according to their earnings—and that final qualification made him feel magnanimous. Even lovable. Feliciano Striano’s daughter, Viola, had managed to live far away from Naples for many years, she’d gone to university and taken a degree in fashion design. Viola wasn’t her real name, she just used it because she couldn’t stand the name Addolorata, inherited from her grandmother, or even the more tolerable version, Dolores, which had already been appropriated by a small army of female cousins. So she’d chosen her name all by herself. When she was barely older than a child she’d gone to her mother and proclaimed her new name: Viola. She’d returned to the city after her mother decided to separate from her father. Don Feliciano had already found a new wife, but Viola’s mother had refused to give him the divorce he’d asked for—commare she was and commare she remained—so Viola had chosen to go and stay with her and give her support in the early days of the separation. Her mother had never moved out of the family home in Forcella, so Don Feliciano had just moved next door. The family is sacred, but for Viola it was even more so; to her it was the DNA you carry inside you, and you can’t exactly claw the blood out of your veins, can you? That’s what you were born with, and that’s what you’ll die with. But then Don Feliciano had become a pentito, a state’s witness, or a rat, and Viola had decided to divorce him as her parent. The name of Addolorata Striano had immediately been added to the family protection program. The carabinieri had headed out immediately to pick her up at home in a bulletproof car, in civilian clothes, to take her as far away from Forcella as possible. And that was where the theatrics unfolded: Viola had gone out onto the balcony to do her screaming, spitting, and inveighing against her would-be bodyguards. “Get out of here! You godless bastards. Sellouts! My father is dead to me, no, wait, he was never born, he never was my father! Go on, beat it!” And so she’d refused to go into the protection program, she’d refused to turn state’s witness, and she’d rejected her father and uncles. She’d remained shut up at home for a long time, designing dresses, purses, and necklaces, while out on the balcony all manner of insults landed: bags full of dogshit, dead birds, pigeon entrails. And then there were the Molotov cocktails that set fire to the curtains, graffiti on the walls of various apartment houses, the downstairs intercom charred by a fire. No one believed what she had to say for herself, and yet she persisted. Until the day that Micione came into her life. By marrying Viola, Diego Faella had freed her at one fell swoop of all the accusations that had pinned her in that cage. And most of all, by taking the family blood that remained intact, Diego Faella had taken Forcella.

  People said that Micione had courted her at some length. Viola had a shapely body, her father’s eyes—a dazzling blue—a prominent nose that she’d wondered all her life whether to keep or get fixed, deciding eventually that her nose was actually her trademark. Viola was one of those women who know everything that’s going on around them, for whom the most important rule is to pretend not to be aware of it. The two of them getting married meant a merger between two fundamental families. It seemed like an arranged marriage, like the ones engineered among the nobility: after all, they were the crème de la crème of Camorra aristocracy, and they struck many of the same poses as the dynasties covered in the popular magazines. Perhaps Viola was sacrificing herself; Micione seemed head over heels. Many observers were convinced that the winning move in his courtship had been when he managed to get her appointed chief designer for a company under the control of the Faella clan that manufactured luxury handbags. But talk is cheap, and for Viola their marriage had to be a triumph of True Love. If she’d chosen her own name for herself, then she could certainly make up her mind about what her future would look like.

  * * *

  As Copacabana had promised, the call came a few days later. Nicolas told his mother: “I’m going to work as a waiter at a wedding. For real, I’m doing it.”

  His mother scrutinized him from beneath his soft wave of messy blond hair. She was searching that phrase and her son’s face for what she knew and what she didn’t know, what might be true and what wasn’t. The door to Nicolas’s bedroom was open and she went so far as to search the walls for signs, taking in with that glance an old backpack lying carelessly on the floor, a pile of T-shirts at the foot of the bed. She tried to overlay the reported news (“I’m going to work as a waiter”) upon the barriers that her son had never once stopped constructing after his parents had been summoned to police headquarters. She knew that the fact that he hadn’t wound up at Nisida Reform School that time had nothing to do with his being innocent. She knew all about the things that Nicolas got up to, and whatever she hadn’t heard about, she was easily able to imagine; unlike her husband, who saw a future, and a good one, for his son, and who therefore worried endlessly only about his bad manners. His mother, on the other hand, had eyes that could drill through human flesh. She pushed back her suspicions and hugged him close. “Good boy, Nicolas!” He let her do it, and she laid her head on his shoulder. She was letting herself go in a way she’d never done before. She closed her eyes and sniffed sharply, to get a whiff of the son she’d been so afraid was lost, but who now came home with an announcement that almost tasted of normality. It was enough to stir her hopes that this might be a new beginning. Nicolas returned the gesture as per script, but without hugging her tight, just laying his hands on her back. Let’s just hope she doesn’t start crying, he thought, mistaking love for weakness.

  They untangled and Nicolas’s mother refused to let him go back into his room, behind closed doors. They studied each other in silence, waiting for some new move. To Nicolas that embrace was just the kind of hug a mother gives a son when a son is obedient, when a son does something, anything, as long as it’s better than nothing. She assum
ed that he’d just tossed her a bone, that out of some strange form of generosity he’d chosen to reward her with a smidgen of normality. What normality?! That kid has thoughts in his mind that scare me. What does he think, I can’t see those thoughts? One crowding in after the other, nasty, vicious, as if he were out to avenge some wrong done him—comme se avess’ ’a vendicà ’nu tuorto. And no one had done him wrong. What wrong could he claim? She couldn’t share these thoughts with her husband. No, not him. Nicolas was able to guess—in the vastness that always opens out in the face of a mother—at that steady inspection, that rough and ready rummaging mixture of knowledge and suspicion. “Mammà, who’d have ever thought it? I’m going to be a waiter.” And he mimed a plate, balanced neatly between wrist and forearm. He made her smile; after all, she deserved it. “How on earth did I make you blond?” she blurted out, steering her inner murmurings to some new subject. “How did I make you so handsome?”

  “You made a fine waiter, Mamma.” And he turned his back on her, but with the sensation that her gaze went on, as in fact it did.

  * * *

  Filomena, or Mena, as she was known, Nicolas’s mother, had taken over a cleaners’ and pressers’ shop on Via Toledo, up toward Piazza Dante, between the Basilica dello Spirito Santo and Via Forno Vecchio.

  It used to be a dry cleaner’s, owned by a little old couple who’d handed over the management of the place and charged her a very low rent. She’d hung out a new light blue sign, and on it she’d had the English words Blue Sky painted, and underneath, in Italian, “Everything clean as a clear sky,” and she’d started her business with a couple of Romanian women, and then a married Peruvian couple, the man tiny, a first-class presser, a diminutive person who never spoke, and the woman broad and beaming, saying nothing about her husband and his silence but “Escucha mucho.” Mena had done some Neapolitan dressmaking in her youth, she knew how to sew by hand and machine, and therefore the services offered by Blue Sky also included small alterations, the kind of work usually done “by Indians,” as people said, but then again, you couldn’t just turn over the market to Indians, Sinhalese, and Chinese. The shop was a hole in the wall, crowded with machines and shelves to store dresses, suits, and linen, with a small door in the back opening out onto a dark courtyard. The door was always open; in the summer to get a breeze, in the winter to catch a breath. Sometimes, though, Mena would stand out in front of the shop, her hands akimbo on her shapely hips, her raven-black hair brushed a little too hastily, and watch the passing traffic, the people going by, she’d start to recognize the customers (“Signo’, your husband’s jacket came out a jewel, a gem”) and they’d start to recognize her. You see how many unmarried men there are, she said to herself, here in Naples, just like up north, and they’re bound to bring in their clothes to be washed, pressed, and stitched up. Quietly, unobtrusively, they come in, they drop off, they pick up, they turn to go. Mena studied the world of that neighborhood she didn’t know, where in fact she was an outsider, Mena from Forcella, but the owners had introduced her properly, because there’s not a profession where someone doesn’t vouch for someone else. And she’d been vouched for. She couldn’t say how long things would go on that way, but in the meantime she was happy to bring home a little extra money, because a high school gym teacher can’t really support a family, and her husband was a uomo cecato, so to speak, a blind man who couldn’t see these problems, couldn’t see what his children needed—he just couldn’t see. She had to take care of things herself, and protect that man, whom she still loved deeply. When she was in the shop, the steam iron gasping, she lost herself gazing at the pictures of her sons that she’d hung up between a calendar and a cork board with a cascade of receipts pinned to it. Christian at age three. Nicolas at age eight, and then another one now, with his blond mop of hair: who’d have ever thought that he was her son? You had to see him next to his father and then it became a little clearer. She darkened as she stirred at the thought of all that young beauty, darkened a little because to some extent she sensed, she could hear; she wondered—curious, eager to know, and she even devised ways of finding out, certainly not through the school, because there was nothing to be learned there, and not from Letizia, either, but rather from those young thugs Nicolas was friends with and was so careful to keep at a safe distance from his home, but not careful enough to keep her from catching a whiff of it, an idea of it, and not a very nice idea, either. He was comfortable with them. He’d put on that face that didn’t scare her, but that might make someone say, someday, “Chill’è ’nu guaglione con la faccia buona e i pensieri cattivi.” Sure, a young man with a sweet face and evil thoughts. And who kept bad company. Where did they come up with all the vicious knowledge they had? Once you have that kind of knowledge, there’s no way of getting rid of it. She was reminded of a proverb of sorts that was familiar to her from her childhood: “A chi pazzèa c’ ’o ciuccio, non mancano i calci.” If you play with the donkey, there’s no shortage of kicks. But who was ’o ciuccio, who was the donkey in question? She could just picture her boy Nicolas spending his time with the donkey of the proverb, and it wouldn’t take much to peel him away. ’O ciuccio is afraid. But maybe, and as she thought these things she turned to straighten a silk dress that had been left on the table, just maybe it was me who first put the evil thought in his head. She ran her hand through her thick, mutinous head of hair and studied Escucha mucho as he ran the iron over a white shirt. “Take care there, that’s a Fusaro shirt, you know.” There was no need to say it, but she said it all the same. And she was reminded of a Sunday afternoon, many years ago. Back then she’d had a malo sentire—a bad feeling—that only now she was able to tie to the bad thoughts, the donkey, and the day at police headquarters. All four of them had been down by the water, not far from Villa Pignatelli. She was pushing Christian’s stroller. It was hot out. The sun was setting fire to metal roller blinds and rummaging amid palm trees and bushes, as if trying to slaughter all surviving shade.

  Nicolas was trotting along at a quick pace, and his father was barely able to keep up with him. Then, all of a sudden, a brutal silence, a sharp blade of silence, and the sounds that followed it. Someone walks into an establishment, maybe a restaurant. First you hear one gunshot, then another. The people on the sidewalks freeze, some of them scatter and vanish. And even the traffic down along the waterfront seems to fall silent. The sound of tables being overturned. Glasses smashing. Those are the sounds they hear and Mena hands the stroller to her husband and grabs Nicolas by the scruff of his neck. She feels a sort of effort as she holds him. No one abandons their post, it’s like that game, freeze tag, when if you’re touched you have to stand rooted to the ground like a statue. Then out of the club’s front door comes a skinny, skinny guy, his tie loosened, his sunglasses stuck to his forehead. He looks around, and what he sees is space, and a street that a short distance ahead turns at a right angle. He seems to have no hesitation, he lunges forward and covers those few yards, veering to the right and then, spotting a parked car, he lies flat on the ground and, making a series of small but extremely quick movements, slides under the car. The man with the gun comes out into the sunshine, takes a step, and then stops, too, just as all the others are motionless around him. Then, though, he notices a man on the opposite sidewalk looking at him and gesturing, pointing at that car, around the corner, not far away. A tiny, barely noticeable gesture that’s underscored by all the motionlessness that surrounds it. The man doesn’t hurry off in search of the guy who slithered under the car. He even takes a moment, a short pause. He strokes his weapon, he squats down easily, he lowers the pistol to street level, parallel to the asphalt, his cheek pressed against the car door, like a doctor listening to a patient’s heartbeat. And that’s when he fires. Twice, then a third time. And he goes on shooting, constantly moving the gun barrel in a new direction with each shot. Mena can feel Nicolas tugging forward. When the man who fired has made his escape, Nicolas twists out of Mena’s grip and runs straight toward the parked
sedan. “I see blood, I see blood,” he cries loudly, pointing to a rivulet running out from under the car, and at that point he kneels down and observes what the others cannot see. Mena runs forward to yank him away, hauling him by his striped T-shirt. “There’s no blood,” his father says, “that’s just jam.” Nicolas ignores him, he wants to see the dead body. His mother manages to drag him away, with some effort. She can sense that her family is suddenly becoming the true protagonist of that scene. The blood, with the assistance of the slight slope of the street, is now streaming in rivulets. Mena only manages to haul the little boy to a safe distance, yanking him, shoving him, but without managing to rid him of that bold, fearless curiosity, that game.

  Every so often, that afternoon comes to mind, and her son comes to mind, at the age of the photograph she has hanging on the wall of her shop. Something claws at her stomach when it does, a vise, a pair of pliers.

  Ch’aggio fatto? What have I done, she asks herself, going back to the iron with an impetuous fury, and it strikes her that that implement, that shop, that work of washing, arranging, grooming also has something to do with her duties as a mother. Nicolas has no fear, she tells herself, and she’s afraid to admit it. But that’s the way matters stand: she can see it. That face, kissed all over by youth, full of sky, forget about blue sky, that face refuses to let itself be overshadowed by bad thoughts, it tucks them under the skin and goes on emanating light. For some time now she’s been thinking of taking him to the shop with her, after school. But what shop, but what school? She’s tempted to smile. The idea of Nicolas taking the Peruvian’s place and pressing a gleaming white shirt sleeve. She decides that maybe he’s better off where he is. But where is he? And to keep from letting herself be infected by the shiver that’s starting to crawl across her flesh, she goes back to the shop’s front door, and she feels beautiful there, with the eyes of the world on her.