“What are you doing, an honest day’s work? An asshole’s day’s work?” asked White. He was still high out of his skull, and he was clinging to the foosball table.
“’Overo è,” Dentino said. “True enough.”
“Anyone who works is an asshole.”
“Ah, because we don’t work from dawn to dusk?” Briato’ broke in.
“We’re always out on the streets, on our motor scooters. But what we do isn’t work,” said Nicolas. “Work is for assholes, and for slaves. And in three hours of work we make what my father earned in a month.”
“Well, that’s not really true,” said White.
“But it will be,” Nicolas promised. He was really talking to himself, and in fact no one paid any attention to him, in part because their attention was now focused entirely on White, who was lining up a tidy grid of lines of coke on the side of the foosball table.
“You want a snort, guagliu’?” asked White.
Nicolas and his friends were gazing in enchantment at the powder. This certainly wasn’t the first time they’d seen it, but it was the first time they’d seen it so openly available. They just needed to take a step, lower their heads, and snort it up.
“Grazie, brò,” said Briato’. He knew what he needed to do, and so did the others. They stood in line, each waiting his turn, and took part in the banquet.
“Come on, Alva’, you have some, too,” said White.
“No, no, no, no, what is this filth? Plus, I need to get back.”
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll give you a ride; come on, it’s late.”
White had his black SUV parked outside. It looked like he’d brought it straight over from the dealership. Nicolas, Dentino, and Briato’ had been invited to join the crew, and they accepted gladly. Their exhaustion had been completely swept away by that first snort of coke. They felt euphoric, ready for anything.
White kept an arm around Alvaro’s shoulders. “So you like this car?” and Alvaro replied, “Yes, sure!” and he got in front. The boys crowded in the back.
The SUV was sailing along smoothly. White drove with precision, impeccably even though he was loaded, or maybe precisely because he was loaded. The road that led to Poggioreale wound through the lights that reminded Nicolas of novaed stars that he’d once seen in his science textbook. Then it happened.
The car as it slams on its brakes and then swerves at the last minute and plows down a dirt road. Then another jerking halt, even more decisive, and the car slams to a stop. The three of them sitting in the back have to throw up their arms to protect themselves, to keep from banging against the seat backs. When the recoil whips their bodies back, they all glimpse in a flash White’s arm stretching out, a pistol that appeared out of nowhere gripped in his fist, his index finger squeezing twice. Boom boom. Alvaro’s head looks like a balloon popping: a shard of cranium sticks to the car window, another scrap on the windshield, and the body flops over as if the soul had just fled.
“Oh, but why?” asked Nicolas. In his voice, more than alarm, the urgent need to know. Dentino and Briato’ sat there, hands still clapped over their ears, eyes staring straight at the same gooey mass splattered onto the steering wheel, but Nicolas was already capable of reacting. He still had his brain, anyway, and it was working overtime. He wanted to understand the reason for Alvaro’s execution, what transgression had led to his death, and what it meant that White had brought them along for the ride, whether this was more of a test, an honor, or a warning.
“Ll’aggio fatto pecché me l’ha ’itto Copacabana.” He did it because Copacabana had told him to.
Now the lights had changed color, they’d taken on a purplish tinge, similar to the theme of the wedding. White ought to have brought along the Capelloni to give him a hand with the passenger, but instead that was their job now. Because they were guaglioni, minors with no criminal records, nobodies?
“But when did he tell you?”
“He said: Give my regards to Pierino, the one who sang best tonight. When he was arrested, that’s when he told me.”
“But when did he tell you?” Nicolas asked again. All that had reached him of White’s response had been the sound of it, not the meaning.
“Quando l’hanno arrestato, te l’aggio ritto. Damme ’na mane, ja’, levammo sta schifezza ’a ccà.” His response came brusquely. When Copacabana was arrested, like I told you. Now help me get this filth cleaned up. The blood that had soaked the car roof dripped onto the now-empty seat. Both Dentino and Briato’ kept their hands up even after the SUV took off with a jerk and retraced the route to the club, until they were finally in the back room again. White had driven just as confidently as a short while before, and the kids paid no attention to his ranting, his assurances that Alvaro would be given a proper funeral, they weren’t just going to dump his corpse somewhere, and how they were going to have to get reorganized now that Copacabana had been taken in. Everything needed to be thought through, adjusted, and White kept talking. He talked and talked and talked. He never stopped, not even when he slammed on the brakes for a stop sign and Alvaro’s corpse, in the trunk, rolled forward and the impact made a thud that drowned out his words for a fraction of a second.
When they got to the back room they parted ways without a word, each climbing onto his own motor scooter and heading home. Nicolas sailed along on his Beverly at a cruising speed that allowed him to let his thoughts roam more freely than usual. He kept the motor scooter in the center of the road with one hand on the handlebars, while with the other hand he toked on a joint that White had offered him before he, too, vanished into the night. What was going to happen now? Would they go on dealing? For whom? The smell of the sea wafted into the streets and, for a moment, Nicolas even thought about forgetting it all and just going to take a swim somewhere. But then the blinking yellow traffic lights brought him back to his Beverly and he revved the engine to get through an empty intersection. Alvaro counted for nothing, he’d met an ugly fate, but after all, his destiny had been predetermined; Copacabana, though, had been caught like an ordinary guaglione, and hadn’t even bothered to react, simply hiding behind a drum set. Lots of talk, lots of words. Albania, Brazil, bucketsful of money, fabulous wedding celebrations, and then he’d wound up just like any other loser, like any old ordinary mariuolo. No, Nicolas wasn’t going to end up like that. Better die trying. Wasn’t it Pesce Moscio who’d had that phrase of 50 Cent’s tattooed on his forearm, Get Rich or Die Tryin’?
Nicolas revved his scooter again, and this time the fumes of the exhaust covered over the smell of the sea. He took a nice deep breath and decided that the first thing he needed to do was get hold of a pistol.
THE CHINESE PISTOL
Pesce Moscio had immediately offered to go pay Copacabana a visit in prison. There were too many questions to be asked and lots of answers to be obtained. What was going to happen now? Who was going to occupy the now-vacant throne of Forcella? Nicolas felt like when he was a little boy and he’d gone to jump off the rocks into the waves off Lido Mappatella. He knew that once he was in free fall, he’d no longer be afraid, but still—just before jumping—his legs always shook. And in fact, his legs were now trembling, but not out of fear. He was excited. He was about to plunge into the life he’d always dreamed of, but first he needed to hear it directly from Copacabana.
When Pesce Moscio came back from the prison, the guys all gathered in the back room. Nicolas immediately cut off all description of the visiting room, the wooden counter, and the low pane of glass that barely separated convict and visitor. “I could even smell Copacabana’s breath. Like a sewer.” What he wanted to hear was the words, his exact words.
“’O Pesce, what did he tell you?”
“I already told you, Maraja. We need to be patient. We’re all his children. We don’t need to worry.”
“And so what did he tell you?” Nicolas insisted. He was pacing the half-empty back room. There was only a little old man who’d fallen asleep at a slot machine, and the bar
tender who was somewhere back in the kitchen.
Pesce Moscio turned his hat around with the bill in the back, as if it were the visor that was somehow keeping Nicolas from understanding.
“Maraja, how am I supposed to tell you? That guy was sitting there looking back at me. Don’t worry, stay cool. He said that, adda murì mammà, he’d take care of Alvaro’s funeral, that he’d been a good man. Then he stood up and told me that we have the keys to Forcella in the palms of our hands, some bullshit like that.”
Nicolas’s legs were no longer shaking.
* * *
Nicolas and Tucano found themselves all alone at Alvaro’s funeral. Besides the two of them, there was an old lady, who they learned was Alvaro’s mother, and a woman in a miniskirt, with the body of a twenty-year-old and, screwed onto the top of it, a face that bore the marks of all the johns she’d seen and serviced. Because there was no doubt about it, she was one of the Romanian whores that Copacabana used to send Alvaro, and from what they could tell, she was one of the fondest, given the fact that she was standing there next to his casket with a handkerchief in her hand.
“Giovan Battista, Giovan Battista,” the mother kept saying, and now she was leaning on the other woman, who might well have been a whore, but at least she’d had some genuine feeling for her unlucky son.
“Giovan Battista?” asked Tucano. “For real, what an absurd name, and what a shitty way to die.”
“’O White is a piece of shit,” said Nicolas. And for a second he tried to put together the image of Alvaro’s shattered brain with the last farewell of that woman with fine firm legs.
He was sorry about Alvaro, though he wasn’t exactly sure why. He didn’t even know if what he was experiencing was sorrow. That poor wretch had always taken them seriously, and that had to count for something. They didn’t even wait for the ceremony to be over; they just left the church, with other things already on their minds.
“How much money have you got on you?” asked Nicolas.
“Not much. But I’ve got three hundred euros or so at home.”
“Good, I got four hundred today myself. Let’s go buy a handgun.”
“Where are we going to buy this handgun?”
They’d come to a halt on the steps of the church, because that seemed like an important question to resolve; they looked each other in the eye. Nicolas wasn’t thinking of any particular pistol, he’d just done a little research on the Internet. What he needed was a gat to pull out when the time was right.
“Someone told me the Chinese sell plenty of old pistols,” he said.
“But excuse me, the Capelloni have more guns than they need, why don’t we try to get some from them?”
“No, we can’t. They’re System people, they’d get word to Copacabana in prison immediately. In no time he’d know everything, and he’d never give us the authorization, because it’s not our time yet. But the Chinese don’t talk to the System.”
“But who ever told them whether it’s time or not time? They took their time, and we need to take ours.”
To Nicolas’s mind, it was a bullshit question to start with. The kind of question only someone who will never be in command would even think of asking. Time, as Nicolas understood it, presented itself in only two forms, and there was no middle ground between them. He always kept in mind an old story from the quarter, one of those stories that treads the fine line of truth, but is never called into question except to add details that reinforce the story’s moral. There was this kid, a guy with super-long feet. Two guys had come up to him and asked the time of day.
“It’s four thirty,” he’d replied.
“What time is it?” they’d asked him again, and he’d repeated the same answer as before.
“Is it your time to command?” they’d asked at last, before shooting him dead in the middle of the street. A story that made no sense, except to Nicolas, who’d immediately absorbed the lesson. Time. The instantaneous time of a claim to power, and the time smeared behind bars to let it grow. Now it was his turn to figure out how best to use his time, and that wasn’t the moment to lay claim to a power he hadn’t yet gathered.
Without a word, Nicolas headed for his Beverly and Tucano followed along, climbing on behind him, well aware he’d said too much. They went by Nicolas’s house to get the money, then they shot over to Chinatown, to Gianturco. A ghost quarter, that’s what Gianturco looks like, abandoned industrial sheds, a few little factories still chugging along, and warehouses for Chinese merchandise, adding red to a landscape that would otherwise smack only of grayness and anger etched on shattered walls and rusty roller blinds. Gianturco—which in Italian smacks of the east, of the color yellow, of fields of grain—is actually only the surname of a cabinet minister, Emanuele Gianturco, a minister in the newly united Italy, who championed civil rights as a guarantee of justice. A jurist long since deprived of his given name, who now stands for streets lined with abandoned warehouses, who now reeks of chemical refineries. It was once an industrial quarter, when there was still industry here. But this is how Nicolas had always seen it. He’d been here a few times as a child, when he still played on the soccer team of the Church of the Madonna del Salvatore. He’d started at age six with Briato’, one of them striker, the other goalie. But then it happened that during a game in the Under-12 championship among the parish churches, the referee had favored the Church of the Sacred Heart’s team, on which the sons of four city councilmen played. There’d been a penalty kick and Briato’ had managed to block it, but the referee had called for a retake because Nicolas had crossed the line before the whistle. It was true, he had, but being such a stickler over a parish church soccer match, after all, maybe they could have turned a blind eye, after all, they were just kids, after all, it was just a soccer match. At the second penalty kick, Briato’ had blocked the ball again, but this time, too, Nicolas had set foot across the line before the whistle, and the referee had called for the penalty kick to be repeated a third time. The third time, all eyes were on Nicolas, who didn’t move a muscle on this round. But the ball went into the net.
Briato’s father, the engineer Giacomo Capasso, with an impassive face and a slow stride, walked onto the field. With the most absolute calm he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a switchblade knife, and gutted the soccer ball. With flat, undramatic gestures, with no visible sign of nervousness, he folded the blade shut, put the knife away in his pocket, and suddenly came face-to-face, nose-to-nose, with the referee, who was cursing, red-faced. Despite the fact that Capasso was shorter, he still dominated the situation. He spoke curtly and imperatively to the referee: “Tu si’ ’n omm’ ’e mmerd’—you’re a piece of shit—and that’s all anyone can say about you.” The torn ball on the ground was a green light for a general incursion onto the field, a full-fledged invasion with the full array of parents and children shouting in rage, with, here and there, a tear or two.
Nicolas and Fabio were taken by the hand by the engineer and led off the field. Nicolas felt safe, clinging to the hand that had held the knife minutes ago. He felt important, clutching that man’s hand.
Nicolas’s father, on the other hand, was tense, disgusted to have witnessed that scene in a crowd of children, on a little parish-church soccer field. But there was nothing he could say to the father of Fabio Briato’. He led his son over to the side of field, and that was that. When they got home, all he said to his wife was: “This boy’s not playing soccer anymore.” Nicolas went to bed without eating dinner: not because he was upset about quitting the team, as his parents mistakenly believed, but for the shame—lo scuorno—to have had the misfortune of a father who was unable to command respect, a man who counted for less than nothing.
That marked the end of Briato’s and Nicolas’s soccer careers, as in the most classic story of friends and kindred spirits; they’d lost all desire to train. They went on kicking a soccer ball around, but without discipline, on the streets.
* * *
Nicolas and Tucano parked t
he Beverly in front of a Chinese department store stuffed with merchandise.
The walls seemed to be on the verge of exploding with all the items packed inside. Shelves stacked high with lightbulbs, home power tools, stationery and school supplies, unmatched suits, children’s games, firecrackers, packets of tea and sun-faded boxes of cookies, and coffeemakers, diapers, picture frames, even an array of motor scooters—you could even buy the parts off them. Impossible to find any rationale for the way those objects had been arranged, save for a rigorous space-saving principle.
“Sti cinesi che hanno cumbinato, tutta Napoli s’hanno pigliato, poco ci manca e pure ’o pesone l’amm’ ’a pavà!” As he was singing Pino d’Amato’s song, Tucano rang the call bell that announced a new customer.
“Eh, still, that’s the truth,” said Nicolas, “sooner or later we really are going to have to pay rent to the Chinese to be able to live here.”
“But how do you know that they sell weapons in this shop?” They wandered up and down the aisles, past young Chinese men who were trying to squeeze hangers onto a rack that was already full to overflowing, or else climbing up on teetering ladders to stack up the umpteenth ream of paper.
“I was on a chat, and they told me that this is the place to come.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah, they sell lots of things here. We’re supposed to talk to Han.”
“If you ask me, these guys make more money than we do,” said Tucano.
“No doubt about it. People buy more lightbulbs than they do chunks of hash.”
“I’d only ever buy hash, forget about lightbulbs.”
“That’s because you’re a drug addict,” Nicolas replied with a laugh and squeezed Tucano’s shoulder. Then he spoke to a shop clerk: “Excuse me, is Han here?”
“Che vulite?” the shop clerk replied in perfect Neapolitan. What do you want? The two of them stood staring at the Chinese shop clerk and failed to notice that the anthill they’d walked into had frozen to a halt. Even the shop clerk standing poised on the ladder looked down on them, with a notebook in one hand.
The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples Page 6