The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “Che vulite?” the first Chinese clerk insisted, and Nicolas was about to repeat the question when a middle-aged woman whom they’d barely noticed behind the cash registers started screeching at them.

  “Out, get out, go away, get out!” She hadn’t even bothered to get up from the perch where she had to sit all day taking in cash. From that distance, Nicolas and Tucano saw only a fat woman with teased-out hair and a flower-print shirt waving her arms at them to get back out the door they’d come in through.

  “Eh, signora, what’s the matter?” Nicolas tried to understand, but the woman just went on shrieking, “Get out, both of you!” and the clerks who had at first seemed to be scattered throughout the big store were now encircling them.

  “These fucking Chinese,” Tucano commented, dragging Nicolas along behind him. “So you see it was a bullshit mistake to get information in a chat room …

  “These fucking Chinese. Adda murì mammà, when we’re in charge, we’ll kick them out of here,” said his friend. “We’ll kick all them out of here. There are more Chinese than ants,” and as a form of moral redemption, he swung his hand at a good-luck cat that sat on a fake antique side table next to the entrance. The cat flew into the air and landed on the price scanner of one of the cash registers, cracking it, but the furious woman paid no attention, and kept on shouting in her loop of insults.

  As they got on the Beverly, Tucano kept saying: “I knew it had to be bullshit,” and they drove off in the direction of Via Galileo Ferraris. Away from Chinatown. They’d accomplished nothing.

  A short distance farther along, a motorcycle pulled up behind the scooter. The scooter sped up, and the motorbike revved its engine too, speeding up and staying close. Now they were really moving, determined to reach the stretch of road that empties out onto Piazza Garibaldi, where they could get lost in traffic. Swerving, darting between buses and cars, Vespas, pedestrians. Tucano kept craning his neck to check on the progress of whomever it might be that was following them, trying to gauge their intentions. The other guy was Chinese, impossible to say his age, a face he didn’t recognize, but he didn’t seem pissed off. At a certain point, he started beeping his horn and waving his arms, gesturing for them to pull over. They’d turned down Corso Arnaldo Lucci and come to a halt just before the Central Station, which was the boundary between Naples’s Chinatown and the casbah. Nicolas slammed the brakes on and the motorbike stopped right next to them. Both of them turned their eyes to the Chinese man’s delicate hands, but he gave no sign of pulling out a knife, or anything worse. Instead he reached over to shake hands and introduce himself: “I’m Han.”

  “Ah, so you’re Han? Then why the fuck did mammeta kick us out of the store?” Tucano snapped.

  “She’s not my mother.’

  “Ah, well, if she’s not your mother she sure does look like it.”

  “What are you looking for?” Han asked, jutting his chin out a little.

  “You know what we’re looking for…”

  “Then you need to come with me. Are you going to follow me or not?”

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “To a garage.”

  “Sure.” They nodded and followed him. They were going back the way they’d come, but retracing your route in Naples can cost you hours in traffic.

  The Chinese never dreamed of going all the way around the piazza; instead, the motor scooters took advantage of the gap for pedestrians between the concrete posts, and emerged in front of the Hotel Terminus. From there, back onto Via Galileo Ferraris and another left turn onto Via Gianturco.

  Nicolas and Tucano realized they were going around in circles when they made their umpteenth left turn onto Via Brin. They’d left bright colors and commotion behind them. Via Brin looked like a ghost street. There were signs announcing warehouses for rent everywhere, and Han stopped outside one of these. He tilted his head, gesturing for them to follow him inside—better get the two motorbikes inside. Once they turned through the main gate, they found themselves in a courtyard lined with warehouses, some of them abandoned and tumbledown, others packed to the rafters with bric-a-brac and junk of all kinds. They followed Han into a garage that seemed no different from any of the others, except that it was neat as a pin. In particular, there were toys, copies of famous brands, more or less barefaced counterfeits. Shelves upon colorful shelves lined with all manner of wonderful products. Just a few years ago a place like this would have driven them out of their minds with delight.

  “So we finally discovered that Santa Claus’s elves are Chinese.”

  Han laughed aloud. He was identical to all the other sales clerks in the shop, perhaps he’d been one of the crew who surrounded them in the shop; maybe he’d laughed with gusto in the faces of those two when they were trying to find him.

  “How much can you afford?”

  They had more than they admitted, but they started out low: “Two hundred euros.”

  “For two hundred euros I wouldn’t have even started my motorbike, I don’t have anything for that much.”

  “Then I guess we’d better go,” said Tucano, ready to turn around and head out the exit.

  “But if you guys can dig a little deeper, then I can offer you…”

  He pushed aside boxes full of plastic machine guns, dolls, and plastic buckets and pails for the beach, and pulled out two pistols. “This is a Francotte, it’s a revolver.” He handed the one he’d identified to Nicolas.

  “Mamma mia, it weighs a cuofano,” he exclaimed, astonished at how heavy it was.

  And it was heavy. It was an ancient revolver, an 8mm; the only attractive thing about it was the handle, smooth, wooden, heavily worn, like a stone that had been polished by time underwater. All the rest of it—barrel, trigger, cylinder—was a leaden gray, dotted with stains that wouldn’t go away no matter how you buffed it, and it had that army surplus feel to it, or even worse, the feel of a gun used to shoot old Westerns, the kind that jam in two shots out of every three. But Nicolas didn’t care. He rubbed the handle and then started squeezing the barrel, while Han and Tucano continued bickering.

  “This one works, eh, they brought it to me from Belgium. It’s a Belgian revolver. I can let you have it for a thousand euros…” Han was saying.

  “Oh, to me it looks like a Colt,” said Tucano.

  “Eh, it’s a fratocucino of the Colt.”

  “Does this thing shoot?”

  “Yes, but it only has three bullets.”

  “I want to try it, otherwise I’m not buying it. And you’ve got to let me have it for six hundred.”

  “No, but really, this gun, if I sell it to a collector, I’ll make five thousand euros. T’ ’o giuro,” Han swore in dialect.

  Tucano tried out a few threats: “Sure you will, but then the collector, if you don’t sell it to him, it’s not like he’s going to come around and burn down your warehouse, or have you arrested, or set fire to your shop.”

  Han kept his cool and turned to Nicolas to say: “Did you bring your sheepdog with you? Does he have to keep barking at me?”

  Whereupon Tucano bared his teeth: “Keep it up and you’ll see if we’re all bark and no bite. Do you think we’re not hooked up with the System?”

  “Then they’ll come for you.”

  “Who are they going to come for?!”

  With every exchange they drew a little closer, until Nicolas put an end to the discussion with a flat: “Oh, Tuca’.”

  “No, seriously, now you’ve pissed me off, now get out of here, or else I’ll have to use this pistol on the two of you,” said Han. Now he had the knife by the handle, so to speak, but Nicolas had no interest in going any further, and dictated his conditions: “Oh, cine’, take it easy. We only want one, but it has to fire.”

  “Go on, give it a try,” and Han put it in his hand. Nicolas couldn’t even get the drum to swing out so he could load it. He tried a second time, but it was no good: “How the fuck is this thing supposed to work?” and he handed it to Han, showing his
disappointment.

  Han took back the gun and fired off a shot, nonchalantly, without even bracing his arm. Nicolas and Tucano leaped into the air the way you do when you hear an unexpected detonation, and it’s not your conscious mind that’s reacting, only your nerves. They both felt ashamed of that uncontrolled reaction.

  The bullet had taken the head clean off a doll on a high shelf, leaving the pink torso motionless. Han just prayed they wouldn’t ask him to make the same shot again.

  “What are we going to do,” asked Tucano, “with this hunk of junk?”

  “For now this is the best we’ve got. Take it or leave it.”

  “We’ll take it,” Nicolas concluded. “Still, since it’s a piece of crap, you can give it to us for five hundred euros, not a penny more.”

  * * *

  Nicolas took the pistol home. He carried it jammed into his shorts, barrel pointed downward, scalding hot.

  He walked, loose-limbed, down the hallway lined with white and green tiles. His father was waiting for him in the dining room. “We’re eating dinner. Your mother will get home later.”

  “Vabbuo’,” Nicolas acknowledged sullenly.

  “Since when do you say vabbuo’! What kind of way is that to talk?”

  “It’s how I talk.”

  “You write better than you talk.”

  His father, wearing a plaid shirt, was sitting at the head of the table. From there he observed his son’s gait as if he were the offspring of strangers. The dining room wasn’t big, but it was clean, decent, almost in good taste: simple furniture, the set of good crystal glasses on display behind glass, a piece of Deruta pottery, an artifact from a trip to Umbria, which was usually used to serve fruit, tablecloths with fish patterns, and faded kilim carpets on the floor. They’d only overdone it with the standing lamps and ceiling lamps, but that was an old controversy: a compromise between the past (chandeliers) and the present (floor lamps). Mena wanted lots of light in that apartment; he would gladly have done without. There were plenty of books in the hallway and on a set of shelves in the living room.

  “Call your brother and come sit down to dinner.”

  Nicolas did nothing more than raise his voice and call loudly, without moving: “Christian!”

  His father had an outburst of anger, but Nicolas paid him no mind. He lowered the volume of his voice ever so slightly, and called his brother’s name again. And this time his brother appeared, in shorts and a loose white shirt, and with a big, grateful smile lighting up his face. He went over and sat down immediately, dragging his chair across the floor.

  “Hey, Christian, you know your mother doesn’t want you to drag your chair. Pick that chair up.”

  He lifted up the chair even though he was fully seated on it, and did it with both eyes fixed on his elder brother, who was standing there motionless as a statue.

  “Would you care to take a seat, Signor Vabbuò,” snapped the father, and lifted the lid off the pan that he’d carried to the table. “I cooked you pasta e spinaci.”

  “Pasta with spinach? Where are we? Nisida Reform School?” Nicolas retorted.

  “What do you know about what people eat at Nisida?”

  “I know.”

  “He knows,” his little brother repeated.

  “And you keep your mouth shut,” said his father as he dished out the food, and to the other boy: “Sit down, do me a favor.” And Nicolas sat down in front of the plate of pasta and spinach with the pistol he’d bought from the Chinese guy stuck down the back of his underwear.

  “What did you do today?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Nicolas.

  “Who’d you see?”

  “Nobody.”

  His father sat there with a forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth: “What’s all this nothing? And who are all these nobodies?” He said it with a glance at Christian as if he was trying to coax him over to his side. But as he spoke, he remembered that he’d left the meat on the stove, and he stood up and vanished into the galley kitchen. And from there, he could be heard, still talking: “Nobody. Chillo esce cu nisciuno. This boy goes out with nobody. This boy does nothing, you get that? Nothing. And I work like a slave for all this nothing.” He came out into the dining room with a serving tray full of steaks to repeat that last phrase: “I’ve worked like a slave for all this nothing.”

  Nicolas shrugged his shoulders and sketched patterns on the tablecloth with the tines of his fork.

  “Go on: eat,” said the father, because he’d noticed that the younger boy had cleaned his plate while the older one still hadn’t touched a bite.

  “So what did you do? Did you go to school? Wasn’t there anyone else at school? Did they test you on history?” He was reeling off questions and the boy was sitting there like someone who didn’t understand the language, with an expression of courteous indifference.

  “Yeah, so eat something,” the father went on, and Christian said: “Nico’ is great.”

  “Great how? Great for what? You just need to shut up, and you, eat something,” he said, speaking to Nicolas. “You do understand that you need to eat? You come home, you sit down at the table, and you eat.”

  “If I eat, then I’ll get sleepy and I won’t be able to study anymore,” said Nicolas.

  His father, angrily, regained his composure. “So are you going to study later?”

  Nicolas knew where to strike his blow. At school he’d caught the attention of various of his teachers, especially on his compositions, because when a topic fired him up, there was no one who could outshine him. De Marino, his literature teacher, had told his father the first time they’d met at parent-teacher night: “Your son is talented, he has a very specific way of viewing the world and expressing those views. How to put this…” and he’d smiled. “Well, he knows how to shape the noise of the world and find the right words to describe it.” Words that the boy’s father had stitched into his chest and nurtured like a hen on a brood of eggs, repeating it to himself like a mantra every time something about Nicolas’s behavior rubbed him the wrong way or discouraged him. And he was ready to let himself be reassured whenever he saw his son raptly reading, studying, doing his research online.

  “No, I’m not going to study. Why would I bother to study?” and his eyes swept the room as if to pile up new certainties about the flimsiness of those walls, the bric-a-brac, to say nothing of the picture of his father in a tracksuit with the team of kids who, ten or so years earlier, had won some volleyball tournament, damned if he could remember which one. Volleyball? What is that, even? He ought to write an essay about these miserable championship tournaments for idiotic kids, that’s what he ought to do. Describe the miserable excuses for parents, the pimply players. He was reminded of the hard-on he had in his pants, and touched himself.

  “Why are you touching yourself? What are you touching?” The crease that appeared at the center of his father’s brow always meant he was playing the role of the head of household. “Eat, don’t you understand you need to eat?”

  “No, I’m not hungry tonight,” Nicolas said, and turned a blank expression on his father, without a glimmer of openness, far worse than a rebellious insult. What do I have to do? he could read in his father’s eyes. You’re worthless, Teach, his son shot back with quiet indifference.

  “You ought to study, you’re really good. When the time comes, I’ll pay for a serious school, you can earn a master’s. You can go to England, go to America. I’ve heard there are lots of kids who do it. Yes, I know what’s going on out there. And when they come back, everyone wants to hire them. I’ll get a line of credit to pay for it…” And though he’d pushed his plate away, he started picking at his food to keep from seeming pathetic, he filled his mouth and threw himself at his adolescent son’s feet, though when Nicolas heard the words “a serious school,” he felt like snickering. He didn’t, though, not out of respect, by any means, but because for the first time he found himself adding up the numbers and lost himself in fanciful imaginings of how
, if he wanted to, he’d be able to pay for that school, that serious school, out of his own pocket, he’d have paid cash, the way a real boss does, cash on the barrelhead, none of those miserable monthly installments that everybody else pays, a monthly installment on the car, a monthly installment on the motor scooter, a monthly installment on the TV. Then his little brother swam into his field of vision and he finally let a smile come to his lips.

  “Papà, I have to finish school. This school, here,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t count for a thing.”

  “Nico’, you need to cut it out with these nothings, these nobodies. We’re here for you…” He wanted to conclude triumphantly with a neat phrase, to come off as an understanding father.

  Dinner was over. His father cleared away the things he needed to and carried them into the kitchen, straightened up by himself, and, to keep from being left all alone in that domestic setting, did his best to restart the conversation.

  Christian had eaten in silence, his eyes on his plate: he couldn’t wait to be alone with his brother in their bedroom. Nicolas had shot him a wink a couple of times with the smile of someone who knows what they’re talking about; it was clear that he had something to tell him. A smile that their father had noticed and that had rekindled his anger: “Who the fuck do you think you are, Nicolas? All you’ve done is cause trouble. You’ve brought shame on this family, you’ve brought scuorno. You were held back for a year. Where does all this arrogance come from? You’re just an overblown ass. God Almighty gave you talent, and you’re squandering it, comme a ’nu strunzo!” He took advantage of his wife’s absence to let loose with a hearty Neapolitan insult, calling his son a fool and a shit.

  “I know this song already, Pa’.

  “Then why don’t you see if you can learn it by heart? Then you might not be quite so arrogant.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” he replied, and yet his father almost seemed to have guessed something. However skillful Nicolas might be at feigning, camouflaging, and concealing, still he brought home the signs of his change of fortune. An important event is a rope that knots itself around you and binds you tighter with every move you make, it rubs and tears at you, and in the end it leaves marks on your flesh that are visible to everybody. And Nicolas was dragging behind him, knotted around his waist, a rope that led all the way back to the garage run by the Chinese in Gianturco. Back to his first pistol.