The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  * * *

  There’s no place where it’s easier to pretend nothing’s happened than in the domestic setting. And Nicolas was pretending nothing had happened.

  When his father felt like he’d taught him the lesson he needed to, Nicolas darted away to his bedroom, followed by Christian.

  “I’ll bet you’ve pulled off some slick move,” Christian said with a smile, clearly eager to know more. Nicolas meant to savor his power, letting his brother dangle a little longer, and he fooled around with his cell phone for a good solid minute, until their mother stuck her face in the door, having just come home. As if they were dropping on their feet from exhaustion, both boys hopped into bed, with the TV turned off and a hasty “Ciao, Ma’” their only response to her timid attempt to strike up a conversation. The silence that greeted every one of her questions made it clear she wouldn’t be hearing anything more.

  As soon as the door was shut again, Christian jumped onto his brother’s bed: “Come on, tell me everything.”

  “Lookie here!” he replied, and pulled out the old Belgian gat.

  “Beautiful!” said Christian, grabbing it out of his hands.

  “Hey, careful! It’s loaded!”

  They handed it back and forth several times, caressing the weapon.

  “Open it up, why don’t you!” Christian begged him. Nicolas flipped open the cylinder of the revolver and Christian spun it. He looked like a little boy with his first cowboy six-shooter.

  “So what are you going to do with this now?”

  “Start working.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We’ll have some fun…”

  “Can I come with you when you do?”

  “Well, we’ll see. But listen, don’t say a word to a soul.”

  “Seriously, are you joking?” Then he threw his arms around Nicolas the way he always did when he was begging for a present: “Can I hold on to it tonight? I’ll keep it under my pillow.”

  “No, not tonight,” said Nicolas, tucking the pistol away in his bed. “Tonight I’m keeping it under my pillow.”

  “Tomorrow I get it, though!”

  “All right, tomorrow you get it!”

  The game of war.

  BALLOONS

  Nicolas had a single thought in his mind: how to clear up the situation with Letizia. No matter how often he called her, she wouldn’t answer. Not on the phone, not from the window: this was the first time she’d acted like this, ignoring him when he was giving her the soft soap, begging her forgiveness, swearing his undying love. If she would only just yell at him, the way she had at the beginning, the way she always did when they were fighting, if she would only insult him, but instead nothing; she wouldn’t even give him that. And it seemed to him that, if she wasn’t beside him, his days were empty. Without her messages on WhatsApp, without her sweetness, he felt bereft. He missed the touch of Letizia’s fingers. The caresses a workingman deserved.

  It was time to come up with a good idea, and for starters he went over to see Cecilia, Letizia’s best friend.

  “Leave me alone” was her first reaction when she saw him. “Lassame perdere, so’ fatti vostri.” Leave me alone, it’s your problem.

  “No, come on, Ceci’. You just need to do me a favor.”

  “I don’t do favors.”

  “No, seriously, just a small favor,” and he forced her to listen to him by blocking the front entrance. “You need to make sure Letizia leaves her vehicle, her motor scooter, in front of your apartment building, because there’s something I need to do. At her house she keeps it in the garage, so I can’t get to it.” He could easily get to it, of course, but it probably wasn’t a very good idea to break into Letizia’s family’s garage.

  “No, forget about it. Just drop it, Nico’,” and she crossed her arms.

  “Ask me for something, ask for whatever you want, and I’ll do it, if you do me this favor.”

  “No … Letizia really, that is … you overdid it with Renatino, what you did was disgusting, it really was filthy.”

  “What does that have to do with anything! When you really love a person, I mean a lot, but really, really a lot, then no one else can even think of getting near that person.”

  “Sure, but not like that,” said Cecilia.

  “Tell me what you want, but do me this favor.”

  Cecilia seemed resolute, unapproachable and unbribeable in her refusal. In reality, though, she was just evaluating his offer.

  “Two tickets for the concert.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you even want to know which one?”

  “It doesn’t matter, any one you name, I have lots of friends who are scalpers.”

  “Okay, then I want to see Benji and Fede.”

  “Who the fuck are they?”

  “Ua’, you don’t know Benji and Fede?”

  “No, not really, I don’t give a damn. The tickets are yours. So when are you going to do this thing for me?”

  “Tomorrow night she’s coming over to my place.”

  “Perfect. Send me a text, write something like ‘all set,’ and I’ll understand.”

  He spent the whole day trying to find someone who could get him the most expensive balloons available, he asked everyone.

  Maraja

  Guagliù, balloons, but not the kind you can find at the market. Nice ones, guagliù, and on every balloon it has to say I love you.

  Dentino

  Nicolas, where the fuck do we find them?

  Maraja

  Ah, help me out here.

  * * *

  The next day they drove all the way out to Caivano, where Drone had learned from an Internet search that there was a party store that had supplies for major events, theme parties, and even for some movies and music videos. They bought two hundred euros’ worth of balloons and a portable tank so they’d be able to inflate them with helium.

  When he got Cecilia’s text, they were already positioned downstairs in the street, and they flexed their biceps getting bags and bags of balloons blown up. One and two and three and ten. He—Nicolas—Pesce Moscio, Dentino, and Briato’ were blowing them up and knotting them with a red ribbon and tying them to his motor scooter. When the scooter was festooned with balloons tugging toward the sky, it was only apparently anchored to the ground by its kickstand, with both wheels lifted an inch or so off the pavement.

  He texted Cecilia, “Tell her to come down,” and then they hid behind a moving van parked on the other side of the street.

  “I need to go downstairs for a minute, Leti’,” said Cecilia, gathering the hair that hung down her back all the way to her bottom with a scrunchie and getting up out of her chair.

  “But why?”

  “I have to go out for a second. Aggi’a fà ’nu servizio. I need to run an errand.”

  “Right now? You never said anything about that. Ja’, stammocénn’a casa,” Letizia said, sliding into dialect as she begged to stay home, half-sprawled on her girlfriend’s bed, her eyes overbrimming with laziness. She made no movement except swinging her legs, first one then the other, and it seemed as if that cadenced movement concentrated all her life-force.

  She’d been this way for days on end, so, even if Cecilia was a little jealous of their love story, she couldn’t stand having her friend in that state any longer, and by now she just hoped that things between Letizia and Nicolas could get back on track. “No, no, I just have to go out for a second. It’s super-urgent, seriously. Come on, it’ll do you good, we’ll get some fresh air, come on.”

  It took Cecilia a few minutes, but in the end she talked Letizia into it. As soon as they walked out onto the street, Letizia saw the extravaganza of balloons and, in an instant, she understood. Suddenly there was Nicolas in front of her, as if he’d appeared by way of some magic trick, and at last she spoke to him: “Ua’, you’re a bastard,” she said through her laughter.

  Nicolas went over to her: “My love, let’s raise this kickstand and fly away together.”r />
  “Nico’, I don’t know,” said Letizia. “You’ve really pulled some dumb pranks.”

  “It’s true, my love, I make mistakes, and lots of them, I make mistakes all the time. But I’m doing it for you.”

  “Eh, for me, that’s just an excuse, you’re violent by nature.”

  “I’m violent, I’m a disgusting mess. You can accuse me of anything you want. The only reason I do it is, when I think of you it’s like there’s a fire inside me. But instead of burning me up, the higher the flames, the stronger they make me. There’s nothing I can do about it. If a guy looks at you, ’o volesse punì, I’ve got to beat him up, it’s stronger than me. It’s as if he were taking part of you away from me.”

  “That’s ridiculous, you’re just too jealous,” she said, holding out with her words, but stroking his cheeks with her hands.

  “I’ll try to change. I swear to you. T’ ’o giuro. Everything I do, I do it with the dream of marrying you someday. By your side, I want to be the best man you ever met, really and truly the best.” He took advantage of her gesture to grab both her hands, turn them palm down, and kiss them.

  “But the best man doesn’t behave like this,” she retorted, starting to pout and doing her best to get her hands out of his.

  Nicolas held her hands to his heart for a moment, then gently let them go. “If I did wrong, I only did wrong trying to protect you.”

  Letizia had Nicolas’s eyes on her, but also Pesce Moscio’s, and Dentino’s, and Briato’s, and Cecilia’s, and the eyes of all the people in the quarter: she gave up all resistance and threw her arms around him, to a burst of applause.

  “Good for them, they made up,” said Pesce Moscio. Whereupon Dentino took a deep breath of the helium for the balloons and started talking in that weird querulous voice, and all the others followed suit. And those ridiculous voices seemed much more appropriate than the serious, important voices they were trying to assume.

  Then Nicolas pushed his way through the balloons on the motor scooter, lifted Letizia up and set her down practically in his lap, took the scooter off the kickstand, and said: “Okay, now let’s fly, ja’, let’s fly.”

  “I don’t need any balloons to fly,” Letizia said, embracing him. “All I need is you.”

  At that point Nicolas pulled out a pocket knife and slowly started cutting the ribbons holding the balloons. Yellow, pink, red, and blue: one after another they rose into the sky, filling it with bright colors, while Letizia watched them go, her eyes finally cheerful and full of wonder.

  “Wait, wait! Will you give them to us?” A bunch of kids six or seven years old came over to Nicolas, attracted by all those beautiful balloons unlike anything they’d ever seen.

  The children had addressed him respectfully, using the semiformal voi, and he liked that.

  “Adda murì fràtemo, for real.”

  And he started cutting the ribbons and tying them to the wrists of the children. Letizia watched him with admiration and Nicolas exaggerated the caresses he was giving the children, looking around for all the kids he could find to give balloons.

  ARMED ROBBERIES

  Nicolas showed up in front of the New Maharaja, where he ran into Agostino.

  “It’s no good, Nico’, they won’t let us in, nun ce fanno trasì.”

  Next to him, Dentino was nodding sadly; for a moment he’d touched the sky with one finger, but now they’d kicked him back onto the miserable earth. Lollipop, instead, freshly emerged from the gym, his hair wet from the shower, seemed excited.

  “What? The bastards!”

  “That’s right, he says that without Copacabana around, he’s not sure we’ll pay. And anyway, they’ve already given away Copacabana’s private dining room.”

  “Fuck, they didn’t waste any time! The minute he’s arrested, he’s already been replaced,” said Nicolas. He looked around, as if to find a service entrance, any door he could use to get back in.

  Agostino came over: “Maraja, what are we going to do? They’re smearing shit on our faces. The others are all working and we can’t … We’re always just substitutes. We’re always just filling in, and the others are full professors.”

  It was time to figure out how to reorganize. And that was up to Nicolas, he was the boss.

  “We need to pull an armed robbery,” he said flatly.

  It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a statement of fact. The tone was that of a final decision. Lollipop opened both eyes wide.

  “An armed robbery?” said Agostino.

  “That’s right, an armed robbery.”

  “With what, with our dicks in our hands?” asked Dentino, who had been stirred out of his torpor by Nicolas’s startling call for armed robbery.

  “I’ve got a gun,” said Nicolas, and he displayed the old Belgian firearm.

  When he saw it, Agostino burst out laughing. “What is that old piece of junk?”

  “Madonna, yeah, what is it! ’O Western! Now you’ve turned into a cowboy!” added Dentino, piling on.

  “This is what we’ve got and this is what we’ll work with. Let’s get our full-face helmets and go.”

  Nicolas was standing there with both hands in his pockets. Waiting. Because this was a test, too. Who was going to pull back?

  “What, do you have a full-face helmet? I don’t,” said Agostino. He was bullshitting, he had a full-face helmet and it was brand new, too, but he was seizing on any excuse to stall for time, to figure out if Nicolas was just talking or really meant it.

  “I’ve got one,” said Dentino.

  “So do I,” confirmed Lollipop.

  “Cerino, you wear a scarf, one of your Mamma’s shawls…” said Nicolas.

  “We need a baseball bat. Let’s go take out a supermarket,” Dentino proposed.

  “So we’re just going like that? Without knowing a thing, without scoping out the situation in advance?” asked Agostino. Now the scale was tipping toward armed robbery.

  “Ua’, scoping out the situation? What are you talking about? What is this, Point Break? We’ll go, we’ll be inside five minutes, tops, we steal the day’s take, and we skedaddle. After all, this is closing time, right now. Then we’ll leave there and take out a couple of cigarette shops, over by the station.”

  Nicolas arranged for the three of them to meet outside his house an hour later. Motor scooters and helmets, that was the assignment, and he’d bring the baseball bat. A few years earlier, he’d developed a passionate interest in baseball and he’d started collecting baseball caps. He didn’t know a thing about the rules of the game, and one time he’d actually watched a game on the Internet but he got sick of it right away. Still, his fascination with that intensely American world had never loosened its grip on him. And so when he got a chance he’d stolen a baseball bat that they’d forgotten to put a price sticker on at Mondo Convenienza, the discount store. He’d never used it, but he liked it, he found it aggressive, brutal in its simplicity, exactly like the one that Al Capone used in The Untouchables.

  He already knew who to hand it to, and when Agostino saw the bat being offered to him, he didn’t blink an eye, he’d known this was coming. He’d expressed too many doubts.

  Agostino was riding along behind Lollipop on his motor scooter. For the occasion Lollipop was wearing a Shark full-face helmet, though who knew where he’d found it? Nicolas, on the other hand, had Dentino riding behind him, and they both wore helmets that had long ago lost their original color, now replaced by dents and scratches.

  They revved off in the direction of the supermarket. They’d chosen an old CRAI market, a safe distance from Forcella, so that if things went wrong they wouldn’t wreck their reputations too badly. The market was about to close for the day, so there was a private security company’s squad car parked out front.

  “Ua’, those bastards!” said Nicolas. He stroked the well-worn butt of his gun; he’d discovered that it helped him to relax. He really hadn’t expected this. An error, one he wouldn’t make again.

  “H
ey, I told you we needed to stake it out, asshole! Let’s go straight over to the cigarette shop, come on,” said Agostino, reveling in his little moral victory, and he slapped Lollipop’s shoulder, and the other guy instantly twisted the throttle on the motor scooter and waved his arm in the air to show he knew where to go. The destination was a tobacco shop, just like any of a million others all over Italy. A couple of plate-glass windows festooned with scratch-and-win tickets and letter-format sheets of paper that verified that, yes indeed, right in that shop just the other week, someone had won twenty thousand euros, and more than twice that sum last year, as if good luck had chosen that location to let loose with its full array of opportunities. Out front, not even one of the usual beggars hoping for a pittance. The sidewalk was deserted. The time was right. They parked their scooters, angled in the direction of the escape route they’d instinctively decided was the best bet: a heavily trafficked intersection that ran under an overpass. They’d be able to zigzag through the other scooters and lose themselves among the cars.

  Nicolas practically didn’t bother to wait for the others to hop off their scooters; he strode in, pistol leveled: “Hey, you bastard, put the money in here.” The tobacconist, a short man dressed in a filthy undershirt, was arranging the packs of cigarettes on the shelf behind the counter and all he heard was a muffled voice from under the helmet. He hadn’t understood a word Nicolas had said, but the tone of voice alone was enough to make him turn around with his hands up in the air. He was a man well past retirement age, and must have lived through this situation countless times before. Nicolas leaned over the counter and pressed his pistol against the man’s temple.

  “Muóvete, miett’ ’e sorde, miett’ ’e sorde,” Nicolas said roughly in dialect, telling him to hurry up and put the money in the plastic bag that he tossed to him. He’d stolen it from his mother after emptying out the doctor’s prescriptions she kept in it.