The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “Take it easy, take it easy, take it easy,” said the tobacconist, “take it easy, everything’s okay.” He knew that the right way to act was midway between cooperation and firm determination. Too passive and they’d think you were making fools of them. Too aggressive and they’d decide this was going to be your last day on earth. Either one would lead to the same outcome: a bullet in the brain.

  Nicolas leaned even farther forward, until the barrel of his gun was pressed against the tobacconist’s forehead. The man lowered his arms and grabbed the bag. Just then, Agostino came in with the baseball bat, held high over his shoulder, ready to knock one out of the park.

  “Allora a chi aggi’ ’a scassà ’a capa!” So whose head do I need to bust open in here?!

  Dentino came in, too. He’d brought the backpack he wore to school, and now he was grabbing candy, chewing gum, pens, everything he could find, while Nicolas kept his eye on the tobacconist as he filled the bag, crumpling up ten- and twenty-euro notes.

  “Guagliu’, facite ampress’!” Lollipop yelled in from outside, urging them to hurry it up. He was the youngest of the four and he’d been assigned to stand watch as a lookout. Nicolas swung his pistol in the air, urging the tobacconist to get moving. The man grabbed everything that was left in the register, and then put his hands back up in the air.

  “You forgot to grab the scratch-and-wins,” said Nicolas.

  Once again, the tobacconist lowered his arms, but this time instead of obeying Nicolas’s order, he used them to point at the bag and convey the idea that the money that he’d put in it was really enough. They were free to go.

  “Give me all your scratch-and-wins, you cocksucker, give me all the scratch-and-wins!” Nicolas bellowed. Agostino and Dentino stared at him in silence. When they heard Lollipop shout, they’d already rushed toward the door and couldn’t understand why Nicolas was wasting time on the scratch-and-win tickets. That plastig bag bulging with money seemed like plenty enough to them. But not to Nicolas. As far as he was concerned, the tobacconist’s attitude was an insult, and so he grabbed the bag out of the man’s hand and slammed him in the head with his gun, knocking him flat to the floor. Then he turned to the other two and said: “Go.”

  “Ua’, you’re totally crazy, Nico’!” Agostino shouted to him as they zipped off through the traffic in pairs.

  “And now, guagliu’, let’s take out a café,” Nicolas replied. The café looked like a carbon copy of the cigarette shop. Two grimy plate-glass windows, though these were covered with ads for the ice-cream cones that were popular a decade ago: a nondescript little establishment, always visited by the same customers. The place was ready to close for the night, the metal roller blind halfway down. This time, too, Nicolas was the first one in. He’d tucked the bag of cash from the cigarette shop robbery under his seat and had grabbed a plastic bag from an empty trash can on the street. The barista and the two waiters were putting the chairs up on the tables and practically didn’t notice that Nicolas and Dentino—who had convinced Agostino to let him carry the baseball bat—had both entered the place.

  “Ràtece tutt’e sorde, ràtece tutt’e sorde, mettite tutt’e sorde ccà dinto,” Nicolas howled, repeating the order in cutting dialect to give up the cash, stuff it into the bag, and he threw the plastic trash bag at the feet of the waiters. This time he hadn’t drawn his pistol because the adrenaline was pumping in his veins and the final image of the tobacconist slumped on the floor had confirmed his belief that nothing could go wrong this time. But the younger of the two waiters, a kid with an acne-pitted face who might have been a couple of years older than Nicolas, gave a mocking kick to the plastic sack and sent it under one of the little café tables. Nicolas reached his hand around behind his back—if these guys wanted to wind up filled with holes, that would be fine with him—but that baseball bat was burning a hole in Dentino’s hands. He started with the espresso cups lined up and ready for the next morning’s breakfast crowd. He hauled off and smashed them at a single blow, making shards fly in all directions, even at Nicolas, who instinctively yanked his hand back and reached up to cover his face, even though he was wearing the helmet. Then it was the turn of the bottles of hard liquor. Dark brown spurted out of a bottle of Jägermeister and hit the young waiter who’d kicked the plastic bag, right in the middle of his forehead.

  “Mo’ scasso la cassa, ma, adda murì mammà, la seconda è ’na capa,” Dentino snarled in dialect, promising to smash open the cash register, and after that, someone’s head. He pointed the baseball bat first at one waiter, then at the other, as if trying to make up his mind which cranium he’d crack in half first. Nicolas decided he’d have it out with Dentino later. This wasn’t the time for it, though, so to emphasize their point, he finally managed to snatch out the handgun.

  The pockmarked waiter fell to his knees and grabbed the bag, while his partner hurried over to the cash register and pushed the button that unlocked it. It must have been a good day, because Nicolas saw plenty of fifty-euro notes. In the meantime, Agostino, attracted by all the commotion, had wormed his way into the café, and started stuffing bottles of whisky and vodka, the ones that had been spared Dentino’s fury, into another backpack.

  “Guagliu’, state qua da ’nu minuto e miezo, ’n’ata vota. Ma che spaccimm’ ’e lentezza!” Lollipop shouted through the door, reminding the three kids again that they’d been in the shop for a good minute and a half, and denouncing them as disgusting snails. In the blink of an eye, they had all scooted out the door and were back on their bikes, lost again in the flow of traffic. It had all been so easy, so fast, like a first-class jolt of coke. Only Nicolas had his mind on other things, and while he used his right hand to jerk the handlebar to veer around a Fiat Punto that had decided to jam on its brakes for no good reason, with his left hand he was writing a text to Letizia: “Good night, Little Panther.” Buonanotte Panterina.

  * * *

  When he woke up, his eyes still blurry with sleep and in his ears the sounds of the day before, the first thing Nicolas did was check his phone. Letizia had replied the way he’d hoped, and she’d even sent him a series of little hearts.

  By the time he got to school it was already ten o’clock, and seeing that he was already late he figured another half hour would make no difference. He holed up in the restroom and smoked a joint. In third period, if he was remembering right, he had De Marino. The only teacher he could stand. Or at least the only one he wasn’t indifferent to. He didn’t give a shit about the things he talked about, but he had to acknowledge the guy’s determination. He refused to resign himself to going unheard and he really tried to dig in deep with the kids in his classroom. Nicolas respected that about him, even if he knew that Valerio De Marino was never going to save anyone.

  The bell rang. The sound of doors swinging open and footsteps in the hall. The restroom where he’d holed up would soon be taken by storm, so Nicolas tossed the rest of the joint into the toilet and went to sit at his desk. Signor De Marino came in, eyeing the class, but not the way the other teachers did, who thought of the teacher’s dais as another place on an assembly line. For them, the quicker the shift ends, the sooner you get to go home.

  He waited for them all to come in and then picked up a book, which he held rolled up in one hand as if it were something of little or no worth. He was sitting at his desk on the raised podum and drumming on his knee with that book.

  Nicolas was staring at him, indifferent to the fact that De Marino was staring back at him.

  “So, Fiorillo, it would be pointless for me to test you today, eh?”

  “Really pointless, Teach. I’ve got a headache that’s killing me.”

  “But at least you know what we’re studying, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Mmm. All right, I won’t ask you this question: At least tell me what we’re studying. I’ll ask you a nicer question, because you’ll be willing to answer a nice question, and you’ll run away from a tough one. Am I right?”r />
  “Whatever you think best,” said Nicolas, and he shrugged his shoulders.

  “What do you like most about the things we’ve been discussing in class lately?”

  Nicolas actually did know what they’d been talking about.

  “I like Machiavelli.”

  “Why is that?

  “Pecché te ’mpara a cummannà.” Because he teaches you how to take charge.

  PARANZINA

  Nicolas had to find some other way of bringing in cash now that, after Copacabana’s arrest, the outdoor drug markets were out of commission. He took a good look around, trying to figure out where to start over. Copacabana knew that what money needed above all was to get out and work, that there was no time to waste. Don Feliciano had turned state’s witness, and now he was coughing up everything. The appointment of a replacement for district underboss, now that Viola Striano was married to Micione, was in fact his responsibility. Strictly speaking, Micione ought to be talking to Copacabana about it. But he wasn’t.

  In prison, Copacabana wasn’t getting any messages. The bosses were silent and so were their wives. What was going on? He wasn’t interested in shakedowns. There were two ways to go: either you started doing shakedowns or you opened up the street markets again and started peddling hash and coke. Either the shops weren’t kicking back their share and were holding on to the markets or else the shops were paying and they didn’t want any other business competing with them. That was his belief.

  Nicolas, Agostino, and Briato’ were planning to pull off their first shakedown with that old Belgian hunk of junk, after the robberies.

  “We’re doing it!” said Briato’. “Nicolas, adda murì mammà, we’re actually doing it!”

  They were in the back room, gambling away the spare change from the armed robbery at video poker, and making plans meanwhile. Dentino and Biscottino preferred just to listen, for the moment.

  “The strolling vendors … All the strolling vendors that are working the Rettifilo—Corso Umberto Uno—have to pay us,” Briato’ continued. “We’ll stick a gun barrel in the mouths of every last one of these fucking Moroccans and negroes, and we’ll make them give us ten or fifteen euros a day.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Agostino.

  “And then, at the stadium, we can be sure we’ll find everyone who was paying Copacabana,” said Nicolas.

  “No, if you ask me, Copacabana wasn’t getting paid at the stadium.”

  “Then we’ll rip off the parking attendants after the game,” said Briato’.

  “Sure,” said Nicolas, “but, guagliu’, if we don’t pool our money, if we don’t do things together, then we’re still jobless employees working for someone! Can we get this straight or not?!”

  “That’s fine with me. For now, we work, and then we’ll see,” said Agostino, and he dropped two euros into the video poker machine; then, as he pushed the start button, he added: “That’s what Copacabana said.”

  “What do you mean, what did he say? Did he talk to you?” Nicolas blurted out.

  “No, it’s not like he spoke to me … But his wife, the Brazilian, did say that, until ’o Micione makes up his mind with him, nothing’s happening, and so we have to live for ourselves, which means he can’t say anything to us, we’re just putting together our monthly payday.”

  “Oh, right, so now it’s ’o Micione,” said Dentino, “just ask him … He’s never given a flying fuck, o’ Micione decides for himself and that’s that! If Don Feliciano was still in charge this wouldn’t have happened. How can it be we still don’t know who’s the boss in Naples?” He slammed his hand against the side of his car, which in the meantime, while they were chatting, had guzzled down thirty euros in just a matter of minutes, and he sat down on a plastic chair nearby.

  “That piece of shit Don Feliciano abandoned us,” said Nicolas. “The less we mention his name, the better off we are.”

  “He wasn’t always a piece of shit,” Dentino put in.

  “Forget about it,” said Agostino, who leaned both of his elbows on the table to roll a joint in silence, and then they passed the joint around in silence. The odor of marijuana was still the best there was; it immediately put them in a state of grace. Dentino exhaled the smoke through the hole in his shattered incisors, that’s the way he always smoked and there had been times when he’d succeeded in picking up chicks with that little trick. When the joint came around to Biscottino, he inhaled greedily, then, as he handed it to Agostino, he took the floor: “If you ask me, ’o Maraja has a point. We need to work together … It’s no good for each of us to strike out on his own.”

  What was tormenting Agostino was that forming a paranza meant both striking out in favor of someone and striking out against someone else. Instead, working day by day for just yourself meant at the very most getting someone angry and then asking their pardon, giving them a piece of what you were earning or, at the very worst, taking a beating, a mazziatone. Starting to work together, to get organized, also meant having a boss, and Agostino knew that wouldn’t be him. He also knew that in that case he’d have to consult with his father’s fratocucino about what to do, and that his fate was either to become a loyal follower or a turncoat, an infame, and he found neither of these alternatives particularly appealing.

  As if to reinforce his statement, Biscottino pulled a large wad of cash out of his pocket. It was all crumpled together like candy wrappers.

  “How the fuck are you carrying all that cash?” asked Dentino, eyes big as plates.

  Biscottino shut him down: “A wise guy don’t carry his money in a wallet. Have you forgotten about Lefty?”

  “Ua’, scassate i ciessi. Out of sight. Biscottino made you look like a fool,” said Nicolas, smacking Dentino on the back of the neck.

  “But Lefty kept his cash all neat and clean in a money clip. The way you’ve got them, though, they’re disgusting. Look at them—tutti ammappociati. All crumpled up.”

  “Guagliu’,” said Nicolas, “who remembers what Lefty called a dollar?”

  “Lettuce,” said Agostino, stubbing out the roach of the joint on the bottom of the table.

  “Exactly,” Nicolas confirmed, and got straight to the point: “And just how did you make all this lettuce, Biscottino?”

  “With my two friends Oreste and Rinuccio.”

  “And who the fuck are they?” he asked, wary and alert now, because every new name was a potential enemy.

  “Oreste!” he said again, raising his voice just a little, as if he were talking to a centenarian who was hard of hearing.

  “You mean Oreste Teletabbi?” He got his nickname from the Teletubbies.

  “Yes!”

  “But he’s eight years old! So you’re saying that you, Teletabbi, and…?”

  “And Rinuccio!”

  “Do you mean Rinuccio, the brother of Carlito’s Way from the Capelloni?! Rinuccio Pisciazziello?”

  “Exactly, he’s the one!” he exclaimed, as if to say: “Eh, you finally caught on!”

  “Well? How did you make the money?” Nicolas stared at him with those dark eyes of his kindling into flame, midway between incredulous and interested. How had those snotnoses managed to put together all that cash? However they explained it, Biscottino had the money, and he must have got it from somewhere.

  “Oh oh,” said Dentino, “they fought the children’s war.”

  “We hit all the bouncy castles where the kids hang out.”

  He said it in utter seriousness, his chin jutting high in pride. The others all burst out laughing.

  “Bouncy castles for kids? What the fuck are those? Playground toys? Merry-go-rounds?”

  “No, all the parks and playgrounds and all the bouncy castles at the malls!”

  “So what’re you saying, what the fuck do you do?”

  “You want to come watch? Today we’re hitting Piazza Cavour.”

  Nicolas nodded, he was the only one who’d taken him seriously: “I’ll come with you now.”

 
; Briato’ zipped after Nicolas’s scooter, while the others cupped their hands over their mouths and shouted from the side of the street: “Tell us all about this bank job when you find out, and especially what Pisciazziello does to help!” Biscottino got on his Rockrider mountain bike and, hearing them still laughing with gusto, turned around and stuck his tongue out.

  He pedaled all the way to Piazza Cavour, stopping only when he got to ’a funtana d’e paparelle, the fountain of the ducks as it was traditionally known, where the Triton was still spotted with sky-blue paint from S.S.C. Napoli’s first national championship. Back then his father had been more or less his age now, and he’d often told him how, after that victory, the city had celebrated for days and nights on end, and that he’d seen them with his own eyes painting the bronze statue of the Triton. He liked the fact that some trace of that celebration had come down to him, still intact, and every time he went by Piazza Cavour he got a lump in his throat, and he felt closer to his father there than at the grave he visited on Sundays with his mother.

  He rose up to a standing position on the pedals to bolster his four foot five inches of height, and started turning his head left and right like a blackbird looking for a mate. He saw where Nicolas and Briato’ had taken up their positions, at the entrance to the park, and then he saw Pisciazziello and Oreste Teletabbi arrive. They were a couple years younger than him, maybe just one year younger, actually. They had the faces of children who already knew everything, they talked about sex and guns: no grown-up, since the day they were born, had judged any truth, fact, or behavior unsuitable for their ears. In Naples there are no paths to growing up: you’re born straight into reality, into the thick of it, you don’t get a chance to discover it a little at a time.

  They weren’t alone, Pisciazziello and Teletabbi. Each of them had two other kids on their bike, standing behind them, and behind them straggled a crowd of little kids. Unmistakably, these were Gypsies. Nicolas and Briato’ dismounted from their motor scooters and stood gazing at the scene in amusement, arms folded across their chests. The paranzina, the mini-paranza, approached the playground equipment, the merry-go-rounds and swings, and started making a tremendous amount of noise: they were taking the littlest kids off the rides and the seesaws, shoving other kids so they fell on their faces, frightening them and making them cry. The mothers and the babysitters shouted at them in incensed outrage: “Che siete venuti a fà?! Via!” and “Uh maronna, ma che vulite cumbinà?” What are you trying to do? Get out of here! and Madonna, what do you think you’re up to? As they exclaimed and called out, they hurried to console the little ones and take them by the hands, hustling them away.