The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “I don’t want to take a salary from anyone,” Nicolas said again.

  “Hey, asshole,” said White, “enough is enough.” Nicolas clenched his abdominals, bracing for a blow to his stomach from the pool cue. It was going to hurt, but if he was lucky he wouldn’t slam to the floor with the wind knocked out of him and he’d have a second or two to throw a punch at someone, maybe even at White himself. In his mind, he was already underneath a human mountain of kicking feet and cursing, with his arms struggling to limit the damage to, alternately, head and testicles. Instead, though, White dropped the pool cue on the floor and got comfortable in his chair again. He had another tremor that he shook off, grinding his teeth. And then he started telling him the story. The day of the burglary, security in Posillipo had been handled by two cops who bought coke from a market that was under their protection. He’d had confirmation of this fact from Pinuccio Selvaggio, who actually supplied that very same market, and he’d added that those two Rambos with their ridiculous mustard-yellow shirts were well-known customers of his. Therefore, White had immediately looked into what had happened at the New Maharaja. But unlike Nicolas, he hadn’t told anyone about what he’d learned.

  * * *

  For two days, Nicolas didn’t emerge from his bedroom and spoke not a word to his brother. He answered Letizia’s calls with short, simple texts: “Sorry, sweets, I’m not feeling good, I’ll call you soon.” He only accepted the food that his mother left outside his door. She tried to knock on the door, get his attention, she was worried, she said, but Nicolas got rid of her, claiming, when he talked to her, too, that he wasn’t feeling well, nothing serious, he’d be over it soon, she had no reason to be afraid, but most of all she just needed to stop knocking on his door because that noise was splitting his skull. His mother left him alone, she assumed that son of hers had pulled another one of his tricks, and she just hoped that this time he hadn’t really fucked up big-time, even though of course she didn’t talk that way, and then it seemed odd to her that he couldn’t handle the sound of her knuckles rapping on his door, since he was constantly listening to music that sounded like it came straight from the devil’s grotto.

  “We got guns, we got guns. Motherfuckers better, better, better run.”

  Nicolas had taken only a second to track down the song and mark it as one of his favorites on YouTube, setting it to loop. White sang that verse, and that verse alone, continuously, under his breath, occasionally bursting into a full-voiced baritone that clashed pretty vividly with his persona as an opium fiend, sometimes just whispering it into the ear of the first person to come within reach. He was singing it, too, when he saw Nicolas again outside Pinuccio Selvaggio’s apartment house. He’d made an appointment to meet there to arrange the New Maharaja situation. Chicchirichì was there, too, and, four floors up, in a one-bedroom with a large kitchen in an apartment house just outside of Posillipo—a place that had had its last paint job sometime in the seventies, if even then—Pinuccio was expecting them. He’d lured in the two security guards with the excuse that he had a new shipment of good shit, Mariposa network, Bolivian, world’s finest. Nicolas knew that he was supposed to wait with White and Chicchirichì in the toilet with the door closed, and that at Pinuccio’s signal—“This shit is better than a woman, it’s pure fucking sex”—he was supposed to leap out the door, grab the rope knotted into a noose that White had given him in the elevator, slip it around the guy’s neck, and yank it tight. Tight enough to blur his vision and then stop when White asked a question. Demanding an answer.

  And that’s what had happened. Except that the two security guards didn’t want to admit that they’d pulled off the job, and in fact, now they were threatening them, telling them they were retired financial police and they were going to make them pay for this. At this point, White got fed up, he’d lost his temper but he was still singing that same verse under his breath.

  “We got guns, we got guns. Motherfuckers better, better, better run.”

  He’d told them that he just needed five minutes, he had to go downstairs, there was a hardware store on the corner. He needed to buy some things. Exactly five minutes later, he was back, as promised. He’d bought a soldering iron and some motor scooter engine oil. Nicolas and Chicchirichì looked like a couple of dog owners out at the park; they had the two security guards on leashes as if they were bulldogs, and when White told the two of them to choose one, tie him up, get his pants down, and stick a rolled-up washcloth in his mouth, they did as instructed without blinking an eye. White unscrewed the cap on the motor oil, poured the liquid down the asshole of the chosen victim, and then jammed in the red-hot soldering iron.

  “We got guns, we got guns. Motherfuckers better, better, better run.”

  White sat down in an armchair, crossed his legs, and for a moment mused as to whether he should snort the Mariposa.

  Later, lying in bed back home, Nicolas could still smell the stench of burnt flesh. Of burnt anus. Shit, blood, and roast chicken. The other guard, who had witnessed the scene, had collapsed immediately and made a full confession: yes, they’d done it, they’d recruited Albanian thugs to help them. Now that Copacabana was in prison, they figured they’d increase the cost of their protection service to that club and all the other clubs they were protecting. Anyone who refused to pay, they’d just empty the place of everything that was in it, and the New Maharaja hadn’t paid up.

  “We got guns, we got guns. Motherfuckers better, better, better run.”

  White had said: “The truth that doesn’t come out of the mouth always comes out the asshole,” and then he’d ordered the officer to take them to the warehouse where they’d hidden the stuff. They’d left the one with the burnt asshole there to cool down a little bit.

  Nicolas wanted his private dining room. In fact, he demanded it as his by right. He pulled out his smartphone and filmed it all. Chairs, candelabra, carpets, computers. Even the enormous canvas with the Indian guy, the Maharaja. Even the safe, which they’d extracted with picks and crowbars. Then he sent the video to Oscar, who, Nicolas imagined, probably watched it in the same armchair he’d last seen him in. He’d given in and accepted all of Nicolas’s conditions. Oscar would hurry over to the carabinieri: “I just received an anonymous phone call. The loot is here. It was the people from the Puma Agency, because I refused to pay them for protection.” He’d become an antiracket hero who’d had the courage to go to the cops and in the meantime he’d start paying White for protection: a thousand euros for every event and a thousand euros per weekend. After all, it could have gone worse.

  Nicolas? Nicolas didn’t want a percentage of the racket that White had imposed on Oscar. Better to take nothing than to be on someone’s payroll. He’d obtained total access to the club for himself and his friends. The New Maharaja was his now.

  When he decided to emerge from the bedroom, it was to tell the whole story to Christian. He took him out into the street, where the only witnesses were the flaking walls. He wanted to serve as a model for him, teach him all the things that he’d had to learn for himself.

  “Ua’, so for real now we have full access to the New Maharaja?” asked Christian.

  “Exactly! Whenever we want.”

  “Ua’, Nico’, I can’t believe it. Can I keep the gun under my pillow tonight?”

  “All right,” his older brother conceded, running his hand over Christian’s crew cut.

  THE PRINCE

  At the Arts High School, in the only workshop, they held an optional course on multimedia studies, focused on audiovisual tecnology. It was very popular. “Hey, Teach, let’s make a music video!” was the most popular request. A group of kids played music, they’d even performed in a few local clubs, they already had a dozen pieces they could record, and they were looking for a producer. On Via Tasso you could rent out rehearsal rooms, and you could record, too. They’d brought in a flash stick with two songs on it and the teacher, who didn’t have an actual degree in any of this but who had attended courses a
t the Italian National Film School in Rome and now offered his services to local productions and to the art institute, was more worried about the equipment, which belonged to him, than he was about the quality of his students’ songs. Uocchio Fino is what they’d dubbed Ettore Jannaccone. Of all the credits he could boast, one outshone them all: he was on the production crew of the classic Italian soap opera Un posto al sole … He taught lessons in production theory and only occasionally let his students get their hands on his “sensitive digitals”—as he called the video cameras that he brought back and forth from his home, urging the principal in the meantime to make an investment in school equipment. “We’re in Naples, everyone has creative flair,” he loved to say. And De Marino had come up with an idea. Record his students reading extracts from works of literature. Jannaccone set aside certain times in the morning hours, chose the set, and established the sequence of passages to be read. Fifteen kids, fifteen passages, no more than ten minutes apiece.

  “What are you doing, Fiorillo?” De Marino asked Nicolas, catching him off guard as he was putting his cell phone in his pocket, waiting to file into the classroom.

  “Huh, Teach, what do you mean what am I doing?”

  “What are you going to read in front of the video camera?”

  Nicolas walked over to a desk, grabbed a female classmate’s anthology, read through the table of contents, and jabbed his finger down onto a page.

  “Chapter Seventeen of The Prince.”

  “Very good, Fiorillo. Now read it through carefully and then you can describe in front of the video camera what you just read.”

  With Fiorillo he was willing to run the risk. All the others did nothing but read mechanically. He wanted to see how Fiorillo would react. Fiorillo appeared and disappeared. The girls shot him sugar-sweet longing gazes. His male classmates avoided him, or actually, he made damn sure they did. What was there inside this guaglione?

  Nicolas took a glance at the book, another glance at his teacher, and a third at his classmate who was twisting her finger in her hair.

  “What do you think? I’m afraid? Sure I’ll do it.”

  De Marino saw him vanish with a book to the far end of the big courtyard where Jannaccone was surrounded by curious boys and girls. “Ué, Professo’,” someone was yelling in his direction, “are you going to let us shoot an episode of Un posto al sole?”

  And another student pretended to yank down his trousers: “An ass in the sun?” And everyone laughed.

  Nicolas had holed up in a corner, his blond head bowed over the pages. At last, he said he was ready. Uocchio Fino focused the lens on his face and, for the first time that morning, he had the sensation that he was filming someone who punched through the screen. He kept that sensation to himself, but he worked a little harder this time to frame his shot properly. Nicolas sat perfectly motionless, there was no kidding around with his classmates, and, most of all, he didn’t hold the book in his hands. Jannaccone asked no questions about why this guaglione was working from memory, he was just satisfied that he could concentrate his vision on that face, glad he didn’t have to tell him every three seconds not to laugh and to hold the book down low, outside the frame. When he decided the moment was right, he said: “You can begin.”

  * * *

  Later that morning De Marino screened the footage. He got a copy of the reading and then shut himself up, all alone, in the visual arts workshop where there was a room with audiovisual equipment. Nicolas’s face appeared on the screen. His eyes were gazing straight into the camera, and to tell the truth, seeing him like that, framed by the camera lens, Fiorillo was all eyes. Now, he does have a fine eye, he thought. Like his name, Uocchio Fino. That young man knows how to see. Nicolas had taken up the challenge and now he was recounting the beginning of Chapter Seventeen of The Prince the way he wanted: “Someone who’s going to be prince shouldn’t care whether the people fear him and say he spreads fear. Someone who’s going to be prince doesn’t give a damn about being loved, because if you’re loved those who love you do so only as long as things are going well but, the minute things go sideways, they’ll fuck you first thing. It’s better to have a reputation as a master of cruelty than of mercy.” He seemed to concentrate at that moment; he sought a sort of consensus around him with his eyes, or perhaps not, maybe he’d just forgotten what he meant to say. He ran a finger over his chin, slowly. De Marino was tempted to rewind so he could watch that gesture again—hovering somewhere between timidity and arrogance. Then he came out with a phrase, more in dialect than proper Italian: “Nun s’adda fà professione ’e pietà.” There is no benefit to professing pity. Where had he come up with that expression? “Professing pity.”

  He went on, clearly and intensely enunciating the words: “Love is a tie that breaks, fear will never abandon you.”

  Nicolas took another pause and turned, offering Uocchio Fino his silhouette for further examination. In silhouette, the arrogance dissolved, he had delicate features, the face of a boy. “If the Prince has an army, that army must constantly remind everyone that he is a terrible, terrifying man, because otherwise you can’t hold an army together, if you don’t know how to make yourself feared. And great achievements come from the fear you instill, from the way you communicate that fear, because that is the appearance the Prince makes, and everyone sees that appearance and recognizes it and your reputation will spread far and wide.”

  On “far and wide” he dropped his eyes for the first time, and remained like that for a moment, as if to announce that he was done.

  “How’d it turn out, Teach? Shall we upload it to YouTube now?” His voice caught De Marino by surprise. Fiorillo had remained behind, he’d wanted to see.

  “Good job, Fiorillo, you scared me.”

  “I learned it from Machiavelli, Teach. Politics works better with fear.”

  “Calm down, Fiorillo. Don’t get worked up.”

  Nicolas was leaning one shoulder against the wall, at the far end of the room. He pulled a couple of folded and refolded pages out of the rear pocket of his blue jeans.

  “Teach, Machiavelli is Machiavelli, this is Fiorillo. You want to give it a read?”

  De Marino didn’t get up from the console, he just reached out his hand, as if to say: “Bring it here.”

  “I’ll read it. Is that your paper?”

  “It is what it is.”

  Nicolas handed it over and then turned on his heel. He raised his right hand, waving goodbye to his teacher, without turning around again.

  De Marino went back to the screen, ran it back a few seconds, and watched Fiorillo as he said: “Everyone sees how you look and recognizes it and your reputation will spread far and wide.” He smiled, turned it off, and started reading the paper. This is what Fiorillo had written, or something very close to it.

  PART TWO

  THE FUCKERS AND THE FUCKED

  There are the fuckers and the fucked, and nothing more. They exist everywhere, and they always have. The fuckers try to gain advantage from any situation, whether it’s a dinner someone else pays for, a free ride, a woman to take away from someone else, a competition to win. The fucked always get the worst of any situation.

  The fucked don’t always seem like it, frequently they pretend to be fuckers, just as it is only natural that the opposite should exist as well, that is, that many of those who seem to be fucked are actually extremely violent fuckers: they pass themselves off as fucked in order to raise themselves to the rank of fuckers with a greater degree of unpredictability. To seem beaten or use tears and lamentations is a typical fucker strategy.

  Let it be clear, there is no reference here to sex: however you’re born onto this earth, man or woman, you’re still divided into one of these two categories. And for that matter, the division of society into classes has nothing to do with it, either. That’s bullshit. What I’m talking about are categories of the spirit. You’re born a fucker, or you’re born fucked. And if you’re fucked, you can be born into any walk of life, into a man
sion or a stable, and you’ll still find those who take away what you most care about, you’ll find the obstacle that keeps you back in your work and your career, you won’t be able to harness within yourself the resources to achieve your dreams. Only the crumbs will be left to you. The fucker may be born in a barracks or in an alpine hut, on the outskirts of town or in the center of the capital, but everywhere he turns he will find resources and fair winds, all the cazzimma, or the cruel strong-mindedness, and ambiguity necessary to obtain what he wants. The fucker achieves what he desires, while the fucked allows it to slip through his fingers, he loses it, he lets them take it away from him. The fucker might not even have as much power as the fucked, maybe the fucked has inherited factories and stock, but fucked he remains unless he manages to climb beyond the extra advantage offered him by good luck and laws that favor him. The fucker, on the other hand, knows how to reach beyond misfortune and can figure out how to use laws or pay to sidestep them, or even ignore them entirely.

  “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule; and there are many kinds both of rulers and subjects.” That’s what good old Aristotle has to say. In other words, to put it concisely, you’re born either fucked or a fucker. The latter knows how to steal and deceive, and the former knows how to be stolen from and deceived.

  Look inside yourself. Look deep inside yourself, but if you’re not ashamed, you’re not looking deep enough.

  And then ask yourself if you’re fucked or a fucker.

  COURTROOM

  One of Micione’s men had wound up in court, the charge was that he’d murdered Don Vittorio Grimaldi’s son, Gabriele. This was certainly true, and Don Vittorio, aka the Archangel, had even seen his son die before his eyes.