The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “Ceri’, it’s people like you I don’t want, and people like you need to get out, right now…”

  “Nico’, maybe I didn’t make myself clear, I’m just saying that…”

  “Aggio capito buono, Ceri’, staje parlanno malamente.” He told him he knew exactly what he was saying, and that he was wrong when he said it.

  Nicolas leaned close, snorted through his nose, and spat in his face. Agostino wasn’t a shrinking violet and he tried to lash back, but as he was pulling his head back to butt Nicolas in the bridge of the nose, Nicolas dodged aside, too quick for him. They stared each other in the eye. And then it was over, the drama was done. At that point, Nicolas continued.

  “Agosti’, I don’t want people who are afraid, fear shouldn’t even come into your mind. If you’re starting to have doubts, then you’re no good to me anymore.”

  Agostino knew he’d expressed what everyone else feared, he wasn’t alone in worrying that they needed to reach out to the old bosses, and that spit in the face came as a warning more than a humiliation. A warning to them all.

  “Now get the hell out of here, you’re not in the paranza anymore.”

  “You’re nothing but a handful of stounzi,” said Agostino, red in the face.

  Dentino broke in and tried to placate him.

  “Austi’, get out of here, you’re going to get hurt…”

  Agostino had never betrayed but, like all Judases, he was a useful tool to accelerate the realization: before leaving the room he, blithely unaware, gave Nicolas exactly what he needed to solidify the paranza.

  “E vuje vulesseve fà ’a paranza cu tre curtielle e doje scacciacani?” What do you think, you’re going to start a paranza with three knives and two starter pistols?

  “With these three knives we’ll slit you open like a fish!” Nicolas exploded.

  Agostino raised his middle finger and waved it in the faces of those whom he had considered, just moments ago, to be blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh. Nicolas hated to let him go that way: you don’t just discard someone like that, not if you know their every day, their every fratecucino, their every uncle. Agostino had been with him at the stadium, all the time, both at the San Paolo and for away games. You need to keep a bro’ close, but this is how things had gone, and expelling him was useful. He needed a sponge to soak up all the group’s fears. As soon as Agostino had slammed the door behind him, Nicolas went on.

  “Brothers, ’o cacasotto—the pants-shitter—has a point … We can’t start a paranza with three kitchen knives and a couple of starter pistols.”

  And the same guys who just a second ago had been ready to fight with the few knives and rusty old gats that were all they had, because Nicolas had said so, all confirmed their disappointment once they were authorized to doubt: they dreamed of gleaming arsenals and they were forced to handle toys that they hid under their beds.

  “I have the solution,” said Nicolas, “and they’re either going to kill me or else I’ll come home with an arsenal. And if that happens, qua adda cagnà tutte cose—then everything around here is going to change: with weapons come rules, perché adda murì fràtemo, senza regole simmo sulo piscitiell’ ’e vrachetta.” Because on my brother’s life, without rules we’re nothing but piscitiell’ ’e vrachetta.

  “We have our rules, Nico’, we’re all brothers.”

  “Brothers without an oath are nothing. And oaths are taken on things that count. You’ve seen that movie Il Camorrista, what do you call it, The Professor, haven’t you? That scene where ’o Professore administers the oath in prison. Veritavéllo, sta ’ncoppa a YouTube—watch it, you’ll find it on YouTube. We need to be like that, a single thing. We need to be baptized with irons and chains. We need to become sentinels of omertà. It’s a great movie, guagliu’, veritavéllo. The bread that if you betray will become lead, and the wine that becomes poison. And then we need to draw blood, amm’ ’a ammiscà ’e sanghe nuoste—we need to mingle our bloods, and be afraid of nothing.”

  While he was talking about values and oaths, Nicolas had just one thing in mind, something that made him uneasy and made his gut feel all emptied out.

  * * *

  The following afternoon was a hot one and there was a game at the stadium, the Italian national team was playing. Letizia had asked him if they could watch the game together, but Nicolas had refused, he was rooting against the national team, too few players from S.S.C. Napoli, too many from Juventus F.C., so he and his buddies felt only contempt for the national team and any games it might play. They had something else to do, and it was urgent. There were six of them on three scooters. Dentino was driving his scooter, the other two scooters were zipping along a few yards ahead. From the Salita Moiariello, it was a road that ran downhill all the way. Narrow, winding alleyways, the vicoli. “The manger scene,” people who live there call it.

  If you go that way, it’s quicker, and by taking Piazza Bellini, on and off the sidewalk, you avoid lots of traffic and wrong-way streets. It only takes a second.

  His contact with L’Arcangelo was in Piazza Bellini, and Nicolas needed to hurry. It’s true, he felt like God Almighty, but he needed this contact. And these aren’t people who’ll wait around if you’re late. Ten minutes and he had to be there.

  The three scooters covered the last stretch of Via Foria, before you arrive at the museum, riding along the wide, well-lit sidewalks, zigzagging with their horns blaring. This time they could easily have just taken the street, because there wasn’t a living soul in sight and the few who hadn’t made arrangements to go to the stadium were sitting staring at one of the screens that you could find at every street corner in Naples. From time to time, if they could hear cheers in the air, they’d stop their scooters and ask the score. Italy was leading. Nicolas swore under his breath.

  They turned into Via Costantinopoli, riding against traffic. They rode onto the sidewalks, which here were narrow and dark, though here there were more people. Young people, for the most part university students, and the occasional tourist. They, too, were going to Piazza Bellini, to Port’Alba, to Piazza Dante—though in less of a hurry—where there were plenty of bars and cafés with televisions set out on the street. The three scooters were going too fast, and they didn’t notice two strollers parked on the sidewalk, next to a group of adults sitting at tables outside a bar.

  The first scooter didn’t even try to brake, the stroller’s nearest handle harpooned the scooter’s side mirror and the stroller started skating along fast until it broke loose and fell on its side, as if it were sliding across a sheet of ice. It stopped only when it slammed into the wall: the impact made a dull thud. A sound of blood, white flesh, and diapers. Newly sprouted, unkempt hair. A sound of lullabies and sleepless nights. After a moment the child could be heard sobbing and the mother screaming. The child wasn’t hurt, just frightened. The father, instead, was turned to stone, motionless. He stood, staring at the kids who had in the meantime parked their scooters and were walking off unhurriedly. They hadn’t stopped. Nor had they fled in panic. No. They’d parked their motor scooters and were walking off, as if everything that had happened was simply part of everyday life in that territory, which belonged to them and no one else. Crushing all underfoot, body-slamming, running. Fast, arrogant, rude, and violent. That’s the way it is, and there’s no other way for it to be. Still, Nicolas felt his heart pumping blood feverishly. His attitude didn’t spring from arrogant opportunism, from cazzimma, but from cold calculation: the accident couldn’t be allowed to modify their itinerary. There were two police cars—one on either side of Via Costantinopoli—parked exactly where the kids had parked. The policemen, four in all, were listening to the game on the radio and hadn’t noticed a thing. They were only a few yards from the accident, but those shouts hadn’t torn them away from their cars. What must they have thought? Shouting goes on all the time in Naples, anyone and everyone shouts in Naples. Or else: best to steer clear, there are only a few of us here and we have no authority.


  Nicolas said nothing, and while he looked around for his contact he was thinking that they’d come close to making a serious mistake, that they should have given that stroller a kick instead of dragging it along beside them for thirty feet. Everything in Naples belonged to them, and they needed their sidewalks, that was something people needed to understand.

  There he was, his contact with Don Vittorio Grimaldi, hat on his head and joint in his mouth. He walked over slowly, and neither took off the hat nor spat out the joint: he treated Nicolas like the little kid that he was and not like the boss he dreamed of being.

  “L’Arcangelo has decided that you can go and pray. But in order to enter the chapel, you need to follow the instructions carefully.”

  Instructions in code that Nicolas knew how to decipher. The boss would receive him at home, but that he shouldn’t even dream of coming in by the main entrance because he, Don Vittorio, was under house arrest and wasn’t allowed to see anyone. You might not be able to see the carabinieri surveillance cameras but they were there, somewhere, buried in the cement. But those weren’t what Nicolas needed to be afraid of. The thing to fear were the eyes of the Faellas. The contact on Piazza Bellini had made it clear that L’Arcangelo wanted Nicolas to be aware of the risk. If the Faellas saw him, he’d become a Grimaldi. And he’d get a brutal beating in the bargain. Period.

  The truth, though, was otherwise: Nicolas and his group were so many dickheads and the Grimaldis didn’t want them to be the reason that the suspicions of the investigators and their rivals focused on L’Arcangelo, who already had more trouble than he could handle.

  Nicolas pulled up to Don Vittorio’s apartment on his scooter; after all, he wasn’t as notorious as he would have liked to be, and in Conocal, far from home, none of the guaglioni of the System knew his face. They might recognize his name, but his face could pass unnoticed. At the sight of him, they might just assume he was there to buy hash, and in fact he pulled his motor scooter over next to some other kids and they immediately did as he’d hoped: “How much money do you have?”

  “A hundred euros.”

  “Fuck, great. Gimme the cash.”

  A few minutes later the hash was under his ass, tucked beneath the seat of the scooter. He drove around the block and parked. He fastened an ostentatious padlock on the scooter, and then strolled slowly toward L’Arcangelo’s apartment building. His movements were clear and determined. No hands in pockets, his head was itching, he was sweating, but he forgot about that. You’ve never seen a soul scratch his head at a momentous juncture. He rang the buzzer to the apartment downstairs from Don Vittorio’s, as instructed. He heard a voice answer. He uttered his name, he carefully enunciated every syllable.

  “Professoressa, it’s Nicolas Fiorillo, can you open up?”

  “Is it open now?”

  “No!”

  It was open, but he’d needed to stall for time.

  “Push hard and it’ll open up.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Now it’s open.”

  CAPODIMONTE

  Rita Cicatello was an old retired high school teacher who gave private lessons at prices that some might describe as popular. All the students of teachers she was friends with came to her for lessons. If they came to her and her husband for tutoring, they passed their exams; otherwise the debts came due, and then they had to go to her for tutoring anyway, but in the summer.

  Nicolas climbed to the landing outside the high school teacher’s apartment. He walked in calmly, like an ordinary student reluctant to subject himself to the umpteenth form of scholastic torture; actually, though, he just wanted to be certain that the security camera that the carabinieri had planted there caught every detail. He believed that, like a human eye, it might blink for a second, and so all his actions needed to be slow, in order to ensure they were captured fully. The carabinieri surveillance tapes, which would be made available to the Faellas as well, needed to see this: Nicolas Fiorillo going in to see Professoressa Cicatello. And nothing more.

  The lady opened the door. She wore an apron that protected her from splattering oil and sauce. In the little apartment there were lots of kids, male and female, ten or so in all, sitting at the same round dining table, their textbooks lying open, their eyes glued to their iPhones. They liked their teacher, Professoressa Cicatello, because she wasn’t like the other ones, who confiscated their cell phones before starting the lesson, forcing them to invent fanciful excuses—my grandfather is having an operation, he’s in the OR right now, if I don’t answer in ten minutes my mother is going to call the police—so they could hold on to them, because maybe they’d receive a message on WhatsApp or a “like” on Facebook. The teacher let them keep the phones and didn’t even bother to teach the lesson herself, she kept those kids in her apartment learning from a tablet—a gift from her son for last Christmas—that was hooked up to a small speaker from which her voice issued, talking about Manzoni, the Risorgimento, Dante. It all depended on what the kids needed to study; Professoressa Cicatello, in her spare time, prerecorded the lessons and then limited herself to shouting from time to time: “Enough is enough with these cell phones, pay attention to the lesson.” In the meantime, she cooked, tidied up the apartment, and made lengthy phone calls from an old landline. She came back to check the homework on Italian and geography, while her husband corrected the mathematics homework.

  Nicolas went in, mumbled a general salutation to one and all; the kids there for tutoring didn’t even bother to look up. He pulled open a glass door and went through. The kids often saw people come in and leave, and usually those people, after a hasty hello, vanished behind the kitchen door. The life that went on behind that door was unknown to them and, since the bathroom was on the opposite side of the apartment from the kitchen, all they knew about the Professoressa’s apartment were the room with the tablet and the bathroom. They asked no questions about anything else, there was no reward for curiosity.

  Her husband was also there, in the room with the tablet, always sitting in front of a television set, always with a blanket over his knees. Even in summer. The kids would go over to him where he sat in the armchair to turn in their math homework. He’d correct the homework with a red pen he kept in the breast pocket of his shirt, dismissively punishing their ignorance. He muttered something in Nicolas’s direction that was meant to sound like a “buongiorno.”

  At the far end of the kitchen there was a ladder. The Professoressa said nothing but pointed straight up. A small, amateurish-looking masonry structure formed an opening that connected the floor below to the floor above. And so, very simply, those who couldn’t go to see Don Vittorio through the front door of his apartment would call on the Professoressa. When he’d reached the last rung, Nicolas knocked a couple of times on the bottom of the trapdoor. It was none other than he, Don Vittorio, who leaned over when he heard the knocking, allowing a gurgle of strain to issue from his mouth, a sound that came straight from his spinal cord. Nicolas was deeply moved, he’d only ever seen Don Vittorio in court before. From up close, though, the Don didn’t strike him as quite as impressive as he’d expected. He was older, he seemed weaker to him now. Don Vittorio ushered him in and, with the same gurgle of back pain, lowered the trapdoor back into place. He didn’t shake hands with him, but showed him the way.

  “Come in, come in…” was all he said as he walked into the dining room, where there stood an enormous ebony table that in an absurd geometric effect managed to lose all its dark elegance and turn into an ostentatious and tasteless monolith. Don Vittorio sat down to the right of the chair that marked the head of the table. The apartment was full of little vitrines containing ceramics of all sorts. Capodimonte porcelains must have been Don Vittorio’s wife’s consuming passion, though there was no other trace of her in the place. The lady with the dog, the hunter, the zampognaro, or bagpipe player—evergreen classics all. Nicolas’s eyes darted from one wall to another, he wanted to memorize everything; he wanted to see how L’Arcangelo lived, but what he saw he didn’t m
uch like. He couldn’t say exactly why it made him uneasy, but this certainly didn’t strike him as the home of a boss. There was something about it that didn’t add up: his mission to this little fortress couldn’t possibly be so banal, so obvious, so facile. A flat-screen television set surrounded by a wood-colored frame and two people wearing S.S.C. Napoli gym shorts: that’s all there seemed to be in the apartment. The two didn’t greet Nicolas, and instead waited for a nod from Don Vittorio, who, once he was comfortably ensconced, forefinger and middle finger joined as if to flick away horseflies, gestured to them in an unequivocal signal to leave, to jatevénne. The two of them went to the kitchen and before long the sound emerged of a comedian’s croaking voice—no doubt there was another television set in there—followed by laughter.

  “Get undressed.”

  Now he recognized the voice of a man accustomed to giving orders.

  “Get undressed? What do you mean?”

  Nicolas accompanied the question with an expression of disbelief. He hadn’t expected this request. Hundreds of times he had imagined how this meeting would go and none of those times had he ever considered the possibility that he might have to undress.

  “Strip down, guaglio’, who the fuck knows you. Who says you aren’t packing a tape recorder, a bug, whatever the hell…”

  “Don Vitto’, adda murì mammà, how dare you think I would…”

  He had used the wrong verb. Don Vittorio raised his voice so he could be heard from the kitchen, to drown out the comedian’s voice and the canned laughter. A boss is a boss when there is no limit to what he’ll dare to do.

  “We’re done here.”

  The two guys wearing S.S.C. Napoli gym shorts didn’t even get a chance to come back into the room before Nicolas was already prying the shoes off his feet.

  “No, no, it’s all right, I’ll get undressed. I’m doing it now.”