The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  But Maraja had had an idea: “A party, with fireworks, M-80s, ash cans, dragon-boom firecrackers, skyrockets, anything that makes noise. At that point, you can’t hear any difference between their detonations and ours.”

  “A real live party, just like that? For no good reason?” asked Dentino.

  They covered all of Forcella, Duchesca, and Foria and asked everywhere they stopped: “Who’s got a birthday party coming up, or a wedding, or a first communion?”

  Unleashed like dogs, they asked anyone, door to door, basso by basso, shop by shop. They asked mothers, sisters, aunts. Anyone who happened to hear of a party needed to tell them, because they had a nice gift to offer. That’s right, a nice gift to offer. For everyone!

  “Found it, Maraja: a lady right in the vicolo, where we can train…”

  The apartment house that Briato’ had identified was on Via Foria. It had a perfect shared rooftop terrace, spacious and surrounded on all sides by antennas that stood as thick as a troop of sentinels.

  He had uttered the word train—in Italian addestrarci—so well and clearly that he almost seemed to be licking his chops to savor the taste of those four hard, almost professional syllables. Ad-de-strar-ci.

  “The lady’s called Signora Natalia,” Briato’ went on.

  Her ninetieth birthday. A major party, a thousand euros of fireworks each. But that wouldn’t be enough.

  “We need more noise than that, Briato’. We need to find another party nearby, and there needs to be music, what we need is a band. Quatte scieme cu ’e tamburi, doje trumbette, ’na tastiera. Four idiots with drums, two trumpets, a keyboard.”

  Briato’ made the circuit of the three restaurants in the surrounding neighborhood, and he found a party for a first communion, but it all still remained to be organized. The family didn’t have a lot of money, and they were working out terms for the price. First communions are dress rehearsals for wedding receptions. From the outfits to the meals, hundreds of guests, and full-fledged financing: IOUs, shylocks. Money is no object.

  “I want to talk to the proprietor,” Briato’ asked the first waiter he ran into.

  “You can tell me.”

  “No, I have to talk to the proprietor.”

  “But why? Can’t you just tell me?”

  Before starting out on his rounds, Briato’ had unzipped the bag and pulled out a pistol at random, just as a way to save time. He wanted to be sure there were no delays, he wanted the equivalent of a badge to make sure people paid attention to him. He was too much of a kid, too babyfaced, no marks, not even a scar that he’d gotten by accident, so he was forced to raise his voice, invariably. He pulled out the gun, unloaded though it was, and probably with the safety still on.

  “Allora ’o fra’, ’a spaccimm’e chi t’è mmuorto,” he started out, saying, “Okay, bro, fuck you and whoever raised you,” and then went on, more calmly, “I’m going to say it politely: Are you going to let me talk to the proprietor, or am I going to have to split that fucking head of yours wide open?”

  The owner of the restaurant was listening and he got down off the podium.

  “Ue’ piscitiello, posa stu fierro che nuje appartenimmo … e te fai male,” the owner called out. “Hey, kid, put down the gun, we’re protected … and you’re going to get yourself hurt.”

  “I don’t give a fuck who’s protecting you, I want to talk to the owner. Now is that really so hard?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Who’s celebrating their first communion here?”

  “’Nu guaglione del vico.” A kid from this street.

  “Does his father have the money?”

  “What money? He’d going to pay me for the meal on installments.”

  “All right, then, you need to take him this message, you need to tell him that we’ll pay for the fireworks for the party, in the vicolo for three hours, we’ll throw this event.”

  “I don’t get it, what fireworks?”

  “Fireworks, dumb-ass, ash cans, M-80s, bottle rockets. What do you call them? We’ll give a fireworks show to the kid who’s having his first communion, or do I have to tell you a third time? By the fourth time, I’m gonna get pissed off, though, let me warn you.”

  “Now I get it. But did you have to put on this whole production just to deliver this message?”

  The proprietor conveyed the message. The paranza hired expert technicians and plenty of fireworks. A thousand euros apiece was the generous donation they made. Briato’ had overseen it all.

  And he wrote on WhatsApp in their shared chat:

  Briato’

  Guaglioni, the party in Foria is all taken care of. Get yourselves ready for the fireworks show.

  The answers were virtually all the same.

  Dentino

  Uuà, that’s huge.

  Biscottino

  For real, bro! That’s great.

  Lollipop

  Uuààà!

  Drone

  Uuàà! I’m already there!

  Pesce Moscio

  Uààà! I can’t wait!

  Maraja

  Nice work, bro! Saturday everyone’s going to the first communion.

  The day arrived. They all parked their scooters in the atrium of the apartment house. No one asked them a thing. They went up onto the roof terrace, everyone was there. Dentino had dressed up special, Briato’ was wearing a tracksuit, but he had a strange set of headphones on his head, the kind that construction workers wear when they’re using a jackhammer. It was a silent procession, faces rapt in concentration, penitents ready for the sacrifice. In the distance, over all the roofs, a red sun was setting.

  They unzipped the bags, and between the zippers emerged the black and silver metal of the weapons, gleaming insects full of life. One bag was full of ammunition, on each box was a length of yellow duct tape with the type of weapon it went with written in ink. Names that they knew very well, that they’d yearned for more powerfully than they’d ever lusted after any woman. They all crowded in, shoving and reaching for machine guns and revolvers as if they were discounted items on the stalls at the street market. Biscottino was rummaging furiously. “I want to shoot, I want to shoot!” Small as he was, he seemed to vanish into the arsenal.

  “Slow down, guagliu’, take it easy…” said Maraja. “All right, the first to shoot is Biscottino because he’s the youngest. And we always let the youngest and girls go first. What about you, Biscotti’, si’ cchiù piccolo o si’ ’na femmena?” He asked if Biscottino was the youngest or if he was a girl.

  “Fuck off,” Biscottino replied. His insistence had seemed capricious and childish, and the others were happy to sidestep the first major embarrassment.

  He grabbed a pistol, it was a Beretta. It looked like it had been used, and quite extensively. It was badly scratched the length of the barrel and the butt was worn away. Biscottino had learned all about pistols, anything you can learn from YouTube without ever having pulled a trigger. Because YouTube is always the teacher. The one who knows, the one who answers questions.

  “All right, so the clip is right here.” He grabbed the grip and pulled out the magazine, and saw that it was fully loaded. “This is the safety,” and he flicked it off. “Then to chamber a round, you pull this slide back.” And he tried to suit action to words, but he couldn’t do it.

  Until that moment, he’d seemed to know exactly what he was doing; this wasn’t the first time he’d ever had a gun in his hands, but he’d never pulled a trigger. And he couldn’t chamber a round on this one. He kept frantically trying to pull the slide, to chamber the round, but his hands kept slipping. He could feel the eyes of the whole paranza on him. Pesce Moscio grabbed the gun out of his hands, pulled back the slide, and a bullet popped out. “You see? There was already a round in the chamber.” And with those words, he handed the Beretta back to him, without humiliation.

  Biscottino aimed at the dish antenna and waited for the first fireworks to go off.

  The first rocket went off, hurtling
shrilly up into the air and ending with an umbrella of red stars in the sky overhead, but no one bothered to look up. Fireworks, the kind that make dogs howl and wake up sleeping children, can be seen from any balcony every night, and the ones that are used to warn and the ones that are there for celebrations are always and exclusively white, red, and green.

  They all stared at Biscottino’s arm; he narrowed his eyes and squeezed off the first shot. He held up well to the recoil, which went entirely into the air.

  “Ua’, you didn’t hit it … no good, my turn…” said Lollipop.

  “No, wait: a clip for each, that’s what we said.”

  “Are you serious? But who decided that?”

  “He’s right, that’s what we decided,” said Dentino.

  Second shot, nothing. Third shot, nothing. All around them a succession of firecrackers, detonations, and fireworks were going off, and in the midst of all that mayhem, it sounded as if Biscottino was shooting with a silencer. He extended his arm, grabbed the butt of the pistol with both hands.

  “Close one eye and aim. Go on, Biscottino, try harder,” said Maraja.

  Still nothing. But on the next shot after that, the fifth, just before the blast of an ash can, they heard a dull metallic noise. He’d hit the dish antenna. The paranza burst into applause. It was like a kids’ soccer team celebrating their first goal. They leaped to their feet. They threw their arms around one another.

  “Now it’s my turn.” Lollipop started digging in one of the duffel bags and grabbed an Uzi. “Guagliu’, this little machine gun scares me. Miette, miette ncoppa a YouTube!” Put this on YouTube, he crowed in dialect.

  They grabbed their cell phones and, scattered all over the roof, held them up in the air trying to find bars.

  “There’s no damn coverage here…”

  Drone intervened. These were his moments, when the hours he spent tapping away in the confines of his bedroom were no longer the easy target for mockery. He pulled his laptop out of his backpack and, logging into an unprotected Wi-Fi network, he set it down on the windowsill. The screen lit up their faces as the sky darkened. Drone took off his glasses and started typing. He brought up YouTube and typed in the names of the weapons.

  Dentino imitated the actions of the guy in the video. Slow, skillful, formal gestures. Too many words, though, and too many explanations for a weapon that seemed fake, for a gun that even women could handle. There were plenty of videos of blond young women showing plenty of cleavage.

  “Go on, guagliu’, and you tell me, between the machine gun and this chick, what do you like better? Are you looking at the machine gun or the chick?” asked Tucano.

  “I really don’t give a flying fuck about the chick when I’ve got the machine gun in my hands,” said Dentino.

  Some of them wanted to linger over those videos of gun-toting porn stars, others were starting to make fun of Dentino for choosing a gun for girls out of that whole arsenal. Still, he didn’t care: he wasn’t going to come off looking like a fool, with that submachine gun it was impossible to miss the target.

  “What the fuck is this guy saying?”

  The man in the video was speaking Spanish with a thick Mexican accent, but what he was saying was of no importance, those tutorials don’t require language. Arms, body, weapon: that’s all you need to teach a Mexican, an American, a Russian, or an Italian how to shoot.

  Dentino positioned the submachine gun level with his nose, as shown in the video, and let loose a burst that almost sliced the dish antenna off clean. The gunfire from the Uzi resonated with flat reports and, in spite of the fireworks, echoed loudly.

  It was an easy victory. There was a burst of applause from the rest of the paranza. And just then, the lights on the terrace and the streetlamps below switched on. It was nighttime now.

  Pesce Moscio stuck his head into the duffel bags and rummaged, discarding the Berettas and the machine guns, until he finally found what he’d been looking for. A revolver.

  “Look at this, guagliu’. It’s a little cannon, a Smith and Wesson 686, they show one in Breaking Bad, too cool!”

  He hit a bull’s-eye on a spotlight illuminating the terrace with his first shot, leaving their figures a little more shrouded in darkness. Silhouettes of young kids on the rooftops, illuminated by the intermittent explosion of fireworks.

  “That was easy. Try aiming at the antenna, the one that’s behind the satellite dishes,” said Maraja.

  The bullet completely overshot the antenna and lodged in the wall, leaving a gaping hole.

  “Uaaa’, you didn’t even see it!” said Biscottino.

  Pesce Moscio fired four more times; he was having a hard time withstanding the recoil, as if he were trying to keep his grip on the reins of a horse he was riding bareback. The pistol not only recoiled, it moved chaotically in his hand.

  “Adda murì mammà, Dentino, look at this hole I made!”

  Dentino walked over, Lollipop ran his finger around the inside and shards of rubble tumbled out.

  “You recognize this hole? It’s like your mother’s pussy—come ’a puchiacca ’e mammeta.”

  “Shut up, you bastard … piece-of-shit purse snatcher.”

  Dentino let fly with a resounding smack to Lollipop’s cheek, and in turn he put up both fists as if preparing to fight. He threw a right, but Dentino grabbed him by the wrist and they both fell to the terrace floor. “Hey, hey,” everyone started shouting. Those two needed to stop, and immediately. They’d gone to all this trouble to find two parties and a band, they’d spent a small fortune on fireworks, and now they had to waste precious time separating these two assholes. A super-high white fountain firework burst up from below. A spectacular detonation that lit up the terrace and the whole paranza.

  The two of them rolling on the terrace looked up, rapt for a moment, staring at the faces lit by the glare, like the dead by candlelight. Then darkness returned. Order had been restored.

  They went back to the gym bags and then, finally, the time came for the AK-47s—the Kalashnikovs.

  They picked up the Kalashnikovs, handing them around like sacred instruments, caressing them. “Guagliu’, allow me to introduce his majesty, the Kalash,” said Maraja, wrapping his arms around it.

  All of them wanted to touch it, all of them wanted to try shooting it, but there were only three: Nicolas took one, Dentino another, and Briato’ took the third.

  “Guagliu’, this thing is straight out of Call of Duty,” said Briato’ as he covered his ears with the absurd earmuffs.

  They loaded while Drone held the computer high in the air as if he were carrying a pizza on a tray, to let it get a better online connection, and show everyone the video of Lord of War he’d selected. First they watched Nicolas Cage shoot, and then Rambo.

  They were ready: ready, set, and they were off. Nicolas and Dentino let loose with bursts of bullets, while Briato’ had his weapon set to single fire, so it emitted just a series of flat cracks. The targets they were having difficulty hitting till then had suddenly all been centered. They literally pruned the antennas lining the roof and tore to pieces the dish antennas that hung there, like ears dangling from a strip of cartilage. “Ua’, ’o Kalash,” Dentino shouted. And all around them the branches fell from their pruning, so thick that in many cases they had to retreat, take shelter.

  They laughed in gasping hiccoughs. They turned their backs to the roofs, in a movement out of a military procession that, random though it was, looked as if it had been perfectly synchronized. And they looked up from their toys all at the same instant, taking in an overweight cat busily rubbing against a sheet that no one had bothered to take down. Three bursts of gunfire that seemed like a single sweeping gust of power. The cat exploded as if it had been detonated from within. The fur tore off clean, as if skinned alive, and stuck to the sheet, which had miraculously remained pinned to the line. The cranium, however, vanished. Pulverized, or perhaps it had bounced away and now lay in the middle of the street. All the rest of it, a compact,
steaming, reddish mass, occupied a corner of the terrace. Munnezza. Garbage

  They were in a state of ecstasy and they didn’t even notice that someone was calling them from down in the vicolo.

  “’O Marajaaaaaa, ’o Dentììììì.”

  It was Dumbo, a friend of Dentino’s, and Nicolas’s brother, Christian. In spite of the fact that there was a sharp age difference between the two, they spent lots of time together. And they were also taking judo lessons together. Christian had an orange belt, while Dumbo was still stuck at yellow belt. Dumbo liked to take Christian places on his scooter, buy him a drink or an ice cream. But he especially liked talking with him because he didn’t have to think too hard: he was a guy who was basically a little abbonatiello, Dumbo, none too swift on the uptake.

  “’O Maraja, ’o Dentììììì,” they called them again.

  Then, without a response or permission, they came upstairs.

  “Guagliu’, we brought a selfie stick…”

  Nicolas was annoyed. He didn’t want his brother taking part in the life of the paranza.

  “Dumbo, where did you get my brother?”

  “For real, he was wandering around like a lunatic trying to find you. I ran into him and told him that I knew where you were, on an apartment house roof, but why?”

  “Nothing, just curious.”

  Nicolas was still constructing his paranza, it wasn’t a finished product yet. They still didn’t command respect, they still didn’t know how to shoot, it wasn’t time yet for Christian to be sticking his nose in his business. He was worried his younger brother might start boasting, shooting his mouth off. And for now it was better if no one knew anything. He needed to be the one who decided what to tell Christian, and therefore control what he could know and tell others. So far that had worked.

  Dentino never hid anything from Dumbo. Ever. Which meant he knew that they were shooting. But Nicolas didn’t like it. Only the paranza was supposed to know the paranza’s business. If they did something, it was them and no one other than them. The people who were supposed to be on that rooftop terrace were there, and the people who weren’t supposed to be there weren’t. Period. These were the rules.