He thought about that while they offered to let Dumbo shoot and he turned down the offer: “No, no, these aren’t things that concern me.”
But Christian started rummaging in one of the two bags and grabbed a rifle. A second later and Nicolas was all over him. He was lifted off the ground and entrusted to Dumbo, who was now going to take him away, just as he had brought him—him and the selfie stick. Christian knew his brother well; when he had that look on his face there was nothing to be done. And so, without complaints or whining, he swiftly trotted after Dumbo and headed down the stairs, dragging the selfie stick with them as they went.
The rifle that Christian had pulled out was an old Mauser, a Kar98k, and Nicolas recognized it immediately: “Fuck … a Karabiner. My brother knows his guns.”
Who could say what war this unbeatable German rifle had seen use in: in the 1940s it was the finest precision weapon around, but now it looked like an old piece of junk. It must have come from Eastern Europe, there was a Serbian decal on the butt.
“But what the hell is it?” asked Biscottino. “St. Joseph’s staff?”
Maraja, though, loved that rifle. He gazed upon it raptly and ran his finger along the firing mechanism.
“What the fuck do you know about guns, this rifle is totally awesome. We need to know how to use these weapons, too,” he said, addressing the paranza with the tone of an ill-intentioned trainer.
He lifted his finger to his nose to get a whiff of the good aroma of gun oil, then he looked around; the fireworks in the vicolo below were starting to die out, there wasn’t much time left. If they weren’t covered up by the detonations of the fireworks, they wouldn’t be able to keep firing, even though, really, with all the noise of the night, their gunshots probably wouldn’t scare anyone. Maybe someone might be alarmed, but still, seriously, no one would ever dream of making anonymous phone calls to alert the police or the carabinieri. Pesce Moscio, though, who’d been keeping his eyes on the time on his cell phone, was prompt in saying: “Maraja, we need to get moving. The fireworks are about to end.”
“Don’t worry” was Nicolas’s response, while with his head tipped back he continued searching for a target and a good vantage point where he could set himself up with his rifle. The terrace they were standing on was very close to the terrace of the apartment house next door. These apartment buildings that shiver from top to bottom when you slam the front door just stand there, like aging giants: they’ve stood through earthquakes, bombing raids. Old palazzi from the years of the Viceroyalty, moldy with decay, constantly the vehicle for the same life-force, where the kids come in and go out with the same identical faces for centuries on end. Amid thousands of monarchist lazzari, bourgeois, and aristocrats, who had climbed and descended these same staircases and crowded these same atriums before them.
At a certain point, Nicolas had a vision: there was a vase he could see in the apartment house across the way. Not on the rooftop terrace, but on a fifth-floor balcony. A typical vase from the Amalfi coast, the mustachioed head of a Turk, with a large proud succulent plant atop it. An ideal target. A target for a sniper.
He needed a vantage point to shoot from, and Nicolas identified a small exterior broom closet, built in violation of code, originally just a sink that had since become, with a little cement and plywood, a small room on the terrace. He climbed onto the roof with just one hand, the other hand occupied with holding tight the heavy German Mauser rifle. Everyone watched him in silence and no one dared to help him. He positioned himself on the small square roof, then aimed the rifle at the Turk’s head on the balcony: the first shot went wide. The detonation was muffled and the recoil was very powerful, but Nicolas managed to control it successfully. He posed like a genuine sniper.
“Ua’, guagliu’,” said Nicolas, “Chris Kyle, I’m Chris Kyle!”
The unanimous response was: “Ua’, seriously though, Maraja, you really are the American Sniper.”
Loading a ramshackle old Mauser like that was no simple matter, but Nicolas liked doing it and the paranza enjoyed watching his sequence of careful, precise gestures. They’d seen the same sliding rotating bolt in all the movies that featured a sniper, and so they remained transfixed, listening to the sounds of metal and wood. Clack … clack … He fired a second shot. No effect. He wanted to make sure the third shot went home at all costs. That ceramic head seemed to him like a gift from heaven, positioned there just so he could show off how good he would be at shooting anyone in the head, just like a real warrior. He squeezed his left eye even more tightly shut and let go with the third shot: there was a tremendous noise, the twang of metal, and an explosion of glass and bones. All together. A tremendous fracas.
This time Maraja was unable to handle the recoil. He’d huddled so tightly over the butt of the rifle; like all green riflemen he believed that it was enough to brace the butt in order to control the entire weapon, and all his muscles and concentration were focused there. Instead, the rifle, like a wild animal, lunged at him: the barrel smacked him in the face, his nose started to bleed, and his cheekbone split open, scratched deeply by the bolt. And since the shot he fired was making him fall over, to keep from toppling he jammed his feet down harder on the little patch of roof, which suddenly collapsed beneath him. Maraja fell and was swallowed up by the little broom closet. He landed on mops, brooms, laundry detergent, heaps of rusted TV antennas, tool chests, and pigeon spikes. The fall made everyone burst out laughing, an automatic instinctive reaction, but one that only lasted a second or two. The last bullet he’d fired had ricocheted off the balcony railing and had hit the plate-glass window dead center, pulverizing it. An old man came out onto the balcony in fright, followed closely by his wife, who glimpsed the heads of the kids on the rooftop of the apartment house across the way.
“What the fuck are you doing? Who are you kids, anyway?”
With great promptness of reflexes, Briato’ grabbed Biscottino under his arms, the way you pick up a child when you bend over to hoist him onto your shoulders. He lifted him into the air, set him down on the apartment house cornice, and said: “Signo’, forgive us. It was this little boy, he threw an M-80, now we’ll swing by and pay.”
“What are you talking about, you’ll swing by and pay? Now I’m calling the cops. Who do you belong to? Who the fuck are you? Figli ’e sfaccimma.” He finished by calling them sons of filth.
Briato’ tried to keep the two old people out on the balcony as long as possible, while Nicolas and the others stowed all the weapons and boxes of ammunition back in the gym bags. They moved chaotically, like mice when a human foot steps into a room where the light has just been turned on. Seeing them, no one would have thought of the soldiers of a paranza. What they seemed like actually was a bunch of kids intent on taking to their heels, keeping their heads down to avoid being seen by their mother’s friends, after breaking a window with a recklessly kicked soccer ball. And yet, earlier that same evening, they’d practiced shooting military-grade weaponry and they’d done it with all the curiosity and naïveté of children. Weapons are always thought of as tools to be handled by adults, but the younger the hand that works the hammer, the ammunition clip, the barrel, the more efficient the rifle, the machine gun, the pistol, and even the hand grenade. A weapon is efficient when it becomes an extension of the human body. Not an instrument of defense, but a finger, an arm, a cock, an ear. Weapons are made for young people, for children. It’s a truth that applies at any latitude around the world.
Briato’ did everything he could think of to keep the old people occupied. He dreamed up stories: “But no, we’re guests here, we belong to the signora who lives on the second floor.”
“And what’s her name?”
“Signora Natalia, she just turned ninety. We threw a party for her.”
“And what the fuck do I care about that? Call your parents, go on. You’ve shattered my whole picture window.”
Briato’ was trying to slow them down, to delay them, though he had absolutely no intention of
paying for the window. The paranza had already spent too much money on the fireworks. They had money, sure, and plenty of it, considering that they were just kids, but even a penny spent on someone else instead of themselves was money wasted.
While Briato’ was detaining them on the balcony and the paranza was gathering up the shells scattered across the terrace, filled with fear that someone might show up to confiscate their weapons, there was just a single thought in Maraja’s head: to make up for the ridiculous showing he’d made by hurting himself with the rifle’s recoil. He could have been proud, if the injury had been received in a firefight or from the explosion of a rifle, anything that was out of his control. Instead, he’d hurt himself because he hadn’t known how to manage his weapon. Like a greenhorn, a rank beginner.
As soon as the old man put on his glasses to dial the three digits of the Italian emergency number, 113, on his cell phone, Briato’ called out: “No, no, you don’t have to call the cops, we’ll come over right now and bring you the money.” And with those words, they all shot away down the stairs.
They galloped down to the motor scooters they’d hidden in the atrium. On the street, they found all the stacks of burned cardboard remnants of the fireworks. Meanwhile, the party was still under way. There were also all the guests from the first communion and all the children and grandchildren of Signora Natalia. Briato’ was recognized: “Young man, young man, hold on a second. Let us thank you.”
They’d heard that it was Briato’ who’d paid, so generously underwriting this great spectacle. They wanted to thank him, in spite of the fact that they understood the underlying motive, though not the military motive—they couldn’t even begin to imagine that—but they had figured out that this was a group of the System that wanted to win their benevolence. Thanking them was the right thing to do.
At first, Briato’ tried to avoid the process, but then he realized he had no alternative: old people were insisting, and so in the end he let them hug him and kiss him. He did his best to remain as discreet and understated as possible, and just kept saying: “It’s really nothing, I didn’t do a thing, it’s all okay, it was a pleasure for me.”
People thought it was a gesture of benevolence on the part of a new group that was emerging into the limelight, and they wanted to give their blessings to that group. But he had two different, simultaneous fears. One fear devoured the other. Too much attention, attracting attention in a vicolo where he was not in charge, was a fear that paled in comparison with the fear of pissing off Nicolas, because it had been his idea to sponsor the fireworks show. In spite of it all, though, he was pleased, pleased that anyone recognized him for anything. And so he tried to get his motor scooter started, pretending that the spark plug had gone bad, but the truth was that he wasn’t really pushing down hard enough with his thumb on the starter button.
Then a gesture from the paranza forced him to speed things up.
“Jamm’ bello, Briato’…”
Everyone was following Nicolas, though they had no idea where, they tried to catch up with him, riding their scooters next to his and asking why he didn’t clean the wound that was bleeding on his face. Most of all, they were afraid that the decision to travel around town with those weapons in the duffel bags might not be a safe one. And it certainly wasn’t a safe decision: still, though, it made them feel they were ready for a war. Any war you cared to name.
TRAINING
The road surface was uneven, potholes everywhere: they sprout in the dozens after every rainstorm, like mushrooms. Once they’d passed Garibaldi Station and turned into Via Ferraris, the paranza was forced to slow down.
Nicolas was going to see a young Eritrean woman who lived in Gianturco. She was the sister of the woman who helped his mother keep house. Her name was Aza, she was a little over thirty, but she looked fifty, easily. She lived in the apartment of a woman with Alzheimer’s as a caregiver. In that part of town, even the Ukrainian women wouldn’t come anymore.
Nicolas had a hunch that this could be the perfect hiding place for the paranza’s arsenal. But he said nothing to the others. This wasn’t the moment. Everyone else followed his Beverly. Some of them had asked him, along the way, what they were going to be doing there. But once their first few questions went unanswered, they’d realized this wasn’t the time for it, that they needed to follow and say nothing. When they pulled up in front of the apartment house, Nicolas parked his scooter and, when the others circled around him, revving and slamming on their brakes, unsure whether to stop or continue, he said: “This is our new arsenal,” and he pointed to the front door.
“Who is it, though?” asked Pesce Moscio. Nicolas shot him a glare so seething with rage that Pesce Moscio sensed that if he held his gaze, he’d be tempting fate.
Dentino hopped off the bike behind him and stepped between the two of them, putting an end to the matter. “I don’t care who it is. All I need to know is that ’o Maraja considers this a safe house: if he thinks it’s safe, then we think it’s safe, too.”
Pesce Moscio nodded, and so did the rest of them.
The building was one of those nondescript, sixties-era structures that blended into the larger cityscape. The street was lined with so many scooters that the five of the paranza were hardly noticeable. That’s why Maraja had made up his mind to hide their weapons here: they could show up at any hour of the day or night without ever being noticed, and what’s more, he’d promised Aza that with them around, the Gypsies were bound to steer clear. It wasn’t true; the inhabitants of the Roma camp didn’t even know who these brash young kids were, bold enough to promise protection in a quarter that already had a boss.
Nicolas and Dentino rang the buzzer and went up to the sixth floor.
Aza was waiting for them at the door. When she saw Nicolas, she grew alarmed: “Hey, what did you do to your face?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
They walked into a completely dark apartment, redolent of the smells of berbere spices and mothballs.
“È permesso?” called Nicolas, the ritual call of politeness when you enter a home. “Can we come in?”
“Keep your voice down, the signora is sleeping…”
He didn’t detect in that apartment the odor that he was expecting, the distinctive smell of an old person’s home; even though he was moving too quickly to focus on details, he still needed to understand. The aroma of Eritrean food did suggest a less-than-reassuring thought: by now, Aza was running the signora’s home as if it were her own, the old woman might be about to die, which meant that the place would soon fill up with family members, it would be occupied by the staff of the funeral parlor.
“And how is the signora?”
“God willing, she’s doing well,” Aza replied.
“Sure, but what does the doctor have to say about it? Is she still healthy, will she go on living?”
“That’s up to God Almighty…”
“Let’s leave God Almighty out of it, what does the doctor have to say?”
“He says that her body is healthy, but her mind is pretty much gone.”
“Fine, good to hear. So the signora will go on living for another hundred years.”
Aza, who had already received instructions from Nicolas, pointed to a high nook. Ever since the disease had devoured her brain, decades ago, the old woman had never looked there or put a hand to it. They got out a stepladder and shoved the bags in the back of the nook, covering them with shepherds from a manger scene, wrapped in heavy cloth, followed by Christmas ornaments and boxes of pictures.
“Don’t break anything,” said Aza.
“Even if I break it, it strikes me that the signora isn’t going to be using any of this stuff…”
“Just don’t you break anything.”
Before climbing down, he grabbed three pistols from one of the gym bags and a sack of bullets from the other.
“Don’t do these things in front of me, I don’t want to know anything…” she murmured, her eyes downcast.
&nb
sp; “And in fact you know nothing, Aza. Now, when we need to come by, I’ll tell you that we’re bringing groceries for the signora and you tell us what time to come. We’ll show up, get what we need, and leave. If anyone I send causes you any kind of trouble, you’ve got my number and you just text me, telling me what kind of problems they’ve caused you. Agreed?”
Aza tied back her drab curls with a scrunchie and went into the kitchen without a word. Nicolas repeated the question—“Agreed?!”—this time in a more peremptory tone of voice. She ran water over a kitchen towel and, still without speaking, walked up to him and ran it over his face. Nicolas yanked his head away in annoyance; he’d forgotten his wound, the cut cheekbone and the bloody nose. Aza stood there staring him in the eye, with the stained rag in her hand. He touched his nose, looked at his fingers, then let her clean him off.
“Every time we come, you’ll be given a present,” he promised, but she seemed to pay no attention.
She pulled open the cabinet door under the kitchen sink and got out a bottle of alcohol. “I’ll put on some of this. It needs to be disinfected.” She was very familiar with wounds, an expertise she’d gathered at home in Eritrea, and which she’d capitalized on here, caring for the wounds and sores of old people. Nicolas didn’t expect it; for that matter, he didn’t expect the comment: “Your nose isn’t broken, it’s just a little dinged up.”
He ventured a thank-you, but it seemed like too little somehow. And so he added a more heartfelt, more Neapolitan “Grazie assai.”
Aza shot him a smile that lit up her careworn face.
Nicolas stuck two pistols behind his back and gave one to Dentino. Then he said farewell to Aza, but only after giving her a hundred euros, which she tucked quickly into the pocket of her jeans before going back to the sink, where she rinsed the blood-reddened kitchen towel.
The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples Page 22