The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “Don Vittorio, if you give me your shit, I’ll force it onto every market!”

  “You’re going to force it onto the markets? Then you’re not ’o Maraja, now you’ve become the wizard Harry Potter? Harry Potter ’o mago? Or maybe you’re just one of San Gennaro’s cousins?”

  “Nisciuna magia, nisciuno miracolo. Noi amm’ ’a fà come Google.” No magic, no miracles. We need to do just like Google.

  The boss squinted hard, trying to follow the line of reasoning.

  “Don Vitto’, why do you think everyone uses Google?”

  “Che ne saccio, boh, perché è bbuono…?” Don Vittorio had no idea: Because it’s good? he ventured.

  “Because it’s good and because it’s free.”

  Arcangelo shot a glance at Cicognone to see if he understood any of it, but he was just standing there with a furrowed brow.

  “Your shit is rotting on the vine, and if we give it out to all the market bosses without markup, they’ll take it.”

  “Maraja, are you trying to use my mouth to give blow jobs?”

  “All right, so ’o Micione buys grass at five thousand a kilo and sells it at seven thousand. In the piazzas he sells it at nine euros a gram. We’ll sell it all at five euros.”

  “Maraja, just stop talking, you’ve spouted enough bullshit…”

  Nicolas went on, staring at him: “The piazzas don’t need to stop selling what ’o Micione gives them. They just need to sell our shit, too. Your shit, Arcangelo, is good, it’s prime … but the quality alone isn’t enough.”

  What Nicolas was saying was starting to penetrate, and now Don Vittorio had lowered his hand and was starting to listen carefully, as was Cicognone.

  “I know who I want to fuck, the same as you do.”

  “Okay, but what do we get out of it?”

  “Nothing, Don Vitto’, exactly like Google.”

  “Nothing,” Vittorio Grimaldi repeated, uttering that word, which seemed like a sharp blade to him.

  “Nothing. The shit you have only needs to cover expenses. First we become Google and then, when everyone comes looking to buy from us, that’s when we screw them. And we set our own prices.”

  “They’ll all think that the shit is no good. The market bosses will assume we’re trying to poison them.”

  “No, they’ll try it and they’ll understand. You’ve got to give us cocaine, too, Don Vitto’, not just grass and hash…”

  “Grass and hash, too?”

  “That’s right, grass and hash, too. You need to sell it at forty euros.”

  “Well, fuck me sideways, you know that I buy it for fifty thousand euros a kilo?”

  “And ’o Micione sells it at fifty-five euros to the market bosses, who turn it around at ninety euros a gram, and when it’s good shit, not when it’s cut with tooth powder…”

  “That means we’re really giving it away.”

  “As soon as they start coming to us, we’ll raise the price nice and slow, and we’ll get it up to ninety, to a hundred. And we’ll start moving it ouside Naples, too.”

  “Ha, ha.” L’Arcangelo laughed loud and long. “We’ll take it to America.”

  “Why not, Don Vitto’, I’m not stopping in this city.”

  Now Cicognone was standing behind L’Arcangelo, and a smile had appeared on the boss’s face.

  “You want to command, don’t you?”

  “I already command.”

  “Congratulations, young commandant. But did you know that no one can trust you?”

  “Don’t make me drink piss, Don Vitto’, just to prove that you can trust me. I won’t drink piss.”

  “What piss are you talking about? You shithead. I’ve never seen a boss who hasn’t done a piece of work. Let me give you some advice, Maraja: the first person who bothers you, take and shoot him in the head. All alone, though.”

  Now it was Nicolas who was closely attending to every word out of Don Vittorio’s mouth. He objected: “Hey, but if I’m alone, no one can see it.”

  “So much the better. People will hear about it, and they’ll quake in their shoes. And remember, before you do a piece of work, never have anything to eat, because if you get shot in the gut, it’ll go straight to gangrene. You need to wear latex gloves, a jumpsuit, and shoes. Then you have to throw it all away. Got it?”

  Nicolas nodded his head in approval, and he was laughing.

  “All right, then, let’s celebrate. Cicogno’, get the bubbly.”

  They drank a toast to their agreement with a bottle of Moët & Chandon. They clinked glasses but their thoughts were far away. Maraja was dreaming of conquering Naples, and L’Arcangelo was dreaming of escaping the cage and taking to his wings again.

  Before leaving, Nicolas reached into his backpack and pulled out his acquisition: “Don Vitto’, what do you say, will the Professoressa like it?”

  In the palm of his hand, a little boy was carrying a garland of roses.

  “Very nice, this little muccusiello, this snotnose, an excellent choice.”

  While he was already climbing down through the trapdoor, he heard Cicognone’s voice: “’O Maraja?”

  “Eh?”

  “Si’ ’o ras.” You’re the ras, the boss.

  From the floor below, Maraja pierced him with eyes that looked like a pair of black needles and said: “’O ssaccio!” I know it!

  WALTER WHITE

  Nothing was working. It happened sometimes that the kids couldn’t even get close to whoever was running the market, the piazza. Lollipop was the one who had it worst of all. They dragged him into a basso with the excuse that in there they could have a better discussion of the marijuana that the paranza had to sell, and then they’d cold-cocked him, knocked him out with an elbow to the nose. He’d reawakened two hours later, tied to a chair in a windowless room. He didn’t know if it was day or night, if he was still in Forcella or in some tumbledown farmhouse in the countryside. He tried to shout but his voice echoed against the walls and, when he struggled to calm down and pick up any sound that might allow him to understand where he’d wound up, all he heard was the sound of water running through pipes. The next day, they freed him and he discovered that he’d spent a whole night in the basso that he’d entered in the first place. “Get the fuck out of here, guaglioncello, and tell your boyfriends to do the same.” The others had been threatened, some of them had looked down the barrel of a magnum, Briato’ had been chased by three motor scooters, Biscottino had taken a kick to the ribs and two days later taking a deep breath still burned his lungs. They’d treated them like children who’d dreamed they were camorristi.

  The men who’d been managing the markets ever since the days of Cutolo had simply laughed Nicolas and his men in the face. They got their shit directly from Micione, and they had Roipnol to protect them. They didn’t even want to talk about the grass and the heroin that their paranza had to offer. What were all these new ideas? Who did they think they were? Dictating their own rules to men who’d been born before these little assholes’ parents?

  “Maraja, not a fucking thing is stirring here. Let’s lay these motherfuckers out.” At the New Maharaja, at the lair, on their motor scooters, Nicolas heard the same demand repeated every time a market rejected their shit. And by now they had lots and lots of shit. Since that night at the private dining room, two weeks had passed and they still hadn’t obtained anything. Nicolas had procured some extra-large Samsonites to put the money in, but they still lay empty on the bed in the lair. Going to the arsenal, getting out ten Uzis, and mowing down those bastards who refused to pay was a thought that had occurred fleetingly to Nicolas quite often, but then he’d stifled the thought and made the paranza swear on their own blood that no one would react with gunfire. They couldn’t afford open warfare. Not yet, anyway. They’d find themselves up against Roipnol, Micione, and the Capelloni. All at once. No, he needed to act surgically, strike one to educate them all, just like that phrase he’d put on his Instagram page. And then there were those words of
L’Arcangelo’s: “I’ve never seen a commander who’s never done a piece of work”—uttered to deride him, to humiliate him, like the first time in his apartment when he’d made him strip naked. It was true, he still hadn’t laid someone out dead on the pavement, but what had annoyed him most was the tone. That man, a prisoner in his nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, had given everything to him and to his paranza—weapons, drugs, trust, practically without batting an eye—but he’d never wearied of lashing him with his words every time he thought it necessary. The respect that Nicolas had required and received from his paranza now demanded a baptism of blood.

  The one who deserved the lesson was the one who’d had the oldest subcontract. Taking him down, Nicolas was convinced, would be like deleting a piece of history. Then his paranza would arrange to write another piece of history to take its place, with new rules, with new men. No more skimming off the top of the sales, everything they earned needed to go straight into their pockets.

  Mellone was a creature of habit. He ran his market, his piazza, the way a diligent office clerk punches in and punches out, only he didn’t sit at a desk for eight hours a day because he preferred to sit in a bar and chug mojitos, his only vice, the legacy of a short-lived season on the run at other latitudes. He’d instructed the bartender on how to make a perfect mojito—the original recipe, none of those “misguided” cocktails that kids downed nowadays—and when the clock struck five in the afternoon, he stood up, rolled up that day’s copy of Gazzetta dello Sport and tucked it under his arm, and went home, to an apartment five hundred yards away. He walked at a steady pace, then he’d go downstairs to the underground garage to make sure the cats had gobbled up every last one of the meaty chunks that he put out every morning when he left for the bar, outside the roll-up metal door of his parking unit. A boring, vaguely pathetic life that followed the rutted grooves Mellone had carved out so many years before.

  Nicolas knew this routine, everyone knew it. He knew how many ice cubes Mellone took in his mojito: five, all identical; which pages of Gazzetta dello Sport he liked to read first: the international championships; and which cats he was feeding at the moment: a couple of brown short-hairs, who’d escaped from who knows where.

  He’d told the paranza that they could take that day off, treat it as a well-earned break, do whatever they felt like, as long as they stayed away from the piazzas for a while—he needed to teach someone a lesson. He needed peace and quiet to do his work. He’d gone on Amazon and ordered himself a cheap outfit, a Breaking Bad costume. Hazmat jumpsuit, gloves, gas mask, and even a fake beard, which he’d immediately thrown away. He’d asked Dentino to bring him a pair of steel-toed boots, which no one was wearing on the construction site anyway. He’d jammed all these items into his school backpack, and then he’d hidden behind one of the cement pillars lining the lane running along in front of the underground garages in Mellone’s apartment house. It was a perfect location because no one, except for Mellone, would have ventured down there. His garage was the last one in the row. Nicolas took off his clothes and dressed up as Walter White. Calmly, with thorough precision, plucking away the wrinkles in the latex gloves so they clung tight to his skin, smooth as flesh. The yellow hazmat jumpsuit fit him perfectly and, even though it was little more than a Carnival costume, the fabric seemed very durable. This needed to be a straightforward execution, without complications, reliably rapid and leaving no traces, at least not on his body. He pulled the hood over his head, with the gas mask tilted up onto his forehead, ready to be pulled down when needed. The two cartridges on either side of the gas mask protruded from the top of his head like Mickey Mouse ears. He hunkered down, resting his back against the pillar, gun in hand. With all the weapons he had available to him, he’d still chosen the Francotte: that was the gun he wanted for his first time. There was always the danger it might jam, but somehow he knew it wouldn’t. The serenity with which he’d donned his outfit was now dripping down his back, down his arms, in rivulets of sweat. He did his best to get control of his increasingly rapid respiration, but none of his efforts served the purpose, because with every deep breath he took, different parts of his body reminded him that something could go wrong. A patch of sweat was spreading over the bluish gloves. What if he lost his grip on the now-slippery Francotte and dropped it? The crotch of the jumpsuit, which at first had seemed to fit him comfortably, now pressed tight against his balls. What if it cramped him just as he was striding toward Mellone? His knees were trembling. Yes, they were definitely trembling. And if he tried to control them, his lungs quit working properly. He upbraided himself, accusing himself of wetting his pants: What if the others could see him dressed up like that, and with a beet-red face? What would happen then? No more paranza, but as many individual paranzas as there were now members of this one.

  At 5:15 p.m. a heavy footstep on the ramp announced the arrival of Mellone. Perfectly punctual. Nicolas had reckoned that it would take him twenty-seven steps to reach the garage door. He counted twenty-five, pulled down the gas mask, and stepped out with his pistol leveled. His lenses fogged up for a second. Just a second, but then he was able to focus on his target, the bald pate of Mellone. Now Nicolas caught a glimpse of that enormous Adam’s apple, bobbing up and down in surprise, and he wondered just what it would sound like to put a couple of bullets right through the middle of it.

  When they found him sprawled on the cement in front of that garage, word would spread that Mellone had stopped talking, once and for all. That there was someone else doing the talking now. Mellone didn’t even have the time to wonder what the hell that alien creature was before Nicolas had pulled the trigger twice, in rapid succession. He’d fired without thinking, focusing only on the pressure of his fingers. His legs were still trembling, but he’d made up his mind to ignore them. The bullets lodged exactly where he’d aimed them, and the terrifying echo of the detonation was followed by the bursting of the Adam’s apple. Pufff. Puff. Like the sound of a tire springing a leak. Nicolas grabbed his backpack and hustled out of there without even checking to make sure the man was dead. But dead he certainly was, because the news spread to everywhere and everyone, without even needing to write it in a group chat.

  * * *

  “Maraja, everyone in the gym was talking only and exclusively about ’o Mellone’s murder.”

  That was the piece of news that had flown through the city, passed along by word of mouth. The day after Mellone’s execution, they’d arranged to meet at the New Maharaja and Lollipop had walked straight over to Nicolas. Maraja was dancing by himself, and that phrase, whispered into his ear, resonated in his head for a moment, with all the intensity of the two bullets lodged in o’ Mellone’s Adam’s apple. Pufff. Puff.

  “Nice!” he replied, and headed for the center of the dance floor, but Lollipop blocked his way.

  “But they all talk about it the wrong way, as if Roipnol pulled it off. A punishment because he’d started doing business with us. They turned it around, the killing, and that’s how they’re making it look.”

  Maraja had frozen in place and that phrase, too, had echoed in his head, only now the sound that he heard was an unpleasant one. The sound of legs trembling. He hadn’t managed to put his signature on that murder because the paranza that he’d founded still didn’t know how to lodge a claim of responsibility for its ambushes. So now just anyone could lay claim to that murder. He felt inadequate, he felt like a child. Nothing of the sort had happened for some time now.

  He dragged Lollipop into the private dining room, where Drago’ and Dentino were already sitting. Maraja interrogated them with a glance and they confirmed that the news had reached them, too, in that form, and there was more. They had received messages from a bunch of people who were working with the paranza, and they were all scared silly. “We aren’t all going to wind up like ’o Mellone, are we?” they wrote.

  “Me! That was me!” he felt like telling them all. “I did that piece of work!” But he held back.

  In no mo
re than twenty-four hours Micione and Roipnol had succeeded in crushing Maraja’s guagliuncelli with the weight of their history.

  Maraja let himself flop heavily down onto the throne that he’d used to assign the markets to his boys. He’d told Oscar that he was going to keep it there, and that if he wanted, he was free to go buy another one for parties. He stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out a very thin packet of aluminum foil. Pink cocaine. He snorted it, the whole package. He didn’t wrinkle his nose, he didn’t run his fingers over his nostrils. It was a painkiller.

  TANKER TRUCK

  On the chat, a single word appeared. From Nicolas.

  Maraja

  Lair.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, the paranza’s free time. These were hours to spend curled up with their girls on a sofa while Mammà and Papà were doing the week’s grocery shopping, hours to use pinning down the memories of the week that was ending. Drone had developed a Snapchat addiction. After giving them a brief lesson, he’d gotten the rest of the paranzini hooked too, and now they bombarded one another with blurry, jittery mini-videos in which there were just fleeting glimpses of lines of cocaine and snippets of panties, exhaust pipes and cartridges arrayed up on a table. A collage edited into rapid sequences that lasted only the seconds necessary to visualize and then, poof, vanished into the wind.

  “Lair,” Nicolas repeated two minutes later.

  And all of them were in the apartment on Via dei Carbonari in no more than twenty minutes, because even when they were on their own fucking time, they could only stray a certain distance, they had to stay close enough to make it possible to bring the paranza together on a moment’s notice.

  Nicolas was waiting for them all, perched atop the television set, there was no way to crush that thing, even if Briato’ had jumped up and down on it, and in the meantime he was texting back and forth with Letizia. He hadn’t seen her in a week, and as usual she was pissed off. She’d made him promise to take her out for a cruise, just the two of them, and then maybe eat in a restaurant overlooking the water.