The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  The captain of the boat had decided that those youngsters were perfect specimens of the Neapolitan rich kids who jammed Instagram full of overblown images. Spoiled kids with more money than they knew how to spend. He soon changed his mind, when they showed up as a group. And he saw things clearly when, now out on the open water, at a gesture from the one who was clearly their leader, they all pulled out their pistols and started riddling the water with bullets. They were shooting at dolphins. Their girlfriends had tried to object: “Sono così bellilli!” They’re so cute! they’d cried in dialect. But it was clear that they were proud of their boyfriends, who could afford to shoot at whomever they pleased, even those magnificent creatures. The captain had witnessed the whole scene from start to finish, and when he saw the dolphins, unharmed, knifing away through the water reddened only by the imminent sunset, he was uninterested in concealing his relief. “Captain,” the tallest one asked him as he was jamming his gun back down his pants, “can you eat dolphin the way you eat tuna?”

  On the main roofed deck, garlands and festoons of fake flowers were intertwined with satin ribbons. On the tables, there were still bunches of yellow and pink roses from the previous event. Pesce Moscio sat at one of the tables and performed the gesture of adjusting his tie, though he wore none, then he spread both hands out on the tablecloth and banged his right palm against the tabletop to draw the staff’s attention. One of the waiters came over and filled his flute with champagne. Dentino and Biscottino, the only ones who hadn’t brought a date, emulated him at the same table. Biscottino tried to act like quite the bon viveur, but after tossing back that glass of bubbly he squinted his eyes and then opened his mouth, smacking his lips.

  The waiters asked if they could start serving dinner, and the three sitting at the table looked for Nicolas, who was leaning against the ship’s railing, with Letizia at his side.

  “Should we get started?” Pesce Moscio shouted in his direction.

  “Let the party begin!” said Drago’, both hands held up like a megaphone. And Nicolas gave his approval. There was then a general rush for the tables, one couple at each. But once they sat down, they felt lonely, isolated. That evening of all times, when they were all there together, on the salt water of the bay, in the dying light that made the distances incandescent and things closer to hand heartbreaking. They tried calling out to each other, from one table to another: “Hey, Mr. Stavodicendo, how’s it going down there?”

  “Ah, Dotto’, Tuca’, take it easy with all that sciampagna!” saying “champagne” as if it were written and pronounced like an Italian word. Then they all got up and moved to two tables next to each other. Pesce Moscio stuck a yellow rose behind his ear and declared that they were all ready for the dishes they’d ordered now. Let the meal begin. The waiter served the salmon.

  “Try to behave like gentlemen,” Nicolas advised them, poking his head into the dining room, “because now you really have become gentlemen,” and then he went back out onto the deck with Letizia.

  She snuggled close to him as they watched Mount Vesuvius shrink into the distance, veiled with evening mist. The whole city lit up in front of them. Just behind them, Ischia was entirely shrouded in the soft dark shape of Mount Epomeo.

  Nicolas took Letizia by the hand and led her to the stern of the boat. He was walking behind her now, both arms around her, and she, leaning against the railing, slid into his arms, pressed against him not without a whiff of gentle lust: just enough that Nicolas was able to read a request into it. Nicolas increased the pressure because he felt sure that’s what she wanted. “Viene cu mme,” he whispered into her ear—come with me—as the others shouted and sang along with the songs pouring out of the speakers.

  They found a private room belowdecks, with a velvet sofa, and over it a porthole through which came the last light of day. Letizia sat down right on the edge of the sofa and Nicolas kissed her long and hard and ran his hands under her dress, in search of an easy point of access.

  “Let’s do it right this time,” Letizia said, looking him in the eye. “With our clothes off.”

  Nicolas didn’t know whether he should be worried about that “Let’s do it right this time,” about that sudden and unusual emergence from dialect into proper Italian, or about the simple but imperious request for nudity, because, for that matter, it’s true that as long as they’d been doing it, they’d always made love half-dressed. Lots of other times Letizia had asked him if they could be alone, really alone, alone the whole night through, and it had never happened. This was the right opportunity. She pushed him away gently and unbuttoned his shirt.

  “I want to look at you,” she told him, and he unbuckled his belt, and as he was fiddling around with getting his pants off, he echoed the sentiment: “And I want to look at you.” They lay down naked on the green velvet and explored each other with unaccustomed patience. Letizia caressed his sex and guided Nicolas’s hand between her legs, and she had to apply determined pressure to make sure his hand stayed there and the fingers started moving. “Come to me,” she said at last, and guided him into her. “Gently, gently, gently,” she repeated, and he obeyed.

  “You’re my guy,” Letizia whispered to him, and he especially liked the word she had chosen to use, maschio, which is related to both macho and masculine, not uomo, the more standard word for man: there are already too many uomini, but far too few maschi. As if he’d been summoned by some sweet and gentle inner ghost, he realized for the first time that she was a woman and that he was inside that woman, both of them mingled in the gentle light that was filling with stars inside the porthole.

  When they came back out onto the deck, the ship had just passed the high rock cliffs of Sorrento and was steering for Naples. The kids were all at the bow.

  “Let’s drink to us,” shouted Drago’, “and to our city—che è la cchiù bella d’ ’o munno.” The most beautiful city on earth.

  They turned toward one of the two waiters, who was sitting, yawning, behind the glass, and went on: “Oinè, wake up! This the most beautiful city on earth, capito? And to hell with anyone who says anything bad about it!”

  “Sputtanatoli di merda,” said Drone with a vicious glare, accusing him of somehow deriding his beloved Naples. Meanwhile, the waiter got to his feet, trying to appeal to his colleague for help, as if to say: “What did we do wrong?”

  “I’d never leave this place,” said Nicolas, all gooey with his love for Letizia.

  Drago’ leaned over the railing and windmilled his right arm, as if he were about to throw a weight, a grenade, as far as he could, toward dry land.

  “I see them, those tremendous fuckers, the ones who go to Rome, to Milan, the ones who look down on us, spit on us. I see them clearly, those ‘Naples spitters,’ those sputtanapoli!” he shouted. “And you know what I say to them? They have to die. All the sputtanapli have to die.”

  They all held their champagne flutes high and then tossed them into the waves. They danced until dawn, as the ship was pulling into port, and the paranzini and their girlfriends swore eternal faithfulness, in a collective exchange of wedding vows, in a ceremony of lifelong loyalty.

  * * *

  The days that followed were a long process of emerging from the coddled atmosphere they’d settled into on the cruise. This time each of them, in his own way, did his best to prolong as far as possible the honeymoon that had begun on the waters of the Bay of Naples.

  Nicolas was heading over to Letizia’s when the paranza’s chat lit up on his phone. They were telling him to hurry over to Cardarelli Hospital, third floor, Pavilion A, with no more information than that. He texted Letizia to cancel their date. Then, immediately after that, another text: “I love you to the sun and the stars.” And he reversed direction.

  Waiting for him on the steps outside Cardarelli Hospital were Drago’, Dentino, and Lollipop. They were passing around an unlit joint, to get the smell in their noses and the taste on the tips of their tongues, indifferent to the glances of relatives and nurses.
They had the look on their faces of someone who has something to say but doesn’t know where to begin.

  “What the fuck happened?” asked Nicolas, and beckoned for the joint. They threw their arms wide and pointed to an indeterminate point two floors higher up.

  “They got injured. Briato’ and Pesce Moscio,” said Drago’.

  Nicolas exploded; the sense of peace that the cruise instilled in him had already evaporated. He tossed the joint into the bushes lining the staircase and was tensing his legs to lash out at a lightpost with a kick when he got control of himself. His rage, too, had evaporated: what remained was Nicolas the opportunist, the one who managed to bring his adversaries over to his way of thinking, the soccer player who managed to catch the goalie off guard. He still hadn’t set his foot back on the ground, and in that position he reminded Dentino of a heron, like the one he’d seen a few years ago while out with his class on a field trip to a WWF wild bird preserve.

  Nicolas finally set his foot down on the step and said: “Guagliu’, let’s go visit the wounded men, and take them their presents.” Uttering the word wounded made him feel that he was at war. And he liked it.

  * * *

  The presents were an old sexy calendar for Briato’ and a jersey autographed by the team captain of S.S.C. Napoli for Pesce Moscio.

  “Guagliu’, what happened?” Nicolas asked again, this time addressing his men who’d been wounded in battle.

  “The Capelloni came into the back room,” Briato’ began. “We were making a bet, we had two scores we were sure of, when ’o White appears and starts staying: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”

  “No, no,” Pesce Moscio interrupted, “the exact words he said were: ‘You’ve laid hands on Roipnol’s gasoline.’ We answered him: ‘We didn’t do a thing, adda murì mammà, what are you talking about?’ At that point, Maraja, they pulled out these metal clubs, and I said to myself, okay, I’m a dead man already. Stavodicendo was hiding in the bathroom. Once he realized the way things were going to turn out, he exited through the window, piece of shit that he is—che omm’ ’e mmerda.”

  The Capelloni had taken Briato’ and Pesce Moscio and broken their legs. Then they’d gone to Borgo Marinari and shattered the plate-glass windows of the restaurant where Stavodicendo’s father worked.

  Briato’ tried to sit up straight, but he collapsed once again on his pillows. “They beat us bloody, I could feel the bones in my broken legs. And then they kept telling us to give ’em the money, give ’em the money, and they were going to town on us, really. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, but I couldn’t feel my face, either, nothing. Then they put us in the car and dropped us off here at Cardarelli.”

  “In the car, I didn’t understand a thing,” said Pesce Moscio, “but ’o White kept saying that he was saving our lives, and that he knows us, and that Roipnol wanted to write our name on the ground, and that…”

  Briato’ interrupted him: “He kept saying the same thing over and over again, that he was saving our asses … and that now we had to start working for him if we were ever able to walk again.”

  “Yes, like fuck,” Nicolas replied. He grabbed the calendar and leaned it against the wall. “Briato’, what month do you like best? April has a nice pair of tits, right? Take a look at Lisella, you’ll see how much better you feel right away.”

  “’O Maraja,” said Briato’, “when I get out of here, I’m going to be lame in one leg.”

  “When you get out of here, you’ll only be stronger.”

  “Stronger, my ass.”

  “Then we’ll get a bionic leg implanted surgically,” said Drago’.

  They joked around a little longer, they harassed a nurse, telling her that with the hands she had on her, they’d even let her insert a catheter, and once she’d left and they were all alone they looked at Maraja to find out what to do next.

  “Amm’ ’a jettà ’n terra a Roipnol,” and he turned the calendar to the month of June. Let’s go lay out Roipnol.

  They all burst out laughing as if it were just yet another joke.

  “Amm’ ’a jettà ’n terra a Roipnol,” Maraja said again. He’d leafed quickly through the calendar until he’d reached November, then he’d admired December for a while, and now he was leafing through the others.

  Dentino laughed again and said: “But that guy never even goes outside.”

  “Maraja, ’o vò capì?” Pesce Moscio piled on, asking Maraja to understand the situation. He was trying to sit up, but his leg darted a stabbing pain every time he moved. “We’re the only ones out on the street,” he went on. “Micione sta int’ ’a gabbia a San Giovanni,” he said, emphasizing the term int’ ’a gabbia, stuck in a cage. “L’Arcangelo is stuck in a cage in Ponticelli, Copacabana is stuck in a cage in Poggioreale, and Roipnol is stuck in a cage in Forcella. We’re out on the street. We just need to split it up among us.”

  “We need to catch him in a cage,” said Maraja. He was starting to connect the dots, Maraja was. The fact that the Capelloni hadn’t killed Briato’ and Pesce Moscio meant that they’d been ordered not to. Micione was fighting for his territory, and three corpses from a single paranza would have caused too much uproar: he already had the police and the carabinieri hot on his trail, he couldn’t afford to attract more attention from them with new bloodbaths. Micione was in no position to kill anyone, and he wouldn’t be for a while now. Here was the opportunity, here was the space that no one else would ever dream of exploiting.

  “Eh, impossible,” said Drago’. “Roipnol’s always assholes and elbows with Carlito’s Way whenever he goes out. And plus, too, he never even goes out. La Culona doesn’t go out much, either, and she always has a bodyguard when she does.”

  “Then we need to bribe Carlito’s Way.”

  “No!” Lollipop interrupted him. “Carlito’s Way won’t betray. Roipnol pays him too much, and now that he’s his butler, Carlito’s Way is even acting like a boss all over Naples.”

  “He doesn’t have to betray.”

  “You’re high,” said Dentino.

  “Even when I’m high, I’m not high. I think straight.”

  “So, let’s hear what the philosopher has to say.”

  “Adda murì mammà, I’ve got the key to open the door to Roipnol’s apartment.”

  “For real?” asked Dentino. “Well, you’re wrong about that, because it’s a steel-reinforced door, and there’s a forest of video cameras.”

  “But I have the real key,” Nicolas went on. He’d slid his arms around Drago’s and Dentino’s shoulders, and he’d maneuvered them over to the two bedridden paranzini, with Lollipop closing the circle. Conspirators.

  He asked in the tone of voice you use to ask a child a super-simple riddle: “Who’s the brother of Carlito’s Way?”

  “Who is it?” said Briato’. “Pisciazziello?”

  “And who’s Pisciazziello best friends with?”

  “Biscottino,” Briato’ answered again.

  “Exactly,” said Maraja. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to go grab Biscottino.”

  I’LL BE GOOD

  Nicolas had everything clear in his mind, as if he’d found the precise equation. It was just a matter of convincing Biscottino, and in order to do that, he’d have to take him out and about, something the two of them had never done before. He made sure he was waiting right outside the school. Biscottino’s mother took him to school every morning, because she wanted to make sure that he got there, safely, to class. She didn’t trust her son’s friends. Since she had to work, though, she couldn’t get there to take him home. As soon as he saw the T-Max, Biscottino elbowed his way through his classmates crowding onto the stairs.

  “Oh, Maraja! Che staje facenno?” What are you doing?

  “Hop on, I’ll take you home.” Biscottino climbed on the back, proudly. The T-Max took off with a screech of rubber, and Biscottino let out a shout, while Nicolas laughed with gusto. After all, he was about to ask a lot of him, better to start out by giving him a tre
at. He chose the longest route. He drove slowly, stopping at traffic lights, easing into curves. He wanted to keep him on the powerful scooter because Biscottino was happy and it would make it easier to talk to him.

  “Biscotti’, everyone’s saying that Mellone was rubbed out because he was with us.”

  “But wasn’t he against us?”

  “Exactly. But that bastard Roipnol—who’s definitely with ’o White and the Capelloni—he’s just now getting the dick that we slid into his ass out, and he’s trying to turn it around and stick it up ours. That bastard! Now it’s up to you to solve this thing.”

  With the word you, he revved up and took off, darted around a car, then another, bumped up onto the sidewalk to maneuver around a truck, and then slowed back down to the minimum speed he’d largely imposed on himself.

  Biscottino’s heart was pounding so powerfully that Nicolas could feel it through his back.

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  “Well, for instance, who is your best buddy?”

  “Pisciazziello?… You mean Teletabbi?”

  “Pisciazziello, exactly. And Pisciazziello’s brother is Roipnol’s bodyguard.”

  The T-Max screeched to a halt. Biscottino smacked his face against Maraja’s shoulder blades, and before he could lodge a complaint, Nicolas had pulled over the median and was now riding along in the opposite direction.

  “You need to go see Pisciazziello,” he said, “and you need to tell him that after the murder of ’o Mellone, no one trusts me or our paranza anymore, and you can tell him that we wouldn’t give you a market, a piazza, either. And you need to tell him that you want to work with him and that you can only talk about it with Roipnol himself. You need to get Pisciazziello to open the door for you. And then, the minute you’re inside, you take out your gun and you shoot him.”

  He slammed his brakes on again, but this time Biscottino braced himself in advance with both hands. He wanted to shout, but in excitement. He felt like he was at an amusement park. Nicolas whipped the bike around in the opposite direction again, and now they were back in the lane they’d arrived in.