The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  The face emerged. And then Dentino freed every ounce of his anguish: “No! No! Madonna!” A powerful bellowing.

  They called the police immediately; they actually sent a helicopter, and the carabinieri pulled the body out of there. The parents arrived. Dentino’s identity was determined and he was transported to police headquarters. They tried to question him there, but he just stared at the wall and gave monosyllabic answers to every question. He was in a state of shock. They released him the next morning. They could have indicted him, on his cell phone were the instructions that White had given him, and then La Koala’s messages, too. He walked out of police headquarters and there was La Koala waiting for him. She gave him a long hug. He let her hold him close without moving a muscle, without responding to her caresses. His eyes were still. They climbed onto the scooter and Dentino said: “Let’s go to the lair.

  They went to Forcella and went to the apartment. La Koala stopped on the steps, respectful of the rule that no one could go in unless they belonged to the paranza. Most important of all, no woman had permission to go into the lair.

  “Come upstairs,” Dentino ordered her.

  She simply obeyed the command. What she wanted was to see nothing, to be invisible. She knew that this would cause trouble, but she waited with him. Dentino wasn’t moving, so she turned on the television, just to fill in the void. Dentino shrugged in annoyance and went to throw himself down on the bed in the other part of the apartment. Then she heard a key turning in the lock and Tucano came in. When he saw La Koala he stiffened. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Dentino came out of the room. “Someone killed Dumbo.”

  “Ah, and who did it?”

  “Well, now, whoever did it is the one who did it, and what I need is to find out who it was. Because Dumbo wasn’t a soldier, he didn’t have anything to do with any of this. Now I want the whole paranza here.” Dentino was a hand shorter than Tucano, but he was spitting all his rage right into his face, so Tucano pulled out his iPhone to summon all the others: “Guagliù, there’s an urgent mini–soccer game to play this morning.”

  One by one they entered the lair, and the last one to enter was none other than Maraja. His eyes were puffy like someone who hadn’t slept in days, and he kept scratching his whiskers.

  Dentino attacked him immediately: “Maraja, now all the heroin that we’re getting from Scignacane isn’t finding buyers, it’s still on our hands. If we go on buying it, if you guys go on selling it, then I’m leaving the paranza and I consider every one of you to be Scignacane’s accomplices!”

  “What the hell does Scignacane have to do with it?” asked Maraja.

  “Dumbo worked for Scignacane’s mamma, and she definitely has something to do with it. And don’t try to act like you don’t know, Nico’, otherwise I’ll have to assume you’re covering for him. Dumbo wasn’t a soldier, he wasn’t affiliated.”

  “Just like us…” said Drago’. He was snickering, and as he spoke he was rolling a joint.

  “Just like us, my ass,” Dentino shouted, grabbing him by the T-shirt. Drago’ twisted loose and drew his head back, ready to butt him. La Koala got between them, pushed them apart. “Don’t act like little kids!”

  “Drago’, Dumbo never picked up a gat in his life. He never did anyone any harm, he was never a bastard!” Dentino shouted.

  “’O Denti’, did you bump your head? That guy moved all the heroin we ever sold … There must have been some mix-up, some fuckup … Someone tried to steal the shit…” Tucano ventured.

  “Impossible. It had to have been an ambush, a trap they set for him!” As he was saying it he was ashamed to realize that he was about to start crying. No one had ever cried between those walls before.

  Drone was standing there, motionless; it seemed like some sort of vendetta to him. Before Dentino, he’d been the one who’d had to choke back tears welling up in his eyes, careful not to let even one spill over. Now Dentino was openly sobbing, and it was a shame—uno scuorno—for the whole paranza.

  Drago’ said: “Denti’, we’re here today, we’re gone tomorrow. T’ ’o rriccuorde? Don’t you remember? Friend, enemy, life, death: it’s all the same thing. We know that, and you know it, too. Accussì è. That’s the way it is. It all happens in the blink of an eye. That’s the way we live, no?”

  “What the fuck do you know about how we live? Pentito! Turncoat!” That venomous word. The only word that could never be uttered.

  Drago’ yanked out his pistol and stuck it in Dentino’s face. “I have more honor than you ever will, omm’ ’e mmerda. You’re here with the sister of a bastard, and who knows how many things of ours you’ve passed over to the paranza of the Capelloni, and you call me an infame? An informant, a turncoat? Get out of here, you and this slut, get out of here!”

  Dentino said nothing, he wasn’t packing, but his eyes focused on Nicolas. Him alone. The boss.

  THE MESSAGE

  Dentino had felt the belly growing day by day, even before she openly told him about it. He’d felt it, one embrace after another, as something that didn’t used to be there, and now it was. Before it had been a tangle of arms, climbing atop each other for a quick hello, not just to make love. That’s the way La Koala was. She grabbed you with her whole body. For some time now, though, Dentino had perceived a certain prudence in his girlfriend, as if she were afraid of being crushed by him, pressed by him. He hadn’t asked her a thing, he’d let her be the one to tell him, Dentino had decided, and in the meantime he had let his imagination run free. What would they call him? His mother had always dreamed of a grandson—a granddaughter even more so—and she was also dreaming of a nice wedding, sparing no expense. Then another thought arrived, impetuous and irresistible, and every time he tried to push it away, it just kept coming at him. Getting rid of it.

  La Koala had waited, she’d understood that he’d understood; he no longer touched her with the rough vigor of before—Dentino, too, had become careful. When they were alone, they now seemed like a couple of young sweethearts in the first throes of puppy love. And she, too, had started to use her imagination. She’d told herself she’d wait till the end of the first trimester—she grew rounder with every passing day, and some women in the quarter had already officially claimed there was a cake in the oven—whereupon she would inform Dentino that he was going to be a father. La Koala, too, wanted a little girl, and in secret she’d even bought a couple of pink onesies, in open defiance of Neapolitan superstition.

  Then Dumbo had been killed, and her man had died a little bit, too. She wasn’t able to speak to him because he was always out and about, busy with his own personal investigation to determine who had sentenced his friend to death. On the rare occasions when she was able to spend some time alone with him, Dentino never touched her anymore, he kept her at arm’s length, and even refused to look her in the eye, because he didn’t want her to glimpse the fact that he knew, that it was too late to keep that belly hidden from him, that by now everyone else knew, everyone but him. He didn’t have any room for the life that La Koala was carrying within her. She tried to make him hers again, she caressed him and gentled him, but he’d lurch away from her and set off with a jerk on his hunt for the culprit. For the first time in their thing together, a chill had settled over them, paralyzing them, but the creature that La Koala had inside her continued to grow, demanding its future father.

  * * *

  Dentino hadn’t eaten a bite in two days. He wasn’t touching food, he wasn’t drinking. And he wasn’t sleeping. Forty-eight hours of a zombie existence. He went everywhere on foot, he’d decided that the motor scooter would keep him from fully gazing into the faces he encountered. And instead he wanted to look everyone in the face, because there he might be able to find a clue about his friend’s murder. He’d also abandoned the paranza’s chat, and no one had tried to write to him privately to persuade him to rejoin. He was on his own now.

  He went back to White, in the back room, but White insisted that he
knew nothing, that someone had given him the message.

  “And who gave you the message?” asked Dentino.

  “The messenger,” White replied. He’d grown another stump of hair, and he was slowly stroking it.

  “And who is the messenger?”

  “The messenger is this dick,” he said, flashing him his middle finger.

  He wasn’t going to get any more information from White, even if he kicked him around the room. He was savoring the moment, White was, and now he was palpating both his stumps of hair. Dentino walked out, head low, thought of talking to La Koala, but she only knew what her brother told her, and then he didn’t want to get her involved, he didn’t want to taint her and the baby she carried inside her. He also mulled over the possibility of going to every piazza where drugs were sold, because they had surveillance cameras there, maybe they’d caught Dumbo aboard a motor scooter, maybe with someone else. The murderer. Then he tried to go see Copacabana, in prison, but he refused to accept his visit. He walked through the streets of San Giovanni a Teduccio for a whole day. Via Marina, Via Ponte dei Francesi, all the streets that run off Corso San Giovanni, Massimo Troisi Park. He strode along, head held high, brash and bold, as if out to invade a territory that didn’t belong to him, because what he had in mind was to make sure he was noticed, maybe even beaten down if that was what it took. He covered miles the same way he’d conducted that investigation from the very beginning. All alone.

  He wasn’t really alone, though, because La Zarina was on the trail of Dumbo’s murderer, too. She’d developed a real affection for that guagliuncello. He made her happy. He was always cheerful and he managed to infect her with that cheerfulness. And the rides they used to take on their motor scooters, from one side of the city to the other, how she missed them. They made her feel like a young girl again, and now for a stupid stunt, that damned picture of his cock, he’d paid dearly. La Zarina had tried to raise her voice and lecture her son. How dare he pry into her cell phone? But Scignacane could afford to stop being a son when he needed to, and he’d shunted the question aside with a shrug of the shoulders. Still La Zarina felt a debt of gratitude to Dumbo, with the lust for life that he’d transmitted to her, so strongly she could still feel it on her flesh. She started pumping her son’s men for information, reminded them that Negus had created the empire that allowed them to live decently, and that they’d better not say anything to Scignacane about that conversation because she, La Zarina, could still hurt them, could still hurt them badly. And one after the other, they talked. They didn’t know much about the operation itself, but by putting together the various pieces of the puzzle, La Zarina reconstructed the way things had gone. She wasn’t interested in the details, the mechanics of the thing, she wanted the chain of command, so she could link up those responsible and undertake a vendetta. Who would die and at whose hand was also of no interest to her. Blood had to be washed out with blood, that was a rule as old as the world, and she knew how to start the cleansing process.

  She did it all from her apartment, from her gilded cage complete with all the modern conveniences, a place only Dumbo had been able to tear her from. Dumbo had talked to her about the friend he’d done time for in Nisida Reform School, whom he’d protected from charges that would have sent him behind bars, too. That’s the purest form of friendship, La Zarina had thought as she listened to that story, a friendship born of sacrifice. She’d ordered her men to get her Dentino’s phone number. She thought about calling him, but it made her anxious. And so she wrote it all to him, she wrote that he was perfectly free not to believe her, and she ended the messages telling him that Dumbo’s friendship had been precious to both of them, as precious as a majolica tile.

  Dentino read the text dozens of times, and every time he did, his finger hovered over the DELETE button, but in the end all that rereading had dug a track, ever deeper. He was sitting in a subway car on Line 1. There were still three stops to Via Toledo. He deleted the text.

  RED SEA

  Mena was giving the last few stitches to the red dress she’d sewn herself in the shop, making use of a handsome length of crimson silk that one of her customers had given her as a gift. “Where am I going to go dressed like this?” she’d asked herself, but then she’d wrapped it around her in front of the mirror and imagined a simple line, without a collar but nicely snug at the waist, and she’d decided, “I’ll go where I go, that’s where I’ll go,” and she’d set about shaping the dress. Now, sitting at the table her husband had left set for her, the way he usually did when she came in late and he had to leave early, she put the fine finishing work on the tiny buttons that ran up the back: twelve little buttons, lustrous, an even fierier red. She’d had the buttonholes done for her—because that was quite an art, making buttonholes, and there was old Sofia in Forcella, who served dressmakers and tailors in spite of her age and her incessant changing of spectacles—and she worked up from the bottom applying the buttons.

  She saw Christian darting out of his bedroom.

  “Addó vai, a mammà?” Where are you going, tell Mamma.

  He replied something that sounded like “Nico’ is expecting me,” but she didn’t hear him clearly. But where is Nicolas expecting him? She sat there, the needle pressed between thumb and forefinger, the red thread dangling. It happened frequently, but she never liked it when the younger one went out into the street with his brother. She set down needle and thread, placed the dress on the table, and leaned out the window that overlooked the walkways running along the front of the building and the street. Christian was down there. He wasn’t moving. Maybe he was waiting for someone. As long as he’s waiting, it’s all right, she thought, and at the same time decided that she needed to try on this dress, make sure the way she’d put on the buttons wouldn’t make it too tight. She thought to herself: That Sofia is blind, she’s good but she’s basically blind. She undressed with confident, quick movements and then, very cautiously, slid on the new dress, letting it glide down over her from above, both arms raised. She smoothed it over her hips, she felt her breasts take the room they deserved and spring into the shape they deserved: yes, now she’d be able to stitch on the little buttons that were missing. She turned with an automatic swivel toward the window. Christian was striding rapidly down the street, toward the Rettifilo, Corso Umberto I. “Where are you going?” she shouted. “A fare ’nu servizio,” the boy replied, cupping both hands around his mouth before turning around again and loping off, as quick as a gazelle. To run an errand. ’Nu servizio? Since when did Christian run errands, especially servizi? She knew the connotations of that word—what kind of thing was that for him to say? She dangled farther out the window until she saw her son disappear beyond the intersection. She went back to the dining room and looked for her cell phone. She could never find it when she needed it. She could never find it. She jabbed the needle into the spool of thread and felt with her hands under the dress she’d just taken off, under the mat, she rummaged through her purse, she looked in the bathroom, and there it was, on the sink. She dialed Nicolas’s number, and he answered almost instantly: “What is it?”

  “Why are you bringing your brother into these things? What does he have to do with it? Where are you?”

  “Calm down, Mamma, what are you saying?”

  “Christian was at home until two minutes ago. And now he’s going to see you. Where? Tell me where.”

  Nicolas sat silent and went on listening, without listening, his mother’s voice warning him, commanding him to send his brother back home.

  He didn’t want to, but he admitted: “I don’t know anything.”

  It was Mena, at that point, who remained in silence. They exchanged silences like so many coded messages.

  And then: “Get them to tell you. Get them to tell you where they’re taking him. Get them to tell you right away.” She knew that there’s always a way to find out what’s going on. She knew that this fair-haired son of hers could do whatever he wanted by now, and if he could do something,
he needed to do it right away. “Get them to tell you.”

  And he replied: “Come downstairs, in the street. I’m on my way.”

  Mena left everything just as it was, didn’t bother to lock the door behind her, galloped down the stairs with the red dress on, open in the back. It occurred to her only when she reached the downstairs entrance that she could have changed, but now she was there. She was there and she was peering down the street for the silhouette of Nicolas astride that goddamned bike of his. She searched for him right where she’d last seen Christian, but he arrived from the other direction, carrying the helmet he had for Letizia in one hand. Mena climbed onto the T-Max and held the helmet in her lap. She didn’t even ask the question, she just waited for him to tell her where, where, where. “Il cavaliere di Toledo,” Nicolas shouted as he accelerated. “The horseman of Via Toledo.” A statue, a piece of modern art. “At the metro stop.” It had only taken him two calls. One minute. Someone had told him. That’s how he knew. But what did he know? What did he know? What was there to know? Under Mena’s hair, which fluttered like a Jolly Roger out over the streets of the city, inside the forward-leaning, concentrated face of Nicolas there were swarms of questions and answers, there were certainties and superstitious dread. There was only one clear image that passed from him to her and back again, and they didn’t know what to make of it: the modern statue that had been erected on Piazza Diaz, with this horse and horseman, this sort of off-kilter jockey, that who knows who had ever come up with.

  * * *

  Dentino, sitting in the metro car, was folded over, tucked in on himself, concealing the Beretta semiautomatic pistol dangling between his legs. It was as if he were clutching the weapon, caressing it, almost as if he were about to celebrate a rite. “Blood doesn’t matter? Let’s see about that. Let’s see what happens if I touch your blood,” he kept saying, repeating the same thought and each time leaning on the “Let’s see,” which continued to emerge like an oath pointing to action. On the screen of his cell phone was the text that he’d sent Christian: “Me and your brother are waiting for you at the monument on Piazza Diaz. You need to come do an errand for us. Ci devi fare un servizio.” And Christian had replied with a smiley face, the same emoticon multiplied by seven.