“Mammà,” he said, “I went to see Antonello yesterday, he’s the spitting image of you, have you ever noticed? You know that when he grows up, he’s going to be crazy about your Neapolitan tart? I’ll bet you spoil him rotten already.”
She said nothing; those words smacked of a farewell, and that was the last thing she wanted. Before she could say a word, he had already turned to go, and in a moment he was already back inside his den.
* * *
He could remember the place perfectly, a building dating back to the sixties, and an apartment on the sixth floor, in Gianturco. Nicolas had chosen it especially because it was anonymous and nondescript, not a place anyone would notice. He’d never been back, but Dentino hadn’t forgotten a single detail of that first day they’d had an arsenal all their own. Back then, though, there’d been no need to post a lookout to keep an eye on that tactical asset. Back then, they’d all been friends, they were all still the paranza.
Dentino identified him in no time: that guaglione could have been him just four or five years earlier. He walked up and down on the sidewalk outside Aza’s apartment building, in fact, he bounced along in his white Converse All Stars to the rhythm of the music he was listening to in his earbuds. Dentino knew how to take him in, just a few years ago he would have fallen for it himself. He went back to Piazza Principe Umberto. “Ch’hé avé,” he said, as if he were just any old customer. Ten euros of cocaine, that would be plenty, and then back to Gianturco again. Back and forth, half an hour each way, but Dentino didn’t mind the sweat or the hours spent crossing the city.
The lookout was still there, idle and bored. Dentino walked over to him and said hello as if they’d been friends forever. A slap on the shoulder, good and hard, so that the lookout was forced to take out his earbuds. Dentino didn’t give him time to react.
“Ua’,” he said, “what kind of shitty job does Maraja have you doing? Still, this is just the beginning, right?”
The other young man took a step back and did nothing more than gaze at him, hands hanging at his sides, not on his handgun, a handgun he didn’t even have, just as Dentino had supposed. Maraja didn’t trust little snotnoses, he told himself.
“Who are you?” the boy asked him.
“You don’t get it, I’m the one who asks you who you are. I’m Nicolas Maraja’s right-hand man.”
“But you don’t look like a member of the paranza…” he said, taking in Dentino’s appearance at a quick glance.
“Huh, sure, but I’m in disguise, I have to go on a mission. But first, why don’t you try a snort of this.” He pulled out the cocaine and offered him some. They started snorting coke right there in the street, while Dentino talked to him about the paranza, about the enemies they’d whacked, about the missions that he’d carried out with Maraja, that’s right, with that very boy’s boss, the same guy who had put the boy there to keep an eye on the sidewalk.
“Go ahead, be my guest,” said Dentino, offering him another snort. “What’s your name?”
“Luciano,” the boy said, and took another snort.
“Good boy, Lucia’, bravo. But now I’ve got to say goodbye to you. I have to go do a job. I need to go up and get a weapon.”
“Hold on, first I need to report this to Maraja.”
Dentino smiled condescendingly and put the rest of the coke away, as if to punish him for those words.
“Let me teach you something. You should never leave traces on your phone before you go do a job,” said Dentino.
Luciano nodded, and, to conceal the red blush of shame, he started tormenting a cigarette butt on the ground with the toe of his shoe.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Dentino, laying a hand on his chest, “I won’t say a thing to Nicolas.” Then he changed his tone of voice and turned suddenly serious: “Do you carry a piece? Or doesn’t Nicolas let you youngsters carry one?”
Luciano blushed an even brighter red. Dentino started up the stairs, but first he turned around: “Be good,” he told him, “and when I get downstairs, I’ll give you another present.”
* * *
Up in the apartment, Aza had managed to get the old lady to sleep and had just sat down for a rest in front of the television when she heard a knock at the door. When she heard the words “Power company, we’re here to read your meter,” Aza opened the door but immediately realized this was no employee of the gas company. “Gypsy,” she squealed, and tried to slam the door. But Dentino had already jammed his foot in the door.
“Go away, or I’ll call Maraja’s paranza, understood?”
He smiled: “Step aside, Aza, I’m Dentino, one of Nicolas’s brothers, don’t you remember?” He had to swallow to get the word brother out, but he never stopped smiling.
At the sound of Nicolas’s name, Aza lessened the pressure on the door and examined him carefully.
It was true, he really did look like Nicolas’s friend, the one with the chipped front teeth. But what had happened to him? Aza wondered, as she gestured for him to come in and then put her finger to her lips to caution him to silence. And that look in his eyes! Could he be on drugs? The question had just appeared in her face when Dentino wrapped both hands around her throat, pulling her head close. “Still in there?” he asked.
“Yes, she’s in there, but she’s asleep, please don’t wake her up,” she replied.
Dentino burst out laughing again, and his breath washing over her face made her squint in disgust. She held her breath.
“Not her. The arsenal,” Dentino muttered, “is it still in there?”
Aza nodded forcefully.
There they were, the big duffel bags. All he’d had to do was move a few bags of Christmas decorations and other junk and he could already see the green of the canvas. Dentino seized one, tossed it onto the bed where Aza slept, pulled down the zipper, and started rummaging inside. He chose a Kalashnikov, then thought it over and opted for an Uzi, hefted it, and then changed his mind once again. He leveled the Kalashnikov and pretended to fire at the Justin Bieber poster—’a Koala had one just like it in her bedroom. Just as quickly as that thought had come into his mind, it slipped away again: it was no longer a time for thoughts like that, that past struck him as someone else’s life. That was another Dentino, another Giuseppe Izzo, the one who had discovered that, behind the death of his friend Dumbo, there was an understanding between Nicolas and Scignacane—heir to the Acanforas, exclusive supplier to Micione for the finest Afghan heroin, who’d twisted the rules to supply the Piranhas with the same shit. Scignacane wanted to eliminate Dumbo over some matter of principle and Nicolas had agreed. He’d sacrificed him in exchange for narcotics.
Dentino also grabbed two hand grenades and a Beretta Storm, which he stuffed into his waistband, the gift for Luciano. In the meantime, Aza had left the room, shutting the door in the hope that it might muffle a bit the metallic rattling of the guns, and then she’d gone into the kitchen. She selected Nicolas’s number, but on the sixth ring she gave up and left a message on his voice mail. In a whisper: “Your friend has the weapons.”
She looked down at the display, hoping he’d call her right back, then allowed herself another thirty seconds and went back to Dentino, but he was already gone.
Luciano had started walking back and forth again, and the pistol that Dentino tossed him with a whistle to catch his attention almost hit him right in the head.
* * *
There had been a time when the soldiers of ISIS had aroused a feeling of repugnance in Dentino. Nicolas thought they had real balls, but Dentino thought they were cowards who planted bombs and couldn’t look their enemies in the eyes. Adrenaline and rage had filled his body with a determination that he mistook for lucidity. He was convinced that now he finally saw everything clearly, and, riding ’a Koala’s scooter, with two hand grenades hanging from the belt loops of his jeans, a Kalashnikov, and two full clips of ammunition, Dentino felt like a vigilante, out to do justice on his own. He roared toward San Giovanni a Teduccio, pulling w
heelies all the way, indifferent to how his hand grenades jerked and lurched every time the front wheel slammed back down on the asphalt.
He was racing to the castle of the Acanforas, a place that Dumbo had described to him a thousand times—even though the only aspects of a castle that it possessed were the bristling defenses and the sentinels standing guard. That narrow lane wedged between buildings was a path that Dumbo had taken back and forth before with La Zarina, Scignacane’s mother, clinging behind him. It was a passageway about a hundred feet long, overlooked by windows that were always left open, summer and winter, because no one lived behind them. The sharpshooters of the Acanfora family spelled one another in eight-hour shifts, so venturing into that cramped alley would have amounted to a suicide mission.
Completing the fortifications was a sheet-metal gate that ran back and forth on a track cut in the asphalt. It wouldn’t entirely stop a car roaring at full speed, but it would slow it down enough to make sure that, trapped in a latter-day barbican, it would be turned into a sitting duck, an ideal target.
Dentino had fantasized about charging into the castle in a scene straight out of The Fast and the Furious. But he gave that dream up promptly, they’d riddle him with lead even before he could make it through the gate, and he couldn’t afford that, not yet anyway. Scignacane wasn’t the last name on his list. Once he’d taken care of him, Dentino told himself, it was going to be Nicolas’s turn, and then at last their accounts would be evened up.
He needed to catch Scignacane out and about, in the no-man’s-land that separated the sheet-metal gate, the city street that ran to the state highway, and the larger feudal holding of the Acanforas, right in those last few yards, where the attention of the bodyguards had slackened. A few more seconds, the clanking of metal, and there was the warm belly of the fortress, safe from the attacks of the Faella clan. He walked down the sidewalk and felt the hand grenades that were slapping heavily against his crotch, like an extra pair of testicles. “Mo’ verimmo chi tene ’e ppalle,” he said to himself. Now we’ll see who’s got balls.
In his accounts, Dumbo had also described the ghost buildings you encountered before entering Scignacane’s neighborhood. The Acanfora clan had bought them and emptied them out, as if trying to create a buffer zone between them and the rest of the city: in order to survive, they lived in a perpetual state of siege.
Dentino checked once again to see that the Kalashnikov across his chest had the safety switched off, and then he lay on his belly on the sidewalk, right where the street curved ever so slightly to the left before the gate, creating a sort of blind angle, or at least that’s what he hoped—proof against video cameras and snipers.
With his nose jammed against the gravel of the walkway, Dentino felt happy. I’m a walking target, he told himself, but at least I’m out of that garage. He laughed at the nonsensical thoughts that filled his mind. “I’m out! I’m out!” he went on, speaking aloud; after all, he was in a no-man’s-land, you could just up and die on that asphalt and your body would bake in the hot sun for days before anyone even bothered to think about cleaning up.
He would wait there, flat on the pavement, until Scignacane’s Smart Car arrived. Dentino knew that the Smart Car might very well just keep driving straight and run him over, that’s certainly what he would have done. But he felt confident that Scignacane, with the flaccidity attributable to his blue blood, would order his driver to come to a halt.
It was a plan full of holes, potential twists and turns, and agonizing waits, but it was one of those unattainable plans that only a capricious god could make feasible in the hands of a madman. And by this point, Dentino was stark raving mad.
He heard the Smart Car arrive. He’d always had a good ear for engine noises, ever since he was a kid. He lay there, motionless, calculating the distance between himself and the approaching automobile. Another thirty yards. One hand grenade would rip open the Smart Car like an M-80 in a can of sardines. But then he wouldn’t have a chance to look Scignacane in the eyes, and Scignacane wouldn’t look him in the eyes. Twenty yards. The Kalashnikov, I’ll use the Kalashnikov, he said to himself with a laugh. Five yards. Dentino bent his elbow, stiffening it, ready to leap to his feet.
A sudden screeching halt. The sound of a car door. Then a sudden acceleration and another screeching halt, as if the Smart Car couldn’t make up its mind whether or not to run him over. Dentino remained motionless. The tar beneath him was giving him strength, it was as if he were breathing in the rhythm of the earth.
“Get out, go and take a look,” he heard Scignacane tell his driver. “Scignaca’, why shouldn’t we run over him? This guy’s dead already.” And, after a pause, Scignacane replied: “Go on, get out.” The engine of the Smart Car cut off, then started up again. A foot on the accelerator, though the car was in neutral by now, and finally another order, again disregarded: “Come on, get out of the car,” but no footsteps in his direction. At last, he heard the driver get out of the car. Ja’, he said to himself, let’s go. And he rolled over.
Dentino let loose the first burst of bullets before even getting fully to his feet, one knee still braced against the ground, and the other leg fully extended. From that stance, he shot Scignacane’s driver in the hips, which exploded like balloons full of blood. The man screamed, or at least Dentino thought he did, but when the hail of bullets whipped back in the other direction he devastated the man’s mouth, and sent him reeling to slam against the Smart Car’s hood. In the meantime, Scignacane was already clambering over the handbrake and gearshift to get into the driver’s seat. A third burst of lead riddled the side of the car, and Scignacane tried to shield his head by crouching so low it was crammed under the steering wheel.
“Fucking Smart Car!” he shouted. A bellow of anger that turned into a screech of pain, rising two octaves, when a bullet hit him. In the instant of the blaze of gunpowder, Scignacane managed to tell himself that the piece-of-shit shooter had managed to tear half his face clean off, and he reached up and patted the side of his head desperately, in search of the missing piece. “My ear!” he yelled. “You piece of shit, you took off my ear!”
“Lost your earring, did you, you queer?” Dentino laughed, and at the same time he jammed a new magazine into the AK-47. Scignacane took advantage of that short pause and managed to get the Smart Car’s engine turning over, shifted it into first gear, and screeched straight at the gate, hitting his driver’s body while he was at it. Dentino stood there watching the automobile vanish behind the gate, then he turned his AK-47 against the Acanforas’ fortress. A spray of lead that he kept coming as long as the magazine held out. It was scorching hot. He yanked it out all the same, ready to shove in a new one, but Scignacane’s men returned fire. With the Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, Dentino took off, running in zigzags, and leaped over the orange plastic barrier that separated the neighborhood from a field overgrown with yard-tall weeds, and disappeared.
* * *
He emerged on the other side of the field covered with scratches and with another, deeper cut on one of his cheeks. Reaching Forcella by foot would be a demented undertaking even for Dentino. He walked over to an intersection and fired a shot in the air. There was always someone who’d panic and abandon their means of transport, and even if it was a two-bit Kymco scooter, it would do in a pinch. Dentino leaped aboard and took off.
He raced through red lights without even bothering to look in either direction to see who was converging on the intersection, bent over the handlebars of his scooter, head even with the top of the low windshield. The street struck him as unusually wide, in fact he even thought that cars and pedestrians seemed to be scattering at his approach, as if they’d sensed the urgency of his mission. He drove with the Kalashnikov clamped between his legs and just one thought in mind: Antonello. That tiny creature was the only innocent character in this whole story, and now he understood that he was far more innocent than Christian had ever been, because Nicolas’s brother had lived long enough to make certain d
ecisions, and for those decisions to be choices made of his own free will. After all, hadn’t he freely gone to the station? To a certain extent, he was responsible for his own death. But little Antonello hadn’t even chosen to come into this world.
A carabiniere standing by the curb held up his paddle, intimating a halt. The Kymco showed no sign of slowing down, and roared past just a handbreadth away from the policeman. The blast of air spun him around and knocked him to the ground. His partner helped him back to his feet and they hopped in their squad car and took off in pursuit, siren wailing.
* * *
Nicolas was eating dinner. Skunk had gobbled down the half-thawed meat for the spaghetti sauce and now the Dogo was fast asleep on the old blanket laid out at the foot of the TV table in the kitchen. Mena was resting in her room; these were hard days at the pressing shop, and in her exhaustion she hadn’t even had the strength to get up and make her son something to eat, so he had heated up a 4 Salti in Padella, a frozen dinner. Linguine with a seafood sauce. Between one forkful and the next, he ran through his directory of contacts on WhatsApp. He had 128 messages scattered through a dozen different chats, and then there was an unknown number, a landline, that had tried to call him and had finally left him a voice mail: “Your friend has the weapons.” He knew that voice, but he couldn’t quite place it, then and there. He poured himself a glass of Coke Light and pressed the button to listen to the message on speaker, but the sound coming out of his cell phone was drowned out by a voice coming from outside. A voice that this time he recognized instantly.
It was shouting in the street, that voice; in fact, it was approaching aboard a scooter revving wildly, a scooter that reminded Nicolas of his old Beverly. He was talking fast, every word driven by cocaine, words that Dentino had been repeating obsessively to himself for months, words that had been steeping in the vinegar of rage and that now emerged in a violent rush. When he finally was able to make out the words, even his last doubt died: “I followed the law. I had my vendetta. ’O criaturo! The little baby! Don’t take it out on the baby, all you know how to do is kill little ones, you’re no one. You had Dumbo killed, even though he had nothing to do with it, you did it for Scignacane, to suck that piece of shit’s dick, Dumbo was my brother, he did his time behind bars in silence, he was a man, not like you. I want to lay you out dead, along with all your blood, all your kin…”
Savage Kiss Page 9