Savage Kiss

by Roberto Saviano

  “Oh, now you have to tell me where the fuck you are, and I’ll come and get you!” he shouted.

  “Nico’, it’s me, Susamiello, your cousin!”

  There was a moment of silence. Susamiello! Of course: the son of his mother’s cousin.

  “Ahhh, Susamiello! Why the fuck would you say that you’re Emanuele, why the fuck would you call me with that name? What are you up to, Susamie’?”

  “Eh, next week I’m turning fourteen. Which means I can drive a scooter.”

  “Ah … and do you have a scooter?”

  “Yes, yes, Papa gave me one.”

  “Good old uncle. So what do you want from me?”

  “I want to work.”

  “What do you think, I have a factory?”

  “Why, no…”

  “Okay, ja’.” Nicolas cut off the conversation. “Let’s get together…”

  “Can I come by now, to your house?”

  Nicolas smiled. He could see him downstairs in the street outside his building, his ass on the saddle of his scooter, his smartphone glued to his ear, and his head tilted back to detect any movement at the upstairs window.

  “Well, what makes you think I’m at home?” Nicolas asked. He found this persistent cousin amusing. A little bit, he reminded him of himself; only he, Maraja, would never have asked anyone permission to work.

  “My aunt told me so,” said Susamiello. From his decisive tone of voice, it was clear that he had prepared that answer and the whole preceding pitch.

  He was tempted to laugh. “Come up, ja’.”

  “Can I bring a couple of my friends?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Classmates of mine.”

  “What school do you go to?”

  “The Convitto Nazionale.”

  “How old are they?”

  “One is twelve, the other one is thirteen, just like me.”

  “All right. Come on, but hurry up, because I have things to do and I don’t want you to bust my balls too much.”

  Nicolas let himself sink into the cushions of his armchair. He told himself that those guys downstairs would let at least five minutes go by before ringing the doorbell, just to make the whole masquerade look plausible.

  The beep of the intercom made him start and he instinctively moved his hand, reaching for where he usually kept the Desert Eagle. The kids had been punctual, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t leave them dangling a little while longer.

  “I’m taking a shower,” said Nicolas. “Come back later … what the fuck.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when he went to the door wrapped in his S.S.C. Napoli bathrobe, he thought to himself he ought really to have had security cameras installed. The fake video camera with the clearly visible sirens that his father had had put in—because, he said, after all, Gypsies see it from outside, and knowing that it’s there, they go looking for another house to burgle—no longer intimidated anyone at all.

  He studied them through the peephole. Zit-ridden, earrings with fake diamonds, one of them even wearing a pair of counterfeit Rolex watches on the same wrist. Muccusielli, thought Nicolas, snotnoses, and he smiled again, without however being able to entirely rid himself of a hint of paranoia that was telling him: bait, cops. After Dentino almost killed him and his mother, and even got arrested in the street down below, he felt he needed to be a little more cautious. He opened the door just wide enough to see all three of their faces and, at the same time, realize if there was about to be a raid.

  Nicolas’s cousin spoke up, with a faint “May we come in?”’O Maraja ran his eyes over Susamiello from head to toe, following the S shape of his gangly body, just like the Neapolitan Christmas cookies from which he took his nickname.

  “Trasite,” he said at last. Come in.

  “Cia’, Nico’!” said Susamiello, and gave him a hug, catching him off guard.

  “Ua’, you’re crooked as a snake, just like you were when you were little,” said Nico’, and he fastened the sash a little tighter around his dressing gown.

  “This is Risvoltino,” said Susamiello, and invited his comrade to step forward. He barely reached Nicolas’s shoulders, and the cuffs he insisted on wearing on his jeans—risvolti were cuffs—certainly did nothing to make him look any taller. He wore a plaid shirt at least a size too small that created rolls on his belly and hips. The sleeves, of course, were rolled up, too. Risvoltate.

  “My pleasure, Maraja.” He shook the clammy hand, and then it was the third boy’s turn, and he introduced himself as Pachi. Nicolas extended his hand again, and the boy took it and lifted it to his lips, planting a resounding kiss.

  “I like the manners of your buddy here,” Nicolas said to Susamiello. “So what is it you want to do?”

  “Eh, we want to work. We want to work with you. With your paranza.”

  “And what do you know how to do?”

  Susamiello’s face lit up, he hadn’t been waiting for anything but that question. He started loudly declaiming the qualities and talents of his friends. He seemed like a farmer working to sell his cattle at a fair. This one knew how to ride a scooter with special skills, that one boasted of how good he was at eluding the cops’ pursuit, and the other was talented at concealing hashish. And he wound up with: “One time we snatched a purse, and we even stabbed this one guy.”

  Nicolas let him talk. He rocked on his heels and every once in a while tilted his head to one side, studying them the way a cattle breeder might do with a few select calves. Then he turned and went toward his bedroom, allowing the three kids to follow him. “We even stabbed this one guy…” he muttered with a laugh. He untied his sash and slid the robe off his shoulders, nice and slow, so they’d have time to take a good look at his back. And even though he wasn’t looking at them, he could see them in his mind’s eye, elbowing one another, pointing at Christian’s name next to the hand grenade, which for them must have been like partying with Dan Bilzerian, fame and reality coinciding for once. When they saw the wings, their jaws had certainly dropped. So was that the logo of the Piranhas? And then a woman’s face, on his waist, to the left. Maraja’s girlfriend?

  “I’m not going to have you work in a piazza. I’m going to put you to work doing delivery,” Nicolas said without turning around.

  Susamiello stumbled over the unfamiliar English word: “Doing deli…?”

  “Doing delivery. People call, and you head out and deliver to their home.”

  He finished getting dressed, unhurriedly, still keeping his back turned to the three youngsters. Then, without any need for words, he invited them to follow him. It was a pain in the neck, having to handle those little snotnoses, or maybe they could turn out to be a useful asset, who could say.

  * * *

  Zi’ Pe’ had worked in that delicatessen in Forcella since, like, forever. If you asked an old man who worked there before Zi’ Pe’, behind that gleaming counter, you’d always get the same answer: “Zi’ Pe’.” On the one side, rosticceria with trays full of prepared foods, already laid out first thing in the morning, and on the other side, an old-school delicatessen, with provolone cheeses and prosciuttos dangling on strings. Behind him, a glass wall to give a sense of depth to the five hundred square feet, at best, of shop and shelf space lined with neat rows of spumante bottles stacked up in miniature castles of glass.

  “Buongiorno, Zi’ Pe’,” Nicolas began, speaking loudly to drown out the ding-dong of the door.

  “Buongiorno, Maraja,” Zi’ Pe’ replied. Skinny and bald, he seemed to vanish within the folds of his white deli clerk outfit, but when he turned his piercing diamond-hard blue eyes on you, most people tended to drop their gaze, abashed.

  “I brought you three young men, they’re going to come work with you,” said Nicolas, and he shoved the youngsters forward. They looked around wildly, trying to figure out if this was some kind of joke. “See if you have some white smocks and hats in their sizes.”

  Susamiello and the two others kept turning their heads from
a hanging pig’s leg to the meat slicer, from the containers of Olivier salad to the medallions of paté.

  “Come right this way,” said Zi’ Pe’, and he handed them three smocks, which the three boys put on without objections, and with the same dreamy expression as when they’d come in there. In the end, it was Pachi who gathered his courage. All in a breath he blurted out: “Maraja, but what do you think we’re here for? This isn’t happening, we don’t want to work like a crew of assholes. Why would we want to be delivery boys for a delicatessen? Is this the delive—, deliver—, whatever the fuck word you said, that you were talking about?”

  “I thought you were a smart boy,” said Maraja, who had come around behind the counter, “wide awake, someone who knew how the world works. I guess I had that all wrong. Get out of here, ja, you’re just a bunch of limp dicks that wouldn’t stiffen up even with a bottle of Viagra.”

  “No, Maraja, forgive him,” Susamiello weighed in, glaring daggers at Pachi. “He’s just an asshole.”

  Nicolas went on, indulgently: “Well then, who is it that people constantly see coming and going, in and out of the apartment houses? The delicatessen delivery boy. Okay? When the call comes in, out you go. We get the call, we forward it to the deli man, and he writes the address of the place you need to go on a piece of paper. One time you’ll work here, another you’ll work at the slaughterhouse, sometimes you’ll work at the supermarket…”

  Supermarket, slaughterhouse, haberdashery. Big warehouses to store the shit: hashish, marijuana, cocaine. They came in in perfect condition, in foil-wrapped lengths, tufts of weed, foil dots for the heroin. Products packaged with care and skill, to be kept in readiness for the couriers: in the spaces between bottles of mineral water, snug in their six-packs, under the labels of the small bottles of preserved red peppers, in among the meat in the freezer cases. Everywhere that the shopkeepers thought it was safe to keep them, in exchange for a monthly fee and the promise that there would be no extortion, no shakedowns.

  The three of them brightened, a glow in their eyes, and suddenly even those delivery boy smocks seemed like so many uniforms of soldiers of the paranza. Risvoltino rolled up his sleeves and said: “So this is delivery!”

  “Good for you, you’re a genius,” said Nicolas.

  “No, though, this is disgusting,” Pachi insisted. “I wanted to work dressed in the latest, not wearing a white smock like a delivery boy, what the fuck.”

  “Do you want Air Jordans, or do you want to go on wearing those parallel shoes you have on your feet?”

  “They aren’t parallel…” The term meant counterfeit.

  “Sure, they’re parallel … you could see it clearly if we stayed here and you flew to the moon. The toe is misshapen and the color is all wrong…”

  Pachi looked down at the toes of his Air Jordans. He’d tormented his mother for six months. Those were the kind he’d wanted, the latest model, the 13 Retro, red heel and sole, the rest white. And those were the shoes he’d been given. No doubt, the red had faded to a pale pink in no more than a week and the sole was already coming loose, but he’d never have dreamed that his mother had bought them counterfeit. Suddenly false. Suddenly he, too, felt he was parallel to the truth, and he buttoned his smock to keep Maraja from making further comments on his Lacoste polo shirt, because he wasn’t certain that the crocodile was facing the right way.

  “You’ll be paid fifty euros a day,” Nicolas went on, “if you work for six hours. They’ll give you the shit to deliver at the location. Then you’ll take turns. Sometimes you’ll be delivering shit, other times you’ll actually be making deli deliveries to housewives … pecorino, provolone, prosciutto, Pan di Stelle cookies. And then baggies of cocaine, assorted fruit, hot chocolate. If you have any problem, call the number I’m going to give you. If you skim off the top…” He came around from behind the counter and stood legs akimbo, facing his cousin. He stared at him hard for a few seconds and then did the same to the two others. “You can do it ten times.”

  “For real, Maraja?” Susamiello asked, his eyes wide with gratitude. “We can skim off the top ten times?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why exactly ten times?” Risvoltino asked; more than listening to the words, he was looking at Maraja’s face and the wording didn’t add up as far as he was concerned. With that smock that hung down almost to his shoes, he seemed even shorter. A garden gnome.

  “Because…” Nicolas began as he moved along the walkway, behind the counter, twirling his fingers in the air, as if he were searching for something. And he found it: a butcher’s cleaver with a worn wooden handle. He swung it through the air like a katana. “Because every time you skim a little off the top,” he explained, “we’ll cut off one of your fingers. How many fingers do you have on both hands? That’s how many times you can skim a little off the top. If you decide to be a traitor, this blade will cut off a finger ten times, and then on the eleventh time, it goes straight for the tip of your dick.” The three kids’ mouths were completely dry. “When the cops catch you, and if they do, keep your mouths shut; worst case, they’ll slap you around a little. They’re not sending you to Sing Sing. And even if you do wind up doing time, man up and show you have a pair of balls, already. Anyway, then the lawyer will come around, and you’ll get some money, even if you’re in the can. Got it?”

  They all nodded. The fright had already worn off, they seemed to have been galvanized, their eyes following the circumvolutions of the cleaver, and on their faces were the smiles of youngsters who finally knew they had been allowed into the ranks of real players.

  “Then we’ll give you a call to organize your work schedules,” Maraja went on. “The vehicles you use to work can’t be stolen, or they’ll catch you first thing. If you fall and hurt yourselves, that’s your fucking problem. If you have a crash, that’s your fucking problem. For the gas, there are a couple of gas station attendants who are brothers of mine, and I’ll send you to them. I’ll let you know. Now I’m fucking sick of looking at you.”

  He hung the cleaver back on the hook he’d taken it down from. He put his arm around Zi’ Pe’s shoulder. “Will you make me an ’mposta ’e pane?” A sandwich, in dialect.

  “Sure, how you want it?” asked the deli man.

  “Ricotta e cicoli.” Ricotta and pork curls.

  Nicolas had always loved the preparation of that sandwich. The curly slices of the pressed cakes of fatty pork, which if you looked closely resembled nothing so much as marble, with the same grain and striations. And then there was the ricotta, light and fluffy, like a cloud, flakes that lay down on that solid mass of pork. And in the end, the touch of magic: a sprinkling of pepper staining the mountain of ricotta with black, and then it’s all pressed together, crushed in the cavern of a rosetta bun after its crumb has been removed.

  Maraja practically failed to notice that his three new men had taken off their smocks and were leaving the store. It was the ding-dong of the door that made him look up.

  “Susamie’, come here,” he said, and immediately added: “The rest of you, get out of here.” He placed his hands on his cousin’s shoulders, and Susamiello looked up at him the way that, perhaps, he had once gazed at Don Feliciano at his trial. That seemed like a lifetime ago, a different life. “Susamie’, even if you have a gob of my blood in your veins, if these two fuck up, or if you fuck up, if you go around telling even just your dad what you’re doing, you’re dead, Susamie’. And it won’t be a pretty death. I’m not going to let you die easy.”

  “No, Nico’, you’re clear with me, I swear it. I can really tell that this is the right path for me. I mean it, I’m really happy. I’ve found my calling. I’ll make you proud of me, it’s an honor for me to work with you.”

  ’O Maraja said nothing. He turned around. His sandwich was ready.

  “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

  THE SOLDIER’S MOTHER

  Biscottino’s mother was listening to the words the man in front of her was uttering, a
nd she felt as if she’d fallen into a dream. He was talking about Africa, Syria, wars, and terror attacks. And then about antipersonnel mines, shrapnel, armor-piercing bullets. Bellies burst open and shattered. Nightmares: but for her, Greta, those nightmares might actually be an escape route from Naples.

  Half an hour had already gone by since that meeting with Doctors Without Borders had started in the conference room in the basement of the Loreto Mare hospital. Everyone was listening, attracted by the thought of those faraway worlds, and with an eye to the refreshments: two tables pushed together on which stood a couple of bottles still cool from the freezer and a Ballarò market tray of pastries, a dozen or so crunchy sfogliatelle ricce, and another dozen smooth sfogliatelle frolle.

  “Here we have the finest physicians specializing in abdominal surgery,” the representative from the NGO named Lorenzo went on, “we’re accustomed to working in frontier conditions, and you all live on the frontier already, anyway. So your assistance will be fundamental.”

  Greta had never before set foot in there, because it was a place off limits to everyone but medical staff, whereas she worked in the cafeteria as a cook, and the fact that she was even there and could listen to all these fantasies of escape was thanks to the kindness of a nurse who was a friend of hers. Every once in a while she’d spend the night at her friend the nurse’s house to look after her father.

  Naples, Greta was thinking, really did resemble one of those countries at war that Lorenzo was talking about. Naples had taught her to cook. It had given her a name that had nothing Neapolitan about it, a job (two, actually, if you counted her work as a caregiver), but it had also given her a husband shot and killed during an armed robbery, three children and the endless challenge of keeping them safe, making sure they survived. The ground-floor hovel, or basso, where she lived, though, she owed only to herself, and the courage to move out of an apartment she deeply loved but was now renting out to university students. She’d found a basso for three hundred euros a month that she’d managed to snatch from the grip of the countless families from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the only ones who were willing to live there anymore. But she felt no shame, in fact, quite the opposite. Her basso was more dignified in its way than the second-, third-, and fourth-floor apartments where her sisters lived. She had furnished it, slowly, carefully selecting the furniture and accessories. She could feel that apartment on her skin, she felt it like a form of prestige that at first had helped her to make it through the day, but that had eventually worn out, until it was transformed into frustration to start and then into a lust for redemption, in the fullness of time. But what could a cook do?