The air that until then he’d been trying to pull into his throat now poured out of it, as if Nicolas had finally found relief; even his face was relaxed. The black needles of his eyes were fixed on L’Arcangelo’s eyes, but he couldn’t see him. He would have liked to imagine his daughter’s face, Letizia’s eyes, but instead nothing came. He could only feel the burning blade of the knife in his belly, and the scuorno—the humiliation—of dying that way.
L’Arcangelo slowly pulled out the blade, careful to avoid staining his suit, and ’o Cicognone released his grip on Nicolas’s throat.
Nicolas staggered forward, the rapidly spreading stain on his shirt darkening the light fabric. L’Arcangelo stabbed him again, just inches from the first wound, and then again. There was no thump, just one knee, and then the other, and finally down on his side. His temple hit the floor. And he saw Tucano. He tried to say something, to tell him not to be afraid, but he lacked the strength. He felt a great chill wash through him, and his legs started to thrash. It was over. He’d imagined dying so many times before, but he’d always believed it would be much faster. A light being switched off. Instead he could feel the parts of his body as they left him. At last, he stopped feeling the pain, because he simply stopped feeling anything.
Briato’ had heard a single shot, and no texts were coming in on his cell phone, so he walked straight to the farmhouse and, without a hint of caution, threw the door open, his pump shotgun leveled, his lame leg extended as a brace. And he saw.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he shouted. He aimed at L’Arcangelo, pumping the trigger. He fired three times before realizing that all that was coming out of the barrel was a puff of air, a fart of gunpowder. Then he hurled the shotgun at him and turned to run.
“Take him out,” Micione shouted.
“Let’s do like in Apocalypto,” Aucelluzzo proposed, as he watched Briato’ drag his leg after him, slam against the furniture in the room, and then trip over his own feet, after traveling in thirty seconds roughly the same distance that ’o Pagliaccio, who’d appeared in answer to Micione’s call, and ’o Cicognone had covered in little more than five. It was like chasing a baby bird with broken wings.
“Apoca … what?” asked ’o Cicognone.
“Fuck, didn’t you ever see Apocalypto?” asked ’o Pagliaccio. “The scene where the guy is painted blue all over, he’s trying to run away from the human sacrifices, and the others all throw rocks and stones at him, shoot arrows … if he can get over the line, they’re safe, but if he’s caught they die.”
’O Pagliaccio hauled out his pistol and started firing. Briato’ had reached the center of the plaza, and when he heard the gunshot, he instinctively ducked, lost his balance, and sprawled headlong.
* * *
’O Cicognone gave him time to get back on his feet, then fired. Briato’ ducked again, but this time he managed to stay on his feet, and the white gate was just a few yards away, within reach.
“Oh, this guy is really getting away,” said ’o Pagliaccio. “Let’s go get him, ’o Cicogno’.”
“Eh, ja’, let him run, after all, we can just go pick him up at home…”
“Quit kidding around, knucklehead, we can’t let word get out that we killed them, these guys from the Piranhas.”
“Oh, what a pain in the ass … but why?”
“That’s how L’Arcangelo wants it. The Children are a threat, even when they’re dead.”
’O Cicognone took off running, his long legs getting in the way of themselves. In the meantime, Briato’ had reached the cherry trees; he grabbed the thin trunks of the trees to swing himself forward. If I can just reach the street, he told himself, if I can manage to get hidden in one of these little houses, then I’ll hunker down, keep quiet, and tomorrow morning I’ll sneak out of here and be safe.
He looked behind him. There was no one. He resumed his flight, even his injured leg seemed to be working better. I swear if I ever get home, I’ll start physical therapy, he told himself. Aucelluzzo was bent over his scooter, elbows out, aiming straight at him. Briato’ tried to dodge to the left and then swerve back to the right to outfox the scooter’s trajectory, but the snout of the TMAX scythed into him at knee height. Briato’ was lofted into the air and landed on the scooter, which had slid over on its side. Aucelluzzo got to his feet, cursing roundly, and started kicking Briato’ savagely in the gut.
He continued kicking him until ’o Pagliaccio arrived, and then knelt down over Briato’ as if to impart some final benediction and finished him off with a bullet to the temple.
They left him lying there, along with Aucelluzzo’s wrecked scooter, and headed back to the estate, discussing Apocalypto as they went.
* * *
In the office, L’Arcangelo was still talking.
“Now that we’ve gotten the Piranhas the fuck out of the way, my men need to be in charge of all the children in Naples: ’o Cicognone and Aucelluzzo, they’ll be giving the orders to the local kindergarten.”
L’Arcangelo bowed his head, over the bodies of Tucano and Nicolas, and went on, as if he were speaking directly to the corpses: “The Piranhas were all good guaglioni. They’d done what we never did. They had the courage that no one in this room has. This one, lying on the floor”—and he jutted his chin in Nicolas’s direction—“had more balls than all the rest of us. We were willing to be shut in, we started to become afraid of our own shadows. When you want something, you have to up and get it, and instead we all started dancing tarantellas, making pacts.”
“Arca’, I’d almost say you want him to come back to life,” said Micione.
L’Arcangelo shook his head, without taking his eyes off Nicolas. “No, it’s more like he brought me back to life. We’re like vampires, we need young blood, we need to suck ideas we can’t come up with ourselves.” Then, at last, he turned back to the others: “All right, come on, we’re done here.”
“All right, then, order has been restored. The cake has been shared out. And no one had better overeat,” said La Zarina. Micione filled his glass with Barolo and passed glasses to L’Arcangelo and ’o Sciroppo. He poured the first glass onto the floor: “The first toast is for the dead who have made it possible for us to live.”
The Barolo ran over the desk, the chairs, the armchairs.
L’Arcangelo poured his glass over Tucano and Nicolas.
“The shit that gets sold in the historic center of Naples has to be bought from me. And the heroin from La Zarina.” Everyone nodded at L’Arcangelo’s words. “And now that we’ve founded the United Nations of Naples, let’s make sure it lasts.”
Then ’o Cicognone and Aucelluzzo arrived with two black trash bags and put the lifeless bodies of the two members of the paranza into them. They took them away, one after the other, dragging them across the floor.
F12
It was all the same. The gulf of apartment buildings, the street that twists its way to the little piazza, the bar on the corner. Even the street doors, the windows, the square yards of soil that held the palm tree, all the same. Actually, though, everything was different. The graffiti on the plaster of the wall right behind the palm tree stated that this had once been a war zone. The warriors who had ruled over this territory and had fought there had left their insignia behind them, in eternal commemoration.
F12.
Letters and numbers ten feet tall. Nicolas Fiorillo. And his soldiers.
“Was it really them, did they do it themselves?” asked Giacomino ’a Lucertola. Jimmy the Lizard.
“Wait, what, don’t you know?” Salvo replied.
The school backpacks on their shoulders were bigger than they were. They sagged limply behind them because they’d left their textbooks to serve as goalposts in the playground behind the school where they played soccer.
“I know a guy from the Piranhas,” Giacomino said. As he talked, he was looking at the graffiti.
“I don’t believe it, Lucertoli’…”
“No, for real. I swear it, adda murì m
ammà.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Carminiello, the third member of the group, and he took a selfie in front of the graffiti with his brand-new iPhone 7. “And who the hell is he supposed to be?” The selfie was already on his Instagram profile. “It’s impossible…”
“No, I really know him.”
Spaccanapoli. On the run. Their backpacks bouncing off their backs and all three laughing, no different than the laughter of all the other little kids happy to be out of school, with the whole long afternoon lying ahead of them.
At a certain point, Giacomino ’a Lucertola threw both arms wide, and without slowing down, even at a run, he started grabbing old advertising and election posters off the walls. The two others imitated him immediately, and from under a piece of copy paper that offered Latin tutoring there emerged another logo, another F12, but by now the three were already far away, they were already in Forcella.
“Look here,”’a Lucertola gasped. “You see these three bullet holes?” And he pointed at three holes, close together, between the door of a basso and a clothes drying rack groaning under the weight of laundry. “The paranza made these three bullet holes during a stesa!”
“Nooo, that’s too cool!” said Carminiello.
“Ua’, I can’t believe it,” said Salvo.
They stuck their fingers into the holes. They felt their edges, careful not to peel away the plaster, and then they stuck their fingertips into them, back and forth. Salvo even stuck in his tongue. “I’m licking the bullet hole…”
“What the fuck are you doing?”’a Lucertola asked him with a laugh.
“I want to see if I can still taste it…”
Giacomino ’a Lucertola started running again. He zigzagged right and left as if he were following an itinerary he’d covered plenty of times before. In the end, he stopped in front of a building with the blinds lowered over the windows.
“Risvoltinooo … Risvoltinooo!”
A man came out of the beauty parlor across the street, shouting at him to cut out that racket, but Giacomino ignored him.
“Risvoltinooo!” Both hands cupped over his mouth.
A roller blind on the fifth floor rose, creaking. “What the fuck do you want?” Risvoltino’s eyes were shut, he was still half asleep, but he’d recognized Giacomino from his croaking voice.
“Come downstairs for a minute, ja’, please.”
Risvoltino shouted insults at him, but five minutes later he was down in the street, still wearing the Boston Celtics shorts he slept in.
“Is it true that you were in the Piranhas?” Carminiello asked. He’d pulled out his iPhone again, ready for another selfie.
“Of course, why not…” said Risvoltino. “Nicolas was a brother to me.”
“For real? And did you do a job together? Did you kill?”
“Certainly, we were always doing jobs together…”
“But is it true,”’a Lucertola broke in, “that when you were clearing the streets, when you were out on stese, Maraja would jump straight up to balcony height so he could shoot right into people’s houses?”
“Fuck, I saw him do it myself … He looked like Spider-Man.”
“Ua’, ’o ras himself … The boss.”
Risvoltino was leaning his back against the building and he’d lit a cigarette. He was smoking greedily, making a special effort to produce smoke rings.
The three stood gazing at him, slackjawed, without being able to work up the nerve to ask him the most important thing.
“All right,” said the ex-paranza member, as if he were able to read their minds, “let’s go take a stroll.”
The first station of the Via Crucis of Nicolas Fiorillo Maraja was the building where he’d been born. The kitchen window was always closed these days, though in the past it hadn’t been, not even after Christian’s death.
“There, guagliu’, that’s where he lived, his mother is still there…” said Risvoltino.
They went up to the intercom and pressed the button. Mena replied with a sigh. Kids were constantly ringing the doorbell, asking her all about Nicolas, and it was a pleasure for her to tell them about her son, see those kids who understood the worth of what Nicolas had done and who took him as an example. It seemed to her that it was a way of letting him live on a little longer, inside those youngsters; she saw them a little bit as his heirs, since he hadn’t had any male offspring and she, Mena, no longer had any children at all. But there were also times when she would like to be alone, you can’t always be a stranger to your own grief. And on those days, her anger boiled up and she had it in for everyone and everything.
At the other end of the intercom, the youngsters stood in silence. What do you say to a hero’s mother?
In the background, they could hear a dog barking, then Nicolas Fiorillo’s mother blew up: “Leave me alone, go ring your own mothers’ doorbells!”
“Ua’, the mamma is like the son, a real hardass!” said Carminiello. Salvo said: “Oh, did you hear the dog barking? That must have been Skunk, Maraja’s Dogo. Uànema, I’ve heard Skunk killed a hundred dogs.”
“Is it true that Maraja had a tiger, too?” asked Carminiello.
“It’s true,” Risvoltino replied. “They say that there are days when you can still see it walking around Forcella.”
Then he led them to the lair, the second station of the cross.
“Everyone used to come here … Drago’, Lollipop, Tucano, Pesce Moscio…”
“I saw Pesce Moscio once!” Salvo cried.
“Shut up!” the Lizard retorted.
“No, for real! I saw him! My cousin went to school with him…”
And off they went again, because Maraja’s city was a big place to tour.
“Here’s where we beat the shit out of the immigrants…”
“That’s where they killed Christian, may he rest in peace.”
“Here all the shops were ours…”
“The clubhouse. This is where the Longhairs used to hang out.”
“Roipnol. This is where that traitor lived.”
Risvoltino went on like that until evening, when they ended the tour right where it had begun, downstairs from Risvoltino’s house. They took the last selfies and thanked him again, then the three of them ran home—they all lived nearby. As they had that morning, their backpacks slammed against their sweaty T-shirts, but they felt older now, they’d learned a bunch of things, they had the impression they’d fought a hundred battles. Suddenly the Lizard stopped in his tracks and the other two slammed up against him. They’d passed that way a few hours earlier, and Risvoltino had explained that this had been the paranza’s official hairdresser, and that after the whole episode with Roipnol and the exploits that had ensued, the kids in the neighborhood, and from outside the neighborhood as well, had basically overrun Santino’s hairdresser’s shop. The shop was still open and the Lizard walked in without the slightest hesitation.
“We’re getting ready to close, guaglio’.”
“I want Maraja’s trademark,” Giacomino replied promptly.
The hairdresser smiled and, with a flourish of the barber’s cloth, invited him to take a seat. Nicolas hadn’t made it long enough, his time in hiding had also deprived him of those small pleasures of life, and so Santino had never been able to show him his new technique. He got the hatchet out of the sink and a carpenter’s hammer out of one of the pockets of his smock. Like a sculptor with a chisel, he gently placed the hatchet on Giacomino’s right temple and started tapping with the hammer against the back of the blade.
“Ua’, how cool,” said Salvo.
“This is a work of art,” said Carminiello.
Once he was done with the right side, Santino started carving the back, leaving narrow strips of hair. F12.
“Ua’, you busted the toilets!”
“Maraja! Maraja!”
Just as they were exulting in front of the shop, Aucelluzzo appeared on his scooter. The Lizard turned just in time to glimpse the new boss of Forc
ella riding his TMAX directly into the shop. The three friends cowered against the wall in sheer terror.
“Go right ahead, Aucellu’,” said Santino, who’d kept his cool. “The boys can finish later.”
“No, no,” said Aucelluzzo, turning off his scooter. “Let them finish, it’s on me.”
Twenty minutes later, they were back in the street, hands touching Maraja’s trademark carved into their scalps. Aucelluzzo left the shop with them, then left the seat of his TMAX and pulled out a brick of hashish.
“A little brick like this, how fast do you think you could sell it? You think you could get it done in a week?”
“Oh, sure,” said the Lizard, “for sure, every one of us!”
“Hold on, what are you, everyone else’s lawyer?” asked Aucelluzzo. He pretended to take offense, and then the smile came back to his face. “Let the others talk!”
The others nodded their heads, eyes sparkling. It was a deal: a hundred euros a week, just to start, Aucelluzzo had told them. Then they’d see. The sky was the limit.
* * *
The next day, they were back again. Same piazza, same backpacks slung over their shoulders, same eyes looking up to admire the graffiti.
“Look what I’ve got here…”’a Lucertola finally said, rummaging into his backpack. A dented Desert Eagle, but still looking fierce.
“Ua’ … The gat,” said Salvo, and he stepped forward to touch it, and so did Carminiello, but ’a Lucertola dodged their hands and put the gun away.
“Risvoltino gave it to me,” he said, and then, before his friends’ incredulous eyes, he added: “He said that this was Maraja’s first gat.”
Again, silence. And then, at last, he said, in a serious voice: “Guagliu’, you want to start a paranza all our own?”
ALSO BY ROBERTO SAVIANO
Gomorrah
ZeroZeroZero
The Piranhas
A Note About the Author
Roberto Saviano was born in 1979 and studied philosophy at the University of Naples. His novel The Piranhas earned widespread acclaim and was adapted as a major motion picture, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlinale. Gomorrah, his first book, has won many awards, including the prestigious 2006 Viareggio Literary Award. It was adapted into a play; a film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes; and a television series. You can sign up for email updates here.
Savage Kiss Page 39