“He’s born!”
“What do you mean, he’s born?!”
“That’s right, he’s born.”
On the other end of the line, silence, nothing but breathing crackling over the microphone. Then: “Wait, are you sure?”
He’d been expecting this call for weeks, but now that Tucano was telling him, Nicolas felt the need to hear it again, repeated so he could be convinced that the day had finally come, to savor it well and truly in his head. So he could be ready.
“Right, like I’m kidding around! No, trust me. He was just born, I swear it, adda murì mammà, ’a Koala is practically still in the delivery room … No sign of Dentino, I came straight to the hospital.”
“Sure, no surprise, he doesn’t have the balls to show his face. But who told you the baby was born?”
“A male nurse.”
“And who the fuck is he? Where did this nurse come from?” Nicolas wasn’t about to settle for generic information, this time he wanted the details. He couldn’t afford to improvise, nothing could get screwed up.
“He’s a guy who used to work with Biscottino’s father, Enzuccio Niespolo. I told him that Koala is a friend of ours, and we just wanted to make sure we were the first to know, when the baby came into the world.”
“And how much did you say we’d pay him? You don’t think he’s spouting bullshit just because we haven’t given him a hundred euros yet?”
“No, no, I promised him an iPhone. That guy couldn’t wait for this baby to be born so he could get his hands on a new phone. He was practically bent over with his ear against Koala’s belly.”
“Then let’s do this thing. Tomorrow morning, the minute the sun rises.”
Dawn found him ready and fully dressed, eager for action. The bed he was sitting upon was barely rumpled, he hadn’t slept in it for even a minute. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, then exhaled, a flat sharp sound. Day had risen. He needed to keep his mind clear, not let himself be sucked down by memories. He had a mission to perform; after that there’d be plenty of time for everything else.
Tucano’s voice acted like the switch that opens the electric current. He stuck the Desert Eagle in his jeans and was down in the street quick as a flash.
Tucano had already put on his full-face helmet.
“Do you have the telephone?” Nicolas asked him as he put on his own helmet. “It’s in the original packaging, right?”
“Maraja, everything’s set.”
“Then let’s go buy the flowers.” Nicolas swung his leg over the seat and started off at reduced speed. He felt a sense of calm warm his whole body. An hour from now, the whole matter would be settled. Case closed.
“These fucking assholes…” Tucano said. “They say they’re not making money, but they sleep all day.”
The metal roller blinds on the florist’s shop were pulled down, they had no idea where to find another one, and in any case, they had to move quickly, thought Nicolas. Then he jammed on the brakes and the front of Tucano’s helmet slammed against the back of his.
“Maraja, maronna…”
“That’s right, the Madonna,” said Nicolas, and, pushing the bike backwards with his feet, he rolled back to the mouth of the narrow alley, the vicolo. There, enclosed within a metal cage that glittered like gold set against its shabby, decaying surroundings, a votive shrine was lit by a small spotlight. Photographs of ex votos and holy cards of Padre Pio practically covered the Madonna, but still, she smiled reassuringly, and Nicolas returned the smile. He got off the TMAX, blew a kiss, the way his grandma had taught him to do when he was little, and, standing on tiptoe, slipped a bouquet of white calla lilies out of a vase.
“Isn’t that going to piss off the Madonna?” Tucano asked.
“The Madonna never gets pissed off. That’s why She’s the Madonna,” said Nicolas, pulling down the zipper on his sweat jacket to make room for the lilies. They took off again, engine roaring. At that exact time, as agreed in advance, Pesce Moscio was about to go into action.
Just inside the gates, the nurse was waiting for them; he was stamping his feet on the asphalt, bundled up in a down jacket. Tucano raised one hand in greeting, and he went on hopping up and down in place, even if what was driving him now was no longer any thought of warding off the bone-chilling cold, as much as the lurking fear that these two new arrivals on a scooter wearing full-face helmets might not be there to repay him for the favor.
“All right, then, take me to pay a surprise call on this baby,” Nicolas began.
The male nurse tried to stall for time, trying to understand the spirit of the visit. He replied that they weren’t relatives, he couldn’t let them in.
“What do you mean, we’re not relatives,” said Nicolas. “It’s not like the only relatives are first cousins. We’re the closest kind of relatives, because we’re friends, we’re real family.”
“Right now he’s in the nursery. Soon they’ll take him to his mother.”
“It’s a boy?”
“Yes.”
“So much the better.”
“Why?” asked the nurse, trying to gain time.
“It’s easier that way…”
“What’s easier?” he insisted. Nicolas ignored the question.
“Easier to bring ’em up, it’s easier if you’re a boy, am I right?” Tucano put in. “Or maybe it’s easier if you’re a girl. At least if you know how to fuck, you can get where you want, right?”
In Nicolas’s silence, the nurse made the assumption that they would wait. He started to throw both arms wide, as if to say, what can you do, these are the rules.
“I want to see this baby before he gets to latch on to his mother’s tits.” The impatient voice, throbbing with rage, slapped him like a whipcrack, and before he could come up with a response, the nurse found himself with his face smeared against the visor of Nicolas’s helmet. “I told you that I want to see him, this baby boy. I even brought flowers for the mother. Now you tell me how to get there.” And with a shove he pushed the nurse back into an upright position.
The information poured forth with precision, the route was simple. At that point, Tucano grabbed the box containing the iPhone and tossed it into the air, while the nurse, eyes turned skyward to track the box’s trajectory, waved his arms in terror, desperately trying to make sure the cell phone didn’t hit the ground. He was so focused on his technological gem that he entirely overlooked the dense cloud of black smoke that was billowing into the air only yards away, and perhaps he even failed to catch a whiff of the acrid stench of burning tires. Pesce Moscio had been punctual to the split second. Nicolas had asked him to be punctual, indeed he’d ordered him to be. I want plenty of smoke. You have to cover everything up with a smoke screen. He’d told him that he wanted to make sure that the booth where the security guards spent their day was empty, the last thing he needed was a platoon of security guards chasing their scooter. “A diversion, Pescemo’,” and Pesce Moscio had picked a restroom in the Polyclinic near the guards’ booth. He’d stolen the tires from a shop that morning, and with a bottle of kerosene and a lighter, he was going to throw a hell of a party, a celebration of stench and toxic smoke, he’d focus everybody’s attention on that restroom.
In the meantime, the Yamaha TMAX was rolling through the gate at walking speed. Up till that point, the plan had followed a certain logic. Nicolas had worked out a timeline and a series of possible snags, and Tucano himself, diligently playing his part, had felt like a cog in this well-oiled machine. Then Nicolas had twisted the throttle and thrown all logic to the winds. The heavy scooter reared up in a wheelie and roared up the first flight of steps, almost like a horse leaping over a hurdle; bouncing step after step, it climbed the stairs and reached the entrance. The hospital’s automatic front door whisked open and the TMAX plummeted into the lobby.
Indoors, the engine roared like a Boeing turbojet. They still hadn’t encountered anyone, and at that hour of the day the steady stream of appointments and visiting families and friends hadn’t yet started to come in, but their noisy incursion brought hospital staff running, bursting out of the ward and clinic doors in disbelief. Nicolas ignored them. He was looking for the elevator.
They stormed into the maternity ward, where they were met by silence. No one in the hallways, not a voice or a whimper to point them in the direction of the nursery. The bedlam they’d unleashed downstairs didn’t seem to have ruffled the peace and quiet on this floor.
“What the fuck is this baby’s name?”
“They must have them listed by last names, right?” Tucano replied. He knew Maraja far too well to run the risk of asking him how he thought they were going to exit from the blind alley they’d rushed into. In fact, that was what made Nicolas what he was, his willingness to push you to your limit before you even realized what was happening.
They left the TMAX blocking the corridor. Gleaming and black, the scooter looked like an enormous cockroach between those walls, which were a pale lime green and covered with posters proclaiming the benefits of breastfeeding. They galloped down the corridor in search of the nursery. Tucano went first, helmet still firmly gripping his head, Nicolas right behind him. An enfilade of doors to the right and the left, and the clucking of their soles on the linoleum flooring.
They emerged into a lobby with two empty desks, and beyond that glowed the plate-glass window of the nursery. There they all were, babies freshly delivered into life, lined up, red-faced in their pastel onesies; some slept, others were waving their tiny fists over their heads.
Maraja and Tucano leaned over, like two relatives curious to know whether the baby resembled mother or father more closely.
“Antonello Izzo,” said Tucano. The light blue blanket with the name stitched to the corner was rising and falling almost imperceptibly. “Here he is.” He turned to look at Nicolas, who was standing there, motionless, palms pressed against the plate glass, his head turned toward that newborn, who was smiling, or at least so it seemed to Tucano.
“Maraja…”
Silence.
“Maraja, now what are we going to do?”
“Come s’accide ’nu criaturo, Tuca’?” How do you kill a baby, Tucano?
“How the fuck do I know, you just thought of that now?”
Nicolas drew the Desert Eagle from the elastic of his boxer shorts and, with his thumb, snapped off the safety.
“If you ask me, it’s just like popping a balloon, isn’t it?” Tucano went on.
Nicolas pushed gently on the door, as if he wanted to be courteous enough to keep from making noise, to avoid waking up the other babies. He went over to Antonello, Dentino’s son, the child of the guy who’d killed his brother, Christian, who’d shot him in the back like the lowest of traitors.
“Christian…” he said, in a whisper. It was the first time he had uttered that name since the day of his brother’s funeral. He looked as if he’d fallen victim to a spell, his dark eyes focused straight ahead of him, but actually fathoming deep into who knows what other reality. Tucano felt like pounding his fists against the glass, shouting at Nicolas to hurry up, shouting that he needed to shoot that son of a traitor right away, immediately: instead Nicolas had placed the barrel of the Desert Eagle on the tiny belly, but the finger on the trigger wasn’t moving. The pistol kept moving up and down, slowly, as if the lungs of that tiny creature really were capable of lifting the four and a half pounds of pistol. Tucano turned to look down at the end of the corridor and realized that in the time Nicolas had hesitated, a nurse had appeared behind them. She was moving rapidly down the corridor toward them, grabbing the pole of an IV stand as if it were a spear: “What are you doing here?” Then she focused on Nicolas and started screaming in dialect: “Stanno arrubbando i criaturi! Stanno arrubbando i criaturi!” They’re stealing the babies! Tucano quickly leveled his Glock at her and the nurse instantly stopped short, with the IV stand held in midair, but that didn’t stop her from continuing to shout.
“Stanno arrubbando i bambini! They’re stealing the little ones! Help! Help!” Her voice was growing sharper and louder, like a siren.
“Maraja, pull the trigger, hurry up, they’ve figured it out, put him down once and for all…” But now Nicolas had tilted his head to one side, as if to get a better look at Dentino and ’a Koala’s son. The baby was sleeping serenely, in spite of the pistol: Christian, too—when his mother had brought him home from the hospital, after delivering him—had slept exactly the same way. She would sit Nicolas down in an armchair and then put Christian in his arms, and Christian would just go on sleeping. But all around Antonello, in contrast, the other babies were starting to wake up. In no time at all, the nursery had turned into a hellish cacophony, the wailing of one newborn quickly infecting the one in the next crib, a deafening wave that was enough to stir Nicolas out of his trance.
“They’re stealing the children! They’re stealing the children!” the nurse went on shouting, whirling the IV post all the while, trying to work up the momentum to hurl that stainless-steel javelin with all her strength.
“Maraja, shoot, kill him now!” Tucano shouted. The nurse kept coming closer, and he didn’t know whether to deck her with a punch to the face or shoot her, and if so, whether to wound or to kill. He just didn’t know.
“Maraja, things are going sideways, we need to get out of here. Now. I mean fast, let’s move!”
Nicolas lifted his left hand and touched the tattoo that he’d had done on the back of his neck, so that it could give him strength, confirm that there, too, in the presence of another innocent, what he was about to do was the right thing. For himself, for his mother, for the Piranhas. Because this was the time of the tempest, and he was the tempest that was crashing down furiously upon the city. He pressed the handgun down hard on the newborn baby’s body, and now Antonello started crying, too.
Tucano had retreated, taking one step back after another until his helmet banged against the plate-glass window. “Listen, fatso,” he was saying to the nurse, “I’ll kill you, stay back.” But she kept coming, and two other nurses, summoned by her shouting, had appeared in the corridor. As soon as they saw their colleague, they too started shouting: “Uddio si stanno arrubbando i criaturi! Stanno arrubbando i criaturi!”
“Get back! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you all!” Tucano was shouting, and now his whole body was plastered against the glass. There was only one way out. He gripped the Glock with both hands now, taking careful aim at the forehead of the nurse with the IV pole.
Boom.
An explosion. Then silence. Tucano looked at his hand, which hadn’t been fast enough to fire.
The bullet in fact had come from behind, shattering the plate-glass nursery window into a hail of sharp-edged fragments, shards that rattled off Tucano’s helmet, glittering on the lab coats of the nurses, who were covering their faces with their hands, bounced off the ceiling, stabbed into walls and floor. When Tucano turned around to see who had fired, he saw Nicolas holding the Desert Eagle still pointed right at what had once been the nursery window. High up on the facing wall was the hole where the bullet had finally lodged. The cries of the babies, which had ceased for a brief fraction of a second, resumed desperately and Nicolas angrily started into awareness: “Come on, come on, get out of here.”
Just like on the way in, they crossed paths with no one. They descended the broad steps of the Polyclinic, and then the steps that led down to the lobby. There Nicolas twisted the throttle all the way to barrel through the security guards who were struggling to draw their guns and the firemen with gas masks on their faces. The last person they roared past was the male nurse who had let them in in the first place, but his eyes were glued to his iPhone and he didn’t even notice them going past.
Nicolas returned home just as his building was emerging from sleep. He heard the showers running, parents calling to children to get moving or hurry up, that the school gates weren’t about to wait for them to wake up. Only his own apartment was mute and deserted. His mother was already at the laundry and pressing shop, every morning she got there a little before opening time; and his father had moved out right after Christian’s death, he’d left the house with them to go to the funeral and then he’d never come home. They could live without him, though; his father didn’t make the difference—he never had. Nicolas’s mouth twisted in a grimace, he tossed the keys onto the table and turned on the television set. The volume was turned down all the way, not even the morning news dared to break a silence that smacked of reproof. Trailing after the segments about local politics, on-screen there were images from the hospital, the shattered plate glass, the nurses taking newborn babies with convulsive bawling faces out of their cribs and carrying them off, tire marks on the floor. “Hooligan Pranks at the Polyclinic,” read the banner graphic on the TV screen. A minute later the report was over, the time you’d devote to a stupid stunt.
He reached his bedroom, lay down on his brother’s bed, and knitted the fingers of both hands together behind his neck, allowing his fingertips to trace the name he’d had tattooed there: Christian. A meticulous braille-reading of the name, back and forth, and then again, a circumnavigation of the oval outline of the hand grenade, and then, slowly, he repeated the process. He’d insisted on having the hand grenade exactly the same as the one on his chest that enclosed his name, Maraja, an identical twin tattoo.
What have I done? he asked himself. He stuck both fists into his eye sockets and started digging.
Cat and mouse. A furious cat on the hunt for a phantom mouse.
The piazzas were thriving. Coke was moving briskly. They had no trouble selling Scignacane’s heroin. The monthly take from the protection racket was coming in on time. The sun shone on the Piranhas’ territories, in the center of Naples. But Dentino was still alive, and Nicolas simply couldn’t make peace with that idea. It was like a backache that just wouldn’t quit, a cavity in a tooth that torments your sleep: the traitor was still somewhere in the city, hiding who knows where.
For the past five months, he’d been wearing himself ragged, on endless stakeouts. He’d begun by setting up an ambush outside the courtyard of the parish church. That rectangular patch of dirt still bore the marks of their soccer matches. Then he’d spent night after sleepless night outside the dentist’s office where Dentino had spent his first month’s wages on whitening the teeth that smoke and drugs had blackened. Then his parents’ apartment, the apartment of his maternal grandparents, then that of his paternal grandparents, and Capodimonte Park because someone said that they’d seen him sitting on a bench there, and finally the train station, because it had just struck Nicolas as a logical option to give that a try. Homeless bum by homeless bum, toilet by toilet. Tightly pinching his nose shut, he’d turned over those worn and weary men sleeping in their rags. At the apartment where Dumbo’s mother lived, he’d devoted a full week of continuous stakeouts, ready to ambush him at any time of the day or night, confident that sooner or later that traitor would give in to temptation. But he’d come away empty-handed.
The mouse hadn’t shown itself anywhere, so he logically had to crush the baby mouse. But he hadn’t been able to do it … Come si accide ’nu criaturo? How can you kill a baby?
“That’s enough,” shouted Nicolas, “that’s enough.” A single movement, his arm sweeping away everything. Saint cards, holy cards, cards of the Madonna, San Gennaro, Padre Pio, photographs of Christian at his first communion, in a swimsuit beside him on a beach of which he had no memory. He looked down at the clutter of objects at his feet, then he took off shoes, trousers, and sweat jacket. After that, he pulled the blanket aside and slid under the sheets, holding his knees up with both arms. And then he finally made up his mind to do what he ought to have been doing for some time now.
He started crying.