O White needed to think and not think at the same time. Develop a plan and avoid putting his foot back into all the bullshit he’d spewed out then and there into Micione’s face. But he’d never been much when it came to strategizing. Maraja was better at that than ’o White, and that’s why he was running circles around him. But strategies are important only up to a certain point. He’d learned that if you were willing and ready to pull the trigger, then might and right were on your side. The driver who had brought them there had ordered him to wait, he’d go and get the VW Golf.
“How many shots do you count in here?”’o Selvaggio was saying. He’d pulled out the clip of his Beretta 7.65 and was holding it high, like a saint card. “One, two, three … there’s nine. ’O White, this clip alone will do it, it’s one shot apiece, with a few left over. We blast lead into that piece of shit Maraja and all of his paranza.”
“I don’t know if it was him. But whoever it was that killed Roipnol and that fat wife of his did a good job, he wasn’t from Forcella, he just bought his way in,” said Orso Ted.
’O White decided that maybe ’o Selvaggio and Orso Ted were right. But what did that matter right now? Micione had set his sights on Carlito’s and they had to bring him Carlito’s.
“The Piranhas are just a bunch of limp dicks,” he said. “I’ll eat ’o Maraja fried and crunchy whenever I please.”
“But when are we going to do it?” asked ’o Selvaggio. “He’s controlling all the piazzas. Micione hardly even noticed…”
“He noticed, and how, but he’s shitting in his own hand. He’s afraid of blood. If he hangs them one by one, you know what happens? They’ll shut down the piazzas. If you’re afraid to shoot, you wind up shot.”
“Sure, but Maraja’s paranza has the piazzas now.”
“Who knows where they get this surplus shit … someone must be selling it to them under the table,”’o White replied. He heard the engine of his car even before he saw it come around the curve, and he headed off down the street, followed by the others.
“It isn’t garbage, what they sell, they’re good rocks … and at ridiculously low prices, they’re taking over Naples,” said Orso Ted.
’O White went on walking, leaving them to argue among themselves.
“Let’s just ride down to Forcella and take them out. Boom boom boom and we’re done.”
“And if we kill all the paranzas of Forcella, asshole, then the outsiders will just take over.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Then let’s go hear what Copacabana has to say … he was the one who was supposed to decide … so he’s the one we’re supposed to bring back.”
The VW Golf pulled up next to ’o White, who grabbed the keys that the driver tossed him and then slid behind the wheel, violently slamming the door behind him. Then he hit the door locks and started the engine. Chicchirichì and ’o Selvaggio grabbed the handles and started yanking on them: “Hey, open up!”
“Like fuck I will, you can hoof it all the way back, you pieces of shit. You aren’t real brothers. When Micione took me you didn’t lift a finger, so now you can walk all the way back.”
“What’s that have to do with anything, ’o White?”
“You’re out to lunch!”
“What were we supposed to do?”
With the screech of tires, ’o White had already disappeared behind the buildings of the Faella clan.
The plan that ’o White had come up with wasn’t outstandingly original or anything, but everyone agreed that it was the most effective one.
They all knew that the Costagliola family had taken off sometime ago, escaped, down to the very last member. Where they had gone, however, no one seemed able to say; the neighbors were keeping their mouths stitched tight, information was at a premium. The plan was to help the neighbors to see matters more clearly.
’O White appeared with his men outside the apartment house, cradling in his arms the only AK-47 the Longhairs possessed.
“What happened to the Costagliola family?” he demanded, shouting up at the empty windows, giving them one last chance.
Then, seeing that no one had even stuck their head out, he pulled the trigger. The balconies might as well have been made of styrofoam, so readily did they absorb the bullets, while the window fixtures shot splinters and shards in all directions. A burst of lead hit a line of geraniums, and the red petals scattered, fluttering gently through the air, while the windowpanes shattered, inundating the terrified passersby below with sharp bits of glass. ’O Selvaggio took the pistol he carried with him and started firing. Chicchirichì and Orso Ted, who carried no weapons, shouted amid the roar of gunfire: “You’re all garbage, you’re shitholes…”
Once he’d fired all the bullets in his first magazine, ’o White waved to his men to fall silent: “All right, then, where are they? What’s become of these ghosts?” he shouted. He gave the people in the building five seconds to make themselves heard, and when that time was up he shoved a new clip into the assault rifle. After the first hail of bullets, once a piece of stone cornice more than three feet long had crashed to the pavement not far from his feet, they heard a voice coming from one of the shattered windows. “In Villaricca! At their grandmother’s! They’re in Villaricca!”
“Where the fuck does this grandmother live?” shouted Orso Ted.
“Near the Conad supermarket!” rang out another voice.
Carlito’s Way’s beehive had started to buzz again. The veil of omertà had been rent asunder because the silence that ensures protection always has a sell-by date, and it corresponds to the moment when you actually risk your own life, in the first person.
The Longhairs rode their scooters back to the clubhouse, where ’o White had parked the VW Golf, and then off they all headed toward Villaricca, equipped as follows: the AK-47, the five magazines of bullets that they kept hidden behind the Stoya poster in the clubhouse, an old Colt M1911, and ’o White’s Beretta. A GPS set for Villaricca, and a crack pipe. ’O White had made sure to buy a car with an automatic transmission, so that he could keep the car on the road with one hand but had the other hand ready when his turn to take a hit came around. With that traffic, it took them two hours to get there.
Passing the pipe around the whole time, they started driving up and down the stretch of street that ran past the Conad supermarket.
“If we keep driving back and forth like this,” said ’o Selvaggio, “they’re going to start thinking we’re planning an ambush. And then we’ll have the police on our ass, busting our chops.”
“Get out and walk it, then,” said ’o White, and he parked the car on a crosswalk.
Orso Ted and Chicchirichì walked along the sidewalk, hands stuffed in their pockets because the evening had turned chilly.
“What do you think, does Carlito’s Way really have nothing to do with this?” Chicchirichì asked, and he’d been wanting to ask that question for a while now.
“If you ask me, he doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with this,” Orso Ted said immediately, and it was clear that he, too, had had that answer in his head for some time.
“According to ’o White, there’s someone behind it, either Sanità with Mangiafuoco, or the people from Secondigliano, or the Quartierani. Which means there’s going to be a war.”
“You ask me, it’s the Piranhas.”
“You ask me, Carlito’s Way sold out. He took money to say when the sentinel wasn’t standing guard.”
“But if he did that, it would have been too easy to find out. He can’t be that much of an asshole. And then, if they’d given him the cash, he wouldn’t be in Villaricca by now. He’s not with the Piranhas. He’s just an asshole. I’ve known him all my life, Carlito’s Way. He’s just shitting his pants because Micione thinks it was him.”
They went back to the Golf. ’O White and ’o Selvaggio had fallen asleep with their heads pressed against the windows, and, seeing that it looked like the neighborhood was deserted, Orso Ted and Chicchirichì slumped into the back seat.
They were awakened by the rapid beeping of a garbage truck backing up. Without uttering a word, ’o White started the car and resumed their patrolling. Compared with the night before, the street had come to life, for the most part populated with retirees pulling shopping carts and heading for the supermarket. There wasn’t the slightest trace of the Costagliola family, though.
“Where the fuck are they!”’o White snapped. He was starting to run out of patience, and the fact that they’d smoked all the crack wasn’t doing a thing to sweeten his mood. He pulled the car up alongside the pedestrians and followed them closely until, terrified by the dilated pupils over that rotten complexion, they scampered to safety down their front drives. ’O Selvaggio kept saying they needed to get back to Forcella, by now they’d made their presence all too clearly known, they’d attracted too much attention, but ’o White wasn’t interested in listening. Now he was tracking the progress of a couple of matrons on their way back from the Conad. The two women, in their turn, were watching ’o White, and once they reached their apartment house door, the younger of the two yanked on the other’s sleeve to get her to hurry up a little. To ’o White, that uncertainty was more than sufficient. He slammed on the brakes and threw open his car door: “Signora Costagliola? Signora Costagliola?” The two women hurried their pace, without looking around, with the younger one practically dragging the older one.
“Signora Costagliola, don’t run away! I just want to tell you something for your son.”
With those words, as if ’o White had shouted, Ready, set, go, the women dropped their shopping bags and started to run. They hurried through the gate and slammed it shut behind them with a metallic clang, vanishing through the atrium while the Longhairs were already clambering over the gate and charging off after them. The elevator door shut right in ’o Selvaggio’s face and so, one after the other, they charged up the stairs, taking the steps three at a time. In the meantime, one of the two women was shouting into her phone for someone to open the door, that it was the people from Forcella, not to waste any time. ’O White waited downstairs, ready to ward off anyone displaying excessive curiosity with the most definitive of phrases: “Nothing’s happening. Family business.”
The first of the Longhairs to reach the walkway on the top floor, Chicchirichì, saw one of the women dive into the apartment, leaving the old woman at the door. Chicchirichì grabbed her by her headscarf and yanked, uncovering a compact, well-tended hairdo. The Longhair grabbed that head of hair, hauling on it with all his might. And he kept tugging, until he finally ripped the wig free and liberated a cascade of really long gray hair.
“Madonna. What is this? Rapunzel as an old woman?” said Chicchirichì.
Carlito’s Way’s grandmother had always been an attractive woman and she attributed her success with men to the head of hair that as a young woman she’d worn waist-length. As she aged, she’d always refused to cut it, even if everyone constantly told her that for older women to wear their hair long was a sign of lasciviousness. And so she kept her hair tucked up, hidden—it had been her secret, at least until the arrival of Chicchirichì.
Now Carlito’s Way’s grandmother, being held hostage by the members of the paranza, was shouting for them to let her go; ’o Selvaggio held both her arms tight behind her back and warned her to pipe down, but she kept up her squawking all the same, calling upon all the saints and the Madonna Herself to blast those interlopers from Forcella straight to hell.
In the midst of that rosary, the door that the other woman was hiding behind swung wide open: in the space framed by the doorjamb, Carlito’s Way appeared with a Glock in his hand. He leveled it immediately at ’o Selvaggio, but he in turn used the grandmother as a human shield and Chicchirichì aimed his AK-47 at her.
Carlito’s Way’s grandmother kept yelling at him to shoot, to send them both to meet their maker, after all, she’d lived long enough, and her grandson kept trying to drown out that bedlam by shouting the words he’d been repeating for months now: “I didn’t do anything! I don’t have a thing to do with Roipnol and ’a Culona, adda murì mammà! They killed them without any help from me. I didn’t sell out! I never sold out.”
“Sure, we can believe you, but it makes no difference, you need to tell your story to Micione!” Chicchirichì explained. “Micione wants to hear you say it to his face. You need to come, otherwise he’ll take it out on us. Fucker! Why the fuck are you running away? Keep it up and you’ll get us all killed, little piece of shit.”
In the meantime, Carlito’s Way’s mother had appeared behind him, and like the grandmother she was calling on the neighbors to come to her rescue. The only one keeping his mouth shut was Pisciazziello. He’d taken shelter at the far end of the living room, and every once in a while he’d stick his head out to get a better view.
Orso Ted kept them both covered with his Colt, while the grandmother shrieked and kept trying to wriggle free by stamping on ’o Selvaggio’s feet, while he dodged and shuffled like a tap dancer.
“I didn’t do a thing! Let go of my grandmother, you bastard!” Carlito’s Way shouted.
“Drop the pistol on the floor, and I’ll give you back the old woman,” said Chicchirichì, jamming his AK-47 into the lady’s belly.
“But what if you shoot her anyway?”
“Oh, so you really are an asshole. If I wanted to, I’d have already shot you, your grandmother, your mother, and Pisciazziello, too.”
Carlito’s Way compressed his lips, turned for a second to look at his mother, then carefully set the Glock down on the floor and kicked it away. The pistol slid to the center of the landing. ’O Selvaggio let go of the grandmother, and the minute she felt his grip relax, like a horse that no longer feels the bit, she took off running into the apartment, with her daughter and her grandson, taking advantage of the fact that the Longhairs had all lunged together for the Glock. The armor-plated door slammed shut so violently that the doorjamb shivered.
From downstairs, ’o White asked what they were doing up there, why it was taking them so much damned time, and ’o Selvaggio reassured him with an “It’s all good,” then he let loose with a burst of gunfire that peppered the door panel. “Now you’re all dead,” he shouted, “every last one of you,” and he held the trigger down until the clip was empty. The move must have been persuasive because after the noise of shots had stopped echoing on the landing and down the stairs, the door opened a crack. Through that narrow opening, Carlito’s Way begged them to stop firing, he’d come with them to talk to Micione. “Cut out the mayhem! Basta co’ stu burdello!”
In the background, you could hear his mother saying over and over again: “Don’t hurt him! He didn’t do anything!” But it was finally Carlito’s Way who told her just to shut up for once: “Don’t worry, Mammà. It’ll all turn out fine, they’re brothers. Pisciazzie’, you take care of it if anything comes up!”
During the drive to San Giovanni a Teduccio, the only sound was Carlito’s Way’s labored breathing. He’d used up all his courage in his attempt to assure his family that it was just a trifle, nothing serious, and that things were well under control, in spite of the firefight on the walkway.
“Smoke this,”’o White told him, extending a joint. “You need to keep calm when you’re talking to Micione.”
Carlito’s Way shook his head, he wanted to keep his head straight, he wanted to give the best possible answers to Micione’s questions.
“But why the fuck did you run away?” asked Chicchirichì. “Eh, why the fuck did you run, what good did you think it would do, why’d you make the whole neighborhood think you’d sold out?”
“You were sure to kill me,” Carlito’s Way replied with a faint threat in his voice.
“Asshole, you belong to my paranza,” said ’o White, “you should have come to me. We’d have taken care of it. What was going to happen? You might have gotten slapped around a little. That was all. You were a piece of shit. You took off. But if I’d killed you, I’d have been killing myself, you asshole! It would have meant that I’d let a traitor inside my own paranza!”
Carlito’s Way raised his hands to his chest to make sure that his breath hadn’t left him. And he wondered whether Al Pacino would have gambled away his own life just because he didn’t have the courage to tell the truth.
The procedure was exactly the same as the first time, but along with Micione, slumped deep in a rosé-hued damask armchair, and ’o Pagliaccio, there were two other people that the Longhairs had never seen before: Micione’s brother, ’o Gialluto, and Roipnol’s sister, ’a Ranfona. They were standing in a semicircle behind Micione; in a corner, almost hidden behind a grandfather clock that loomed all the way to the ceiling, Agostino ’o Cerino, or Matchstick, watched the scene with both hands locked behind his waist. He looked like a bodyguard, or a sellout, as ’o White would have called him, still baffled at the fact that the guy had managed to get himself kicked out of the Piranhas and then recycled himself as Micione’s bagman.
Carlito’s Way did his best to hold his head high and thrust his chest forward, but the result was a ridiculous pose, like a fighting rooster. Micione smiled and intercepted the shove with which ’o White tried to rid himself of Carlito’s Way as if of some useless prey. “No,” Micione said, “there’s room here for everyone, but you all need to stand, because you’ve busted my balls with what you’ve done. You, Carlito’s, you can sit down, though,” and ’o Pagliaccio stepped forward to lead him out of the group of Longhairs and nail him to the sofa. It was no longer a time for poses and attitudes, and soon Carlito’s Way was sucking in oxygen with a labored breath.
“Now then,” Micione began, “it was your job to protect Crescenzio Roipnol and you failed. You can just thank the Madonna that you’re still breathing; that your mother is still breathing; that your brother is still breathing; that your grandmother is still breathing; and that we didn’t board the ship to grab that gay father of yours.”
“He’s not gay,” Carlito’s Way said, reacting instinctively.
“No? Then how do you think he passes the months without women on that ship? Don’t you think he swaps fish with the other sailors?” Behind Micione everyone burst out laughing, and even a few of the Longhairs laughed along with them.
“And only the son of a queer can leave his job uncovered like you did. You were supposed to stand sentinel but you sold out. So now you die.” Micione hoisted himself up on the armrests and lunged at Carlito’s Way. He started off with a light punch, and then he increased the intensity, focusing with brutal fury on his ears. Carlito’s didn’t react, he limited himself to grunting and at least to holding his back straight.
“Where the fuck were you? Queer!”
“I went to pick up the gambling money at the bar, I was supposed to bring it to Roipnol. I always did it at the same time of day. They must have followed me, so that’s when they went and rubbed him out.”
Two more straight punches. A right and then a left. And then Micione retraced his steps, sitting comfortably back in the armchair. Then ’a Ranfona stepped forward, and once you looked carefully you could see that she was the spitting image of her brother. Tall, dark, curly-haired, arms so long they almost reached her knees, so they looked like ranfe, or octopus tentacles. A big octopus tentacle—’a Ranfona.
“They got in,” she said. Her voice, too, seemed to come from the depths of the sea. “The door was open, they didn’t bust it open, so it must have been someone they knew. Someone you must have introduced them to, you piece of shit!” And she swung back and hit him. That was the signal. ’O Pagliaccio and ’o Gialluto unleashed a storm of punches to his back and his rib cage, which seemed to echo as if there was nothing inside but a void.
“I didn’t introduce anyone to them,” Carlito’s Way spat out. “I just went down to get the money…”
“How long did you take?” asked ’a Ranfona. “Walking with your balls scraping the dirt, the distance between Crescenzio’s house and the bar is five minutes. How fucking long were you out if by the time you got back, the police were already there? They’d already called the ambulance. It had been half an hour. So what the fuck were you doing all that time?!?” And she punched him again. That was the second signal. ’O Gialluto lifted him to his feet, grabbing him by the ears.
“Well? What the fuck did you do?”
Carlito’s Way’s eyes were brimming over with tears, but his cheeks were dry. He didn’t want to cry in front of what he still considered his paranza. Then he told himself the time had come to confess.
“I stopped to eat,” he said.
“You stopped to eat?!” Micione shouted, immediately taking back the floor. “You were supposed to stand guard at the front door. You’re seventeen years old and you don’t even know how to guard a door? If I’d let your brother do it, if I’d let ’o White do it, things would have worked out better, right?” He turned toward ’o White and slapped him hard in the face; he didn’t want him to feel safe just because he wasn’t the one getting the third degree. The chief of the Longhairs took the blow, but his ponytail whipped through the air, and his hand went straight for his lower back, where he usually kept his Beretta.
“What, did you want to shoot me, ’o White? Did your hand try to go for your boxer shorts?” asked Micione. “Good job, you ought to shoot me, because I trusted the fucking paranza of the Longhairs and now we’ll never even know who the fuck it was. ’O Maraja? The bastard Grimaldis? Mangiafuoco from Sanità, who wanted to take revenge?”
“There are video cameras…” Carlito’s Way whispered. His right ear had already started to swell and his vision was beginning to blur.
“Asshole!” Micione shoved ’o White to get him out of the way and crammed his face nose to nose flat up against Carlito’s Way, who ventured: “But there was a video camera…” Bang. Micione’s fist slammed against the base of his right ear. Carlito’s Way felt no pain, just a piercing whistle, as if a siren had been installed in his brain.
“Of course there was a video camera, asshole, but it wasn’t recording, otherwise we might as well just hand over the film to the cops!” It was an age-old rule of the many thousands of video cameras that kept watch over the front doors of mob bosses. You could see what was happening in real time, but you never, ever hit record, you never, ever leave evidence. No one had noticed that ’a Ranfona had left the room and now come back with a pair of carpenter’s pliers. She was opening and closing them to see how they worked.
“You were eating…” she said. “That was your failing. So now we’re going to teach you how to stop eating.”
Carlito’s Way lunged for the door, but ’o Pagliaccio stuck out his leg and tripped him, then grabbed him by the hair and dragged him back to the sofa and forced him down onto his back, jamming his knee against his sternum. ’A Ranfona handed the pliers over to Micione, stepped behind Carlito’s Way’s head, and seized both his wrists. She pushed down, using all her weight as if on the handle of a car jack, until she could hear his joints cracking. In the meantime, ’o Gialluto pressed his nostrils shut and used his other hand to yank his jaw open wide. An act of medieval torture.
Micione started with a molar. He made sure that the pliers had a firm grip on the tooth and then he started twisting, as if he were trying to extract a screw from a wooden plank. Carlito’s Way emitted a succession of animal sounds, punctuated by the muffled slurps of his blood-engulfed epiglottis.
The molar came away with the whole root, accompanied by a bloodcurdling scream. “You went to eat, did you?” he said, puffing with the effort. “This’ll teach you to stay in and do your job next time.” And then Micione went on to a canine. “Fuck, the teeth on this piece of shit must have been cemented in place.” He handed the pliers over to ’o Pagliaccio, who pulled sharply in a way that shattered the incisors while he was at it. Then it was the turn of the two others. In the meantime, Carlito’s Way had passed out, and they were able to finish the job without encountering any more resistance.
The Longhairs were staring at the floor. After Carlito’s Way, it could have been anyone else’s turn next. ’O Cerino, on the other hand, was supposed to report back on every detail to Copacabana, in his prison cell.
“Your life belongs to me,” said Micione, after ’o Pagliaccio had brought Carlito’s Way back to consciousness by pouring a pitcher of water over his face. “Now I’m going to lend it back to you.”
“No, I want him dead! I want him dead!”’a Ranfona objected, but Micione brought her around with a solid argument: “The guaglione needs to stay alive, but don’t you worry, I’ll give you the dealership in Forcella.”
After hearing those words, ’a Ranfona crossed her long arms and said not another thing.
“First thing.” Micione turned back to Carlito’s Way. “You need to thank the Madonna that you’re still alive, to prove that my paranza betrayed nobody. Otherwise, it would be better to get rid of pieces of shit like you, with a bucket of water on the sidewalk. Your life has only one purpose to me: as a poster on the wall. You just need to tell everyone that you’re still here, you need to say, ‘They let me live because I wasn’t the one who betrayed.’ And if you leave Forcella, anytime in the next ten years, you’re a dead man. Now get the fuck out of my face. I’m sick of looking at you.”
They found a plastic tarp, stealing it from a nearby construction site, covered up the leather rear seats of the VW Golf, and laid Carlito’s Way on them. He couldn’t seem to stop coughing. When his solar plexus sank he barked out a cough, spraying blood and chunks of broken teeth.
They arrived in Villaricca after a long and roundabout excursion to avoid any possible checkpoints, but apparently the shootout had been dismissed as an attempted robbery, and the street was clear.
They dragged him down the driveway, and then up the elevator, and finally deposited him against the armor-plated door, which had been repaired, or jury rigged, with a section of plywood.
The mother came out even before ’o White could ring the doorbell: “What have you done to him? What have you done to him, you bastards?!”
“What have they done to him…” said Chicchirichì.
Pisciazziello had emerged, along with his grandmother, his eyes filled with hope. “Did they believe him?”
“Yeah, they believed him,” replied ’o White, in the bitter tone of someone who knows they’re still not bringing good news.
At the sight of his brother—face ravaged, unrecognizable—Pisciazziello’s vision blurred. It was only the pity of a passing moment, then everything emerged again before his eyes, up close, all too clear. Around him moved the frightful, deformed face, the splotches of blood, the fists that his mother was pounding against her chest, the long locks of white hair fluttering in the air, the walls, the floor, a merry-go-round of horror that melted his muscles.
He slumped to the ground, and, something that hadn’t happened to him in years, his bladder released, drenching his underwear and trousers.