The paranza’s new cars were having their maiden run, a baptism by rubber along Via Posillipo to Marechiaro, and back. They never went any farther, because it would have meant disturbing the shoals of Nisida. “That bitch Nisida never gave in to Posillipo, instead she jumped into the sea,” as Nicolas had told the story rooted in ancient mythology.
Briato’ showed up at the New Maharaja in a fire-engine-red Porsche Cayenne brand new from the dealership.
“Ua’, let’s try this car out!” Lollipop suggested immediately.
Back and forth, the members of the paranza took turns taming the Cayenne; even Susamiello claimed his run, but that privilege was still denied to the little ones. “Did you wash your hands?” Briato’ asked them.
Nicolas alone stayed off to one side, punching words into his smartphone, indifferent to everything that was going on in the parking lot of the New Maharaja.
“Nico’,” Briato’ shouted, “it’s your turn. Nico’!”
Nicolas shook his head and pointed to his Rolex. There was no time, he still had to hand out the monthly paychecks and then go by to pick up Letizia. “Maternity class,” he explained, pointing an imaginary pistol at his temple and pulling the imaginary trigger.
In about half an hour, Nicolas divvied up the cash and said goodbye to his men, but before he could hop on his TMAX, Drago’ came over to him: “Hold up, Nico’, let’s drive part of the way together.”
They rolled along, scooters side by side, in silence, until Drago’ asked: “So, have you ever driven a car?” Nicolas sped up, putting a good fifty yards between them, but then he let Drago’ catch up with him. It would do no good to lie.
“Then let’s set up this driving school, ja’,” said Drago’ in such an inviting tone that Nicolas found himself obliged to accept.
The first stop was at a hardware store; they needed a drill bit and a roll of duct tape. It was simple physics: if they used the butt of a pistol to break a car’s side window, it would make a tremendous racket. If they taped the drill bit to the pistol butt, and then hit the window with it, the glass simply imploded. A nice clean piece of work.
“Maraja, choose the car!”
They buzzed along Via Nuova Marina and pulled over by the cars to consider them. They felt like they were in Grand Theft Auto. Drago’ knocked on the driver’s window of a big sedan and signaled for the guy to roll it down. The guy was so fat that the transmission was completely hidden.
“Is that an automatic?” he asked him.
The guy tried to accelerate, but the two of them were on him in a flash, and Drago’ repeated his demand, whereupon the guy nodded his head. “Queer,” Drago’ commented.
At last they laid eyes on a perfect car. A Mercedes SLC the driver was parking, using the stick shift. They shut off the street, Nicolas hopped off the scooter, shattered the driver’s window with a quick blow from the butt of his pistol, yanked open the door, and hauled the unfortunate man out onto the pavement.
As soon as Nicolas started up, he acquitted himself admirably. The car shook a bit and touched the curbs from time to time, but he drove along reasonably well. Drago’ rode along next to him and gave him instructions through the broken window—“Shift, brake, downshift”—but he couldn’t keep Nicolas from taking a turn too tightly and scraping the side of the Mercedes and, more important, wedging it irremediably in the narrow alleys, or vicoli. They just dumped the car there: Nicolas climbed out and got behind Drago’ on his scooter; he stopped a short while later.
They chose another car stuck in traffic, a Fiat Panda, easier to handle. They shattered the driver’s window, hauled the owner out, thoroughly terrorizing her, and off they went again, back to driving school. Nicolas ground the gears as he shifted from second to third, and lurched forward a bit, but for a brand-new driver he wasn’t doing badly at all. Drago’ hit the horn a couple of times to celebrate his pupil’s progress, and Nicolas responded by banging his fist on the roof of the car. The vicolo widened slightly, allowing Drago’ to rev the TMAX and ride along on the driver’s side. From there he’d enjoy a better view of Nicolas at work.
Something wasn’t quite right. The engine was revving too high, it should have been in third gear by now, but Nicolas had his eyes glued to his rearview mirror. Drago’ turned to look behind him and he saw what Nicolas had seen: motorcycles belonging to the Falchi squad of the police. We need to do something, thought Drago’, and Nicolas must have been thinking the same thing, because he’d drawn his pistol. Drago’ kicked the door of the Fiat Panda: “Nico’, let me take care of this. You get out of these vicoli and out into traffic.” The Panda accelerated and Drago’ fired four shots into the air so the Falchi came after him. There was a fork in the narrow lane, and Nicolas veered to the left, while Drago’ turned right, leading the police.
If I can only get to Piazza Mercato, then from there I can cut over to the station, and I’m safe, thought Drago’. He’d aim at pedestrians and veer away only at the last second, forcing them to leap out into the street and hoping that would slow down his pursuers. In the meantime, Nicolas was driving through the vicoli, trying to find his way to Via Nuova Marina, and as he drove he typed into the paranza’s chat:
Maraja
Cop emergency. Come on your bikes.
Kids come too, come on, guagliunciell!
And he sent the Google Map coordinates.
Here’s the marina, and there’s my scooter, Nicolas thought to himself. He jumped out of the Fiat Panda without even bothering to switch off the engine, leaped onto the TMAX, and took off in the direction of Corso Garibaldi. Knowing Drago’, he would have veered into the messy labyrinth of the neighborhood around the station to elude his pursuers. He just had to stay out of their reach long enough for the paranza’s network of protection to leap into action. It was a strategy they’d been employing as long as they’d been alive: bewilder, confuse, and make as much ruckus and turmoil as possible.
Drago’ had practically reached the station. As he roared through Piazza del Mercato, he realized that the motorcycles chasing him had gone from two to, now, three. He was racing as fast as he could, leaning into the curves at angles approaching forty-five degrees, and in the end he’d emerged onto the last stretch of Corso Garibaldi. The Falchi were still right on his ass. In his pocket, his cell phone was sizzling on his thigh, buzzing with the growing stack of text messages and notifications.
Drago’ stood up on the scooter’s deck to get a glimpse of the road ahead, beyond the cars: at the far end of the piazza there were two squad cars full of state police, and from the right, over near the station, a car full of city traffic cops was arriving. He was surrounded. Drago’ considered whether to just dump the scooter and continue his flight on foot. There was a small knot of Africans who were bivouacking next to the monument; with a bit of luck maybe he’d be able to use them as human shields. He released the throttle, determined to make that last desperate attempt, but he saw a 50 cc scooter coming in the opposite direction, pulling a wheelie as it arrived. Driving it was Susamiello. Yes, none other than Susamiello, and right behind him was another scooter, driven by one of the youngsters, one of the other two guagliuncielli, he couldn’t even remember his name. They darted suddenly to one side, in an incursion into the lane that Drago’ was occupying, roaring straight at the car full of city traffic cops as if challenging them to a reckless duel.
The anti-police had arrived. And the more Drago’ looked around, the more scooters he saw appearing; in fact, there was even a young kid riding a BMX who veered over close to one of the squad cars and with a well-aimed kick shattered one of its brake lights. Drago’ felt as if he’d fallen into one of those old Westerns that his father could never get enough of: the police were the regular army, organized, methodical, predictable; the guaglioni of Naples were the Indians, courageous, skillful in exploiting the territory, deeply anarchistic. Here was mayhem, here was salvation. Drago’ sped up and shot past the two squad cars that were now busy trying to thread their way through the buzzing swarm of scooters, and left the piazza, free at last.
That evening, at the New Maharaja, they celebrated their exploit. Drago’ had sidled over next to Nicolas, whispering: “Congratulations on your new driver’s license,” and they’d clinked their flutes of Moët & Chandon together, sloshing at least half of the bubbly onto the floor of the private room. Just a short time before that, Drago’ had awarded Susamiello and his comrades their prize. He’d stepped out of the club and found them waiting there, as usual in single file, facing off with the unruffled and unrufflable bouncer. Drago’ had wrapped his arm around the human refrigerator’s shoulder and then pointed at those three, who burst out in exultation when they saw the gesture, only to turn and relay the same signal to a small group of young girls waiting behind them. The bouncer waved in the three youngsters with their chosen damsels, and they vanished into the long night of the New Maharaja.
Nicolas, too, had a gift for Drago’: he handed him a set of keys.
“The car comes from our dealership,” said Nicolas. “They weren’t fast enough to deliver it, these jackoffs.” Drago’ looked down at the set of keys in his hand: a Maserati SUV.
“Since when did you buy a dealership?” Drago’ asked. Nicolas had locked arms with him and led him to the parking lot. Day was dawning.
“Ever since we started offering him protection, the owner keeps giving us cars. He says that if we drive them, then everyone is going to want to buy one, that same model. Can you believe it, we set the fashion.” Nicolas was talking with his eyes narrowed to slits. Too much Moët, too much cocaine, too much New Maharaja.
“Everyone wants to be like you,” said Drago’. “Nico’,” he went on, “I have something I need to tell you,” and he started relating his tale, beginning with Viola’s incursion. “If it had been up to me, I’d have laid her out dead outside my front door, but she’s still blood of my father.”
“Drago’, these guys are getting scared, don’t you get that? They want an armistice. We’re succeeding! We’ve busted the toilets!”
They slapped each other five, then Drago’ told him about that morning with Micione, starting with Genghis Khan and showing Nicolas his selfies in the cage.
“He has a real lion?” asked Maraja.
“Real as can be.”
“Fuck me, after the Dogo Argentino, what I need now is a tiger, adda murì mammà,” and the idea made them all laugh.
Drago’ described the repeated attempts by Viola and her husband to bring him into their family: “‘You’ve been here before,’ ‘We’re all one family,’ ‘All the good your grandfather did in his life can’t be wiped out by just one turncoat,’ all that kind of bullshit, Nico’.”
He spoke and gesticulated, a whirling of hands as if to sum up the idea that the encounter had been an overwhelming meat grinder, but that he’d been capable of emerging from it intact.
“And then he told me that I needed to take over the paranza.” He said it with the sense of immediacy with which Micione had said it to him. At the home of the Faellas, he had reacted by contesting each point: But how would Nicolas react?
“And what did you tell him?” asked Nicolas, never taking his eyes off his face.
“I told him that the paranza belongs to all of us, that we’re brothers, that we own the paranza, and that we’re all bros.”
“And what did he tell you?” The confession had turned into an interrogation, but Drago’ sensed in Nicolas’s question curiosity more than concern, as if Nicolas wished he could have been in his shoes, gaining access to the headquarters of the Faella clan.
“He told me that now everyone in the city wants to work under us, and that I have the blood to command, not like Copacabana, not like ’o White.” Drago’ paused: “Not like you,” he said, and he stopped before adding that the way Micione saw it, he was nothing more than Maraja’s houseboy.
“Not like me,” said Nicolas, with a hint of a smile, and he thought to himself that that was exactly his strength: he never laid claim to his realm on account of any rights of birth, he conquered it through his own merits. “These guys really are old. They’re still worrying about blood. Fucking nobility, my ass.”
“Maraja,” said Drago’, his gaze level, “my blood is the blood of my brothers.”
“I know that, Drago’, I know it,” Nicolas replied. He’d learned that whatever happened, more than an interpretation, what was needed was a reaction. You always had to respond. He said: “One of these days, let’s take a ride up to Rome and visit your cousin.”
Drago’ returned home the morning of the following day. Nicolas had decided that they’d leave the New Maharaja only once they’d emptied all the fridges. Once he arrived on Via Nuova Marina, he veered sharply toward the Inner Port, roared past a couple of shipyards, and stopped at a wharf.
“Filthy water,” he said loudly, and shoved the scooter into the waves.