One morning, Nicolas heard a sound he’d never heard before, coming from outside. The police? Impossible. They wouldn’t have made all that noise. Those were scooters, and there had to be hundreds of them, maybe thousands. The roar seemed to emanate from the earth itself, like the rumble of a tsunami about to slam into the walled-up apartment building.
Nicolas lay flat on his belly, his ear glued to a crack between the floor tiles. “Motor scooters, sure enough, I wasn’t mistaken,” he said aloud. Then the noise suddenly stopped. He pressed his ear back against the floor. “Maraja! Maraja! Maraja!” A chorus of voices. I’ve lost my mind, he thought. He got up off the floor as if to move away from that hallucination, but even so, standing in the middle of the room, he could hear his name, “Maraja! Maraja! Maraja!” chanted faster and faster. Then he saw dust and chunks of plaster falling from a wall, and finally the tip of a pick penetrating the walled-up door. His hand darted rapidly to his pistol, but the light was already pouring in from outside, and his eyes were so unaccustomed to the sun that it took him a while before they could withstand the intensely blazing light. The shouting voices continued to chant his name, and more and more light filtered through his eyelashes: there was now a big hole in the wall. And then there was a crowd of young men outside, all on scooters, singing Maraja’s praises. Among them, he was able to identify Susamiello.
“You see?” the youngster said to him. “We came to get you.” Nicolas squinted and tried to focus. They each had both hands raised and crossed. Their fingers were bent to make a symbol. The left forefinger was pointing at the sky, the right forefinger and middle finger were raised in a V for victory, but held horizontally, intersecting with the nail of the left forefinger. Those three fingers were forming an F. F for Forcella.
It was time to go back to the city. Escorted by hundreds of scooters: his army. The army of children who hadn’t betrayed him. His army, an army that feared no one.
Drone’s garage was like a warehouse of discarded technology. The shelves were piled high with hard drives and modems, the floor was cluttered with dusty monitors that progress had made obsolete. Nicolas walked in and for a moment he almost missed the walled-up neighborhood.
“I have to see Cristiana,” he told Tucano, even before greeting him after all those months. The apartment in Vomero would be the first place they’d look for him, so Tucano convinced him to wait. “Too dangerous.” At first Nicolas put up some resistance: How dare he tell him what he could or couldn’t do? Whether he could or couldn’t see his baby girl? He started shouting, he didn’t give a fuck whether his voice echoed through the garage and down the apartment building’s hallways.
“L’Arcangelo wants to see you. Tomorrow,” Briato’ said in a flat tone, and Nicolas quieted down.
“I have to go see the arsenal, I have to understand,” he said, and he wouldn’t brook objections on that point.
They arrived in Gianturco with Nicolas concealed in the trunk of Briato’s Cayenne, while Orso Ted and Carlito’s Way went ahead to scout things out. Aza confirmed what she’d texted two days earlier, and Nicolas couldn’t get any contradictory information out of her; the young Eritrean woman was telling the truth. At a certain point she threw herself at Nicolas’s feet, and he helped her back up: “It’s all right,” he told her, but the glance he shot at Briato’ and Tucano conveyed the very opposite.
Drone heard the sound of helicopter blades. It was exactly the same as in Call of Duty, there was no mistaking it. He emerged from his room and ran down the stairs; he had to find some way of warning Nicolas that they were coming to get him. But Nicolas had already figured it out: that helicopter kicking up a wind had already made him run far away.
Drone stepped out the downstairs front door and a policewoman floored him with a billy club to the stomach. Drone folded over at the waist and then fell to his knees. Another policeman yanked him back onto his feet, and a third cop handcuffed him. The police cars had come to a halt in a semicircle in front of his building, and now he could clearly see the helicopter high overhead, monitoring the neighborhood. Drone turned around when he heard his mother sobbing. Next to her, his father was staring at him, impassive, while Annalisa had a hand over her mouth, as if trying to choke back words she preferred not to say. The three policemen dragged him toward the squad car, but Drone dug his heels in and the officers loosened their grips slightly, to give him one last moment with his family. Drone leaned forward to give his sister a kiss. He wanted to kiss her on the mouth, in the traditional act of a clan boss sealing a pact of trust with the one who will manage their business while they’re away. It’s the kiss of death, which sentences the one receiving it to death if they then cheat or betray. He stretched, lips pursed, but Annalisa turned away. Then he tried the same thing with his father and then his mother. No good. It had been them after all. Annalisa had brought them around without much effort, once they found out that the boss of the Piranhas was hiding in their garage.
“Bastards! Rotten blood! Shitty traitors! I paid your salaries! I paid for your construction projects!” he shouted at his father. “I don’t want to be near you, even in the cemetery!”
His family stood watching, forcing themselves to remain silent. Only when his body was already half inside the squad car did Annalisa take her hand away from her mouth and say: “Better to come see you at Poggioreale Prison than in Poggioreale Cemetery, behind a marble plaque. Better behind bars than underground.”
It was almost time to head back to the garage when Tucano asked him: “What does L’Arcangelo want, I wonder?”
Nicolas shrugged. Actually, he was worried that he’d disappointed L’Arcangelo with that stupid murder, which had kept him far from his business for months. Again, he shrugged his shoulders, but Tucano was already looking elsewhere. He was staring at the sky. Nicolas sped up his pace, but Tucano seized his arm and dragged him into a hallway. A helicopter darted between the buildings, nose down to cut through the wind, as if it were abandoning the theater of operations. Nicolas and Tucano stepped back out into the open, made sure that the street was empty, and continued toward Drone’s house. One more corner to turn, and Nicolas would be safe again.
The sirens of a couple of squad cars split the air, and Tucano and Nicolas flattened themselves against a wall, like a couple of clandestine operatives surprised by the fall of the curfew. Nicolas leaned out and just managed to glimpse Drone’s head vanishing into a police car, and his family trooping back into the building.
“What now?” Tucano asked, stammering.
“Now we go to the lair. It’s all burned … not even a dead man would hide out there.”