Chapter Fifteen #2
“Are we just mosquitos?” he asked them. “Is that all you want to be?”
There was an uncomfortable silence as everyone considered whether this might be such a terrible fate. One or two of the boys shouted, “Yes!”
“If you want to do it, then go,” Tito said. “But if you decide to join them, then you’re done here. No hard feelings, but you can’t come back.”
He looked so fierce, eyes like dark stones. There was muttering as everyone discussed this.
“What do you suggest?” asked Nikki.
She was personally relieved by Tito’s pronouncement.
She somehow understood that the offer to the group wasn’t meant to include her, the only girl.
She’d spent the past three years earning the respect of the gang, loved being a part of them, and hated the ominous feeling of change.
She didn’t want to be left behind. Moreover, she was gaining an understanding of what the System was.
With her father and Adriano in the carabinieri, Nikki understood that if Tito decided to bring his gang to join one of the clans, she would be forced to choose between her family and her friends.
“We need to be more than mosquitos,” Tito replied. “We need to have something valuable to sell them—so that we can work for ourselves and make them pay us more.”
But he didn’t know what that valuable thing was. Not yet.
Two of the boys, Loris and Brizio, left Tito and started working for the clans. Loris was a hothead and had always pushed against Tito’s leadership, so it wasn’t a surprise when he left. But Brizio was Tito’s intimate, and the betrayal clearly stung.
In the weeks that followed, some of the other boys started muttering behind Tito’s back.
Nobody said the word coward, although it was clear that was what they meant.
Nikki, who had seen Tito stand up to the hulking rage of his violent father, knew he wasn’t a coward.
She trusted him to come up with an answer.
She didn’t need money as desperately as her friends, but she knew that Tito’s reputation and leadership depended on his ability to guide them all to wealth.
—
It was around this time Gianni was arrested for dealing drugs.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he whined to Nikki. “The lookouts didn’t warn me in time.”
Gianni was fourteen, and the case was heard in the juvenile courts.
The investigating magistrate was initially inclined to jail him in detention, and Beatrice agreed, saying that Gianni needed to feel the impact of his actions.
But Raoul didn’t want his son’s future tainted.
He testified, promising to be responsible for him.
The charges were knocked down to possession, and Gianni was released on probation into his parents’ custody.
Tito seemed intensely interested in the details of Gianni’s arrest, and questioned Nikki about it. The following week, he presented his idea to the group.
“If you’re dealing, it’s stupid to rely only on a lookout,” he said. “Maybe the lookout is an idiot. Or maybe he gets distracted. Maybe he’s busy taking a shit when the patrols come by. And, even if he does warn you, by then it’s too late. You might still get caught.”
There were other stupid risks, too, he explained.
If you chose a clan, then you would be targeted when the clans fought one another.
Also, he reminded them, their gang—about fifteen boys plus Nikki—wasn’t from just one neighborhood.
They couldn’t simply join the Sanita gang, because it would leave out everyone from the Forcella neighborhood.
What Tito suggested was a new business model. “We won’t work for just one clan. We’ll sell something everybody needs: information.”
Tito’s idea was to map out the rhythms and patterns of local police patrols—to learn the names and behaviors of the officers who worked in certain districts, to predict where they would be and what they would do.
This wasn’t too different from the spy games they already played.
But now there would be a real purpose for it, real stakes, and a real payoff.
Their first client was a woman who stood outside a community center in Forcella, selling contraband cigarettes from under a blanket.
Their information was so accurate, so effective in keeping down arrests and fines, that their reputation spread.
After a few months, the gang had nearly two dozen clients—from street dealers to shop owners. The money was beginning to pour in.
They could have continued like this indefinitely, slowly growing their wealth and importance.
But Brizio came back to visit Tito one day. Nikki saw them and snuck close to eavesdrop.
“…you just need to stop,” Brizio was saying. “He says you’re cutting into his profits.”
“That’s bullshit,” Tito replied. “He just doesn’t like it because he’s too stupid to do it himself.”
“He says he’ll fucking shoot you if you don’t stop.”
“Armo’s all talk,” Tito said. “He’d never dare.”
But he was wrong.
—
On the day of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a group of laundry women found Tito bruised and bloodied, unconscious, in an alley near his home.
His arm and three ribs were broken, and his face was so swollen and purple and red, Nikki hardly recognized him in the hospital bed.
But she recognized the glint of hardened steel in his eye.
“Tell me what you need,” she said, anger and sadness making her voice shake.
He had the names memorized: the boys he’d recognized from Armo’s group. He made her write them down.
“Find out where they live,” he instructed. “Find out who their friends are. Find out where they park their bikes at night.”
Nikki wanted to complete this assignment herself, but she didn’t have as much freedom at night as the others. So, she recruited two of the top boys to help. In little more than a week, by the time the swelling in Tito’s face was beginning to subside, the report was complete.
Tito thanked them all in that strange way he had: looking them each in the eye so solemnly while he spoke the words, so that you wanted more than anything in the world to volunteer for the next job, to take another turn at receiving those thanks.
But Tito didn’t ask Nikki to complete the next part of the assignment. She only learned about it after the fact, when it was too late to argue against it or, as Tito likely feared, report it to her carabinieri brother.
On Christmas Eve, when the bells struck midnight, signifying that all of Naples had gone to mass, fires were lit simultaneously across the city. Five motorbikes burned, along with the homes of the couriers and anyone else foolish enough to stash their supply.
Nikki thought about those flames—which she’d only seen in her imagination. They danced, black and orange, against the night sky, thick smoke racing upwards like the billowing smoke of the studio fire.
—
Nikki picked up Preston’s copy of Beowulf and read aloud to him, but this seemed to increase his agitation, so she stopped and sat silently for a long time, until fatigue overcame her and she half slept in the bedside chair.
—
In the late afternoon, the shadows lengthened and the windows reflected the fluorescent lights as the world outside darkened. Driven by hunger, Nikki left Preston’s room long enough to find the hospital canteen and get a sandwich and small bag of salted macadamia nuts.
Preston was still asleep when she returned.
She went through her rucksack for her stack of cards, and peeled away the rubber band.
The details were already in her mind—no need to reread what she already knew by heart.
Instead, she tapped the pen, mentally sorting the pieces that still didn’t fit.
What made Claire leave the yacht on Saturday night?
What happened during those missing three days?
Why was she at the church? Why had Monica thrown the knife?
Then the new gaps—the lie about seeing Claire…the cocaine…the missing bag.
The facts were piling up, but they felt disconnected and wrong tonight, loose threads she couldn’t grip.
Her body was twitchy and restless, unable to calm, unsettled by the sight of Preston in that bed, and thinking about the bleed in his brain.
She imagined it as a sort of invading force, decimating everything in its path: the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare and all the other poets who lived as friends inside his mind.
—
Nikki’s phone chimed and she went into the hallway for a signal. She’d missed several text messages: a dozen from Audrey Lake—a series of laughing-face emojis and hearts interspersed with jokes:
Where do fruits go on holiday? Pear-is!
What did one wall say to the other? I’ll meet you at the corner!
The final text message read, Can you come over?
I can’t come over, Nikki texted. Out of town.
—
Nikki saw she’d missed a call from Izzy.
She called back and gave her report: “He’s still resting. The doctor says he’s stable. Did you sleep?”
“A bit,” said Izzy. “I’m just getting ready. I should be there soon.”
Nikki protested. “Please sleep in your own bed tonight.”
Izzy’s voice was tight. “He needs me.”
“He’ll need you when he wakes up,” Nikki said. “Rest now. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
—
The nurses arranged for a cot in Preston’s room. Closing her eyes and drifting to sleep, the rigid canvas beneath her, Nikki watched the shimmer of orange flames.
—
Izzy arrived early in the morning, showered and reordered into that familiar graceful style, wearing a soft pale blue sweater and cream-colored slacks. She took her place of vigil at Preston’s bedside, and clasped his hand.
Giving them privacy, Nikki left.
She changed, and brushed her teeth. In the mirror, her eyes and face were puffy, her short hair squashed on the side. She splashed her face, then combed water through her hair with her fingers.
Her neck and shoulder were cramped. She did some stretching, then found her way to an exit, squinting up into the dim sunlight of a clouded London morning.
After the detached isolation of the hospital, the sudden pulse of the world was invasive: a grinding roar of traffic, and a rush of people.
She started to move, jogging along the sidewalk and into the blocked-in maze of shabby-looking apartments around the hospital. She ran faster and faster, sprinting, body warming, until a sore spot in her knee made her stop.
At an intersection, she found a small shop selling cigarettes and sodas and beers, a money-transfer and travel-agency shop, and a dingy café smelling of mildew and grease, floors and tables of pressed wood.
She ordered a flat white and a grilled cheese sandwich and sat at a table to check her phone. Looking at her texts, she was chagrined to realize she’d forgotten her promise to go sailing with Valerio today.
“Shit.”
She texted an apology and explained the situation.
—
There were twenty-six unread text messages from Audrey Lake. She didn’t open them.
—
Nikki scrolled through Instagram without expecting much—Monica and Kami hadn’t posted in days—but the comments had exploded. Stay strong, girl! We love you. and Funny how people are quick to defend her. We all know what a total cunt she is. Money doesn’t buy everything.
Public opinion was rapidly splitting. It was the same over on Facebook. And a fundraiser for Kami’s defense. Her mother’s plea: Help us give her a chance to prove her innocence, and bring her home.
—
Claire’s Facebook page was already filled with tributes, with the Albion Nanny Agency organizing a memorial: Join us for a casual gathering, reflecting Claire’s free spirit, they wrote. In lieu of flowers, bring a story to share, as we honor her together.
The event was tonight at 18:00 in a pub in Gidea Park called the Three Horseshoes.
—
As she slowly ate the cheese sandwich and drank the watery coffee, Nikki thumbed through the images of Claire: pictures of her caring for children, those big brown eyes and that shy smile.
There was a soft brightness, a sweet sincerity to the nanny.
She’d been, what? Twenty-two, twenty-three?
Impossibly young. It struck Nikki that she had been younger than this—only twenty years old—when Izzy and Preston had taken her into their home, kept her sane when she should have gone mad with despair and grief; loved her when she loathed herself.
She felt a strange light shining back on the person she’d been then, the memories more accessible in this moment than they’d been for a long time—as if this city had unlocked a cupboard where she kept that other self.
She’d been split down the center those days: she and Tito making two halves of a whole.
All those years, Tito had tunneled into the underworld of Naples.
Nikki had tried to redirect him—suggested escape plans, fresh starts in Spain or France, or the United States.
But his love affair with the System had felt like something inevitable, and she’d gone along with it because she didn’t have the power or arguments to make him stop—and because he had been so much a part of her, it was impossible to conceive what it might mean to live without him.
She’d been too weak to truly resist or change him.
Then Adriano had been shot.
Everything exploded in that moment, rearranging itself so that the past and the future seemed to collapse into a single point of unbearable weight.
Her mother, who had always been so calm…
distant…untouchable, was unmoored by grief.
She raged insensibly, screamed and broke things, tore down walls and cabinets with her hands until her nails broke and her fingers bled.
It was a terrifying exhibition from a woman who had never made a scene.
Neither Nikki nor her father knew what to do; neither could find a way in.
At other times, Beatrice would sit for hours in the dark of her room, motionless, as if she’d been turned to stone.
One day, when Nikki had tried to draw her out of this state, she turned and hissed vehemently: “ ‘If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness!’ ”
Those words had struck at Nikki, burrowed inside, and she knew that her mother had sent them like a curse, imprinting themselves on her mind forever.
—
Nikki finished her sandwich and coffee, locked her phone, put it in her pocket, and left the café.
Back in the hospital, she slowed, realizing that she dreaded reentering that room with her aunt and uncle, and the world between them that was slowly decaying.
A nurse brushed past her, jogging down the hallway. To Nikki’s dismay, she rushed into Preston’s room. She heard the commotion as she approached, her chest frozen mid-breath.
Then her aunt was in the hallway, a hand on her mouth. She looked at Nikki, eyes wide, and only then did Nikki see the smile in them.
“He’s awake!” Izzy exclaimed. “He’s awake!”