Page 55 of Marcello

“Good. Then let’s go see how bad you want that job.”

19

The three of us walked through back alleys for the next ten minutes.

Lametta led the way while Buzzcut stayed behind me. I was pretty sure he kept the pistol aimed at my spine the entire time.

He probably expected it to unnerve me, but it didn’t.

I was just going through the motions in the movie I was starring in.

This is the scene where the hero gets marched at gunpoint to the mystery location.

As we walked, I tried to engage Buzzcut in conversation. “So, this tryout you want me to do – ”

“Shut the fuck up,” he snarled.

I shut up.

We eventually reached the Piazza del Plebiscito, the ‘Square of the Plebiscite.’ I knew from my university history classes that it was named for the big vote in 1860 that created the modern nation of Italy. The Piazza del Plebiscito is easily one of the most recognizable locations in Naples.

On one side of the gigantic piazza is a big-ass church with a flattened dome that’s surrounded by a long, curved portico with dozens of massive columns supporting the roof.

And when I say ‘long,’ I mean it: each side of the curved walkway was at least as long as a football field.

Other than the church’s dome, the most recognizable symbols of the Piazza were the marble lions at either end of the curved walkway. There were also some bronze statues of riders on horseback in the piazza itself, and some marble statues on top of the church.

Across the piazza was a massive rectangular building – probably an old palace. Far behind it, you could see the tops of cruise ships docked a mile away in the harbor.

Of course, this was Naples… which meant that everything looked pretty from a distance, but once you peered closer, things got messy.

Inside the curved portico, there was graffiti everywhere. On the stone pillars, on the walls, on doors. Mostly scrawled messages in Neapolitan, but I also saw plenty of swastikas, spray-painted dicks, and even the English words, I like pussy.

Charming.

There were lots and lots of windows set into the wall of the curved walkway. The second-story windows looked like they might belong to apartments: I saw potted plants in a couple of them.

There were also shops on the ground floor. Well… there was a lot of shop space, but only a few that were occupied. A bookstore here, a clothing store there, a café with a couple of tables and umbrellas outside.

Every 20 feet were twelve-foot-tall wooden doors painted dark green, but most of them were closed and covered with graffiti. I figured they could have been stores, but nobody wanted to rent them.

The overall impression was of a beautiful monument that had fallen into disrepair. Vandals had taken over and messed things up, but hadn’t entirely trashed the place… yet.

Lametta and Buzzcut forced me up the steps between the lions, and we followed the curved walkway till we got close to the church entrance. Those were the only green doors that didn’t have any graffiti on them. It might have been because it was a church, but it probably had more to do with the security camera on the wall.

By the way, the church doors were bolted shut like all the others. God apparently wasn’t open for business today.

The area in front of the church was much prettier, at least. The floor was made of marble slabs. The columns were marble, too, instead of the rough grey stone used for all the other pillars. A dozen ten-year-olds were playing soccer in front of the church and using the marble columns as goalposts.

When we were fifty feet away from the kids, Buzzcut pushed me back against one of the graffitied doors. He and Lametta came in close to keep me from getting away.

“Alright, here’s the deal,” Buzzcut said. “If you walk all the way to the other end of the building, there’s a guy down there selling drugs.”

I looked to my right, but the other end of the portico was hundreds of feet away, and the curvature of the building and the pillars blocked my view. “I don’t see him.”

“He looks like Lametta – track suit and tats. You can’t miss him.”

“Okay,” I said, not quite understanding why he was telling me all this. “What do you want me to do?”