sticky fingers

Everything is drenched in summer. Angelo spent summers just like this as a boy, sawing through tall grass and pulling weeds in the garden, and the wet heat is compounded in his memory with the smell of broken stems and bruised leaves, manure and deep rot. Encamped on the hillside, they are surrounded on all sides with a dense wall of summer sounds — insects singing, distant bells, birdsong.

As a young man, Julius Caesar was once abducted by Greek pirates off the coast of Asia Minor and held for ransom. In captivity and under guard, he read the crew his poetry and joined in their games. He issued lofty commands like an honored guest and the men permitted it — and no doubt in private the pirates derided him as an idle waster, a long-haired catamite with pretenses toward grandeur. Maybe some of them even pitied him. When the young Caesar was ransomed, he had them all crucified.

The Getty boy comes from another world than theirs, another planet — one populated with Hollywood directors, rock stars, and beautiful Communist twins ready to go to bed with you for love alone. He wouldn’t survive in this place, not in Primo’s hands.

Everyone here knows Primo. There isn’t a person alive in their village who doesn’t know him — they were all born into the same business, just on a lower rung, and Primo’s position in that chain of power is clear. He comes and goes with impunity, rattling down from Rome in that wine-red Alfetta that Angelo envies so much, and he comes bringing trouble. He’s Don Salvatore’s attack dog, and the rumors surrounding him are so dark that they cannot even be whispered. The way he dresses you’d think he came from another planet too, and not from a falling-down farmhouse that Angelo’s own grandfather helped build. He’s a far cry from all the old men with their shapeless suits who decide who lives and who dies in Calabria. If Angelo ever becomes a man of honor, Primo will be there for the ceremony swearing him in. There in the dark behind the veil of privacy, he will have a hand in the making of him. Angelo will owe him for that for the rest of his life.

The thought sends a rush of unaccountable nausea through him. Angelo’s shaking hands make the coffee pot rattle against its camping trivet. The three of them have been camping out here in shifts, with rifles slung across laps. Dante brings his big-titty mystery paperbacks and reads them until the sun goes down, then plays jangly little songs on his impromptu guitar. It had been Dante who recruited him — Dante who had come to Angelo at his grandmother’s house and conveyed what was to be done in quick, emphatic sentences — but it was Primo who had pressed him into service. Primo and the men who are like him are the men who will get Angelo a job one day. The men who really govern Calabria are all bound together by blood.

A few feet away, Primo Nizzuto is peeling an orange; his blunt thumbnail frees a long track of white-backed orange skin. He sits with both feet together and strong thighs spread – Angelo must look too long, because he lifts his head and grins at him with teeth, like a dog.

“Hot enough for you?”

Primo does not look like the unassuming old men who make up the backbone of this organization. He looks flashy and louche, with his shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest and his trousers tailored eye-wateringly tight. The Nizzuto family and the Calati family have a long history together, though you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone local whose roots reached no further back than a century and a half. There’s always been braggarts and hotheads and layabouts: sons, cousins, nephews. None of them has ever been like Primo.

Angelo hesitates. “It’s not bad up here, with the wind coming down the valley. It’s been quiet.”

People used to sneak away to places like this in the woods, to drink and fuck or to do anything else equally illicit where the eyes of their aunts and cousins can’t find them. The outdoors is one of the few places to find privacy living out here. As a boy, Angelo crept away to the mountains to smoke cigarettes and look at magazines, back when he had friends and playmates. All his old classmates are on the fast road to becoming husbands and fathers, cutting meat and herding cattle, and none of them will ever make it out of rural Calabria.

In Naples, he hadn’t been able to look any of his classmates in the eye. Their faces and voices had made him uneasy, the way they swung their arms when they walked or carelessly sprawled with legs wide apart. He’d never dared to look Primo Nizzuto in the face before, though he’d known all the ways to recognize him in a crowd, he’d come to know the flash tailoring and expensive car. There’s something troublesome beneath his good humor, like a cat flicking its tail in a sunbeam.

“You didn’t have any trouble on your own? Keeping busy?”

“I’m going to do some shooting later,” Angelo says, truthfully. “Target practice.”

He’s never liked hunting, he’s never been all that comfortable even holding a gun, but if he’s going to be this man’s translator he’d better learn.

Primo leans back languidly. “I could show you a couple of things. When’s your military service?”

They chat, and Angelo drinks; Primo lounges around on the blankets like he’s on a Sunday picnic. The mood so far has been almost a holiday, and even long-haired Paul seems to have forgotten about the brutality it took to bring him here.

Paul marvels out loud about everything, about the local fish or the fresh air or the pollen-heavy yellow flowers. You’d think he was a sightseer, except that nobody comes to the Serre to take pictures. The hard part is chaining him up again; Paul accepts it with resigned good humor, chatting with him or lamely joking, but it is impossible to forget that you are kneeling on the ground to shackle and chain a human being, and the floor of the old barn is all stones, with some broken glass for good measure. This interval of waiting has been longer than any of them expected, and even the golden hippie is starting to show a little wear around the edges.

At least Primo seems to be in good humor, after delaying his arrival long into the afternoon. With Dante patrolling it had been Angelo and the prisoner alone up here all night and all morning, no doubt while Primo slept off some hangover in a real bed down in the village. He drives back from Rome drunk as a lord, swerving from lane to lane, and everyone knows to get out of the way.

“Quit standing around and come sit, you make me nervous. How is he, the billion-dollar boy?”

Primo offers Angelo the first segment of his orange when he takes a seat and accepts his refusal affably.

Angelo says, “He’s all right. I gave him a little to drink like you said, and now he’s sleeping it off.”

(To keep him compliant, like rubbing whisky on the gums of a fussy baby. Angelo had tipped the bottle into his mouth and Paul drank from it, like an invalid accepting his medicine. Paul had clasped his hand in thanks, there in the stone barn, and the cool damp of his palm still lingers on Angelo’s skin like an itch.)

“I thought the two of you were getting along. Has he said anything?”

“Not really. He’s — I don’t know, not unless he wants something.”

What does Primo want him to say? Does he think some exchange has taken place between them, like the two of them are swapping secrets and brokering deals in the hours it takes for Primo to get over his hangover?

“No way to treat his best man,” Primo says.

“Oh, that — that was just talk. He’s a spoiled kid. Thinks he’s getting married. He hurt himself last night,” Angelo says. “I think his shoes aren’t very good. He can’t walk in them, so he takes them off.”

Paul bleeds; Paul hurts himself. A shard of bottle-glass through the pad of Paul’s foot like a thorn – Angelo had to pull it out with his bare hands, and Paul had thanked him for it. The blood ran, and he had nothing to bind it with. These rich Americans are going to think their son has been held captive by some real barbarians. No shoes, no girls, no rock and roll music.

Primo exhales, blowing the hair out of his eyes. “They’re the ones he came with. You think he’ll be going anywhere any time soon?”

“What if we have to move him?”

“You don’t have to think about that,” Primo says flatly. He proceeds to eat the rest of his orange.

They’re all going to be rich if Primo gets his way, or they’re all going down for their sheer stupidity. Either way.

Angelo swallows. “He can’t sit in there all day long, doing nothing. He needs a radio or something.”

A radio to hear how everyone is searching for him — to listen and to hold out a little longer. Not to try anything stupid.

Primo brushes the suggestion aside like a fly, with a skin-prickling lightness: “He won’t be here much longer. A little peace and quiet, it’ll do him good.”

Angelo strains to sound casual and uninvested. “I have one down in the village. I can bring it up with me…”

Paul isn’t going to fight them if he doesn’t have to. He isn’t going to run away again if his basic needs are met. It doesn’t need to be any worse than it already is. In a record store in Naples Angelo had read some newspaper headline reprinted in a magazine — who breaks a butterfly on the wheel?

“No. No radio.” Primo finishes his orange and tosses away the peel. “Don’t worry about him. He wouldn’t be here if he weren’t a little liar.”

Primo wouldn’t have chosen him if he thought he was stupid. Even Dante, with his shitty little cigars and his trash paperbacks, still has a brain in his head and knows how to follow orders without turning into a clumsy little automaton. But then they’d needed anybody who could translate, anybody at all, and on short notice.

Primo talks like this whole thing was his idea, but that can’t be true. Dante had sounded so proud just to be invited in on the scheme, prouder than a new father, as if there was ever any question whether he’d be allowed to decline the offer.

“Right. It won’t matter when we get the money,” Angelo says as if speaking the words will bring the idea into being.

Primo repeats it quietly by way of affirmation. “When we get the money.”

He is terribly close to him now, there on the blanket — his mood has turned, and his gaze has perceptibly hardened. Angelo ducks his head, feeling the back of his neck grow hot with embarrassment. Primo has strange eyes, pale and luminous. His mother was a northern girl from the Veneto, and his father had needed some kind of dispensation from the head man of the village to marry her. The old man must have gotten it, and then came this monstrous child.

Primo reaches out and plucks the glasses from his face, drawing their thin wire arms from behind his ears with the deliberation of a bully.

“You don’t want to lose these out here,” Primo says. “People get turned around out here, you know. Lose your way here in the mountains and you’ll never go home again.”

He folds them and sets them aside. Angelo freezes.

“Is — is there anything else?”

“Did you think I was going to kiss you?”

“What? No, no—“

“You were looking at me in that kind of way. It’s all right, you’re young.”

When Primo starts to sound understanding and informal, that’s when things start to feel dangerous. He is smiling down at him, with an expression that is anything but genial; it makes something in the animal pit of him flare with heat, an uncertain rush of something like fear.

Primo takes his face between his hands again and draws a kiss from Angelo’s mouth. The taste of him is fresh and sour but his skin smells like oiled leather, dark and male. Angelo opens his mouth to him 0ut of sheer surprise, letting his tongue pass into his mouth — the jolt of shock disarms him.

It seems to last for a terribly long time until it stops. Primo’s thumb scruffs at his sparse beard. He is amusing himself at Angelo’s expense.

“So what do you want to do?” Angelo asks. His mouth is burning. The blood is singing in his ears, and all of the day’s heat is blazing in his face.

Primo holds up a hand. “Wait.”

Angelo is acutely aware of his breathing, of how his chest is rising and falling, of the rush of blood that floods his face. “I can go down on you if you want.”

“Is this what you learned in Naples? Your poor mother. Show me your dick.”

Angelo unbuttons his jeans with some hesitation. Primo is watching him, eyes following the trail of dark hair on his belly, leading from his navel downward, and all of a sudden he can’t keep his hands from shaking. It’s obvious that he wants this, which could be good or could be bad — the thought of Primo looking at him makes him hopelessly hard even as it scares him out of his wits.

It’s like a nightmare and a dirty dream rolled up into one. Angelo works at his cock for a few strokes, waiting for Primo to tell him what to do, but no immediate order comes. Primo just settles in, letting his knees fall lazily apart, letting his left hand bracket the shape of his cock through his trousers. It’s almost careless, just resting there over the tenting fabric, but the vulgarity of the gesture is unmistakable. Angelo barely lets himself breathe.

Primo’s strange eyes are on him and Angelo searches his face for something like approval. His lips are slightly parted, and there’s a sliver of pink tongue visible between his teeth like he’s focused intently on what he sees. There’s something dangerous about that smiling mouth.

Angelo should feel like a kid again under that gaze, like he’s up here in the mountains passing around a dirty magazine for the scrutiny of a pack of suspicious schoolmates. But the shame passes quickly when he’s working on himself — desire burns in the pit of his stomach, watching himself be watched. Angelo jerks off with slow strokes until the wetness beads up at the tip of his prick and his balls are aching.

Primo shuts his eyes for a second and the spell is broken. “That’s good. I like that.”

Primo takes his hand and holds it there, cupping his cock and balls beneath his own broad grip; the heat of his palm makes Angelo’s pulse jump. The strong line of his body presses against Angelo’s side, and his forearm is hard with muscle, threaded with fine black hairs. Angelo has the fleeting, ridiculous impulse to compare their bodies and see who’s hairier. Primo is an important man and he is only humoring him because Angelo is barely out of boyhood and because his family owns plenty of land, because Angelo has served him well before and because he will lie and cheat to make Primo happy. More than anything he will do these things to keep away Primo’s anger, that scorching volcanic thing that is always just under the surface, just out of sight.

Angelo kisses him back, yielding and returning, and Primo lays him down in the scrub grass.

“What about the shoes?” Angelo asks, from beneath.

“Of course,” Primo says, like there was never any doubt. Primo makes a noise of annoyance and rolls him over into the position he wants him in. Angelo must prop himself up on his arms to keep from going flat on his face, one knee thrust out to steady himself; Primo wastes no time, groping at his backside and rubbing along the inner seam of Angelo’s jeans with his own thick thigh. Angelo lets his trousers down for him with a guilty kind of deliberation.

Whatever is coming for him, he can take it — he will take it like a man if it means stopping something terrible from happening to someone who can’t handle it. The blanket spread out beneath them is iron-gray wool, with the acrid smell of long storage in a hot space, but when Primo maneuvers him onto it Angelo is still surprised by the chivalry of the gesture. The long grass beneath it is springing with life, and when Angelo puts out his arm to steady himself it sends up a cascade of fleeing insects — the sun is too hot, and the smell of crushed grass fills his nose and mouth, making his eyes itch.

Primo shucks down the elastic of his blue underpants and moves in close against him with his hips. His cock rests heavily against the tops of Angelo’s thighs, resting against those downy mammal hairs that cover his legs. Angelo can feel the blood-heat of it as Primo fondles himself, as it rises up stiffer and harder.

He imagines young Paul in his own place, bent over for Primo’s use — his long legs bent, his sharp knees dimpling the rough greenery, the gouged-out line of his back. He’d come to them so trustingly that it’s like he scarcely knows he should be frightened of them all, but with Primo showing him he’d learn fast. He imagines Paul naked.

“Look at you, schoolboy. You’re shaking like a leaf.” Primo smacks him with his cock, just a short rap between the legs. “Relax, huh? I’m not going to shoot you.” He spits on his fingers and gets to work.

Primo doesn’t throw himself down on top of him like a cheap mattress but arranges himself nicely to pin Angelo into the position he wants him in. The weight of his body, as unmistakably male as it is, is insistent and arousing. He rubs two fingers down the cleft of his ass, playing at him like a girl — Angelo almost complains but the scrape of Primo’s necklaces against the back of his neck reminds him he’d better not.

Primo’s hard smiling mouth is terribly close to the back of Angelo’s neck. The sweat on the back of his neck is prickling from the proximity and he has never felt more fragile, more permeable. Angelo presses his forehead to the ground and surrenders himself. He doesn’t know how to make it good, except to keep still and not complain, but his pulse is pounding and the muscles of his legs all shake.

Primo must have balled all kinds of people in Rome but he takes particular notice of Angelo now — his hands pass all over him, charting his body like a map.

When Primo’s first thrust enters him, Angelo can’t keep from flinching — the sharp press of pain makes his muscles jerk, and a groan of surprise is forced from his lungs. Primo braces him with an arm wrapped across his chest, enveloping him in the smell of summer sweat cut through with bergamot and orange oil.

His fingers brush Angelo’s chin, prickling his whisker; he can taste the sweetness of fruit on those blunt fingertips, and the salt of sweat, the scents of summer. That first breach passes quickly in its flinch of pain and Primo guides him into a rhythm; he fucks him in short jolting strokes that bring his hips against Angelo’s backside with sharp little slapping sounds. The electric tension of his forcefulness thrums against Angelo’s back, and he can’t help angling himself into it, opening to it — his prick is aching and the hot ache of penetration turns from discomfort to something like pleasure.

If it’s strange Angelo can’t complain. Boyhood is behind him now, and he’s never had the nerve to do this with another man and risk throwing everything away. There’s no way to do that in a small town where everyone knows your family name, no way to mess around and not get caught. Not in Naples either, where around every corner there’s someone who knew your father, who knows your uncle, someone whose husband’s brother was married to one of your mother’s sisters. Word travels fast. But Primo fucks whoever he wants — here, in Rome, wherever — and what he wants to do to Angelo is nobody’s business. Even Angelo doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

If you’re scary enough, maybe you can do whatever you want. Angelo buries his face against the crook of his arm, smelling hot earth; a stone digs into the soft part of his chest. Squirming to rearrange himself just gets Primo’s hand pressing in at the base of his throat, like a warning. Primo sucks a bite from the side of his neck and makes him gasp – worrying with teeth and tongue at the skin where his shoulder begins, to raise a bruise.

So much unceremonious noise — It’s like he wants to get caught, like he’s daring somebody to hear them. If Dante were up in the mountains with them Primo would never have taken such a foolhardy risk — but when Primo angles into him it kindles something, and Angelo can’t help himself. He whimpers like a hurt animal, grinding against the blankets just to try and get off. The friction is too close to painful and there is something happening that is so close to his reach, something he wants so urgently that it comes back around to pain again.

“I didn’t forget you,” Primo says against his ear, so close and low that the electric rasp of his voice makes Angelo’s dick jump. His hand snakes around past his damp shirttails to finish him off.

He shuts his eyes and buries his face against his arms, trying to forget, trying to ignore what happens next. This is something that both of them have done together, both of them have engineered it to happen, and if it’s bad then it’s not the worst thing they’re doing. A week from now they’re both going to be rich. After this happens they’re both going to go back to pretending like it never happened — Angelo is going to do as he’s told and no one will get hurt. After the ransom comes he’ll never have to do anything like this again — he’ll go to university and find a girl. The Getty boy will go back to New York and his nightclubs and his Rolling Stones, a little less rich than he was before. Primo will take his money and go back to Rome. Angelo will take his money and go—

When Primo comes, he snarls.

Catching his breath means coming back to his senses, to the hum of insects and the come drying between his legs. They lie together like that for a while, which is dangerous in its own right, worse than being caught in the act. Primo hangs onto him like a girl, leather-scented and sweat-wet, and Angelo is reluctant to push his luck. He can feel Primo’s breath against his shoulder, and the weight of him pressing creases into his shirt; he can feel the beating of his heart, like an animal’s. Primo knows Angelo’s secret now, he’s found it out without needing to be told — because there is no one who could possibly tell. But he knows something about Primo in return, and it makes for an uneasy truce.

Afterward, once they’ve come apart, Angelo lies on his back, with the sun smarting in his eyes and the open sky overhead. Beside him Primo leans back on his hip, rummaging for a cigarette. Yet another button of his shirt has popped undone, and there’s a track of sweat making its way down the smooth slope of his chest. He exhales.

“You like him, I think.”

Angelo blinks through smoke. “What, him? The golden hippie?”

“Don’t go and fall for him, now. When they hand over the money I’ll buy you a girl to celebrate. Whatever kind of girl you like.”

Primo holds the filter-end to Angelo’s lips, and Angelo smokes.