in our town there has always been this continual patrol it is a completely enclosed territory even if there are no fences or gates but there’s always someone making the rounds there are young men driving around in their cars with cell phones and they report on who is on the move and whether there are Carabiniere or police checkpoints or roadblocks these are the notorious muschilli which translated out of dialect means gnats the little annoying kind this is practically a profession practiced in the past and now by many young men in the past they were young men who were sick and tired of working as bricklayers or in any case who came from poor families now even young men from very prosperous families even young men with rich families become muschilli for no other reason than that it makes them feel stronger or more powerful I don’t know anyway they feel stronger or more powerful and that’s why they do it they are young men who routinely drive around in Mercedes Benzes and they are often risking arrest for nothing much it’s a lot that they are risking

they caught one of these guys carrying a couple of pizzas into the house of wanted men this young guy lived near my house he was working as a muschillo a gnat for certain professional killers and one of them who was wanted and was hiding out called him on his cell phone and told him to bring him a couple of pizzas to the usual place so he gets there to the house where this wanted man was living he’s somebody I know too we grew up together and so he got there and found the police in the middle of doing a round-up a sweep and they caught this fugitive from justice and the police asked my friend what the fuck he was doing in that house and he just said that a friend of a friend had asked him to do a favor just a couple of pizzas to a house he’d never been to in his life just because this friend of a friend couldn’t go there himself but that he had no idea who this guy was no idea what he did for a living and this young man that they wound up arresting was called Michelino and he was just a kid now he must be twenty-five or twenty-six years old but until seven or eight years ago he was not only a good kid but he was also a little bit of an idiot he was someone who people liked to make fun of and all that sort of thing then he wound up getting sucked into this kind of environment through his brother in law and the thing that struck me was that when he joined the organization he changed completely he changed from one day to the next