Viper

by Unknown

  Valsi fell silent as he concentrated on fastening two bolts at either side of what were semi-circular steel strips that overlapped each other and had been punched with holes to accommodate the bolts.

  First boyfriend – Armando Rossi, seventeen – they rode his Lambretta. She’d leaned her face against his back and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  ‘Beautiful. Bellissimo. It fits perfectly. You’ll look a dream. Well, my dream at least. You see, five years is a hell of a long time to think about revenge. Because that’s what this is about, Alberta, revenge – pure and simple…’

  First true love – Bernardo Santo – a man ten years older than her, a man who’d always smelled of forests, a man she should have married and had children with.

  ‘Sockets, please.’

  Wires were handed to two goons. Valsi squatted, so that he was at Alberta’s eye level.

  ‘I hope the voltage is good. We’ve rewired it especially for you. Too little and the current will cook slowly through your neck until your head drops off. Too much and it may explode. Pop! Neither is a nice way to die.’

  Die!

  Alberta’s powers to distract herself were gone now. There was no past to dip into.

  No more firsts to go through.

  Only lasts.

  The last moments of her life.

  Valsi smiled in mock sympathy and touched her cheek. ‘Hey, enough of these sad looks! You know you have to die, Alberta. I must show the polizia what happens when they exploit people like you. All informatori must know what awaits them if they ever try to do the same.’

  Valsi paused and watched for fear on her face. He was saddened that there was none. Brave bitch. Brave, arrogant bitch.

  ‘Sal, throw the switch!’

  The air buzzed and hummed.

  Alberta’s body went into spasm. Her eyes bulged and her head sagged as her nerves became paralysed.

  ‘Jesus, what a stink!’ Valsi wafted a hand playfully in front of his face. The room filled with the smell of burning flesh. The henchmen coughed and laughed. Coarse, meaty sounds like they were choking on beer during a good joke. Alberta was dribbling blood.

  But she still wasn’t dead. Even as her internal organs baked from the electric charge, life still flickered within her.

  Valsi squatted on his heels again. Stared into her eyes. ‘Not long now, you’re frying nicely.’

  Alberta’s skin was crimson.

  Her flesh was starting to split.

  Suddenly, a gush of blood and boiling stomach contents bubbled from her mouth.

  One of the goons gagged.

  Sal the Snake had left the electric box and stood beside Valsi. He shook his head and smiled. What a sight.

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Valsi. ‘Don’t waste any more juice on the bitch. Sal, get her body out of here and destroy what’s left of it. Set fire to it so the cops don’t find any of our traces, then leave it where it’ll be found within the next few days.’

  13

  New York City

  Jack seldom slept past six, so it was no chore to cross town and be at Creed’s hotel before seven. He stamped snow on a large rubber mat opposite a cheap reception desk staffed by a plump woman in her forties. ‘I’m looking for a guest of yours – Luciano Creed. Could you call his room for me?’

  Brenda Libowicz had worked receptions in fifteen different hotels in New York City and she could smell cop all over her early morning visitor. ‘NYPD?’

  Jack smiled in due appreciation of her observational skills. ‘Ex-FBI. Is it that obvious?’

  ‘That it is,’ Brenda smiled warmly. ‘Only cops and feds get to the point that quickly. Normal people usually manage a hello, a please or even a remark about how cold it is.’

  ‘Normal people?’ laughed Jack.

  ‘No offence. You know what I mean.’

  ‘None taken.’ He nodded at her computer. ‘Any chance of ringing my Mr Creed?’

  ‘None,’ she said, flatly. ‘He left town last night. We called him a cab for the airport.’

  ‘You remember when?’

  ‘Let’s see. I think it would be about eight. Yep, that’s right. JFK was still shut but Newark had reopened a runway around five.’

  Jack frowned. ‘Was he due to check out so soon?’

  Brenda finally needed the computer. She typed an entry and pulled up his record. ‘No, he was down originally for another two days. Only told us yesterday that he was leaving early.’

  ‘Can I see his bill, please?’ He stressed the please.

  She pulled a printout from a tray and handed it over. Jack made a note of the home address, though he doubted it was real. There was no CAP– Codice di Avviamento Postale – the Italian equivalent of the postcode, and the province was Ogliona, which he was certain didn’t exist. ‘He pay cash or card?’

  ‘Cash. Big wad of Uncle Sams.’

  Jack read the rest of the bill. ‘Media services. What’s that, Internet?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. It’s a nice way of billing a fella for the porn channels.’

  ‘You know what he watched?’

  ‘Sure. He was here four days and he bought the twenty-four-hour non-stop adult service. Watched the lot.’

  Jack raised an eyebrow and passed the bill back.

  ‘He was a real sleazeball. Gave me the shivers. He done something?’

  ‘Not sure.’ Jack glanced at the clock behind her head. ‘I guess his room’s not been cleaned?’

  She laughed. ‘You guessed right. Maid don’t start til ten. You want to look, I suppose.’

  ‘You mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Brenda bobbed beneath the counter and eventually produced the key card to Creed’s room. ‘Second floor. Number two-twelve. Stairs right behind you and to the left.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate this.’

  ‘Enough to buy me coffee sometime?’

  Jack took the key, but not the bait. ‘Would love to, but my wife wouldn’t approve. And anyway, I really don’t know if I would be safe with someone who reads people as well as you do.’ He winked and headed for the stairs.

  ‘Safe?’ she shouted. ‘Oh, believe me, mister, safe is the last thing you’d be!’

  He could still hear her laughing when he reached the landing of the second floor and let himself into Creed’s old room. It was small and stank of an unflushed toilet, old carpets and no ventilation. In the tiny en-suite bathroom he picked up a plastic waste bin. He collected another from near a big old-fashioned boxy TV that virtually rested on the edge of a sagging single bed. He pulled off a dirty duvet and emptied the bins on to the grey-white base sheet.

  There were sweet wrappers, empty Coke and beer cans, a half-empty plastic bottle of hotel body lotion, numerous tissues that looked stiff from semen, several pages from magazines that had been ripped out and then torn into small pieces. Some hotel paper that had been written or drawn on had also been torn up into pieces no bigger than a postage stamp. Anything ripped this small had to be of significance.

  Jack was desperate to examine the pieces of paper and magazine but had no evidence gloves. He returned to the bathroom and found what he was looking for – a shower cap. He opened it up, put his hands inside and used it like clumsy mittens.

  Working through the cap, it took him almost an hour to assemble just one largish section of the hotel paper and a single page of the magazine. But what he saw was enough to convince him that Luciano Creed could indeed be everything he feared.

  By the time he left the hotel, salt and grit had chewed like rats through the city’s blanket of white snow. The sun was high and dazzlingly bright as traffic crawled back to normal – or as normal as New York City ever gets.

  Jack holed up for a while in a nearby deli. Black coffee and a skinny blueberry muffin quelled his hunger and fed his thoughts.

  ‘You want a refill?’ The question came from a surly sumo wrestler masquerading as a waitress.

  ‘Thanks.’ Jack proffered his mug.

  She walked
away and he speed-dialled the cellphone of Massimo Albonetti, Direttore of Italy’s Violent Crime Analysis Unit.

  ‘Pronto, parla Albonetti,’ said a deep, Roman voice. He sounded distracted, maybe even annoyed at being interrupted.

  ‘Ciao, Direttore. Come stai?’

  There was a brief pause, then an eruption of laughter. ‘Jack, my friend, you speak little Italian and the few words you have learned, you murder with your horrible American tongue. How are you?’

  ‘Vaffanculo, buddy. I’m fine.’

  More Italian laughter. ‘Aah, the bad words you can pronounce properly. Fuck you too! You are like a small boy, using such language. Still, it is good to hear you.’

  ‘Thanks, but you might not think so in a minute. I’m in New York, been speaking at a crime seminar, and came across someone from your neck of the woods. Guy called Creed, Luciano Creed.’

  Albonetti was on his way into a community meeting. He’d been forced by his boss to address a holy order of brothers about the changing face of criminality in modern Italy. ‘This name, it rings no bells.’

  ‘Didn’t expect it to. He’s from Naples. Says he’s a psychologist attached to the carabinieri. Been digging into some Missing Persons files and reckons he’s detected a series of murders.’

  ‘Murders in Naples?’ Massimo faked surprise as he scribbled Creed’s name on the front of a stack of files he was carrying. ‘Now, that’s a real shock.’

  ‘Yeah. I know they have more killings than Iraq. The local force apparently has them down as MPs but Creed’s done some low-level profiling on them and it all comes up looking like a serial murder file.’

  ‘You think so?’ Massimo sounded more serious now. He nodded politely at one of the brothers entering the conference room for the planned meeting.

  ‘It’s more a perhaps at this stage. But I’ve seen enough to make me think there’s a good chance we’re not just looking at runaways. Can I give you some names?’

  ‘Sure, shoot.’

  Jack peered at the notepaper that Creed had forced on him. ‘Luisa Banotti, Patricia Calvi, Donna Rizzi, Gloria Pirandello and Francesca Di Lauro.’

  Massimo read them back to make sure there were no mistakes.

  ‘Do you think you could have a little dig around and check out Creed as well?’

  Massimo spelled out his name. ‘C-R-E-E-D, and first name, Luciano?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Okay. I am this second starting a meeting – with a bunch of priests, believe it or not – but I’ll start digging around within the next hour or so.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ve got a bad feeling about this guy. He’s a bit of a weirdo and he claims to have been personally involved with the last girl to have gone missing.’

  Massimo entered the room with his hand over the phone and apologized to his distinguished audience. ‘Mi dispiace. Un momento per favore.’ The twelve brothers seemed to understand – the officer was a busy man – they would wait patiently.

  Massimo spoke to Jack again. ‘You’d have him as a suspect? He claims he’s working with the police, but you think he might be the offender?’

  ‘That’s too big a stretch. But he makes me uncomfortable. I found some pornography and also personal sketches he’d made. He’d ripped them up and left the pieces in the bin in his hotel room. The photographs were hard-core sadism, much edgier than your usual hand-party stuff. They showed a naked woman, cuffed to a metal pole, being whipped and branded with hot irons.’

  ‘Mannaggia! ’ The Italian’s emotions made him forget the company he was in. ‘God Almighty, why do people find such things a turn-on? Whatever happened to a stolen kiss, a hand on the knee and the sweet hope that it might lead to a little more?’

  ‘Not for this guy, Mass. The sketches he’d made were of mutilated genitalia – multiple, obsessive drawings, too far out even for the Guggenheim.’

  ‘Porca Madonna!’ exploded Massimo.

  The twelve holy brothers looked sharply at him and crossed themselves.

  Massimo cupped the phone and whispered to Jack, ‘I’ll get back to you. I think I’m going to have to say an act of contrition before I start this meeting.’

  14

  Centro città, Napoli

  Nine-year-old Mario Gaggioli mumbled the instructions as he ran. This was an errand that he knew he mustn’t get wrong. His long black hair trailed from a specially customized woollen rapper’s hat. His wiry body zigzagged fearlessly between the honking mopeds, cars and trams that fought for space down Naples’ potholed streets. He was Ronaldinho, sidestepping a sliding tackle. He was Henry, ready to sell a dummy and unleash a fireball from his foot. Above him, wet washing flapped from lines strewn from one balcony to another. Down at his level, old people swore as he bumped and barged his way past them. His foot flashed at a stone and thundered it into the path of traffic. Henry scores!

  True to his word, Mario didn’t stop running until he reached his given destination. His body zinged with excitement. It was like Ronaldinho taking a penalty in the last minute of extra time. Now was the moment. The time to step up – to be brave – to deliver!

  Pounding towards the front steps he remembered the drill. He flipped the woollen hat round so it concealed his face but still allowed him to see through a slit he’d cut in it.

  Ronaldinho places the ball and takes three steps back.

  Inside the building, he spotted his target.

  The Brazilian begins his run.

  Behind the reception desk, a man in uniform looked up from paperwork he was helping a pensioner complete.

  ‘La bagascia è morta! ’ shouted Mario. He threw the small soft parcel he’d been given into the chest of the carabinieri receptionist and bolted for the door.

  Ronaldinho scores! It’s all over!

  Mario had no idea why he’d been told to shout the bitch is dead, and he had no clue as to what was in the handkerchief. The carabinieri officer picked it up from the floor and opened it.

  He wasn’t sure what sickened him more, the sight of a severed tongue or the sure-fire fact that another young child’s soul had already been lost to the Camorra.

  15

  Capo di Posillipo, La Baia di Napoli

  The fortified home of the Finelli family, known to the carabinieri as the Viper’s Nest, was in a rocky, wooded height at the western end of the Bay of Naples.

  The spacious, sprawling structure was the product of two generations of Camorra activity. Fredo’s father Luigi had been a young Neapolitan recruit to Vito Genovese’s end-of-war smuggling activities. After helping re-route thousands of tons of army grain to the black market that was run from Nola, in the east of Naples, he went on to serve the Families of Lucky Luciano, set up after the mobster arrived in 1946. Luciano lived in the region until 1962 and by then Luigi Finelli had risen through the ranks and was running his own Camorra clan.

  Despite bitter differences between father and son in later life, Luigi’s portrait still hung above the table where three generations of the family ate dinner on a giant oak table. Many years earlier, Fredo had paid a local sculptor to fell the tree, slice it in two, treat the timber and then hand carve the bespoke piece that he hoped would be handed down from generation to generation.

  Fredo’s two younger brothers, Dominico and Marco, had come tonight with their wives, their sons and daughters and grandchildren. In all, the great tree had just finished hosting eighteen people, ranging in age from four to sixty-four.

  There was no formality to what happened after dinner. Everyone went their own way. The children – mostly the same age – raced each other round the corridors until they were red-faced. Meanwhile, Gina Valsi and the rest of the adults took coffee and desserts in a giant L-shaped garden room that opened into a pool house where the kids would scream and splash once their dinners had settled.

  Her husband and her father didn’t join them. There was business to discuss. Don Fredo apologized and begged their understanding.

  The Capofamiglia put his arm around
his son-in-law’s shoulders and guided him to his study. The den was large but warm and had a carefully crafted cosiness. The walls and floors were panelled in cherry wood, with floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with antique books on three sides and a custom-built desk and drawer area occupying the other wall. Three green antique leather settees formed a horseshoe around a giant cherry-wood table scattered with legal documents and company accounts. The centrepiece was a silver ashtray. Don Fredo lit a Toscana cigar. ‘Please, sit,’ he said, waving a hand at the settees. He heard Valsi settle noisily into the leather as he produced a bottle of Vecchio brandy and two crystal glasses.

  ‘Salvatore tells me you managed to renew your acquaintance with our old friend from Assisi?’ He chose the couch across the table and poured generous measures.

  Valsi took a glass. ‘Yes, it was good to catch up, but we won’t be seeing each other again.’

  They clinked crystal.

  Don Fredo gently swirled the amber liquid, smelled it and took a warming sip. ‘We mustn’t be gone too long. It is impolite with family in the house. But I want to share a concern with you, and it is best we talk now before it grows into a problem between us.’

  Valsi made a point of sitting upright. He wanted the Don to know he had his full attention.

  ‘When you were in prison, you formed some friendships with people who, now you are free again, it would not be appropriate for you to continue having relationships with.’

  The young Capo put down his brandy. ‘When I went to jail, you told me that survival in Poggioreale would be all about relationships. You were right. Many people were good to me. I feel it would be wrong now to forget them.’

  ‘I know. But despite how you feel, forget them you must.’

  Valsi tried not to show his annoyance. ‘But please, tell me, who exactly are you suggesting I turn my back on?’

  Don Fredo looked directly into his son-in-law’s eyes. ‘It would not, for example, be good for you to associate, or be linked in any way, with the likes of Alberto Donatello or Romano Ivetta.’