Viper - Michael Morley [2]
When you walk in a dream but you know you’re not dreamin’, signore,
– through her skull –
’Scusa me, but you see, back in old Napoli, that’s amore.
– through her hips and ribs and any other major bones that had survived the inferno.
He searched the scorched ground. Made sure he’d been his usual thorough self.
And then he chopped again.
This time he used a small hand-axe on the troublesome hip, cleaving through the sacrum, coccyx, ischium and pubis.
He was dripping with sweat when he climbed out of the pit, carrying Francesca’s young life in two dented steel buckets, her total existence reduced to ash and broken bones; ash that blew away in the wind as he walked to his car.
Would her beauty have stayed with her into her thirties, forties or fifties? Would her children have inherited those hypnotic eyes?
The ponderings amused him as he drove to the sacred spot where he laid them all to rest.
He dug again. The blood-red sunrise painted his skin as he upended Francesca’s remains into a shallow grave.
He slapped the old steel buckets with his hand. Cleared the last of the dust – the last of Francesca – that stuck to the sides. A couple of smashed bones were still larger than he liked. He stomped them into the earth.
The first coral-blue hues of morning fought their way into the angry sky as he completed the burial. He bent his head, closed his eyes and slowly prayed: Domine Jesu Christe, Rex Gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni et de profundo lacu.
Before leaving, he urinated on the freshly dug grave. Partly because he needed to. Mainly because he liked to. As he zipped up, he wondered whether God would indeed heed his prayer to free the soul of the faithfully departed from infernal punishment and the horrors of the deep pit.
But then again, he asked himself, did he really give a fuck?
He sauntered back to his car, singing in Italian this time: Luna rossa lassù, mare azzurro quaggiù: questo è amore!
ONE
Five years later
1
Prigione di Poggioreale, Napoli
Camorra mobster Bruno Valsi got a five stretch for frightening the life out of people due to testify against his gang boss father-in-law. It was a walk in the park compared to the life sentences he should have served for several murders and countless sadistic assaults.
Few had cheered when he’d gone down. Few had been that brave. Maybe the fact that three of his arresting officers had been shot in the legs, and the local carabinieri headquarters had been burned to the ground, had something to do with the silence.
The Camorra message had echoed around every street corner. Cross the Family – get brutally punished. No one needed telling twice.
As witnesses withdrew, even the local cops heeded the warnings. Vital evidence vanished from inside the station house. The case against Valsi’s father-in-law crumbled. But the young Camorrista wasn’t so lucky. One young woman came forward and testified about being threatened. It was enough to get him the five years. One day – soon – he would find her and make her pay.
Three guards marched the Camorrista into the discharge area for him to collect his personal effects and change out of his prison clothes. He gave them the finger as they watched him strip. Above his left breast a tattoo declared who owned his heart. Not a woman. No way. It belonged to the Finelli clan. The guards’ eyes were drawn to the distinctive image of a red viper, slithering down a switchblade. From its mouth dripped three blood-red words: Onore. Lealtà. Vendetta. Honour. Loyalty. Vengeance. The Finellis were one of the few Camorra clans to wear gang markings. Valsi jabbed a finger at the word Vendetta and his jailers looked away. ‘Andate tutti a fanculo – fuck you all,’ he called to them as he struggled into his old, grey Valentino suit. Prison life had made the trousers too big in the waist and the jacket too narrow across the chest. That’s what happens when you pump iron twice a day, every day for 1,827 days behind bars. You get hard. Jail rock hard. Prison had changed him in other ways