Viper - Michael Morley [20]
‘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