Viper - Michael Morley [3]
One of the bigger and more senior guards walked him the final distance to the front gates. Valsi stood inches from his face. ‘Caccati in mano e prenditi a schiaffi.’ The insult was well known, shit in your hand and then hit yourself, but until now, no one had ever dared say it to a prison officer.
Jacket over shoulder, he blinked as he walked into the sunlight. To the far east rose the slopes of Vesuvius and Mount Somma. Up close and all around him inner-city slums skulked incongruously in the shadows of the slick and shiny skyscrapers of the city’s business district. Hardly anything of value had been built here without kickbacks to the Camorra clans – the Families who ran the System – an invisible web of corruption that supported and strangled the socio-economic life of the Campania region.
Valsi gave the guards the finger for a final time. Prison gates creaked shut behind him. Giant bolts slammed. Heavy keys turned. In the safety of the jail the guards cursed back at him. Across the road, locals cheered and clapped as he walked free. He smiled for them and they cheered even louder. Journalists flashed cameras from a polite distance. Valsi’s not oriety and good looks sold papers, the Camorra was akin to celebrity. Within hours his new images would become screensavers on the cellphones of thousands of teenage girls across Naples. He was the ultimate bad boy. The rebel whom girls couldn’t help but fantasize about. The man even their mothers glanced twice at.
Almost in unison the doors of five waiting Mercedes swung open and a legion of black-suited Camorristi stepped out. It was more than an act of respect, it was a public display of defiance. Heavily armed, their weapons were brazenly on show. No one dared challenge them.
Valsi soaked up the sight. Cameras clicked again. Another smile for the press and his public. Then he coolly walked towards the one car that stood out – a new chauffeur-driven Mercedes Maybach – the type of limousine that cost more in extras than most Neapolitans earned in a year. Only when he was a metre away did his proud and grateful father-in-law step out and embrace him.
If Don Fredo had known what was on Valsi’s mind, he’d have had him shot dead before the prison gates had even shut.
2
Carnegie Hall, New York City
A howling nor’easter had bowled up the coast and airdropped a thunderous delivery of snow and ice on a New York City that had complacently thought it was in for a mild winter. Rosy-cheeked kids stretched cold hands at falling flakes. Yellow Cab drivers snarled from rolled-down windows. Their cursing breath froze in the early December air as traffic hit gridlock. Winter was going to be savage.
Jack King, his wife Nancy and four-year-old son Zack had arrived at her parents’ house in Greenwich Village barely two days before the biggest pre-Christmas snowfall since 1947 had shut down both JFK and Newark airports.
Nancy had closed Casa Strada, her booming hotel and restaurant business in Tuscany, for two months to enable extension work to be done. Straight after New York she’d be in Umbria, buying property to convert into a second hotel. Jack, meanwhile, was mixing business with pleasure. Pleasure being the chance to catch up with old friends and family that he and his wife had left behind when they’d emigrated to Italy. Business being a well-paid keynote speech in his capacity as a freelance psychological profiler.
He commanded the stage of Carnegie Hall as surely as any entertainer who’d trodden its famous boards. ‘Given the inclement weather, I want to leave you with some chilling thoughts,’ Jack told the International Serial Offender Conference. ‘People are like icebergs; we only ever see ten per cent of them. The really interesting – and sometimes deadly – ninety per cent lies mysteriously hidden in the dark waters of personal secrecy.’ He peered out from the stage in the Isaac Stern auditorium. Almost three thousand people, spread five tiers high, peered right back at him. ‘Bergs are pieces of ice that have