Michael Morley
Viper
La Baia di Napoli Francesca Di Lauro had the kind of eyes you never forgot. Hypnotic, almost translucent. An indefinable shade between blue and green. More hologram than optic.
They were fixed on the man in front of her. Fixed very firmly on him as he watched her naked body. Francesca's faultless skin and tumbling black hair were backlit by the golden flicker of a newly lit fire. The two of them were alone. Outside, in the pine-smelling woodland. No one to disturb them. Perfect privacy.
Only this was no romantic encounter. This was the worst moment of her life. The flames around Francesca's feet crawled up the metal stake she'd been tied to. Wind tugged her hair and suddenly the jaws of an orange dragon were chewing her flesh. Francesca twisted hopelessly, the agonizing heat searing her paraffin-soaked skin.
He stood a few metres away, mesmerized by the slow murder, stroking himself pleasurably. His eyes fixed on the curtain of flames. This would take time. A deliciously long time.
Francesca had been tied with coils of wire around her feet, hands and neck. He'd learned from past mistakes.
Rope burned, then they tried to get away. He didn't want any more messiness. No mistakes this time.
Bricks were stacked waist-high, all around her. A kiln to funnel heat up her body. Rags stuffed in her mouth and then bound around her face to choke off any screams. Though sometimes he liked to hear them. Liked to hear the air leave their lungs for one last time.
Francesca's head slumped limply on her chest. She was a quiet one. Flames ate her hair. The smell of burning flesh, sweet and greasy like a hog roast, carried in the cold night air. He sucked it in. Savoured it. Fed on it.
Amid the crackle of the fire he waited. Listened now for the moment when he heard her skull crack and sizzle. Popping chestnuts! How he just loved to peel away those crisp, burned outer shells.
He'd removed all her jewellery and, while he watched, he played with it in his pocket, turning the trophies in his hand like beads on a rosary.
The blaze illuminated the pit that he stood in. It was almost three metres deep, seven metres wide and fifteen metres long. It had been dug by the landowner as foundations for a house that never got built. Dead dreams. These days it was more commonly used to burn some of the overflowing stinking rubbish that clogged the city's vermin-infested streets.
He stayed until darkness had faded seamlessly into the dawn, then he raised a gleaming stainless-steel spade and began softly singing. He sang in English, complete with a near-comical Dean Martin accent.
When the stars make you drool joost-a like pasta fazool, that's amore;
He scraped Francesca's bones from the blackened wood, grey ash and red embers. Slammed the blade of his spade across the snake of her spine.
When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet, you're in love;
The metal sliced through her pelvis -
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 lassu, mare azzurro quaggiu: questo e 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. Lealta. 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 too. He was meaner. And better connected than he'd ever been.
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.