The Fifth Man

by James Lepore

  “No, you haven’t, but I know what you’re thinking.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Theresa stared at him.

  “Who else lives there?” he asked.

  “Ally Scarpa’s the super.”

  “Nick’s son? You’re kidding. He’s out of jail?”

  “Yes.” Theresa raised her eyebrows as she said this, stopping for a click at the top before lowering them, a movement that, combined with a slight tightening of the lips, transmitted a wordless mother-to-son message that Matt had received and acknowledged, sometimes silently, sometimes not, countless times.

  “It’s a Mafia-fest over there,” he said, deciding to make this one of the non-silent times.

  “Grandpa owns the building. What did you expect?”

  Matt said nothing, but he smiled, and shook his head, acknowledging to his mother, who stood before him proudly, still striking at forty-six, that what bound them most profoundly, besides their blood, was their membership by birth in an old-fashioned mob clan, a Mafia family that few knew existed, but that, deft and imaginative, swam quietly with the deadliest and most powerful of sharks in the commercial seas of the twenty-first century.

  “You have your Uncle Joseph’s smile,” Theresa said, staring at him, her eyes softening. “What do you think’s in the locker?”

  “Heroin, cocaine, crystal meth. Stolen televisions.”

  “Stop it.”

  They both smiled now, and Matt could see from the look in his mother’s eyes that she was thinking of Joseph, remembering him, the bad Massi brother, the heroin addict, who, he had come to realize, she may have loved more than the one she married.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked.

  “Shopping with Dana Carbone, then dinner someplace. Join us.”

  “Maybe; I’m picking a friend up at LaGuardia. I’ll call you.”

  That look again. That almost imperceptible tilt of the head and narrowing of the large brown DiGiglio eyes. A friend? What kind of friend? Male? Female? LaGuardia?

  “It’s the guy from the Scorpion,” Matt said, smiling, giving his mother a break. “Nico. I told you about him. He’s coming over to visit relatives.”

  “Oh. Okay. Bring him to dinner.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  2.

  Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, August 20, 2012, 7:00 p.m.

  “This is quite a place,” Matt said. He had been looking around Sabrina’s—the Russian restaurant cum nightclub on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach—while Nico was in the back talking to his cousin, one of the owners.

  “You like it?”

  “What’s not to like?”

  “The girls?”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  Nico was referring to the two young women in gold bikini tops and sequin-covered skirts who were dancing under blue and red strobe lights on a raised platform on the stage in the restaurant’s large main room. The jagged-edged skirts revealed a lot of leg, and seemed somehow, Matt noticed, to reveal a bit more as the girls waved to Nico and smiled when he passed the stage on his way to the kitchen. He and Matt were seated outside at a front corner table on a covered patio facing the beach. The Atlantic Ocean, solemn and calm tonight under a cloudless sky, lay just fifty yards beyond. Through open-air doors behind them, they had a view of the noisy interior. The dancers had been joined by a singer in a low-cut sequin dress that matched her golden hair and their sparkling outfits. She was smiling and waving at the people at one of the tables near the stage. Her teeth, Matt noticed, were very white and beautiful and her lipsticked lips bright red.

  “The singer is also my cousin.”

  Matt nodded and smiled. He had spent long stretches at sea with the twenty-five year old Nico, and heard a lot about his so-called cousins. In Odessa, it paid apparently to be a part of a large family with plenty of nerodnoy brat.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Later, I will prove it. We both have flowers on our asses.”

  “Tattoos?”

  “Nyet. Birthmarks. In the shape of a poppy, the Ukrainian flower.”

  “Is the vodka good here?” Matt asked.

  “Matvey! This you do not have to ask.”

  He didn’t. The vodka, brought out especially for them in tall bottles without labels—a family recipe according to Nico—was the best he ever had, silky smooth with an earthy bite and a clean, happy aftertaste, leaving you wanting more. Which Matt, who could hold his liquor, did and did not. He paced himself, and the food— brought out endlessly by waiters in white shirts and black bowties, who spoke rapid-fire Russian to Nico—helped him stay relatively sober. He had spent more than a few nights in ports from Sebastopol to Palermo drinking with Nico, who never got drunk. After ten vodkas his boyish face might turn a deep red and he might smile a lot, but that was it. He greased six-inch cables, wrestled with tie-down hardware and scraped rust all day onboard ship, and was tall and tanned and very strong. One night in Naples he tossed around some locals like they were ragdolls. They had called him a dumb Polack, a double insult. Matt wasn’t worried though, about anything Nico might or might not do. He just never got drunk with strangers, or in public.

  After dinner, they sat on the boardwalk and smoked Nico’s black market Turkish cigarettes while they waited for the last show to end, when the singer and one of the dancers were supposed to join them and continue the evening.

  “Why are you here, Nick?” Matt asked. They were facing the sea, the better to catch the faint breeze drifting in from Ireland, the night still hot and humid.

  “To visit my family,” Nico answered. “To play in America.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No, there is more, but if I tell you what it is, you will be…What do I mean to say? A participant?”

  “Then don’t tell me.”

  “I agree. I will not. May I ask you, Matt, who are you?”

  Matt smiled and glanced over at the young Ukrainian, who had his thickly muscled arms stretched out on the back of the bench they were sitting on, some few feet apart. Their eyes met for a second, and then both looked out to sea. Such patience, he thought, a year at sea.

  “I’m a college student,” Matt replied, flinging his half-smoked cigarette over the metal rail in front of him, watching it land and die out on the sand below. “I told you.”

  “American college students do not get visas to work on oil tankers on the Black Sea.”

  “The Scorpion was Greek.”

  “And your father is really a lawyer?”

  “Yes, The Piraeus Group is a major client.”

  “Not Mafia?”

  “The Mafia doesn’t exist any more, Nick, except in the movies.”

  “Our captain must watch the American movies.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing was to happen to you.”

  “Why are you bringing this up now? You had a year to bring it up.”

  “I only take orders.”

  “Yes, I understand. Who from?”

  “Gods in tall buildings. Men in kitchens drinking vodka.” Wawdka, was how he pronounced it. It made Matt smile.

  “So, why are you here?”

  “I am to ask if you are interested in a business proposition.”

  Matt took his time replying. This meant that Nico’s people knew at least that money was a part of Matt’s world. And possibly—likely—more. How much more? For Nico to ask a question like this of Matt Massi was to take the risk that the tall, open-faced young Russian would not return from America, that he would never be heard from again.

  “Someone has done some research,” Matt said, finally.

  “That goes both ways, I’m sure,” Nico said.

  “No, Nick, we’re friends,” Matt replied. “But it could always be done no
w.” Even if your last name is not Pugach, and you were not born in Kiev, and your mother was not the woman who fed us dinner on the roof of her apartment building last summer, I could find out who you are in a couple of hours. And I will.

  3.

  Jackson, New Jersey, August 21, 2012, 3:00 p.m.

  “I need to rent another unit,” Matt said. He had rung the bell at the counter and waited several minutes for Ms. Cavanagh, she of the great accent and the chip on her shoulder, to appear. He spent those minutes looking around the Wall Storage office, which was neat and clean, but sad, its two faux leather and faux chrome chairs against a side wall, a Walmart flower print hanging slightly askew above them; a faux leather sofa under the room’s one window. And it was hot, near ninety degrees in the room. The air conditioner fitted into a wall cutout sat there silently, the words old and broken written all over it. While he was waiting a fax came in, something, he could not miss seeing, from the Superior Court of Ocean County, Domestic Violence Unit.

  “In addition to A-17?” Anna Cavanagh answered.

  “Yes.”

  “What size?”

  “Small, I just have to put this in it,” said Matt, lifting the duffle bag he was holding above the level of the counter that separated them.

  “I have lockers behind the office.”

  “So we don’t have to go outside?” Matt was thinking of Nico, sitting in Matt’s car in the parking lot just inside the front gate. He had walked from unit A17, the duffle bag over his shoulder, through the back streets of the facility and entered the office through a back door.

  “No. We go there,” Cavanagh said, pointing to a metal door to her right.

  “Is there an entrance from the outside?”

  “Yes, behind the office, but I will take you through from here.”

  “Good, let’s do it.”

  “I will need your credit card.”

  Matt, twenty-two, six foot tall, a trim one hundred ninety pounds of good-looking young man untempered by any bad experience with women, had been, as a matter of course, rapidly assessing Anna Cavanagh as they spoke. After saying let’s do it, he paused to take a better look. She was far from what he had expected. Her pinned-up hair—what he could see of it—was a pretty, golden blonde, her skin fair. A tiny bead of sweat was making its way slowly down a straight, slightly large, but finely modeled nose, a proud nose set between full lips below and wide apart green eyes above. One—the left one—was slightly off-center, looking permanently at the faint but distinct dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose. They were beautiful, these eyes, made more beautiful by the one that was slightly cocked, but not beautiful enough to hide the shadow behind them. Of what, he could only guess. Fear? Hatred? Loss? They were eyes that would be magnetic if she ever smiled, feral if she got angry. A grown woman’s eyes.

  “I am waiting,” said Cavanagh.

  “You have it,” Matt answered. Why so serious? He wanted to say, to break the ice, to get some kind of a reaction from her, but held back, remembering the fax he had seen. Domestic Violence Unit. Something was very wrong in Anna Cavanagh’s life.

  “I must run it through this time.”

  ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

  In the parking lot, Nico was standing outside the car, looking toward the facility’s front entrance, where the locksmith’s van was just passing under the black and white gate arm. He smiled and waved when he saw Matt approaching across the hot tarmac, a smile that Matt was familiar with, beaming, wide open, too innocent to be true.

  “So, what did she look like? Nasty?” Nico asked when they were underway, heading toward the Garden State Parkway. On the drive down from Manhattan, Matt had told him about his audio-based impression of Anna Cavanagh, leaving out the accent, the most interesting thing, until today, about her.

  “No,” Matt replied. “Worn down, wary, but not nasty.”

  “Good looking?”

  “She’s okay.” She’s beautiful, Matt thought. And then: You’re guarding your treasure. Like Smaug the dragon.

  “The body?”

  “Tall, thin.”

  “Too thin? Is she a woman?”

  “Not too thin.”

  “How old?”

  “Twenty-nine, thirty.”

  “Married?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Twenty-nine is the best age, Matvey,” Nico said. “They want to make the most of the last of their youth.”

  “Not this one,” Matt said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t smile once.”

  “For me she will smile.”

  “Sure, Nick, give it a try.”

  4.

  Jackson, New Jersey, August 21, 2012, 4:00 p.m.

  In the apartment behind the office, Anna Cavanagh, laundry basket in hand, paused to take a look at herself in the pink-framed mirror in her daughter’s room. She did not like thinking about her looks, not in the way she believed most women did. Was she pretty? Was she attractive to men? To this man, or that man? She had never taken more than a few steps down that path. She knew without thinking about it where it would lead her. She looked and assessed of course, but in her own way, her heart ready to cry STOP before she saw her father’s smiling face, and heard his voice telling her how beautiful she was.

  Now she looked a bit more carefully than usual, caution thrown tentatively to the wind, on a short leash, one might say: first at her bad eye, her ugly eye, traumatic strabismus, the doctor at the clinic in Prague called it. Then at her fake-looking, too-yellow hair, pinned up now against the heat, wisps of it falling on her ears and the back of a neck that seemed too long; at a face that was too angular to be pretty, the nose plain and boring and yet somehow haughty. The freckles, God, still there. Her father’s face had been angular and thin, his nose large and straight and proud too, and he had been a drinker, like her husband, though she didn’t know it when he was alive, living as she was in a child’s dream world until that winter day in 1989.

  Pretty or not, men were drawn to her; some falling for her like trees felled in a forest. Whoosh, and they would do anything for her. Tall, thin, her breasts large and full, her ass plump and curvy, her skin creamy, she knew what they wanted. She had learned early about sex. One of those do-anything men had been Skip Cavanagh, whom she married not because he begged her to, but because she could not extend her visa any longer.

  Haggard was her assessment now. Tired. Afraid.

  On her own since she was eighteen. Everyone dead. Father, mother, grandparents. Fourteen years. America, she thought, when she left Prague, would be the answer. There she would make a new life and find a way to forget, to put the past behind her. But she never could put it behind her, her past. She could never stop looking out that window in her little house on the outskirts of Prague. And now there was more. Reflexively, she reached to touch the bruise on her right side. Lifting her blouse, she saw that the edges were fading to an ugly yellow, that only the center was still the deep purple color of an eggplant. Today, there was no blood in her urine for the first time since Skip, drunk, high on what the cops later told her was something called crystal meth, had struck her with a baseball bat two weeks ago.

  In the kitchen, she soaked a washcloth with cold water and held it first against the back of her neck and then her forehead. Through the window above the sink, she could see her son and daughter playing on the thirty-foot by thirty-foot patch of sunburned brown grass behind the building. It was sweltering hot, but, dressed for the heat in shorts and T-shirts, they seemed oblivious as they dug in the ground in the far corner near the chain-link fence that enclosed the yard. Beyond the fence a short way was the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a million acres of brush pine that surrounded her and her children and her dying little business like a monster in a dark fairy tale, ready to swallow them without warning in one quick primeval gulp.

 
; She had immediately gone online two days ago to make sure that Matt Massi’s first credit card payment had cleared. She had no doubt, having met him, that his second would be fine. Half of her units were empty and there were too many deadbeats among the other half, too many up-and-coming auctions to pay too much back rent. Matt Massi’s two payments would get her through three months if she was careful. But what else would she be but careful? And then what?

  In the kitchen was a television wired to the closed circuit security cameras that monitored the front gate and the storage rows on the property. The quarterly insurance bill had arrived the day after she threw Skip—with the help of the Jackson Township police and a judge who was awoken at 3:00 a.m. to sign a temporary restraining order—out. The three thousand six hundred dollar bill was still on her desk. It was either pay it or feed the kids. She checked the TV in the kitchen and the other two, in the office and in her bedroom, obsessively. Her life was in Wall Storage—all of her savings, the money she had hoarded waiting tables and tending bar for five years before she chose Frank “Skip” Cavanagh as her ticket to American citizenship. That decision had not been cold or calculated, but nevertheless she was paying a heavy price for it.

  Back in the front office Anna sat at her computer and Googled Matthew Massi, finding a radio talk show host in Sacramento and a math teacher in Binghamton, New York. One fat and bald, the other thin and old. For Joseph Massi she found the same run-of-the-mill types, more of them than she expected. One was a ventriloquist in Los Angeles. This produced one of her rare smiles. Then, toward the last page of Massis, she found a 2003 New York Post article about the discovery of parts of a body in a suitcase in a canal in Brooklyn and the ensuing investigation that led to the identification of the partial corpse as that of Joseph Massi of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The U.S. Attorney’s Organized Crime Task Force surmises that Massi, a member of the Velardo crime family under suspicion of several gangland slayings, was tortured and then killed by gangland rivals in a dispute over drug territory in Brooklyn. Below this was a brief obituary, which named Massi’s surviving wife, Rose, his two sons, Christopher and Joseph, Jr., and his grandchildren Theresa and Matthew. There were no pictures.