by James Lepore
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Let me put it this way, Teo: what Mafia don would send his only son to spend a year on a Greek oil tanker in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea?”
“This one did.”
“There’s something I’m not getting.”
Back to the first person singular.
“When you find out what it is, let me know.”
“I’m going to Skopelos tomorrow night on the Piraeus jet. Come with me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why? It’s Dad’s birthday. School doesn’t start for two weeks.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
Another pause, as Matt and Tess stared at each other. Fuck, Matt thought, seeing the look in his sister’s eyes. I just can’t keep my mouth shut.
“For Dad?” Tess asked, finally.
“Yes.”
Now Tess’s eyes softened. She leaned across the empty space between them and took one of her brother’s hands in hers. “I’m worried,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“Don’t. I’m fine.”
“Let me worry, Teo. You know what Dad always said. It’s a form of prayer.”
“Okay, Tess,” Matt replied. “Pray for me, like you did when we were kids and I was always in trouble. You used to say, ‘I’m praying for you, Teo, that you won’t be an idiot forever.’”
Now they both smiled, and Matt could feel the pressure increase as Tess squeezed his hand tighter, and he could see the love in her eyes, and the fear.
7.
Piraeus, Greece, August 22, 2012, 12:30 a.m.
Chris Massi did own tall buildings, though not in his name, and also houses. One of these was a very modest affair, crammed in like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle among many others on a twisting street at the top of a hill overlooking the smallest of Piraeus’s three harbors, Munichia. The oddly shaped three-story house’s best feature was the view of the busy harbor from its top floor and rooftop deck, a sweeping vista to the north and south along the coast of the Saronic Gulf, and west out over the green Aegean, which tonight, as Chris gazed at it from his small study, was dark and quiet. The reflected lights of huge cruise ships tied to bulkheads and many smaller vessels moored within the harbor’s safe confines sparkled on its placid surface like diamonds under a sheet of black glass. One of those small vessels was his, a Fleming 75 yacht, Eleftheria, with oversized gas tanks, a specially tooled engine and a Greek captain whose brother-in-law was Munichia’s harbormaster.
Yes, Matt, Chris thought, that is why I asked you to take a year off from Columbia; to work on a tanker delivering the world’s most important commodity to some of the world’s most dangerous cities. To toughen you, and to see what kind of crowd you would attract. You were bound to attract one no matter where you were or what you were doing. Better where I could watch.
On Chris’s desk was a deceptively simple but perfectly secure phone, hard-wired for him by a local employee of OTE, the largest Greek telecom provider, who moonlighted for special clients. Chris lifted the old-fashioned black plastic-covered handset from its squat base, dialed a number from memory and hung up. A few minutes later, the phone rang.
“Max,” Chris said after lifting the receiver and placing it against his left ear.
“Yes, c’est moi.”
“Where are you?”
“Arizona.”
“Doing what?”
“Helping with some training.”
“I need you to go to New York. Can you?”
“When?”
“Now. As soon as possible.”
“What’s up?”
“I think our Russian friends have made contact.”
“With Matt?”
“Yes.”
“Anybody we know?”
“The Nico Pugach kid.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. Call me when you land. I’ll fill you in.”
“Just me?”
“For now. But we have friends there.”
“I’m on my way.”
Chris hung up and used the same phone to call Eleftheria’s captain.
“Send the launch, Costa,” he said when the captain answered. “We leave tonight.”
“Tess?”
“She can fly to Skiathos on the small jet. I’ll arrange it.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes Costa, your friends at the Café Eleni, ask them if there’s any talk of diamonds gone missing.”
“Do you suspect someone?”
“No, but they’re on offer, ten million dollars worth.”
“It will be done.”
Chris took his custom-made German binoculars from a nearby shelf, but before putting them to his eyes he looked for a moment at his reflection in the window in front of him. He would turn fifty tomorrow, which was why, ostensibly, Tess was coming over. He didn’t look fifty. His hair, which he wore longer than he did ten years ago when he was fighting to save his law license, and his life, was still a lustrous black; his face, except for the pale lightning-bolt shaped scar on the bridge of his nose, had not changed much. Despite the dim outline of crow’s feet that were beginning to spread east and west from the corners of his eyes, it was still a young man’s face. But his eyes were not young. They had seen too much real life in the last ten years to stay young and happy looking. His father chopped up in a mob slaying, his mother dead of a broken heart, his drug-addict brother killed in the one act of bravery in his short life. He looked at his eyes and then out to the Aegean, both dark and somber, both having seen their share, as Matthew Arnold put it, of the turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Then, dismissing Arnold’s deep pessimism, which he shared, he put the glasses to his face and focused on Eleftheria—Freedom—where the launch was being lowered by the ship’s first, and only, mate, Costa Vasiliou’s twenty-six-year-old son, Elias.
The Russians, Chris thought, they won’t go away.
8.
Manhattan, August 22, 2012, 10:00 p.m.
“Where was your sister going in that limousine, Matvey?”
“To the airport. She’s going to Greece to visit my father.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s in graduate school in Washington.”
“Which is what? Graduate school.“
“Post-graduate studies. You go after college.”
“For what purpose?”
“International relations. She’s at Georgetown.”
“She is very beautiful.”
“Yes,” Matt answered. “And smart.”
“And forbidden, yes? Apagorevmemos.”
Matt smiled. He and Nico were standing on the sidewalk in front of Villa Mosconi, the family-owned and operated Italian restaurant in the West Village that he and his dad went to weekly while they were living in SoHo and he was going to La Salle Academy. Sal Visco, the restaurant’s bulky unofficial bouncer, a white golf shirt stretched across his thick chest and arms, was lighting up a cigarette about ten feet away, watching a boisterous group of college kids as they passed by. The night was clear and beautiful and the Village vibrated, as it always did on warm summer nights, with the energy of the young and the restless.
“Nothing is truly forbidden, Nick.”
“I mean the price too high. Is that the correct English?”
“It’s close enough,” Matt answered. Nico, overdressed in a dark suit and tie, had been the perfect gentleman at dinner with Theresa, her friend Diana and Tess, the picture of modesty. Too modest, Matt thought, and with more English than he wants me to believe. His boat mate, the simple, rough-hewn Russian youth, had vanished.
“Where are you headed?” Nico asked.
“I have a date with Natalya. I thought you knew.”
“No. Why would I know?”
“She’s your cousin. You seemed close.”
“Our love lives, we do not discuss.”
“Do I have your permission?”
“I am honored, but you do not need it.”
“What about you?”
“Little Odessa.”
They shook hands and parted and Matt went back into the restaurant.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Sal flipped his cigarette away and watched Nico walk east on MacDougal Street until he turned right on Sixth Avenue and was out of sight.
9.
Jackson, New Jersey, August 23, 2012, 3:00 a.m.
Anna Cavanagh woke with a start, thinking she had heard one of the kids cry out. She sat up and listened, but there were no sounds coming from their room, only a few steps away. In the past she had often been awakened by the beep in the office that indicated that someone, using their access code, had entered the premises after hours, but this system had been shut down when she couldn’t pay the alarm company’s bill.
The room was hot and thick with south Jersey, late-summer humidity, its two small windows wide open. Had she heard a car? She listened carefully, but heard only crickets clattering madly. Skip had called at midnight, drunk, high, she did not know which; out on bail—how could that be?—and threatened to come over to his house, his business, to see his kids. She had called the police. Skip was not to come within a thousand feet of her or the kids. The police were as shocked as she was that Skip was out on bail, which had been set at fifty thousand. She was hoping it was them she heard, doing a routine patrol, and not Skip.
Then a movement on the television monitor in the corner to the right of her bed caught her eye. The screen was divided into four squares for the facility’s four main avenues. In the upper left quadrant, Aisle A, a car was parked and a man in a ski mask was using a metal shear to cut the lock on a unit.
Anna’s friend, Dale, whom she had met when they were both tending bar at one of the Jersey shore’s insane clubs, had given her an air horn that her boyfriend had stolen from the golf course where he worked. The boyfriend had installed it for her on an exterior wall with a button in the office that set it off. He had also given her a gun—a Baby Glock, he called it—which she kept on her night table. Grabbing the lightweight, polymer-coated gun, she slipped out of bed, made her way quietly to the air horn button and pushed it. The sound was deafening. Then she turned to the TV monitor in the office and saw the man with the metal shear jump into the car, back out of the aisle and pull away out of sight. A minute later she heard the crack of the front gate arm as the car crashed through it. She pushed the horn’s button again for good measure, and then the earmark button on the security console on her desk. Then, realizing she was naked—it was so hot she couldn’t stand even wearing panties to bed—she returned to her bedroom where she quickly dressed. Back in the office, she grabbed a flashlight and, Glock in one hand, flashlight in the other, went out to the unit that the man was trying to enter. She had a hunch which one it was, and she was right. It was A-17, Matt Massi’s unit, the one he had taken the duffle bag out of.
Back in her kitchen, she put a small pot of coffee on and lit up a Marlboro Light. The first deep drag calmed her down. While the coffee brewed, she fished around in the trashcan under a counter and found today’s Asbury Park Press, thinking of a front-page story she had read that morning: Local Locksmith Found Shot Dead. She knew the man, Ed Shields. He had come over to help her out when there was a lock on a deadbeat’s unit that was too much for her and her small arsenal of tools. He had hit on her and she had hissed him off, but he was a decent guy and never charged her.
Had he been the locksmith who opened A-17 for Matt Massi?
10.
Jackson, August 23, 2012, 11:00 a.m.
“How did they get in?”
“They must have had your code, or someone’s code.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I have already given them enough trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Do not ask.”
“You mean it’s none of my business?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you need a police report for your insurance company?”
Silence.
“Or don’t you have insurance?”
“They did not get in. Nothing was taken.”
“They?”
“There were two of them, one stayed in the car.”
“Can I see the video?”
“Of course.”
They were standing, as before, facing each other with the office’s waist-high gray Formica-covered counter between them. The south Jersey heat wave continued unabated. It was over eighty-five degrees in the un-air-conditioned office.
“You’ll have to come around,” Anna said, nodding toward the swinging half-door to Matt’s right. As Matt made his way into the inner space, Anna pulled two leather-covered bar stools out from under the counter. When they were both seated, she clicked on a video-camera icon on her computer screen. Matt, needing a better view of the video he was about to see, brought his stool closer to Anna’s. He was wearing khaki shorts and Anna was wearing a light cotton skirt. His knee touched hers and he let it stay there for a couple of seconds before pulling it away. Anna, concentrating on the computer, did not seem to notice. Or perhaps she did.
They watched a six-inch-square frame open on the screen, first appearing as a grainy gray and then resolving into a surprisingly sharp black-and-white image of a narrow, asphalt-covered street with a one-story storage building on either side. Seconds passed, and then a late-model sedan, its headlights off, turned into the narrow street heading toward them. The car stopped and a man in a ski mask got out of the driver’s side, approached a unit and went at the lock with a heavy-duty metal shear. He stopped suddenly and hustled back into the car, which he then backed rapidly and seemingly effortlessly out of the aisle, executing a quick and flawless K-turn at the open end before racing away.
The screen went gray for a second or two, and then Anna appeared, naked. Frontally and very beautifully naked, her large breasts round and high and perfectly formed, her belly slightly bulging, her crotch a thick mass of silky yellow curls on which Matt’s eyes were riveted until, a second later, the screen went gray again.
“Fuck,” Anna said.
“What was that?” Matt asked.
“I thought I hit the earmark button. I must have hit the interior office button by mistake.”
“Are you blushing?”
“As you would be.”
“Can we run through it again?”
Anna laughed at this, a rough, quick, involuntary bark of a laugh. Seeing her face light up for an instant, Matt realized he was wrong about her having a magnetic smile. What he saw was a flash of innocence, a child emerging for a split second from under the depressing layers of an adulthood that he now knew—for reasons he could not explain, except for the way she laughed and then quickly stopped—had started way too early.
“I mean it,” he said, smiling himself now. “You can delete the last frame. I’d also like a copy.”
“It was the middle of the night,” Anna said. “It was very hot.”
“Anna,” Matt said. “Can I call you Anna?”
“Why not?”
“Forget it. I never saw it.”
They looked at each other for a second or two, during which Matt recalled the feel of Anna Cavanagh’s sweaty leg when he got too close a few minutes ago. Was she remembering it too?
“Why do you want a copy?”
“To get it enhanced.”
“To try to see who it was?”
“Yes.”
“He had a ski mask on.”
“The other person didn’t, just a baseball cap. And there’s the license plate. That should be easy to read.”
“There is something I must tell you.”
“What?”
“What locksmith did you use?”
“A guy named Ed Shields. I found him online. Why?”
“He was killed two days ago, murdered. It was in the newspaper.”
Matt shook his head, remembering Shields, how talkative he was, how friendly, how he quickly quieted when he saw what was in the duffle bag.
“Did he have a family?”
“Two kids.”
“Did you know him?”
“He’s been here a few times.”
“What kind of guy was he?”
“What do you mean? He’s been dead two days. He could not have been the one who tried to get into your unit.”
Matt was silent for a second. That was as far as he would go with this line of questioning.
“Can you give me the newspaper?” he asked, finally.
“Sure.”
“There’s something else,” Matt said.
“Yes? Tell me.”
“I’d like to send someone to hang out around here for a few days. Would that be okay?”
“Hang out?”
“Watch the place.”
“Am I in danger?”
“You could be. Do you have a gun by any chance?”
“Yes, but I have never fired it.”
“Sleep with it.”
“What about my kids. I have two kids.”
“Can you send them someplace?”
“I have a friend. How long?”
“A few days, a week. I’m sorry, but it’s best.”
Anna was silent for a moment.
“What are you thinking?” Matt asked.
“My friend has children they can play with.”
“Good.”
“I know who you are,” Anna said. She stared at him, and as she did her bad eye seemed to be trying hard to align itself with the good one. Trying but not succeeding.