by James Lepore
“Go on.”
“The woman’s name was Irina Tabak. The police are looking for her boyfriend, a man named Andrei Kamarov. Here is his picture.” Costa Vasiliou handed Chris an eight-by-ten piece of white copy paper, in the center of which was a black-and-white four-inch by four-inch image of a young man with short, light-colored hair and light eyes, probably blue. His pronounced Slavic features were set in near perfect symmetry in a square, open, handsome face. An innocent face.
Chris took the picture and studied it, but said nothing.
“They have been watching Irina for three years,” Costa continued.
“And now she’s dead,” Chris said.
“Yes.”
“And some diamonds appear for sale.”
“Yes.”
“Sit, Costa.”
“No, Nonos, I will stand.”
Chris had given up trying to get Eleftheria’s captain to stop calling him godfather, or a diminutive of the word. Neither could he get his friend and employee of five years to relax when they were talking business. He looked at Costa now, taking in his nut brown, weather-beaten face, his expressionless liquid brown eyes, his hands still clasped, held at his waist. Chtapodi was the name he had given Vasiliou. The octopus. His tentacles were everywhere.
“There is more, Nonos,” Costa said.
“Yes.”
“Irina Tabak was Chechen. The police in Moscow think there is a connection to Caucasus Emirate.”
“Mr. Umarov.”
“Yes.”
“You must thank your friends at Eleni’s for me, Costa. In the usual way.”
“I will, Nonos…Nonos?”
“Yes.”
”We have company. A yacht in the bay.”
“Someone new?”
“Yes.”
“Probably rich Americans. But give me some pictures.”
“Yes, Nonos.”
Chris eyed Costa, remembering when they first met, in a police station in Athens in 2005. Who had saved whose life that night, exactly?
“Costa, you are my brother,” he said, finally. “I am not your godfather.” One more try.
“My life is yours, adelfos.”
“I may need divers.”
“How soon?”
“Tonight.”
“Ochi problima.”
“Where is Tess?”
“Sunbathing, I believe, with her new friend.”
“The waiter?”
“Yes.”
“Send someone to ask her to come up.”
“Yes, Nonos.”
As Costa turned to leave, there was a knock at the door.
“Antikleidi,” a woman’s voice said.
“Come in Christina.”
Chris’s housekeeper, dark and handsome at age sixty, her jet-black hair streaked with gray at the temples, entered and quietly shut the door behind her. She had a cell phone in her hand. Chris studied her face as she silently handed him the phone. Nothing, he thought, good. On the phone’s front screen was a telephone number in Cyrillic. The phone he was holding was Christina’s, one he knew she used for everyday calls to the local markets, family and friends. Chris touched the speaker button and laid the phone on his desk. “Yes,” he said.
“Mr. Massi?”
“Yes.”
“Your daughter has paid us a visit.”
Chris did not reply.
“If you step to one of your front rooms, you will be able see her on deck. You can’t miss my yacht in the harbor. Frie Markit, it’s called. You will need your binoculars.”
“Who are you?” Chris said. He had not risen or moved anything except his full southern Italian lips as he spoke.
“I am a businessman. A Russian businessman.”
“What do you want?”
“I would like to discuss a matter of international import with you. I am authorized to speak for the Kremlin in this matter. They have asked me for a favor.”
Costa had stepped to a nearby cabinet, extracted a pair of Zeiss binoculars and left the room. Across the hall was a guest bedroom with a view of Panoramos Bay and its small, sheltered harbor. Through the open doors Chris watched as Costa raised the binoculars to his eyes, lowered them, and then turned to Chris and nodded.
“Let my daughter go, and we’ll talk.”
“Mr. Massi, your daughter is here of her own free will. It is just a fortunate coincidence that she paid us a visit. If you are watching you will see we are lowering the launch.”
Costa put the binoculars to his eyes again, watched in complete stillness for thirty seconds, and then turned and again nodded to Chris.
“What’s your name?”
“I am Marko Dravic.”
“Mr. Dravic.”
“Yes?”
“Come to my house for dinner tonight. We’ll talk. Eight o’clock.”
“Excellent. I will be there.”
Chris pushed the red end bar on the phone.
“Do you still want the divers?” Costa asked. He was back in the study.
Christina was standing by the door. She had said nothing, but her eyes were burning. Tess had been coming to Skopelos twice a year since Chris bought the house and the restaurant on the beach below five years ago. “You are giving him dinner?” she blurted out now, before Chris could answer Costa’s question.
“Yes, Christina,” Chris replied, smiling, “and a good one, please.” Then turning to Costa, he said, “Yes, Costa. Just one, tonight. Also, Costa, get me pictures of the launch when it drops Tess off at the dock.”
17.
Jackson, New Jersey, August 25, 2012, 2:00 a.m.
Matt, covered by a sheen of sweat from hairline to toes, lay on his back on the faux leather couch in Wall Storage’s office/waiting room, his hands clasped behind his head, looking up at the ceiling fan turning slowly above him. The two sheets he had used as bedding lay in a damp, sticky mass at his feet. He reached for the wet washcloth that Anna had given him in a bowl of ice and wiped the sweat from his neck and arms and chest. He did it slowly, saving his face for last. The ice cubes had melted, but the fan, though now working, was old and slow, and the tepid water against his hot skin was his only defense against the heat and humidity that had been pressing down on the Jersey shore for over a week, turning Anna’s waiting room into a small, breathless cave. That and his youth and his memory of sleeping in the hold of the Scorpion as it trudged through similar nights on a windless Mediterranean. At least there was no smell of sour crude or engine oil to contend with here.
Earlier, having dinner on the concrete patio behind her living quarters, he and Anna had watched a full moon rise in a clear night sky. The last thing he saw before falling asleep were the stripes the Venetian blinds on the window behind him made on the far wall. Now they were gone and the room was full dark. Outside he could hear the wind whipping through the pine forest that surrounded Anna’s small complex of buildings. A storm, he thought, to break this crazy weather.
On the floor under the couch was the Glock his new friend Max French had given him. Sitting up, he reached for the gun, checked that the safety was on, then slipped into his sandals. His black T-shirt, with Isola Di Giglio emblazoned in white script across the front, was on the coffee table next to him, but he left it there. It was still very hot and humid in the room. In cargo shorts and sandals, the Glock tucked into his belt, he padded to the front door to check that it was locked, then headed down the narrow hallway that lead to the rear door. He slid the bolt lock open and went into the concrete-floored room that contained Wall Storage’s small lockers, in one of which, number 114, was Joseph Massi, Sr.’s two million in cash. The door that went to the small parking area in back was also locked. Bolted tight.
“They want the two million, but they also want you, Matt,” Max French had said.
&nbs
p; “Why?”
“To trade. That’s my guess. They want something from your father.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the diamonds?”
“They don’t have to sell you the diamonds if they can just take the two million.”
“Who are they?”
“We’re not sure.”
This conversation had taken place while Matt and Max were standing on the edge of an oily pond in the New Jersey Meadowlands surrounded by rushes and reeds that grew over their heads. At the bottom of this pond were the bodies of the two ski-masked men, weighted down with cinder blocks they had found strewn around the nearby mudflats, now bone dry after twenty days of ninety-degree weather and no rain. Remembering that scene, Matt said to himself, as he had many times in the last few days: Grandpa Joe, what were you thinking?
Matt did not have many memories of his paternal grandfather—known to a very small group of people as Joe Black Massi, the Mafia assassin—but the ones he had were vivid. The way the old man looked at him sometimes, as if he wanted to tell him a million things, but could say nothing, nothing that would make a difference. That look of sadness and love and something else, something that Matt was just now beginning to understand: you will be tested, Joe Black was silently saying, and I will not be there to help.
When he got back to the office Anna was standing in the middle of the waiting area in a scooped-neck T-shirt that reached to her thighs, pointing her Baby Glock at his head.
“It’s me,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Kurva.”
“What?”
“Fuck.”
Outside, thunder cracked and rain started falling heavily. Some of it began splashing through the window behind the sofa, which was wide open. Anna ran to it and, kneeling on the couch, pulled it down, accentuating, as she did, a rounded, plump rear end beneath the light cotton of her shirt. She was still holding the Glock. When she turned back to face Matt, she put the gun on the coffee table, next to the People magazines. Matt put his Glock there as well. They stood for a moment, in the middle of the dark, overheated room, and looked at the two guns and then each other and listened to the rain coming down in sheets and the thunder now rolling in the distance. Matt, whose eyes had adjusted to the dark, could see the outline of Anna’s breasts, the nipples pointing at him like the Glock had been a moment ago. His heart beating rapidly, he felt himself getting hard, uncontrollably, like when he was thirteen, and then being hard, very hard, his penis and heart throbbing with lives independent of his.
With his right foot, Matt slid the flimsy coffee table aside and stepped to Anna. When he reached her, he cupped her face in his hands and looked at her. Her mouth was shut tight, but she did not pull away. Who was she? Who was the person hiding behind that bad eye, that dark green thing adrift on its own that looked through him and away from him at the same time? His heart aching, and his loins, he kissed her, gently at first, feathering her lips apart with his tongue, then hungrily, pulling her against him, feeling with a shock her breasts through her thin shirt against his bare chest, the bulge of her belly against his penis. Still kissing her, feeding on her lips and teeth and tongue, he pressed her back toward the couch. She pulled away, startling him, but it was only to slip out of her shirt and panties, a second’s work. On the couch she lay under him, her long legs wrapped around his back, as he entered her, shocked again at the sudden rush of pleasure as his mind and body—his entire being—became his penis for the five slow minutes it took him to climax. She moaned at the end too and, looking at her, he saw her eyes rolling upward, their spacing normal for an instant, and then the lids fall. He thought for a second she had fallen asleep, or even passed out, but then the lids, which he noticed for the first time were thickly lashed and blonde, lifted.
“Teo,” Anna said, smiling languidly. “You are not gay like your gay uncle.” For an answer, Matt laid his face between Anna’s breasts and, breathing in her scent, listened to her heartbeat. “Christ,” he whispered, “that was unbelievable.”
Then, cocking his head slightly, Matt rose up and put his right index finger against Anna’s lips, perpendicular to them. He lifted himself off of her and reached for his shorts on the floor near his feet. “Get dressed,” he whispered, as he was stepping into them. “Take your gun. Go behind the counter.”
“What…?”
“Do it.”
While Anna was putting on her panties and T-shirt, Matt slid the safety off on his Glock, stepped over to the hallway that lead to the rear door, and listened. Nothing. What had he heard? A thump? A second hallway ran perpendicular to the back hallway, this one leading to Anna’s bedroom, the first door on the left, and the kids’s bedroom beyond that. Matt, walking slowly, could see that Anna’s door was open. The Glock to his right ear, he looked in. Nothing. Then he heard another sound and saw the knob on the kids’s door turning. He stepped over to the wall beside it and watched. The last time he had been in a situation like this he had swung a vodka bottle at Max French, who had deflected it with a sudden movement of his left arm, somehow managing to flip Matt to the floor and sit on him at the same time.
The kid’s bedroom door swung in and Matt, still pressed to the wall, could sense that someone was standing there in the dark, looking into the hallway. Without thinking, he stepped in front of the person and lunged at his chest, using his head as a battering ram, driving the intruder deep into the room and crashing him against the far wall. They both went down, but Matt jumped quickly to his feet, and pointed the Glock at his adversary’s chest. “Stay there,” he said. But the person either didn’t see the gun or didn’t care, because the next thing Matt knew there was a sharp pain in his right knee, and the intruder was on his feet, reaching behind his back for something. Matt stepped back and fired a round into his attacker’s right leg, the one that had delivered the savage, lightning-quick kick to his knee. The intruder went down on his side, grabbing his leg. His gun had fallen to the floor with a thud. Matt picked it up and then, using his good leg, kicked him over onto his back. It wasn’t a man. It was Natalya, her hair in a ponytail. Matt put the Glock to her forehead. “Stay there,” he said. “Don’t move.”
He began to search her for more weapons, but did not get far when another person came jumping through the open bedroom window. Max French.
“Where were you?” Matt said.
“Sal fell off the roof. He broke his leg. He’s with Nico.”
“Who’s this, Teo?” said Anna Cavanagh. She was standing in the doorway, pointing her Baby Glock at Max.
“He’s a friend,” Matt answered. “Can you get some rope?”
“She doesn’t need rope,” Anna said. “She needs a hospital.” She had entered the room and was looking down at Natalya, whose eyes were wide open with hatred in the middle of a face now white, completely drained of color. “Fuck you,” she mouthed to Anna.
“She’s not going to a hospital,” Max French said. “But a rope is a good idea. We’ll tourniquet her leg. We don’t want her to die just yet.”
18.
Skopelos, August 25, 2012, 9:00 a.m.
“Did you sleep okay?”
“Yes. Are you angry?”
“Of course not.”
“Who is he?”
“Who? Your waiter, or Dravic?”
“Well… both.”
Chris and Tess were sitting on the north terrace, sipping coffee. A silver serving tray holding a loaf of the crusty bread Christina called psomi kristina, with a painted china plate of fresh butter next to it, rested on a small wrought iron table between them. From here they could see the whitewashed houses of the village arrayed in crooked rows on the hill that flanked Panoramos Bay, which gleamed a hot blue-green under the Aegean’s relentless morning sun.
“Tell me what happened?”
“I thought you’d never ask
.”
Chris smiled. Last night at dinner he had acted as if all was normal. Poised, very beautiful after two days in the sun, Tess, taking his cue, had lent a deft hand with the small talk over which the three courses of Christina’s rich, deceptively simple meal were consumed. She had excused herself after the baklava, leaving him and Dravic to take their coffee and talk in the large, formal sitting room at the front of the house. Just another day in paradise.
“You handled yourself well,” he said.
“What’s going on, Dad?”
“What happened out there?”
“Patriki said he knew the chef on the new yacht in the harbor,” Tess replied. “The owner was supposed to be away. He said his friend invited us for a drink and snack.”
“How did you get there?”
“Patriki had his cousin’s skiff. It took five minutes.”
“What happened when you got there?”
“The owner was on board. Mr. Dravic. The chef was embarrassed. He had forgotten that he invited us.”
“Did you believe him?”
“At the time I did.”
“Then what?”
“Dravic was gracious. We sat on the bow deck and had lemonade and petit fours.”
“Did you know he called me?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“He sent me ashore in the launch.”
“And Patriki?”
“He said he wanted to stay and talk to his friend.”
“He won’t be back.”
Chris watched his beloved Tess lower her eyes as he said this, and then raise them and look out over the village to the bay. The Frie Markit was gone.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
Chris Massi looked at his daughter, his first-born. At twenty-four, though he knew she would disagree and call herself a woman, she was still a girl. Beautiful, intelligent and proud, but still a girl. He did not want that to change any sooner than necessary, but the time had come.