by James Lepore
“Did you make the call, Costa?” he asked, standing next to his captain at the rail, watching the launch being lifted onto the deck.
“Yes.”
“Thank you. I will fly to Prague from Skiathos tonight.”
“I will make the arrangements. Are you going alone?”
“Matt will come with me. Tess will fly separately. Send two of your men with her, the ones watching her now. Put her in the Europa. They are not to leave her until I say so.”
Costa nodded. “How was Turkey?”
Not, how was the don? Or, how did your business go? How was Turkey? This was Costa’s one weakness, his hatred of the Turks. Christina hated them even more, if that were possible.
“I am glad to be back on Greek soil.”
Costa smiled, his white teeth brilliant against the blue-water tan of his face.
“And Marchenko?” he asked.
“Don Marchenko has made an idol of himself,” Chris replied. “It is the great sin of our age.”
“No one above God, no thing above God.”
“Yes.”
“Shall I continue to watch Mr. Dravic?”
Neither Costa nor Max French had been able to discover who Marko Dravic was. Frie Markit was registered in the Cayman Islands in the name of a Swiss corporation. There was no getting behind those curtains without Mr. White’s help, and Chris did not want that help.
“Tell me: when he goes to the Cathedral in Moscow, what does he do?”
“He is met by an old woman, who escorts him through a door behind the altar.”
“Where your people cannot follow.”
“Yes. It is perhaps a private chapel. Or meeting place.”
“Do you have pictures of the people who enter before him?”
“No, we followed him there.”
“Are there other entrances?”
“Several.”
“Who is the bishop there?”
“Bishop Josef Bukov.”
“Check him out.”
“I will. Shall I continue following Dravic?”
“No, it is not necessary. Have last night’s pictures arrived?”
“They came in while you were ashore.”
“Put the prints in my briefcase. I will look at them on the plane.”
25.
Skiathos, August 29, 2012, 8:00 p.m.
“Tell me what happened,” Chris said.
Matt had been waiting for this question for the past two days, unnerved by how long it took his father to ask it. They were seated on plush leather swivel chairs in the lounge area amidships of a corporate jet, a twin-engine Gulfstream, as it stood on the tarmac at the airport on the island of Skiathos. A cable news program was being broadcast on two high definition televisions mounted on the walls above them; the newsreader, a handsome middle-aged man, looked grim as he spoke of Greece’s financial crisis. There will be a delay, the captain had told them when they boarded, perhaps thirty minutes, nothing unusual. The hostess, in a simple black skirt and white blouse, with an onyx pin on it that said, Hellenic Waste Management, served them sparkling water and retreated through the door that led to the service area at the rear of the plane. The six passenger seats, also buttery-looking leather, were empty.
“The guy pulled a gun,” Matt said, thinking of the days when he was thirteen and thought that Mafia violence was cool. “He had already hit her with a bat. I saw the bruise. He was drunk, or high on something.”
“So it was self-defense? Him or you?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“What did he look like?”
“A mess, like he’d been up all night drinking, or drugging, probably both.”
“Describe him.”
“Six-three, two-thirty, cut, tattooed, long greasy hair.”
“How long?”
“Almost to his shoulders.”
“Where were the tattoos?”
“His forearms.”
“Of what?”
Matt stopped to think. “I can’t remember,” he said finally.
“What did he say?”
“He asked me who I was. Who the fuck are you? he said, when I told him. I want to see my kids.”
Chris nodded.
“Don’t ask me the color of his eyes, Dad,” Matt said, half smiling. “I don’t know.”
“And the woman? Anna.” Chris said. “Where is she now?”
“She’s here.”
“You brought her here?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“In town, in a hotel.”
“How old is she?”
“How old is she?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-two.”
“The kids, are they here too?”
“Yes.”
Matt watched his father absorb all this, his face unreadable.
“I was crazy about your mother when we first met.”
Matt said nothing. What could he say to that?
“Why did you bring her?” Chris asked. “Are you worried about their safety?”
“Yes. I was afraid friends of Nico would want revenge, or come after her looking for the money.”
“Max says she’s a Czech national. When did she come to the U.S.?”
“When she was eighteen.”
“She’s fluent in Czech, I take it. Anything else? Czech kids learned Russian in grammar school.”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s her story?”
“Her father worked in the underground against the Russians. He was arrested, tortured and killed when Anna was ten. Her mother had died earlier. She came to the U.S. on a work visa when she was eighteen, then married Cavanagh.”
“What was the father’s name?”
“The full name, I don’t know. Cervenka, I assume.”
“Have you checked out her story?”
“Dad…”
“I’ll do it.”
Chris picked his cell phone up from the coffee table between them and dialed a number. “Costa,” he said after a moment or two. “Where are you?” Chris listened for the time it took Costa to answer, then said, “Turn around. Matt will meet you in the harbor.” Then to Matt: “Take Costa and pick up Anna and the kids. Drop the kids off to Christina, bring Anna here. She’ll come with us.
“Why?”
“She speaks Czech, she knows the city. My bet is she speaks Russian too. She’ll blend in. I may need someone like that.”
“She’s a civilian. She’s completely innocent.”
Chris did not respond to this immediately. His face was set at an angle that prevented Matt from seeing his eyes. What’s he thinking? He never thinks just nothing. It’s always something.
“No one’s completely innocent, Matt,” Chris said finally, turning to face his son.
“You may be right,” Matt said, thinking of Anna, of how she would react to another abrupt move, knowing she would have no choice. Once Uncle Frank DiGiglio’s two farmers showed up and took Skip Cavanagh’s body away, while she watched, even offering them coffee, she had crossed the line into the parallel world where the Chris Massi’s, the Max French’s, the Frank DiGiglio’s—and now the Matt Massi’s—lived and worked, interacting with but never re-joining the world where normal people, civilians, lived their lives, with only sins of the flesh and spirit to haunt them, not murder or worse.
“What about the two wounds?” Chris Massi asked. “Uncle Frank said there were two wounds. Did you have to shoot him twice.”
“Yes, I did,” Matt replied without hesitation, thinking, I should have known he’d speak to Frank. And then a worse thought: he knows I’m lying. “I was nervous. I missed low with the first shot.”
“How did it feel?” Chris asked.<
br />
“I don’t know. Inevitable.”
26.
Prague, September 1, 2012, 2:00 p.m.
Of the women whose pictures he had fallen in love with, Tess Massi was the first Max French had spent any time with. Or even met for that matter. He had never been formally introduced to the beautiful redhead, Megan Nolan, nor could you call the five minutes he was in her presence before she was killed in an abandoned hunting lodge as having spent time with her. The same went for Jeanne-Claude Robiana, the woman who had slowly killed her husband with rat poison in Paris. A reporter then, he had covered her arrest and attended every minute of her trial, but there was all that distance between them. Now he found himself walking over the Charles Bridge on a beautiful late summer day with Tess Massi, feeling guilty about the photograph of her he kept in his jacket pocket, and shy to the point of psychosomatic-muteness, a term used by psychiatrists to describe the shell he went into after watching his stepfather kill his mother when he was thirteen.
“Max,” Tess said.
“Sorry, yes?”
“Are you with me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You were drifting.”
“No, I was assessing our situation.”
“What situation?”
“The pedestrians around us, the vendors, the guy on stilts with the striped pants and wig, the boat that just passed under the bridge.”
This was not a lie. Situational awareness was for Max a near automatic, near constant function of his brain and his senses. At the same time as he was remembering the term psychosomatic muteness, he was seeing and hearing the man on the sightseeing boat, in a blue vest and bowtie, microphone in hand, describing the sights of Prague to his passengers. The Charles Bridge with its historic Gothic Towers was built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Construction began in 1347 under the auspices of King Charles IV… he remembered hearing.
Tess, absorbing this, remained silent, which was fine with Max, but alas, not only was Tess beautiful, she was also normal in all respects, including her eagerness to talk to the man who would be watching over her until she left Prague. The mysterious Max French, she had said when they were introduced, at last. This did not bode well, and now here he was.
“Is that something I’ll learn how to do in Arizona?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“My father said you teach there.”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m sorry I forced you to do this.”
“You mean take a walk?”
“Yes.”
“You have to get out.”
“You could have sent one of the other guys.”
“No, I couldn’t.” If you get hurt or taken, I’m a dead man, so no, it has to be me who takes the two walks a day with you.
“Let’s start now,” Tess said.
“Start what?”
“My training.”
“Tess…can I call you Tess?”
A second of silence. Two seconds. The man on the stilts was a woman. She had breasts. He had given her a wide berth and seen their profile under her bright red shirt. She was behind them now, handing a balloon to a small child.
“Of course,” Tess said.
Silence. The bridge was fine.
“Max.”
“Yes?”
“Can we start now? I mean it.”
“The person on the stilts,” Max said. “Was it a man or a woman?”
“I don’t know. A man I assume.”
“Did you notice the wig?”
“How could I miss it?”
“What color?”
“Purple.”
“It was a woman. What would you do if she approached us?” Tess turned to look back at the stilt person, now some twenty yards away.
“I don’t know?”
“Move to the side. And if she reached into her pants pocket?”
Silence.
“Go low. Knock her off her stilts. Pull your weapon. Point it at her head from behind.”
“Max, are you serious?”
“Yes and no.”
“You sound like my father.”
I’m forty-five, Max thought, old enough to be your father. And of course your father…well, I work for him. As he thought this, Max could not stop himself from thinking about the sound of his name coming from Tess’s lips, of how her voice made such a stupid name sound…sound what? Normal, a nice name for a man to have. Fuck. Stop it, Max.
“That’s a compliment,” Max said.
“What, that you sound like my father?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about Arizona. I’m nervous about what to expect. Very nervous.”
“Everyone there will be nervous. Even your instructors.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you one overall concept. So that you won’t be killed, err on the side of killing.”
Silence.
“Do you know how to use a knife?”
“No, of course not.”
“Tomorrow, instead of taking a walk I’ll teach you the fundamentals.” The proximity will kill me, but I’ll do it.
“Good, thank you.”
“No problem.”
“Max?”
“Yes?”
“What happened? Why are you so shy?’
Max’s throat suddenly became very dry. He stopped walking. With some effort, he worked up some saliva and swallowed. He opened his mouth to talk, but nothing came out.
“Don’t answer,” Tess said, taking his arm and getting them walking again. “What kind of knife will we start with?”
27.
Prague, September 1, 2012, 6:00 p.m.
“Is this it?” Matt asked.
Anna did not answer. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail and was wearing no makeup but, standing there in the late-day sunlight, staring at the tiny house and barren front yard, the site of the event that changed her life in ways he could only imagine, she looked more starkly beautiful than ever. Matt had linked pain and wisdom before in his mind, but never pain and beauty. Until today.
“Yes,” she said, finally. “This is it.”
Matt knew enough to say nothing. Silence is never inaccurate was another one of his father’s admonitions. Nor embarrassing or stupid, he thought.
“What are you thinking?” Anna asked.
“Only of you.”
“Why are we here, Teo?”
“In Prague, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
“I do. It is fate that brought me here. I fled Prague as soon as I legally could. I wanted nothing to do with the Czechs, the people who allowed themselves to be enslaved, who allowed my father to be tortured and killed because he was fighting for their freedom. And now I am back. How strange.”
“It can’t be circumvented, or thwarted,” Matt said, “no matter how you try.”
“My fate.”
“Yours, mine, everyone’s, yes.”
“What is it? My fate.”
Matt shrugged. “My father speaks of inevitability all the time, Anna. He had me memorize Antigone when I was fifteen. ‘It will reveal itself,’ he used to say. Be ready.’”
“Your father wants my help.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps your father can help me.”
“How?”
“I would like to find Mr. Blond Man.”
“Anna…”
“I thought I saw him today, getting into a limousine near our hotel.”
Silence.
“I’m not crazy. He’s here, Matt. I can feel it.”
“What would you do if you found him?”
“I would kill him of course, with your help.”
&nb
sp; “Anna…”
“Many former Kumunists have blended back in, have gotten away with their murders and their tortures. They are alive and happy. My father is dead.”
“When did you get this idea?”
“On the plane.”
“Anna…”
“We have already killed one person who deserved to die, you and I,” Anna said. “And who deserves more to die than Mr. Blond Man? It is what your grandfather did, is it not? Joseph Massi, Sr?”
“How do you know about him?”
“It doesn’t matter, Teo. What matters is that his blood is in your veins, and my father’s blood is in mine.”
28.
Prague, September 1, 2012, 7:05 p.m.
Mr. Massi,
I will be in the lobby this evening at 7:00 p.m., sitting near the fountain. I will be wearing a yellow flowered print dress. I have the other half of an icon that you will recognize.
Valentina Petrov
This note was in an inside pocket of Chris Massi’s linen sport jacket as he sat across from Valentina Petrov in a plush chair in the sunken living room of his penthouse suite at Prague’s Europa Hotel. The wall nearest to them was floor-to-ceiling glass, the view twenty stories below to Wenceslas Square and the Charles Bridge in the distance postcard perfect. As the sun set, lights were twinkling on in a city that in Chris’s view matched Paris in its beauty and overmatched it, by far, in its heart.
“You are a cautious man,” Ms. Petrov said.
“I try to be,” Chris replied, acknowledging that the woman sitting across from him was referring to the fact that he had not met her in the lobby, but had sent two of the hotel’s security men to escort her to his apartment.
“What if I had refused?” she asked.
“They were told not to take no for an answer.”
“Someone may have noticed.”
“I own this hotel,” Chris replied. “People here see what I want them to see, no more.”