Gods and Fathers

by Lepore, James

Last night in bed, she had told him about her conversation with Antonio.

  He cried, Matt. He said it wasn’t right that my life was so hard. Only God can judge, he said. He said he knew that’s why I went to church all the time, to ask God for something. He said he would make my life better. He promised he would.

  He’s a good kid, Matt had said, holding Jade close, hoping that her porn movies, a teenaged lapse of judgment that she saw as her big sin, were behind her at last. We punish ourselves, Matteo used to say. We make the stick from hard wood and pick it up and use it until God takes it from our hand.

  In his bedroom office, Matt made a fire, then sat and turned to the two weeks’ worth of mail that he had pulled from his mailbox last night. He sorted it, threw away the junk stuff, then opened the bills, putting them aside for payment. From here, through the window at his desk alcove, he could see the boys playing. Michael was no match for Antonio, but he didn’t seem to understand that. He kept crouching, hustling, dogging the taller and much more graceful and naturally athletic teenager, making him work for every basket. When he had the ball, Michael was equally blind to his own lack of talent. Using his elbows like pistons he somehow managed to score twice while Matt was watching, to Antonio’s seven buckets. Not bad for a kid with soccer legs and no jumping ability. Antonio, for his part, was not taking Michael lightly. He scowled as much as he smiled at his much smaller opponent’s tenacity. I think they like each other.

  After the bills, there was only one item left, a padded brown envelope with Debra’s Park Avenue return address in the upper left corner. Debra, what are you sending me? In the sixteen years they had been divorced she had never sent him so much as a note, not even a sarcastic one. Inside were two DVDs in white, unlabeled sleeves, and a note, in Debra’s hand, on beautiful cream-colored paper with her initials embossed in flowing script on top. He picked up the envelope he had just torn open to look at the postmark. March 3rd, the day she killed herself. Outside, the thumping continued. He could hear Antonio laugh and say something to Michael.

  He read the note first:

  Matt,

  Please tell Michael not to plead guilty to anything. The enclosed videos prove his innocence. There is another video that may come out after I’m gone. So be it. You don’t owe me anything, not after I turned Michael against you, but I’m asking you, for his sake, to defend me. What I did was very bad, but I would have stopped Adnan and Ali. I was planning to. Blame it on my drugs. They made me more paranoid, not less, more insecure, not less. I was hallucinating, playing out a secret wish that I knew I could stop at any moment. Mustafa tricked me, and used Adnan and Ali for his own purposes. When I told him to put a stop to it, he told me they could not be reached. He said they had run away with the money. And then it happened, and I entered hell.

  One more thing, tell Michael about the day we met, the person I used to be, that we loved each other once. And that I will always love him.

  Debra

  March 3, 2009

  He slipped the first DVD into the slot on the TV on the shelf to the right of his desk and pushed the play button. After some static and a gray screen, Adnan and Ali appeared, knocking on the door to an apartment with the number 1102 on it. The date and time were running digitally along the bottom left. January 30, 2009, 1:18 PM, 1:19 PM… Yasmine Hayek let them in, and the short video came to an abrupt end. You must have stolen this from Mustafa, Matt said out loud, that took some heart.

  He ejected the first DVD, inserted the second one and pushed the play button again, expecting a continuation of the first tape, perhaps Adnan and Ali coming out of Yasmine’s apartment. Again the static and again the gray screen, but now there was Debra, sitting at a desk in an office somewhere, a small, feminine study. Park Avenue, most likely. Adnan and Ali were standing across from her. And there was sound.

  Sit, Debra said. She was impeccably dressed, as usual. Her long dark hair framed her handsome face, as usual. But something about her was not as usual, something that chilled Matt’s heart as he sat and watched.

  As you wish, Mrs. The two young killers sat on chairs with flower print cushions facing his ex-wife.

  Have you considered my offer?

  Yes.

  Are you willing to do this for me?

  Yes.

  Adnan, the smart one, was doing the talking.

  Here, Debra said. There’s ten thousand dollars there. She handed a thick brown envelope across the desk. Adnan took it.

  Do you know where she lives, the Excelsior, apartment 1102?

  Yes, we know.

  Do you have your tickets?

  Yes.

  I do not wish to see you again, ever.

  As you wish, Mrs.

  The date and time ran across the bottom of this DVD as well, January 25, 2009, 5:02 PM. 5:03PM…

  Matt ejected the DVD and brought it with him to the window at his desk. The thumping had stopped. Michael and Antonio were sitting on the ground, back to back, against the steel post that held the backboard. Michael’s face was flushed and he was laughing. Antonio was smiling and shaking his head. Jade was pulling into the driveway. The boys got up and began to help her unload the groceries.

  Matt took the second DVD and the note and brought them over to the fireplace, where the fire was crackling, giving off a warmth he did not feel. Debra, he said, pressing the thumb and index finger of his free hand to his eyes, seeing his ex-wife’s face, young and beautiful, on the day they met in 1987, and then on the day she killed herself, when he told her about Mustafa’s secret taping; death, the idea of suicide, in her eyes. Debra.

  Then he threw the note and the DVD into the fire, and watched them ignite, melt and disappear.

  About the Author

  James LePore is an attorney who has practiced law for more than two decades. He is also an accomplished photographer. He lives in South Salem, NY with his wife, artist Karen Chandler. He is the author of three other novels, A World I Never Made, Blood of My Brother, and Sons and Princes, as well as a collection of three short stories, Anyone Can Die. You can visit him at his website, www.jamesleporefiction.com.

  Other Books by James LePore

  James LePore has been called “a great discovery” by New York Times-bestselling author William Landay. Now that you’ve discovered LePore yourself, here are some samples of his other novels, complete with commentary from the author himself:

  A World I Never Made

  Though the first novel published, A World I Never Made is not the first I wrote. It is the third. The first was an attempt, in the 1980’s, to deal, via a piece of fiction, with the loss of a loved one. It had a great title, That Archangels May Come In, taken form an Emerson essay, but nothing else about it was any good. In late 1999 I decided to quit my day job to write and take pictures full time. In the next six or seven years I produced three novels and a great many images. The third novel was World. I did not know it at the time, but in those years I was learning, image by image, sentence by sentence, a simple, but incredibly valuable lesson. It is this: that though the eye and the voice are the instruments of expression that God gave us, it is the heart that sees and speaks. This lesson was confirmed for me with the publication of World. Many, many readers, in the more than 700 reviews the novel has received online, spoke of their connection to the father and daughter whose broken relationship, and the journey that re-unites them, are at the core of the book. I had written from the heart and touched other hearts. I had made a beginning.

  Pat arrived at his hotel at a few minutes before noon, which gave him just enough time to put the roses into a vase with water and wash his face and hands before going down to the lobby to meet Officer Laurence. When he unwrapped the roses, a prayer card of some kind fell out; he put this in his pocket without thinking much about it. He told the desk clerk that he was expecting an Officer Laurence of the Paris police and pointed to a
stuffed chair in a corner where he would be waiting for her. There he sat and began to ponder his strange meeting with the flower girl, but within seconds, or so it seemed, he was interrupted by a tall angular woman in her mid-thirties dressed in a chic dark blue suit over a white silk blouse. Her nose was on the large side and slightly bumpy, and would have dominated her face except that it was nicely in proportion to her high, wide cheekbones and full-lipped broad mouth. The eyes in this face, forthright eyes that met his squarely, were an arresting shade of gray-green that Pat had never seen before. Her gold bracelets jangled as she extended her hand to him and introduced herself with a half smile and a nod of her head.

  “Do you speak French, Monsieur Nolan?”

  “Un peu.”

  “You prefer English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mais oui. Of course. You seem surprised, Monsieur. I am not dressed to chase criminals today.”

  “I was expecting someone in a uniform. Inspector LeGrand said you were an officer.”

  “I am an officer of the judiciary police. In America I would be a detective.”

  Pat was surprised at Laurence’s appearance, but it wasn’t at the way she was dressed. Nor was it solely how lovely she was, although she was quite lovely to look at. It was, he realized, how interesting the look in her beautiful eyes was. There was no French arrogance in them, but its opposite, something akin to humility or a complicated, frustrating sadness not unlike his own. This look, whether imagined or real, and the thought it sparked in his overworked mind, took Pat for a moment—a very brief moment—out of himself, a process that on some wider level he observed with gratitude.

  “Shall we go?” Laurence said softly, bringing him swiftly but gently back to the grim task at hand.

  The ride to the hospital in Laurence’s black Peugeot station wagon was short and quiet. Once there, Laurence spoke rapidly in French to a desk clerk, then shepherded Pat into an elevator which took them to the basement.

  “Wait,” she said when they exited the elevator; then, turning, she walked quickly down a long corridor, her high heels clicking on the tiled floor. She disappeared behind double swinging doors, reemerging a moment later and gesturing to Pat to come. It was a long walk for Pat, longer even than the one he had taken twenty-nine years ago to confirm for himself that his wife of eight months was dead. Laurence held open one of the swinging doors for him and he entered a squarish, harshly lit room with a wall of stainless steel body lockers at one end and an autopsy station at the other, where a lab technician in a white smock stood next to a gurney. Pat took this scene in for a moment and then felt officer Laurence’s hand on his left forearm. At the gurney, Laurence nodded to the technician, who pulled down gently on the pale green sheet. Pat’s eyes went first to the shaved head, then to the crude sutures at the right temple, and then finally to the face, white and stony in death these last four days. It was not Megan. It was a woman generally of Megan’s age and size and coloring, but it was not her.

  “This is your daughter, Monsieur Nolan?”

  Pat’s mind had stopped working for a second, but it started again when he heard officer Laurence’s voice. Other voices then filled his head.

  My birthday’s coming up. You can bring me a present.

  A quick cremation.

  Have faith, Monsieur. You will be led to her.

  Megan was alive but wanted the world to think she was dead. The world except for Pat and the flower girl on the Street of Flowers. “Yes,”he answered, nodding, and at the same time reaching out and placing his right hand over the body’s left hand. He pressed through the sheet to feel for the heavy silver ring that he had bought for Lorrie on their honeymoon and then given to Megan when she turned sixteen. To the best of his knowledge, she had not taken it off since. He confirmed its absence, then stepped away from the gurney, keeping his eyes on the unknown woman who had visited Megan on December 30 and killed herself in furtherance of what dark and strange conspiracy—a conspiracy he had now joined—Pat could not fathom. Why, Megan? And where are you?

  “She has lost weight from her cancer,” said Laurence.

  “Yes.”

  The detective nodded to the technician, who pulled the sheet up and began wheeling the gurney toward the lockers.

  “Detective Laurence,” Pat said.

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to have my daughter cremated today if possible. Can you help me?”

  “Yes. Upstairs we will sign papers to release the body. We will call a crematorium from my cell phone.”

  “And her personal effects?”

  “I have them in my car. I will take you to her room if you like.”

  “Yes. I would.”

  “Perhaps you would like something to eat first, a drink?”

  Yes, I could use a drink, a long night of drinking, Pat thought, realizing, as Laurence stared intently at him that the stunned look on his face was not what she thought it was, sorry that he had had to lie to her.

  “No,” he said, thanking her with his eyes for the sympathy in hers. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Blood of My Brother

  Revenge: the action of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.

  Romans 12:19-21: Beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” Therefore, “if thine enemy is hungry, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou will heap coals of fire on his head.” Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

  Most of us know the hard truth behind Romans 12:19-21’s admonition to leave revenge to God, that is, that we will damage our own souls if we take it into our own hands. Yet we do it, have always done it, and, despite the consequences, which are usually bad, we will continue to do it. Why? What would justify revenge in the face of God’s clear warning to leave it to him? This is the question I asked myself as I began writing Blood of My Brother. The answer was not hard. Deep hurt, deep injustice, are not easy to ignore, let alone repay in kindness. For certain people, under certain circumstances, revenge is as necessary to survival as breathing. Jay Cassio, an orphan whose only friend is brutally murdered, and Isabel Perez, who was enslaved by very evil men when only a child, are two such people. Blood of My Brother, a novel of revenge writ large, is their story.

  9:00AM

  December 24, 2004

  Puerto Angel

  Jay stood at the stone wall, looking down at the bay and the two small beaches that straddled the mouth of the Arroyo River. Local children were playing on one of them, while nearby a group of men were hauling in a net by a long rope that was the thickness of a man’s arm. The storm had thrashed itself out in the night, and in doing so washed away the torpid heat that had been pressing down on Mexico’s southeastern Pacific coast for the last week. The morning sun brought with it the promise of a hot but brilliantly clear day.

  Up early, Jay had spent an hour drinking coffee and reading the last of Bryce Powers’s paperwork, which contained, among other things, notes of all of the bribes paid to de Leon in the seventies, and which meticulously tracked all of the drug cash that had passed through his company’s accounts over the past ten years. In addition, Powers had somehow managed to acquire copies of the contracts between Herman and Rafael and the various overseas banks, which named them, along with Lazaro Santaria, as the owners of the accounts where much of the cash ended up. If he had the contents of Bryce’s old leather suitcase, Chris Markey would not need Isabel to put Herman, Rafael, and Lazaro in jail for many years.

  There was another contract in the Banque de Geneve folder, an original that Jay had pulled out and put in his knapsack. Now, hearing the cottage’s back door open, he turned and saw Isabel coming out, carrying a tray of buttered bread and another pot of coffee.

  “Buenos días,” she said, as she set the tray on the wall.

  “Buenos días. You look beautiful.�
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  “Thank you.”

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, the Valium worked. And you?”

  “Yes, I was up early, but I slept.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “An hour or so.”

  “Reading?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will Rafael go to jail?”

  “Yes. And Herman and Lazaro.”

  Isabel looked down at the sea, shimmering in the morning sunlight, then across at Jay. “I am sorry about last night,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “It is an awful thing to know.” She poured coffee for both of them, but they did not pick up their cups. They were sitting on the stone wall, the breakfast tray between them. Jay reached across and took her hand.

  “What is the name ‘Jay’?” Isabel asked. “Is that your proper name?”

  “Do you know the story of the golden fleece?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother foresaw great things for me.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Many times.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Yes, I miss her, and my father. They spoiled me.” But expected me to grow into a man, thought Jay. It’s a good thing they’re not around to see what I’ve made of my life.

  Sons and Princes

  The Mafia myth in American culture first coalesced in 1972 around the movie The Godfather, a portrayal that was on the whole more positive than negative, Don Corleone as Robin Hood you might say. Things got darker in The Godfather II in 1974, darker still with the release of Goodfellas in 1990, and darkest of all in the television series The Sopranos, debuting in 1999. Despite all this utter blackness—the insane violence, the degradation of women, the venality and corruption of public officials—the myth continues to fascinate us. In the Mafia world as we see it—perhaps I should say as I see it—the stakes and the means of achieving them are medieval in nature. Kings, queens, princes, bastard heirs, all battle for power, wealth and turf, the very stuff that land is made of, a piece of the earth itself. Kings and princes, some good, some evil, some on a journey to one or the other, all fighting for realms, will always fascinate us.