by James Lepore
“Yes, to whom?”
In Fleming’s pocket was a diamond ring in a small satin and velvet box. He was going to ask Billie to marry him tonight, end his profligacy for good.
“To Billie Shroeder.”
“Thank goodness,” said White. “Washington thought it might be you.”
“Me. You mean . . .”
“We told them to bugger off.”
“Here,” White said. He took a brown envelope from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to Fleming.
“What is it?”
“Telegraph receipts, two of them.”
“Telegraph receipts?”
“We sent someone to Deggendorf. The telegraph office is in a chemist’s shop. You know the Germans, how they multi-task. ‘Poor us, you raped us at Versailles, we have to make a penny go a long way.’ They’re also efficient to a fault, never throw away a receipt. Your Miss Shroeder sent two telegrams while you were in town, both to Heydrich.”
“I . . .”
“Yes, I know, you’re not sure what to do. Not to worry, we’ll take care of it. Take your time.”
Ian Fleming would never again be at a loss for words, but at this moment he was as silent as death, unable to formulate a coherent thought let alone a sentence.
“Did you ever tell her she was a Jew?” White asked.
Fleming remained silent.
“We’ll take care of that as well.”
* * *
Fleming stood for a long moment outside the door to his room, recalling, with an odd equanimity, as if they really had nothing to do with him, the reports and telegram copies that Ellie White had given him before taking his leave. Coming out of the lift he had passed two waiters he had never seen before, in waist jackets and bow ties, standing idly next to food service carts. Key in hand, he looked over and saw that they were still there. One nodded to him. Finally, he inserted the key and entered the room, his hand on the 20 caliber Beretta he carried with him at all times when not working, the safety off. Billie was on her back on the bed, dead, in her silk robe, one long, beautiful leg exposed, her eyes open. Papers and a brown envelope were scattered on the floor. He picked them up and glanced at them. A birth certificate, copies of the same telegrams he had just read and then burned in the lavatory downstairs, a list of eight people who worked at a textile company in Bremen.
He packed his things carefully, then looked at himself in the room’s tall mirror. He had dressed, not formally, but what he considered sparsely, for the occasion of his engagement, his simple, no frills suit a deep charcoal, nearly black, his thin tie the same color, his shirt a snowy white, his cap-toed shoes black and highly polished. Appropriate, he thought, without irony. At the bed he reached over to close Billie’s eyes, but paused first to look into them, now flat and lifeless as glass. “Old Ellie thought he was doing me a favor, Billie,” he said, “but he wasn’t. I wish he had left you to me.” He decided to leave her eyes open. He had read somewhere that the soul had no peace until the dead body’s eyes were closed.
In the hall outside the room were the two waiters he had never seen before. They nodded to him.
“A favor,” said Fleming.
“If we can,” said one.
“Leave her eyes open.”
“That we can do.”
Then Fleming stepped between them and headed to the lift.
About the Authors
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 five other novels, A World I Never Made, Blood of My Brother, Sons and Princes, Gods and Fathers, and The Fifth Man, as well as a collection of three short stories, Anyone Can Die. You can visit him at his website, www.JamesLeporeFiction.com.
Carlos Davis writes and produces films, among them the Emmy nominated Rascals and Robbers with David Taylor and the cult favorite Drop Dead Fred with Tony Fingleton. He lives in New York City.
Also by James LePore
New York Times bestselling author William Landay said, “Jim LePore is a great discovery.” Blogcritics called his first novel, A World I Never Made, “An outstanding first novel, and a wonderful thriller.” LePore’s brilliance is his ability to create complex, relatable characters and place them in tense situations where their very humanity comes into question. The result is stirring fiction that hits you in the gut and the heart at the same time. Here are some samples from each of this other books:
A World I Never Made
Pat Nolan, an American man, is summoned to Paris to claim the body of his estranged daughter Megan, who has committed suicide. The body, however, is not Megan’s and it becomes instantly clear to Pat that Megan staged this, that she is in serious trouble, and that she is calling to him for help. This sends Pat on an odyssey with Catherine Laurence, a beautiful but tormented Paris detective, that stretches across France and into the Czech Republic and that makes him the target of both the French police and a band of international terrorists.
Juxtaposed against this story is Megan’s story. A freelance journalist, Megan is in Morocco to do research when she meets Abdel Lahani, a Saudi businessman. They begin a torrid affair, a game Megan has played often and well in her adult life. But what she discovers about Lahani puts her in the center of a different kind of game, one with rules she can barely comprehend, and one that puts the lives of many—maybe even millions—at risk.
A World I Never Made is an atmospheric novel of suspense with brilliantly drawn characters and back-stories as compelling as the plot itself—a novel that resonates deeply and leaves its traces long after you turn the final page.
* * *
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 rid
e 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
When Jay Cassio’s best friend is murdered in a job clearly done by professionals, the walls that he has built to protect himself from the world of others begin to shatter. Dan Del Colliano had been his confidante and protector since the men were children on the savage streets of Newark, New Jersey. When Dan supports and revives Jay after Jay’s parents die in a plane crash, their bond deepens to something beyond brotherhood, beyond blood. Now Jay, a successful lawyer, must find out why Dan died and find a way to seek justice for his murder.
Isabel Perez has lived a life both tainted and charmed since she was a teenager in Mexico. She holds powerful sway over men and has even more powerful alliances with people no one should ever try to cross. She desperately wants her freedom from the chains these people have placed on her. When Jay catapults into her world, their connection is electric, their alliance is lethal, and their future is anything but certain.
Once again, James LePore has given us a novel of passions, intense moral complexities, and irresistible thrills. Filled with characters you will embrace and characters you will fear, Blood of My Brother is a story about a quest for revenge and redemption you won’t soon forget.
* * *
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.”
“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
Chris Massi has been running from his world his entire life. The son of a Mafia assassin and the former son-in-law of a mob kingpin, Massi has tried to stay on the right side of the law, building a prestigious career as an attorney, and insulating his children as much as possible. But now a series of tragedies have left him without a law license and without several of his loved ones. And at the same time, his teenaged son is beginning to gravitate toward the gangster world Chris has tried so hard to protect h
im from.
Michele Mathias has been running away from her life for more than a decade. Once a promising young woman with a future, she’s now a drug addicted street player living with the knowledge that her daughter – the only bright thing in her life – was taken away from her. When her roommate is murdered in a mob-related hit, her life intersects with Chris’s life – and their worlds change forever.
For Chris, a showdown is coming. The only way for him to save his son and regain his future is to face – and maybe even embrace – the demon he’s always avoided. For Michele, her last chance at redemption has arrived. How their journeys collide with the dark New York underworld is the stuff of the kind of suspenseful, passionate drama we’ve come to expect from James LePore.
* * *
Chris made his way around the restaurant thanking people, kissing second and third cousins he hadn’t seen in years and making small talk, some of it, as with the now dispersed faction from Carmine Street, enjoyable for the honest nostalgia it added to his otherwise confused mix of feelings. Ending up in the courtyard, he saw that Matt had joined Joseph and Rocco. He watched intently for a moment as they chatted under the far right corner of the arbor, the dappled shade cast by the grape vines overhead fluttering across their faces. Matt, his black hair slicked back, his suit hanging loosely on his reed-like body, nearly a head taller than Rocco, was making his usual transparent attempt at the studied casualness of the confident tough guy, a pose that grated on Chris even though he had seen it a dozen times in the last forty-eight hours.
Then he spotted Teresa alone at a table in the far left corner, and walked over to join her.
“So,” he said when he was seated, “have you thought about it?”
“It’s not something I can decide in one night, Chris.”