by James Lepore
“Look at him over there,” Chris said. “Who do you think he’s trying to emulate, the junkie or the Mafia thug?”
“Chris…”
The night before, Chris had joined Teresa on the funeral home’s wide, wrap-around porch, and, while she smoked, told her of the misgivings he had been having over their son’s recent behavior, much of it centered around his naive conception of the Mafia life and his perceived position within it. Worshiping the wrong heroes was bad enough, Chris had said, but Matt’s arrogance, the superior attitude he struck as the only grandson of the great Anthony DiGiglio, required immediate action, immediate intervention by both parents. His idea was for Matt, who was finishing eighth grade at a public school in North Caldwell, the bedroom community in Jersey where Teresa lived, to attend high school in Manhattan and live with Chris there starting in September.
Teresa had noticed the same behavior in the boy. He was disdainful of his sister, most of his “straight” classmates and even his Mafia-related cousins, children of lesser gods, as it were. But he remained by and large respectful to her, and relatively easy for her to handle, and so she had not drawn the same dire conclusions as Chris had. And, of course, the remedy he was proposing had aroused all of her instincts to, as a mother, keep her son under her wing, and shred anyone who tried to take him from her nest.
“I didn’t ask you to decide,” Chris said. “I asked you to think about it.”
“He’ll never agree.”
“We don’t need his permission.”
“He’s fourteen. He’s not a baby.”
“He’s a baby when you want him to be, and he’s grown up when you want him to be.”
“You want me to give my son up for no reason?”
Gods and Fathers
Matt DeMarco is an accomplished Manhattan attorney with more than his share of emotional baggage. His marriage ended disastrously, his ex-wife has pulled their son away from him, and her remarriage to a hugely successful Arab businessman has created complications for Matt on multiple levels. However, his life shifts from troubled to imperiled when two cops – men he’s known for a long time – come into his home and arrest his son as the prime suspect in the murder of the boy’s girlfriend.
Suddenly, the enmity between Matt and his only child is no longer relevant. Matt must do everything he can to clear his son, who he fully believes is innocent. Doing so will require him to quit his job and make enemies of former friends – and it will throw him up against forces he barely knew existed and can only begin to comprehend how to battle.
Gods and Fathers is at once a powerful mystery and a provocative international thriller, all of it presented with LePore’s signature fascinating characters placed in dire circumstances where every choice poses new and potentially fatal challenges.
* * *
“Why can’t you stay at your mother’s when they’re away?”
“I told you, Basil’s worried about security.”
Though this statement was challengeable on several levels, Matt let it pass. The marriage six years ago of Debra DeMarco, nee Rusillo, and Basil al-Hassan, a rich and handsome Syrian businessman, had marked the beginning of the end of Matt’s long and tortured fight for a place in his son’s heart. Armed with the ultimate weapon – her new husband’s money – Debra had made quick work of destroying the last vestiges of Matt’s hopes. A penthouse on Park Avenue, a beach house in Easthampton, a flat in Paris, a “cottage” in Bermuda, clothes and cars virtually on demand, Matt had no way of competing with all this, and no way of expressing his anger –until tonight.
“What about Mina?” Matt asked.
“What about her?”
“Why aren’t you seeing her?”
“She’s studying.”
“Studying?”
“Yes, studying. You keep repeating what I say. She’s a student. Students study.”
This statement was delivered dismissively, not sarcastically. You’re stupid, Dad. I’m tired of you. Why am I bothering with you? are what Matt heard, and it occurred to him, with a clarity that shocked him after all these muddled and painful years of effort and rejection, effort and rejection, ad nauseum, that he could not hurt Michael, that his own son was indifferent to him, and this was a blow, and strangely a release.
“Well, your friends are assholes, and you are too, Michael. You’re an arrogant, shallow asshole. Where you came from, I don’t know. But not from me.”
“That could be. Maybe Mom had an affair – like you did – and I’m not your son. Do I care? No, I don’t. Can I go upstairs now? I’ll leave in the morning.”
In the kitchen, Matt poured himself another scotch. He took the pizza out of the refrigerator and sat down to eat it, surprised to find that he actually had an appetite. Until tonight, despite the bad cards he had drawn, he had never stopped trying to break through to his son. It’s over, he said to himself, over and done. He’s not your son. He’s Debra’s son, Basil’s son. You lost him a long time ago.
He finished the pizza and was wrapping the garbage to take out in the morning when the doorbell rang. Looking out the kitchen window he saw that it was snowing heavily. Those idiots, he thought, they’re probably stuck someplace. No choice but to let them in. But when he swung open the front door, it wasn’t Adnan and Ali, but his friends Jack McCann and Clarke Goode, homicide detectives who he had worked with for many years, standing facing him. He could see their unmarked car at the curb, and behind it, blocking his driveway, a Pound Ridge patrol car, its engine running and headlights on, two uniformed officers in the front seat. McCann, a florid Irishman whose blue eyes were usually lit by some inner secret joke, looked grim; and Goode, a gnarled black man who never failed to greet Matt with a big smile, was not smiling. Far from it.
“Come in. What’s up?” Matt said. Then, nodding toward the street where the patrol car sat: “What’s with the uniforms?”
The two detectives stepped into the foyer.
“Take your coats off,” Matt said. He could see they were dressed for work, sport jackets and ties on under their trench coats.
“Matt…,” McCann said.
“Talk, Jack,” Matt said. “Is somebody dead?”
“Is Michael home?” Goode asked. He had not taken off his coat, and neither had McCann.
“That’s his car out there,” Matt said. “You know that.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s upstairs.”
Matt looked from McCann to Goode, then back to McCann; looked in the eyes of each, and did not like what he saw. “What about Michael?” he asked.
“We’re here to arrest him,” McCann replied.
“For what?” Drugs, Matt thought, good, let the kid get a taste of the pain he’s always inflicting on others. Him and his two Arab suppliers.
“For murder, Matt,” Goode said.
The Fifth Man
Sons and Princes riveted readers with its epic depiction of a man caught between crime and conscience. Now LePore returns with a sequel to Sons and Princes. It is eight years later and life has changed overwhelmingly for Chris Massi and his son Matt. Chris now possesses more power than he ever could have imagined. But with power comes considerable, unremitting risk. And when Matt finds himself drawing the attention of the Russian Mafia, the risks become all too immediate and the reaction all too crucial. As the circle widens to include Chris’s daughter and the woman that has surprisingly captured Matt’s heart, Chris must make moves that could make him and his entire family vulnerable.
Rippling with tension, The Fifth Man is a story of strength and consequences, of the price of the past and the perilous path to the future. It is James LePore at the height of his storytelling skills.
* * *
Matt had shut his cell phone down for the ride to and from the Jersey shore. He turned it on when he got to his apartment on Carmine Street, a spacious five-room fourth-floor walkup that could house a small family and that his mother had furnished for h
im before his return from Europe—a bedroom, a study, a full kitchen, a living room/dining room combo, built-in bookshelves in all of the rooms, even the kitchen, many of them lined with the books Theresa had been storing for him at her big house in Jersey before she moved to Manhattan. When he turned his phone on, he was surprised to see a message from Natalya, the singer at Sabrina’s. “Matvey, Nico gave me your number. I hope you don’t mind. That was a lot of fun, Matvey. Please call me. We will do it again. Also, can you please erase the picture? Very embarrassing.”
They had drunk wawdka in Natalya’s apartment above Sabrina’s, and played music from her collection, dancing to the Ronettes and the Rolling Stones in her small living room. Before the night was over, Nico and Natalya had revealed their birthmarks, ass cheeks side-by-side. Matt had snapped a picture with his iPhone. He laughed now, remembering the proud smiles on their faces as they looked at him over their shoulders, mooning him in tandem. They may not be who they said they were, but they were a lot of fun. And Natalya, a brunette under her blonde wig, was a knockout with a sweet face and an even sweeter body. Now she was calling him.
Matt took a shower and when he came out he dressed and then dialed a number that he knew would not be answered. He opened the package of books that had arrived from the Columbia bookstore and began browsing as he waited for a return call. Modern Times, by Paul Johnson; The Road to Serfdom; Robert Conquest, Milton Friedman. Ivy League orthodoxy did not interest Matt. A double major, in history and economics, he was in a one-on-one honors program in which he was free to read, and write, as he wished. His mentor, the head of the history department, had promised to have his collected papers published, but Matt knew he would not allow it when the time came. The ringing of his cell phone broke into his thoughts abruptly.
“Dad,” he said, after sliding the unlock bar and pushing the speaker feature on his phone.
“Matt.”
“There’s something you need to know,” Matt said, getting right to the point, hoping he had done the right thing in calling this particular number.
“Hold on, Matt,” his father said, his voice light, even teasing. “First, how are you?”
“Good. Fine. School starts in two weeks.”
“And your mom?”
“She’s fine. She went a little overboard furnishing my apartment. We’re having dinner tonight.”
“Tess?”
“She’s joining us.”
“She’s coming over here for a few days.”
“She told me.”
Matt had been nervous waiting for his father’s call. He had dialed this number only once before, when he was sixteen and had finished last in the mile event in a high school track meet. His father had admonished him then. This number is not for hurt pride, Matt. Now he seemed breezy, unconcerned. Gods in tall buildings, Nico’s phrase, came to Matt’s mind, though he knew that the metaphor was not quite accurate when it came to his father, who might own tall buildings, but did not, as far as Matt knew, have an office in one.
“What’s up?” Chris Massi asked.
“Two things.”
“Go ahead.”
“I got a letter from a self-storage place at the shore. I thought it was Uncle Joseph’s, but it was Grandpa Joe’s. Dad, there was two million dollars in it in a duffle bag.”
Silence, in which Matt could hear the humming of his new refrigerator and his own quiet breathing as he pictured his father in his office on the top floor of that crazy old house in Piraeus.
“What did the letter say?” Chris Massi asked, finally.
“What letter?”
“The one from the storage company.”
“That Joseph Massi had pre-paid the rent for ten years, that if he didn’t renew I was to be contacted.”
“It’s old man Velardo’s money.”
“The Boot?”
“Yes.”
“What should I do with it?”
“It’s yours. Whatever you want.”
“Mine?”
“There were rumors about this money, Matt. I never knew if they were true or not. Now I do. Your grandfather was holding it for the old man, but he’s dead and so is most of his family that matters. It’s the spoils of war. Joe Black obviously wanted you to have it.”
“There was no note, Dad. Just the cash.”
“He wasn’t much of a letter writer, my father.”
“Dad…”
“It’s your money, Matt.”
“What should I do with it?”
“Think of it as a test.”
“A test?”
“Yes, you passed the first part. You told me.”
“What’s the second part?”
“What you do with the money.”
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want the money.”
Silence at the other end. And then: “Your grandfather left it to you, Matt.”
“Why?”
“He must have had his reasons.”
Matt had lived with his father in Manhattan from 2003 to 2007, while he went to high school. Except for a handful of Chris’s short absences, and the weekends Matt occasionally spent with his mother in New Jersey, they had had dinner and conversation together every night during those years. As a consequence, Matt had learned to read his father’s silences, so he knew for a fact what this last one meant.
“What’s the second thing, Matt?”
Matt paused for a second before answering. Two million dollars. Fuck. Most people would be ecstatic, but Matt was not most people. He saw the money as a burden, not a blessing. And then there was the oddness of the situation, his father’s matter-of-fact tone, as if…as if what? But his father had moved on. That part of the conversation—the part where he might have an opportunity to complain or make a joke or ask for advice—was over. That’s what his father’s silence had meant.
“One of my shipmates is here,” Matt said, finally. “The Russian guy I told you about, Nico.”
“Nico Pugach.”
“Yes.”
“What about him?”
“He wants to sell me some diamonds.”
“Are you interested?”
This question stopped Matt in his tracks. Are you interested? Later, when the Nico Pugach affair was over and done, he would realize exactly what the question was and what his father had meant it to be: a turning point, a choice to make.
“Should I be?” he replied, slightly stunned, but without hesitation. “He says I would have the contacts to re-sell them for a huge profit.”
“So he thinks he knows who you are.”
“Yes.”
“Does he know about the two million?”
“No.”
“Does anybody?”
“No. Well…”
“Well what?”
“I had to get a locksmith. There was a padlock on the duffle bag as well that needed to be sheared off. He saw the top layer of cash.”
“That’s not good.”
“I know. When he left, I rented another unit and put the duffle bag in it.”
“Good, that’s it? Nobody else?”
“No, no one else knows.”
“Keep it that way.”
“Of course.”
“Did Nico mention a price? Any details?”
“Five hundred thousand. He said they’re worth ten million retail, several million or more to a middle man.”
“When are you seeing him?”
“Later tonight.”
“Tell him you’ll think about it. Call me at this number tomorrow at this time. If I don’t call you back, call again the next night at the same time. Keep doing that until I do call you back.”
“Okay.”
“Matt.”
“Yes.”
“Be careful of this Nico. From now on only meet him in public places, always someplace you know. Don’t go anyplace alone with him, not even in a car or taxi.
Understand?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Anything else?”
“I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Is this why you made me take a year off from college?”
More silence. His father, like a Zen master, a very incongruous Zen master, had said to him many times, take everything at face value, take nothing at face value. He had puzzled over this obviously contradictory advice for years, until Nico showed up in America and seemed so different—and then asked him for half a million dollars.
“That’s a good question. And you know what I say about questions.”
“They’re the royal road to consciousness.”
“Yes.”
“I learned last semester you stole that from Freud. Sort of. He said it was dreams that are the royal road to consciousness.”
Chris Massi laughed his deep throaty laugh, a sound that filled Matt with happiness because it was so rarely that he heard it.
“We’ll talk about Freud when I see you.”
“When will that be? Are you still coming home in two weeks?”
“Maybe not,” his father replied. “But you may have to come here. We’ll see.”