No Dawn for Men (27 page)

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 him 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.”

“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 him 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.