Gods and Fathers (22 page)

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:

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.”

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.”

“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.