The Fifth Man (20 page)

“What happened, Dad?” Tess said.

“Fourteen people died,” Chris replied.

“Who?”

“A woman in Moscow named Irina Tabak was the first.”

“Who was she?” Matt asked.

“Nobody. Someone framed for stealing diamonds that were never stolen.”

“Never stolen?” Matt said.

“The GRU probably has them, but set her up for it. Your friend Nico killed her.”

“And the other thirteen?” Tess asked.

“Captain Stavros of the Scorpion, the two that Max killed in Brighton Beach, Skip Cavanagh, four Chechan terrorists in Prague; Patriki, Anna, the Czech soldier; a Russian don named Marchenko, a Russian spy master called the Wolf.”

“What about Nico and Natalya?” Matt asked.

“They’re alive, in Warsaw.”

“Why?”

“They weren’t spies, just thugs, idiots. They may be useful.”

“What happened?” Tess asked.

“Can
you
tell
me
?”

“No, I’m lost.”

“Matt?”

Matt shook his head.

“How’s your nose?” Chris said to Tess. Her bandages had been removed just the day before; her eyes were discolored but the swelling had gone down.

“Fine.”

“I was careless,” Chris said.

“No you weren’t,” said Tess.

“How?” Matt asked.

“I assumed that Patriki was killed by Dravic. I barely looked at the picture Tess sent me.”

“Am I still going to Arizona?” Tess asked.

“Yes. You’ll know what to do the next time someone takes a wild swing at you.”

Father and daughter smiled at each other.

“What happened?” Matt asked.

“The attack in Prague was supposed to line up with the ones in the Middle East. It would have been a disaster, Hillary Clinton killed, the Czech president. The Wolf tried his best to implicate me in it, starting with the money we paid for the diamonds,
if
we bought the diamonds.”

“Why? Who
are
you, Dad?” Tess asked.

“I’m a weapon,” Chris answered.

“A weapon?” Tess said.

“That’s what it comes down to,” said Chris.

“Dad…”

“We’ll talk later,” Chris said. “Here come the kids.”

Michaela was standing just inside the French doors, one child in each hand. Bathed in sunlight, they were beautiful children, the girl, five, dark like her father, and the boy, four, blond like his mother. They were composed, but somehow tense, like child actors about to go on stage. They have their role now, Chris thought. Then he looked over at Matt, who was staring with great intensity at the children.

“We’ll take care of them, Matt,” Chris said. “They’re part of our family now.”

“What about Dravic?” Matt asked.

“The Czechs have him. They’re going to try him for the torture and murder of Antonin Cervenka.”

“Do they have the death penalty in the Czech Republic?” Matt asked.

“No,” Chris replied.

Matt nodded, his eyes flat, expressionless.

“What are you thinking?” Chris asked.

“Inevitability,” Matt replied. Then, smiling, the children approaching, he picked up his glass of scotch and said, “To Anna, and the debt we owe her.”

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 four other novels,
A World I Never Made
,
Blood of My Brother
,
Sons and Princes
, and
Gods and Fathers
, as well as a collection of three short stories,
Anyone Can Die
. You can visit him at his website,
www.jamesleporefiction.com
.

A Note from the Author

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.

Sons and Princes
, the novel from which
The Fifth Man
grew, was my homage to the Mafia myth as seen through the eyes of one man, the honorable, decent, very smart and ultimately very brave Chris Massi. At the end of
Sons and Princes
, Chris had a choice to make, and now you know how he chose. To me, who created him, this is the only choice he could have made. It was pre-ordained. He is now a weapon, a weapon that his country will wield again in future novels as Chris’s destiny, and America’s, continue to unfold.

James LePore

South Salem, New York

December, 2012

Read an excerpt from James LePore’s
Sons and Princes:

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?”

Here’s an excerpt from James LePore’s
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.”