The Fifth Man

by James Lepore

  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.”

  “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 quic
kly 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.”

  Here’s an excerpt from James LePore’s 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.

  Here’s an excerpt from James LePore’s novel 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?”