by James Lepore
“You were taking too long,” he said, surveying the scene before him, pointing his gun at Chris’ chest. “I heard voices.”
“It’s okay,” the don replied. “Put your gun away. I’m having a conversation.”
“June...,” Aldo said, his eyes on Chris’ gun.
“I invited him here,” Junior Boy said. “He brought the gun to protect himself. You can go. Tell Rocco to bring Phil and Nicky and Joe Pace back here.”
Aldo, incredulous, did not move at first, but then he saw the look on his older brother’s face, a look that chilled him tonight as it had whenever he had the misfortune to be exposed to it over the last sixty-odd years.
“Is the grave marked?” Chris asked, when Aldo was gone.
“We can’t do that, Chris, you know that. But I can have someone lead you to it.”
“What about Barsonetti?”
“I’ve been waiting to have this conversation.”
Chris nodded.
“If you accept my offer,” Junior Boy said, “you can order it. If not, I’ll take care of it.”
“Aldo hates me.”
“He’s retiring, too. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is. Frank, too.”
“Matt’s coming with me, regardless.”
“No one will stand in the way of that, whatever you decide.”
“How long have you been thinking about this proposal?”
“Since you showed up at Benevento and played your hand.”
“Did you know I’d come after you?”
“I thought you would.”
“What if I just pulled the trigger?”
“Then I’d be dead, and you’d have a different life ahead of you. But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
There was a knock on the door, and Junior Boy said, “Wait.”
And then to Chris he said, “You can go. Think about what I said.”
“I’ll think about it,” Chris answered, and then he turned and left. Outside the rain was coming down harder, soaking Chris through to the skin as he ran the fifty feet or so to the car. Inside, in the driver’s seat, John Farrell was slumped against the steering wheel, dead.
EPILOGUE
Stone Ridge, New York, September 7, 2003
“Thanks, Rocco, you can wait in the car.”
Chris and Matt watched the husky Rocco Stabile turn and walk, with surprising grace, even daintiness, back along the rough, overgrown forest path that they had followed to their destination. When he disappeared in the thick woods, Chris looked down at the spot Rocco had pointed out and then, beyond the tree line, out over the verdant valley below to the rolling brown and green hills in the distance. His hip younger brother left Manhattan only to travel to other cities, usually Las Vegas or Miami Beach, but he would spend eternity overlooking a bucolic valley dotted with cows and haystacks. Chris could only smile at the irony and hoped Joseph was smiling, too.
“Help me carry some rocks over,” Chris said. “There’s a stone wall over there.”
A half hour later, working slowly in the late summer heat, they had laid six rocks of varying sizes and shapes in the form of a very crude cross on the grave. Matt sat on the biggest one to rest when they were done, while Chris surveyed their work, which in a week or two, would look more like a random group of rocks than anything else.
“It’ll have to do,” Chris said.
Matt remained silent. Two days ago, he had moved into his Chris’ apartment in Tribeca. The next day, a Saturday, Tess had come in and they had gone out and gotten him some things for his room and some new clothes. Chris had made it clear that from today on, after their visit to Joseph’s grave, there would be no more talk of the Mafia or the DiGiglio family. All signs of Matt’s previous attitude had vanished and were replaced by a steady and serious demeanor in which Chris saw much of himself as a boy. Last night, his son, with only the vaguest idea of what it took to be a runner, had announced that he would be trying out for the freshman cross-country team when he started at LaSalle on Wednesday.
“Go on back to the car, Matt,” Chris said. “I’d like a few minutes alone here.”
Matt got up and, turning to Chris, said, “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I think we should call Marsha.”
“We can’t bring her here.”
“I know, but we should call her.”
“Sure, we’ll call her this week.”
When Matt was out of sight, Chris sat on the big rock and, picking up some pebbles, began sifting them through his hands. Among the mail that Vinnie Rosamelia had brought over to his apartment on Friday was a letter from Karen Pierce, informing Chris that an investigation into Ed Dolan’s case files had revealed serious improprieties in his handling of U.S. V. Massi and in the role Dolan played in Chris’ disbarment proceedings. She invited him to come to her office, with his lawyer, to discuss the action that needed to be taken to get Chris’ license restored and – “to the extent possible in an imperfect world” – his name cleared.
A week before, he and Michele had attended John Farrell’s funeral at a Christian Brothers retreat house near Troy, New York. Michele was working for a catering company in Glen Cove, living in two rooms above their kitchen and going to rehab meetings three nights a week. After the funeral, they had driven back to Manhattan to Barbara Lopez’ office where Michele signed the petition Barbara would file with the court for the return of custody of Grace. Three days ago, Chris had driven to Belleville, New Jersey, where he had given Antoinette Scarpa a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, and, crying, she had found and handed him the half-dozen letters Joe Black had written to her then-nineteen-year-old husband during his first stretch in prison. Chris had forgotten about those letters in the turmoil of his recent life. They now lay on his dresser, waiting to be read.
“I wish I had thought to protect you, Joseph,” Chris said, getting to his feet. “If I had, you might be alive today, but I thought only of criticizing you. I won’t make the same mistake with Matt. He did not choose his parents. Whatever I have to do to keep him safe, I’ll do it. In your name.”
Then Chris rolled the pebbles in his hand one last time, threw them on the grave, turned, and headed back to the waiting car.
Dear Reader,
The three novels that I call The Tristate Trilogy (A World I Never Made, Blood of My Brother and Sons and Princes) are connected not by characters or sequential plots, but by theme: the existential struggle against the demons, internal and external, that assail the human heart.
In A World I Never Made, though they didn’t know it at the time, their own bitterness was as much an adversary to Pat and Megan Nolan as the terrorists that pursued them.
Jay Cassio and Isabel Perez in Blood of My Brother, were forced to fight not just the professional killers of a Mexican drug cartel, but the despair that threatened to kill their spirits.
And it was Chris Massi’s pride in Sons and Princes that caused his world to shatter. He thought he had beaten the odds: of having a hit man for a father, a junkie for a brother, a Mafia princess for an ex-wife. But he hadn’t. Humbled, he chose to fight back, and there, his story, his path to redemption, begins.
In the short stories I wrote to accompany A World I Never Made and Blood of My Brother, my intention was to explore not internal struggle, but the forces at work that shape the adult heart, the staging ground so to speak for the battle to come. The past as prelude.
The first of these, together in a small volume called Anyone Can Die, published in February, 2011, reach into the past, to incidents in the lives of the central characters of A World I Never Made.
I did the same in the trio of stories I wrote to accompany Blood of My Brother, collected in a volume entitled, The Man In The Black Suit, which will be released in June, 2011.
As I look ahead to the writing of the novella that will accompany Sons and Princes, it does not escape me that Chris Massi’s future may be more interesting to readers, and more fun to write about, than his
past.
James LePore
South Salem
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
The Story Plant
The Aronica-Miller Publishing Project, LLC
P.O. Box 4331
Stamford, CT 06907
Copyright © 2011 by James LePore
eISBN : 978-1-611-88016-8
Visit our website at www.thestoryplant.com
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by U.S. Copyright Law.
For information, address The Story Plant.
First Story Plant Paperback Printing: May 2011
