The Fifth Man (2 page)

He pulled his cell phone out of the front pocket of his jeans, found the number of Wall Storage at the bottom of Anna Cavanagh’s letter and dialed it.

“Wall Storage,” a woman said, after only one ring.

“Is this Anna Cavanagh?” Matt asked.

“Yes it is.”

“Hi. My name is Matt Massi. I got a letter from you about a storage unit. My uncle’s unit, Joseph Massi.”

“I did not think you would call.” Matt did not respond. There was something about Anna Cavanagh’s deep voice that, despite her sexy accent, bothered him. A wariness. As if she didn’t trust him for some reason, though of course they’d never met. Weird.
Too serious.

“Do you want to renew?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“I will close in an hour. The contract is terminated today. You have to decide now.”

“What’s the shortest I can renew for?”

“Six months is the minimum. Plus one month security.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-one hundred dollars.”

“Now?”

“Yes. On a six month contract, you are required to pay it all at once.”

I am
required
, Matt thought,
all at once
, trying to mimic the formal, metronomic way she spoke, as if she were picturing each word in her head before sounding it out. Each word an experiment. What
was
that accent? And what kind of face and body matched it?

“Fine,” he answered, finally.

“I will need your credit card.”

“Hold on.” Matt slipped his wallet out of his back pocket. “How do I get in, by the way?”

“To the unit?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a key?”

“No.”

“You have to call a locksmith. Tell him there is an industrial lock on it. A puck lock. If there is damage to the door, we will charge to your credit card.”

“Who’s
we
?”

“Please?”

“Do you work for a company or is this your place?”

“That’s not…that’s none of your business.”

Matt had fished his Visa card from his wallet and was staring at the number. Anna’s tone had softened slightly when she realized she was about to make a quick twenty-one hundred dollars, but then hardened again when he asked his last question. How old was she? Twenty? Thirty? And why so serious? So grave? If she looked anything like she sounded—cold, suspicious, bitter even—she wasn’t pretty. Still, there
was
that accent, and that husky voice.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^

“Who was that?” Theresa asked, when he clicked off. She was in the kitchen now, near the built-in desk where she paid bills and kept her cookbooks, going through her purse.

“The bookstore.”

“At Columbia?”

“Yes. I need to read five books in the next two weeks. They’re sending them here.” He had actually been on the phone with the Columbia Bookstore before calling Wall Storage, while his mother was in her bedroom getting herself ready to go out.

“Did you get your mail?” Theresa asked, her keys in her hand.

“Yes.”

She looked at him now, her head slightly tilted.

“What was that letter from the storage company?” she asked.

“Uncle Joseph stored some things and put my name on the papers.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know.”

“Down the shore? He hated the beach.”

Matt did not reply. The people that had known his father’s younger brother, Joseph Massi, Jr., all said he looked just like him—black hair swept away from the forehead and falling in waves below the ears, piercing, dark brown eyes—the irises so uniformly dark you had to look hard to see a pupil—a straight, proud nose, thick sensuous lips…Matt was the last Massi to see Joseph alive.

“He’s been dead eight years,” Theresa continued.

“I know.”

“Are you going down there?”

“I renewed the contract. I’ll go down next week.”

Matt could see that his mother wanted to say more.

He was twenty-two, about to re-enter Columbia, to start his senior year. He had spent the last twelve months in Ukraine and Turkey, working for a shipping company owned by a friend of his father’s, a client. A lot of those twelve months he had spent on a Greek-registered oil tanker going back and forth through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, bringing Russian oil from Odessa to a half-dozen Mediterranean ports. Thanks to his bunkmate, and the crew at large, he now spoke semi-fluent Greek and could get by in a seaman’s rough Russian. He was grown up, but that wasn’t what stopped Theresa. It was their history, the things that happened eight years ago, the things that brought them to where they were now. Their relationship had mended, but he had defied her then, when he was fourteen, had wrested himself from her control. Had she forgiven him? Had he forgiven her?

“Do you like the apartment?”

“It’s great, Mom.”

“Did you call your grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“Tom’s son lives in the building.”

“Tom Stabile?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Mom…” Matt did not dislike Tom Stabile, Theresa’s husband. Nor did he like him. His reaction to Stabile was an easy neutrality that infuriated his mother.

“Have I been disrespectful?”

“No, you haven’t, but I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, you don’t.”

Theresa stared at him.

“Who else lives there?” he asked.

“Ally Scarpa’s the super.”

“Nick’s son? You’re kidding. He’s out of jail?”

“Yes.” Theresa raised her eyebrows as she said this, stopping for a click at the top before lowering them, a movement that, combined with a slight tightening of the lips, transmitted a wordless mother-to-son message that Matt had received and acknowledged, sometimes silently, sometimes not, countless times.

“It’s a Mafia-fest over there,” he said, deciding to make this one of the non-silent times.

“Grandpa owns the building. What did you expect?”

Matt said nothing, but he smiled, and shook his head, acknowledging to his mother, who stood before him proudly, still striking at forty-six, that what bound them most profoundly, besides their blood, was their membership by birth in an old-fashioned mob clan, a Mafia family that few knew existed, but that, deft and imaginative, swam quietly with the deadliest and most powerful of sharks in the commercial seas of the twenty-first century.

“You have your Uncle Joseph’s smile,” Theresa said, staring at him, her eyes softening. “What do you think’s in the locker?”

“Heroin, cocaine, crystal meth. Stolen televisions.”

“Stop it.”

They both smiled now, and Matt could see from the look in his mother’s eyes that she was thinking of Joseph, remembering him, the bad Massi brother, the heroin addict, who, he had come to realize, she may have loved more than the one she married.

“Where are you off to?” he asked.

“Shopping with Dana Carbone, then dinner someplace. Join us.”

“Maybe; I’m picking a friend up at LaGuardia. I’ll call you.”

That look again. That almost imperceptible tilt of the head and narrowing of the large brown DiGiglio eyes.
A friend? What kind of friend? Male? Female? LaGuardia?

“It’s the guy from the
Scorpion,
” Matt said, smiling, giving his mother a break. “Nico. I told you about him. He’s coming over to visit relatives.”

“Oh. Okay. Bring him to dinner.”

“I’ll call you.”

2.

Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, August 20, 2012, 7:00 p.m.

“This is quite a place,” Matt said. He had been looking around Sabrina’s—the Russian restaurant cum nightclub on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach—while Nico was in the back talking to his cousin, one of the owners.

“You like it?”

“What’s not to like?”

“The girls?”

“They’re beautiful.”

Nico was referring to the two young women in gold bikini tops and sequin-covered skirts who were dancing under blue and red strobe lights on a raised platform on the stage in the restaurant’s large main room. The jagged-edged skirts revealed a lot of leg, and seemed somehow, Matt noticed, to reveal a bit more as the girls waved to Nico and smiled when he passed the stage on his way to the kitchen. He and Matt were seated outside at a front corner table on a covered patio facing the beach. The Atlantic Ocean, solemn and calm tonight under a cloudless sky, lay just fifty yards beyond. Through open-air doors behind them, they had a view of the noisy interior. The dancers had been joined by a singer in a low-cut sequin dress that matched her golden hair and their sparkling outfits. She was smiling and waving at the people at one of the tables near the stage. Her teeth, Matt noticed, were very white and beautiful and her lipsticked lips bright red.

“The singer is also my cousin.”

Matt nodded and smiled. He had spent long stretches at sea with the twenty-five year old Nico, and heard a lot about his so-called cousins. In Odessa, it paid apparently to be a part of a large family with plenty of
nerodnoy brat
.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Sure I do.”

“Later, I will prove it. We both have flowers on our asses.”

“Tattoos?”

“
Nyet
. Birthmarks. In the shape of a poppy, the Ukrainian flower.”

“Is the vodka good here?” Matt asked.

“Matvey! This you do not have to ask.”

He didn’t. The vodka, brought out especially for them in tall bottles without labels—a family recipe according to Nico—was the best he ever had, silky smooth with an earthy bite and a clean, happy aftertaste, leaving you wanting more. Which Matt, who could hold his liquor, did and did not. He paced himself, and the food— brought out endlessly by waiters in white shirts and black bowties, who spoke rapid-fire Russian to Nico—helped him stay relatively sober. He had spent more than a few nights in ports from Sebastopol to Palermo drinking with Nico, who never got drunk. After ten vodkas his boyish face might turn a deep red and he might smile a lot, but that was it. He greased six-inch cables, wrestled with tie-down hardware and scraped rust all day onboard ship, and was tall and tanned and very strong. One night in Naples he tossed around some locals like they were ragdolls. They had called him a dumb Polack, a double insult. Matt wasn’t worried though, about anything Nico might or might not do. He just never got drunk with strangers, or in public.

After dinner, they sat on the boardwalk and smoked Nico’s black market Turkish cigarettes while they waited for the last show to end, when the singer and one of the dancers were supposed to join them and continue the evening.

“Why are you here, Nick?” Matt asked. They were facing the sea, the better to catch the faint breeze drifting in from Ireland, the night still hot and humid.

“To visit my family,” Nico answered. “To play in America.”

“That’s all?”

“No, there is more, but if I tell you what it is, you will be…What do I mean to say? A participant?”

“Then don’t tell me.”

“I agree. I will not. May I ask you, Matt, who are you?”

Matt smiled and glanced over at the young Ukrainian, who had his thickly muscled arms stretched out on the back of the bench they were sitting on, some few feet apart. Their eyes met for a second, and then both looked out to sea. Such patience, he thought,
a year at sea
.

“I’m a college student,” Matt replied, flinging his half-smoked cigarette over the metal rail in front of him, watching it land and die out on the sand below. “I told you.”

“American college students do not get visas to work on oil tankers on the Black Sea.”

“The Scorpion was Greek.”

“And your father is really a lawyer?”

“Yes, The Piraeus Group is a major client.”

“Not Mafia?”

“The Mafia doesn’t exist any more, Nick, except in the movies.”

“Our captain must watch the American movies.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing was to happen to you.”

“Why are you bringing this up now? You had a year to bring it up.”

“I only take orders.”

“Yes, I understand. Who from?”

“Gods in tall buildings. Men in kitchens drinking vodka.”
Wawdka
, was how he pronounced it. It made Matt smile.

“So, why are you here?”

“I am to ask if you are interested in a business proposition.”

Matt took his time replying. This meant that Nico’s people knew at least that money was a part of Matt’s world. And possibly—likely—more. How much more? For Nico to ask a question like this of Matt Massi was to take the risk that the tall, open-faced young Russian would not return from America, that he would never be heard from again.