Blood of My Brother Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. - 7:00 PM, September 1, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 2. - 8:00-11:00 PM, September 1, 2004, Montclair, West Orange

  Chapter 3. - 5:00 PM, September 4, 2004, Montclair

  Chapter 4. - August, 4. 1991, Mexico City

  Chapter 5. - 3:00 AM, Sunday, September 5, 2004, Montclair

  Chapter 6. - 2:00 AM, September 12, 2004, Montclair

  Chapter 7. - 9:00 PM, July 12, 1967, Newark

  Chapter 8. - 10:00 AM, September 17, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 9. - July 1967 - July 1976, Newark

  Chapter 10. - 2:00 PM, September 27, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 11. - 5:00 PM, December 3, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 12. - 6:30 PM, August 25, 1991, Mexico City

  Chapter 13. - 2:00 PM, December 5, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 14. - 7:00 PM, December 7, 2004, Montclair

  Chapter 15. - 6:00 PM, December 8, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 16. - 3:00 PM, December 9, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 17. - 3:30 PM, December 9, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 18. - 6:00 PM, December 9, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 19. - 4:00 PM, December 12, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 20. - June, 2003, Mexico City

  Chapter 21. - 11:00 AM, December 13, 2004, Montclair

  Chapter 22. - 8:00 AM, December 14, 2004, Bloomfield

  Chapter 23. - 2:00 PM, December 14, 2004, Newark

  Chapter 24. - 5:00 PM, December 15, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 25. - 5:00 PM, December 16, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 26. - 5:00 PM, December 16, 2004, Miami Beach

  Chapter 27. - 6:00 PM, December 16, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 28. - 8:00 PM, December 16, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 29. - 5:00 PM, June 14, 2003, Palm Beach

  Chapter 30. - 9:00 AM, December 17, 2004, West Palm Beach

  Chapter 31. - 9:30 AM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 32. - 5:00 PM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 33. - 4:00 PM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 34. - 5:00 PM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 35. - 5:30 PM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 36. - 8:00 PM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 37. - Midnight, December 18, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 38. - 4:00 PM, December 18, 2004, Merida, Mexico

  Chapter 39. - 8:00 AM, December 19, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 40. - 5:00 PM, December 18, 2004, Merida

  Chapter 41. - 9:00 AM, December 21, 2004, Mexico City

  Chapter 42. - 10:00 AM, December 20, 2004, Puerto Angel, Mexico

  Chapter 43. - 5:00 PM, December 23, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 44. - 9:00 AM, December 22, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 45. - 8:00 AM, December 23, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 46. - 8:00 PM, December 23, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 47. - 9:00 AM, December 24, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 48. - 12:00 PM, December 24, 2004, Miami

  Chapter 49. - 12:00 PM, December 24, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 50. - Midnight, December 25, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 51. - 6:00 PM, December 25, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 52. - 7:00 PM, December 25, 2004, Puerto Angel

  Chapter 53. - 8:00 AM, December 26, 2004, Ejutla de Crespo

  Chapter 54. - 9:30 AM, December 26, Southwestern Mexico

  Chapter 55. - 6:00 PM, December 26, 2004, Santiago Ixtayutla, Mexico

  Chapter 56. - 2:00 PM, December 27, 2004 Oaxaca City, Mexico

  Chapter 57. - 6:00 PM, December 27, 2004, Santiago Ixtayutla, Mexico

  Chapter 58. - 9:00 AM, December 29, 2004, Santiago Ixtayutla

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  Praise for

  A World I Never Made

  “I picked up A World I Never Made and was riveted from start to finish. An adventure to places both exotic and intimate, told with great sensitivity, inventive plotting, and propulsive suspense. Jim LePore is a great discovery.”

  - William Landay, author of

  The Strangler

  “A World I Never Made is an outstanding first novel, and a wonderful thriller. The story moves very quickly, almost to the point that the reader feels as if they’ll miss something if they put the book down even for a moment . . . I’m looking forward to James LePore’s next work; this one was a gripping read that I would recommend to anyone.”

  - Blogcritics

  “A compelling page-turner--one of those wonderful books with characters as strong as the story and a story worth reading. Don’t miss it.”

  - M.J. Rose, author of

  The Memorist

  “I highly recommend this compelling suspense story filled with vivid characters and haunting storylines. A story that will stay with the reader long after the final page.”

  - Bella Online

  “Nothing could have torn my attention away from this story. A World I Never Made by James LePore is a must read for thriller fans!”

  - Cheryl’s Book Nook

  “The plot of this intriguing, suspenseful novel is taut, moves rather rapidly, and mesmerizes the reader with each new complex, mysterious detail. James LePore knows how to spin an international thriller tale that slowly reveals an inner, fascinating depth to each character and to the developing connections between each and all. Well, well-done, James LePore!”

  - Crystal Reviews

  “Author James LePore has created a remarkable, gripping tale of suspense in his debut novel. A World I Never Made is filled with strong, vividly described international characters to whom the reader will quickly form an attachment, all the while being transported through wonderfully described exotic lands. The combination creates an atmosphere of breathless suspense affording readers a desire to continue reading up until the thrilling, yet tender, conclusion.”

  - Feathered Quill Book

  Reviews

  “The suspense will keep you white-knuckled as the plot unfolds with plenty of depth and intelligence. In fact, A World I Never Made kept me so enthralled that I simply didn’t want it to end. So if you’re looking for a new author who can knock you breathless with a clever thriller, James LePore is the one to pick.”

  - Nights and Weekends

  “The key to this exciting thriller is the cast, especially the Nolan father and daughter . . . fans will enjoy this one sitting suspense thriller.” - The Mystery Gazette

  - The Mystery Gazette

  “James LePore writes in an exciting and most readable style. He is an artist at building the suspense as the story progresses to its ultimate conclusion. There is just enough doubt about the possible outcomes to keep the reader wondering and turning pages. A World I Never Made is a fine tale filled with love, adventure, mystery and suspense.”

  - Mainly Mysteries

  “A carefully crafted, well written book with a rich cast of characters and a plot as complicated and convoluted as the characters themselves.”

  - Reader Views

  “An unputdownable novel.”

  - Everything Distills into Reading

  To Kay and Jim LePore. May they rest in peace.

  Acknowledgments

  The final version of this novel is much different and, hopefully, much better than its first and many interim iterations. For reading those in-progress manuscripts, and offering their often helpful and always sincere comments, I am grateful to the following people: Jay Breslin; Steve Carroll; Bill Evans; Dave and Meryl Ironson; Bob, Pat, Joe, and Jerry LePore; Erica, Adrienne, and Jamie LePore; and Greg and Joy Ziemak. I ho
pe they enjoy the final version, much of which will be new to them. I am also very grateful to my friend and editor, Lou Aronica, for his high level of professionalism and his passion for excellence. Working with him, with each new book I learn more of the craft and I get to go deeper into the land of imagination.

  For teaching me how to land a small aircraft in an emergency (while sitting at my desk), I thank Frank Hippel, pilot and friend.

  I save my most important acknowledgement for last. I thank my wife, Karen, for her love and encouragement, and for the example she sets for me in all things.

  The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

  - Genesis 4:10

  Prologue

  10:00 AM, July 12, 1967, Newark

  In July of 1967, Jay Cassio, who would be turning five in September, started a prekindergarten program at St. Lucy’s School on Sheffield Street in Newark, New Jersey’s oldest, largest, and about to be most turbulent city. At the time, St. Lucy’s church and grammar school were at the spiritual and cultural center of the city’s First Ward, an enclave of Southern Italians that for sixty years had stubbornly clung to the customs and values of Italy’s Campagnia region from whence they and their parents had come in the great migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  The school, housed in a nondescript but sturdy brick building next to the beautiful gothic church, started teaching grades K through six to the children of the first wave of Italian immigrants in 1906. Now it drew equal numbers of black and Hispanic boys and girls, their parents looking to the Sisters of Charity as sources of discipline and respect in the ghetto that, as a direct consequence of the mindless placement of a massive public housing project in its midst, the First Ward was fast becoming. An only child, with no cousins, Jay was slow to socialize. Taller than the other boys, he had not been picked on, or challenged; but shy, an involuntary air of isolation about him, neither had he been approached in friendship.

  Jay lived a half block from the school, on Seventh Avenue, on the fourth floor of a four-story tenement, with his parents, A.J. and Carmela. The first floor was taken up by his father’s bakery, Cassio’s, founded by his great-grandfather in 1903. He was not lonely or afraid at school, but if he needed comfort ever, he had only to look down the short half-block of Sheffield Street to where it formed a T with Seventh Avenue. There, directly in sight at all times, were Cassio’s large, old-fashioned plate glass windows, through which, if he stared long enough, he could spot his father at work. Sometimes, A.J., in his white baker’s apron, his thick, black hair dusty with flour, would catch his eye, smile, and wave. On either side of the Cassios’ tenement were similar four- and five-story buildings with stores below and apartments above. If he was unable to see his father, the familiar faces of the women and small children who spent so much of their lives on the stoops and sidewalks in front of these tenements were always a delight to Jay, who, handsome, his large, gray eyes set perfectly below a clear brow and long, silky lashes, was a favorite in the neighborhood.

  In the summer of 1967, when weeklong spasms of destruction called race riots swept the country’s major ghettos, Newark’s eruption was arguably the worst. A second tier city with virtually no national identity, its angry blacks were fueled to even more furious and mindless violence by their seeming invisibility compared to the attention given to Harlem and Watts. There was no Park Avenue or Rodeo Drive in Newark, no story of fabulous wealth threatened by mobs; only a series of bleak and poor neighborhoods made exponentially bleaker and poorer by six days of mayhem and death.

  On the day the Newark riots started, Jay went at the morning recess with a group of children to the ice cream truck on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Sheffield Street. The day was warm and balmy, not oppressively hot. Sirens could be heard blaring along Broad Street, about ten blocks away, the main artery leading from the First Ward to Newark’s slowly dying downtown. These were a common enough sound in the neighborhood. A hearse and three limousines, black and gleaming in the midmorning sun, were parked in front of St. Lucy’s. On the opposite side of Sheffield Street, directly across from the church, were Buildings D and E of the Columbus Homes, eight, featureless twelve-story “apartment” buildings erected by the federal government in 1955.

  The First Ward was poor now, and bleak, but the projects , as they were universally called, were poorer and bleaker, a no-man’s-land teeming with drug addicts and the forerunners of today’s gangbangers. This gaunt “housing project,” surrounded by an aura of despair and menace, marked off a boundary keenly observed by the remnants—like the Cassios—of the old Italian-American community who were clinging to a last hope that the neighborhood would survive. There were no trees on Seventh Avenue or on Sheffield Street, nothing to block Jay’s view of his small piece of the world, or to soften its hard and grimy edges.

  Jay paid for his Eskimo Pie, peeled off its silver wrapper, and drifted over to the cyclone fence that surrounded the schoolyard. There, as he did every day, he would eat it while watching the doings of his classmates, absorbed in these creatures called other children, like him and not like him. When he reached the fence he heard a loud pop coming from the direction of the projects. He gazed that way, and then his attention was drawn to the front of the church, about fifty feet away, to his right, where a man in a black suit was kneeling, holding his arm, and where a bronze coffin had fallen with a loud clang to the sidewalk. Immediately there were two more pops, and a motorcycle policeman, who was one of two that were about to lead the funeral procession to the cemetery, was toppling from his seat, and the mourners, dressed in black, were pointing up to the roof of Building E and scrambling for cover along the sides of the hearse and the limos.

  Jay watched, amazed, his ice cream forgotten, as the second cop dragged his fallen comrade to the sidewalk side of the hearse, and then pulled his two-way radio from his belt and began shouting into it. The two nuns who had brought the children out to the street, one an old crone straight from Italy’s Potenza Province, hated and feared by the entire class, the other a young Irish beauty with a mesmerizing, lilting accent, swung swiftly and forcefully into action, herding the group through the gate in the cyclone fence and harrying them like border collies toward the school. Jay, out of sight of the nuns, was about to join his classmates when a boy whom he knew to be named Danny—a brash, stockily built boy, with big eyes wide apart and a shock of black hair—grabbed his arm and said, “We won’t see anything from in there. Follow me!”

  Jay did. He dropped his ice cream and followed Danny as he ran down Sheffield Street, darting past the mourners and policemen huddled behind the limousines, up the wide imported stone steps of the church, whose massive wooden doors stood open to the summer day. Then, once inside, up more steps at the side of the vestibule to the bell tower, where large open-air arches gave a perfect panoramic view of the scene below, as well as across the street to the roof of Building E.

  “Look!” said Danny, pointing up.

  Kneeling at the parapet was a black man of indeterminate age, shirtless, his muscles rippling, a rifle cradled in his arms. In silhouette, the sun behind him, there was a stillness, an ease, to this figure, as if he had been manning this rooftop, waiting to shoot white people, for years. Directly below, the coffin squatted on the sidewalk, forlorn, while the pallbearers and other family and friends of the deceased tried their best to attend to the two injured men in the shelter of the limos. The cop was bleeding from a chest wound, a deep maroon stain spreading across his pale blue shirt. Sirens were screaming close by.

  Looking toward Seventh Avenue, the boys saw an ambulance and four police cars round the corner and hurtle toward the church. The man on the roof took careful aim at the lead car. When it stopped and the policemen in it jumped out, he fired off three shots—pop, pop, pop—then he ducked and was seen no more. The boys ducked, too. When they looked up a second later, there were cops running toward the entrance of Building E, and others were lined up behind their cars, firin
g rifles up at the parapet. The ambulance attendants, one black, one white, jumped out and began working on the cop with the chest wound. The firing stopped and all was still and quiet except for a harsh static from the radio of the lead patrol car. There were no other injured cops on the ground.

  “I know that cop,” said Jay.

  “Which one?”

  “The one bleeding.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He comes in the bakery.”

  “What bakery?”

  “My dad’s. Cassio’s.”

  Jay pointed to the bakery, and was astonished, as he did, to see his father running out of the front door, unwrapping his apron as he went, heading for the entrance to the school. He wove through a gathering crowd of people, white from Seventh Avenue, black from the projects, but was stopped at the foot of Sheffield Street by two cops who were manning a hastily thrown up roadblock. A.J. Cassio, bulky and muscled from years of making bread by hand, and not past his prime at thirty-three, went chest to chest with one of the cops, shouting something and pointing toward the school. The second cop took hold of A.J.’s arm and quieted him down, then turned and headed into the schoolyard.

  “That’s my dad,” said Jay.

  “He’s looking for you.”

  Jay said nothing, his gaze fixed on his father, who was staring intensely toward the school entrance. The first cop, who had kept his composure throughout, was now carefully steering A.J. away from the roadblock. The wounded cop directly below was now on a stretcher and being lifted into the ambulance, while cops in flak jackets were leading the mourners back into the church.

  “Does he hit you?” Danny asked.

  “No.”