“Someone has done some research,” Matt said, finally.
“That goes both ways, I’m sure,” Nico said.
“No, Nick, we’re friends,” Matt replied. “But it could always be done now.” Even if your last name is not Pugach, and you were not born in Kiev, and your mother was not the woman who fed us dinner on the roof of her apartment building last summer, I could find out who you are in a couple of hours. And I will.
3.
Jackson, New Jersey, August 21, 2012, 3:00 p.m.
“I need to rent another unit,” Matt said. He had rung the bell at the counter and waited several minutes for Ms. Cavanagh, she of the great accent and the chip on her shoulder, to appear. He spent those minutes looking around the Wall Storage office, which was neat and clean, but sad, its two faux leather and faux chrome chairs against a side wall, a Walmart flower print hanging slightly askew above them; a faux leather sofa under the room’s one window. And it was hot, near ninety degrees in the room. The air conditioner fitted into a wall cutout sat there silently, the words old and broken written all over it. While he was waiting a fax came in, something, he could not miss seeing, from the Superior Court of Ocean County, Domestic Violence Unit.
“In addition to A-17?” Anna Cavanagh answered.
“Yes.”
“What size?”
“Small, I just have to put this in it,” said Matt, lifting the duffle bag he was holding above the level of the counter that separated them.
“I have lockers behind the office.”
“So we don’t have to go outside?” Matt was thinking of Nico, sitting in Matt’s car in the parking lot just inside the front gate. He had walked from unit A17, the duffle bag over his shoulder, through the back streets of the facility and entered the office through a back door.
“No. We go there,” Cavanagh said, pointing to a metal door to her right.
“Is there an entrance from the outside?”
“Yes, behind the office, but I will take you through from here.”
“Good, let’s do it.”
“I will need your credit card.”
Matt, twenty-two, six foot tall, a trim one hundred ninety pounds of good-looking young man untempered by any bad experience with women, had been, as a matter of course, rapidly assessing Anna Cavanagh as they spoke. After saying
let’s do it,
he paused to take a better look. She was far from what he had expected. Her pinned-up hair—what he could see of it—was a pretty, golden blonde, her skin fair. A tiny bead of sweat was making its way slowly down a straight, slightly large, but finely modeled nose, a proud nose set between full lips below and wide apart green eyes above. One—the left one—was slightly off-center, looking permanently at the faint but distinct dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose. They were beautiful, these eyes, made more beautiful by the one that was slightly cocked, but not beautiful enough to hide the shadow behind them. Of what, he could only guess. Fear? Hatred? Loss? They were eyes that would be magnetic if she ever smiled, feral if she got angry. A grown woman’s eyes.
“I am waiting,” said Cavanagh.
“You have it,” Matt answered. Why so serious? He wanted to say, to break the ice, to get
some
kind of a reaction from her, but held back, remembering the fax he had seen.
Domestic Violence Unit
. Something was very wrong in Anna Cavanagh’s life.
“I must run it through this time.”
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
In the parking lot, Nico was standing outside the car, looking toward the facility’s front entrance, where the locksmith’s van was just passing under the black and white gate arm. He smiled and waved when he saw Matt approaching across the hot tarmac, a smile that Matt was familiar with, beaming, wide open, too innocent to be true.
“So, what did she look like? Nasty?” Nico asked when they were underway, heading toward the Garden State Parkway. On the drive down from Manhattan, Matt had told him about his audio-based impression of Anna Cavanagh, leaving out the accent, the most interesting thing, until today, about her.
“No,” Matt replied. “Worn down, wary, but not nasty.”
“Good looking?”
“She’s okay.” She’s beautiful, Matt thought. And then:
You’re guarding your treasure. Like Smaug the dragon.
“The body?”
“Tall, thin.”
“Too thin? Is she a
woman
?”
“Not too thin.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-nine, thirty.”
“Married?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Twenty-nine is the best age, Matvey,” Nico said. “They want to make the most of the last of their youth.”
“Not this one,” Matt said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t smile once.”
“For me she will smile.”
“Sure, Nick, give it a try.”
4.
Jackson, New Jersey, August 21, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
In the apartment behind the office, Anna Cavanagh, laundry basket in hand, paused to take a look at herself in the pink-framed mirror in her daughter’s room. She did not like thinking about her looks, not in the way she believed most women did. Was she pretty? Was she attractive to men? To
this
man, or
that
man? She had never taken more than a few steps down that path. She knew without thinking about it where it would lead her. She looked and assessed of course, but in her own way, her heart ready to cry STOP before she saw her father’s smiling face, and heard his voice telling her how beautiful she was.
Now she looked a bit more carefully than usual, caution thrown tentatively to the wind, on a short leash, one might say: first at her bad eye, her ugly eye,
traumatic strabismus
, the doctor at the clinic in Prague called it. Then at her fake-looking, too-yellow hair, pinned up now against the heat, wisps of it falling on her ears and the back of a neck that seemed too long; at a face that was too angular to be pretty, the nose plain and boring and yet somehow haughty. The freckles, God, still there. Her father’s face had been angular and thin, his nose large and straight and proud too, and he had been a drinker, like her husband, though she didn’t know it when he was alive, living as she was in a child’s dream world until that winter day in 1989.
Pretty or not, men were drawn to her; some falling for her like trees felled in a forest.
Whoosh,
and they would do anything for her. Tall, thin, her breasts large and full, her ass plump and curvy, her skin creamy, she knew what they wanted. She had learned early about sex. One of those
do-anything
men had been Skip Cavanagh, whom she married not because he begged her to, but because she could not extend her visa any longer.
Haggard
was her assessment now.
Tired
.
Afraid.
On her own since she was eighteen. Everyone dead. Father, mother, grandparents. Fourteen years.
America
, she thought, when she left Prague, would be the answer. There she would make a new life and find a way to forget, to put the past behind her. But she never could put it behind her, her past. She could never stop looking out that window in her little house on the outskirts of Prague. And now there was more. Reflexively, she reached to touch the bruise on her right side. Lifting her blouse, she saw that the edges were fading to an ugly yellow, that only the center was still the deep purple color of an eggplant. Today, there was no blood in her urine for the first time since Skip, drunk, high on what the cops later told her was something called crystal meth, had struck her with a baseball bat two weeks ago.
In the kitchen, she soaked a washcloth with cold water and held it first against the back of her neck and then her forehead. Through the window above the sink, she could see her son and daughter playing on the thirty-foot by thirty-foot patch of sunburned brown grass behind the building. It was sweltering hot, but, dressed for the heat in shorts and T-shirts, they seemed oblivious as they dug in the ground in the far corner near the chain-link fence that enclosed the yard. Beyond the fence a short way was the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a million acres of brush pine that surrounded her and her children and her dying little business like a monster in a dark fairy tale, ready to swallow them without warning in one quick primeval gulp.
She had immediately gone online two days ago to make sure that Matt Massi’s first credit card payment had cleared. She had no doubt, having met him, that his second would be fine. Half of her units were empty and there were too many deadbeats among the other half, too many up-and-coming auctions to pay too much back rent. Matt Massi’s two payments would get her through three months if she was careful. But what else would she be but careful? And then what?
In the kitchen was a television wired to the closed circuit security cameras that monitored the front gate and the storage rows on the property. The quarterly insurance bill had arrived the day after she threw Skip—with the help of the Jackson Township police and a judge who was awoken at 3:00 a.m. to sign a temporary restraining order—out. The three thousand six hundred dollar bill was still on her desk. It was either pay it or feed the kids. She checked the TV in the kitchen and the other two, in the office and in her bedroom, obsessively. Her life was in Wall Storage—all of her savings, the money she had hoarded waiting tables and tending bar for five years before she chose Frank “Skip” Cavanagh as her ticket to American citizenship. That decision had not been cold or calculated, but nevertheless she was paying a heavy price for it.
Back in the front office Anna sat at her computer and Googled Matthew Massi, finding a radio talk show host in Sacramento and a math teacher in Binghamton, New York. One fat and bald, the other thin and old. For Joseph Massi she found the same run-of-the-mill types, more of them than she expected. One was a ventriloquist in Los Angeles. This produced one of her rare smiles. Then, toward the last page of Massis, she found a 2003 New York Post article about the discovery of parts of a body in a suitcase in a canal in Brooklyn and the ensuing investigation that led to the identification of the partial corpse as that of Joseph Massi of Bloomfield, New Jersey.
The U.S. Attorney’s Organized Crime Task Force surmises that Massi, a member of the Velardo crime family under suspicion of several gangland slayings, was tortured and then killed by gangland rivals in a dispute over drug territory in Brooklyn.
Below this was a brief obituary, which named Massi’s surviving wife, Rose, his two sons, Christopher and Joseph, Jr., and his grandchildren Theresa and Matthew. There were no pictures.
Anna then opened the accounts folder in her hard drive and found the file for
Massi, Joseph
, whose lease was dated September 1, 2002, and whose address was listed as 15 White Oak Terrace, Bloomfield, New Jersey. In the file cabinet beneath her desk were the manila files where she kept hard copies of all of her accounts. She slid the drawer open, thumbed through until she found
Massi, Joseph
and pulled it out. Clipped to the inside cover was a copy of Mr. Massi’s driver’s license, which contained the photo ID required of all new lessees. There he was, Matt Massi’s grandfather. An assassin. She looked for a long moment into Joseph Massi’s somber, black eyes. She had not yet owned Wall Storage when he rented his unit and so had never met him face-to-face, but she had no doubt he was the real thing, and that his duffle bag held something of grave importance.
What was it? Human bones? Drugs? A million dollars? Another smile.
A close look in the mirror, a couple of smiles.
An internet search
. Matt Massi had done this. The young and handsome Matt Massi, with his dark, grave eyes, thick black hair and confidant smile. And his attitude, one she had not come across before, the air of royalty about him, of a prince born to be a king.
Her thoughts turned from the Massi family to the one she used to have, and from there to the metal box in the bottom drawer of her desk, where she kept the yellowing photographs of her parents and grandparents that were all that remained of her past. She retrieved the box, opened it, and picked up the top picture of her and her father and Chessa together on their porch in the summer of 1988, taken by her grandmother. She remembered clearly, like it was yesterday, the day it was taken and, as she stared, her mind drifted to another day, the one in 1989 when she was ten years old and her life changed forever.
Her father’s old Skoda would not start that morning. It was too far for her to walk to school, and so she was there, in her small second floor bedroom, to hear the hissing of a car on the road that led to her house. Had her father called a neighbor to take her to school? Looking out her window, she saw him splitting wood in the snow-covered front yard, her German Shepherd, Chessa, helping him bring logs to the pile on the front porch. The long black car, the largest she had ever seen, stopped in front of her house. A tall, handsome man, his short hair blond like hers, but with a widow’s peak, got out and walked toward her father. Chessa stiffened and growled and the man drew a pistol from the pocket of his long overcoat and shot her. The rest was a blur, but a blur imprinted on her psyche as if with a chisel on stone: her father raising his arms high, turning to look up at her, staring directly into her eyes before being pushed into the car, the sound of her shoes on the steps as she ran downstairs and then outside, the car receding in the distance, Chessa lying on her side in the snow, breathing hard and fast, taking her last look at the world—at Anna—before she died. Anna’s yellow hair standing on end, her scalp tingling in the cold winter air.