Gods and Fathers Read Free Page A

was never far beneath the surface. Of all the facts of his life, it was the hardest and most durable, almost completely resistant to the softening forces of time and experience, like a rocky outcrop still sharp and jagged, and lethal, though the sea’s waves had broken over it for centuries.
    Matt focused on the photograph again, on the two DeMarco men as they stood next to each other on that day six years ago. He had chosen this picture because he and his son were together and smiling, a rarity. But of course it had been a mistake, wishful thinking. They were not really together, and the smiles were not real smiles. Matt’s was forced, and you could tell, if you looked hard enough, that, lurking beneath his son’s was a smirk. A smirk that had evolved into a more or less permanent sneer as the years passed and the barren ground between them became impassable.
    Next to this picture was one of Matt and his father, taken at Rose Hill on the day Matt graduated from law school in 1986. Seven years later Matt, Sr., who had raised Matt alone in the Gunhill Road neighborhood of the Bronx before buying a small house on City Island, was dead from lung cancer. Like his son and grandson, Matteo DeMarco, Sr., was dark and charismatically handsome, one of the cigarettes that killed him dangling from his half-smiling lips. It was the money that his father left him that had enabled Matt to buy his Pound Ridge house and still keep his small apartment in Manhattan. The guy was a worker, and a fighter, Matt thought, the same half-smile crossing his face for a second, remembering the daily early morning calisthenics and the weekly shooting lessons that were as much a part of his childhood as spelling and math.
    The ringing of his cell phone broke Matt’s brief reverie. He returned the picture of himself and his son to its place on the dresser, and looked at his phone’s screen. The call was from Jon Healy. He thought for a moment, then decided to let it go to voice mail. As he made his way through the living room, Matt was surprised to see Michael in the entry foyer talking to two young men. He had not heard the front doorbell ring, which was not surprising since the rap music, or whatever it was, was still blaring. He was about to turn toward the kitchen, to avoid an introduction, but something about the two men, presumably friends of Michael’s, made him change his mind. They did not look like the pseudo-hip, superficial young men, with their spiked hair, polished fingernails and meticulous, form-fitting clothes that his son usually gravitated toward.
    These two were a bit older, perhaps in their late-twenties. Both wore jeans, expensive leather jackets and the bulky type of shoes that looked like if they kicked you, could do some damage. Both were swarthy, with several days’ growth of black beard. The taller one was balding, his dark eyes heavy-lidded. The shorter one had a crooked nose and a head of thick, black, wiry hair. They seemed civilized enough as they chatted with Michael, smiling at something he was saying, standing casually with their hands in their jacket pockets. But there was a hardness about them, in their eyes and in their bearing—intensity that he knew his unworldly son, eager to be cool, would either be oblivious of or think fascinating—that Matt did not like.
    Neither of them looked at Matt as he entered the foyer. Michael ignored him too for a couple of long and uncomfortable seconds, then turned to greet him.
    “Hi,” he said. “I didn’t know you were home.”
    “My briefcase is on the kitchen counter.”
    “I didn’t see it.”
    “I didn’t know you were coming. Is your mother away?”
    “They’re in St. Moritz.”
    Sometimes Matt’s ex-wife, Debra, and her husband, Basil, let Michael use their Park Avenue apartment when they were away, and he was in town to see his girlfriend, Yasmine, who was a senior at Columbia. Sometimes—for reasons Matt could not quite understand—they didn’t, which