The End Game

by Tod Goldberg

  “Oh, Michael,” she said, “you shouldn’t have.”

  “It was nothing,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “It was just so unexpected,” she said. She was still holding on to me as I tried to get to a seat at the table, so I sort of had to drag her a bit. “So thoughtful! How did you remember my favorite flowers?”

  I looked down at the vase. It overflowed with pink lilies, a burst of yellow sunflowers and a sprinkling of light blue irises. “I don’t know,” I said, but then I saw the card affixed to the vase. It said, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, MICHAEL & NATE.

  “Oh, it’s perfect,” she said. “Such a surprise. I had to bring it from home so Fiona could see it. Isn’t it lovely, Fiona? Isn’t it a wonderful surprise? I didn’t think he’d remember now that he’s home.”

  “It sure is,” Fi said.

  When you’re not a spy anymore, it’s important to sometimes expect the best of people, even when past history suggests otherwise, because you might just find yourself pleasantly surprised by the actions of people like your dumb little brother, who maybe isn’t so dumb after all.

  After a lunch consisting of Fiona quizzing my mother about the number of childhood friends and girlfriends I had (“I remember a neighbor girl named Julie Quint,” Mom told her, which got Fi excited until I reminded my mother that the Quints moved while I was still in preschool, and then she mentioned three friends, including Andre, who were currently guests of the state of Florida), I decided to wait until after we ordered dessert to bring up the uninvited appearance of Davey Harris in my life, or at least in the Target I frequent.

  “Ma,” I said, “I can’t stress this enough. You can’t keep telling people your son the spy is home.”

  “I don’t see why not,” she said, “no one believes me, anyway.”

  “There’s a reason I didn’t tell you what I was doing all those years. You’ve seen enough now to know that it’s not a thing to play with. So if someone asks what I do for a living, just tell them I’m in sales. Retail. Import. Export.”

  “I hate to lie, Michael,” she said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since always.”

  “Well, then, just pretend. You don’t have a sudden moral opposition to pretending, do you?”

  “You used to love pretending.”

  “When you do it for a living,” I said, “it becomes a little less fun. Just, please, avoid the subject of what I do. Or did. We’ll all be safer.”

  A sprightly dressed waiter dropped off a plate of chocolate cake for my mother, another mudslide for Fi and a squirt of frozen yogurt for me. For a time, we ate in silence. It felt nice. I hoped I’d essentially put a cap on the issue and we could all live our lives in perfect happiness for another thirty minutes, or at least the amount of time it took me to meet up with Sam and find out what job he’d conscripted me into.

  “Did he play dress-up?” Fi asked my mother.

  “Here we go,” I said.

  “There was a time when he was twelve that he pretended for a week to have a broken leg,” Ma said. “Limped everywhere he went.”

  “You made me do that,” I said.

  “How could I make you pretend to have a broken leg? That’s just crazy, Michael.”

  “Well, Ma, as I recall, you ended up getting the TG amp;Y to give you a couple hundred bucks in store credit, since you claimed one of their shopping carts malfunctioned and ran me over.”

  My mother gets a nice blush of red in her face when she’s angry. At that moment, she looked like an apple. “That’s asinine,” she said, but there wasn’t much behind it, and she immediately began shoveling cake into her mouth.

  “And didn’t Nate ‘pretend’ to have a broken wrist, too?”

  “You know, Michael, I was just trying to do my best to raise you two. If my methods were unconventional, I’m sorry.”

  “Unconventional? You had my leg put into a cast.”

  “And all of your friends signed it,” she said. “It was wonderful for your self-confidence.”

  “Didn’t we just determine that I didn’t have any friends, Ma?” I said.

  “I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette.” My mother stood up, grabbed her purse and tucked her vase in the crook of her arm. “You can ruin someone else’s Mother’s Day if you like, but you’re not going to ruin mine.”

  I leaned back in my chair and finished off my frozen yogurt, aware that Fiona was glaring at me. “What?” I said, finally.

  “You’re just going to let her stand out there?”

  “She put my leg in a cast, Fi,” I said.

  “When you were twelve.”

  “Exactly.”

  Fi grabbed my elbow. Hard. “And I could put your arm in one now,” she said.

  Sometimes Fiona’s violent streak is cute. Sometimes it’s just violent. This was the latter. “Fine,” I said, but by the time I got outside, Ma was already gone. And I hadn’t even had the chance to give her the Crock-Pot and toaster oven yet.

  3

  One of the benefits of covert ops is that money is never an issue. If you’re having dinner with Chadian Aozou rebel leaders in Southern Libya and you set your Visa down, there’s never any concern that you won’t have enough room on your card to cover the bill. If you must purchase a decommissioned Soviet-era tank to ease tensions among opposing warlords in the Sudan, there’s never a call to your bank to check your credit rating. If you need to get your hands on a million dollars to pay off someone and that someone isn’t going to turn around and bomb U.S. interests, you don’t have to wait five business days for the funds to clear your bank.

  When you’ve been burned and you have to worry about the price of detergent and the sudden rise in dairy costs affecting your yogurt consumption, making sure you have a steady cash stream takes on new importance.

  Something Sam knows all too well, which is why I wasn’t exactly bamboozled when he told me about the client he’d met with earlier in the day.

  “Thing of it is, Mike,” he said, “this is the kind of job I literally could do on my own without a problem, but I’ve been reading the newspapers lately and I’m not afraid to say that, for those working freelance, the outlook is pretty bleak.”

  “Funny,” I said, “I didn’t see any stories in the Herald detailing the plight of the out of work spy.”

  We’d been sitting on the Carlito’s patio for a little more than twenty minutes, largely making idle chatter, which is how Sam warms up before breaking bad news to me. So we’d already covered my shopping adventure at Target, the exploding ship and my exploding mother, which brought us to the job at hand. There was a thin manila file on the table that Sam hadn’t mentioned yet.

  “Well, you gotta read between the lines,” Sam said. “You can’t trust that the media is going to say the exact truth. Little propaganda here, little propaganda there, keeps people on an even keel. Price of gas, for instance. Prime indicator of tough financial times ahead in the industry, my friend. Even your average drug smuggler or arms guy is going to take a long look at the ledger before he decides to make the Atlantic run with a bunch of cargo.”

  “I get it, Sam,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, you never know where your next dollar might come from.”

  This already sounded bad. “But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”

  Sam plucked an oyster from the bowl in front of him and then took a long sip from a bottle of Stella. “How do you feel about boats?”

  “That depends, Sam. Are they blowing up?”

  “Of course not,” Sam said.

  “Because I saw a really nice yacht turned into slivers today and I don’t have a pressing desire to be involved in that sort of thing.”

  “Thing of it is,” Sam said, “a friend referred me to a gentleman in the Italian yacht industry who has a rather significant problem.”

  “The Italian yacht industry?”

  “Yes,” Sam said.

  “Didn’t I tell you that I wasn
’t interested in Mob business?”

  “This isn’t the Mob,” Sam said, but he said it in such a way that I sensed there was some semantic interpretation at work.

  “I have no desire to enter into some squabble with Cosa Nostra,” I said. “The Outfit. Cosca. The Family. Whatever word you want to use. You’re talking about two hundred years of pissed-off people. They are not my problem.”

  “It’s not that yacht industry,” Sam said.

  “No?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “What yacht industry do you think I’m speaking of?”

  Sam pondered this for a moment. “The one that takes place at the shipyards. Right?”

  “Who is the friend?” I asked. This was important. Many of Sam’s friends in the past were actually people who were friends with his former girlfriend Veronica, which meant they had some problem that could only be solved to my near peril. Other friends of his were people who lived in that nebulous territory between smuggler and outright pirate, and who’d found themselves in situations requiring backup. And others still were people who bought him drinks when he was low on cash and learned his long and sordid history and figured he might be able to help them avoid violent exes, shylocks, bookies, unpleasant organized solicitors upon their businesses and other sundry unpleasant societal ills.

  No one ever needed a cat rescued from a tree.

  No one ever needed someone to give their son a stern talking-to about fireworks.

  No one ever needed a guy to water their plants and watch their poodle, even.

  “Maybe friend is a bit of a stretch,” Sam said. “A guy I know from a thing I did in Latvia a few years ago-let’s just say it was totally legal within the constructs of common treaties currently in place-has a small business venture whereby certain people come to him looking for help with projects that require sensitivity and care in the retrieval of certain products or persons. A former client of his contacted him today in relation to an event of a dangerous nature.”

  “So,” I said, “a mercenary?”

  “Essentially,” Sam said.

  “If he’s so good,” I said, “why did he need to come to you with things of a ‘dangerous nature’?”

  “This job is a little out of his area of expertise.”

  On the beach, people were playing volleyball, tossing Frisbees, applying suntan lotion. A bank of thick gray clouds lined the horizon, making me think that a storm might be coming, or if it were like any other Miami afternoon, they’d just sit out there all day as if to let everyone know that somewhere else people had it just slightly worse.

  I sighed. It was better than speaking.

  “And my friend isn’t technically allowed in America,” Sam said.

  I sighed again. This one was meant to convey a sense of quiet resignation tinged with muddled anger.

  “Now, Mikey,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t have agreed to take this job if it didn’t seem like something you could do with your eyes closed. You wouldn’t even need to take off your sunglasses.”

  “Where is this client?”

  “He’s staying at the Setai,” Sam said.

  The Setai is the most expensive hotel in South Beach. It’s the kind of hotel you stay in when you want people to know that money means nothing to you, but not in the frugal sense. Odds are that if you’re staying at the Setai, you don’t have a Crock-Pot and a toaster oven in your trunk, you didn’t have lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s and your problems are not the kind that can be solved with your sunglasses on.

  “Who is this person? One of the Medicis?”

  Sam cleared his throat, “Gennaro Stefania.” He waited, as if I might suddenly bolt from the table, or pass out, or have any response at all.

  “That supposed to mean something to me?”

  “At any time in the last ten years did you pick up a magazine with an actress or model on the cover?”

  “No.”

  “People?”

  “No.”

  “You are aware such magazines exist?”

  “I am aware that I’m about thirty seconds from going home.”

  Sam slid the manila file folder toward me. I opened it and saw a photo of a man on the deck of a catamaran cutting through rough seas. There were other men surrounding him, but for reasons unknown their faces were pixelated. The man looked to be about forty, athletic, his arms long and sinewy with muscle, like a runner’s. He was handsome in a regular way, which is to say he didn’t look like a model, just your average alpha male: an angular face, deep-set green eyes, wavy brown hair.

  I turned the page and saw a word that immediately made me close the file: Ottone.

  The Ottones were a family made for tabloid journalism. They were nineteenth-century money that had migrated from land wealth in the Old World to the currency of luxury: the Lux, a two- seater sports car modeled after their Formula One racecars, which became quickly favored in the 1970s by men on their way to the disco and the women who loved them, in the ’80s by would-be investment bankers and the women who held their cocaine and hair gel, in the ’90s by midlife-crisis humans of all sexes who didn’t realize they weren’t driving Porches. In the twenty-first century, they sold their car line to Ford and began a full-throttle investment into opulence: clothing lines, jewelry, watches, fragrance, casino properties. They added their name to anything that connoted the good life, including Fashion Week in Milan, tennis tournaments and golf opens in Dubai, polo in England, open-wheel racing in Monte Carlo, nightclubs in New York and Los Angeles that attracted people who merely wanted to be near the kind of money they’d never earn. In a few years people would think Ottone was just another word, not a proper name.

  And with all of that, of course, comes scandal. Mistresses, drug addictions, deaths-the sorts of things that happen to normal people all the time but that are heightened by a place in world society.

  A place I was not interested in being a part of.

  A place Gennaro Stefania was connected with by virtue of being married to Maria Ottone, which was a little like being married to the key to Fort Knox.

  A place that invariably led to publicity. Not what a burned spy craves, ironically.

  “Not interested,” I said, and slid the file back to Sam.

  “His family is in peril,” Sam said. His voice was serious, but I could tell that he’d practiced that line. Peril wasn’t a word that rolled off Sam’s tongue.

  “Isn’t that the sort of thing that would be on the news by now?”

  “It’s complicated,” Sam said.

  “This is not something I can do with my sunglasses on, Sam, I can tell you that already.”

  “It’ll be a piece of cake,” Sam said, “trust me.” He swallowed the last of his Stella and stood up.

  “You going somewhere?”

  “We’re already late,” Sam said. “You think you could call your brother and see if he could pick us up? Can’t exactly pull up to the Setai in the Charger, you know? You mind?”

  “I do mind,” I said.

  “He’s a good kid,” Sam said.

  “He’s not a kid, Sam,” I said. “He’s an actual adult. You really want him parked in front of that hotel while we meet with your client?”

  Sam thought about that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “That shouldn’t be the baseline consideration,” I said.

  Sam pulled out his phone. “Let me see if I can get a buddy of mine to loan us something appropriate.”

  The difference between being wealthy and being rich isn’t so much a question of dollars and cents as it is an understanding of levels. When you’re rich, you might have a vacation house in Sun Valley or the Hamptons, might have a Bentley or two, might have a photo of yourself with the president on the wall of your office. Maybe you’re a lawyer or a doctor, or you invented doubled-sided tape and thus have a net worth in the millions of dollars earned off your own hard work and expertise and invention.

  You’re rich.

  When you’re wealthy,
you don’t have a second home, you have a second island, the president or premier or king or violent despot is probably in your pocket (particularly in certain OPEC nations) and you probably don’t have to worry about punching a clock, since the other key difference is that wealth perpetuates wealth generationally-so that men like petrochemical scions Mukesh and Anil Ambani don’t need to create anything new whatsoever; they just need to wait for their parents to die, and even if they end up feuding and suing each other and breaking apart the companies they inherited, they still both end up being worth more than $40 billion each. Not a bad day’s work, if you can get it.

  You’re wealthy.

  The other option toward untold wealth, particularly if you don’t want to work terribly hard for it, is age-old and difficult to ever understand completely: love. People have married for much less than a billion dollars, but in the case of Gennaro Stefania, most people figured it was the billions, not love, which led to his romance and eventual marriage to Maria Ottone a little more than a decade ago.

  I was in the passenger’s seat of Sam’s buddy’s car-a BMW that smelled like people had been having sex in it, regularly, and in all of the seats-reading through Gennaro’s file again as we made our way to the Setai. I was trying to figure out why someone like him would need someone like me, but, more than that, why he might have needed someone like Sam’s nebulous friend, particularly a nebulous friend who would provide such an extensive dossier, which detailed his life in familiar CIA-speak and description and detail.

  “Your friend,” I said. “What did he do for Gennaro before?”

  “Security mostly,” Sam said.

  “Security like he protected him, or security like he hid bodies for him?”

  “Security like he helped him out of a problem with some undesirables. It’s on page six.”

  One thing I knew for certain was that marrying into the Ottone clan was no easy bargain, money or not. But especially not for someone like Gennaro, who wasn’t exactly Italian royalty. He was the American-born son of Victor Stefania, who’d raced for the Ottone’s Formula One team in the ’60s and ’70s and died in a fiery crash I remembered watching with my dad on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I could still hear Jim McKay announcing the race, the slow-motion replays of the car flipping over the grassy midfield of some foreign track before turning supernova. “That’s the agony of defeat,” my dad said then, which says a lot about Dad.