The End Game

by Tod Goldberg

  “I must have.”

  “And the part with the fixed races?”

  “Took me by surprise.”

  “Because I asked you about that and, as I recall, you said it was impossible.”

  “It’s hard to keep up with technology,” Sam said. “Ten, fifteen years ago, you told people they could watch a movie on their telephone they would have sent you to an asylum. It’s a crazy world, Mikey. Ever changing.”

  We rode the rest of the way down in silence, partially because I was waiting for Sam to start explaining to me why he hadn’t told me all of the facts he certainly knew outside the sudden advent of great new technological advances in cheating, and partially because I think Sam was trying to figure out what his answers would be.

  We made it back through the lobby, where we saw a woman who looked a lot like Madonna, and all the way out to the valet station. I was holding strong.

  “Crap, Mikey,” Sam said. “Are you gonna say something?”

  “What would you like me to say?”

  “I don’t know. Something about this being a job for a Delta Force team? Maybe something snide about the amount of information I’d kept on the side. That sort of thing.”

  I had to give it to Sam. He knew me well. “When was the last time you tacked on the open sea, Sam?”

  “It’s been a few years. It all comes right back. You got nothing to worry about, Mikey.”

  “You’re right,” I said, and smiled, because when you can smile instead of scream, it’s always a nice gambit.

  “Once a SEAL,” he said, though he didn’t sound too confident, “always a SEAL. I’ll pick up some deck shoes and we’ll be good to go. Sign me up for the America’s Cup.” Sam turned and looked at the old Art Deco portion of the Setai and then looked back to me with a queer smile on his face. “That Jack Dempsey stuff with you and Nate and your dad. That really happen?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Still,” he said, “pretty good story.”

  “I wanted to go,” I said, “but my dad wouldn’t take me. I don’t even know how old I was. Maybe seven or eight. Young, at any rate. Twenty years later, I’m making a dead drop in that one library in Namibia that had an English-language section and I find Dempsey’s biography just sitting there, like it’s been waiting for me all that time. I didn’t have a Namibian library card, so I’m afraid I stole it.”

  “Namibia was a nice place,” Sam said.

  “If you like imploding tungsten mines.”

  “I find the smell of burning tungsten mines very relaxing.”

  “Not from the inside,” I said.

  The valet brought Sam’s buddy’s car around.

  “What’s different about my car?” Sam said.

  “It’s not actually your car,” I said. “And it looks like they washed it.”

  Sam seemed duly impressed and compensated the valet for the cleaning by handing him five whole American dollars before we got in and drove off.

  “Tell me something, Sam: Do you trust Gennaro?”

  “Sure, Mikey,” Sam said. “You saw the look on his face. I don’t think you fake that kind of desperation.”

  Sam was probably right, but something was eating at me about the whole situation. A point that wasn’t clear yet.

  “Tomorrow, see if you can get some information on the Web site and any communications coming into his room.”

  “Sure. Buddy of mine can probably get the records for all the incoming calls. Might be interesting to see who’s been calling Madonna, too.”

  “Let’s just keep it focused on Gennaro,” I said.

  Sam agreed by grunting, so I expected to get a full report on Madonna’s movements nonetheless.

  Another thought occurred to me. “Do you happen to know anyone in town trying to sell plutonium?” I said.

  “Not unless Bin Laden’s on Spring Break,” Sam said. “Why, you looking to take out Canada once and for all?”

  “Fi said an old friend was in town,” I said. “Just wanted to, you know, see if you’d heard anything.”

  “A few years from now, when you two are living behind a nice steel-enforced white picket fence at some secure location, you’ll look back on this period of your life and laugh,” Sam said. The funny thing was that he didn’t say it with the slightest bit of irony.

  5

  When you’re planning a clandestine operation, it’s wise to keep your team small. People tend to notice fifteen men in body armor storming an embassy, so if you need to kill someone, steal something or map out a location for a future action, it’s better to go alone if you can. Someone to watch your back and someone to guard your flank are helpful, but if you want to be sure a job gets done right, it’s best to do it by yourself.

  Less margin of error, which means less chance someone goes home in a coffin, and less chance that you’ll be on Al Jazeera with a canvas bag over your head.

  No one looks good with his head in a canvas bag.

  The same rules apply to fixing a sporting event. There’s nothing easy about fixing a match that involves the complicity of more than one person. Two men in a ring savagely beating each other is easy to control. Find the fighter with the Jell-O-like moral center and make your pitch. Give anyone enough money and it isn’t difficult to convince them to stay on the ground after being hit in the face.

  Try convincing nine men to throw a baseball game and you’ll be lucky to get out alive. Same with hockey, basketball or football. You want to avoid angering men with bats or sticks or elbows sharpened on human skulls. As general policy, you also want to avoid situations where you’re outsized by two or more feet and several hundred pounds by men who like to get hurt for fun.

  So if you want to fix a team sport, you should try to shave points. This is easier than getting a team to win or lose and it requires only one person who plays a pivotal role to be desperate and stupid, versus an entire squad. So if you’re Joe Quarterback or Jack Point Guard and you’ve found yourself in deep with the Russian Mafia, you might be inclined to throw an interception or brick a free throw or two to preserve the point spread (and your kneecaps) at the end of a game. And if you’re lucky, your team still wins and you can sleep at night with only one Ambien instead of two.

  In sports, however, there’s also the inevitable entrance of luck. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just luck itself. A terrible shot somehow finds its mark. An intercepted football gets fumbled back into the hands of the offensive team. If you’re a spy and have been sent to Azerbaijan to kill an arms dealer and miss when you shoot him, it’s unlikely you’ll be around to tell the story of how luck interceded, particularly if your head is in a canvas bag, with or without the rest of your body.

  So if you’re really invested in subterfuge as a profession, you want to find a sport that doesn’t rely on any kind of points or any kind of luck. A sport that exists on an equal playing field, where wins and losses are calculated by human error, machinery and the unpredictable aspect of nature. Like horse racing. Betting on animals is stupid. They’re animals. They don’t know what they’re doing. But at least the playing field is even, since none of the horses is any more sentient than the other. And because they are animals, they can’t rat you out. Or NASCAR. The advent of the restrictor plate means that engine power became uniform in many of the races, or at least the races you’d want to fix, like Daytona and Talladega. Betting on cars is just as stupid as betting on animals, since they tend to break down, crash and then blow up and kill people, which frequently requires investigation. But cars don’t speak, either, which means you can disable one without anyone ever knowing, particularly if you are at least somewhat adept with remote devices. And provided no one is immolated in the process, you might just get away with it, too.

  Or boat racing. In a regatta, like the one the Pax Bellicosa was about to run in, all the yachts are precisely the same, Swan 45s, sleek racing yachts with towering sails totaling more than 1,400 feet of mainsail and jib. With the machinery uniform, you fix a
race not by tweaking the system, but by altering-or failing to perform-the subtle duties of the people on the boat, none more so than the helmsman.

  Gennaro’s job.

  Think of a helmsman like a quarterback, but one who not only knows how to throw a tight spiral and read defenses, but also has an intimate relationship with wind currents and retrograde velocity. The helmsman doesn’t simply pilot the boat and direct the other members of the team; he interprets the elements.

  The other men on the boat can effect change, too. It can be as simple as reacting a few moments late on an order, carrying more weight on your person than expected, or, if need be, falling overboard.

  If you need to make a lot of money fast-and that means illegally-you want to avoid the ponies and cars, since both are bet on regularly without criminal involvement, and both are so deeply regulated that trying to muscle in to affect a race of any significance is simply not worth the time and effort. It would take less time to heist a casino.

  But the international regatta world is different. The players-the people who own the yachts-are millionaires and billionaires, which means that most of the fans are of a similar caste. Instead of a league like the NFL, yacht racing is frequently proctored, at least overseas, by the luxury corporations. Makers of watches, fine wines and cars advertise at these events to suggest a way of life. In addition to the races, these corporations run a week of events catering to every desire of the fan base. This means fashion shows, wine tastings, seminars where Warren Buffett comes in and talks about how to fold money properly-things like that.

  According to that morning’s Miami Herald, for the next week the inhabitants of South Beach would be worth collectively more than the GNP of Honduras. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me, then, when I picked up Fiona and found her in a more chipper mood than the day previous, particularly after I filled her in on the latest job I’d found myself party to.

  “You don’t intend to pretend that you don’t require payment again, do you?” she asked. We were in the Charger heading toward my mother’s house. I thought bringing Fi with me on the drive of shame back to my mother’s house would make it less awful. I didn’t really want to go and fight with my mother, but the longer I waited to drop off her gifts, the more likely I was to take them apart and use them for something else. Ever find yourself imprisoned in your home and need to make an IED? Turning a slow cooker into a bomb takes only a few household cleaning items, a bit of foam from an old ice chest and, if you’re looking to really hurt someone, a handful of paper clips, or, in a pinch, the zipper from your pants.

  I also figured that if I had Fiona with me, two things might happen: I’d attempt to be more civil in the face of the now-vivid memories I had of my leg encased in plaster, and I’d be able to use her as an excuse to get out of recaulking the fireplace or cutting a cord of wood for the frigid spring months, or shoving my hand into the disposal again to fish out calcified animal fat.

  “Sam was working on the financial end,” I said.

  “And to think your government used to trust you,” she said.

  “The job came through a contact of Sam’s,” I said.

  “So now there’s a finder’s-keepers rule?”

  “Whatever you need will be covered, Fi,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re coming out of this with your own catamaran. Just because these people have money doesn’t mean anything.”

  I never liked taking money. It made this all feel like a job, like something I was now doing permanently versus doing to keep my skills up, or to bide time, or simply because it was the right thing to do. You’re employed by the people when you’re a spy, even if they aren’t aware of it most of the time, and my feeling was that once I figured out my burn notice, I’d be paid back.

  But, just the same, I have to eat. And Fi needs shoes and purses and that lipstick that makes her lips look irresistible, and I’d prefer she made money with me instead of selling guns or picking up jobs for bounty hunters and such.

  Even if we weren’t together as in together, life was still fundamentally more interesting with Fiona in the frame.

  “I once owned a yacht, I’ll have you know,” Fi said.

  “Owned?”

  “Possessed might be a better word,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means for about a month I managed to live on one off the coast of Montenegro, fully staffed, even had a girl who came in and fluffed the pillows and a small boy who would come in at night-fall with a plate of cookies and chocolates.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “The owners came out of their comas.”

  “That happens,” I said.

  Fiona had the dossier from Sam’s friend Jimenez and was flipping through it absently. Fi has always been more of a read-and-react kind of girl versus the type to do in-depth critical analysis, which means she’s best on her feet with a gun or an M-19 grenade launcher or just her fists, using her experience as a guide instead of doctrine.

  “He’s cute,” Fi said. I looked over and saw the photo of Gennaro with Bonaventura.

  “Which one?”

  “The gentleman in the fifteen-thousand-dollar suit.”

  “That’s Christopher Bonaventura.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s one of our problems.”

  “He doesn’t look like much. He has a manicure in this photo. I’ve never liked a man who cared for his nails.”

  “I’m going to guess that he has a staff who digs the graves and dumps the people in them.”

  “Gennaro seems below his pay grade.”

  I explained to Fiona that when you get down to the working level of the yacht-racing business, after Rolex lays out their cash for their race and Ferrari theirs, much of the hard work, the swinging of hammers, the actual running of the show, falls into other hands: the mafia. Not even the America’s Cup could avoid a scandal a few years ago when the race was held in the Sicilian port city of Trapani and lucrative deals were cut with government officials for the Cosa Nostra to gain huge windfalls of cash, both in construction contracts and, just for kicks, the nebulous realm of “entertainment.”

  You have two choices if you want to place major action on a yacht race. You can either shout across your bow at the captain of international industry anchored just adjacent to you, or you make a call to someone like Christopher Bonaventura. Bonaventura-or someone like him, since there are a hundred men just like him in Miami alone, never mind Italy-will give odds and take proposition wagers, and will treat you like the king you might very well be. If you’re a billionaire, dealing with someone like Bonaventura isn’t really like getting yourself involved in organized crime, since in your case, it’s truly a victimless crime. You win, he pays. You lose, you pay. No one ends up getting their legs broken. It’s a world of high-stakes betting by people who can afford to lose.

  Which made figuring out who was pressuring Gennaro all the more difficult.

  Kidnapping an heiress and her daughter in order to ensure a race’s outcome is like setting fire to the Amazon to make s’mores: It would work, but it’s a might excessive.

  “I’ve never understood why anyone bothers with kidnappings anymore,” Fiona said. “They so rarely work and then there’s all that care and feeding that must take place so your captive doesn’t die before you’re ready to kill them. Or, worse, they have a heart attack or a stroke and you’re left with some dreadful mess.”

  “You’re a tender person, Fi,” I said.

  “Seriously, Michael, if you are the type of person to kidnap someone, you’re ill equipped to care for your captive, which is only going to lead to bigger problems. It’s so much easier to just do identity theft these days. You never have to worry about some sweating, crying child making a mess on your sofa or in the trunk of your car.”

  “You should film a public service announcement,” I said.

  “Would you want to spoon-feed some terrified person? Walk them to the bathroom? Beat them if you ha
ve to, which, as I think you can attest, is not as much fun as it seems? No, thank you,” she said.

  “Anyway,” I said, “in this case, as of right now, Maria and Liz don’t know any different. They’re somewhere in the Atlantic, eating lobster off Wedgwood.”

  “That’s a lot of trouble just to get some money.”

  “But that’s the thing. If they wanted money, they could have yanked the diamonds out of Maria’s ears. There’s something else here.”

  Fi was still looking at the photo of Bonaventura. “Am I going to get to play with him?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “That is a lovely suit.”

  “Fi.”

  “I’m just saying, Michael, that if given the chance and I need to execute him, we might remember to ask him for his tailor’s name before he expires.”

  We pulled up in front of my mother’s house. She was standing on the front porch, smoking and talking to a woman who looked vaguely familiar, in the way that many old women in Florida look vaguely familiar: She was wearing a white blouse that had a lovely multicolored pelican stitched over the right breast pocket, her hair was somewhere between blond and the color of an old French horn and was done in such a way that it looked strangely translucent. Even from the car, I could see that her lips had a lacquering of bloodred lipstick. She looked like a person wearing a Halloween costume of an Old Woman from Florida.

  “Who is that?” I asked Fiona, since over the course of the last several months she’d gotten to know many of my mother’s friends by virtue of attending Ma’s weekly poker nights, the cooking course they took together and, frighteningly, for a time, a silent movie night at the Luart Theatre.

  “That could be Esther,” Fiona said. “But I don’t think Esther would wear a pelican. She’s always struck me as more of a seagull or egret type. So it might also be Doris. Or Cloris. They’re sisters. Neither can bluff. But they play the river like pirates.”

  “Why does she look like that?”