by Tod Goldberg
“Whatever you want, Nate,” I said, but then thought better of it, lest he actually wear whatever he wanted. “Anything but white. And wear a tie.” I told him to pick us up from the Setai in two hours.
“I think you’re forgetting something.”
It was true. I was forgetting lots of things. Forgetting the time when we were kids and he thought it would be funny to set the fire station on fire. Forgetting the time he threw a phone book at my head. Forgetting the times I’ve done jobs for him that invariably involved me nearly getting killed by Russian crime syndicates.
“Why don’t you enlighten me,” I said.
“A thank-you would be nice,” he said.
Ma.
“Oh, right, sorry, Nate,” I said. “I owe you for yesterday.”
“And the last decade or so.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
“Good. Your half of the flowers was fifty dollars. Times that by ten years and I’ll call it even for standing around silently for you today,” he said, and hung up.
I apprised Nate of the situation at hand while he drove his limo from the hotel to Key Biscayne. I was going to let Christopher Bonaventura know that Gennaro was working with us and that his sporting interests were now over.
“What’s my name?” Nate asked.
“How about Nate?” I said.
“That’s not working. If I’m going to be some henchman, I need a henchman name. Three-Finger Frank or something.”
“You understand that Mafia guys get their names from their actions or physical descriptions, right? It’s not some arbitrary name to scare people.”
“Yeah?”
“So if you want me to call yourself Three-Finger Frank,” I said, “you’re going to need to lose some fingers.”
Nate went silent. I looked in the rearview mirror to see how Gennaro was handling this. He looked stricken.
“This is going to work out fine, Gennaro,” I said. “Just do what I say and we’ll have one problem eliminated.”
“You don’t know Christopher,” Gennaro said.
“I know people much worse than him,” I said. Gennaro shook his head slightly, like he was trying to move things around in it until they made sense again.
My plan was simple, which was perhaps why Gennaro seemed so grave: tell Bonaventura that Gennaro was now in my pocket and that if he had any side business with him, aware or otherwise, it would have to come through me, too. Three things could come from this:
1. Bonaventura would agree and then try to have me killed.
2. Bonaventura would disagree and then try to have me killed.
3. Bonaventura would ask to go into business with me, I’d agree, and then he’d probably try to have me killed.
What I knew without a doubt, however, was that he wouldn’t kill me right where I stood, particularly not with Gennaro standing beside me. And by the time he did decide to kill me, we’d have figured out the root system here, which likely would mean that Christopher Bonaventura would have larger problems.
“When I was in school,” Gennaro said, “Christopher protected me. Someone came at me, he dealt with them. Maybe he just feels like he’s still helping me, even if I don’t want the help.”
“This isn’t high school,” I said. “And I have to think that if Christopher is now all about the altruism, he wouldn’t have blown up that yacht yesterday.”
We were already on Key Biscayne at this point and the cars surrounding us in traffic were filled with people driving back home from work, kids getting picked up from day care, families heading off to dinner.
When you see Miami on television, it’s always bikinis and diamonds and flashy cars. It’s cops and crooks and bags of cocaine. But in real life, people actually live in Miami, raise families, work nine to five, and try to give normal life a go.
Regular people.
Regular cars.
Regular problems.
It seemed like a long time since my problems-and the problems of the people I encountered-weren’t literally life-and-death.
It was also a million miles away from Gennaro Stefania’s situation. Here was a man whose wife and child we’re kidnapped and no one knew, not even the wife and child.
“I just don’t understand any of this,” Gennaro said.
“You have any idea why your stepfather would want to see Maria dead?” I asked.
“Maria? No. No. He adores her. He adores Liz. He wants for nothing.”
“What do you think he was doing meeting with Christopher?”
Gennaro shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “They are familiar with each other, but if we were in Italy he wouldn’t be seen within a hundred miles of him. The paparazzi would devour him for it.”
There was something else. Something Gennaro didn’t know. Something, hopefully, we’d find out after Sam got done at the hotel, where he was busy putting eyes and ears on Dinino’s Internet activities.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said. I was trying to sound hopeful, and for a few seconds of silence, maybe it worked.
And then Nate said, “How about Slade?” as if we were still talking about the slate of imaginary names he was considering. Which, apparently, to him, we were.
“You want me to call you Slade?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s right with that?”
“Look,” Nate said, “if I’m going into this, I gotta know who I am. Strong, silent, cool, I’m with that. But if I need to flex, I should have a name at the ready. What if I get captured? You want me to just blurt out my name and address and social security number?”
Flex? At some point, Nate started picking up words from gangster rap and movies where people turn their guns sideways to shoot each other.
“We’re not invading Iran,” I said. “No one is going to capture you.”
“What’s your cover?”
Sam had a buddy of his dummy up some street credentials for me-which means, essentially, if anyone goes looking for information on Tommy the Ice Pick, they’re likely to hear he’s Las Vegas mafia with Chicago backing. The Sicilians think of the American mafia, if they’re not from the original five families, like perpetual rookies. For someone like Bonaventura, the mere idea of checking me out would be admitting that he’d lost a notch.
“Tommy,” I said.
“Just Tommy?”
I didn’t want to tell Nate about the Ice Pick part and I didn’t really want Gennaro to hear it, either. He was already sweating.
“From Vegas.”
“Tommy from Vegas?”
“Right,” I said.
“So we’re in from Las Vegas. Muscling into this action. Getting our piece.” Nate was near giddy.
I turned around and looked at Gennaro. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “He won’t be speaking.”
It was just after five when we pulled up to Bonaventura’s gate. There were still a good half-dozen men on the other side of it. When they saw us pull up, they opened the gate and one of the men walked up to the car and tapped on the driver’s window.
“You’re at the wrong place,” the man said. Sam was right: He looked like a Marine. Even the way he was standing, like he was trying to figure out how to kick down the door of the limo and start shooting.
Surprisingly, Nate just stared forward and didn’t speak.
“I got Gennaro Stefania in the back to see the big guy,” I said. I was staring forward, too. Just a profile with sunglasses.
The man craned his head into the car and made out Gennaro in the back.
“You weren’t expected today, Mr. Stefania,” he said.
“I didn’t know I was coming,” Gennaro said, just as I told him to say. Whatever questions anyone had, his answer was the same: He didn’t know.
“I can let you in,” the man said, “but your detail has to stay out here. That’s orders.”
“We’re not his detail,” I said. “You tell the big guy that Tommy the Ice Pick is out here, and eithe
r he lets us in with Mr. Stefania or we start removing Mr. Stefania’s nonvital organs.” I pulled my sunglasses down and turned to face the guard. Let him see my face. Let him see my eyes. Let him know I wasn’t scared in the least. “You know what the spleen does, Jarhead? Does it have an actual purpose? Because that’s the only detail you might want to consider.”
The guard kept his eyes on me but didn’t show any emotion. “One moment,” he said, and walked back through the gate, shutting it behind him.
“Tommy the Ice Pick?” Nate said.
“Tommy Two Toes doesn’t exactly scare people,” I said. The guards were clustered behind the gate now and were checking their guns and readjusting their Kevlar.
Not a good sign.
“Is this going to work?” Gennaro said.
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s the protocol if they start shooting?” Nate said.
“They’re not going to start shooting,” I said. Though I wasn’t 100 percent certain of that declaration, it seemed reasonable to me that a firefight on the most expensive street in Key Biscayne would probably bring the kind of bad publicity people tend to shun, even people like Christopher Bonaventura, at least while on American soil.
Jarhead stepped away from the group and talked into his Bluetooth for a moment. He nodded twice. He turned and stared at the car. From his facial expressions, you’d think he was trying to decide whether he wanted a latte or a mocha. I could tell he was concentrating, but that he was also assessing the entire situation going on around him.
This was not his most difficult experience involving cars, men and guns. You could almost see him standing in Kabul at a roadblock. The funny thing is that I had the odd sense that I had seen him in Kabul.
Not funny like it was amusing, but funny like I was starting to wonder if I was walking into something much larger than myself.
A few moments later, Jarhead stepped back through the gate and stood by Nate’s window. “Thank you for your patience,” he said, his voice flat; friendly even. He looked from Nate to me-maybe a moment longer on me-and then back toward Gennaro. Made eye contact with each of us, let us know he was in control of the situation. “Mr. Bonaventura would be happy to meet any friends of Mr. Stefania’s. However, you pull through this gate and make a single move I determine to be threatening? We will light you the fuck up. We understand?”
I had to hand it to Jarhead. He knew how to play the game. “That’s what I like to hear!” I pounded my hands on the dashboard. “You get tired of this yes-man shit, you got a job with Tommy the Ice Pick, Jarhead.” His eyes flickered slightly. Either he didn’t like being called Jarhead or he was silently filing away my name. Either way was fine with me. “Let me correct myself: Mr. Jarhead,” I said, and put up my hands. “No disrespect. Don’t light us the fuck up, okay?”
Jarhead didn’t say another word. He just stepped away from the window and waved open the gates.
“Nice guy,” Nate said after he put his window back up.
“That’s why I don’t want you talking,” I said.
Surprisingly, Nate didn’t argue the point. Maybe it was because we were pulling past the phalanx of guards, each of whom looked at us with nothing short of boredom in their eyes, which was a touch disconcerting since they had their guns pointed at us, too. Jarhead and two other men followed behind us in a golf cart.
“I didn’t think the Mafia hired out,” Nate said.
“It’s a recent development,” I said.
If you’re a decent crime boss, invested in staying a crime boss who rules from a mansion, not a prison cell, you take note of changes in law enforcement. It used to be easy to kill off your competition by bashing them to death with a phone and then burying them in a field somewhere or tossing them into a river.
That was before DNA testing and the advent of forensic crime scene investigation.
Beat someone to death with a phone and you’re going to leave a million clues for investigators, everything from skin cells to hair fibers to microscopic bits of plastic that contain their own fingerprints from their production cycle. Hit someone on the back of the head with an old rotary-dial phone and forensic experts will be able to trace one slice of plastic molding all the way back to the day it was poured.
Beat someone with your fists and you might as well just leave your social security number on the body, too.
Likewise, if you dig a grave in a cornfield, you’re going to leave footprints and fingerprints and hair follicles and skin cells from your car all the way to the grave, and unless you’re wearing a hazmat suit, there’s an excellent chance you’ll drop fibers from your car, your home, your victim’s clothing and your Doberman’s chew toy along with it all.
If you want to kill someone these days and want to avoid capture, you hire a professional.
Not a hit man.
A professional. Trained by the government in espionage and assassination. A person who not only knows how to kill but knows how not to leave evidence or, better, only leave evidence that points in the direction you want it to point. When investigations consisted only of a detective pounding on doors, you could afford to be brazen-pay off enough people above him and it wouldn’t matter what he found.
But today you’d need to pay off scientists in the basement of a university maybe five hundred miles away. You’d have to know what every single piece of evidence was to figure out which labs were being used.
You’d need to pay off a blood-spatter expert.
A biologist.
A chemical engineer.
The evidence chain used to go between one or two people. Now it’s more like a hundred.
Mafia bosses don’t get away with murder anymore because they’re criminal masterminds or are able to act above the law by virtue of their payoffs; they get away because they understand the science of investigation and how to kill someone in a clean environment. Or if they don’t, they hire people who do.
As we pulled up the expansive drive, I noticed that in addition to the men there were also the armor-plated cars Sam mentioned, the bikes and, to my surprise and delight, running around the vast acreage to the east of the house, about twenty children with balloons. I also made out a clown, a small elephant with a child on its back being guided around the circumference of the property and tables covered in presents, food and pyramids of glasses. There were a few older women sitting in lawn chairs and other younger women milling about with the children and lingering near the tables of food. Under a white tent there were a dozen tables being set up, and a series of cooking stations were being arranged along the back of the room. There were pink and white streamers everywhere, including one huge one strung across the front of the tent that said HAPPY 5TH BIRTHDAY, TINA!
“We grew up in the wrong part of town,” Nate said.
“I’m not so sure,” I said.
“Did I even have a fifth birthday?”
I told him I thought we went to Red Vest Pizza, a place our father liked to go to on account of the dollar beers. “There wasn’t a pachyderm in sight, if you’re curious,” I said. “Who is Tina?” I asked Gennaro.
“Christopher’s daughter.”
This new information-the party-required a distinct change in thought.
“Gennaro,” I said, “if at some point during this meeting it looks like there’s going to be a fight, just know that I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. Okay?”
“What?” Gennaro said, now in full panic.
“When was the last time you were in a fight?”
“Never,” he said.
“Not once?”
“I told you, Christopher protected me when we were kids, and these days I have people like you.”
People like me. Great.
“If it looks like a situation where you might find yourself in a compromised position, I’ll hit you first. If I have to hit you, just know you probably won’t remember it.” This didn’t ease Gennaro’s panic. “But it probably won’t come to that, really. So just be calm.
”
I actually wanted Gennaro slightly uneasy, as if he were really being yanked about by someone like Tommy the Ice Pick.
Christopher Bonaventura was in the Mafia. Tommy the Ice Pick was in the mob.
The difference is that a person like Tommy the Ice Pick would actually kill you with his own hands. Christopher Bonaventura was more about outsourcing.
“And, Nate, don’t do anything, okay? I don’t want you getting hurt, either. These guys aren’t thugs, they’re actual professionals. Something happens to me that I can’t control, you’re not going to control it, either.”
“Then why am I here?”
“In case I need you to do something. And in that case, make it happen.”
That got Nate smiling. There’s a part of Nate’s reptilian brain that responds well to conversations that essentially state the obvious but in ways you might hear in old Clint Eastwood movies.
Nate parked the limo next to one of the black Suburbans, and by the time we stepped out Jarhead and the other two men were already waiting for us. Their guns were out of sight, but I figured Jarhead for the kind of guy who would prefer to stick his KA-BAR into your kidneys.
“Mr. Bonaventura is inside,” Jarhead said, as we walked toward the front of the mansion. Nate and Gennaro were just in front of me, the two other guards at their flanks. “He can give you ten minutes. Minute eleven and you’re back in your car. There is no negotiation.”
“If we get out in five,” I said, “you think I could get a slice of cake to go?”
“We get inside,” Jarhead said, “and you act like a gentleman and give me whatever you have on your leg, whatever you have on your back and anything else you think I might want. Minute eleven, you get it all back.”
“Yeah, and what’s in it for me?” I said.
Jarhead smiled. It wasn’t menacing. It wasn’t mocking. It wasn’t even an inadvertent twitching of the facial muscles. It looked like Jarhead was actually happy about something. “Your meeting goes off without a hitch,” he said, “Mr. Stefania and your silent friend get out alive, and I don’t tell Mr. Bonaventura that I know you.”
