by Tod Goldberg
“Move your legs,” Bonaventura said.
“I’m not done talking to you yet,” I said. “I’m not some punk you can just brush off. I’ve got people ready to kill your friend Gennaro’s wife if things don’t go as I want them to go. Show him your phone, G.”
Gennaro dug his phone from his pocket and handed it to Bonaventura, who looked at the video for a moment and handed it back without a word.
I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or not. So I explained it to him; see if he blinked. He showed nothing, so I went on. “You want that I kill Maria and make poor Liz watch? You want that on your plate? Because the first person the FBI and cops and Interpol look to isn’t going to be Tommy Feraci. It’s going to be you, Chrissy. You think the FBI isn’t going to find out you’ve been fixing his races? That’s some RICO shit right there, partner, and it’s a lot easier to prove than mail fraud.”
“You have nothing,” Bonaventura said. “They have nothing.”
“No, they had nothing on Capone. You know where he ended up? Right here in Miami, brain sick from the syphilis. Ended up dead in his big-ass mansion over on Palm Island. You can probably see his place out your window, right there on your water. Me? I got your friend Gennaro here,” I said. “I got every single person my guy Slade put an ounce of pressure on, each rolled on you like it was their job, like if they rolled on you, I was gonna give ’em health benefits and a 401(k), you know? Rolled and rolled and rolled, Chrissy. Just one look from Slade was all it took. One look.”
Nate straightened up. Flexed his jaw muscles. Sucked in his stomach, puffed out his chest, narrowed his eyes. I’d ask him later where he picked up those moves, since it made him look like he had the stomach flu.
“That’s why we’re here,” I continued. “Just being a gentleman about things. Being reasonable. You let Gennaro’s interests go, or his wife dies, maybe his kid, too, and it’s on your ass. Besides, you’ve made your nut off of this, right? You can absorb a few gambling losses this week, right?”
Taking risks is about calculating the possibility of success. Hit a 17 against a face card in blackjack and it isn’t a risk, it’s poor judgment. Telling a mafioso exactly how he would be implicated in the murder of one of the wealthiest women in the world is just good business sense.
Provided the Mafioso isn’t already planning the same murder, of course.
That’s where the risk came in. I had to hope I was making the right play.
Bonaventura briefly shifted his eyes over to Jarhead. A real bully only attacks when he knows he can’t be beaten, when he has someone else to handle his business if it looks like the odds aren’t in his favor. And Christopher Bonaventura definitely had the odds.
“You touch Maria Ottone, and you will not sleep another night,” Bonaventura said.
A person with actual skill and training doesn’t care about the odds, especially when fighting someone who has always relied on personal intimidation and not actual physical prowess in defeating his opponents… Or if the person with skill is actually looking to get hit.
“I wouldn’t dream of touching her,” I said. “The plan is for one of my guys to chain her to the anchor, toss her over and see if she’s Houdini.” I looked at my watch. “In about fifteen minutes, if they don’t hear from me, Gennaro’s wife will be under your water, Chrissy.”
If you want to avoid getting hit in the face and aren’t much of a fighter, the best thing to do is run away. Adrenaline and fear will give you a burst of speed that your attacker may not be able to match. It will also give you the opportunity to find a weapon or, better, other people. Civil society is usually more of a deterrent to violence than a piece of balsa wood being waved by someone in mortal fear for their life.
If running isn’t an option, you want to control the situation as best as you can. That means controlling the point of attack. If you’re going to get hit in the face-if, in fact, you’re encouraging someone to hit you in the face-the forehead is the best possible landing position for their fist.
The forehead’s main job is to protect your brain, which makes it one of the hardest plates in the human body. As a side benefit, your forehead has an interstate of thick blood vessels crisscrossing from just above your eyebrows up through your hairline, and, when punctured, they tend to geyser. It’s how every professional wrestler is able to bleed out on the mat and still make it back into the ring the next weekend.
Most people not involved in professional wrestling don’t care for the sight of blood, particularly not blood in geyser form.
The other side benefit is that there’s a pretty good chance that the person hitting you in the forehead is going to break his hand or at least a few fingers or knuckles, especially if you’re someone like Christopher Bonaventura, who’d just tucked his thumb into his fist; it’s a common tactic seen in five-year-old girls and nervous Mafia bosses who realize they’ve been backed into a corner by someone calling himself Tommy the Ice Pick.
So as Christopher Bonaventura swung down at me, I tilted my head back and thrust my neck upward, letting him catch me flush in the forehead, but without losing any control over my neck muscles.
If you don’t want to get knocked out when being hit in the head or face, you have to learn to control the acceleration and deceleration of your head and neck muscles. When someone hits you in the face and you pass out, what’s actually happening is that you’re having a stroke.
A very small stroke, but a stroke just the same.
You want to avoid having a stroke.
A rotary blow-a roundhouse left, for instance-will cause your head to swivel sharply, compressing and constricting your carotid arteries, which is not a good thing if you enjoy having regular cardiac function or the ability to speak.
An uppercut works in much the same way, except that instead of constricting the carotid, the whiplash effect of the acceleration compresses the circulation to the back of your brain.
Keeping circulation flowing to the back of your brain is important, particularly if you like controlling your motor functions. Getting hit square on the chin might snap your temporomandibular joint like a chicken bone, but if you have strong neck muscles, you’ll only pass out from the pain.
If you don’t have the opportunity to walk around with weighted headgear for a few hours every day in order to build up muscle, try yoga. The natural resistance training will give you flexibility and core strength. The serenity might keep you away from angry mob bosses intent on punching you in the face.
Barring the ability to achieve any of the above, your only other option is to match or beat the velocity of the object moving toward you, so that when it impacts, most of the damage goes in the other direction.
Or exactly what happened to Christopher Bonaventura’s fist.
I felt his thick wedding band dig into the tightened flesh of my forehead, splitting it right where I’d hoped, sending a spray of blood out from my head, which I then flung forward, dousing him, and then dousing the sofa, and getting a few drips and drops on the coffee table, too. If I got the opportunity, I’d walk over to the bookcase and grab Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and leave a couple streaks there, too. All of which would be hard for Bonaventura to explain to his daughter, the nice invited guests here for her birthday and the elephant tamer, too.
But first he’d need to go to the emergency room, since as soon as his fist landed on my forehead he let out a shriek, which told me he’d probably just broken his thumb, maybe his ring finger, too, which would serve him right for hitting me with his wedding band. He stumbled out from between the sofa and the coffee table, holding his hand and covered in my blood.
Nate made a move, but Jarhead gave him a slight shove that sent him back against the wall. It was a halfhearted effort by both of them, which is about what I expected. Jarhead was going to let Bonaventura do what he was going to do, which didn’t end up being much at all, which was probably better for all involved.
I had two options here: pretend to be really hurt or be
the tough guy.
“That all you got?” I slurred. I staggered up and then fell back into the sofa.
Bonaventura stood next to Jarhead and glared at me. It was about all he could muster, since his hand had already started to balloon grotesquely. Also, I was shaking my head back and forth, spreading blood onto as many surfaces as possible. He was going to have quite the cleaning bill, though something told me he could afford it. His daughter might only get an alpaca for her next birthday, however.
“Get this trash out of my home,” he said to Jarhead.
“Does that mean we have a deal?” I said. “Because Maria has about ten minutes left on her clock.” I tapped my watch. “Tick, tick, tick, Chrissy.”
He glared at me some more. The he turned and glared at Gennaro. He took some time doing that glaring thing to everyone in the room, even his own guys. I got the impression that he thought this was a good way of communicating rage and indignation, generally, but at that moment I think it was also a way to keep him from crying out in pain again. “I hope you know what you’ve done,” he said to Gennaro.
“All I know is that I don’t want my wife to die,” he said. “If I am in this maniac’s pocket or yours, I can’t see the difference.”
Bonaventura walked out of the room without another word, which I took to mean I’d solved one of our problems. I took one of the throw pillows from the sofa and pressed it against my forehead and then stood up, which got the blood flow to stop.
“How many minutes was that?” I said to Jarhead.
“Nine,” he said.
“Think I can get a ride on the elephant?”
“Not this time,” he said. He motioned to one of his guys, who gave me and Nate back our guns. Jarhead then handed me a card. All it had on it was his name: ALEX KYLE. No number. “Call me,” he said. “We should talk.”
10
It used to be that the only way you could get reliable information on someone was by tapping his phone. Get a wire on someone’s line and you could find out the most intimate details of his life. But now everyone uses e-mail. From a legal standpoint, it’s more difficult to tap into someone’s e-mail account than it is to get a wiretap on his phone.
From an illegal standpoint, it’s also harder.
If you want to tap a phone, there are stores in the mall that will sell you everything you need. What used to be the most clandestine technology is now sold as a way of watching your children. For less than two hundred dollars, you can get the RDRX-99, a line-activated digital recorder that will monitor up to five different phone lines at once for thirty-four hours at a time, and will e-mail you reports on the time and date of phone calls. If you don’t want to break into someone’s home to install the device in his wall jack, you can always access his outdoor box and place your device there. It requires the same technical precision required to set up a DVD player. Plug A into B and listen.
But if you want to intercept someone’s e-mail or track his movements online, it’s usually far more complicated.
In a high-level break-in, you’d want to redirect the line of information by locating transmission points-from delivery to reception-and constantly adapt the signal. This means you’d need a very large antenna, expert digital technology that could adjust radio waves and diagnose algorithms, and finally an expert who could decipher it all into a dummy location before letting it through to the actual delivery point, so that the person being tracked wouldn’t know anything ill was happening.
If you have an office in Langley or Qatar or even in the Green Zone in Baghdad, you can accomplish this in about an hour’s time at a tax-payer cost of about three hundred thousand-dollar staplers.
Or, if you happen to be one wall away from your target, and that target isn’t exactly a technical wizard, you can just jam the prevalent Wi-Fi signal using a modified 5.8 GHz cordless telephone, a length of speaker wire and your index finger, and then divert the person you’re interested in to your network, which in this case was a powerful Wi-Fi router Sam purchased for the grand total of $77.25 at Staples.
And the result?
“Mikey, the perversion of some people is astounding,” Sam said. We were sitting in the Aground Bar at the Southern Cross Yacht Club in Coconut Grove, from where the race would launch in the morning. I’d brought Gennaro over in the Charger after Nate dropped us off, and spent the majority of the ride telling him everything would be fine, that half of his problems were solved.
Not that I actually believed everything was going to be fine just yet, but the odds had improved and I’m an optimist.
Out the window I could see Gennaro and his team working on their yacht. They were due to launch in the bay within the hour to test out the conditions and dry run out into the open sea for several hours in preparation for the race.
Sam had a file open in front of him and was leafing through several sheets of paper.
“What did Dinino have?” I said.
“Well, I’m not specifically talking about Dinino. I had to wait around quite a while until he came back to his room, so I did recon on other folks that seemed suspect, according to, uh, some of their in-room habits.”
“I’m shocked,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” Sam said, “that there’s no good reason to ever be searching for a blow-up doll of Alaska’s governor. I’m all for privacy, but there have to be limits.”
He handed a page over to me. There, in fact, was a blow-up doll of Alaska’s governor. It was very lifelike.
“Clearly.”
A group of men wearing white slacks and navy blue sport coats with gold buttons and lovely anchors stitched over their breast pockets came and sat at the table beside ours. They regarded Sam and me like we’d just crawled out of a gutter.
“How you fellas doing?” Sam raised his beer at the men, but they didn’t respond. “Here for the big race, or do you just love the maritime?”
Nothing.
“Well, nice joint you have here. Any of you guys got any pull with the jukebox? Maybe replace Artie Shaw with something from the last 100 years?”
Nothing.
“All right, then,” Sam said, and tipped his beer their direction again. “Avast and Ahoy!”
The Aground normally catered to a clientele of South Florida’s richest men, as the Southern Cross Yacht Club didn’t admit women into the building, much less the bar, until 1957, and tradition still lingered. They were still largely sexually segregated, though with much charm and aplomb and contemptible politeness, naturally, as the women had a tearoom downstairs where skirts were always required, as if it were still 1957.
And they were certainly socially and economically segregated, too, which was clear when the men got up and moved to another table as one, never once bothering to speak. Maybe it was because the center of my forehead looked like a blood-filled Easter egg. Or maybe it was because we were both in strict violation of the dress code posted above the front door that instructed all patrons in the bar to be in slacks and a coat after four p.m.
“That was subtle,” I said.
“Blue bloods have a low tolerance for me.” Sam again raised his beer toward the men once they settled at another table. “What can I say? I guess not everyone likes me.” He slid the rest of the file my way. “Anyway,” he said, “Dinino is our guy. He got back to the hotel and within five minutes he was up viewing the site. He sent three e-mails off to the same dummy g-mail address that my buddy Walt routed to Corsica, which is where the person uploading the video is located. How’s your Italian?”
“Not bad,” I said. I read the e-mails. One was asking when the next video would be uploaded, the second asked for confirmation that proper payment had been received and the third was informing the person in Corsica that their services would no longer be needed after tomorrow. “You get any more of his e-mails?”
“I got in and pulled out everything he’s received and sent in the last two weeks,” Sam said. “It’s all there. You might want to skip to the pictures I printed out. Wo
rth a couple million words, probably several million dollars.”
The first photo was of Dinino with a girl of about sixteen. Maybe seventeen. But not any older. They were picking fruit from an open-air market. Looked like Florence.
“Illegitimate daughter?” I said. It was really more of a hope than a true estimation.
“Keep looking,” Sam said.
The next series of photos was of Dinino and the girl walking the grounds of the Palazzo Pitti’s Boboli Gardens. I flipped through them like the frames of an old cartoon. His hand was in the center of her back and then lower and lower and lower as the photos progressed. The last photo was of them kissing near the entrance to the garden’s amphitheater.
“That’s not how you kiss your daughter,” I said. I tucked the photos back into the file. “Who is she?”
“Jimenez says she’s a summer intern in the Ottone offices in Florence,” Sam said. “There’s a good chance she’s a plant.”
“This Jimenez fellow is full of great news,” I said. “Who planted her?”
“I can tell you who didn’t,” Sam said.
“Please don’t say Bonaventura.”
“Okay.”
Sam took a sip from his beer.
I looked outside. I could make out Gennaro motioning to his crew, stalking along the edge of his boat, giving directions. For whatever it was worth, it looked like he had his mind somewhere else for the first time. I’d removed the fix behind him, as best as I could tell, but his wife and daughter were still out on the sea with nothing stopping their imminent demise.
The blue bloods did their blue-blood thing, which as far as I could tell was to drink Macallan 30 year, neat.
I pondered the bull’s-eye on my back from my day’s activities with Christopher Bonaventura. Regardless of Dinino’s involvement, it was a needed step.
It just never got easier.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“It isn’t Bonaventura,” he said.
“Stunned,” I said.
