by Joe Nelms
“No. I said I’ll handle it. It’s personal.”
Brittany and Anfernee
“We got him.”
Brittany Marinakos clicked the Pause button on her computer’s video player. The playback on the monitor next to her froze on a black- and-white shot of Frank Fortunato staring angrily at the camera that had been so carefully placed behind the speaker screen of his TV. Perfect. Just like she had rehearsed it.
And how fortunate that he chose to punctuate his murder plans with a slow-burn look toward the camera that was oh so powerful. Not in a soap-opera way, but in a real Jimmy Caan, let’s-settle-this-mano-a-mano kind of way. The kind of look you always assume precedes some sort of dastardly deed. Or a dance off.
She took a millisecond to remind herself that she was about to put her five years on the job at risk by proposing a mission that could make her a shining star in the FBI. Or ruin her. Then she turned dramatically (presentation is everything, Columbo), making sure to keep her carefully constructed “confident” face on as she waited for Anfernee’s reaction.
“You ‘got’ him? For what? Going to see ‘a guy’ about ‘a thing’? What are you going to charge him with, ‘a crime’?”
“Did you see the same footage I saw? He’s going to see Carmine. To kill him.”
“But they never said that. I can’t go to Justice with this.”
“Sal shrugged.”
“. . . And?”
And in Mafia talk that was as good as Sal sending Frank a BFF text message describing in detail their plans to slit an associate’s throat. It was hard to remember that some people hadn’t been as immersed in the Cosa Nostra culture as deeply as she had. It had been twenty-six months now.
Brittany had joined the FBI to please her father. He was a legend in the Bureau. Not for what he did. For what he didn’t do. Man, that guy could keep his mouth shut. He saw all sorts of rule breaking and didn’t do a goddamned thing about it. His nickname among those who could be trusted was “The Zipper.” Because his lips were zipped. Always. Oliver “The Zipper” Marinakos. He worked his cases, stayed right in the middle of the political road, and retired the day after he clocked thirty years.
Since she was a girl, Brittany had tried everything to please her father. She was captain of her high school debate team. Homecoming queen. Twice. She played hockey, for Christ’s sake. Nothing ever resonated. It might have been the lifelong depression her dad suffered from, or perhaps he was just a terrible father, but nothing Brittany did ever got more than a “Well, isn’t that nice” reaction. Straight As. Uh-huh. Scholarship to State. Super. League playoffs. Sounds great. The playoffs! Nothing. So she quit law school and became an FBI agent, just like him. Seemed like a foolproof plan and the bennies were solid. It was her first accomplishment that he seemed proud of.
Brittany was vaguely aware of her desperate subconscious need to please her father, but she was fine with that. It was fairly non-self-destructive and actually a pretty good motivator, so why mess with it?
And then her dad was hit and killed by a school bus on his way out for a morning jog. Things sort of started to unravel after that as Brittany began questioning every aspect of her life.
What am I doing spending my weekends chasing down kidnappers? Is saving innocent people and making the world a better place all there is to life? I wonder if I should try out for American Idol? What if I make it to the Hollywood round and have to perform a Motown song with someone who can’t dance and they screw it up for me? Why didn’t I use my flexible spending account to get Lasik?
It was about that time that her grandmother started becoming a burden.
The loss of her son was too much of an opportunity for Lola Marinakos to pass up. Life had always revolved around Lola, even when it involved other people’s tragedies. Well, they say your attitude is the most important thing when you’re fighting the cancer. By the way, if you’re not going to be using your ski house this winter . . . She wasn’t mean, rather, in her mind, realistic.
The phone calls began on the way home from the wake and were soon lighting up Brittany’s cell phone five times a day, maybe more. It wasn’t long before most of them went to voice mail, but Brittany’s sense of family wouldn’t let them go unreturned. So every day, she dialed up Lola and listened to her complain about how depressed and lonely she was in between the details of fabu shopping sprees and catty gossip about her bridge friends. Occasionally, Lola would ask how the whole father-loss thing was going with Brittany, but that mainly served as a transition to some other Lola-related subject of conversation.
Had Lola maintained her usual all-about-me behavior instead of ratcheting it up to Defcon 1 levels, Brittany might have never started therapy to deal with her guilt over hating her grandmother, hating her like she was Bernie Madoff talking behind her in a movie theater. And she would have never told her analyst about her relationship with her father. And she would have never faced up to how unhealthy it was to live her life to impress someone who wasn’t even around anymore and who didn’t care when he was here. And the good doctor would have never asked her the questions that made her wonder what she was doing with her life. And she would have never considered leaving her job.
But she did. That was three years ago. Since then it had been thirty-six months of writing various GOOD DAY, SIR. ISAIDGOODDAY! versions of her resignation letter in her head as she pounded away on the elliptical machine. When she’d finally had enough, she acted. Only rather than impulsively tendering a tear-laden, emotionally charged, take-this-job-and-shove-it speech, she made the decision to do something sensible. She called in sick, opened a tub of cake icing, and watched Wendy Williams. And that’s when it hit her.
Being famous would be awesome.
Ah, but how? That was the issue. Why would anyone care about her? If nothing else, Brittany was practical, even within her flights of fancy. What did she have to offer the Perez Hiltons of the world? Why would Entertainment Tonight want to find out her secrets to staying in shape? What assets did she have that were marketable to the American public?
She made a list. She wasn’t bad looking. At twenty-seven, still young-ish. Kind of funny. Decent voice when she remembered to breathe from her diaphragm and act like Angelina Jolie in Salt. She had a cool job.
Ooh. That was it. Her job.
Americans love cops. Yes, perfect. What if she could become some sort of law enforcement consultant to CNN or MSNBC or Lifetime? What if she had an interviewer position at a network or a series in syndication? What if she hosted a talk show from the point of view of an experienced FBI agent?
Wait. That’s it. She had cracked it. Tyra with a badge.
Now she needed some reason for Hollywood to notice her. How had other talk show hosts done it? Some spent years as reporters, slogging away on local newscasts, covering water skiing squirrels and painfully obvious tips for beating the heat. Nope. Working her way up through the ranks of production in the hopes that some producer might notice how cute yet intelligent she looked schlepping cables across the stage and make her a star? Not happening. Getting an agent and auditioning along with every vapid former cheerleader in Los Angeles? Maybe.
But what she really wanted was the Scarface promotion. Straight to the top by way of gutsy moves and unbridled moxie. And to do that, she needed a ginormous case to solve.
Nothing makes a good, nationally devoured, movie-optionable story like a mobster case. That’s the kind of thing you can milk for decades and maybe even get Jamie Foxx to star in. So that’s what she looked for. A big commercially viable mob case.
She passed on long-term drug stuff. Boring. She claimed to be too busy to join in on the war on illegal downloading. Yawn. She waited and waited until there was some Mafia action on the table. And then she jumped.
It wasn’t much at the start. A small construction company shakedown investigation with hints of labor union embezzlement. Probably nothing prosecutable as usual, but Brittany begged to be assigned to the case and locked her jaws onto
it until she found something. Nothing big, but something. The company had a few silent investors and one disgruntled partner who talked a little too much when he was in his cups. There was definitely some money being laundered there.
Rather than moving in for that small kill, Brittany convinced her superiors that there was more to the case and asked for more time and resources. The truth was she had no idea if there was more to it, but this was a Mafia case and she was going to squeeze that bastard until she was sure there wasn’t a drop of juice left inside. So she squeezed.
There was, in fact, more juice in the form of a link to the Maraschino crime family. It was precisely what she had hoped for and exactly what she needed to implement her plan to become a household name.
Two years of slogging through paperwork and bureaucracy and ass kissing later, Brittany was about to get her shot at running her own mob sting operation. And then she heard Frank telling Sal about the guy and the thing. Cha-Ching! This was more than she could have ever hoped for. No longer a simple money-laundering affair or a city hall bribe, but an actual murder plot. Real Jamie-Foxx-on-line-two kind of stuff. And now, she faced one last hurdle. Her direct superior, Anfernee Fine.
Anfernee Fine was not a stupid man. He was a company man. Long ago he had figured out that succeeding in the world of government employment had very little to do with how smart you were, how clever your ideas to improve workflow were, or even how well you did your job. No, it was Anfernee’s conclusion that the yardstick of success in the FBI was one that measured a murky mix of seniority, lack of offense, and an easy-to-recite summary of press-friendly cases with clever names in which you played some role. Not necessarily the top cop hero role. But a role.
So that’s what Anfernee did. Not that he was lazy. Certainly he could have proven his intelligence, improved workplace efficiency, and performed far and above what his job description called for. But that would have gone unnoticed. Working hard in a government job, even the FBI, is like trying to perfect the balance of spices in a McNugget. Nobody cares.
Instead, he played by the rules and avoided making waves of any kind. As flawed and weighed down with red tape as it was, the FBI wasn’t going to change anytime soon, so he decided to roll with it. Why beat your head against the wall when all it’s going to do is give you a headache? It made more sense to attach his name to projects that, if successful, he could claim some degree of participation in and, if failures, he could walk away from virtually untouched. Frank Fortunato and Brittany Marinakos were not the only ones with self-serving PR plans.
Part of Anfernee’s own internal approval process had to do with names of projects. He needed a quick and easy-to-remember nickname that associated him with the case. Nothing he would use on a day-to-day basis, but something that he could drop into conversations as extra support to his granite-like foundation of mediocrity. Oh, that construction company extortion racket sting? I was the foreman of Operation Demolition. The White Slavery bust? Of course I know about it. You’re looking at the John Wilkes Booth of Operation Abe Lincoln. They didn’t always make sense. But they were memorable and would associate Anfernee with these high-profile cases in the minds of his coworkers and superiors enough that he could count on job security for years to come.
It was this philosophy that had taken Anfernee straight to the middle. Number one hundred thirty-eight with a bullet. No longer the grunt, but not really the boss. He was one of the guys the never-in-the-field bosses looked to for approval of their milquetoast proposals, asked to write memos and reports, and relied on to “look into” things. All tasks he could farm out to underlings while taking credit for their hard work himself. He would probably never make chief this way, but chances were even better that he would never get canned no matter how bad the economy got. And he was fine with that.
Anfernee’s burning ambition was to continue employment until he no longer needed to work. Another eight years and he would be riding his pension straight to Henry’s Fork for an equivalent period of fly fishing.
In other words, he was no Brittany. So, it was unlikely that he would show too much excitement this early in the process. There were so many details to hear before he gave his approval. What was Brittany’s plan, exactly? How would she justify the warrants they would need? Would the name of her plan play on the front page of the paper? Was it amenable to memorable ancillary nicknames that could be applied to him? Critical stuff. Stuff that everyone else in the department was already thinking about.
Not surprisingly, when Frank Fortunato made his big play to become the celebrity mobster, the FBI took notice. If there’s one thing the American public likes more than a big flamboyant bad boy, it’s a big flamboyant target. And Frank was playing right into the inevitable cycle of celebrity. He had started to believe his own hype. It was simply a matter of time before he was ripe. The fact that he was now planning a murder really worked out well for everyone involved. Except for the guy with the other other thing.
The decision on how to bring the Maraschino family down was a much-debated one within the department. Some factions felt strongly that they should stay the course of undercover work that would lead to the arrest of lower-level gangsters who would then be coerced to flip on their bosses, the bosses then coerced to flip on their bosses, and so on. They referred to it as The Domino Theory. Another camp championed focusing solely on income-tax evasion. Their plan was to determine the inner workings of the Maraschino crime family and calculate its total cash intake before swooping in and arresting the grand poobah for income tax evasion. Operation Tax Cut. Yet another camp favored good old-fashioned catch and punish. Chase down the guys who were doing the crimes and put them in jail. Project Clamp Down. Behind closed doors, this was referred to as Project Old School as it was considered to be a pretty outdated and pointless plan.
None of the names were particularly savory in Anfernee’s mind. They lacked pizzazz. Why was it so hard for these people to come up with something clever? How was he supposed to attach himself to The Domino Theory? It didn’t exactly scream nickname-friendly. The Ace of The Domino Theory? No. The Big Daddy of The Domino Theory. Sorry. The Dominator of the . . . oh why bother?
Eventually, in the tried-and-true manner of an oversized bureaucracy, it was decided by the higher ups that the Mafia-catching budget would be split equally among the various factions. Essentially giving the green light to any and all agents who came up with an idea. All they had to do was convince their supervisors.
Brittany didn’t have a catchy name for her plan. It was the one omission of her pitch. Not that she hadn’t tried to come up with something clever—Operation I Spy Wise Guy, The Badfellas Commission, The Godfather IV: Uncle Sam’s Revenge. Nothing sounded right. She knew it was important to Anfernee and was hoping to overcome this obvious shortcoming by adding plenty of drama to her presentation, perhaps crying if necessary.
“Anfernee, Carmine Mastramouro is ‘the guy.’ Frank’s going to kill him.”
“You think?”
“Trust me. I’ve been watching Fortunato. I’ve got audio of his meetings. I’ve got pictures of his associates. I’ve established motives. All I need now is permission to pull the trigger and I’ll destroy this guy.”
Anfernee considered her for a second.
“Do you have a name for this mission?”
Brittany had chosen her bulky sweater today for just such an emergency. Who needed flop sweat staining their pits as their brain thumbed through possible name files, grasping for anything that would pull this one out of the burner—puns, movie titles, names of old boyfriends and pets, anything. And suddenly, like a TMZ reporter on deadline, it just appeared in front of her eyes.
“Project Fancypants.”
It was so easy she had overlooked it for the last two weeks. And now it came out of her mouth as if she had been sitting on it forever, just waiting for the right time to drop this brilliant bomb.
Anfernee silently considered the name. Project Fancypants. It was bold enough that the
brass would be impressed with his team’s brazen determination, but vague enough that he could claim it was a simple surveillance mission that went out of control in the hands of a renegade agent who was definitely not him. And he already had the perfect nickname in the case of success—“The Tailor of Project Fancypants.” Bingo.
Anfernee nodded. Just a nod. Not a notarized approval letter. Later, Anfernee could plausibly be able to say he had merely stretched or yawned and had been misinterpreted. Unless she actually caught Frank Fortunato. Then his nod would take on an entirely different meaning.
Brittany quickly scooped up her presentation materials and headed out to start work as Anfernee sat silent and still, wary of giving any further indications of his thoughts.
“Thank you, Anfernee! You won’t regret this.”
The Interview
“And then you were at Overthink for three years. Nice company.”
The heat in Geoff Pedretti’s sunlit corner office was on the verge of aggressively uncomfortable. Geoff had apologized for the temperature earlier, but a suspicious person might wonder if it weren’t some sort of bizarre test to weed out the weaker candidates. Of course, compared to doing time in a synthetic chicken suit on a city street in a globally warmed September, it was practically cool. Brad waited patiently as the CEO and chief creative officer of Red Light District Advertising perused his résumé again, as if there were some secret code hidden within the meticulously designed piece.
Sitting in this office, Brad felt like he had been granted a temporary visa back to his New York. The New York he knew and loved and missed so desperately. Mmmmm, New York advertising. The walk through Red Light to Geoff’s office had been a luxurious indulgence. The supporting staff there were different from the ones at Overthink, and yet so very much the same.
Hello skinny-jeans-chunky-glasses-web-designer-guy. Hi super-casual-account-exec-who-still-looks-like-an-uptight-suit-in-his-jeans-guy. What up, secretly-ambitious-asexual-intern. Oh, we’ve never met, but I know you all too well. And I already love you.
