The End Game

by Tod Goldberg

  “Fine,” I said. “But if he gets dramatic on me again, I’m leaving.” Sam and I walked outside and stood on either side of Gennaro, in case he decided to jump, or in case I decided to throw him off. He turned and looked at us both with what could only be described as dispassion, as if we were somehow ruining his moment.

  “Gene, why don’t you tell Mikey about your mitigating circumstances?”

  Mitigating circumstances never sounded like good news. Invariably, it was the sort of thing that meant I was going to get shot at.

  “You have to understand that there is a tremendous amount of pressure related to being the son of Victor Stefania,” Gennaro said.

  “I can appreciate that,” I said.

  “It might not be the case here in America, but he was part of the world culture. People feel like he was part of them, not just a person they saw racing on television. I saw my father die, but so did fifty million other people. Do you know what that’s like?”

  “No.” I didn’t bother to tell him that I was one of those fifty million.

  “And there’s another level when you’ve married into the Ottone family. It’s not like you marry a girl you met in a bar or went to college with. It’s… international. It’s… generational. There are family problems that date to before the American Revolution.”

  I didn’t like where this was headed. But I let Gennaro continue on, because sometimes I like to think that people will flip the page and I won’t be reading the book I thought I was reading. Usually, they flip the page and it turns out that things are topsy-turvy and I’m in the middle of a pop-up book filled with dragons and moats and hobbits. I was hoping this would be something like a Victorian romance.

  “Being on a team owned by the family isn’t like being on a team where you’re just the employee. You probably don’t have context for this, but I’m the only man in the family who has amounted to anything.”

  “I have some context for that,” I said.

  “And I’m not even really family. Not in some of their eyes. I’m Maria’s husband and I’m Liz’s father, but I’m not an Ottone. And I’m not a hundred percent Italian. My mother was from California, just a mutt like everyone else out there. With Maria, it doesn’t matter. We are bedrock. And it’s not just because of Liz. And it’s not all that gossip shit you read. Maria truly is the love of my life. But it’s her family. Her mother. Her stepfather, really.”

  In the dossier, it said Maria’s stepfather was Nicholas Dinino. He married Maria’s mother five years ago after the death of her husband, the family’s patriarch and the holder of the royal lineage, or at least the Ottone lineage. Dinino owned the yacht team, which made him Gennaro’s father-in-law and de facto boss, too. Not an easy arrangement.

  “I get it. You’re living in a Crock-Pot.” At some point, I thought, I needed to see my mother…

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Tell me something, Gennaro, were you on drugs?”

  “No, no, never.”

  “Then what was going on with you and Christopher Bonaventura?”

  “I’ve known him since I was twelve. We went to boarding school together in Connecticut. His father and my father used to go to Studio 54 together. It was like that, you know? We have a lot of similar issues related to our extended families. He was just someone I could turn to. That’s all.”

  I didn’t believe Gennaro. Not exactly. I trusted that they were friends, but somehow this situation with his wife was tied to his friendship. Or at least his refusal to go to the authorities was. I felt Gennaro dancing around the issue, and if there’s one thing I find more disturbing than a man crying in front of me, it’s a man dancing in front of me. Makes me nervous. Makes me feel like I’ll be asked to do some sort of boot-scoot boogie, and that wasn’t happening.

  “Tell me you’re not already throwing races, Gennaro.”

  “I’m not,” he said. Before I could even exhale with relief, he said, “But I think they’re being fixed behind me. The Pax Bellicosa should not be winning as we are. Not with me as the helmsman.”

  “You think?” I looked at Sam. He was puffing on his Cuban and attempting to look absolutely engrossed by the moon.

  “Look,” Gennaro said, “this hasn’t been the best year for me, for my family, so I called in a favor a few months ago. One favor. That was it. Just to get me pointed in the right direction. Take me out of the cooker.”

  “Let me guess. You put in a call to Christopher Bonaventura.”

  “One race. That was it. Just asked him to help me get in position to place. I didn’t even have to win.”

  “Was this before or after he was warned away from you?”

  “After.”

  “Stay right here,” I said to Gennaro, and gave him a big, big smile, the kind I normally reserve for angry mullahs preparing to torture me, and pulled Sam away from the terrace and back inside. “Your friend Jimenez. He fail to mention this to you?”

  “This is all news to me.”

  “You recognize that this isn’t an easy job, correct?”

  “I’m beginning to sense that it might be more intricate than first was apparent. New intel. All that. But what can you do? I don’t see anyone flying around Miami with a cape on these days.”

  I pointed at Sam. I didn’t have words to speak. So I just kept pointing until I felt calm enough to go back outside and speak to Gennaro. “So I understand,” I said when I got back to the terrace. “The mafia has fixed races so that you win, is that correct?”

  “No.” He was starting to look green. That’s what happens to a guy when he realizes he’s spent all day digging the grave his wife and child could be buried in.

  I said, “I am not here to judge you. I am here to help you. If you lie to me, there’s nothing I can do. I walk out this door and you and I never met.”

  Gennaro leaned over the balcony and exhaled hard. His shoulders slumped, and I could see the muscles in his jaw working. It wasn’t pride that was keeping him from giving the whole story-it was shame. Sam stepped back outside, but I gave him a little wave to let him know I wanted Gennaro to myself for a minute, which Sam took to mean now would be a good time to stretch out on one of the two-dozen chaise lounges with his Cuban and a bottle of Utopia. You get the chance to drink a hundred-dollar bottle of beer, I guess you take it.

  “This hotel used to be owned by Jack Dempsey,” I said. “Did you know that?”

  Gennaro looked up at me, eyebrows raised, like he wasn’t sure where I was headed. “The boxer?” he said.

  “Yeah. Back in the 1930s it was called the Dempsey-Vanderbilt. But it was just the small Art Deco part down below,” I said. I pointed over the ledge, and Gennaro craned his head to get a look. “When I was a kid, my dad brought me and my brother, Nate, down here. Dempsey was signing autographs and pretending to hit people. Putting on a show, basically. By that point he didn’t own the hotel or anything. He was an old man from history books, really. But here was a guy who, back in the day, was considered the toughest man alive. 1919, 1920, when you were heavyweight champion of the world, it wasn’t like now where you fight once or twice a year; you fought all the time. Plus, he was the kind of guy who’d fight just for fun. Go into a bar. Call someone out. Even after he retired, he kept fighting in exhibitions, just to keep hitting people. Now, I’m not an athlete, so I don’t know what that’s like, that need to always be competing, but I’d guess that’s pretty intoxicating?”

  “Better than just about anything,” Gennaro said.

  “Thing of it is, you know what people remember most about Dempsey? What everyone wanted to talk to him about that day?”

  Gennaro said he didn’t know.

  “One of his last fights, he got in the ring with a guy named Gene Tunney. There was a dispute about how much time the ref gave to Tunney after Dempsey knocked him down, and how little time was given to Dempsey when Tunney knocked him down. No one said the fix was in, but that hint of impropriety, it followed Dempsey around for the rest of
his life. He never knew if he really won, or if he really lost. So there he was, sitting downstairs behind a table covered in bunting, talking about a fight that took place fifty years earlier. And you could just see it on him. The doubt. Like he wanted to fight the fight all over again.”

  I paused to let what I’d said to Gennaro sink into his skin. That I didn’t know anything about Gennaro prior to that day didn’t change the fact that, to a segment of society, he was considered one of the world’s finest athletes, if helmsmen can be considered athletes. I suppose if NASCAR drivers and jockeys are classified as such, competitive yacht racers probably have equal claim to the designation.

  “Christopher just told me he’d give me a better chance not to lose, that’s all,” he said. “I still had to race to win. I wanted my skill and my boat to win out at the end, not have it be something where I just coasted in.”

  “Do you even hear yourself?” I said. “This is your wife and child we’re talking about. This is what you’re going to stand on when your wife and child are shark bait?”

  “He narrowed the field with his influence,” Gennaro said. “The end game was easier to manage. That’s all. But he’s still doing it. I know.”

  “How?”

  Gennaro squinted up at the darkening night sky. Clouds had rolled in and the air was thick with humidity, the moon and the stars obscured in gray, but the swirling winds atop the Setai made everything feel tinged with violence. “I’m not Jack Dempsey,” he said.

  “Then you call Bonaventura and you tell him to stop. You tell him that you need to race on your own.”

  “I can’t just call him and tell him to stop.”

  “Sure you can. Same way you told him to start.”

  “I throw a race and then go to the FBI, you think Christopher would just let me walk away from that? How long before they’d be cornering Christopher? I make that call and I’m asking for trouble from Christopher that our friendship won’t save. Maria, Liz, me, the whole family. Christopher won’t care. He’s made that clear enough.”

  When you go into business with the mafia, it’s important to understand their organizational values and business model. Just like McDonald’s, they are all about conceptualizing a franchise and then re-creating the concept over and over again, so that people get comfortable knowing that if they’re in Pensacola or Paris or Prague, they can say “Big Mac, large fries and a Coke,” and be fairly certain what they’ll be getting back. You see that yellow M, Ronald McDonald and a bunch of severely underpaid employees and you feel relatively safe. With the mafia, the same principles are in place. You see a person like Christopher Bonaventura, you expect that he’ll be able to “influence” a boat race in such a way that you have a better chance of winning. Trouble is the mafia isn’t concerned with “better chances.” They want an assured decision. Just like you don’t want to order a Big Mac and get a lamb shank, the mafia wants to know that if they fix something, they’ll see a return on their investment without fail.

  It’s called organized crime for a reason. When the mafia is run correctly, it can be as highly functional as a Fortune 500 company, with every aspect controlled and proctored and studied. The difference is that the mafia typically only ruins a few lives.

  Christopher Bonaventura was suspected of ordering the murder of his father and his older brother. Killing Gennaro Stefania and half of the Ottone family wouldn’t be fun, or without publicity, but if you’re Christopher Bonaventura, bad publicity is the least of your concerns.

  What was clear, however, was that he wasn’t the person who’d surreptitiously kidnapped Maria and Liz. There was nothing working to his advantage from the act, and kidnapping simply wasn’t mafia style, at least not one this intricate, where the people who’ve been kidnapped-and probably most of the crew of the boat-had no idea they were actually being held captive. If Christopher Bonaventura was responsible, Gennaro wouldn’t have received a link to a secure Web site; he’d have received his daughter’s Achilles tendon.

  But if he was in Gennaro’s life, there was a good reason to believe that he’d be lingering on the periphery of this all.

  “When is the race?”

  “It starts in two days,” Gennaro said.

  “Starts?”

  “It takes a day, sometimes longer, to get to Bermuda.”

  “Bermuda?”

  “We go from Miami to Nassau.”

  “Sam?” I said. Gennaro and I were still at the terrace, looking toward the sea. Toward Nassau. Toward the Bahamas.

  “Yeah, Mikey,” he said from behind me. His voice sounded a little husky, like maybe he’d closed his eyes while enjoying his contraband cigar and his bottle of the most expensive beer produced in the United States. Like he wasn’t paying attention in the least, just enjoying the twenty-thousand-dollar-a-night view. Like he already knew how all of this was going to shake out.

  “Seems Gennaro’s race is going to take him out of Miami,” I said. “Out of American waters entirely. All the way to Nassau. You ever been to Nassau, Sam?”

  “Did a job there in ’ninety-two. Rumor was Car los the Jackal was there taking a powder. Ended up totally erroneous. Splendid beaches, Mikey. You’d love it there.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “I won’t be going to the Bahamas, will I?"

  “Oh, right, right,” Sam said. He sat up. Rubbed at his eyes a little. Took a puff. Took a swallow. Like he didn’t realize the high likelihood of a Coast Guard gunship waiting for me if I strayed too far from Miami. Or just the gun. “Well, if it turns out we can’t solve Gene’s problem before the race, I’ll make the trip, Mikey.” He looked at Gennaro, who, I could tell, didn’t really like being called Gene in the least. “It’s going to be no problem, Genie. Mike and I will solve this intricate riddle.”

  The riddle was a significant one. Whoever had set up the surveillance on Maria and Liz knew they could ask for a million dollars, or five million dollars, or a bag of diamonds, and the Ottone family would have no problem supplying the demand. Money would mean nothing to them. When Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped by Barry Keenan and his hapless pals, it wasn’t because Keenan loved “My Way.” He was broke and needed money to live on. In Colombia, where kidnapping is the lone growth industry in a sagging economy, where they could practically put up Chamber of Commerce billboards that say MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND RANSOM KIDNAPPINGS THIS YEAR! and no one would blush, since it’s the best investment opportunity in the country.

  Most people don’t just stumble into an abduction. If you kidnap someone, you usually have to be willing to kill that person, and if you’re willing to kill someone-in this case, a woman and a child-that means you’re desperate. Barry Keenan wasn’t desperate, he was stupid, and when you’re stupid, you involve more stupid people in your employ and eventually someone breaks, their morality gets the better of them, and the plot all falls apart, as it did with Sinatra Jr. The Colombians and Mexicans are desperate and engaged; a dangerous combination, but one that takes savvy. The Colombian model involves in-depth knowledge of the people you’re pressuring, which made Gennaro’s issue all the more curious. Whoever was on the boat, whoever had contacted Gennaro, whoever needed him to lose, knew he couldn’t go to the authorities, knew somewhere, somehow, that Gennaro had dirt on him that could get his wife and child and himself killed without any secondary exertion at all.

  Intimate.

  Elegant.

  Flawless.

  “This is going to be a costly mission,” Sam said, as if he’d been listening in to my thought process, though more likely he was just thinking about how much he was enjoying the fruits of the mission thus far and wouldn’t mind daily update meetings in the suite. “With the kind of intel we’ll be reconning, this will require an absolute DEF-CON Level X-Ray Attachment, right, Mikey?”

  Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Sam used to be an actual Navy SEAL.

  “I can pay whatever you need,” Gennaro said. “That’s not a concern.”

  I told Gennaro I’d need the
names of everyone on the boat with his wife, the names of everyone who sailed with him on the Pax Bellicosa and a simple understanding that from now on, he answered to only one person.

  Me.

  “We need to make this problem disappear before you ever get on your yacht,” I said. “Eliminate any possibility of problems, and make sure your wife and daughter are safe. When will they be in American waters?”

  “Race day,” he said. “Maria gets nervous when I race, so they’ll be right outside Government Cut. She always says if she has to wait for me at the end, she won’t have any nails left. But if she can see me stream past, when everyone is even, it’s easier. I’ve never understood it. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “Sounds like she just wants to see you perform. You watch the beginning of a two-day race, it’s just the sport, not the competition.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  “She probably doesn’t care if you win or lose, Gennaro,” I said. “And neither does your father.”

  Gennaro reached out and shook my hand, and this time it felt like there was an actual body behind the hand.

  “I trust you,” Gennaro said.

  “I’m going to get your wife and child off that boat alive.”

  “I know. I do.”

  “Good. Now you tell me something so I know I can trust you: Got any idea who might have blown up that million-dollar yacht this afternoon?” Gennaro nodded once, very slowly. It was enough. “Let me guess. It helped your end game?”

  “This isn’t the life I wanted,” he said.

  “Who has that, exactly?” I said.

  “My wife,” he said. “My daughter.”

  “Then we’ll keep it that way.”

  We left Gennaro out on the terrace and made our way back to the elevator. Two days wasn’t much time, but then kidnappers don’t generally work with your schedule. Once you have the ability to manipulate time, you have the ability to manipulate emotion, which meant that we’d need to have an idea who the players were long before Gennaro took to the water.

  “So,” I said to Sam after we stepped into the elevator, “did you forget the part about the Bahamas?”