“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?”