“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?”
“I must have.”
“And the part with the fixed races?”
“Took me by surprise.”
“Because I asked you about that and, as I recall, you said it was impossible.”
“It’s hard to keep up with technology,” Sam said. “Ten, fifteen years ago, you told people they could watch a movie on their telephone they would have sent you to an asylum. It’s a crazy world, Mikey. Ever changing.”
We rode the rest of the way down in silence, partially because I was waiting for Sam to start explaining to me why he hadn’t told me all of the facts he certainly knew outside the sudden advent of great new technological advances in cheating, and partially because I think Sam was trying to figure out what his answers would be.
We made it back through the lobby, where we saw a woman who looked a lot like Madonna, and all the way out to the valet station. I was holding strong.
“Crap, Mikey,” Sam said. “Are you gonna say something?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something about this being a job for a Delta Force team? Maybe something snide about the amount of information I’d kept on the side. That sort of thing.”
I had to give it to Sam. He knew me well. “When was the last time you tacked on the open sea, Sam?”
“It’s been a few years. It all comes right back. You got nothing to worry about, Mikey.”
“You’re right,” I said, and smiled, because when you can smile instead of scream, it’s always a nice gambit.
“Once a SEAL,” he said, though he didn’t sound too confident, “always a SEAL. I’ll pick up some deck shoes and we’ll be good to go. Sign me up for the America’s Cup.” Sam turned and looked at the old Art Deco portion of the Setai and then looked back to me with a queer smile on his face. “That Jack Dempsey stuff with you and Nate and your dad. That really happen?”
“No,” I said.
“Still,” he said, “pretty good story.”
“I wanted to go,” I said, “but my dad wouldn’t take me. I don’t even know how old I was. Maybe seven or eight. Young, at any rate. Twenty years later, I’m making a dead drop in that one library in Namibia that had an English-language section and I find Dempsey’s biography just sitting there, like it’s been waiting for me all that time. I didn’t have a Namibian library card, so I’m afraid I stole it.”
“Namibia was a nice place,” Sam said.
“If you like imploding tungsten mines.”
“I find the smell of burning tungsten mines very relaxing.”
“Not from the inside,” I said.
The valet brought Sam’s buddy’s car around.
“What’s different about my car?” Sam said.
“It’s not actually your car,” I said. “And it looks like they washed it.”
Sam seemed duly impressed and compensated the valet for the cleaning by handing him five whole American dollars before we got in and drove off.
“Tell me something, Sam: Do you trust Gennaro?”
“Sure, Mikey,” Sam said. “You saw the look on his face. I don’t think you fake that kind of desperation.”
Sam was probably right, but something was eating at me about the whole situation. A point that wasn’t clear yet.
“Tomorrow, see if you can get some information on the Web site and any communications coming into his room.”
“Sure. Buddy of mine can probably get the records for all the incoming calls. Might be interesting to see who’s been calling Madonna, too.”
“Let’s just keep it focused on Gennaro,” I said.
Sam agreed by grunting, so I expected to get a full report on Madonna’s movements nonetheless.
Another thought occurred to me. “Do you happen to know anyone in town trying to sell plutonium?” I said.
“Not unless Bin Laden’s on Spring Break,” Sam said. “Why, you looking to take out Canada once and for all?”
“Fi said an old friend was in town,” I said. “Just wanted to, you know, see if you’d heard anything.”
“A few years from now, when you two are living behind a nice steel-enforced white picket fence at some secure location, you’ll look back on this period of your life and laugh,” Sam said. The funny thing was that he didn’t say it with the slightest bit of irony.
5
When you’re planning a clandestine operation, it’s wise to keep your team small. People tend to notice fifteen men in body armor storming an embassy, so if you need to kill someone, steal something or map out a location for a future action, it’s better to go alone if you can. Someone to watch your back and someone to guard your flank are helpful, but if you want to be sure a job gets done right, it’s best to do it by yourself.
Less margin of error, which means less chance someone goes home in a coffin, and less chance that you’ll be on Al Jazeera with a canvas bag over your head.
No one looks good with his head in a canvas bag.
The same rules apply to fixing a sporting event. There’s nothing easy about fixing a match that involves the complicity of more than one person. Two men in a ring savagely beating each other is easy to control. Find the fighter with the Jell-O-like moral center and make your pitch. Give anyone enough money and it isn’t difficult to convince them to stay on the ground after being hit in the face.
Try convincing nine men to throw a baseball game and you’ll be lucky to get out alive. Same with hockey, basketball or football. You want to avoid angering men with bats or sticks or elbows sharpened on human skulls. As general policy, you also want to avoid situations where you’re outsized by two or more feet and several hundred pounds by men who like to get hurt for fun.
So if you want to fix a team sport, you should try to shave points. This is easier than getting a team to win or lose and it requires only one person who plays a pivotal role to be desperate and stupid, versus an entire squad. So if you’re Joe Quarterback or Jack Point Guard and you’ve found yourself in deep with the Russian Mafia, you might be inclined to throw an interception or brick a free throw or two to preserve the point spread (and your kneecaps) at the end of a game. And if you’re lucky, your team still wins and you can sleep at night with only one Ambien instead of two.
In sports, however, there’s also the inevitable entrance of luck. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just luck itself. A terrible shot somehow finds its mark. An intercepted football gets fumbled back into the hands of the offensive team. If you’re a spy and have been sent to Azerbaijan to kill an arms dealer and miss when you shoot him, it’s unlikely you’ll be around to tell the story of how luck interceded, particularly if your head is in a canvas bag, with or without the rest of your body.