“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. Worth 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.
“This afternoon Dinino transferred seventeen thousand in cash advance from a credit card to a bank account in Myanmar.” Sam had printed out the screen shot, which showed the account information for the recipient, but no name. “The previous two days he did the same thing. All in, he transferred close to fifty thousand in cash advances from different credit cards.”
“You ask your friend Darleen about this?”
Sam either blushed or suddenly had a severe blood flow problem. Whichever was the case, he stopped and took a sip of beer before he answered me and was fully composed by the time the bottle was back on the table. “You get a woman like Darleen on the line,” he said, “and you need to play it smooth. Can’t just start letting her know you’re snooping on people’s e-mails.”
“I think that’s called ethics,” I said.
“You ever forget whether or not you had sex with someone?”
“Not that I recall,” I said.
“Me either,” Sam said. “But if it were to happen, that would be normal, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Anyway,” he said, “this bank in Myanmar, it’s practically got a flag waving in front of it that says Drug Dealers Welcome.”
“Then why are you so sure Bonaventura isn’t on the other end?” I said.
“It’s all Islamic drug money going in there to fund terrorism,” Sam said. “Bonaventura might be a killer, but he’s a good Catholic, and if he tries to transfer money out of there, he’s asking for trouble.”
Sam was right. After 9/11, the Patriot Act started designating banks across the world as rogue supporters of terrorism, which meant that if you did business with them, there was a good chance you’d wake one morning and find someone like me standing at the foot of your bed.
Or not wake up.
And that was if you happened to live in a country that wasn’t an American ally. In an allied nation, there was a fair chance that your entire family would be put on a plane in the middle of the night and flown to a prison in another foreign country where you’d be kept as an enemy combatant.
And then one day, you might wake up and find a person like me standing at the foot of your bed anyway… and not to read you your Miranda rights.
Whoever was getting the transfers didn’t care about those possibilities, which made them all the more dangerous.
“We’re not dealing with a simple shakedown,” I said.
“I’ll say one thing, Dinino would have been better off getting the money from a loan shark,” Sam said. “The vig to VISA is almost as bad as the vig to some shylock on the street.”
“I doubt that he didn’t have the cash to send,” I said, “I think he can’t send it. If Dinino is getting blackmailed by these photos to the point that he has to kidnap his own stepdaughter and threaten to kill her so Gennaro will throw the race, then I’m pretty sure his wife isn’t aware of the situation. He’s setting Gennaro up so that whoever this third party is will get a true windfall some other way, not from him. This money is just to keep them quiet until the race.”
“You think he went to Bonaventura looking for some quiet cash? I mean, what does fifty Gs mean to Bonaventura, right?”
“Nothing,” I said. “He spent more than that on his daughter’s birthday.”
“He’s already got protection,” Sam said.
“Not the kind of protection Bonaventura could offer,” I said. “If he’s getting pressed by some other syndicate from back home, Bonaventura’s a big enough gun to maybe get them to back down. Or force them to.”
“Or short him some cash to get the problem taken care of without alerting the missus,” Sam said. “It’s not as if he can go to someone legit to help him on this, because in ten minutes it would be on some blog. Bonaventura is probably the only person he knows who is in Miami who could help him and not have it ping back to wifey.”
“She finds out he’s making time with a sixteen-year-old girl, he loses everything,” I said. “That’s the catalyst here.” Which meant Fiona was right: It all boiled down to a girl being involved. I just wasn’t expecting it to be an actual girl.
It also meant something a bit more distressing.
“If Dinino told Bonaventura even half of the truth,” I said, “if he really wanted to convince him to help, then he told him about Maria and Liz on the boat. Didn’t tell him he was behind it, of course, but he must have dangled that out there.”
“Oh, Mikey,” Sam said. “That’s not good.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s occurring to me.” My play this afternoon to get Bonaventura off Gennaro had probably worked. But now it’s likely he thought Tommy the Ice Pick and his outfit were behind the blackmailing of Dinino, too. Or were at least affiliated with whoever was pulling the strings. It was, disturbingly, a perfect mess.
We knew Dinino was the one pressing Gennaro.
We knew why Dinino was pressing Gennaro, but not who was pressing Dinino.
We knew that if we released the photos to make Dinino fold, there was a good chance Maria and Liz would be dead and, in short order, Gennaro would be killed for ratting Bonaventura out, too.
“We need to get Maria and Liz off that boat,” Sam said.
“Or we need to make sure that Bonaventura does it for us,” I said.
Christopher Bonaventura’s easiest move, provided he thought unemotionally, provided he had someone with a little tactical training in his stable, was to remove the chance Maria and Liz might get killed himself.
Which meant I needed to speak with my new friend Alex Kyle again sooner rather than later. Convince him that even if I wasn’t Tommy the Ice Pick, I was still the person making this all happen.
“You know where Virgil is?” I asked.