“Mikey, it’s nine hours ahead of us in Italy right now. It’s the middle of the night.”
“Your friend Jimenez got us into this,” I said. “He can have a sleepless night.”
Sam agreed, if begrudgingly. “Where you gonna be?”
“I need to have a conversation with Alex Kyle,” I said.
“You’re not going back to Bonaventura’s, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure Alex Kyle will find me.”
“This boat you want,” Sam said, “can Virgil be on it?”
I liked Virgil.
Really.
It was just that Virgil meant my mother, and my mother meant problems.
“If he has to be,” I said.
“The man is a valuable asset,” Sam said.
“Make it happen,” I said, “however it happens.”
When Sam left, I called Nate and told him that I needed another favor.
“You need me or Slade Switchblade?”
“Slade Switchblade?”
“If you’re Tommy the Ice Pick,” he said, “I’m Slade Switchblade.”
“When was the last time you actually saw a switchblade, Nate?”
“When was the last time you actually saw an ice pick, Michael?” Nate said. I paused. The truth was that the last time I saw an ice pick, I was shoving it into a man’s chest in Siberia, so, best as I could recall, about the fall of 1999. But my hesitation was enough of an opening for Nate. “And anyway, it’s about reputation, right? Isn’t that what you said? So maybe Slade used a switchblade back in the day, and now, now he uses a howitzer, but no one knows. People are more scared of a switchblade than a howitzer, right? More personal, right? So that’s why he’s Slade Switchblade not Slade Howitzer.”
“Right,” I said. While I liked that Nate had actually thought through his own personal narrative, I wasn’t comfortable with it actually making sense. “Look, I don’t need Slade. But if I do, you give him whatever nickname you want.”
“Slade Six-Gun was another one I came up with,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “If Wyatt Earp comes through town, I’ll let him know you’re ready to mount up. In the meantime, I need you to talk to your friends in the betting industries. Find out who is putting money against the Pax Bellicosa in the Miami-to-Nassua. Not five hundred or even a thousand dollars, but numbers with lots of zeros.”
“Someone rich rolling,” he said.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Someone rich rolling. Anyone owes you any favors, I need you to call them in.” Nate was silent. I thought I heard him writing something down. “You still there?”
“Just getting this all on paper so I don’t forget anything.”
I’ve never, ever, seen Nate take a note, or make note, mentally, of anything. “Okay,” I said. “You run into a problem, let me know.”
“I got nintey-nine problems,” Nate said, “but this ain’t one of ’em.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “It’s a song, Michael. One day, when you’re free, we should sit down and I’ll catch you up on the parts of the twenty-first century you’ve missed out on.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
After I hung up with Nate, I watched Gennaro from the window of the Aground until I finally saw Sam striding through the marina. He had on a striped shirt, blue pants, a white baseball cap and bright red boat shoes, all of which made him look like a waiter at a nautical-theme restaurant at Disney World. He’d have to tell Gennaro’s crew some plausible story, but I wasn’t too worried. I had a good feeling that expert sailor Chuck Finley was about to be on the deck.
12
Anxiety-like its cousin, actual physical pain-is a natural occurrence. It’s your brain’s way of reminding you that even if your ancestors didn’t see a saber-toothed tiger lurking in the low underbrush, there was a high probability that the tiger was there, licking its chops, anticipating the rich and nuanced flavors found in your average austra lopithecine.
Where you might find a therapist to talk you through your anxiety, maybe find a way to medicate the fear of the tiger away, when you’re a spy, you learn to calculate your anxiety so that you can compartmentalize it in your mind and make decisions, so that if a house cat crosses your path you don’t scramble an F-16 from an offshore aircraft carrier to take it out.
What are you afraid of?
Is the threat credible?
Can you take it out by yourself?
Unbounded anxiety creates mental isolation. Even a spy can go crazy if he’s not able to exercise his brain. If you’re captured by the enemy, hooded and shoved into a locked room, the first thing you should do is start talking to yourself. Even if you’re speaking gibberish, you want to use the only weapon you have-your intellect-to turn your fear into your asset. Language and thought and reason will focus you, will break down your anxiety into workable parts, until you see your anxiety for what it ultimately is: a desire not to die or suffer terrible pain. Once you recognize the danger and the possible outcomes, it’s easier to fight, even if the fight is all in your head.
If someone really wanted you dead, you’d already be dead.
While I didn’t know precisely what I was facing, I knew that the players on my radar were not much to be afraid of personally, but for Gennaro and his wife and child, however, they were the epitome.
I had to remember that.
I was also aware that positions were aligning in such a way that even if I was able to save Gennaro’s family, I might very well be in the crosshairs of the bad guys, the good guys and probably a few opportunists, too.
That meant the threat was credible.
And that meant I needed help.
The sun was already down, but Bayfront Park, Miami’s own central park, was lit with glittering white bulbs strung tree to tree to highlight a free show given by the Flying Trapeze School housed on the park’s grounds. There were booths selling corn dogs, pork sandwiches, funnel cakes and sweet corn on the cob, others offering hand-churned ice cream, fried plantains and guava marmalade served over pound cake. Young couples and families sat on blankets and watched the spectacle as the trapeze students sailed through the air, catching each other by the ankles and flying back again, flipping, twirling, and even falling occasionally to the mesh net below, to the ooohs and ahhhs of the crowd. There was that whirl of expectation in the air that comes from shared excitement and fear.
The festive kind of fear.
Somewhere, Fiona was watching my back. If real trouble came down, she’d be on top of it. That allowed me to focus my attention on the task at hand, which was locating Barry, Miami’s finest nonviolent lowlife, among the audience of sugar-high kids and their parents.
I eventually found him sitting on a lawn chair under a tree, a plate of food on his lap, a cooler beside him.
Barry was the kind of guy who could get you what you needed, like dummy home loans, millions of dollar in fake wire transfers, new identities, small helicopters, and the occasional piece of advice about the inner workings of the bad people he associated with.
A jack-of-all-criminal-trades, really.
I sat down on the grass next to him, and for a few minutes we watched the trapeze. Four different students were doing a series of tricks that involved midair flips timed perfectly to a classical music arrangement. There was always someone in the air and someone launching into the air.
The precision, timing and dedication looked flawless, but it meant hours of preparation and failure had been embarked on long before this date.
“What I wonder,” Barry said after a while, “is what a professional trapeze artist does on his day off. Sit in a cubicle?”
“Probably the same thing anyone does,” I said.
“What do you do?”
“I plot,” I said. “And wait.”
“See, that’s the thing,” Barry said. “You need to find something more relaxing. I tried collecting wine for a little while. You know, like as a hobby? Started going to tastings and these things where they put out ten different kinds of cheeses and then the wine you’re supposed to drink with each cheese. Turned out to be very stressful. Too many decisions to make.”