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.
So if you’re really invested in subterfuge as a profession, you want to find a sport that doesn’t rely on any kind of points or any kind of luck. A sport that exists on an equal playing field, where wins and losses are calculated by human error, machinery and the unpredictable aspect of nature. Like horse racing. Betting on animals is stupid. They’re animals. They don’t know what they’re doing. But at least the playing field is even, since none of the horses is any more sentient than the other. And because they are animals, they can’t rat you out. Or NASCAR. The advent of the restrictor plate means that engine power became uniform in many of the races, or at least the races you’d want to fix, like Daytona and Talladega. Betting on cars is just as stupid as betting on animals, since they tend to break down, crash and then blow up and kill people, which frequently requires investigation. But cars don’t speak, either, which means you can disable one without anyone ever knowing, particularly if you are at least somewhat adept with remote devices. And provided no one is immolated in the process, you might just get away with it, too.
Or boat racing. In a regatta, like the one the Pax Bellicosa was about to run in, all the yachts are precisely the same, Swan 45s, sleek racing yachts with towering sails totaling more than 1,400 feet of mainsail and jib. With the machinery uniform, you fix a race not by tweaking the system, but by altering-or failing to perform-the subtle duties of the people on the boat, none more so than the helmsman.
Gennaro’s job.
Think of a helmsman like a quarterback, but one who not only knows how to throw a tight spiral and read defenses, but also has an intimate relationship with wind currents and retrograde velocity. The helmsman doesn’t simply pilot the boat and direct the other members of the team; he interprets the elements.
The other men on the boat can effect change, too. It can be as simple as reacting a few moments late on an order, carrying more weight on your person than expected, or, if need be, falling overboard.
If you need to make a lot of money fast-and that means illegally-you want to avoid the ponies and cars, since both are bet on regularly without criminal involvement, and both are so deeply regulated that trying to muscle in to affect a race of any significance is simply not worth the time and effort. It would take less time to heist a casino.
But the international regatta world is different. The players-the people who own the yachts-are millionaires and billionaires, which means that most of the fans are of a similar caste. Instead of a league like the NFL, yacht racing is frequently proctored, at least overseas, by the luxury corporations. Makers of watches, fine wines and cars advertise at these events to suggest a way of life. In addition to the races, these corporations run a week of events catering to every desire of the fan base. This means fashion shows, wine tastings, seminars where Warren Buffett comes in and talks about how to fold money properly-things like that.
According to that morning’s Miami Herald, for the next week the inhabitants of South Beach would be worth collectively more than the GNP of Honduras. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me, then, when I picked up Fiona and found her in a more chipper mood than the day previous, particularly after I filled her in on the latest job I’d found myself party to.
“You don’t intend to pretend that you don’t require payment again, do you?” she asked. We were in the Charger heading toward my mother’s house. I thought bringing Fi with me on the drive of shame back to my mother’s house would make it less awful. I didn’t really want to go and fight with my mother, but the longer I waited to drop off her gifts, the more likely I was to take them apart and use them for something else. Ever find yourself imprisoned in your home and need to make an IED? Turning a slow cooker into a bomb takes only a few household cleaning items, a bit of foam from an old ice chest and, if you’re looking to really hurt someone, a handful of paper clips, or, in a pinch, the zipper from your pants.
I also figured that if I had Fiona with me, two things might happen: I’d attempt to be more civil in the face of the now-vivid memories I had of my leg encased in plaster, and I’d be able to use her as an excuse to get out of recaulking the fireplace or cutting a cord of wood for the frigid spring months, or shoving my hand into the disposal again to fish out calcified animal fat.
“Sam was working on the financial end,” I said.
“And to think your government used to trust you,” she said.
“The job came through a contact of Sam’s,” I said.
“So now there’s a finder’s-keepers rule?”
“Whatever you need will be covered, Fi,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re coming out of this with your own catamaran. Just because these people have money doesn’t mean anything.”
I never liked taking money. It made this all feel like a job, like something I was now doing permanently versus doing to keep my skills up, or to bide time, or simply because it was the right thing to do. You’re employed by the people when you’re a spy, even if they aren’t aware of it most of the time, and my feeling was that once I
