figured out my burn notice, I’d be paid back.
But, just the same, I have to eat. And Fi needs shoes and purses and that lipstick that makes her lips look irresistible, and I’d prefer she made money with me instead of selling guns or picking up jobs for bounty hunters and such.
Even if we weren’t together as in together, life was still fundamentally more interesting with Fiona in the frame.
“I once owned a yacht, I’ll have you know,” Fi said.
“Owned?”
“Possessed might be a better word,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means for about a month I managed to live on one off the coast of Montenegro, fully staffed, even had a girl who came in and fluffed the pillows and a small boy who would come in at night-fall with a plate of cookies and chocolates.”
“What happened?” I said.
“The owners came out of their comas.”
“That happens,” I said.
Fiona had the dossier from Sam’s friend Jimenez and was flipping through it absently. Fi has always been more of a read-and-react kind of girl versus the type to do in-depth critical analysis, which means she’s best on her feet with a gun or an M-19 grenade launcher or just her fists, using her experience as a guide instead of doctrine.
“He’s cute,” Fi said. I looked over and saw the photo of Gennaro with Bonaventura.
“Which one?”
“The gentleman in the fifteen-thousand-dollar suit.”
“That’s Christopher Bonaventura.”
“I know.”
“He’s one of our problems.”
“He doesn’t look like much. He has a manicure in this photo. I’ve never liked a man who cared for his nails.”
“I’m going to guess that he has a staff who digs the graves and dumps the people in them.”
“Gennaro seems below his pay grade.”
I explained to Fiona that when you get down to the working level of the yacht-racing business, after Rolex lays out their cash for their race and Ferrari theirs, much of the hard work, the swinging of hammers, the actual running of the show, falls into other hands: the mafia. Not even the America’s Cup could avoid a scandal a few years ago when the race was held in the Sicilian port city of Trapani and lucrative deals were cut with government officials for the Cosa Nostra to gain huge windfalls of cash, both in construction contracts and, just for kicks, the nebulous realm of “entertainment.”
You have two choices if you want to place major action on a yacht race. You can either shout across your bow at the captain of international industry anchored just adjacent to you, or you make a call to someone like Christopher Bonaventura. Bonaventura-or someone like him, since there are a hundred men just like him in Miami alone, never mind Italy-will give odds and take proposition wagers, and will treat you like the king you might very well be. If you’re a billionaire, dealing with someone like Bonaventura isn’t really like getting yourself involved in organized crime, since in your case, it’s truly a victimless crime. You win, he pays. You lose, you pay. No one ends up getting their legs broken. It’s a world of high-stakes betting by people who can afford to lose.
Which made figuring out who was pressuring Gennaro all the more difficult.
Kidnapping an heiress and her daughter in order to ensure a race’s outcome is like setting fire to the Amazon to make s’mores: It would work, but it’s a might excessive.
“I’ve never understood why anyone bothers with kidnappings anymore,” Fiona said. “They so rarely work and then there’s all that care and feeding that must take place so your captive doesn’t die before you’re ready to kill them. Or, worse, they have a heart attack or a stroke and you’re left with some dreadful mess.”
“You’re a tender person, Fi,” I said.
“Seriously, Michael, if you are the type of person to kidnap someone, you’re ill equipped to care for your captive, which is only going to lead to bigger problems. It’s so much easier to just do identity theft these days. You never have to worry about some sweating, crying child making a mess on your sofa or in the trunk of your car.”
“You should film a public service announcement,” I said.
“Would you want to spoon-feed some terrified person? Walk them to the bathroom? Beat them if you have to, which, as I think you can attest, is not as much fun as it seems? No, thank you,” she said.
“Anyway,” I said, “in this case, as of right now, Maria and Liz don’t know any different. They’re somewhere in the Atlantic, eating lobster off Wedgwood.”
“That’s a lot of trouble just to get some money.”
“But that’s the thing. If they wanted money, they could have yanked the diamonds out of Maria’s ears. There’s something else here.”
Fi was still looking at the photo of Bonaventura. “Am I going to get to play with him?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“That is a lovely suit.”
“Fi.”
“I’m just saying, Michael, that if given the chance and I need to execute him, we might remember to ask him for his tailor’s name before he expires.”
We pulled up in front of my mother’s house. She was standing on the front porch, smoking and talking to a woman who looked vaguely familiar, in the way that many old women in Florida look vaguely familiar: She was wearing a white blouse that had a lovely multicolored pelican stitched over the right breast pocket, her hair was somewhere between blond and the color of an old French horn and was done in such a way that it looked strangely translucent. Even from the car, I could see that her lips had a lacquering of bloodred lipstick. She looked like a person wearing a Halloween costume of an Old Woman from Florida.
“Who is that?” I asked Fiona, since over the course of the last several months she’d gotten to know many of my mother’s friends by virtue of attending Ma’s weekly poker nights, the cooking course they took together and, frighteningly, for a time, a silent movie night at the Luart Theatre.
“That could be Esther,” Fiona said. “But I don’t think Esther would wear a pelican. She’s always struck me as more of a seagull or egret type. So it might also be Doris. Or Cloris. They’re sisters. Neither can bluff. But they play the river like pirates.”
“Why does she look like that?”
“That’s what all women look like after age 70, Michael, to punish men like you for disregarding women like me in our prime,” she said and then got out of the car before I could respond, which was fine, because I didn’t have a response.
I reached into the backseat and grabbed the Crock-Pot and the toaster oven, made a silent vow to myself to be pleasant and then got out of the car and walked up the front lawn toward the house. When I reached them, Fiona was already in the middle of hugs and kisses from my mother and warm handshakes from the woman dressed like a drag queen. I set the boxes down and tried to look dutiful.
“Loretta,” Ma said to the woman, all pretense of joy gone, “this is my son Michael. He’s the one who works in shipping and receiving.”
Passive.
Aggressive.
My mother.
“A pleasure,” I said, and shook Loretta’s hand, which was like shaking a leather bag filled with chicken bones.
Loretta looked me over with what could only be called disappointment. “My son works in Tallahassee,” Loretta said.
“That’s great to hear,” I said.
“For the governor,” she said.
