“How you fellas doing?” Sam raised his beer at the men, but they didn’t respond. “Here for the big race, or do you just love the maritime?”
Nothing.
“Well, nice joint you have here. Any of you guys got any pull with the jukebox? Maybe replace Artie Shaw with something from the last 100 years?”
Nothing.
“All right, then,” Sam said, and tipped his beer their direction again. “Avast and Ahoy!”
The Aground normally catered to a clientele of South Florida’s richest men, as the Southern Cross Yacht Club didn’t admit women into the building, much less the bar, until 1957, and tradition still lingered. They were still largely sexually segregated, though with much charm and aplomb and contemptible politeness, naturally, as the women had a tearoom downstairs where skirts were always required, as if it were still 1957.
And they were certainly socially and economically segregated, too, which was clear when the men got up and moved to another table as one, never once bothering to speak. Maybe it was because the center of my forehead looked like a blood-filled Easter egg. Or maybe it was because we were both in strict violation of the dress code posted above the front door that instructed all patrons in the bar to be in slacks and a coat after four p.m.
“That was subtle,” I said.
“Blue bloods have a low tolerance for me.” Sam again raised his beer toward the men once they settled at another table. “What can I say? I guess not everyone likes me.” He slid the rest of the file my way. “Anyway,” he said, “Dinino is our guy. He got back to the hotel and within five minutes he was up viewing the site. He sent three e-mails off to the same dummy g-mail address that my buddy Walt routed to Corsica, which is where the person uploading the video is located. How’s your Italian?”
“Not bad,” I said. I read the e-mails. One was asking when the next video would be uploaded, the second asked for confirmation that proper payment had been received and the third was informing the person in Corsica that their services would no longer be needed after tomorrow. “You get any more of his e-mails?”
“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.”
