Stefania, who’d raced for the Ottone’s Formula One team in the ’60s and ’70s and died in a fiery crash I remembered watching with my dad on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I could still hear Jim McKay announcing the race, the slow-motion replays of the car flipping over the grassy midfield of some foreign track before turning supernova. “That’s the agony of defeat,” my dad said then, which says a lot about Dad.
The dossier said Gennaro lived in America through college, moved to Italy after the death of his mother from cancer and married into the Ottone clan a decade ago amid persistent rumors that it was some kind of reparation for his father’s service, but, at least looking at the photos of him with Maria and their young daughter, things seemed bucolic, rumor and gossip aside. He’d inherited his father’s love of speed, but he preferred his work on the water-a lot less chance for fire-balls, that afternoon’s activities notwithstanding-and was now the helmsman for Ottone’s yacht racing team, the Pax Bellicosa, which was in Miami to take part in the Hurricane Cup.
Yacht racing is one of those sports that the average American doesn’t care about because the average American is landlocked. Even still, the idea of taking part in a regatta probably conjures images of men in navy blue sport coats calling each other old chap and sport and chum while skirting around buoys in the pleasant waters of the Atlantic, which certainly isn’t as compelling as anabolic freaks slamming into each other for a hundred yards of contested territory, ten yards at a time.
The truth was that there was a lot of “old chap” this and “sport” that and “chum” tossed around New England, but on the world stage, yacht racing was big business and big entertainment, which meant, as with all things big, that there was a criminal element. I didn’t think that yacht blowing up beneath the causeway this afternoon was a faulty wiring issue, certainly. There were also million-dollar parties, secondary events like fashion shows and car expos and haute cuisine displays. And gambling, though not of the legal variety. These teams, like Gennaro’s, were owned by people who threw money around like confetti. Where there’s money, there’s desire for more, and desire makes people blind. Blind people stumble into stupid things, like stickups, heists and good old- fashioned extortion, all in the name of sport.
Nevertheless, Gennaro seemed normal enough, which probably meant he was completely corrupt.
I flipped to page six.
“Oh, this is surprising,” I said.
“I’m not convinced it’s going to be a problem,” Sam said, but he might as well have said that he didn’t think he’d ever want to drink another beer. Some lies are well-meaning. Others are just lies.
There was a picture of Gennaro with Christopher Bonaventura, head of one of the largest international crime families. Allegedly. It was taken from a distance of several hundred yards and captured the two of them walking along a rocky jetty. The photo was likely snapped from a dinghy somewhere in the Adriatic. “What is this, Sam?”
“They’re old friends,” Sam said. “There was a question of impropriety that arose from the friendship. My friend smoothed it out.”
“What kind of impropriety?”
“There was some thought Gennaro had debts he wasn’t informing his family about.”
“Gambling?”
“Drugs. Bonaventura moves a lot of H. Seeing the two of them together raised suspicions. Especially since they weren’t exactly meeting in front of Starbucks.”
“Who was tailing him?”
“Don’t know. Probably Bonaventura’s own guys.”
“And your friend smoothed it out how?”
Sam shifted in his seat. It was his one tell. Sometimes he just can’t sit with things. “He convinced Mr. Bonaventura that he was no longer friends with Gennaro.”
“You couldn’t have told me this when we were still at the Carlito?”
“Gennaro doesn’t believe his situation is related to this. Frankly, Mikey, I’m inclined to believe the kid.”
I flipped back through the dossier. “He’s almost forty.”
“He’s very innocent,” Sam said. “You’ll want to protect him when you see him.”
“I’ll probably want to shake him until he passes out.”
Up ahead, the Setai shimmered in the fading sun. The hotel was a strange and entirely appropriate nexus between the past and the present, as if Art Deco had gone on a long, hot date with Asian design aesthetics. Look one way, you were in Miami in 1933. Look the other, and it was Hong Kong fifteen minutes ago. Half of the hotel was the old Dempsey-Vanderbilt, which first entertained the rich and notorious eighty years ago; the other half was a forty-story tower that was a second home to any celebrity with a single name.
“You going to tell me who your friend is?” I asked. It wasn’t important on a personal level, just that Sam’s patented avoidance of the subject made me curious and also indicated to me that our new friend Gennaro probably had issues beyond the dossier.
“A guy named Jimenez. That’s all I can say.”
“CIA?”
“For a time.”
“NSA?”
“Just an old friend, Mikey. He assures me Gennaro is fine and totally on the level. And rich, Mikey. Big money here. The kind where you won’t have to work for months afterward and can just focus on figuring out your burn notice.”
“Just the vacation I’ve been hoping for,” I said.
We pulled up to the hotel and were met by a valet dressed in an all-brown Nehru outfit. He took Sam’s keys without muttering a single word or looking directly at either one of us before speeding off. Indifference was the new politeness.
“Not exactly the Motel 6 here,” Sam said.
“You get what you pay for,” I said.
“But do they leave the lights on for you?”
“I’m going to guess that they do,” I said.
“My money, all you really need in a hotel is a bed, a bar and a pool.”
“Well,” I said, “good thing it’s not your money.”
Inside, the Setai was oddly quiet. I’d grown so accustomed to every hotel in South Beach being an excuse for a nightclub to have a roof that I’d forgotten elegance still existed. The lobby began as a narrow expanse that widened out across the back of the hotel, so that you got the sense you were looking into the hotel through a Panavision camera, your eyes taking in each new design detail as you moved across the brushed travertine floor. Throughout the space were vases of white roses atop nested tables beside matte bronze sofas that looked comfortable enough to sleep on, but which not a soul was sitting on. The muted glow of candles created fanciful shadows on the walls, which were also an understated bronze highlighted by long black draping and grand pieces of oval-shaped marble.
At the far end of the lobby was a single stomach-high reception desk made of brushed steel and inlaid squares of marble and wood. A man and a woman stood behind the counter. Both wore those odd Nehru outfits, and as we neared them en route to the elevators their faces turned downcast.
“You know what I miss?” Sam said.
“I dunno, Sam. The Cold War?”
“Used to be you walked into a hotel, it didn’t feel like you were somehow annoying the employees. This place, it’s pretty, but it’s not Howard Johnson’s.”
The last time the two of us spent a substantial amount of time in a high-rise hotel in the service of the superrich, Sam ended up taking out most of the fifth floor of the Hotel Oro. I had the sense that doing the same here would not be met with indifference. The Hotel Oro was owned by Russians of dubious intent. The Setai was owned by the GHM chain, the difference being the hotel chain would be more likely to chase you to the ends of the planet with a passel of lawyers. I’ll take Russians of dubious intent any day over lawyers. So, I made it a point to give the dour humans behind the reservations desk a nice smile as we passed.
Nothing. Not even a wave.
We took the elevators up to the fortieth floor, where they opened to the penthouse level. I expected to be greeted by some tough guys in suits, because that’s normally what you find at the entrance to a penthouse suite, but the hallway was empty save for the marble floor and the impressionist paintings on the wall alongside archival
