Tod Goldberg - The End Game

Psychopaths prefer to cut you into bite-sized pieces using their nail clippers.

An American. This was important, particularly since he was an American working for an Italian crime boss. You commit a crime in America involving a gun and, provided you are apprehended and convicted, you’re looking at between five and twenty years of prison time, but the truth is that if you have a decent lawyer and a relatively clean record and are a war hero, you’re probably on the street in six months.

Commit a crime with a gun in the service of a foreign national involved in criminal enterprise on American soil, and you’re looking at federal time. Do it as an American soldier and there’s a good chance they’ll try you for treason.

All of this worked in our theoretical favor.

There was also a pretty good chance that Jarhead had already played out these issues in his own mind, too, and didn’t care.

Nihilism is always a wild card.

Jarhead stopped before the open doors of a sitting room that overlooked the water. The walls were covered in bookshelves and surrounded two couches that faced each other in the center of the room. A mahogany coffee table was placed between the couches, and as we entered the room a woman was placing a tray of ice water and lemonade onto it, along with several glasses and a plate of cookies.

Nate started to move toward the food-it might have just been reflex on his part-but I grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

It’s important to appear courteous and hospitable when dealing with your enemies. It’s more important to make sure they eat first, not just out of custom, but to ensure the food isn’t poisoned.

When the woman left, Jarhead finally spoke again. “Please give me all of your weapons,” he said. Usually in a situation like this, I’d be concerned that Nate might do something stupid, like start shooting, but I’d made my calculations and felt somewhat secure that Jarhead was working on the level-or at least a level that allowed him to be threatening, but not outright murderous-so I immediately began disarming and handing everything over to one of Jarhead’s men, which caused Nate to do the same thing.

Jarhead hadn’t said another word directly to me, but I was certain now that when he said he knew me, he wasn’t speaking philosophically. Now I was trying to figure out how.

My first impression upon seeing him was that he’d been in Kabul. The truth, however, is that he could have been anywhere. We could have huddled against a berm together for five minutes in Iraq. We could have been in a classroom in Virginia. We could have sat next to each other on an Apache hovering over Malawi.

What was obvious, no matter the situation, was that he didn’t know Tommy the Ice Pick and wasn’t all that concerned by my deception. At least not to the point that he actually acted on his knowledge, which in and of itself was cause for concern.

There’s subversion and then there’s third-rail treachery. Jarhead was standing close enough to the latter to be putting off sparks, playing both sides without any visible recompense.

Which meant he had his own agenda, provided I didn’t try to choke Christopher Bonaventura to death.

“You ever do any time?” I said to Jarhead once all of the guns were collected. “Because you look like a guy I knew back in the day.”

“Worked in the post office for a little while,” Jarhead said flatly.

This was good.

We were now officially speaking in code.

When you’re a spy or an operative like Jarhead, working in the post office means you’ve been disseminating propaganda and doing incursions into foreign countries.

In the early days of Vietnam, this meant sending CIA operatives into the country as journalists and aid workers who could alter the news, ferment change via small-group discussions in hamlets and villages and salt any open wounds helpful to American concerns.

And occasionally executing people.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was more of the same, but a higher reliance on executing people and then altering the news, leafleting hamlets and then, if need be, engaging in blackmail, extortion and general malfeasance, all under the guise of democratic nation building.

Freedom has certain responsibilities, and very few of them are pretty if you happen to be standing on foreign soil and prefer a more totalitarian ruling technique.

“I don’t get a lot of mail,” I said. “I’m sort of an off-the-grid kinda guy, know what I’m saying? You ever live in the East?”

“Worked out there,” he said. “Went to school up North.”

Translation: was stationed in the Middle East, or at least dropped in a few times in the dead of night and took out Baath party members in advance of a Humvee line. Trained in North Africa, which meant we had similar skill sets.

Not a great development.

“You get to any clubs? Maybe I seen you at one?”

“Didn’t go out much after I stopped working at the post office,” he said. “Just wanted to stay home. And now I get to make my own hours. But who knows? Something interesting happens in the mail industry, maybe I’ll get back into it. I just love to work.”

Translation?

Covert Ops.

Decommissioned.

Freelance.

Loves to answer the phone at three a.m., put on black body armor and kill people.

Further translation:

No problem killing my entire family, if that’s what his orders were.

“Great,” I said. “Good you like your job.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds, each of us taking account.

There weren’t a lot of soft spots on Jarhead. My best chance with him would be to go for his eyes, try to get knuckle deep in one and see if he submitted, which was unlikely. Jarhead didn’t look like the kind of guy who submitted to anything.

Likewise, Jarhead was trying to calculate my soft spot. He looked me up and down slightly and then, almost imperceptibly, cut his gaze to Nate.

“Working with family is more rewarding,” he said. “I learned that from Mr. Bonaventura.”

He was good. And he knew it.

Happy with his progress in sussing out the threat level in the room, Jarhead told one of his men to get the boss, and a few moments later Christopher Bonaventura stepped into the room with a studied nonchalance.

In photos, Bonaventura looks dapper and collected, like he’s always about to sip a martini and smoke a cigar before engaging in a lively game of chance somewhere in Monaco, just prior to jumping on a Learjet bound for the Caymans.

Or ordering the murder of his father, because the truth is that he is a thug. Nothing more. Nothing less.

But on this day, he was a thug holding a birthday party for the five-year-old daughter, which meant he wasn’t looking terribly dapper. He had on a plain white T-shirt, tan shorts that showed off his pale knees, and I noticed that he hadn’t bothered to put on any shoes. There were bits of grass and dirt between his toes, and he smelled vaguely like cotton candy, which made sense since there were tiny pink gobs of it on his chin.

Bonaventura looked around the room, shrugged once, sat down on one of the couches, poured himself a glass of lemonade, drank it, wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, and then turned to me and said, “Who the fuck are you?” His accent was prominent, but he’d been educated in America and spent enough time here to have a library stocked with books in English. It seemed like he was a big Harry Potter fan, but maybe that was for his kid.

“Tommy Feraci,” I said. I extended a hand towards him but he didn’t move. “From Las Vegas originally, but now I’m cohabitating in these here parts.” I pointed at Nate. “That’s my man Slade.” I pointed at Gennaro. “That’s your mark.”

“You know this guy, Gennaro?” Gennaro said he did. Bonaventura took another sip of his lemonade, swallowed, seemed to contemplate the information he had and then said, “You have some sort of business proposal for me, is that right?”