Tod Goldberg: The End Game

“Did he play dress-up?” Fi asked my mother.

“Here we go,” I said.

“There was a time when he was twelve that he pretended for a week to have a broken leg,” Ma said. “Limped everywhere he went.”

“You made me do that,” I said.

“How could I make you pretend to have a broken leg? That’s just crazy, Michael.”

“Well, Ma, as I recall, you ended up getting the TG amp;Y to give you a couple hundred bucks in store credit, since you claimed one of their shopping carts malfunctioned and ran me over.”

My mother gets a nice blush of red in her face when she’s angry. At that moment, she looked like an apple. “That’s asinine,” she said, but there wasn’t much behind it, and she immediately began shoveling cake into her mouth.

“And didn’t Nate ‘pretend’ to have a broken wrist, too?”

“You know, Michael, I was just trying to do my best to raise you two. If my methods were unconventional, I’m sorry.”

“Unconventional? You had my leg put into a cast.”

“And all of your friends signed it,” she said. “It was wonderful for your self-confidence.”

“Didn’t we just determine that I didn’t have any friends, Ma?” I said.

“I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette.” My mother stood up, grabbed her purse and tucked her vase in the crook of her arm. “You can ruin someone else’s Mother’s Day if you like, but you’re not going to ruin mine.”

I leaned back in my chair and finished off my frozen yogurt, aware that Fiona was glaring at me. “What?” I said, finally.

“You’re just going to let her stand out there?”

“She put my leg in a cast, Fi,” I said.

“When you were twelve.”

“Exactly.”

Fi grabbed my elbow. Hard. “And I could put your arm in one now,” she said.

Sometimes Fiona’s violent streak is cute. Sometimes it’s just violent. This was the latter. “Fine,” I said, but by the time I got outside, Ma was already gone. And I hadn’t even had the chance to give her the Crock-Pot and toaster oven yet.

One of the benefits of covert ops is that money is never an issue. If you’re having dinner with Chadian Aozou rebel leaders in Southern Libya and you set your Visa down, there’s never any concern that you won’t have enough room on your card to cover the bill. If you must purchase a decommissioned Soviet-era tank to ease tensions among opposing warlords in the Sudan, there’s never a call to your bank to check your credit rating. If you need to get your hands on a million dollars to pay off someone and that someone isn’t going to turn around and bomb U.S. interests, you don’t have to wait five business days for the funds to clear your bank.

When you’ve been burned and you have to worry about the price of detergent and the sudden rise in dairy costs affecting your yogurt consumption, making sure you have a steady cash stream takes on new importance.

Something Sam knows all too well, which is why I wasn’t exactly bamboozled when he told me about the client he’d met with earlier in the day.

“Thing of it is, Mike,” he said, “this is the kind of job I literally could do on my own without a problem, but I’ve been reading the newspapers lately and I’m not afraid to say that, for those working freelance, the outlook is pretty bleak.”

“Funny,” I said, “I didn’t see any stories in the Herald detailing the plight of the out of work spy.”

We’d been sitting on the Carlito’s patio for a little more than twenty minutes, largely making idle chatter, which is how Sam warms up before breaking bad news to me. So we’d already covered my shopping adventure at Target, the exploding ship and my exploding mother, which brought us to the job at hand. There was a thin manila file on the table that Sam hadn’t mentioned yet.

“Well, you gotta read between the lines,” Sam said. “You can’t trust that the media is going to say the exact truth. Little propaganda here, little propaganda there, keeps people on an even keel. Price of gas, for instance. Prime indicator of tough financial times ahead in the industry, my friend. Even your average drug smuggler or arms guy is going to take a long look at the ledger before he decides to make the Atlantic run with a bunch of cargo.”

“I get it, Sam,” I said.

“I’m just saying, you never know where your next dollar might come from.”

This already sounded bad. “But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”

Sam plucked an oyster from the bowl in front of him and then took a long sip from a bottle of Stella. “How do you feel about boats?”

“That depends, Sam. Are they blowing up?”

“Of course not,” Sam said.

“Because I saw a really nice yacht turned into slivers today and I don’t have a pressing desire to be involved in that sort of thing.”

“Thing of it is,” Sam said, “a friend referred me to a gentleman in the Italian yacht industry who has a rather significant problem.”

“The Italian yacht industry?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Didn’t I tell you that I wasn’t interested in Mob business?”

“This isn’t the Mob,” Sam said, but he said it in such a way that I sensed there was some semantic interpretation at work.

“I have no desire to enter into some squabble with Cosa Nostra,” I said. “The Outfit. Cosca. The Family. Whatever word you want to use. You’re talking about two hundred years of pissed-off people. They are not my problem.”

“It’s not that yacht industry,” Sam said.

“No?”

“Not specifically.”

“What yacht industry do you think I’m speaking of?”

Sam pondered this for a moment. “The one that takes place at the shipyards. Right?”

“Who is the friend?” I asked. This was important. Many of Sam’s friends in the past were actually people who were friends with his former girlfriend Veronica, which meant they had some problem that could only be solved to my near peril. Other friends of his were people who lived in that nebulous territory between smuggler and outright pirate, and who’d found themselves in situations requiring backup. And others still were people who bought him drinks when he was low on cash and learned his long and sordid history and figured he might be able to help them avoid violent exes, shylocks, bookies, unpleasant organized solicitors upon their businesses and other sundry unpleasant societal ills.

No one ever needed a cat rescued from a tree.

No one ever needed someone to give their son a stern talking-to about fireworks.

No one ever needed a guy to water their plants and watch their poodle, even.

“Maybe friend is a bit of a stretch,” Sam said. “A guy I know from a thing I did in Latvia a few years ago-let’s just say it was totally legal within the constructs of common treaties currently in place-has a small business venture whereby certain people come to him looking for help with projects that require sensitivity and care in the retrieval of certain products or persons. A former client of his contacted him today in relation to an event of a dangerous nature.”

“So,” I said, “a mercenary?”

“Essentially,” Sam said.

“If he’s so good,” I said, “why did he need to come to you with things of a ‘dangerous nature’?”

“This job is a little out of his area of expertise.”

On the beach, people were playing volleyball, tossing Frisbees, applying suntan lotion. A bank of thick gray clouds lined the horizon, making me think that a storm might be coming, or if it were like any other Miami afternoon, they’d just sit out there all day as if to let everyone know that somewhere else people had it just slightly worse.

I sighed. It was better than speaking.