Tod Goldberg: The End Game

“And my friend isn’t technically allowed in America,” Sam said.

I sighed again. This one was meant to convey a sense of quiet resignation tinged with muddled anger.

“Now, Mikey,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t have agreed to take this job if it didn’t seem like something you could do with your eyes closed. You wouldn’t even need to take off your sunglasses.”

“Where is this client?”

“He’s staying at the Setai,” Sam said.

The Setai is the most expensive hotel in South Beach. It’s the kind of hotel you stay in when you want people to know that money means nothing to you, but not in the frugal sense. Odds are that if you’re staying at the Setai, you don’t have a Crock-Pot and a toaster oven in your trunk, you didn’t have lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s and your problems are not the kind that can be solved with your sunglasses on.

“Who is this person? One of the Medicis?”

Sam cleared his throat, “Gennaro Stefania.” He waited, as if I might suddenly bolt from the table, or pass out, or have any response at all.

“That supposed to mean something to me?”

“At any time in the last ten years did you pick up a magazine with an actress or model on the cover?”

“No.”

“People?”

“No.”

“You are aware such magazines exist?”

“I am aware that I’m about thirty seconds from going home.”

Sam slid the manila file folder toward me. I opened it and saw a photo of a man on the deck of a catamaran cutting through rough seas. There were other men surrounding him, but for reasons unknown their faces were pixelated. The man looked to be about forty, athletic, his arms long and sinewy with muscle, like a runner’s. He was handsome in a regular way, which is to say he didn’t look like a model, just your average alpha male: an angular face, deep-set green eyes, wavy brown hair.

I turned the page and saw a word that immediately made me close the file: Ottone.

The Ottones were a family made for tabloid journalism. They were nineteenth-century money that had migrated from land wealth in the Old World to the currency of luxury: the Lux, a two- seater sports car modeled after their Formula One racecars, which became quickly favored in the 1970s by men on their way to the disco and the women who loved them, in the ’80s by would-be investment bankers and the women who held their cocaine and hair gel, in the ’90s by midlife-crisis humans of all sexes who didn’t realize they weren’t driving Porches. In the twenty-first century, they sold their car line to Ford and began a full-throttle investment into opulence: clothing lines, jewelry, watches, fragrance, casino properties. They added their name to anything that connoted the good life, including Fashion Week in Milan, tennis tournaments and golf opens in Dubai, polo in England, open-wheel racing in Monte Carlo, nightclubs in New York and Los Angeles that attracted people who merely wanted to be near the kind of money they’d never earn. In a few years people would think Ottone was just another word, not a proper name.

And with all of that, of course, comes scandal. Mistresses, drug addictions, deaths-the sorts of things that happen to normal people all the time but that are heightened by a place in world society.

A place I was not interested in being a part of.

A place Gennaro Stefania was connected with by virtue of being married to Maria Ottone, which was a little like being married to the key to Fort Knox.

A place that invariably led to publicity. Not what a burned spy craves, ironically.

“Not interested,” I said, and slid the file back to Sam.

“His family is in peril,” Sam said. His voice was serious, but I could tell that he’d practiced that line. Peril wasn’t a word that rolled off Sam’s tongue.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing that would be on the news by now?”

“It’s complicated,” Sam said.

“This is not something I can do with my sunglasses on, Sam, I can tell you that already.”

“It’ll be a piece of cake,” Sam said, “trust me.” He swallowed the last of his Stella and stood up.

“You going somewhere?”

“We’re already late,” Sam said. “You think you could call your brother and see if he could pick us up? Can’t exactly pull up to the Setai in the Charger, you know? You mind?”

“I do mind,” I said.

“He’s a good kid,” Sam said.

“He’s not a kid, Sam,” I said. “He’s an actual adult. You really want him parked in front of that hotel while we meet with your client?”

Sam thought about that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“That shouldn’t be the baseline consideration,” I said.

Sam pulled out his phone. “Let me see if I can get a buddy of mine to loan us something appropriate.”

The difference between being wealthy and being rich isn’t so much a question of dollars and cents as it is an understanding of levels. When you’re rich, you might have a vacation house in Sun Valley or the Hamptons, might have a Bentley or two, might have a photo of yourself with the president on the wall of your office. Maybe you’re a lawyer or a doctor, or you invented doubled-sided tape and thus have a net worth in the millions of dollars earned off your own hard work and expertise and invention.

You’re rich.

When you’re wealthy, you don’t have a second home, you have a second island, the president or premier or king or violent despot is probably in your pocket (particularly in certain OPEC nations) and you probably don’t have to worry about punching a clock, since the other key difference is that wealth perpetuates wealth generationally-so that men like petrochemical scions Mukesh and Anil Ambani don’t need to create anything new whatsoever; they just need to wait for their parents to die, and even if they end up feuding and suing each other and breaking apart the companies they inherited, they still both end up being worth more than $40 billion each. Not a bad day’s work, if you can get it.

You’re wealthy.

The other option toward untold wealth, particularly if you don’t want to work terribly hard for it, is age-old and difficult to ever understand completely: love. People have married for much less than a billion dollars, but in the case of Gennaro Stefania, most people figured it was the billions, not love, which led to his romance and eventual marriage to Maria Ottone a little more than a decade ago.

I was in the passenger’s seat of Sam’s buddy’s car-a BMW that smelled like people had been having sex in it, regularly, and in all of the seats-reading through Gennaro’s file again as we made our way to the Setai. I was trying to figure out why someone like him would need someone like me, but, more than that, why he might have needed someone like Sam’s nebulous friend, particularly a nebulous friend who would provide such an extensive dossier, which detailed his life in familiar CIA-speak and description and detail.

“Your friend,” I said. “What did he do for Gennaro before?”

“Security mostly,” Sam said.

“Security like he protected him, or security like he hid bodies for him?”

“Security like he helped him out of a problem with some undesirables. It’s on page six.”

One thing I knew for certain was that marrying into the Ottone clan was no easy bargain, money or not. But especially not for someone like Gennaro, who wasn’t exactly Italian royalty. He was the American-born son of Victor 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.