The careful art of subversion involves turning people against their own leaders. During a long campaign, this entails intricate-and intimate-psychological warfare mixed with a fair amount of propaganda. This means everything from arming opposition leaders to facilitating the escape of political prisoners to simply attending to the core needs of the people you wish to convert.
You give them money and prescription drugs.
You pave their roads.
You give children candy and toys.
And then you tell the people that their government is corrupt and controlled by a puppet master in the west, the east, the north, the south.
And if none of that works? You capture them, torture them, tell them they have two choices: Join your militia or die.
Most people will opt to live.
Sometimes, this all works our perfectly… And most everyone dies, regardless.
Guatemala.
Cuba.
Iraq.
Iraq again.
That knowledge gave me pause.
Telling someone that you know they are lying-and lying to their leader-and yet refusing to act is one of the basest forms of subversion. You do it to build trust while creating a false sense of reciprocal empathy between a rank-and-file soldier just doing his job and the person they are charged with guarding.
But if Jarhead knew who I was, that meant he was aware of one of the most profound truths concerning intelligence: You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.
So as Jarhead directed us through the house, I broke him down from the available information, which was only what I could see, what Sam had told me, and what I had to assume.
He was:
A Marine. Probably Force Recon, which meant he’d spent the last several years in combat situations requiring far more mental acuity than walking uninvited guests to a sitting room.
A trained killer. The difference between a trained killer and a psychopath is usually distance. A trained killer shoots at objects at the end of a scope and can marginalize them into “kills” without considering that human element. The targets are impediments to freedom, or the crossing of a bridge or the clearing of a hot zone. Force Recon Marines, however, tend to recruit men not morally opposed to close fighting-whites-of-their-eyes moments-if the need arises. But there’s not a lot of close fighting when you have Apaches and Black Hawks on your team, too.
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?”
“Not so much a proposal,” I said. “I don’t propose. This is more like an infomercial. I’m gonna tell you what’s what and then you tell me how much you’re buying.”
Christopher Bonaventura burst out laughing. He laughed until it became uncomfortable for the rest of us standing and watching him, so I sat down across from him, poured myself a glass of lemonade, too, and waited for him to calm down, which he did directly.
“I like you,” Bonaventura said. “You come to my home, during my daughter’s birthday, you bring my old friend Gennaro with you like a captive and then you tell me how it’s going to be. You don’t need my permission Tommy. Go about your business with Gennaro with my blessing. That’s how much I like you. None of my business.”
“I think that’s where we aren’t seeing things correctly. My business with Gennaro directly relates to your business with Gennaro.”
“I’m not in business with Gennaro,” he said. “Are we, Gennaro?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Gennaro said.
“You leave that up to your wife now, too?” Bonaventura said. “First she tells you who you can be friends with, and now she tells you what to think? Your father would be ashamed of you.”
Gennaro flinched but didn’t say anything.
“Here’s the dilly-o,” I said, ignoring whatever was going on between the two of them. And by ignoring, I mean that I was paying absolute attention, but that Tommy the Ice Pick had a single-minded determination to get on with the conversation. “I can’t have you working the open seas like you’re Gaspar. This is my water, so you won’t be fixing races on it unless I say so.”
“Gennaro, why would you tell him I’m doing that?”
Gennaro looked at me and then back at Bonaventura. If he followed the script, we’d be fine. “He has my wife and child,” Gennaro said. “He told me if I don’t lose the race he’ll kill them and then me.”
Perfect.
“Here’s how it is,” I said. I motioned to Nate, who was holding up a bookcase with his back while trying to look menacing. “My guy Slade over there takes a lot of action on these races, and everyone he talked to this week said the Pax Bellicosa was the way to go. Lots of cheese going that direction. So I made a couple calls. Talked to some guys on the other boats-and by talk, I think you know what I’m saying, right, Chrissy?-and it all came back to you.”
“If this were true,” he said, “why would it be any concern of yours? Where did you say you’re from?”
“Las Vegas originally. Spent a couple years in Angola-the one in Louisiana-and finished up down here at Glades, and my friends have been nice enough to let me set up my own shop here. Guess I just got used to the clean Florida life,” I said. “See, no disrespect, but this race isn’t being held in Corfu, so you want to get into this in Miami, you go through my shop. And then there’s the issue that my shop has certain worldwide interests involving Mr. Stefania here, and they don’t involve him winning any more races.”
Bonaventura stood up and walked over to the window. He was still sipping on his lemonade. Perfectly casual. Not a single ounce of stress in his bones. “You seem like a reasonable person, Tommy.”
“That’s what people say,” I said.
“And I think I’m a reasonable person. Wouldn’t you say that, Gennaro? That people consider me reasonable above all else?”
“I don’t know,” Gennaro said.
“Sure you do,” Bonaventura said. “Wasn’t I reasonable when you came to me for help? Wasn’t I reasonable in not telling your family of your own insecurities? Wasn’t I reasonable when we were kids, Gennaro? Didn’t I handle all of your problems then in a reasonable way?”
I didn’t like where this was going.
“Hey, everybody thinks everybody is a peach, right?” I said.
“Right,” Bonaventura said. “So let’s do a little algebra, Tommy. Is the water in… what did you say, Corfu?… is that the same water that flows through this bay?”
“Hey,” I said, “I ain’t some kinda waterologist here. You want someone to explain to you how water works, go get yourself a dolphin. You want to know how money works, we can talk.” I was walking a very thin line between cocky and the victim of an assassination, though I thought it was unlikely Jarhead would do anything to me. If he knew who I was, he knew what I was capable of, and I was capable of taking down this entire room in less than a minute, though when I looked over at Jarhead again I did some quick math and decided it would probably take an extra forty seconds or so to deal with him. Thing was, right when I looked over at Jarhead he looked right at me, as if maybe he was doing the same math. “No disrespect,” I continued, “but this isn’t bocce ball we’re talking about here.”
Bonaventura laughed again. “You pretend that you’re dumb, Tommy,” he said. He walked back across the room and stood directly in front of me, so that I had to look up at him from my spot on the sofa. I could see the smoothness of his skin up close, could smell his cologne, could see the glint of diamonds off his watch.
Could break both of his legs in fifteen seconds.
Maybe less.
“But I know you’re smart,” he said, and then pointed a finger at me, but not in a threatening way. Just pointing out the obvious. “So I’m going to explain to you one time the universal truth of this business you think you’re in. All the water that I see is mine. I don’t care where in the world I am-if I want it, it’s mine. If I choose to have sway over a race in Miami, or in Italy, or in the fucking toilet you sit on each morning, I do it. There is no why. I do it. So you tell your people to leave his family alone, or you, your people, everyone your people know, have a problem. Do we understand?”
“I don’t know who we are,” I said. I spread my legs out so Bonaventura was actually in the V between my feet, effectively trapping him where he stood. “But I know I understand one thing, and you told me another.”
“Your smugness is not becoming and it will not last,” Bonaventura said. He looked down and saw my legs. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a birthday party to get back to.”
If you were a lunatic, this would be the moment when you would kick Christopher Bonaventura in the knees, and then while he was down you’d probably kick him in the head, too. You’d stand on top of him and you’d say something you first heard on television or in a music video or uttered by an action hero… And then Jarhead would shoot you in the back of your skull.
Tommy the Ice Pick was a lunatic.
Michael Westen didn’t want to get shot in the back of the head.
But neither of us was letting him go yet.
“Out of curiosity,” I said, “where do you get an elephant? My kid, she’s always asking for a puppy or a gerbil, and I figure one day, who knows, I might pick one up. But you can’t just go into PetSmart and find yourself an elephant, am I right?”
“Move your legs,” Bonaventura said.
“I’m not done talking to you yet,” I said. “I’m not some punk you can just brush off. I’ve got people ready to kill your friend Gennaro’s wife if things don’t go as I want them to go. Show him your phone, G.”
Gennaro dug his phone from his pocket and handed it to Bonaventura, who looked at the video for a moment and handed it back without a word.
I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or not. So I explained it to him; see if he blinked. He showed nothing, so I went on. “You want that I kill Maria and make poor Liz watch? You want that on your plate? Because the first person the FBI and cops and Interpol look to isn’t going to be Tommy Feraci. It’s going to be you, Chrissy. You think the FBI isn’t going to find out you’ve been fixing his races? That’s some RICO shit right there, partner, and it’s a lot easier to prove than mail fraud.”
“You have nothing,” Bonaventura said. “They have nothing.”
“No, they had nothing on Capone. You know where he ended up? Right here in Miami, brain sick from the syphilis. Ended up dead in his big-ass mansion over on Palm Island. You can probably see his place out your window, right there on your water. Me? I got your friend Gennaro here,” I said. “I got every single person my guy Slade put an ounce of pressure on, each rolled on you like it was their job, like if they rolled on you, I was gonna give ’em health benefits and a 401( k), you know? Rolled and rolled and rolled, Chrissy. Just one look from Slade was all it took. One look.”
Nate straightened up. Flexed his jaw muscles. Sucked in his stomach, puffed out his chest, narrowed his eyes. I’d ask him later where he picked up those moves, since it made him look like he had the stomach flu.
“That’s why we’re here,” I continued. “Just being a gentleman about things. Being reasonable. You let Gennaro’s interests go, or his wife dies, maybe his kid, too, and it’s on your ass. Besides, you’ve made your nut off of this, right? You can absorb a few gambling losses this week, right?”
Taking risks is about calculating the possibility of success. Hit a 17 against a face card in blackjack and it isn’t a risk, it’s poor judgment. Telling a mafioso exactly how he would be implicated in the murder of one of the wealthiest women in the world is just good business sense.
Provided the Mafioso isn’t already planning the same murder, of course.
That’s where the risk came in. I had to hope I was making the right play.
Bonaventura briefly shifted his eyes over to Jarhead. A real bully only attacks when he knows he can’t be beaten, when he has someone else to handle his business if it looks like the odds aren’t in his favor. And Christopher Bonaventura definitely had the odds.
“You touch Maria Ottone, and you will not sleep another night,” Bonaventura said.
A person with actual skill and training doesn’t care about the odds, especially when fighting someone who has always relied on personal intimidation and not actual physical prowess in defeating his opponents… Or if the person with skill is actually looking to get hit.
“I wouldn’t dream of touching her,” I said. “The plan is for one of my guys to chain her to the anchor, toss her over and see if she’s Houdini.” I looked at my watch. “In about fifteen minutes, if they don’t hear from me, Gennaro’s wife will be under your water, Chrissy.”
If you want to avoid getting hit in the face and aren’t much of a fighter, the best thing to do is run away. Adrenaline and fear will give you a burst of speed that your attacker may not be able to match. It will also give you the opportunity to find a weapon or, better, other people. Civil society is usually more of a deterrent to violence than a piece of balsa wood being waved by someone in mortal fear for their life.
If running isn’t an option, you want to control the situation as best as you can. That means controlling the point of attack. If you’re going to get hit in the face-if, in fact, you’re encouraging someone to hit you in the face-the forehead is the best possible landing position for their fist.
The forehead’s main job is to protect your brain, which makes it one of the hardest plates in the human body. As a side benefit, your forehead has an interstate of thick blood vessels crisscrossing from just above your eyebrows up through your hairline, and, when punctured, they tend to geyser. It’s how every professional wrestler is able to bleed out on the mat and still make it back into the ring the next weekend.
Most people not involved in professional wrestling don’t care for the sight of blood, particularly not blood in geyser form.
The other side benefit is that there’s a pretty good chance that the person hitting you in the forehead is going to break his hand or at least a few fingers or knuckles, especially if you’re someone like Christopher Bonaventura, who’d just tucked his thumb into his fist; it’s a common tactic seen in five-year-old girls and nervous Mafia bosses who realize they’ve been backed into a corner by someone calling himself Tommy the Ice Pick.
So as Christopher Bonaventura swung down at me, I tilted my head back and thrust my neck upward, letting him catch me flush in the forehead, but without losing any control over my neck muscles.
If you don’t want to get knocked out when being hit in the head or face, you have to learn to control the acceleration and deceleration of your head and neck muscles. When someone hits you in the face and you pass out, what’s actually happening is that you’re having a stroke.
A very small stroke, but a stroke just the same.
You want to avoid having a stroke.
A rotary blow-a roundhouse left, for instance-will cause your head to swivel sharply, compressing and constricting your carotid arteries, which is not a good thing if you enjoy having regular cardiac function or the ability to speak.
An uppercut works in much the same way, except that instead of constricting the carotid, the whiplash effect of the acceleration compresses the circulation to the back of your brain.
Keeping circulation flowing to the back of your brain is important, particularly if you like controlling your motor functions. Getting hit square on the chin might snap your temporomandibular joint like a chicken bone, but if you have strong neck muscles, you’ll only pass out from the pain.
If you don’t have the opportunity to walk around with weighted headgear for a few hours every day in order to build up muscle, try yoga. The natural resistance training will give you flexibility and core strength. The serenity might keep you away from angry mob bosses intent on punching you in the face.
Barring the ability to achieve any of the above, your only other option is to match or beat the velocity of the object moving toward you, so that when it impacts, most of the damage goes in the other direction.
Or exactly what happened to Christopher Bonaventura’s fist.
I felt his thick wedding band dig into the tightened flesh of my forehead, splitting it right where I’d hoped, sending a spray of blood out from my head, which I then flung forward, dousing him, and then dousing the sofa, and getting a few drips and drops on the coffee table, too. If I got the opportunity, I’d walk over to the bookcase and grab Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and leave a couple streaks there, too. All of which would be hard for Bonaventura to explain to his daughter, the nice invited guests here for her birthday and the elephant tamer, too.
But first he’d need to go to the emergency room, since as soon as his fist landed on my forehead he let out a shriek, which told me he’d probably just broken his thumb, maybe his ring finger, too, which would serve him right for hitting me with his wedding band. He stumbled out from between the sofa and the coffee table, holding his hand and covered in my blood.
Nate made a move, but Jarhead gave him a slight shove that sent him back against the wall. It was a halfhearted effort by both of them, which is about what I expected. Jarhead was going to let Bonaventura do what he was going to do, which didn’t end up being much at all, which was probably better for all involved.
I had two options here: pretend to be really hurt or be the tough guy.
“That all you got?” I slurred. I staggered up and then fell back into the sofa.
Bonaventura stood next to Jarhead and glared at me. It was about all he could muster, since his hand had already started to balloon grotesquely. Also, I was shaking my head back and forth, spreading blood onto as many surfaces as possible. He was going to have quite the cleaning bill, though something told me he could afford it. His daughter might only get an alpaca for her next birthday, however.
“Get this trash out of my home,” he said to Jarhead.
“Does that mean we have a deal?” I said. “Because Maria has about ten minutes left on her clock.” I tapped my watch. “Tick, tick, tick, Chrissy.”
He glared at me some more. The he turned and glared at Gennaro. He took some time doing that glaring thing to everyone in the room, even his own guys. I got the impression that he thought this was a good way of communicating rage and indignation, generally, but at that moment I think it was also a way to keep him from crying out in pain again. “I hope you know what you’ve done,” he said to Gennaro.
“All I know is that I don’t want my wife to die,” he said. “If I am in this maniac’s pocket or yours, I can’t see the difference.”
Bonaventura walked out of the room without another word, which I took to mean I’d solved one of our problems. I took one of the throw pillows from the sofa and pressed it against my forehead and then stood up, which got the blood flow to stop.
“How many minutes was that?” I said to Jarhead.
“Nine,” he said.
“Think I can get a ride on the elephant?”
“Not this time,” he said. He motioned to one of his guys, who gave me and Nate back our guns. Jarhead then handed me a card. All it had on it was his name: ALEX KYLE. No number. “Call me,” he said. “We should talk.”