The End Game

2

You have two choices when facing a hostile interrogation: Tell the truth or tell a lie. The problem here is that if you’re being interrogated by hostile forces, the end result is that you’re likely going to be killed regardless. So in the event that you find yourself on the pointed end of a knife, or looking down the barrel of a gun, or are simply sitting in a bathtub filled with water while one guy wearing a mask holds a video camera and another a plugged-in hair dryer, each awaiting your confession, well, you give whatever answer you think will buy you a few more minutes to formulate an escape plan.

“So, you didn’t have any friends, Michael?” Fiona asked.

“Not that I choose to recall,” I said. We were in the Charger but not moving, traffic in midtown Miami having come to a complete stop. Now would be a good time to have an extraction team.

“Who did you eat lunch with?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“You didn’t eat, or you didn’t eat with people?”

“I mostly did sit-ups.”

“And who do you blame for this, your mother or your father?”

“Combination of both,” I said. “What’s with all this traffic?”

“After school, you didn’t play with anyone?”

“No, I didn’t play with anyone. I built a lot of things. Small explosives. My own BBs. That sort of thing.”

“And where was Nate?”

“Causing problems somewhere,” I said. I turned on the radio and searched for a station with a traffic report, but all I found were stations playing hip-hop and Gloria Estefan. Doesn’t matter what station you listen to in Miami; they all play Gloria Estefan.

“Was I your first kiss, Michael?”

“Fi,” I said.

“It occurs to me that Sam is the only friend of yours I’ve ever met,” Fiona said.

“You met Larry,” I said.

“Who wasn’t really your friend,” she said.

“He was for a while,” I said.

“He was an assassin,” she said.

“Well, before that, he had good points.”

“Being an efficient killer doesn’t count.” I gave Fi a look. “Normally, anyway.”

“You met Ricky,” I said. “My friend Andre’s kid brother.”

“That’s right. And where is Andre now?”

“Doing twenty-five,” I said. “And now you have Davey. The five of you should go out and swap stories about me. Let me know what you find out.”

We were on our way to South Beach to meet my mother-Fiona kindly phoned her from Target and told her we’d decided gifts just wouldn’t do, and that I’d like to buy her dinner, as well-but the 195, the causeway we’d need to get on to get across the water, was frozen in front of us, too.

I made a left turn off Miami Avenue and wound around Roberto Clemente Park. Used to be this part of town was all working-class Puerto Rican families, but now it was this weird mix of big-box stores, high-rise condos, art galleries, coffeehouses, dollar stores, empty warehouses, boarded-up houses, chain-link fences, jungle gyms on broken pavement, cops parked window to window under trees and teenage gangsters trying to look hard, but mostly looking like they were bothered by the humidity and just wanted to be inside. I doubted any of them knew who Roberto Clemente was.

“You take me to the nicest places, Michael,” Fiona said. The pleasant thing about being with Fiona is that you drive through a bad neighborhood with her and she doesn’t lock the doors and scream for you to find the closest Quiznos. She just takes it all in. Cereal-box gangsters and graffiti scare her about as much as a guppy scares a shark. She was looking out the window and smiling at the corner boys, periodically waving at them as we passed.

“You want to know what I did when I was a kid?” I said. “I came down here and stole cars. Half of them were already stolen or had fake plates as it was. Sometimes, Nate and I would steal a car here, drive it to the Pork ’n’ Beans Projects, steal another car there, drive it back over here and then catch the bus back home before my dad even knew we were gone.”

“And that was fun?”

“That was the best time,” I said. “Better than being home, Fiona. Better than being home.”

We wound back through 34th Street, picked up the 195 and circled back to the MacArthur Causeway, which was a longer trip, but I didn’t mind too terribly much. I’d already seen my mother five times that week-once to unclog her sink, which it turns out was backed up with a compound of cigarette ash and animal fat, which had turned into a marcite-like substance in her disposal; once to take her to see her podiatrist in order to get her troublesome ingrown toenail cut out; once to assure her that her neighbors were not using their DirecTV unit to bug her conversations; once to show her how to operate her DVD player and once to dissuade her from making me go to family therapy with her again.

It was her new thing. She wanted us to get closer to each other, to get past my anger at her having been married to my father, of her letting him treat us like leaves, something to be raked up and burnt, and to, as the last article she clipped from Oprah’s magazine said, “mend our broken home.”

Twenty years of psychological training in warfare and battle. Armed conflicts in half the world. Set up shadow governments in countries that don’t even exist anymore. No one told me I’d still be responsible for repairing my past, too.

From the MacArthur Causeway I could see what was causing all the backup on the parallel causeway-a yacht the size of Bali had crashed into a piling beneath the Venetian Causeway, which runs between the MacArthur and the Tuttle. There wasn’t any real damage to the causeway, as it looked to be a glancing blow, but the yacht seemed wedged into place. The water was filled with other boats, mostly other ostentatious yachts, as well as a series of rescue ships and Port Authority boats making their way towards the accident.

“What’s with the luxury fleet?” I said. The bay was frequently filled with gorgeous boats and dinghies alike, but there was something clearly different on this day. Yachts like you only see on the coast of Italy and in rap videos were thick on the water, some so close to each other it was hard to distinguish where one began and the other ended.

“There’s a race this week,” Fi said. “One of those playboys-with-toys events.”

“Why do you know that?”

“A business contact is coming into town for it,” she said. “Do you have any pressing needs for weapons-grade plutonium?”

“No.”

“Shame.”

“Who do you know who is handling plutonium?” I said.

“Just an old playboy.”

“Anyone I know?”

Fi tried to hide her smile, but I caught a glimpse of it. I am not a jealous person. I’m not. Normally. At all. In the least.

“He’s very complex,” she said. “Your complete opposite.” It occurred to me that Fiona was probably making up this entire scenario as she went along. “Whereas you’re cagey and apt to disappoint,” she continued, “he is perfectly acute to everyone’s feelings.”

“Which is why he’s trying to move weapons-grade plutonium.”

“Everyone has bills, Michael.”

Just as I was about to respond that it might be wise for Fiona to keep herself a safe distance from anyone handling plutonium, lest they be inexperienced with it and find themselves in a situation where they might accidentally kill everyone in a ten-mile radius, or at the very least give them all inoperable cancer, I was distracted by the explosion of the crashed yacht. One moment it was a ship; the next it was a thousand flaming splinters raining into Biscayne Bay and back onto the causeway. Within moments, the palm trees and slash pines that dot the causeway just east of the accident site burst into flames, paradise burning in mere seconds, the sky filling with ugly black smoke.

Most people live their entire lives without wit nessing an explosion firsthand. That’s because things rarely explode.

Things catch on fire.

Things burn down.

Things occasionally crash into other things and then ignite, but then stop burning after a short period of time.

In order for something to explode, two things generally need to be in place: a trigger and a person who wants to blow something up. Other than small children, you’d be surprised by how few people on this planet have a real desire to create widespread criminal destruction.

If you want to kill someone and get away with it, blowing up their yacht isn’t the best way. If a boat is going to explode on its own, there will be evidence-leaking gas line, compromised fuses, a faulty battery. Any of these things could cause a boat to explode, provided there was a perfect and rare confluence of events. The key is that the explosion would come from the bottom up, where the gas, battery and fuses are kept.

Not, as even we could see paused on the causeway, from the flying bridge, unless the people driving the yacht kept high-powered acceler ants there or were taking on mortar fire. None of which seemed the likely occurrence, even from our distant vantage point.

It wasn’t my problem. And to some degree, that felt good.

Nevertheless, cars all around us came to a halt and passengers started hopping out to look at the wreckage, which is always a bad idea, but since everyone is now a “citizen journalist” they were willing to risk their lives to shoot shaky videos and wobbly photos from their cell phones. Fi and I just kept moving. Besides, we’d both seen worse. And neither of us wanted our picture taken.

“You know how your friend was making it into Miami?” I asked.

“Boat,” Fi said.

“Big boat or small boat?”

“Big.”

I nodded. “He already in town?”

“I hope so,” she said.

“If there was weapons-grade plutonium in that,” I said and pointed out the window, though we couldn’t see the fire anymore, the MacArthur having turned south briefly, though smoke had filled the sky and sirens could be heard from all directions, “we’d already be dead. And that causeway would probably be gone, too.”

“Your point?”

“No point,” I said. “Just making a statement. Playboys don’t know much about explosives, that’s all.”

“That seem peculiar to you?” Fiona said. “That boat exploding like that, all that smoke, fire, destruction?”

“The fact that it clearly was a bomb of some kind?”

“Yes, that,” she said.

“Fi,” I said, “it’s Mother’s Day. I can only be possessed by one disaster at a time.”

“I’m not possessed by it,” Fi said, “just noting that if, at some later point, you’d like to do something like that as you go about walking the earth helping the unfortunate, that it can be done with a lot less damage and does make for an impressive display of might. Just something to keep in your little head.”

We drove on, but Fi’s point was well made, even if I didn’t listen. The other aspect of an explosion like that was if it turned out to be something truly awful or notable, eventually someone of importance would notice that Fi and I were in the vicinity, might even have access to a security photo of my car driving on the opposite causeway at the precise time of the explosion, since even if the public wasn’t aware, subsequent to 9/11, most significant bridges and causeways now had surveillance cameras trained on each passing car and, invariably, I’d need to make an accounting or have it used against me.

The nice thing about being paranoid? It gets you to cover your ass when you might normally let it hang out in the open. Even though Sam was no longer regularly informing on me to the FBI, it was important to keep him abreast of potential issues that might arise in the event that I’m at some point implicated, along with Fi, in blowing up a million-dollar yacht.

So, after we hit Miami Beach, and after I called my mom to let her know we were running a little late because something had just blown up in Biscayne Bay, I dialed Sam. “Just if you’re curious,” I said when he answered, “that didn’t have anything to do with me.”

“What didn’t?” he said.

I could hear talking in the background and dishes being gathered up. The clink of glasses. Silverware. I looked at my watch. It was about twelve thirty, which meant Sam had been at the Cafe Carlito for about two hours and five to seven beers. I doubted he was watching the news.

“Some yacht just went kaboom in the bay,” I said.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I just met with someone about a yacht.”

“I know where you can get one cheap,” I said. “Might need some work.”

“A guy with a job,” Sam said. “Needs some discreet help. I told him I knew just the person.”

“How discreet is it if you tell everyone who asks?” This caused Sam to pause and think. While Sam has had to act as the eyes and ears on me for the government, it’s more passive than aggressive. In fact, it’s almost completely passive now. We have an agreement that he’ll give the least he can and I won’t imperil him more than I have to. It works about fifty percent of the time, and that’s largely his fifty percent. “Fi and I are having lunch with my mother. Where are you going to be in an hour?”

“Training for a ten K,” Sam said.

“So the Carlito?” I said.

“Unless they run out of limes,” he said.

“Got it,” I said.

“And you said a yacht blew up?”

“A big one.”

“You see any Italians in expensive suits running from the scene?”

“I didn’t see the scene,” I said. “It was on the water.”

“Well, good. What about in sweat suits?”

“Sam,” I said, “have you agreed to help some mobbed-up pigeon?”

“No, no,” he said.

“You’re just keeping an eye out for Italians in expensive suits and track wear these days?”

“Give your mom my best,” he said. “She and Virgil having a special day, too?”

Virgil was an old friend of Sam’s who, inexplicably, took a shine to my mother after we twice helped him with special problems, once involving vicious drug dealers and once… well, involving another group of vicious drug dealers. Subsequently, he and my mother have had a thing. Not a thing like what Fiona and I have. Nor a thing I really want to consider, ever, or even a thing like my mother and father had, but a thing no less. You never want to think of your parents having a romantic life. It’s the sort of thought process that makes therapy appointments even more uncomfortable.

It was also an excellent way of changing the subject. You deal with people with psy-ops training, you have to figure they’ll occasionally put their training to use.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Ah, Mikey, it’s good for both of them. Just like that song said. Two less lonely people in the world,” Sam said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know that song.”

“Little before your time. We tortured Noriega with it. Now it sort of runs in a loop in my head. Anyway, I think it’s sweet. Have a laugh, Mikey-it’s a funny situation.”

“This is me laughing,” I said, and hung up. We were driving down 5th Street and Fi told me to take a right on Collins, and then a brief left on 3rd Street, and then had me stop in front of a big red-striped edifice that made me wonder if my thoughts were somehow getting uploaded to a master computer that was transmitting directly to Fi and my mother.

“T.G.I. Friday’s?” I said. “You told my mother to meet us at T.G.I. Friday’s?”

“Your mother loves it,” she said, “and they actually serve protein-based foods, so it will be a nice shock to your system.”

As we walked into the restaurant, I tried to remember how we used to spend Mother’s Day, back when Dad was still alive and Nate and I were still just kids, not whatever we are now. I had a vague memory of a trip north to Weeki Wa chee Springs to see the mermaid show, another memory of Ma throwing a plate of frozen meat at Dad after he forgot to get her anything, another of us asking when kid’s day was and her telling us that every day was kid’s day, except that I don’t precisely recall ever having a day that felt all that celebratory for being the kind of kid I was.

Ma sat at a table with a huge vase of flowers in the middle of it. She looked positively beatific in her glow. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw her like that. When she saw us, she jumped up from the table and threw her arms around me.

“Oh, Michael,” she said, “you shouldn’t have.”

“It was nothing,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“It was just so unexpected,” she said. She was still holding on to me as I tried to get to a seat at the table, so I sort of had to drag her a bit. “So thoughtful! How did you remember my favorite flowers?”

I looked down at the vase. It overflowed with pink lilies, a burst of yellow sunflowers and a sprinkling of light blue irises. “I don’t know,” I said, but then I saw the card affixed to the vase. It said, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, MICHAEL & NATE.

“Oh, it’s perfect,” she said. “Such a surprise. I had to bring it from home so Fiona could see it. Isn’t it lovely, Fiona? Isn’t it a wonderful surprise? I didn’t think he’d remember now that he’s home.”

“It sure is,” Fi said.

When you’re not a spy anymore, it’s important to sometimes expect the best of people, even when past history suggests otherwise, because you might just find yourself pleasantly surprised by the actions of people like your dumb little brother, who maybe isn’t so dumb after all.

After a lunch consisting of Fiona quizzing my mother about the number of childhood friends and girlfriends I had (“I remember a neighbor girl named Julie Quint,” Mom told her, which got Fi excited until I reminded my mother that the Quints moved while I was still in preschool, and then she mentioned three friends, including Andre, who were currently guests of the state of Florida), I decided to wait until after we ordered dessert to bring up the uninvited appearance of Davey Harris in my life, or at least in the Target I frequent.

“Ma,” I said, “I can’t stress this enough. You can’t keep telling people your son the spy is home.”

“I don’t see why not,” she said, “no one believes me, anyway.”

“There’s a reason I didn’t tell you what I was doing all those years. You’ve seen enough now to know that it’s not a thing to play with. So if someone asks what I do for a living, just tell them I’m in sales. Retail. Import. Export.”

“I hate to lie, Michael,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“Well, then, just pretend. You don’t have a sudden moral opposition to pretending, do you?”

“You used to love pretending.”

“When you do it for a living,” I said, “it becomes a little less fun. Just, please, avoid the subject of what I do. Or did. We’ll all be safer.”

A sprightly dressed waiter dropped off a plate of chocolate cake for my mother, another mudslide for Fi and a squirt of frozen yogurt for me. For a time, we ate in silence. It felt nice. I hoped I’d essentially put a cap on the issue and we could all live our lives in perfect happiness for another thirty minutes, or at least the amount of time it took me to meet up with Sam and find out what job he’d conscripted me into.

“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.