The End Game

A smirk ran across Alex Kyle’s face. “Tommy the Ice Pick. The funny thing? You check out. You got wise guys who swear to your veracity. Bonaventura actually believes someone called Tommy the Ice Pick has him cornered on a potential murder rap.” He shook his head once, very slowly, and started backing away from us. A black SUV pulled into the parking lot right on cue and idled next to him. “He killed his own father and brother and didn’t get caught, and you actually have him worried.” He patted the hood of the SUV. “All else fails, you got that going for you.”

Alex Kyle got into the SUV then and pulled away, even offered a brusque wave out the window as he passed us.

“He was nice,” Fi said. “And he donated some very nice guns to our rebel cause.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But I don’t think we’ll need them.”

“Don’t be such a disgrace,” Fiona said. “We could have been killing people and improving your standing among your peers all the while. We should take up that opportunity now that we have it.”

“Next time,” I said. We got in the Charger and headed back toward Fiona’s.

My cell rang. It was Nate. I answered in one ring. Never too late to set a good example.

“You owe me big, bro,” Nate said.

“What do you have?”

“You ever hear of a country called Calabria?”

“It’s not a country,” I said. “It’s a province. In Italy. On the Ionian Sea.” I remembered I was talking to Nate and added, “It’s the part that looks like the toe of the boot.”

“Awesome,” Nate said. “We ever get on a game show together, you’ll handle world geography questions and I’ll be the guy saving lives.”

Nate with confidence was a scary thing. It presupposed a level of involvement in my affairs that usually promised bad things.

But maybe this time was different.

The idea of a game show involving geography and death did, admittedly, have some allure.

“Slade Switchblade came in handy tonight,” Nate said. “I called in all the favors I had-and that reminds me, next week, no rush, but a friend of mine is going to need some help with an ex-girlfriend who is stalking him. I waived your normal fee, but said you’d take care of whatever problems existed in an expedient and spyish fashion that would be totally badass to witness. He wants her car to blow up, but I said, ‘Hey, no promises.’ ”

“Nate,” I said. “Get to it.”

“Right, right.” He explained that a friend of his was picking up some “businessmen” at the airport and bringing them to a race party at South Beach and that in the past, he’d gotten the impression they were in the Mafia. “The real Mafia,” Nate clarified. “So I tell him, ‘Hey, this isn’t something to trifle with; let me and my big bro take care of it.’ ”

“Tell me you didn’t threaten these guys,” I said. The last thing I needed on my plate now was even more angry crime bosses, which reminded me I was still angry with Sam for getting me in their business again. Next job he offered I was going to demand that he first provide expert witness testimony that whatever bad guys we were about to engage had more petty concerns than perpetuating a myth of toughness and respect based on a bullshit code from the last century.

“I’m not stupid,” Nate said. “I just recorded them. But here’s the thing. One guy wasn’t even Italian. He was Iranian. Or Iraqi. One of those places where they don’t use the alphabet.”

When you’re xenophobic, not knowing the difference between Iranian, Iraqi or any other Middle Eastern point of origin makes you dangerous. When you’re a common person who can’t pinpoint the 50 states on a map, much less imagine explaining Puerto Rico’s role, it just makes you ignorant, but not uncommon. In Nate’s case, this was the latter. What was notable about Calabria was not that it was in Italy, but that it’s also home to traditionally the largest concentration of Mus lims in the country-in Italy, over one-third of the country is Muslim-and normally that only means good things.

In Calabria, however, the international crime trade and terrorism network often finds a nexus. It’s the home of the most brutal and notorious wing of the mafia now, their stock and trade being drugs, importing and exporting heroin and opium and cocaine, and, worse, human trafficking. Women. Young girls.

Their drug connections stretch all the way to Afghanistan, which makes their bedfellows people like the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Washing drug money through Al Qaeda isn’t just stupid, it’s potentially fatal. But in Calabria, where the government often looks the other way and the large Muslim community protects its own, it has proven to be lucrative.

That doesn’t mean local banks will take the money. But Myanmar? That’s a different story.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“They were speaking Italian and that other language,” Nate said.

“Farsi?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “so I had to call in another favor to get the recording translated. Well, the Italian. I don’t know anyone who speaks that other stuff.”

“I do,” I said, meaning, I do.