The End Game

“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.

The dossier said Gennaro lived in America through college, moved to Italy after the death of his mother from cancer and married into the Ottone clan a decade ago amid persistent rumors that it was some kind of reparation for his father’s service, but, at least looking at the photos of him with Maria and their young daughter, things seemed bucolic, rumor and gossip aside. He’d inherited his father’s love of speed, but he preferred his work on the water-a lot less chance for fire-balls, that afternoon’s activities notwithstanding-and was now the helmsman for Ottone’s yacht racing team, the Pax Bellicosa, which was in Miami to take part in the Hurricane Cup.

Yacht racing is one of those sports that the average American doesn’t care about because the average American is landlocked. Even still, the idea of taking part in a regatta probably conjures images of men in navy blue sport coats calling each other old chap and sport and chum while skirting around buoys in the pleasant waters of the Atlantic, which certainly isn’t as compelling as anabolic freaks slamming into each other for a hundred yards of contested territory, ten yards at a time.