Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [113]
Victor cast his eye down the list of reservations. Bermúdez would be the undisputed VIP that night. The rest were regulars with two exceptions, a rough-sounding man named Gómez, who had asked for a table for four, and a Señora Lara, who had sounded delightful and said she had been recommended by a Mexican diplomat who came regularly once a month with his mistress. She’d booked a table for two and asked for a window. On a routine Thursday night such as this, it would be no problem. Victor smiled benignly at a sad-eyed grouper in the sparkling tank and lumbered into the kitchen to check on his newest dishwasher. He was newly arrived from Cuba and a trifle skittish, poor dear.
JOSÉ BERMÚDEZ wondered moodily whether there was any such thing as a perfect rose. He had ordered a dozen, to be sure of getting one he liked, and still he was not satisfied. On close examination they all were flawed in some tiny way. He would change florists. Choosing the least offensive among them, Bermúdez meticulously affixed it to his lapel. The splash of yellow winked cheerfully from the gray sharkskin. Bermúdez smiled at the hall mirror, which obligingly confirmed his eminence. He was ready then, ready for the elegant dinner that would climax all the work, all the planning, all the years of posturing in a country that was not his own.
Market forces. How the gringos loved to talk about their precious market forces. At business school, at the bank, that was all they ever talked about. Idiotas. They would drown, mewling like doomed kittens, clutching helplessly at the straw of private enterprise and the market system. How stupid they were. Even after what the Arabs had done to them, even after the smelly Semites in their absurd burnooses had milked them dry, the gringos did not understand. Competition was as obsolete as democracy. The twenty-first century would be the age of the cartel, the unforgettable era of the new monopolists, when men who were strong and farsighted and, yes, ruthless would control the globe. And José Bermúdez would be one of them. Beginning tonight, at dinner with the jaded Colombian patriarch.
The old man was essential for now. He was powerful, smart and dangerous. He would make an instructive partner until, a year or two from now, Bermúdez was strong enough to devour him. Then, like a line of tumbling dominoes, the pace would quicken. His five-year plan was to monopolize a steady flow of cocaine into the United States from a seat in the United States Senate he would purchase with cocaine money. In the five years after that…well, anything was possible—wasn’t it?—in the land of free enterprise. The mirror returned Bermúdez’s broadest smile.
The Colombian could have no cause for complaint tonight. Bermúdez’s promised destruction of the cocaine competition in Miami had been as smooth as the skin of the old man’s flower girls and as violent as their sexual urges. Enough had died to chase the others away. And the old man had kept his bargain. If there was any cocaine left in Miami, it was old stock. All that remained now was to set the new price and solidify the new lines of supply.
Like the old man, Bermúdez himself would be far removed from the commercial side of the business. He had recruited a small group of young Cubans, all of them college-trained, all of them hungry, to handle that; a modern management team that would obey utterly a shadowy voice called Ignacio. All that remained for Bermúdez himself would be the occasional policy decision and short trips to diplomatic banks in Panama and the Bahamas.
Bermúdez paused for a moment in the circular graveled drive to run his fingers lovingly over the gold JLB demurely inset on the driver’s door of the chocolate Seville. He loved the car and the sense of power it gave him.
He savored the drive