The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [104]
99
The Midnight Club; Beverly Hills, California
DISCREETLY HIDDEN AMONG the hills and canyons north of Sunset Boulevard, the suburb of Bel Air is almost exclusively residential, accessible for the most part through steel gates occasionally guarded by private police.
Nestled among the lush, low hills is the Hotel Bel Air: classic, palatial, secluded; unique for its understated and tasteful landscaping, its petal-strewn walkways, its swans.
Almost everything about the California hotel is beautiful, and best of all, respectable.
During the first week in November of that year—gloriously sunny days, consistently in the high seventies—there were no rooms or suites available to any of the business travelers, the movie studio executives, the movie stars, who frequent the Hotel Bel Air.
Instead, the eleven-acre, ninety-room retreat was reserved for an unusual meeting. Twenty-seven business executives, government leaders, and high-ranking military men were in attendance. They met each morning, over breakfast served in the Pavilion and Garden Room, more typically used for expensive weddings and lavish bar mitzvahs. Every night, the participants dined as a group in the hotel restaurant, which had also been booked for the five days.
The talk of the Bel Air was the usual sort from the twenty-seven members of the Club, although it could hardly be considered shop talk…
—There was the important subject of narcotics, now a $23-billion-a-year business, with a profit margin over 65 percent.
—There was borrowing and lending, once known as loan-sharking. This banking function now accounted for $14 billion, $10 billion of that profit.
—There was prostitution, computed at less than $1.5 billion. Still, 40 percent in the black.
—And gambling—about $12 billion net, half of it positive earnings.
One evening at dinner, there was a disinterested discussion about how the Cubans were getting into the numbers racket in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
The Nigerians and the Pakistanis were involved in heroin dealing lately, and also the seemingly unrelated false credit card business. Why did ethnic groups always seem to have their specialties? None of the members really cared.
This was big business, with profits in the area of $59 billion to $60 billion a year.
During the week in Southern California, refinements were made in distribution channels; changes were agreed on in the pyramid-style management system that would affect business in every major country around the world—elemental changes in the way things had run for perhaps a thousand years. At the top of the new infrastructure was a chief executive; then came a chief operating officer; a general counsel; and finally the other major executives.
What the twenty-seven members had finally done was to control crime.
They had succeeded in making organized crime one of the most powerful and wealthiest business entities in the world. They were now eleven times more profitable than IBM, with no competition in the mid-range of their product line.
Only one important Club member was missing for the high-level meeting in California.
Alexandre St.-Germain was not among the group sequestered in the hills of Bel Air. He purposely had not been invited. However, he was the subject of important conversations at the hotel.
The discussion was one of business practices, of the new way versus the old, of respectability and anonymity. The Grave Dancer had fallen back into his violent ways. There was the style in which he had attempted to enforce his will recently in New York. Shootings. An unfortunate kidnapping, in which the Club had finally intervened. There was the matter of a missing young woman named Susan Paladino.
Alexandre St.-Germain had been necessary in the original plan to eliminate the Old Guard of crime. He had a shrewd understanding for business and politics, the instincts of a Machiavelli; he had personally charmed several of the twenty-seven current members. He had originally brought them into the venture, in fact. But now: what to do with the Grave Dancer?
In the early