The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [62]
St.-Germain calmly took a shrimp from the platter set before them. “You think so. Well, that’s good, Cesar. Myself, I have no family, no attachments. I have only myself to be concerned about. You know, I even enjoy wet work. Wet contracts. I understand who I am. I am a monster. I was an assassin when I was twenty years old. Psychopath? Do you know that word? Psicopata?”
The brothers looked at one another, and then both bearded men laughed. This afternoon, each was wearing a white linen suit with leather sandals. The sandals alone cost more than the average yearly wage in their country.
“It is a time of great change,” Alexandre St.-Germain went on. Although he was speaking to the brothers, he seemed to be staring through them. They might as well not have been there.
“For the past five years, we have been planning everything so carefully. There was very little bloodshed until Atlantic City. The other members, the bankers, the politicians, they don’t like killing. They prefer the courts. In New York, in Rome, London, the Far East, in Bogotá, information was mysteriously made available to ambitious district attorneys and other prosecutors. The traditional ranks of the syndicates were thinned out in this efficient manner. Do you see what I’m saying? Then came Atlantic City. Years of work were consummated in a few moments. The old crime empire was eliminated. And now, a completely new breed exists. Here’s to better business for us all.”
Rafael Montoya raised his glass of white wine. “Congratulations on your victory.”
“Our victory,” said the host, still seeming to look through the skulls of the two Colombian drug lords.
The Montoyas smiled again, and seemed relieved by the last pronouncement. “Our victory.” So, they were getting their father’s territory after all. The Midnight Club had made its decision.
St.-Germain gave the two brothers lunch, and they talked very serious business for the next hour or so. He was curious about their future plans, the future of the South American drug business. Suddenly, he seemed to want to know everything from them.
As he listened, he was thinking that Rafael and Cesar Montoya were the worst kind of sociopaths, the most dangerous of all. The brothers were bloodthirsty animals, yet they thought of themselves as family men. They had helped him plan the death of their own father; and ironically, their father had helped him plan this afternoon as well.
Wet work. Yes, he did enjoy it. Shattering the most sacred taboos was sport for him. His only true release. Psicopata.
The gun concealed in Alexandre St.-Germain’s waistband was small, less than ninety millimeters. It was over almost before it had begun. Two head shots fired on the deck of the luxury yacht. Both Montoyas dead. Perfect execution of the street law.
They were too uncontrollable to run South America, even Colombia. Their father had known that. Alexandre St.-Germain knew it as well.
They were old-style gangsters, not businessmen. They had no place in the future of the Midnight Club, the new Club.
61
John Stefanovitch; One Police Plaza
JOHN STEFANOVITCH HAD always tried to embrace life; to accept the good with the bad. Because of his philosophy, he often had the sense that he was racing, trying to cram enough life into too short a time span.
He had slept only two hours the previous night. At four in the morning, he woke rigid and sweating. He spent the better part of an hour crouched behind a darkened apartment window overlooking Second Avenue—thinking, plotting, getting more lost and confused than he had been in a couple of years.
He still didn’t understand what had happened in Atlantic City. How could they have been so close to Trump’s, and failed to stop the killings?
The Midnight Club? Who actually controlled it, if it wasn’t the crime bosses themselves? Who had ordered the shootings at Trump’s?
Then there was the matter of Sarah McGinniss. In some ways, Sarah was the most difficult and troubling problem.