Alexandre St.-Germain seemed so terribly respectable. He didn’t act like the Grave Dancer; he didn’t even look like the Grave Dancer, the underworld figure she had once photographed on Fifth Avenue. He had never been more dangerous.
Stefanovitch turned to her. He was clearly disturbed. His body was tense, almost numb. “Let’s go,” he finally whispered. “I’ve heard as much as I need to. As much as I can stomach for today.”
The Grave Dancer was alive. It was starting all over again.
67
Alexandre St.-Germain;
The Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin
A COMPLETELY NEW order would exist now, a sixth estate rising out of the impossible chaos of the old mob structure. It would be in effect everywhere that mattered: in the United States, in Italy, West Germany, in England, France, Holland, Spain, all through Japan, Hong Kong, the rest of the Orient. In all the major cities and countries of the world, respectability and anonymity would be the foundations for the future of organized crime.
The Midnight Club would operate like any multinational corporation, almost like a government. There was no room for gangsters, for unpredictable dons and bosses, when hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. What was necessary was strong local representation, and even stronger central control.
Tonight there would be celebrations, respectable parties, the kind that any successful business might throw after a victory over the competition.
Tomorrow, the orderly investment of profits would begin. Two dozen legitimate takeover targets had been identified on stock exchanges around the world; real estate opportunities had been found in every major city.
* * *
Alexandre St.-Germain’s luxury yacht was named The Storm Rider. It was docked in its accustomed port at the boat basin at Seventy-ninth Street.
The guests had begun to arrive around nine-thirty. They were congregated on the aft deck, where every kind of drink, assorted shellfish and caviar, red meat, and exotic bird was being served by William Poll’s gourmet catering staff.
Live music played: European disco, Brazilian sambas, slightly dated punk rock. The guests of Alexandre St.-Germain included New York artists, their stodgy patrons, old eastern stockbrokers, executives from multinational corporations, Broadway actors and actresses, musicians, the usual hangers-on for each of these groups. Enormous wealth was everywhere. The confident aura of power and prestige was unmistakable.
Alexandre St.-Germain was completely at ease among the wealthy party-goers. He had selected a light gray suit that was subtle and elegant. He understood his role tonight: helping to seed the new order; securely establishing his own place in it. Long ago, he had discovered that facades and surfaces were everything in any society. It was as true on this yacht as it had been in the underworld of Marseilles. The difference between the two worlds was that one operated on deception, the other on self-deception.
The distinguished guests, with their ingrained oh-so-serious looks, found him witty, charming, even better-looking than had been rumored. They were easily convinced that the stories about Alexandre St.-Germain were apocryphal; media-inspired exaggerations. There was no way this European gentleman could be the things he was said to be.
Respectability, he remembered all through the night. It was a mask he wore easily; one of his more subtle disguises.
Late in the evening, he stood alongside Jimmy Burke on the yacht’s deck. For several years, Burke had been carefully preparing the way for St.-Germain’s emergence in New York. Now, the two men watched the glittering, super-rich party from shadows falling across the second deck of The Storm Rider.
“The créme de la créme of New York society,” Alexandre St.-Germain said. “A peculiar thing, the conversation of most American men—there is rarely any content, no depth of thinking or knowledge. It’s a consistent trait, I find. All that they know about is making money, and not so much about that as they think.”
St.-Germain pointed toward the main deck. He indicated a tall, striking blonde who was dancing there. He felt the need to do something that wasn’t so respectable. Something for himself tonight.
“You see the one I like? The blonde in blue. Quite stunning. Do you happen to know her?”
“I can find out for you.”
“Yes, find out for me. Bring her around. She’s the most beautiful creature here tonight. Tell her that. Tell her I would like to meet her very much.”
68
WHEN THE LAST OF THE guests left in the early morning, the young blond woman, Susan Paladino, remained on board the yacht. She couldn’t have possibly left the main stateroom by herself.
She was feeling uncomfortably warm inside the elegant and luxurious room. She was having trouble getting her dress up over her head and off. Underneath the cumbersome blue Azzedine, she wore nothing. She had planned to meet someone important and interesting at the party tonight. She just hadn’t been sure who.
Susan Paladino was feeling sleepy, but also sexy, and wonderfully important in the stateroom, which she knew belonged to Alexandre St.-Germain. She had the intoxicating thought that she had come a long way from Buffalo. She was somebody now; she really was.
The exotic shipboard room seemed to be moving around her. The walls and ceiling occasionally blurred, coming in and out of focus.
Finally, she had to lie down on the huge double bed. It was a good place to wait for him to come back. Alexandre St.-Germain. Handsome. Blond. Very, very rich… Susan Paladino. Very, very naked.
She tried to sit up, but it was no good. She wanted to speak, but couldn’t get control of her voice.
How could she be so drunk? She never let herself get like this. She felt completely separated from the scene, from her own body.
She suddenly noticed Alexandre St.-Germain there in the stateroom, along with a few other men, but he didn’t say anything to her. How strange. Hello? Hello there? Was she saying that out loud?
She tried to smile.
But he didn’t smile back at her.
How different he was. How interesting and provocative. How stunning with his long blond curls.
Why don’t you smile, Goldilocks? she wanted to say. Don’t take everything so seriously or you’ll ruin tonight for both of us. Why don’t you say something?
He sat in a chair across the room. His long legs were draped across the chair’s arm. He never said a word to the girl. He watched the other men use Susan Paladino. The Grave Dancer merely watched. Later, he watched as they injected her with cocaine, almost 90 percent pure.
There was nothing that compared with this forbidden thrill: watching someone die, especially a frightened, beautiful woman. It was one of the last taboos in a world that claimed to have none. It was an experience he had known Club members pay fortunes to witness…
The drug threw her body into convulsions. The convulsions went on for several minutes. Technically, she suffered a stroke. She seemed to be coming as she died. Who was the poet who had enjoyed that image? Lord Byron, wasn’t it? Watching her die, Alexandre St.-Germain was as excited as he ever became.
The men in the stateroom discarded the young woman’s body somewhere around Sandy Hook. Susan Paladino sank quietly into the dark waves of the sea. She was weighted around the waist and ankles, and wouldn’t be found until spring, if ever…
Just another dance for the Grave Dancer.
69
Sarah McGinniss and John Stefanovitch; East Hampton
SARAH COMPOSED AN opening for a very pivotal chapter in The Club, maybe the turning point of the book.
She was sitting at an old schoolroom desk, framed in a dormer window of her beach house. She eyed the main road rather than the ocean, watching as the cars steadily arrived. She wrote to distract herself as much as anything:
Everyone we could trust, possibly even trust with our lives, had been asked to come. Seven men and two women were invited out to the house in East Hampton, a list whittled down from twenty. A harrowing task in itself.
They began t
o arrive as early as six forty-five in the morning. The first was David Wilkes, who’d traveled from Washington. Stefanovitch and I had prepared everything as well as we could under the circumstances. Neither of us entirely believed what we had decided to do, only that something had to be done.
For Stefanovitch, there was no issue: he had to go after Alexandre St.-Germain again. There was no choice for him. No choice at all.
* * *
Stefanovitch busied himself stoking a modest fire in the living room. He tried not to think about what was going on here; about the fact that St.-Germain was alive.
He used oak and pine shavings Sarah had brought from Vermont during the spring. After twenty minutes, the house began to smell sweet and good, like New England on a crisp fall morning. The atmosphere was deceptively pleasant, as homey and traditional as any countryside inn.
Stefanovitch saw that it was still spitting rain outside. The sky was gloomy cardboard gray, pressed down and hugging the ocean. Sam raced along the top of the dune in a bright yellow slicker. He was an irrepressible spirit, an irresistible little boy. Sam seemed oblivious to all of what was happening, the possible dangers.
As he shuffled a final log onto the fire, Stefanovitch noticed his hands were unsteady. A very troubling question remained for him: had they chosen these people wisely enough? Could every member of the group be trusted?
The night before, he and Sarah had made the necessary phone calls. A meeting was decided on. The house in East Hampton seemed like a good place, as secure as any.
Sarah finally appeared downstairs. She stood beside one of the dripping bay windows, talking with Isiah Parker. Stefanovitch had told her everything about Parker. He had shown her the detective’s personnel file, which he’d been able to copy at Police Plaza. Parker had been a superior policeman for his twelve years with the department, but Parker was also an enigma.
“I guess we should start,” Stefanovitch said at last. “We’re all here now.”
They began to settle around an old oak serving table in the dining room. The room was filled with antique furniture, also humorous knickknacks Sarah had picked up both in the East and around California. They helped to lighten the mood of the room but not enough.
Three lawyers, one man and two women, were there from the district attorney’s office. They all sat together at the table. Stefanovitch had known each of them for years. Stuart Fischer had been the right hand for the district attorney over the past several years.
David Wilkes had flown up the previous night. He’d accepted the invitation immediately; he seemed well aware of problems with the ongoing investigation in Atlantic City, the mysterious lessening of police resources.
Stanley Kahn from the New York Times had been asked to come by Sarah. The reporter accepted without too many of his difficult questions being answered beforehand.
David Hale and Terry Marshall from New York’s Organized Crime Task Force were already seated at the dining table. So was John Keresty from U.S. Customs. So far, none of them knew why they had been invited, except that it had to do with the reappearance of Alexandre St.-Germain.
Sarah remained standing as the others quietly seated themselves. Small details seemed charged, and terribly important that morning. The shore house felt as if it were holding more of the morning’s chill than usual.
“I might as well start with a few things that are on my mind,” she said from her place.
“For reasons that should become clear as I go on, we decided against Police Plaza for this meeting. We also decided against the district attorney’s office. Or even the Times offices, on Forty-third Street, Stanley.”
She bowed in the direction of the Times reporter, who looked slightly bemused.
“If you think you hear a little paranoia in what I’m saying, I’m afraid you do. We don’t know exactly whom we can trust in police departments,” Sarah said. She paused to let the implication of her words sink in. “Or in the district attorney’s office. Or at the Times. Or in the Treasury, or FBI. Did I leave anybody out? I assume I have everybody’s attention now?”
“Rapt,” Stanley Kahn said from behind tented hands.
Sarah watched the tightening circle of faces. None of the men and women seemed overjoyed to be among the trusted few. That was understandable. The notion that so many others weren’t trusted was overwhelming to consider.
A chair scraped against the wooden plank floor. A body hunched forward. Mostly there was silence.
“Where to start is part of my dilemma,” Sarah continued. “Maybe if I go back closer to the beginning…”
Stefanovitch was getting an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. He had been here before and he’d been burned badly. He had trailed St.-Germain into a trap. His wife had been murdered. Stefanovitch finally spoke up from his place at the table.
“What we’re here to discuss is the possibility of playing by their law. Not just the street law. It’s not that simple. We’re talking about the unwritten laws of supernational corporate executives around the world. And the laws practiced by governments and military juntas. The laws of the super-rich, people who think they’re above ordinary laws.
“We want to talk about a crime syndicate, an entirely new kind of syndicate. It’s called the Midnight Club. It represents what’s become of organized crime.”
70
LATE THAT AFTERNOON, after all the others had left, Sarah and Stefanovitch sat up on the deck overlooking the water. The rainstorm had finally passed. A pale wafer of sun was trying to break through the cloud cover.
For the first twenty minutes or so, they talked about the important meeting that had just finished. Had they sounded too paranoid? They didn’t think so. Not based on the reactions; especially the questions asked toward the end of the session. The new Midnight Club had the full attention of everyone invited to the meeting.
“Maybe we should talk about something else for a while,” Stefanovitch finally suggested. “Sarah, I really am sorry about what happened in Pennsylvania,” he went right on—while his nerve was up.
“It’s over now,” Sarah shrugged. “I’m not sure if I understand exactly what happened, though,” she couldn’t help adding.
“I think I understand it okay,” Stefanovitch said. “I’m not so sure I can put it into the right words, and then get the words out.”
Sarah didn’t say anything. She had a sense that Stef had to do this his own way, or not at all.
She looked into his eyes. He had deep brown eyes, but too often, they seemed on the edge of sadness.
Sarah realized that part of her wanted to make the sadness go away. She didn’t know if that was possible; if it was a wise thing to want to try to do; if it was healthy for either of them. She did know that they needed a break from both the Midnight Club and Alexandre St.-Germain.
“I’ve tried to be with somebody a few times since the accident,” Stefanovitch said. As he spoke, he watched children playing in the surf. “One time it was the woman I mentioned meeting in Gramercy Square Park, a nurse named Pat Beccaccio. I wanted to get close to her. There was this ache inside me. I was afraid, Sarah. The more I needed somebody, the more afraid I got.
“I’d go over to Gramercy Park, hoping she’d be there after work. I’d think about her a lot during the day. If I saw some tall woman with dark hair in the neighborhood, my heart would start to slam around, thinking it might be her. If she wasn’t at the park, I’d be incredibly disappointed and hurt…
“I’d imagine that she didn’t come because she didn’t want to see me, didn’t want to stop and have to talk to some cripple. I decided she was avoiding the park, so she wouldn’t have to see me.”
Sarah felt she was getting closer to whoever John Stefanovitch really was. For better or worse, Stef had this old-fashioned code of honor. It was stuck like a broken record in his thick skull. He would probably have it for the rest of his life.
There are features I like besides his eyes, she was thinking as she listened to him talk. Like a scar that
ran like the serrated edge of a knife over one of his eyelids. It made the eye sag a little, which gave his face more character. He’d been bitten. In a high school basketball game, he’d told her. She could understand how someone might want to bite him sometimes.
“I don’t know if you can understand any of what I’m saying, Sarah? I couldn’t bring myself to call Pat Beccaccio and-make a date. Sometimes, I’d be in my apartment at night, with my hand right on the phone receiver. I couldn’t make myself call. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I just want you to know what’s been building up inside me for a long time.”
“I understand a little,” Sarah finally said. She wanted to reach out for him suddenly, to hold him and be held, but she didn’t. She listened. She let him talk.
“This may not sound like a cop talking, but I was afraid. Afraid of you. I was scared you might reject me, right when I was starting to feel something.”
“Maybe that’s okay. Maybe you’re getting back in touch with something important?”
Finally, Sarah came closer. He could smell her perfume, which was light and flowery. The whole thing had an extraordinary this-isn’t-happening aura. It fit with a lot of other experiences lately.
It was Sarah’s turn to be confused, though; time for her head to be whirling. She wasn’t sure exactly who started it…
They began to kiss. The kiss was sweet, more tender, gentler, than she would have expected it could be. That was the thing. Stefanovitch was always full of surprises.
She wasn’t sure whether this was the right thing, or absolutely the wrong thing for them. Sarah wasn’t sure how she felt about anything right now. Her mind was reeling a little. No, her mind was reeling a lot. She knew just one thing for certain: she wanted to kiss Stefanovitch. She needed to be held by him, and to hold him back. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure of anything.