If The Seas Catch Fire(12)
In all the years he’d spent planning to bring the families down from the inside out, Sergei had never given much thought to Domenico Maisano. He was high up the food chain, and yet… not. Domenico was the Joker in the deck, and this wasn’t a game of Jokers Wild. He was that card that nobody knew what to do with. Or why it was even in the deck. The adopted prince who would never be king, but everyone still had to go through the respectful motions anyway.
Sergei suspected Domenico was little more than a pity case. Though he’d never amounted to much as a Mafioso, he was untouchable. After all, he was the orphaned son of Corrado’s disgraced brother, taken in as a boy despite the damage his father had done to the family name. Sergei had heard that if Alessandro Maisano had survived two or three more years, his son would’ve been killed along with him, but Corrado had taken pity on the boy because he’d been so young.
As if the Maisanos had ever hesitated to execute children for sins of the father.
On his way into the backstage dressing room for his shift, Sergei ground his teeth and shoved those thoughts away—the brutal family and the man who shouldn’t have been stuck in his mind—as he tried to concentrate on getting ready for work. Another night, another dozen or so dances for horny men with too much money. There hadn’t been any goons in here lately, thank God.
It was over. Maisano was in the past. No one was coming to bother him about it, or they would have already.
Focus, Sergei. And not on him.
Once he’d finished preening in the dressing room mirror, he went out to the lounge to start earning his pay. The left stage had just opened up, so he nodded to the deejay and took his place at the pole. The music started. So did Sergei. Undulating, shaking his hips and ass so there wasn’t a soft dick in the room. Business as usual.
And right on cue, someone from Cape Swan’s seedy underbelly showed up.
Though Sergei didn’t miss a beat, the sight of a slick-haired man in a pin-striped suit made his skin crawl. This one wasn’t Italian, though. Baltazar was the smooth-talking Greek who’d drawn Sergei into this world in the first place.
Like Sergei, Baltazar could never be made because he wasn’t Sicilian, so he worked as an independent contractor. He was the go-between for a motley crew of thugs and contract killers—some who worked together, some lone wolves like Sergei—who carried out some of the families’ dirty work. He handled jobs for both the Maisanos and the Passantinos. Maybe the Cusimanos too. Sergei had never heard the guy say anything remotely endearing about that clan, but their money was as green as anybody else’s.
Baltazar sidled up to the stage and sat down at the last empty seat. While Sergei continued to dance, they locked eyes for a split second, and the subtle nod confirmed what he already knew—this was business.
At the end of his dance, as he always did, Sergei grinned down at the men watching him. “All right. Who wants a private dance?”
Immediately, cash came out. Mostly twenties. A few hundreds. Held in wads, waved in outstretched hands, with “I can get more from the ATM” called out over the thumping music.
Baltazar, of course, casually fanned enough hundreds on the edge of the stage to halt all the others in their tracks. The men lowered their hands. Twenties disappeared. Then hundreds. Baltazar and Sergei exchanged grins, and Sergei collected the cash before stepping down beside him.
The cash he laid down here wasn’t a bid for a private lap dance, but it wasn’t just for show either. It was a means to outbid the others in order to get Sergei alone without rousing suspicion, and it was also a deposit for the deal they were about to negotiate. There was no question that Sergei would take the money and complete the job. He’d learned at a very, very young age that nobody said no to the Mafia.
On the way back to the private booths, he surreptitiously thumbed through the cash. Roughly ten grand, which meant the job was a hundred. Somebody fairly high in the ranks, then. At least a lieutenant, maybe, or a captain. Not necessarily a made man, but definitely a valuable target.
He was curious about the hit, especially since it seemed to be coming awfully quickly on the heels of Barcia’s contract, but he wasn’t terribly surprised. There’d been an uptick in violence among the families over the last few months. From all three sides, men were sending up smoke signals to each other in blood and gun powder. There was a war brewing. A big one.
Sergei had played a role in that. None of the families had yet caught on that for the past few years, he’d been methodically arranging them like chess pieces. He’d long ago learned what could mark a man for death. By strategically setting someone up—framing him for embezzlement, planting conspicuous bugs in homes and vehicles so it appeared someone was in cahoots with the law—Sergei could virtually guarantee that the powers that be would issue a contract on that man’s head. Getting that contract himself was a plus, and the money certainly never hurt, but as long as it ended with one more Mafioso in a body bag, Sergei was pleased.
The most important part was that when the right people were killed—either by Sergei directly or because he’d set them up—then other people moved into power. With time and patience, he had, for all intents and purposes, sculpted the leadership of all three families until they were, without even realizing it, moving themselves into checkmate. He’d cleared the way for men with bloody grudges to rise to power opposite each other. Removed the more sensible, diplomatic ones in favor of the hotheads and sociopaths. The ones who could be manipulated into going to war with each other and, ultimately, bring all three organizations down in flames.