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You made fun of people like that at your peril.
He now lifted a one-pound piece of rib-eye steak from the refrigerator and unwrapped the thick white waxed paper. He himself had been responsible for this perfectly sized and edged piece. Every month or so, Swann would buy a half side of beef, which was kept in a cold-storage meat facility for people like him--amateur butchers. He would reserve a whole glorious day to slice the meat from the bones, shape it into sirloin, short ribs, rump, chuck, flank, brisket.
Some people who bought in bulk enjoyed brains, intestines, stomach and other organ meats. But those cuts didn't appeal to him and he discarded them. There was nothing morally or emotionally troubling about those portions of an animal; for Swann flesh was flesh. It was merely a question of flavor. Who didn't love sweetbreads, crisply sauteed? But most offal tended to be bitter and was more trouble than it was worth. Kidneys, for instance, stank up your kitchen for days and brains were overly rich and tasteless (and jam-packed with cholesterol). No, Swann's time at the two-hundred-pound butcher block, robed in a full apron, wielding saw and knife, was spent excising the classic cuts, working to achieve perfectly shaped specimens while leaving as little on the bone as he possibly could. This was an art, a sport.
This comforted him.
My little butcher man...
Now he set his rib eye on a cutting board--always wood, to save his knives' edges--and ran his fingers over the meat, sensing the tautness of the flesh, examining the grain, the marbling of the fat.
Before slicing, however, he washed and re-edged the Kai Shun on his Dan's Black Hard Arkansas whetstone, which cost nearly as much as the knife itself and was the best sharpening device on the planet. When he'd been sitting atop Annette, he'd moved from tongue to finger, and the blade had an unfortunate encounter with bone. It now needed to be honed back to perfection.
Finally, the knife was ready and he turned back to the steak, slowly slicing the piece into quarter-inch cubes.
He could have made them bigger and he could have worked faster.
But why rush something you enjoy?
When he was done he dusted the cubes in a mixture of sage and flour (his contribution to the classic recipe) and sauteed them in a cast-iron skillet, scooping them aside while still internally pink. He then diced two red potatoes and half a Vidalia onion. These vegetables he cooked in oil in the skillet and returned the meat. He mixed in a bit of veal stock and chopped Italian parsley and set the pan under the broiler to crisp the top.
A minute or two later, the dish was finished. He added salt and pepper to the hash and sat down to eat the meal, along with a rosemary scone, at a very expensive teak table in the bay window of his kitchen. He'd baked the scone several days ago. Better with age, he reflected, as the herbs had bonded well with the hand-milled flour.
Swann ate slowly, as he always did. He had nothing but pity bordering on contempt for people who ate fast, who inhaled their food.
He had just finished when he received an email. It seemed that Shreve Metzger's great national security intelligence machine was grinding away as efficiently as ever.
Received your text. Good to hear success today.
Liabilities you need to minimize/eliminate:
Witnesses and allied individuals with knowledge base of the STO operation. Suggest searching Moreno's trip to NY,
April 30-May 2.
Identified Nance Laurel as lead prosecutor. IDs of the NYPD investigators to follow soon.
Individual who leaked STO. Someone is searching for identity now. You may have thoughts on how to learn ID. Proceed at your own discretion.
Swann called the Tech Services people and requested some datamining. Then he pulled on thick yellow rubber gloves. To clean the skillet, he scrubbed it with salt and treated the surface with hot oil; cast-iron should never meet soap and water, of course. He then began to wash the dishes and utensils in very, very hot water. He enjoyed the process and found that he did much of his best thinking standing here, looking out at a dogged ginkgo in a small garden in front of the building. The nuts from that plant were curious. They're used in Asian cuisine--the centerpiece of the delicious custard chawanmushi in Japan. They can also be toxic, when consumed in large quantities. But dining can be dangerous, of course; when we sit down to a meal who doesn't occasionally wonder if we've been dealt the salmonella or E. coli card? Jacob Swann had eaten fugu--the infamous puffer fish with toxic organs--in Japan. He faulted the dish not for its potential for lethality (training of chefs makes poisoning virtually impossible) but for a flavor too mild for his liking.
Scrubbing, scrubbing, removing every trace of food from metal and glass and porcelain.
And thinking hard.
To eliminate witnesses would cast suspicion on NIOS and its affiliates, of course, since the kill order was now public. That was unfortunate and under other circumstances he would have tried to arrange accidents or construct some fictional players to take the blame for the murders that were about to happen: the cartels Metzger had claimed were really responsible for Moreno's death, or perps the police and prosecutor had put in jail, out for revenge.
But that wouldn't work here. Jacob Swann would simply have to do what he did best; while Shreve Metzger would deny that kill orders even existed, Swann would make absolutely certain that no evidence of or witnesses to his clean-up operation could possibly tie NIOS or anyone connected with it to the killing.
He could do that. Jacob Swann was a very meticulous man.
Besides, he had no choice but to eliminate these threats. There was no way he'd let anybody jeopardize his organization; its work was too important.
Swann dried the dishes, silver and coffee cup, using thick linen, with the diligence of a surgeon completing the stitches after a successful procedure.
CHAPTER 13
Robert Moreno Homicide
