A Five Year Plan

Chapter Nineteen

Jimmy Figaro believed in history. But what was the use of it if you didn’t learn from it? You didn’t know about it, you were doomed to repeat its mistakes, and one thing Figaro could not afford was a mistake. Not with his client list. With some of these guys you fucked up just once and that was it. Then it was you that was history.

One of history’s lessons was to do with being the bearer of bad news. A cop he once knew in Orlando got woken in the middle of the night by another cop on his doorstep telling the guy he had some bad news for him. As it happened the bad news was just that the guy had been ordered to take charge of an accident investigation in which a lot of kids had drowned, and the cop was going to have to look at the kids’ bodies. But the guy was so annoyed with the other cop when he found out it wasn’t really bad news for him at all, and that none of his own family were dead or anything, that he pulled a gun and shot the cop on the doorstep dead.

There were a lot of permutations on the don’t-shoot-the-messenger theme. Nobody liked the guy who brought bad news. And that nobody could turn nasty when he was someone like Tony Nudelli. It was ironic how Figaro’s own bad tidings were tied up with the very same thing that had taught him to be extra careful of Nudelli and his quick temper in the first place. Which was Benny Cecchino.

Benny Cecchino had been a made man, a loan shark who had borrowed 8250,000 from Tony, at half a percent per week, to put out on the street at whatever vig he liked. One percent, or a hundred percent, Tony didn’t care who got charged or how much just as long as he got his 1,250 a week from Cecchino. Cecchino had lent $4,000 to an individual called Nicky Rosen, who promptly disappeared. Three weeks later Cecchino had been driving up Collins and thought he saw Rosen in another car. By the time Cecchino realized that the guy was someone else he had smashed his Mercedes into the lookalike and put him in hospital. An honest mistake, except that the lookalike turned out to be Tony Nudelli’s own brother-in-law. It was just bad luck and Nudelli might have excused this, but for the fact that Cecchino had gone around the Beach talking about it like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened. Like he didn’t give a shit whose brother-in-law it was. And the minute Nudelli heard about that he took a gun, drove down to the restaurant where Cecchino was usually to be found, which was a mob-owned place, and took care of the insult himself. And not just any gun either, but an awesome little Derringer-sized twelve-gauge pistol, firing one single capiscum round that was capable of crippling a grizzly bear. It was like having a shotgun in the palm of your hand. A make-sure killer’s gun that left most of Cecchino’s head in his lap.

After that happened it wasn’t just Jimmy Figaro who gave Naked Tony extra respect. It was everyone. David Delano included.

As Figaro parked his BMW on Nudelli’s drive, he reflected that it was curious the way history was always rewriting itself. How years after you thought the chapter was closed, new facts came along to alter your perception of something you thought you knew very well already.

It was Figaro’s client, Tommy Rizzoli — Tommy of the ice trucks and the mango trees — now cleared of all racketeering charges, who had supplied the original crumb of information that caused Figaro to go and check out a few things himself. What he discovered was that on the night Dave Delano saw Naked Tony walk into that restaurant and shoot Benny Cecchino, Dave had been there to make a deal with Cecchino on behalf of Nicky Rosen, the guy who had disappeared with Cecchino’s four grand. Rosen, it turned out, had been engaged to be married to Dave’s sister, Lisa, and Dave was trying to make sure that the same thing didn’t happen to his future brother-in-law as had happened to Naked Tony’s. The lookalike guy. Except that the twelve-gauge capiscum had put an end to the negotiations.

No one ever found Benny Cecchino’s corpse. But it wasn’t long before the word got out that Nudelli was involved and that Dave Delano had been the last man to talk to Cecchino before he got himself killed. The State tried and failed to put together a case against Naked Tony, which was when the Feds, already trying to make a Rico case against Nudelli, subpoenaed Dave to give evidence before a Grand Jury. Just a few weeks after Dave’s five-year sentence for contempt, Naked Tony had taken over Benny Cecchino’s vig list. Three months later, Nicky Rosen was found dead in a boatyard at Dinner Key. Someone had sawed his head half off with a broken bottle.

It wasn’t that Jimmy Figaro thought that Dave was planning to double-cross Nudelli or anything. He had no idea what business he and Dave were involved in, merely that Dave and Al Cornaro were somewhere out of town and doing it. Actually he didn’t think the news was so bad. But with the paranoid way Nudelli had greeted the news of Dave’s release from prison, Figaro couldn’t see his client treating this latest revelation with equanimity. So he had made sure to bring some really good news as well.

With a face like a rock, Nudelli listened to Figaro explain the whole story, and then stretched the cheeks across the bones with his fingers while he gave the matter some thought. Finally he said, ‘And what’s the silver lining you want to sew into this fucking cloud of shit you brought me, Jimmy?’

‘Just this,’ smiled Figaro, shifting excitedly on the leather sofa. This was the moment he had been looking forward to. ‘The Court of Appeal affirmed the lower court’s decision throwing out the challenge to the public portion of our new hotel’s financing. It means the city properly created a redevelopment district to finance its share of the project.’

‘That’s good news, Jimmy.’

‘Isn’t it great?’ Figaro smiled. He had worked it well, he thought.

‘So the builders can start when?’ Nudelli asked him.

‘Just as soon as you give them the down payment, Tony.’

Nudelli remained silent.

‘There’s no problem about the money, is there? Twenty-five million in cash. That’s a lot of green. But without it—’

‘The money’s on its way. Be here any day now. Soon as Al gets back to Miami. So don’t worry about a thing. Now when do you think we can open the hotel?’

‘By early ’98.’

‘Then I think this calls for a bottle of champagne.’ Nudelli pushed a button on his library desk to summon Miggy, his butler. ‘I can’t tell you how happy this makes me, Jimmy.’

‘I’m glad. And I’m relieved. To be honest I was a little worried how you’d take the other thing. About Dave Delano.’

‘I appreciate your concern, Jimmy. Maybe now you’ll understand me a little better, huh? I had a nose about that kid, remember?’ He pointed a finger at Figaro. ‘You thought I was being paranoid.’

Jimmy Figaro started to disagree but Nudelli wasn’t about to be contradicted on this point.

‘Don’t fuckin’ argue, it’s true.’ But Nudelli was laughing as he said it, still wagging the finger at Figaro. ‘I seen it in your eyes. You were thinkin’ it, even if you weren’t saying it. Well, I got an instinct for these things. Maybe this is why I am where I am. Not by havin’ no college education, or no rich daddy, or by marrying some classy broad. Some hope. I got to be where I am by trusting to my fuckin’ instincts, y’know? Just like I knew we could get past this redevelopment district bullshit.’

Nudelli’s finger tapped the side of his nose and then the side of his temples. He chuckled as he said, ‘It’s a basic instinct. Like Sharon Stone’s pussy. You see it only once, for a second, but it’s always there. Waiting to go into action.’

Figaro grinned back at him and shook his head in apparent wonder. ‘I have to admit, Tony, you were right, all along.’

This was all Nudelli wanted from Jimmy Figaro. The acknowledgment.

‘So what happens now?’ asked Figaro. ‘About Delano?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I had the impression that some sort of business relationship had been concluded.’

Nudelli looked up at the grandfather clock against the wall of his study. Twenty thousand dollars’ worth of time-keeping. It was English. A George II walnut eight-day long case, the height of a basketball player. The same height as the pile of cash he expected Al to bring back from the Atlantic score.

‘Concluded? Yeah.’ Tony Nudelli laughed. ‘In just a few hours that’s what it’s gonna be. Concluded.’