To Save a Son

by Brian Freemantle

  “Never,” said Nicky. “They always wanted the public impression to be that it was your company.”

  Franks burned with humiliation as he remembered all the discussions and talk at the board meetings. It had all been a charade, every bit of it. He’d imagined they were giving way to his pressure and all the time he’d been doing exactly what they wanted, creating the shield behind which they could hide. “What about the gambling?” he said in abrupt recollection.

  “That was the eventual aim,” disclosed Nicky.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The FBI came here yesterday. Two guys. I don’t know what they’ve found but they said they’ve been investigating for months. They know about the credit linkup between Las Vegas and Nassau. Said it was the classic way these guys get money out. All they do is make the deposit in Las Vegas and draw it from us, in the Bahamas. Gamble a little, to make it appear genuine, cash up the rest, and put it into an offshore account.”

  The feeling of sickness came to Franks again, at a further realization. The discussion about installing the casino had occurred when Nicky was away on his honeymoon. Informal, they’d said. No reason to keep any notes. So any investigation would show the initiative to the Bahamas government to be his, with the formal company discussion only occurring afterward. Franks’ mind stayed on records. He said, “What documentation is there that I haven’t seen? Stuff beween you and Pascara? With any of them?”

  Nicky licked his lips, not moving.

  “Give it to me!” yelled Franks.

  Hesitantly the lawyer took a slim folder from a desk drawer, sliding it across the table toward the other man. “I wasn’t keeping it from you,” he said.

  “Liar.” said Franks. “You have kept it from me. What’s here?”

  “Dukes’ bank transfer, for the original company creation. Came from an offshore account in the Netherlands Antilles. Instructions from Pascara, for dividend payments. That’s offshore, too. An account in the Bahamas …”

  “Into which goes the casino money?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nicky. “There’s also my own notes, about the formation. What I was asked to do. Some stuff about Pascara’s other investments, too.”

  Franks looked down at the folder and then back up to Nicky. “Didn’t the FBI ask for this?”

  “They probably would have done if they’d known about it. They just wanted the company books; said if I refused they’d get them by subpoena.”

  Franks sat back in his chair, trying to analyze everything. It was a mess. An embarrassing, humiliating mess that was going to tarnish his reputation badly and probably destroy Nicky’s. Which the bloody man deserved anyway; he felt no sympathy for him. Thank God he’d kept the companies separate from everything in Europe.

  “How were things left with the investigators?”

  “They told me not to get in touch with Pascara, Dukes, or Flamini. Said they’d want to talk to you and wanted to know when you’d next be in America.”

  “We’ll cooperate,” decided Franks. He lifted the unopened folder. “Make this available and anything else they might want. It’ll wreck the company, of course. We’ll get some sort of price for the hotels but we won’t cover ourselves. We’ll need lawyers, naturally. The best. You must be able to get the names. Do that this afternoon.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Nicky.

  “Not sure about what?”

  “Cooperating.”

  “What are you talking about! We’ve been suckered—I have, at least. I don’t like it and I like even less the thought of it becoming public knowledge. But it’s going to become public knowledge. There’s nothing we can do about it. The important thing now is to salvage what little we can.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the public affairs of the company,” said Nicky. “Nor the hotel company or the casino holding. We took an investment in good faith and operated strictly according to the law.”

  “You know—and now I know—that it was crooked money! We’ve been set up, as a front, for criminals to operate,” protested Franks. “Are you suggesting we become criminals too?”

  “There’s been nothing criminal in the operation of the company,” insisted the lawyer.

  “Surely in American law it’s criminal to withhold information in a criminal investigation?”

  “I’m not a criminal lawyer, as you said,” agreed Nicky. “But my understanding is that we comply with the law if we respond to the requests that are made of us. But no more.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just that,” said Nicky. “We comply, but we don’t offer any more than what’s asked of us.”

  “You mean there might not be any prosecution?”

  “I’ve no idea if there’s going to be any sort of prosecution. Certainly, from what was said yesterday, they seem to know a lot, but it’s a lot about Pascara and Dukes and Flamini. It’s not about this company. And that’s our only involvement. The hotels and the subsidiary casino operation.”

  “Through which they’ve washed their money!”

  “Is it provable?” asked Nicky.

  Franks waved the folder at the other man. “The offshore accounts listed here would probably make it so.”

  “We haven’t been asked for that.”

  “Are you suggesting we go on fronting for a bunch of gangsters?”

  “No,” said Nicky. “I’m suggesting that we try to protect ourselves. In every way. If there’s no prosecution, then we quietly withdraw and divest ourselves of the holding.”

  “What if there is a prosecution?”

  “Then we’re innocent victims. Stupid maybe, but still people who were cheated.”

  Franks shook his head. “That won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you prepared to lie on oath?”

  “Yes,” said Nicky, without any hesitation. “I don’t give a damn about perjury if I’m thinking about survival; I went to church to get christened, confirmed, and married.”

  He didn’t have any religion, thought Franks. So did perjury matter if it meant minimizing the damage that was likely? “What would you say?”

  “Nothing,” said Nicky. “That I only knew them as business investors with whom every dealing was absolutely satisfactory.”

  “That sounds like a character reference.”

  “To me it sounds like common sense.”

  “I asked for anything that wasn’t in me official company records. Because it seemed obvious mat there would be something. What happens if me investigators ask as well?”

  Nicky spread his hands. “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “Don’t be glib,” said Franks.

  “Let’s destroy it, while we’ve got the chance,” said Nicky, suddenly urgent.

  “I haven’t looked at it yet.”

  “Take my word for what’s there.”

  “I took your word. And got trapped because of it. Don’t be fucking stupid.”

  “You’re not in England now, Eddie. Here things are different. Pascara and Flamini and Dukes aren’t small time. They’re important, really important. We’re not talking of bicycle thefts and parking tickets.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “We’re talking about getting killed.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Franks’ rejection was automatic but there was an immediate feeling of chill. He’d read about gangland assassinations, in newspapers and magazines. Read about them in fictionalized books, too, and seen the films. But that’s what it was. Newspaper stories about other people. And fiction. Not something that happened to him.

  “I’m not being ridiculous, Eddie. I’m being desperately serious.”

  “Are you telling me that you won’t testify against them if a case is made?”

  “Exactly that.”

  “How can you!”

  “Easy,” said Nicky. “I acted for clients believing they were reputable businessmen. I’m shocked and dismayed to find that they’re not. Embarrass
ed, too. But as I know nothing about any criminality, I can’t give evidence about it.”

  “What about me?” demanded Franks. “What about my being the majority stockholder in both companies. The man who negotiated the casino agreement?”

  “You thought they were reputable businessmen too. You did, until today.”

  “Not anymore I don’t.”

  “Because I chose to tell you. Because I owed it to you.”

  “It’s lying.”

  “It’s living.”

  “I still think that’s ridiculous.”

  “I don’t want my sister to be a widow. Or David and Gabriella to be orphans.”

  “Isn’t it a bit late to think like that?”

  “I deserve anything you feel like saying,” capitulated the lawyer.

  Franks was engulfed in a fresh wave of anger, a feeling of impotence. He wanted physically to hit the man but guessed he wouldn’t fight back that way, either. “You’re a shit!” he said. “A complete, lying shit. I hope you get everything that’s coming.”

  “All those things,” agreed Nicky. “I wanted to be like you and I couldn’t, not in a million years. Now it’s atonement time. I’m not asking for forgiveness. Don’t expect it. But I am sorry. Once it started, I couldn’t stop. Okay, I admit it. I didn’t want it to stop. It was a ladder to climb and I got to the top.”

  “You didn’t have to involve me,” said Franks bitterly.

  “I didn’t think there could ever be any risk,” repeated the lawyer. “Everything else before had been so smooth and so easy.…” There was a pause. “I wanted you to see me as a big-time fixit lawyer with a big office, able to pluck millions out of the air with a phone call. There wasn’t any maybe about it,” he concluded, completely prostrating himself.

  Franks supposed the man was being honest and genuine now, but he still couldn’t find any compassion or forgiveness. Nicky wasn’t sorry for entrapping him. The weak, vacillating bastard was sorry that it had been discovered and there was a risk of everything coming out. If the FBI hadn’t come the previous day, Nicky would have gone on being the shoulder-slapping, bonhomie-filled brother figure who would have always kept the private file in his bottom drawer and laughed to himself all the time how easy it had been to con the supposedly big-time operator.

  And it had been easy. It had been easy because despite all the bullshit about personal control and attention to every detail that Franks boasted about, he’d taken Nicky’s word and accepted Pascara and Dukes and Flamini as business partners. He hadn’t run any sort of independent check—the sort of independent check they’d clearly run on him and which he should have run on them if he purported to be half as good a businessman as he thought he was—which might have warned him. A credit survey would have been enough, because credit surveys threw up criminal convictions. He wouldn’t have considered tying himself to anyone with a criminal conviction, no matter how many years ago it had occurred.

  The anger now wasn’t so much directed toward the lawyer as to himself. Maybe Nicky had set him up, but Franks recognized that he only had himself to blame. He could have backed out from the preliminary meeting. And he could have backed out after the charade that they’d staged in the islands, even though he hadn’t known what sort of charade it was at the time. The anger wasn’t just at recognizing how ineptly he’d behaved. It was at remembering that he’d actually known, at the time, that he wasn’t being properly businesslike. And still going on! He was physically hot, flushed, and didn’t care that Nicky would see it. Weak, vacillating bastard, he thought again.

  But he wasn’t. He hadn’t shown himself to be much of a businessman so far in his involvement with them, but now was the time to start; the way to start if he was to minimize the damage. He’d been stupid, but so had they, in their eagerness to make him a puppet. He knew the way the strings worked now. So they could dance to his manipulation.

  “I’m the controlling stockholder,” he said, making it an announcement.

  “Yes,” agreed Nicky, doubtful at Franks’ sudden forcefulness.

  “So I’m going to summon a board meeting.”

  “What!” demanded the lawyer.

  “I want to dissolve both companies,” said Franks. “There’s a formation clause about impropriety?”

  “It’s standard,” agreed Nicky.

  “I’m not satisfied about the propriety of my fellow directors—and I’m going to find out more that will make me become even more dissatisfied—and I have the power as controlling stockholder, with Tina’s vote, to dissolve the companies. Which is what I intend to do.”

  “The investigators said …”

  “I don’t give a damn what the investigators said! At the moment I’m provably fronting for men involved in God knows what. If there is a prosecution and we’ve disposed of the companies, then we’ve shown some responsibility. Distanced ourselves.”

  “Eddie,” said Nicky, empty-voiced, “I don’t want to confront Pascara and the others.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Franks. “I do.”

  13

  Having made the decision—and fueled by anger at his own stupidity and their use of him—Franks’ impulse was to summon the meeting immediately to get rid of them. It was the same anger that enabled him to control the impulse. An investigation was just that, an inquiry that might prove nothing, leaving only the suspicion. Recognizing that he needed more, Franks initiated the sort of credit surveys he should have commissioned at the beginning. Through a separate legal firm in Chicago and another in Houston he asked for personal checks on all three men. When he faced them, he was determined there would be no way they could rebut the propriety clause.

  There was an inexplicable discomfort at Tina being so far away. The same night as his disclosure meeting with Nicky, Franks booked into the Plaza—impatient at the commuting delays that would have arisen if he’d opened up the Scarsdale house—and called Tina in England. As reluctant as Nicky had been during his telephone conversation, Franks refused to go into any details. He said there was a serious problem—the most serious that he’d ever had to confront—but he thought that there might be a way to limit the damage. It meant her vote and he wanted her with him, not thousands of miles away. She agreed to fly out the following day and asked whether she should bring Gabriella. Franks hesitated, and then said the child should remain at home in the care of Elizabeth.

  He met Tina at Kennedy Airport but refused to talk in the car, within the hearing of the driver, so by the time they reached their suite Tina was positively irritated, imagining Franks was being overly dramatic. The attitude leaked away as he told her what had happened. When he finished she said, “Oh, God! Oh my God!”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong,” insisted Franks. “I’ve been tricked, and I was stupid, but stupidity isn’t a crime.”

  “You think the courts will see it that way?”

  “I don’t know how American courts work,” said Franks. “I don’t know how English courts work, for that matter. What I do know is that going ahead as I am now shows proper business responsibility.”

  “Nicky trapped you?” she demanded, working through what Franks had said.

  “Yes.”

  “The little bastard.”

  “I’ve said it all.”

  “Have you spoken to Poppa? He knew, as well.”

  “There hasn’t been time.”

  “Aren’t you going to?”

  Franks had avoided thinking about it. He could hardly wait for the confrontation with Pascara and Dukes and Flamini. But not with Enrico. Franks despised Nicky because Nicky had actively, knowingly involved him. But Enrico hadn’t. Franks supposed Enrico had some guilt, but it was guilt of omission—of omitting to warn him—not his true son’s guilt of commission. He would face the old man, but he didn’t think it would be in anger, even though he might try to indicate the feeling. Toward Enrico he felt only disappointment. Despite all the bombast and the bullying and the competition-setting, Franks had trusted the
old man. Trusted and respected and admired him. Loved him, Franks supposed, forcing the admission from himself. But Enrico couldn’t have loved him, to let happen what had happened. To Tina, Franks said, “Of course I’m going to talk to him. But not yet. There’s too much to do here yet.”

  “I want to see Nicky,” she demanded.

  “I’ve got to see him,” said Franks. “I’ve left him setting up the inquiries, in Chicago and Houston.”

  “I want to come, too.”

  Tina actually entered her brother’s office suite ahead of Franks when they got there, in the afternoon, stopping in the middle of the big room with her hands on her hips and yelling, “What the fuck do you think you’ve done!”

  “We’ve been through it all,” said Nicky wearily, nodding beyond his sister to Franks. “There isn’t anything else left to say.”

  “Oh yes there is,” insisted the woman. “I want to hear you tell me, personally, why you thought nothing of getting us involved with mobsters. In the middle of some fucking FBI investigation. Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

  “Of course I know what I’ve done. And I’m sorry.” Nicky was as disheveled as he had been the previous day, pouch-eyed with fatigue.

  “Sorry!”

  “Tina,” intruded Franks from behind, “we’ve had the recriminations. I want to know what the other lawyers have said; how long they think things will take.”

  “Not yet.” Tina went farther toward her brother. She stopped at the edge of the huge desk, staring down at the man. “I think you’re a bastard,” she said. “I think you’re scum. You used us. Not just in the business. You cheated us in that, but you cheated us as friends as well. How the hell could you and Maria get as close to us as you did when you still knew what you were doing!”

  “Maria didn’t know; doesn’t know. I haven’t told her anything.”

  “You don’t care who you cheat and lie to, do you!”

  Nicky shrugged, with no defense.

  “You’ve broken up the family, Nicky,” she said. “We’re going to be together in the next few days because that’s how it’s got to be, to try to salvage something. But when it’s over—however it finishes—I never want to see you again. I never want to speak to you or hear from you. I hope you rot in hell. And I don’t know how I feel about Poppa, either. He knew; maybe not everything, but he knew and he could have prevented it if he’d wanted to. I don’t think I want to see or speak to him again, either.”