And things fall apart.
They thought the boom would last forever.
In the land of sunshine and blue water where only good things happen to beautiful people.
But the real estate market slows, then comes to a halt, and Nicky is leveraged to his eyeballs. Nothing is selling, nothing is even renting. Nobody is investing and the creditors want their cash.
Which Nicky doesn't have.
He's gambled it all on the come and it isn't coming.
Condo complexes, apartment buildings, raw land.
All sitting as still as a dead summer day.
And the other business, well, every business needs tending, and Nicky's been neglecting the organization. The two units are pretty much operating on their own, sending a share of their profits up to Nicky and skimming a little more off his share every day. Schaller, Kubinsky, and Tratchev are conspiring to do just the thing that Nicky had intended to do for them before the recession shut down his cash pipeline – leave Nicky's organization and become independent.
And there are grumblings: Nicky's not putting anything back into the business, Nicky's gotten sloppy, Nicky's gotten soft.
Nicky has gone American.
Dani and Lev try to warn him. Dani tells him to take back control while there's still time. Give his security force something to do, keep them sharp, keep the weapon honed. Nicky tells them no.
Things will turn around. The economy will bounce back. To this extent they're right in what they're saying about him – he has gone soft. He doesn't relish a return to the gun and the knife and the chicken chop.
He sends good money after bad.
Scrapes up what money he can to make the loan payments but it's never enough. Month after month the market spirals down.
He has empty condos, empty apartments. Hell, he has two apartment buildings under construction that he doesn't have the money to complete because he's shifted funds to pay the loans on other properties.
He starts doing more and more coke. It makes him feel better. He buys art he can't sell and can't afford to keep, because it makes him feel better and it keeps up appearances. He spends cash on women who six months ago would have balled him for free. He gives them coke, he gives them art. They get him hard and he feels powerful again for a few minutes.
All the while his own wife is drinking like a fish, taking pills, and causing scenes at parties. ("How many people here have fucked my husband? A show of hands, please.") They get into fights, he knocks her around. His kids start looking at him like he's some sort of monster. He hits them once or twice. ("Don't you ever open your mouth to me.") He spends more and more nights away from home.
None of this escapes the attention of Tratchev, Rubinsky, and Schaller.
You listen closely at night, you can hear the wolves circling.
Pam goes to rehab and comes back a raving bitch.
Sober, and the first time Nicky lays a mitt on her she goes to the authorities and lays a TRO on him.
Gets his name in the court system.
I have stolen millions of dollars in this country, Nicky thinks. I have robbed and killed and stolen millions and this is the first time my name appears in court. And my wife does that to me.
My own wife.
Not for long.
Pam files for divorce.
"I told you I would kill you," Nicky says. "I mean it."
"I don't care," Pam says. "I can't live this way."
"If you leave, you leave the way you came. With nothing but some cheap dress on your ass."
"I don't think so," Pam says. "I'll take the children and the house and half of everything. I'll even take your precious furniture, Nicky."
It could happen, Nicky thinks. In this godforsaken country where a man has no rights. They'll give the drunken bitch the kids, they'll give her the house, they'll launch a fishing expedition through my finances that could prove not only costly but dangerous.
It would endanger the plan.
A plan of such simple elegance, such balanced design, such perfect symmetry that it only confirms in him his own sense of genius.
Crime as artful construction.
A plan that, if it works, will achieve his goal of the turnaround in one generation.
And Pamela could stop it.
Take his dream and his identity with it.
In a particularly cruel argument one night she snaps, "My son will not be a gangster."
No, he will not, Nicky thinks.
In despair, he goes to Mother.
Goes into her room in the small hours of the morning, sits on her bed and says, "Mother, I could lose – we could lose – everything."
"You have to do something, Daziatnik."
"What?"
"You know, Daziatnik," she says. She takes his face into her hands. "You know what you have to do."
Yes, I know, Nicky thinks as he lies back.
I know what I have to do.
Take back control of my organization.
Protect my family.
He's at home, taking a walk on the lawn when it hits him. He's looking down at Dana Strands, he's thinking about Great Sunsets, and the idea comes to him.
The perfect symmetry of it.
The beautiful balance.
Perfectly structured poetry, like the finest furniture.
Everything, all, in a master stroke.
He watches the sun set over Dana Strands.