Gangsterland

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Rabbi David Cohen never returned to the scene of a crime. It’s how people ended up getting fingered by previously forgetful witnesses or caught on surveillance cameras. And yet here he was pulling into the same parking spot Slim Joe had used in front of the tanning salon on his last day alive. Of course, no one had bothered to report Slim Joe missing, since he was the kind of guy most people were happy to not see again — and David never bothered to ask Bennie about Slim Joe’s mother, but it was safe to assume she was on a permanent vacation now.

Since Bennie had instructed David to never set foot inside a casino on account of their facial recognition software, David couldn’t really complain about Rachel Savone’s desire to meet at a neighborhood restaurant like Grape Street even if it happened to be in the same shopping center as Slim Joe’s favorite tanning salon. It was one of those restaurants David would never visit on his own — he had a standing policy that forbade him from ever going into a joint that had a chalkboard outside, and this place, he saw when he got to the front door, had two, one with a list of the day’s specials, another with a list of appropriate wine to go along with each special.

David walked back to his car and, as discreetly as possible, removed the butterfly knife he kept in his sock, and put it in the glove box. No need to tempt fate, particularly since the idea of spending an hour anywhere talking to Bennie’s wife without some kind of medication — be it in pill or liquid form — had him considering ways to potentially kill himself, not to mention anyone who might make him, something he was always wary of when out in public, even though he still didn’t recognize himself in the mirror.

This all had the potential to turn black quickly. But before he could make a break for it, Rachel pulled up in her little silver Mercedes convertible, the top down even though it was only about sixty degrees outside. She was on the phone, and when she saw David she waved at him but didn’t hang up.

David watched her for a few moments, tried to decide if he found her attractive or if it was just that he hadn’t spent any time alone with a woman — in a physical way — in almost a year. It was easy for him to dismiss these thoughts at the temple, since most of the women there were so wracked with worry or guilt or some kind of existential crisis that he wasn’t able to look at them as women at all. They were just bundles of problems clothed in expensive leisure wear.

With Rachel, though, David felt a small sense of familiarity. It wasn’t that she reminded him of Jennifer exactly. As far as he could tell, they were completely different from one another in almost every plausible way — Jennifer would no sooner drive around in a convertible Mercedes while talking on a cell phone than she would ride on the back of a motorcycle with her ass hanging out — except in one sense: They were both married to bad men.

It took a special kind of woman to decide that hitching up with a mob hit man and freelance professional killer (or, in Rachel’s case, a Mafia boss who probably didn’t kill a lot of people with his own hands anymore but likely had done a fair share of that sort of thing back when they were dating) was a fun way to spend not merely a few dates but also the rest of her life.

Maybe it was exciting at first, when everyone was young and stupid and watched a lot of dumb movies, but once things got solid, once bills came due and there were kids and broken radiators and car payments and funerals, along with all the other tiny disasters that made up the daily life of a married couple, you had to want it. You had to call what you had love. You had to look at that person in bed next to you and respect him, even if you knew the truth about what he was.

“Sorry I’m late,” Rachel said when she finally reached David. “It’s been a crazy day.” She was wearing a light blue sweater set, black trousers that widened around her ankles, so that David couldn’t see her shoes, no sunglasses. She had on the same jewelry she always wore — diamond earrings, the simple gold necklace, the nice wedding ring he’d first noticed at the Hanukkah carnival — and carried an expensive-looking handbag.

“I just got here,” David said.

“If you’re anything like my father,” she said, “you’ll just love this place.”

“What about Mr. Savone?”

“Oh, he won’t come here,” she said. “He won’t go anywhere near a wine bar.”

After ordering, it took Rachel twenty minutes to finally address the purpose of their meeting, filling up the time with idle chatter about the temple before letting them both get in a few bites of their Caesar salads. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just sitting here babbling. You must get so tired of listening to women babble.”

“It’s fine,” David said, because it was, for the most part. She hadn’t yet asked him to solve anything, which was different than every other conversation he’d had over the last two months.

“No, no, it really isn’t,” she said. “When my father was your age, he didn’t have to deal with what you have to deal with. He could come home at the end of the day and not feel like he’d been party to every single injustice of the world, just the ones facing the Jews.” She took a sip of wine — she ordered a bottle of Merlot immediately upon sitting down, and most of it was gone — and then stared at David for a long moment. “Why don’t you have a wife yet, Rabbi, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Married to the job,” David said. It was a line he’d used about ten thousand times since taking his position at the temple, every young mother in the place wanting to set him up with a single friend, every old-timer wanting to introduce him to their daughters or granddaughters.

“Everyone says Las Vegas is a great place to be single,” she said, “but I don’t believe that. It can be pretty lonely if you’re looking for a girl to start a family with.”

“Well, that’s not my priority right now.” David tried to smile at Rachel, but it didn’t feel natural. It never felt natural. It wasn’t that his face still felt like a mask, though it did; rather, it was that he’d spent so many years trying not to smile, growing up so hard, anything that was happy had the elastic snap of shit, so it was easier to just treat everything evenly. Once he got in the business, he didn’t want to be one of those assholes who ended up with a nickname like “Smiley” or “Gums.”

“If it becomes one,” she said, “let me know.”

“I will,” he said.

“My father says you’re an excellent young rabbi,” Rachel said.

“Your father is a kind man.”

“My father can be an asshole,” Rachel said, without a trace of anger, “but I love him.” She took another sip of her wine and then refilled her glass with the rest of the bottle. “I’m sorry we haven’t had the chance to talk much, because everyone says you’re an incredible listener. Claudia Levine thinks you’re wonderful.”

“Yes, well,” David said.

This got Rachel to smile. “My father teach you to say that?”

“It’s taught on the first day of rabbinical school,” he said, and they both laughed.

“This feels good,” Rachel said. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”

“If you could just laugh and cry in a single sound,” David said.

“Maimonides?” Rachel asked.

“Springsteen,” David said. This made Rachel laugh again. David took a sip of his wine, felt his face get a little warm, felt the muscles in his shoulders relax a bit. It wasn’t like drinking Scotch, but at this point, it was better than drinking water. Maybe things would turn out okay today.

Three tables over, David saw a familiar face. “Is that Oscar Goodman?” he asked.

Rachel looked over her shoulder. “Everyone comes here,” she said.

“Looks like he’ll be mayor,” David said, trying to make conversation, but also trying to figure out just how connected the Savones were.

“It will be good for the city,” she said. “He was on the board at Beth Shalom for years, so he knows what it’s like to work with intractable ideologues.”

So that answered that.

“What has my husband told you about me?” Rachel was still smiling, but David could see that something had hardened inside of her, that she’d moved on to the part of the conversation she’d been dreading, too. He found that to be somewhat of a relief. For once, even ground.

“Nothing, really,” David said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I find that hard to believe. He spends more time with you than he does with anyone, except for his lawyer.”

“What we talk about is. .,” David began, but Rachel waved him off.

“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s confidential.”

“Actually,” David said, “it’s mostly business related. Your husband has been very good to the temple. I really can’t thank him enough.” These were sentences David had practiced a thousand times in preparation for anyone asking about his relationship with Bennie Savone. “We’ve also had many interesting talks about his faith, which, as I’m sure you know, is a constant challenge.”

Rachel shook her head and laughed again. “Rabbi,” she said, “I appreciate that you’re trying to be polite, but you don’t need to be. I know who my husband is.”

“He’s said you’re unhappy,” David said.

“Understatement of the year,” she said, “and we’re only in January, so maybe I should include last year, too.”

“And that you’re not well, physically.”

This time Rachel didn’t laugh. “I’m glad he’s aware of these things. I’m glad he can talk to you. It would be nice if he could talk to me.”

“He’s a complicated person,” David said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“He’s not complicated,” she said, “he’s a liar. There’s a difference, if you don’t mind me saying, Rabbi.”

Thankfully, their waiter arrived and dropped off their lunch. David ordered the chicken Marsala on Rachel’s recommendation, though now he realized he probably wasn’t going to get a chance to enjoy it since Rachel was already dabbing at her eyes in a futile attempt to save her makeup from the tears. He took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket — the advantage of wearing a nice suit every day, David now realized, was that you were forced to be a gentleman around crying women, even if you didn’t want to be — and slid it across the table.

“Thank you,” she said. “Look at me. Crying in the middle of a restaurant.”

“The Talmud tells us that even when the gates of heaven are shut to prayer, they are open to tears,” David said.

“I’m going to leave him,” she said.

David looked around the restaurant, tried to figure out if there was any way Bennie might have bugged it. The guy behind the bar pouring wine into tiny tasting glasses, maybe he was wired up. Maybe the waiter. Maybe Oscar Goodman, walking out right then, was headed off to report directly to Bennie.

“I’m sorry,” David said. “Did you say were considering leaving Mr. Savone?”

“Not considering it, doing it,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. My father, he won’t listen, tells me to just suffer through it. I can’t talk to my girlfriends about it. I can’t talk to anyone, really, except for you.” She reached across the table and took David’s hand. Everyone always wanted to touch his hand, as if whatever wisdom he might have could be delivered through the sweat of his palm, which, in this case, might have been closer to the truth, since David was certain he was sweating like a Baptist preacher. “I’m not a young woman anymore, Rabbi. Don’t I deserve to be happy? Don’t I deserve to be loved by someone capable of love?”

“You’re still a young woman,” David said.

“I’m thirty-nine,” she said. “I’ll be forty in six months. That will make it official.”

“I think you need to consider all of your options here,” he said.

“That’s what I’m doing,” she said. She covered his hand with both her hands now, making a minifurnace that was heating his entire body.

David examined the table for something sharp, but the waiter had taken the steak knives from the table. He didn’t know what he was looking to cut, anyway, other than maybe his own arm off at the wrist. At this point, he could probably do the job with a spoon.

“You have to consider your children,” David said, figuring that was a good place to start, a good way station for Rachel while he figured out what he was going to do with this information.

“They wouldn’t miss him,” Rachel said. “Sophie might, I guess, but Jean knows what kind of man her father is. Thirteen going on forty-five, that one. I’m not going to wait another ten years for Sophie to get the picture, Rabbi. I can’t do that.”

David flipped through his mental Rolodex looking for some kind of Talmudic interpretation of divorce that would make Rachel realize the error of her ways. Not that the Talmud forbade divorce — the Jews were pretty forthright on it, much to David’s surprise, allowing that a life in a bad marriage was no life at all and that a divorce, while not a great option, was nonetheless an inevitable one. And this wasn’t even a modern interpretation.

Still. This was not acceptable.

“Have you thought about marriage counseling?”

“He’s not the marriage counseling type,” she said.

“Yet you think he’s the divorce court type.” Rachel flinched in her seat, and David realized he had slipped into his old voice, that his cadence was off. Shit. Still, it gave him an opening to remove his hand from her grip. He cleared his throat. Took a sip of wine. Grabbed a waiter, asked for a knife. Cut a piece of chicken, dipped it in the Marsala sauce, put it in his mouth, chewed as deliberately as he could. . and all the while, Rachel stared at him in something like muted wonder.

“Maybe I can’t divorce him,” Rachel said, her voice sounding resigned. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t leave him.”

“Do you think you’ll just run off? You think you can do that?” He cut another piece of chicken, swirled some pasta onto his fork, swallowed it all down without even chewing. There was that voice again. “How will you survive?” Dammit. “Financially. How will you survive financially if you just run off? That’s something to consider.” Another bite of chicken. A gulp of wine.

“Well,” she said, “eventually I’ll inherit the funeral home from my father.” She sat back from the table and exhaled. “It’s not a business I’m interested in, but it’s not like there’s ever a down season, if my father is to be believed.”

“Rabbi Kales is a long way from being dead,” David said, though he wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Was it possible that Bennie didn’t know this salient bit of information concerning the funeral home? David didn’t imagine Rachel would want to be the owner of a funeral home that was laundering money. . and bodies. . for the Mafia. And then there was the new tissue business. . and whatever else David and Bennie could dream up. More importantly, it was the cash cow that was going to get David back to Chicago, back to Jennifer and William, back to Sal Cupertine.

Oh, he thought, this will not do.

“Of course, of course,” she said. “But you know he’s been slipping, mentally, for a while now. I’m sure he hides it well when he’s at work, but, Rabbi, there’s a reason you’re here now, obviously.”

“Obviously,” David said.

“My point is, my father is not going to be able to run the business for much longer regardless,” she said. “I’ll need to get power of attorney, so if need be, I can step in to handle his affairs. I don’t want to, but if my husband won’t support his children, what choice would I have?”

That Rachel wasn’t aware her father was not running the funeral home, even now, was a concern. If she began digging — or had a lawyer start digging — that would not be good. David didn’t like the idea that he might need to kill Bennie’s wife. He also didn’t like the idea of going to prison.

“Let me think for a moment,” he said.

“Of course, of course,” Rachel said.

David had learned that if you really wanted to get people to listen to you, it was important to pretend that you needed a moment to listen to God before coming up with a proper answer to something. David did this by closing his eyes and breathing slowly. Except when he closed his eyes, he wasn’t talking to God as much as he was trying to figure out how not to choke the life from the person sitting in front of him.

In this case, he was trying to decide if it would be better, all things considered, to simply follow Rachel out to the parking lot, and as she was walking up to her car, shoot her once in the back of the head. Except he didn’t have a gun on him. Just that knife, which was now in the car. He could stab her in the throat with a fork, but that felt too personal, and, generally, people tended to notice a person geysering blood from her neck in the middle of a crowded parking lot.

And, he didn’t kill women. It seemed like an irredeemable trait, even among a series of what would normally be highly irredeemable traits. Yeah, the Russians and the Kosher Nostra in Chicago did it, but they did it for reasons completely unlike this one. This was an issue of preservation, not to collect a debt, which, actually, sounded like a better reason on the face of things. But, still. He had to take that option off the table. What else was there?

Reason, he supposed. He could attempt to reason with Rachel. Or maybe he could lead her to see the folly of her ways by pointing out how fucked she was if she even thought she could walk out on Bennie Savone.

“It was my understanding,” David said, his eyes still closed, “that your husband helped your father purchase the funeral home. Is that correct?”

“That was years ago,” she said. “That debt has been paid, I’m sure.” David couldn’t tell if there was any sarcasm in Rachel’s response or if he was looking for. . something, anything, to get an idea of what Bennie had on Rabbi Kales.

He opened his eyes and tried to be as soothing as possible, tried to make Rachel change her mind based solely on answering simple questions. It was a tactic he learned from some old hard knocks in the Family when they tried to get information out of people before whacking them. “Are you certain?”

Rachel exhaled deeply, again. “I guess I’m not,” she said. “Bennie isn’t exactly forthcoming with these sorts of matters.” She paused. “I guess I could ask my father, but he’s already advised me that I’m being foolish, for any number of reasons, even considering this. But you understand, don’t you, Rabbi Cohen? I have a right to be in a marriage that I find fulfilling, don’t I?”

“Of course,” he said. “Let me ask you a question. Do you think any of this has to do with your recent medical problems?”

“No,” she said. . too quickly in David’s opinion.

“Because I know how going through the change of life can make one start to reevaluate one’s choices from a place that is more emotional than reasonable.”

“How do you know that, Rabbi? Do you have a lot of experience going through the ‘change of life,’ as you put it?”

“Talmud tells us to look not at the pitcher but at what it contains,” David said.

“It contains bullshit and recrimination and lies,” Rachel said. She flagged down a waiter and asked for another bottle of wine, this time a Chianti. “Rabbi, I’d be curious what you know about your body betraying you. Do you know I’m going to need a hysterectomy? Do you know that? Don’t you think that I’d like my loving husband around when I was going through that? Doesn’t that sound reasonable to you?”

“Lower your voice,” David said. This time, he used his old voice intentionally.

The waiter came by and refilled Rachel’s glass and then left the bottle in the center of the table. Rachel picked it up and examined the label. “Last good thing that came out of Italy,” she said quietly. “Do you know where I went to get married?”

“No,” David said.

“Florence,” she said. “This was 1982. I was twenty-two, and Bennie, he was a big shot, thirty years old, money falling out of his pockets, that’s what I thought, anyway. But you know, when you’re young, someone with a thousand dollars seems rich. I wanted to get married at Temple Isaiah when it was still down on Oakey, but because Bennie wasn’t Jewish, they made a real stink about it. My father was a rabbi there, so he didn’t care, obviously, but the board wouldn’t let it happen for political reasons, which is just a fancy way of saying they didn’t want to have Bennie’s family showing up in photos inside the temple, not when one of their members was about to run for the Senate. So Bennie says, Fuck them. He said that to me. I remember it clear as day. He said, Fuck them. So he flew my family, all of my friends, all of his friends and family, plus anyone who was a member of Isaiah that wanted to come, flew everyone to Florence, and I got married at the Great Synagogue of Florence.”

“That sounds like a good time,” David said.

“It was,” she said. “But it took me until recently to realize he didn’t do it out of a sense of justice, or even to make me happy. He did it out of spite. Maybe I should have seen that back then, but what do you know when you’re twenty-two?”

“You think you know everything,” David said.

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s so right, Rabbi. You think you know everything. You think your whole life is going to be what it is at that very moment, can’t imagine anything ever being different, can’t imagine you’ll ever feel differently about the things you don’t care about, if that makes sense. A year later, my mother would be dead from ovarian cancer, and all of a sudden, I realize how young I am. That all I want is my mommy. So here I am now, with these two girls, and I’m realizing my entire marriage is based mostly on spite. That is not a pleasant experience, Rabbi. I don’t want my daughters to look back and think that their mother let them live a horrible life.”

The problem David faced on a semiregular basis when talking to his congregants was that he just couldn’t relate to their issues, but Rachel’s problem was one that David had become intimate with since the night he found himself in a frozen truck filled with meat and nothing but time to think. It was hard, after having a kid, not to start thinking about your legacy. Though, admittedly, David hadn’t really started contemplating what he was leaving behind for William until he was already gone, which was strange since he’d been thinking more and more about his own father, and his trip off that building.

Still, he couldn’t very well just let Rachel sneak out in the middle of the night, particularly since he was pretty certain he’d be the one who’d have to chase her down.

“My advice,” David said, “is that you need to look inside yourself first and see precisely what you’re dissatisfied with. I think you may find, ultimately, that your husband is not at fault here. Let the Torah speak to you.”

Rachel pushed her plate of uneaten bow-tie pasta and vegetables to the side of the table so she could make room for her purse, which she turned over and dumped onto the table. Among the items was a Saturday night special, a little silver-and-black Lorcin.380, a piece of shit, really, mostly a paperweight.

“Do you see this?” she said.

“The gun?”

“Of course the gun,” she said. “Why aren’t you freaking out?”

“It’s not pointed at me,” David said. “And I’m not scared to die.” He picked up the gun and examined it on his lap. Nice weight to it, actually, though David couldn’t believe Bennie allowed his wife to leave the house with anything less than a nine. Then it occurred to him: He probably didn’t even know she was packing. . and that was probably the point of this little exercise. David wrapped the gun in his napkin, wiped it down, and then set it back on the table with the napkin on top of it. “It would be a good idea to put the safety on, otherwise you might kill your purse.”

“I have to carry a gun because of my husband, Rabbi. Today, I’m going to pick up Jean and take her to softball practice, and I’m going to have a killing machine in my purse. Because of him. And because I think people will try to hurt me when I’m with him,” she said. “Or hurt my children. So don’t tell me this is somehow my fault. Okay?”

Half the restaurant was already eavesdropping on their conversation now, never mind all of the staff. Peopled tended to notice the word “gun,” and if the restaurant had anything approaching halfway decent lighting, they would have all been under the tables after she dumped the.380 next to the salt and pepper. “I’m a mess. Jesus. I’m a mess,” Rachel said quietly. She patted her face with powder from her compact, which made it look like she was trying to hide something. “How’s this?”

“Better,” he said.

Rachel gathered herself, even tried to smile. “I’m not asking for your permission, Rabbi, I’m asking for your guidance. So please, Rabbi, please, give me some idea of hope.”

He needed to get out of this conversation and this restaurant. “Okay,” he said. He was in an absurd situation, he recognized. Here he was, a man who’d spent his entire life killing people, sitting across from a woman with a gun, attempting to convince her that the world was a safe and good place, even in the face of what he knew was a terrible decision on her part, a terrible decision that could ruin his own life even more. “Your husband is not trying to hurt you,” David said calmly.

“How do you know that?”

“Because if he wanted to hurt you,” David said, again, calm as can be, “my understanding is that you’d already be hurt.” Rachel’s eyes widened, but David kept staring into them, hoping she’d get the subtext he was trying to impart, without revealing too much about himself in the process. “So my idea for hope is this: Live your life for yourself and your children, but do not put yourself in a position where your husband is forced to act. . irrationally.”

“Jesus Christ,” Rachel said. “He’s gotten to you, hasn’t he?”

“No one has gotten to me,” David said.

“You’re lying.”

“Mrs. Savone,” David said, “I have never been more honest than I am right now. I’m a rabbi, I’m not an idiot. I get the same newspaper as you. It’s all right there.”

Rachel stared at David for a long time, then chuckled to herself. “I should have seen it,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it.”

“Seen what?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.” Rachel looked at her watch. “I need to go,” she said, a smile wide across her face now, as if she’d discovered something particularly fantastic. “I have an appointment.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” David said.

“I was going to get Botox, if you must know,” she said. She stood up and came around to David’s side of the table, kneeled down next to him so he could really see her face. “Do you see these lines around my mouth?”

“No,” he said.

“You are a liar.” She touched him lightly on the face, just under his left ear, where his beard still didn’t grow correctly. “You almost can’t see your scars anymore.” She let her hand linger on his cheek for just a moment, then smiled again, this time in a way that seemed terribly unhappy. “Dr. Kirsch did my face, too,” she said.

That afternoon, David sat on a chaise lounge out by his pool, smoked a cigar, and tried to figure out the best way to escape. It had warmed up into the low seventies, the sky was a deep blue, and in the distance he could hear the sound of children laughing.

David got up from the chaise lounge and walked the perimeter, tried to gather his thoughts into a straight line, see if he might be able to make some decisions. If Fat Monte was really dead — and David didn’t doubt the veracity of the information Bennie had given him, only that sometimes people in the Family who were presumed dead ended up alive — that was one less impediment to his returning home, or at least one less person who might hurt Jennifer and William. Not that Ronnie wouldn’t be happy to farm that out to the Gangster 2–6, or just some tweaks willing to kill a family for a grand a head, maybe less.

No, if he wanted to get back to Chicago and be assured of his family’s safety, he’d need to have Ronnie put out to pasture. Because the more he thought about it, the more David began to suspect that none of this was an accident, that there’d been a plan in place to get Sal in trouble, that preyed on his desire for a better life, a dangling carrot that moved him out of the shadows (where he frankly enjoyed working) and into what amounted to a business meeting with the FBI. Sal Cupertine should have died that day. Four against one. But once he was out on the streets, Ronnie must have moved on to plan B.

Jewish custom said to meet all sorrow standing up, and that’s what David was trying to do. Ronnie clearly wanted him gone, which meant there was something he didn’t want him to learn, something that would eventually matter enough to David that he’d kill his own cousin.

Problem was that Ronnie was nearly impossible to get to. He was never alone, even out in public, kids on the street running up to get their pictures taken with the used-car salesman/gangster from the TV. And no one local would be dumb enough to take the contract, not even one of the scads of crooked Chicago cops, half of whom were on Ronnie’s book, anyway.

David was getting way ahead of himself, indulging in the same fantasy he’d been having for months now. He needed to handle Las Vegas first, then worry about Chicago. Except for one thing: He needed to get some money to Jennifer, let her know somehow he was still alive without tipping off the feds. Ah, the feds. Jeff Hopper, another dead man that was suddenly alive. Another person he needed to handle.

A brown Southwest plane flew overhead, and David traced its path as it descended down toward McCarran Airport. Every forty-five minutes, the same brown plane would pass overhead, either coming or going, David wondering if anyone ever bothered to look at what was really underneath them: a fetid sunburnt bowl of dust in the middle of nothing. Just another Pleasure Island, filled with liars and thieves.

Money. That was the first order of business. He had to figure out a way for Jennifer to get a good sum, in case Ronnie cut her off, because now that Monte was dead, he’d be tightening the noose in order to keep her quiet.

Problem was, he didn’t quite know how to get her money in a way that wouldn’t be tracked. This would take some finessing.

What David also knew for certain was that Dr. Kirsch needed to disappear, though David couldn’t very well make it look like an accident, not with Rachel aware of. . something. And what did she know? That he’d had plastic surgery? What did that prove? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Except Rachel Savone knew her husband was in the Mafia. And now she thought she knew something about him, something that wasn’t possible to prove, because there was no David Cohen. He didn’t exist. Yeah, he had all the right papers, but how far would those papers take him? If Bennie wouldn’t let him go inside a casino for fear of the facial recognition cameras, he sure wasn’t about to go into the airport or even out of Las Vegas.

David needed to have a conversation with Rabbi Kales. A candid, open conversation where David made it clear that he had no problem killing him unless Rabbi Kales let him know what Bennie had on him. And then, if need be, he’d handle Rachel, too. He wasn’t about to let Bennie know about her plans, however, because then it would be an order to make her disappear. No, first, he’d make sure the funeral home was willed properly, see that it was left to the temple, not to Rachel, and if that meant he did it with a gun to Rabbi Kales’s head, then so be it.

But how long would it take for the feds to start sniffing up the freeway from the strip club and into Bennie’s personal life? How long before they saw how much money he’d donated to the temple? How long before there was a subpoena to look at the temple’s books? David figured that Bennie was smart enough to avoid that sort of impropriety — he was sure of it — but that didn’t mean the feds wouldn’t want to eventually sit down and talk to him just to make Bennie sweat.

David went inside the house and came back out a few minutes later with a yellow legal pad, a ballpoint pen, a glass of Macallan 30 year, and his copy of the Torah. He made a list of all the people he needed to deal with locally — including, eventually, the bouncers who’d beaten the tourist in the first place, since they were out on bail pending trial, and who knew what they might say — then ripped off the page and made a list of all the people in Chicago he needed to deal with, with Jeff Hopper’s name on the top. He tore that page off the pad and folded both it and the Las Vegas list together and shoved them in the Torah, so he’d have easy access to them, a reminder as to why he was doing all this in the first place.

He then made a short list of all the materials he’d need: guns, some decent knives in case he decided to go that route, steel-toe boots, gloves, bleach, some S.O.S pads, hollow-point bullets, a length of rope. . It had been a long time since he’d put together a decent murder kit, so he had to remind himself of all the important instruments he liked to keep nearby.

Which reminded David of one other important detail. He went back inside and came back with the bottle of Macallan, the Yellow Pages, and the telephone. He poured himself another drink and flipped through the phone book, finally landing on the listing for building supply outfits. The first one listed was A & A Construction Supply, which David thought was cheating, since he was sure there was no one there actually named A or A, so he scanned down the page until he landed on Kerby’s Machine Tools Direct & Rental. The store was located out on the other side of Craig Road, about ten miles away. There wasn’t much development out that way yet — a casino, of course, and an overpriced movie theatre, but no decent houses, which was perfect, since no decent houses meant the Jews weren’t thick on the ground. Last thing David wanted was to run into one of the Israelites while he was busy doing his other job. He’d practically screwed the pooch with Rachel today, and that was when he was at least quasi-prepared.

Kerby’s answered on the first ring.

“Yes,” David said, “I’d like to rent a portable foundry.”