Gangsterland

CHAPTER THREE

For the first week, Rabbi David Cohen still couldn’t open his mouth more than half an inch, just enough room to shove in a fork and do some good chewing. Soft foods mostly. Potato salad, pasta. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, as he brushed his teeth with the fancy electric toothbrush he’d picked up after Gray Beard had finished his wire excavation, David realized his mouth had regained nearly full mobility.

His jaw still hurt at the joints, which made long conversations somewhat painful, not that he and Slim Joe were having long and involved chats. David had learned that Slim Joe’s main job was working the door at the Wild Horse, a job he’d gone back to after David was allowed out the front door, and that he was nominally in charge of shaking down the pimps who brought their girls in to work the club. It was a small percentage of the two hundred or so girls who worked on a weekend night, enough to keep him in Nike tracksuits and gold chains. His other job, David had gleaned, was to provide a bit of de facto security for David. The closed-circuit TVs were in Slim Joe’s closet, along with an armory to put up a good long siege if that came to pass.

David had also learned that Slim Joe had two big ambitions: He wanted to open up a cart on the Strip serving all kinds of different hot dogs, as well as slices of homemade pies that he envisioned his mother would be in charge of fixing. It would be open from midnight to 5 a.m. when all the drunks and tweaks were fiending and when the dancers got off shift. “I’d do it real classy,” Slim Joe told him. “None of that taco truck shit where you don’t know what kind of cheese you’re getting. I’d be cutting fresh cheeses, too, deli-style. It’ll be off the hook.”

“You need a permit for that,” David said. “You really want the state looking into you?”

“On the real?”

“What’s your other idea?”

“Bennie had me take some classes over at CCSN,” Slim Joe said. “Computers and shit. I had this idea of making a website where people would just, like, put up their thoughts every day. Like two sentences about what was on their mind. Call it Expressions, but with a z.”

“Why don’t you just call it Snitches?”

“Don’t be a bitch,” Slim Joe said, like they were friends.

David told Slim Joe that if he ever called him a bitch again, he and his mother would be selling hot dogs and pies in the middle of the desert from the trunk of a burnt-out Cadillac. It was the first time he’d threatened Slim Joe, the first time in six months he’d threatened anyone, and it made him feel great.

Like he was back in the game.

But all the books he’d been reading were having some kind of residual effect on David, because his elation was short-circuited by the honest look of hurt on Slim Joe’s face. And then he thought about something he read in the Talmud: Hold no man responsible for what he says in his grief. Because the truth was, he didn’t give a shit if Slim Joe called him a bitch or anything else. Those were just words, and it’s not as if Slim Joe even knew what he was saying; the kid was practically illiterate. David was just mad about. . everything. The whole nut of his life had been cracked open.

“Look,” David told him, “there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone else’s dreams, right? But these are good ideas. You should save some money and do it.”

“Really?” Slim Joe perked right back up, like a dog that’s chased a ball into the street, only to get hit, but still wants to get that fucking ball. “I ain’t told no one about this shit because I don’t want no one biting my game. So you think, on the real, that it could work?”

“On the real,” David said, and then he went back upstairs for the rest of the night. He just couldn’t listen to anything more about anything.

David spit out his toothpaste, wiped off his face, and went into his closet to pick out a suit. He was supposed to meet Bennie in thirty minutes at something called the Bagel Café. “Bring all of your fancy Jew books with you,” Bennie told him. “You’re gonna meet someone important.”

David had no idea who that might be, though the idea of bringing all his books with him set up a bit of a practical dilemma. The nice thing about Christians is that they had just one book, the Bible, and inside of it were all the secrets of life. The Jews, however, had the Bible, and the Torah, which was really just the five books of Moses from the Bible, and the Talmud, which ran six thousand pages, or what David thought of as his sleeping pill.

And then there was the Midrash, which was like someone went through the Bible, Torah, and Talmud and filled in the empty parts, or explained what everything meant, or what they thought everything meant, since some of it was pretty clear to David and, yet, there was an explanation that was completely contrary to his understanding. Finally, there were the stacks and stacks of books on “Jewish thought” that had been dumped off at the house over the weeks, which were like reading a combination of someone’s diary filled with their thoughts on all of the other books combined.

All this for a fucking cover? David thought it would have been a lot easier to say he was a butcher.

David picked out a gray Hugo Boss suit and put it on with a white shirt and a blue tie and those five-hundred-dollar black Cole Haan dress shoes, found a handkerchief and put it in his breast pocket, and then called downstairs to Slim Joe to help him with his books.

“You look like a pimp, dog,” Slim Joe said when he saw David, and then, quickly, he added, “that’s a good thing, yo. Just on the real.”

All this time, Slim Joe had treated him like nothing. Didn’t fear him. Didn’t respect him. Didn’t disrespect him, either, but generally regarded him as nothing but a warm body he was tasked to bring food to and help change bandages for early on in the process. But since David threatened him twelve hours earlier, the kid was now acting deferential, maybe even a bit scared, which struck David as funny since he looked less menacing than he ever had. His words, though, still carried weight. He liked that.

“You think so?” David said. “I don’t look like a pussy?”

“Never, dog,” he said. He examined all the books stacked up on David’s dresser. “You need to take all these?”

“That’s what Bennie said.”

“Sometimes, I think he just says things to say things, you feel me?”

“He’s the boss,” David said.

“Is he your boss?”

Slim Joe had never asked him a single organizational question; it was as if he’d been strictly informed to steer clear of any such talk, which seemed like a reasonable possibility, which made his sudden boldness questionable.

“Just put the books in the car,” David said.

Back home, David drove a 1993 Lincoln Town Car his cousin Ronnie got for him. When he had to do a job for the Family, someone would show up with a car for him to use, something that could be torched or cleaned and resold. When he had a freelance job, he’d take the bus over to O’Hare or Midway and steal a car from long-term parking. Weird thing was that he always had his license with him, even on the jobs he did freelance, on the odd chance he was pulled over for speeding or running a stop sign — not that he’d gotten a ticket since he was a teenager. Having a valid identification was a good way to avoid ancillary problems.

He had a temporary Nevada license in his wallet — Bennie brought it by over the weekend, along with another test, this time about what happens to Jews after they’re resurrected, which was some of the most absurd shit Dave had ever read, as it involved Jews rolling from their graves all the way to Israel, which made no sense whatsoever — and had been told over and over again that his paperwork was legit and not to worry, which was easy enough for Bennie to say. He wasn’t the guy driving around in a gold Range Rover with tinted windows, which made David feel as inconspicuous as the Sears Tower and just as big. So David drove from his house in Summerlin to the Bagel Café, located five miles away on the busy intersection of Westcliff and Buffalo, at about ten miles below the speed limit, which brought him to the restaurant fifteen minutes late.

When David walked in, he noticed first all the old people. There was a bakery section at the front of the house, and the seniors were lined up five deep by the pastry windows, the din of their hearing-aid-loud conversation bouncing off the walls of the place, the cacophony reminding David of a bingo parlor the Family ran back in the day on the South Side. On the other side of the bakery was the seating area — a U of booths around the perimeter, which looked out to the street and the parking lot, and then a dozen or so tables in the middle. David had always been freaked out by old people, never able to imagine himself living past fifty or so, not even after Jennifer had William and his life began to feel. . different. More valuable. It just didn’t seem feasible. His father was dead by forty. Never knew his grandparents. His mother remarried and moved to Arizona as soon as he graduated high school, and he’d lost complete contact with her, though he guessed she was probably still alive. His dream of retiring to California as a top dog was just a dream, something to put in the back of his head when he was doing contract killing in Champaign. As it turned out, Sal Cupertine was dead. David thought he might start keeping a list of all life’s cruel ironies, just to be sure he wasn’t imagining half of the shit that was happening.

He spotted Bennie sitting alone in a booth at the near corner of the restaurant, a bunch of papers spread out in front of him, three waters on the table. He had a pair of reading glasses in one hand, something David had never seen before.

“You’re late,” Bennie said when David slid in across from him.

“It took Slim Joe a while to get all the books downstairs,” David said.

“How’s that working out?”

“He’s fine,” David said, though the truth was he really wanted him out of the house, David not having any time to himself since the day of the shooting.

“He’s an idiot,” Bennie said.

“He’s all right,” David said, not really sure why he was defending Slim Joe.

Bennie put on his glasses and examined David’s face. “Any pain?”

“Nothing I can’t manage.”

“Swelling?”

“Around my chin some,” David said. “Probably couldn’t take an upper cut, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Jaw looks good,” Bennie said. “The beard is coming in nicely.”

“I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror.”

“That was the point,” Bennie said. He gathered up some of the paper in front of him — they looked to David like blueprints and spreadsheets, actual business work — and slid them into a manila envelope. “Anyway,” he said. “You ready to start earning?”

“Yeah,” David said, not sure what he was agreeing to. Anything was better than sitting around reading and watching the local news. Maybe Bennie would send him out to hit the weatherman on Channel 3 who needed a dog to sit next to him every day while he told Las Vegas it would be eighty-eight degrees for the fiftieth straight day, as if the stress of blue skies, dry air, and a city full of strippers was too much to handle by himself. “I need to get out of the house.”

A waitress walked up to the table then and smiled warmly at Bennie. “Hi, Mr. Savone,” she said. She was maybe eighteen, no more than twenty, tall, brown hair, had a hole in her nostril where David presumed she usually kept a ring, a little butterfly tattoo on her ankle just above her no-show socks and white Keds. The servers — male or female — all wore the same outfit: tan shorts, red polo shirt, white shoes. It looked to David that this waitress had hemmed her shorts a little higher than most of the other ladies. Not that he had a problem with that.

“How are you, Tricia?”

“Super,” she said. “How’s your wife? I haven’t seen her at temple in forever.”

“She’s been sick lately,” Bennie said.

“I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Lady problems,” Bennie said. David marveled at how Bennie showed absolutely no embarrassment at all. “What’s it called? Endometriosis? When it gets bad, she just can hardly get up. But what can you do, right?”

“Oh, no,” Tricia said. “Well, when she’s feeling better, if you guys need someone to watch the kids for a date night or whatever, I’m happy to come over to help anytime.”

“I appreciate that,” Bennie said, and it sounded to David like the truth.

“Are you waiting on Rabbi Kales?”

“He just went to the restroom, so maybe just get him his usual,” Bennie said. “And I’ll have bacon and eggs, scrambled wet. Bring me a plate of sausage, too.”

“And what about for you?” Tricia gave David that same warm smile, which immediately made him feel uncomfortable. When was the last time he’d even seen a woman, much less spoken to one?

“Rabbi,” Bennie said, “you want some bacon and eggs, too?” Bennie not just fucking with him now, but also letting him know that he needed to act like a Rabbi in this place.

“I guess I’ll have an onion bagel and coffee,” David said. A plate of fucking sausage would work, too, the mere thought of it making his mouth turn on for the first time in months. No, no, not sausage. A plank of honey ham and a couple eggs fried in the ham fat and some corned beef hash. Glass of buttermilk to wash it down. Why were they meeting at a deli when Bennie knew Rabbi David Cohen couldn’t eat anything he might want?

Tricia took down his order but didn’t scurry on, which David really wanted her to do. The combination of his ham fantasy and her legs, which had to be ten feet long, was distracting. “So, I have to ask,” Tricia said, “are you going to be the new youth rabbi we’ve been hearing about?”

“He is,” Bennie said before David could answer. “He’ll be taking over in a couple of weeks.”

David couldn’t help but think of something he’d read a few mornings ago about the nature of good and evil, which basically said that no man was born entirely one or the other, that the moral freedom to be a complete asshole is inherent in all men. If you were largely a decent human, that was called yetzer tov. If you were not, that was called yetzer hara. Bennie Savone, the fat fuck, with his order of sausage and bacon, with his complete inability to inform David of things like the fact that he was about to become some kind of youth rabbi, clearly had made his choice. This was a personal choice to surprise him, put him off-center, show him that he had no control over anything. The Jews, they were always going on about personal liberty and truth — what did they call truth? The seal of God, not that David believed in God, but the sentiment was concise enough.

“That is so cool,” Tricia said. “We all totally miss Rabbi Gottlieb.”

“I’ve heard only good things about him,” David said, thinking, I can’t just sit here like an idiot and let Bennie push me into corners, though, at the same time he realized he had no choice, his own response a calculated answer to make this pretty young girl appeased. What was happening to him?

“He was so young, so it’s totally sad,” she said, and David realized Rabbi Gottlieb hadn’t just moved to Reno. “The way he spoke Torah. .” She couldn’t continue, as the power of whatever she was talking about was just too palpable.

Bennie patted Tricia lightly on the small of her back. “A tragedy,” he said. “And Tricia, be a doll, and make sure my bacon is soft. I can’t eat that crispy stuff.” Bennie watched her walk off before he said, “Her father used to own half of North Las Vegas. Jordan Rosen. You’ll meet him at temple.”

Great. “What happened?”

“He started coming down to the Wild Horse,” Bennie said. “Fell in love with a girl we used to have. Said she was Iranian when shit was bad with the Iranians, said she was Iraqi when shit was bad with them, but truth was she was just brown. Real name was Karen but on stage she went by Sholeh, which she said meant ‘flame’ or ‘fire’ or ‘hot pussy.’ She had the game she played. You get these idiots in from Kansas who want to get some towel head to push her tits in their face while they say trash to her, that’s a good time. Tricia’s dad, he just wanted some strange, you know? He couldn’t stand having these tourists abusing her, so he’d buy her all night long, drop five, ten thousand a night on her. That adds up.” Bennie paused and took a sip of his coffee, put his glasses back on. “The pictures we sent him did the rest.”

“You had to do that?” David said, testing him now, still thinking about what he’d read, pondering exactly how he was going to address this whole situation, seeing if Bennie ever made the right choice.

“He started putting dances on his credit card, and he kept getting declined,” Bennie said. “First time, whatever, we let it slide. He’s a good customer, so I tell the manager to pay the girl for her time and that we’ll double up next time. Next time comes, same shit, so now I’m out twenty K. I gave him a few days to make good, you know, gentleman to gentleman, and he didn’t come up, says not to worry, he’s good, owns half the city, just having some liquidity issues, and so I’m reasonable, right? You’d say I’m reasonable?”

“Yeah,” David said, thinking: Reasonably mad.

“Two months he pulled this shit,” Bennie said. “He lives three houses from me, his wife and kids practically cousins to my wife and kids, so what can I do?” Before David could answer — and his answer would have been Beat it out of the fucker, because a debt is a debt and somehow, if you owe, you gotta pay—Bennie pointed at a tall, well-dressed older gentleman walking through the restaurant. “That’s Rabbi Kales,” he said. Rabbi Kales stopped and had a few words with the people at almost every table, his hand always on someone’s shoulder. “Watch how he works the room. That’s your lesson for the day.”

Rabbi Kales didn’t really look like a rabbi, at least not what David thought a rabbi looked like, which is to say he thought he was going to be wearing that black getup, have the long beard, the hat, all that Hasidic garb. Instead, Rabbi Kales looked like a bank president — blue suit, not too flashy, but clearly expensive, nice shoes, though not as nice as the ones David had on, tie with a big Windsor knot, and what looked to David like a pretty decent watch. (David had a Rolex once, though he hadn’t earned it. He just took it off of a body. It eventually started to creep him out, so he traded it to a Russian for a nice GSh-18 self-loading pistol when the Family had him proctor an arms deal a few years back.) Rabbi Kales wasn’t even wearing a yarmulke, which came as a great relief to David, since he realized he’d be able to do likewise.

When Rabbi Kales finally finished his tour of the restaurant, he sat down beside his son-in-law in the booth and gave him a handful of checks. “Take these to the bank for me, Benjamin,” he said.

Benjamin? For some reason, David had never thought of Bennie as having any other name. The mere thought of this gave David his first reason to smile in a very long time.

Bennie went through the checks, one by one, nodding each time. “Not a bad pull,” he said. “Maybe we should come back at dinner.”

Rabbi Kales didn’t reply. He was too busy eyeballing David, that jovial table-to-table demeanor David witnessed now long gone. “So,” Rabbi Kales said finally, “you’re him.”

“I guess so,” David said.

“Did you bring your books?”

“They’re in the car,” David said. “You want I should get them?”

Rabbi Kales gave a short laugh, not much more than a snort. “In your entire life,” he said, “have you ever heard anyone, other than the people you worked with previously, use a phrase like You want I should get them?”

David felt his face getting very hot. “I don’t—” he began, but Rabbi Kales cut him off with a wave of his hand.

“You’re smart,” Rabbi Kales said. “Speak like it.”

David didn’t know if he was smart. He liked to think he wasn’t dumb, even sort of liked learning new things, provided it didn’t come at the expense of doing something he really wanted to do. He didn’t believe in street smarts, since that meant you were a failure in some other part of your life but somehow were cagey enough to make shit work out among the uneducated trolls who lived under the bridge. But David was aware that he didn’t sound smart. “I only know how to talk one way,” David said.

“We’ll fix that,” he said. Not rude. Not condescending. Just factual. David admired that. It was a different kind of toughness. “Rabbi Gottlieb, you should know, was a very popular man. You have your work ahead of you.”

“Where did he go?” David asked.

“Right off the side of a boat,” Bennie said.

“He was a fine boy,” Rabbi Kales said quietly. “And an excellent rabbi. He didn’t deserve his fate.”

“Yeah, well, who does?” Bennie said.

“He was a religious man, Benjamin,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Then he should be happy,” Bennie said. “He’s in a better place.”

“You know nothing of our religion,” Rabbi Kales said. He spit the words out with such venom that David actually backed away from the table and banged his knee on the underside of it with a force that knocked water out of the glasses, all of which seemed to get Rabbi Kales to settle down a bit. “For my granddaughters, at least,” he continued, “you might want to know what happens to them when they die. It’s the sort of question children tend to ask.”

Yeah, David thought, yetzer hara for sure.

Thankfully, Tricia reappeared then with everyone’s orders: plates of pork and eggs for Bennie, lox and onions for Rabbi Kales, David’s lone bagel. David had never been happier to see a waitress in his life. Everything he’d witnessed thus far had him completely confused: There was, apparently, some belief by Bennie and his father-in-law, Rabbi Kales, that he’d be working as a rabbi. Not pretending to be a rabbi as a cover story while he chilled out for a few months, years, whatever.

There was no good reason either Bennie or Rabbi Kales should think he was qualified for any kind of work with kids, or any kind of work that didn’t involve killing people. It was his unique, cultivated skill set.

What David really couldn’t figure out was Rabbi Kales. What could Bennie possibly have on him? Bennie was married to his daughter, they had kids, and apparently Bennie was somehow involved enough in the day-to-day operations of the temple that Rabbi Kales wasn’t in the least bit worried about being seen giving him money in the middle of a restaurant.

“Listen,” David said. He leaned across the table and spoke as quietly as he could while still being heard. “I’ve been a good soldier here. You guys wanted to change my face? Fine. Change my face. You want me to read five hundred books on Judaism? Fine, I’ll read the books. You want me to take tests? Write essays? No problem. Give me a number 2 pencil. You want to coop me up in solitary confinement in that house with that half-wit Slim Joe for six months, I grin and make it through. Now, either someone tells me what the plan is, or I bounce. And when I bounce, people get hurt. That’s all I’m saying.”

No one said anything for a moment, so David sat back, took a bite of his bagel, and chewed it angrily, or what he presumed Rabbi Kales and Bennie would see as anger, though really he chewed it with relief for finally speaking his mind (plus he could finally chew with actual purpose, which was a nice surprise). Whether or not he’d made the wrong play was a slight concern.

Both Bennie and Rabbi Kales seemed surprised, neither of them used to getting told what was what, but if there was one thing he’d learned in his life, it was that as soon as you let someone else dictate the terms of your survival, you are a dead man. That’s why even though he’d been part of the Family all these years, he still worked freelance and didn’t concern himself with whether or not someone got pissed about not getting a pinch of his take. If they wanted a bite, they could try to come and take it.

“Tell me something, David,” Rabbi Kales said, his voice perfectly calm, his whole demeanor at ease. “Do you understand what you’ve read, or do you just memorize?”

“I get what I get,” David said. “Some things, they just seem like weird stories that someone came up with after a meth run.”

Rabbi Kales took a bite of his breakfast — lox and onions, neither of which appealed to David, at least not in their raw form, seemed to be popular in the place, David noticing half the octogenarians had big slabs of the pink fish on their plates — and chewed for a few moments, his eyes still on David, everything about him placid. “Give me an example,” Rabbi Kales said.

This was all getting too strange. David had essentially threatened to kill both of the men sitting across from him, but neither seemed to take any offense. Back home, someone would already be dead. Nothing was the same in Las Vegas, not even the deli they were sitting in, which was like someone had cut and pasted a Chicago deli into the middle of the desert. Even David: sitting in a booth in a thousand-dollar suit making threats he didn’t even know how to make good on anymore. And now he was getting quizzed on sacred religious texts, as if he were a normal person, not someone who’d put, what, fifty people into the ground? Maybe more like seventy-five. Shit, maybe one hundred. He’d never kept count, had never tried, really, but he could see each of them. Remember all the details. Because that’s what he did. He kept that on file in his head, ready to be accessed at any time. It was his risk-management plan, knowing that the softest part of the windpipe is actually down by the clavicle, and that if you want to be humane, you press on the carotid artery for about thirty seconds and the guy will pass out first, and then you can break his windpipe without much struggle. But what was he gonna do now? Reach across the table and stab a rabbi in the throat with a butter knife? Suffocate him with his bagel and schmeer? And then kill a couple dozen senior citizens on his way out the door?

“Well,” David said after some more thought, “that Ezekiel is a piece of work. The Orthodox drop his vision of the Valley of Dry Bones into half their writings. I mean, that guy was a complete whack job of the first order, and yet every other book I’ve got in the car talks about him like he’s this creature of the divine. My opinion? He’s got dementia or schizophrenia. Not a level guy in the least.”

Rabbi Kales tried to stifle a smile, but it didn’t work. “Well,” he said, “you’re lucky that Temple Beth Israel is Reform. You won’t have to deal with much of that sort of thing.” He took another bite of his lox and onions, took a sip of tea, wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin, which somehow made him look elegant, and then sighed. “You see these people in here, David?”

“Yeah, I see them,” David said.

“Do you know why they are all here?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “The bagels aren’t bad.”

“They’re here because it’s their community,” he said. “This is not the best food in the city. It’s not even the best bagel, you should know. But this deli stands for who they are, their traditions. This food I’m eating? It’s a connection to my father. In 1919, as a little boy, he was smuggled out of Russia, Ukraine, to be accurate, across the Black Sea to Romania inside a bag of potatoes, with his own baby brother in the bag beside him, dying. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”

“I’ve got some idea,” David said.

“You have no idea,” Rabbi Kales said, “because you’ve never been pursued for being born, for what exists spiritually and metaphorically in you. But all of these people here? They have the same ancestral stories, or, many of them have worse stories. The books you have? They have the same books. The food you’re eating? They have the same food. Ezekiel may seem to you to be insane, and maybe he was. But for everyone here, whether they know it or not, he is a witness to both the beginning and the end, and that is at least worthy of some respect. Sitting here, just to have a simple meal, is a connection to a collective history, much of it born out of misery that had nothing to do with any of them directly. You, you’ve had to accept the consequences of your horrible choices.”

“If you’ll pardon me,” David said, though he made sure he kept his voice down, “what about your horrible choices, Rabbi?” David knew enough about Jewish history through his reading to know that what Rabbi Kales said was absolutely true, but that didn’t mean he wanted the lecture, nor the sanctimony. “You’re sitting here, too, and you’re sitting with me and with Bennie, not your, uh, what is that word? Mish something or other.”

“Mishpocha,” Bennie said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“Right,” David said. . and he suddenly felt undercut by Bennie, who, as it turned out, actually was Rabbi Kales’s mishpocha, at least through marriage. “That.”

“Your people shall be my people,” Rabbi Kales said. “I’m sure you’re familiar with that?”

Truth was, Jennifer had a framed print of that passage from Ruth in their bedroom, right under a photo of them on their wedding day, May 5, 1988. The memory of this suddenly paralyzed David, the realization — one he’d had several times — being that he was beginning to forget details of her face already. Not how she looked, but specific lines and moles and dashes of pigment, and how they both looked in that picture. He couldn’t conjure his own face anymore, either. And then a new level of sadness ran through him: He’d missed their ten-year anniversary. Rabbi Kales was right, that was the problem: This was all a consequence of his own profound mistake.

“You feeling okay?” Bennie said.

“I, uh,” David began, but he couldn’t say anything. All the tables surrounding them were filled not just with old people. . not just old Jews. . but old men and women, together. Staring at each other across their meals, kibitzing about their lives, their pasts, just the minutia of everyday existence. Couples. Old married people.

David needed to get out of this deli.

“My jaw,” David said. He kept his eyes focused on his lap, didn’t dare look up at Bennie, since he was pretty sure he had tears in his eyes. Christ. Had it come to this so quickly? Six months and a few weeks and a couple thousand pages of Judaica, and he was suddenly a big fucking puss. The Jews, the thing was, they didn’t get down with this woe-is-me shit. They took vengeance, you fucked with the wrong person, you woke up with Mossad standing over your bed. “It’s, uh, I need a Percocet. It’s tightening up. Shooting pain into my eyes.”

“Fine,” Bennie said, all business. “Why don’t you take Rabbi Kales back with you to get your baby aspirin, and then we can meet back at the temple in, say, thirty? Give you both some more time to argue about what the food means.”

Rabbi Kales hadn’t taken his eyes off David the whole time, or at least that’s what David felt. Rabbi Kales exuded a sort of kindness that David had never experienced. The man was a hard motherfucker, that was clear enough; weird thing was that he also seemed like he had a real vested interest in other people’s wellness, something David was not particularly familiar with.

“That would be fine,” Rabbi Kales said. When David finally got his shit together enough to look up, he saw that Rabbi Kales was still staring directly at him. He looked profoundly sad.