Gangsterland

CHAPTER FOUR

“You ask good questions,” Rabbi Kales said. They were weaving through the streets of Summerlin, David still keeping his speed low, though with Rabbi Kales periodically waving at people in the cars beside them, David didn’t know why he even bothered. “Inconspicuous” was apparently not a word in Rabbki Kales’s vocabulary. He had a volume of the Talmud on his lap and was flipping through it, not reading, just looking at the pages and at the notes David had left in the margins. He closed the book, but kept his hand on it, his thumb running back and forth over the gold-leafed pages.

“When you know a test is coming,” David said, “it’s easier to figure out what you don’t understand.”

“Is that your philosophy?”

“No,” David said, though, now that he thought about it, it was probably better than “everybody dies,” which had managed to get him through the previous thirty-five years. “Just something I’ve noticed.”

“Yes, well,” Rabbi Kales said, “it is the basis of much of what you’ve been reading. Trying to figure out the unknowable. Place order onto chaos. All anyone wants to know is how they’ll find happiness, what it will feel like to die, and what happens next.”

“And do you know that?”

“Of course not,” Rabbi Kales said. “Nobody does. Not definitively.”

“I thought all the Jews rolled to Israel,” David said. “And the Mount of Olives opens up. Isn’t that what Ezekiel said?”

“That’s when the Moshiach returns,” Rabbi Kales said. “It’s one of the thirteen principles of our faith. But no one knows. How can they? Even the prophets, they just speak prophecy.” Rabbi Kales made a tsking sound. “Everyone so concerned about what’s next. No one cares what they’re doing now. There’s no present anymore.”

“So it’s a racket,” David said. You want to run a racket, you’ve gotta give people the hope that there is a tangible result in the end — money, sex, a free futon, TV, trip to Tahoe, whatever. God, it seemed, was the biggest racket of all. You sell people the afterlife, you sell them resurrection from the pine boxes they’re buried in down in Palm Springs, you’re not gonna be around when they find out if you were right or not. In David’s books, the Orthodox Jews were always talking about how everyday items could be cloaked in radiance, how a wet towel in the bathroom suddenly bore messages.

“Yes,” Rabbi Kales said, “I suppose you could look at it that way.” David stole a look in his direction, saw that the Rabbi was staring out the window, but still with his hand on the Talmud, his thumb moving over the edges of the pages.

“Tell me something,” David said. “What does Bennie have on you?”

“He loves my daughter,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Bullshit,” David said.

“I believe that’s honestly true,” Rabbi Kales said.

“No,” David said, “I meant bullshit on that being all he has on you. Guy like you doesn’t just fall into a racket. Don’t try to play me like that. At least show me that respect.”

Rabbi Kales tapped on his window. “You see all this land out here? All these houses? When I was your age, this was actual desert. Just thirty, thirty-five years ago. No buildings. No people, maybe a few living off the grid, as they say now, but then, just living. I could come out here and walk and think and imagine what my life might be like without worrying about getting run over by someone driving the equivalent of an aircraft carrier. Coyotes, rabbits, desert squirrels, field mice, all of them gone now. For what? Who is going to live in all of these houses? Has anyone given any thought to this?” Rabbi Kales paused, then tapped his window again. “You see those mountains?”

“The Red Rocks?” David said.

“Yes,” Rabbi Kales said. “When I first arrived from New York — this was 1965—you could actually see their real color. What you see now, that’s a product of the air quality we now have, all that carbon monoxide, because all of these houses and buildings and casinos have changed the way the shadows fall, changed the way light works. Just in the last ten years, it’s all changed. Everything has become diffuse right before my eyes.”

“Could just be your eyes,” David said, finding that parlance again, the way he used to talk to the old-timers in the Family, give them a little hell as a backward way of showing respect. David was learning that dealing with retired Family members and religious figures wasn’t all that different: They both wanted you to solve your own problems and be a man and listen to the stories of how things used to be, the past always a pristine vision of a golden age, the present always a bag of shit, the future a vast, unknowable wasteland. Sometimes being a man meant showing that you were bold enough to tease a little, confident that your intention was clear — that you were a person who knew the score, whatever that score might be.

“Could be that, I suppose,” Rabbi Kales said. He pondered that for a minute, though the thing of it was, David already had similar thoughts about the mountains, too. Here, everything was the color of old, rusted blood; the mountains jagged and ripped, at night they sat against the sky like pieces of broken glass. “My son-in-law,” Rabbi Kales continued, “offered me an opportunity to fill that desert with my faith, to see my dream come true, to provide education and culture to my people. He offered me an opportunity to create a place of understanding and faith. With opportunity comes sacrifice.” He shrugged, like this was nothing, starting up a temple funded, apparently, by the Mafia. “We have big plans for Temple Beth Israel.”

“Bullshit,” David said again.

“I have made mistakes in my life,” Rabbi Kales said. It came out with such finality that David didn’t feel he could question what those mistakes were, though he sensed that if Bennie were his chief benefactor, it must have been bad. “My son-in-law offered me a chance to start with a fresh ledger. So maybe we aren’t that different.”

“You don’t know what I’ve left behind,” David said, “so don’t try to tell me we’re the same.”

“Why don’t you tell me something,” the Rabbi said. “Who are you?”

David hesitated. He wasn’t supposed to speak that name. His own name. “I can’t say,” he said.

“I’m your rabbi,” Rabbi Kales said. “We have the privilege of confidentiality. Nothing you tell me can be repeated, legally.”

“Really? Even if we’re not in the temple?”

“Where I am is the temple,” Rabbi Kales said. “That’s the law.” And there it was, again, that sense of radiance. Bennie, man, that guy was onto something. If Rabbi Kales was a rabbi, and if David Cohen was a rabbi, there was an awful lot of wiggle room in that. Here was a hustle that David was finally beginning to see. “So why don’t you at least tell me what you’ve done to end up here?”

“Killed some people,” he said, nonchalant, like back at home, talking to the boys.

“Some?”

“That’s my job. I kill people. And then I killed the wrong people, and here I am.”

“What made them wrong?”

“They were feds.”

“Oh, yes,” Rabbi Kale said. “I read about this. In Chicago?”

“You read about this?”

“Harvey B. Curran wrote about it in the R-J,” Rabbi Kales said. “I think he said you were found dead. Dismembered and burnt, as I recall.”

That sounded about right. Poor Chema or that retard Neal, maybe both of them, dead just for knowing his name, knowing where he was last seen. Jennifer, she’d know it wasn’t true. Maybe Ronnie would give her some kind of hint, nothing concrete, because nothing was ever concrete anymore; everything was about conditions and consensus, everything done to protect the brand, the Family now like a McDonald’s franchise. “What else did that cocksucker have to say?”

This brought a smile to Rabbi Kales. He was an odd man. Holy, sure, but whatever he was mixed up in with Bennie was another side of his game that didn’t add up yet; no matter what his “mistakes” were, whatever skin they were cutting, he had to have some take in it beyond the spectral. “Only that it was the sort of screw-up that would have all the families watching their backs for the next decade or so.”

“I made a mistake,” David said. “I snapped.”

“How does a professional killer snap?” Rabbi Kales asked. Again with the calmness. The man was like a glass of warm milk.

It was a good question, David had to admit. “It’s like anything else,” David said. “Bad day, I guess.” Though, of course, it was much more than that, but he needed to get Jennifer out of his head. He needed to get William out of his head. He’d been so sharp on this for the last several months, and then he meets this rabbi and all he can think about is what’s been left behind. “Fact is, Rabbi, one day, something bad was going to happen one way or the other. This mess probably saved my life. Too high profile to actually kill me for it, you know?”

Rabbi Kales processed this information for a few moments and then said, “You cost Benjamin quite a bit.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what I said,” Rabbi Kales said. “He paid a great deal of money for you.”

“He bought me?”

“There was some understanding that you had special skills,” the rabbi said. “The amount of reading you’ve done, the amount you recall, is astonishing. Do you know that?”

“I have a lot of free time,” David said.

“You’re smart,” Rabbi Kales said again. “If you actually believed anything you were reading, I have every faith you could be an excellent rabbi.”

“Why don’t you think I believe?”

“If you did,” he said, “you wouldn’t have threatened to kill me in the Bagel Café.”

David turned left from Alta onto Palmer Lane and came through the ornate front entrance to his neighborhood, the Lakes at Summerlin Greens. Normally — or at least for the last week, since he’d been given freedom to drive himself — David went back and forth through the rear gate, since there was never anyone there, no gardeners, no kids on their bikes, no old ladies in terry cloth walking their golden retrievers, still feeling like he needed to keep a low profile. Now, David decided to bring Rabbi Kales in through the front door, show him how he was living, suddenly feeling like he needed to let the rabbi know he wasn’t some kind of beast who went around threatening to kill people over breakfast. Not every day, anyway.

The front entrance had a blooming fountain surrounded by five-foot-tall white rose bushes in the middle of a half circle paved with replica Spanish brick, which was like driving over a dry creek bed. Ingenious. It was the one thing David and Slim Joe really agreed on: that if given the chance, they’d find the guy who designed the entrance and drag him over the bricks a few times, let him know that what looked nice wasn’t user-friendly.

He turned right on Trevino Way, then left on Nicklaus Street, then turned onto his own street, Snead Place.

David pulled through his own front gate and up his driveway. “I’m just going to run in, take my pill, and then I’ll be right out,” David said after he’d parked, not that he needed a pill for the pain, though he now thought about finding one of the Xanax he’d been given a few months ago. “Unless you want to come in.”

“No,” Rabbi Kales said. “It’s bad enough seeing you in Rabbi Gottlieb’s car. I step foot in his house, and I’m morally complicit in his death.”

“This is his house?”

“It was, yes,” Rabbi Kales said.

“I’m sleeping in his bed? Using his bathroom?”

“And living with the man who killed him,” Rabbi Kales said. “I don’t suppose Benjamin mentioned these details to you?”

“No, he skipped all that,” David said. Slim Joe didn’t seem like the killing type. Plus, Bennie said Rabbi Gottlieb had gone into Lake Mead. Guess he was pushed. “Truth is, I don’t need a pill. I just had to get out of that deli. That place was making me nuts. But now I come to find out I’m sleeping in a dead man’s bed. Next thing you’re gonna tell me I’m wearing his clothes.”

“He wasn’t quite as flashy as you. He dressed for the people, not himself. You’ll do the same.”

David didn’t know about that. What he did know was that he wasn’t going to spend another night in Rabbi Gottlieb’s bed. You sleep in a murdered man’s bed, that’s inviting doom. David didn’t believe in much, even Rabbi Kales could tell that, though what he did believe in was that you didn’t go around courting cosmic reparations. David didn’t even bother turning the car around — he just backed up all the way down the driveway.

“Tell me how to get to the temple,” David said.

Temple Beth Israel was only a few miles away, just on the other side of the Summerlin Parkway, on a mostly barren stretch of Hillpointe Road. . which meant it was a few blocks away from hundreds of houses and gated colonies that looked suspiciously like the very one David lived in. For a people that spent forty years lost in a desert, David found it more than a little dubious that they’d parked themselves in a place where it could happen just as easily, the replication of precisely manicured lawns, pastel and cream homes, and gold Lexuses a desert in itself.

The temple took up an entire square block and was abutted on either side by expanses of open field that, at that very moment, were being graded and watered. On one side was a sign that read FUTURE HOME OF THE NEW BARER ACADEMY: NOW ENROLLING K–12! and on the other was a sign that proclaimed it the FUTURE HOME OF THE TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL COMMUNITY PARK & LEARNING CENTER. Across the street was the Temple Beth Israel Cemetery and the Kales Mortuary & Home of Peace, which gave David his first bit of understanding regarding where the good Rabbi’s shake was coming from.

David pulled into the temple’s parking lot and saw that Bennie was already there, pacing back and forth in front of a playground filled with young children — they couldn’t have been more than five years old — while he talked on his cell phone. Though David could tell that the temple was fairly expansive just from its width on the street, he wasn’t expecting to see that the place was more like a campus of buildings in the back. There was a sign pointing to the DOROTHY COPELAND CHILDREN’S CENTER, which was a one-story building just adjacent to the playground, and another sign pointing toward the TIKVAH PRESCHOOL. Both were modern glass-and-steel buildings that looked to David more like the FBI office in Chicago than any place he ever went to school. The playground itself was like something from the model-home signs he saw all over Summerlin: a jungle gym that resembled a Navy SEAL training regiment, complete with rope jumps, tunnels, pools of percolating water, monkey bars over a padded blacktop, and a pegboard for climbing.

“All this,” David said to Rabbi Kales as they walked across the lot toward Bennie, “and you couldn’t afford a sandbox?”

“If you’re paying a thousand dollars per week for preschool,” Rabbi Kales said, “I’m afraid a sandbox isn’t sufficient.”

“A thousand dollars per week? For how many weeks?”

“It depends,” Rabbi Kales said. “Most do it for at least six months. Many do it for nine months, like a traditional school year. You can do the math.”

There must have been sixty kids on the playground. A couple million. And no blood.

“How many years?”

“Usually two,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” David said.

“When the private school opens next fall,” Rabbi Kales said, “it will be more.”

“How much more?”

“The high school students will cost thirty-five thousand dollars per year, maybe more. The younger children will be less than that, but not by much.”

“And people will pay that?”

“People will line up to pay that,” Rabbi Kales said. “And those that can’t afford it will be offered loans.”

“And what happens if they can’t pay back the loans?”

“We’ll put a lien on their property, that sort of thing,” he said. “But I suspect that won’t be a problem.”

“Everybody defaults,” David said. “Trust me on this.”

“Well, then it will be your problem to solve,” Rabbi Kales said.

Bennie then waved them over, though he was still on his phone. In the time David had been in Las Vegas, he’d gotten the sense that Bennie was a pretty busy guy. He had the Wild Horse, which he went to most nights, and then he had his other business interests, which David didn’t know too much about. David knew what Bennie had told him about his involvement in the construction game — he’d put good money on those land graders belonging to Savone Construction — and the union shit, which probably took a lot of time and energy; he just didn’t have a sense of how the Savone family soldiers went about making their nut or how Bennie collected. Slim Joe shook down pimps, which didn’t sound like a great way to make a long-term nut if he was already thinking about getting into the hot-dog-and-pie game.

Back home, even though he was just a gun and therefore not expected to be pulling jobs, he knew, for instance, that Fat Monte’s main job was the low-grade heroin distribution, the shit they gave to college kids and Canadians. So he had his whole operation, and he kept his take and kicked the rest upstairs. Or a fool they called Lemonhead, because he was always sucking on Lemonheads, he was in the offtrack betting they ran out of a couple of different restaurants. Perfectly legal, except that Lemonhead ran the side game, running the crazy bets and parlays, along with a little bit of girl business, too.

In Las Vegas, though, with so much stuff actually legal, David couldn’t see Bennie collecting much on that. When you can jack someone for their toddler’s tuition, maybe it didn’t matter.

“That was your daughter,” Bennie said to Rabbi Kales. “She wants to know what you want for Thanksgiving and whether or not we should invite over the new rabbi, since apparently it took Tricia Rosen all of five minutes to let her parents know they met.”

“Perfect,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Perfect?” David said.

“It’s important that you don’t just show up one day,” Rabbi Kales said. “But if you’re here for a few weeks, showing up periodically, people will get used to you. Won’t be a big deal when you start doing actual work.”

“You think Curran saw us?” Bennie said.

“He was sitting at his usual table,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Good,” Bennie said.

“Wait a minute,” David said. “The columnist was in the restaurant?”

“Every Monday,” Bennie said.

“Then why do you go there?” David asked. None of this lined up, David thinking that whatever amount of money Bennie paid to get him to Las Vegas would have been better spent on decent legal counsel.

“So that he sees us sitting there,” Bennie said. “I thought they said you were smart.”

“It’s not how we did shit in Chicago, is all I’m saying,” David said.

“And yet here you are,” Bennie said.

David needed to stop looking for evidence that anything in Las Vegas was like it was in Chicago. He didn’t want to be like one of those guys from New York who could see things only as a compare-contrast with New York.

“I just,” David said quietly, “I don’t want to wake up and find a bunch of U.S. Marshals on my front lawn because you want to keep up appearances.”

“The only way for you to avoid the marshals will be to keep up appearances,” Rabbi Kales said. “No one is looking for you here, David. That’s what you need to understand.”

Bennie pointed at his watch. “I’ve got an hour,” he said, and started walking toward the main temple. “Either keep up and learn something, or fly back to Chicago where everything is candy canes and pillow fights.”

Religious places freaked Rabbi David Cohen out. He knew intellectually that a church or a synagogue was just a place, just dirt and wood and cement and glass. He knew that the priests or rabbis or whatever were just men (and, occasionally, women) that had once been kids, had once watched Daffy Duck cartoons and The Brady Bunch and saw Spot, Dick, and Jane run and then, at some later point, decided they wanted to devote themselves to a book. Still, there was something about religious places that made David aware of how different his own life was, how if any of the people in the building (save, in this case, for Bennie and Rabbi Kales) knew what he was, they’d throw holy water on him and try to cast his demons out. He was a bad guy, he knew that. Was he evil? No, David didn’t believe he was. Fucked up? For sure. He watched enough of those shows on the Discovery Channel to understand that maybe his brain didn’t work like other people’s brains, though David also had to consider that people who celebrated the purported holy day of Easter by eating marshmallow baby birds were just as twisted.

So as he followed Bennie and Rabbi Kales through the temple and they told him bits of information that was probably very important, he had to do his very best to concentrate, what with all the stained-glass windows, Hebrew letters on walls, memorial candles for dead Jews, notices about Shabbat and daily services and holiday services and the upcoming Hanukkah celebration. Weird thing was, it was the first time in his life that he’d been in a place like this and actually knew what everything meant. Not that he could read Hebrew, though he had a sinking feeling that soon that would not be the case. Some things had become so familiar to him from his reading that he kept getting a strange sense of déjà vu.

“There are one hundred thousand Jews in Las Vegas,” Rabbi Kales said as they turned down a long hallway toward the temple’s administrative offices. “And six hundred Jews move here each month, which, as you can imagine, has created a need for more and better facilities. We built the cemetery and mortuary here in 1990, and we’ll have the Barer Academy built by next fall, ready for all grades. The Learning Center should open at the same time. The next phase will be the Performing Arts Annex, though that may be a few years down the line, depending upon funding.”

“How many of them die every year?” David asked. The preschool kids grossed the joint a cool two million dollars, though someone probably had to teach them something, and feed them, and that preschool looked like it cost more than a few bucks, too. But funerals? That was another kind of beast. When Carlo Lupino died a few years back — and granted he was old-school Chicago Family, so there was a whole production — David remembered hearing it ran over seventy-five thousand dollars once you factored in food, flowers, embalming, the casket, the service, all that. Even a simple service was going to run ten, fifteen, maybe twenty-five Gs. There was cash in the body business, David knew that firsthand; burying them, however, that’s where the real money was.

“What did you say?” Bennie rubbed that spot on his neck again, that spot that looked like someone had garroted him. Rabbi Kales looked pale.

“He asked how many,” Rabbi Kales said. He actually sounded rattled for the first time.

“Yeah,” David said, “that’s what I asked.”

“Depends,” Bennie said. He wasn’t rattled in the least. He seemed fairly giddy. “Good year? Usually between 750 and 900. Of course, we don’t bury all of them. Some get shipped back to Boca Raton or Seattle or Palm Springs. Some get buried across town at the old Jewish cemetery, though I don’t see that happening much in the future. Anyway, we’ve had a lot more lately.”

“Lately?” David said.

“Next year is already looking good,” Bennie said.

Rabbi Kales pushed on past Bennie and made a show of fumbling in his pockets for something. David took this to mean he didn’t want to hear whatever was coming next.

“How is this week looking?” David asked.

Bennie shrugged. “Who is to say?”

“It’s okay,” David said, getting it now, or thinking, maybe, getting part of it. “I’m a rabbi. We have the privilege of confidentiality.”

“Thanksgiving is usually a slow week,” Bennie said. “But the first of the month tends to be a busy time.”

“Here?”

“Everywhere,” Bennie said. “We’ve got a few wealthy clients who’ve found that they prefer our cemetery services to those in their own hometowns.”

“These clients,” David said. “They live in Chicago?”

“Some of them. Some of them live in New York. Some of them live in Los Angeles. We’ve got some new clients in Cleveland. Detroit just opened up a few opportunities.”

“And they’re all. . Jews?”

“They are when they get in the ground,” Bennie said.

“Who presides over these funerals?”

“Why you do, Rabbi Cohen.”

The Jews, they were pretty specific about their funerals. No embalming. No open caskets. No waiting around, either. The Jews wanted you in the ground within twenty-four hours, bad to wait more than three days. They also advocated simple pine boxes; they were big on their people returning to the earth and doing so as quickly as possible.

Bennie Savone. The guy was a genius. What better place to bury war dead than a cemetery? Feds would need an act of God to get a court to agree to start disinterring bodies in a Jewish cemetery. Even if they did, what would they find and how would they find it? They could pile a couple bodies into one coffin, and who would ever know?

“Who knows this?” David asked.

“It’s a small circle,” Bennie said. “The three of us. My guy Ruben, who you’ll meet, who works on the bodies across the street.”

“Slim Joe?”

“He knows you,” Bennie said. “But not for much longer. I didn’t like that shit he said today.”

“You got my place bugged?”

“Number one, it’s not your place,” Bennie said. “Number two, I did it for your own safety. You want that dumb fuck turning state’s on you?”

It made sense. All of it. Why Bennie was willing to buy him from the Family. His new face. The reading. . all the reading. . and now this more direct revelation.

“What’s my take?” David asked.

“You’ll be provided for,” Bennie said.

“What’s my take?” David said again.

“Depending upon how effective you are,” Bennie said, “twenty, twenty-five percent.”

“Of what?”

“Of a lot,” Bennie said. “Plus, I see you doing some additional work around town, starting with your friend Slim Joe. You comfortable doing that?”

“Who gets the other seventy-five?” David said, not bothering to answer Bennie’s question.

“This place look cheap to you?”

How much would it take for him to get back to Chicago? How much would it take for David to get back to Jennifer and William? To buy the kind of freedom he wanted, he’d need more than just a few hundred thousand dollars. How much would he need to get Sal Cupertine back? He’d need millions. “I want an accounting,” David said.

“Now you’re a businessman?” Bennie said.

“I guess I am,” David said.

“Fine,” Bennie said. He looked at his watch. “Any more demands? I’ve gotta pick up my wife and take her to the doctor.”

“No,” David said, and then he added, “not at this time.”

“Great,” Bennie said. He took an exaggerated look over both of his shoulders and then reached into his sport coat and pulled out a nine and handed it to David. “Don’t make a mess unless you want to clean it up.”

“When do you want it done?”

“Yesterday,” Bennie said, “but give the kid his Thanksgiving. Give his mother her last good memory, then we’ll maybe do her, too. Last thing I need is for her to start yapping.”

“Root pulls aren’t my thing,” David said.

“She’s my cousin,” Bennie said. “So don’t think it hurts you more than it hurts me, okay? Anyway, if you’re lucky, she’ll be back on a plane by Sunday and you won’t need to deal with it. You make the call. You think she knows about you, we’ll make it look like an accident. You any good with poisons?”

“No,” David said. The idea of killing Slim Joe’s mother didn’t appeal to him in the least, but he understood the message that was being relayed: No one was off-limits when it came to this proposition.

“I’ll figure something out,” Bennie said.

Rabbi Kales found what he was looking for then — his key chain — and unlocked a wooden door just a few feet from the main office entrance, which was glass embossed with a huge Star of David. David could see a middle-aged woman sitting behind a reception desk. She had a phone to her ear and was absently flipping the pages of a magazine. She looked up when Rabbi Kales opened the office door wide and sunlight flooded into the hallway, along with a plume of dust. She gave David a vague half smile, which made sense when Rabbi Kales said, “This was Rabbi Gottlieb’s office. It will be your office now. You’ll bring your books in here.” He stood in the doorway while he said this, only the side of his face visible to David. “We’ll meet each morning at seven for your lessons. I can’t have you working with the children until you are up to speed, you understand.” He turned then and regarded David. “You do understand, don’t you?”

“Yes,” David said. For the first time in seven months, he understood everything.