Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “You fought in Korea?”

  “Nah,” Ronnie said. “Before my time.”

  “So you were in Vietnam?”

  Ronnie pointed at his feet. “Bad arches.”

  “My dad fought.”

  “Yeah? He come back all messed up?”

  “Got cancer eventually,” Matthew said. “I don’t know if it was the Agent Orange or the two packs a day.”

  “You know quitting cigarettes is harder than quitting heroin?”

  “No,” Matthew said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “There’s no secondhand heroin,” Ronnie said. “You want heroin, you gotta go find it. Cigarettes are everywhere. Fucks with your head.” He paused. “Your old man ever try to quit?”

  “Not once.”

  “Sounds like he had a death wish.”

  “He was complicated,” Matthew said. “But he signed up to fight. Didn’t wait for the draft. I feel like I would have done the same. And if they said I had some physical impairment, I would have asked for a waiver, snuck back in, whatever it took.”

  “You say that now,” Ronnie said. “Wait until some shit goes down.” He selected a toothpick, dug out a spot of food jammed above his incisor. “The weapons back then were shit and, pardon my language, who the fuck wanted to sit in a jungle waiting to get captured? End up like John McCain? All bent in thirty different directions? Nah.” He rubbed his top front teeth with his index finger, then leaned back from the sink, adjusted his shirt, made sure his collar was straight, adjusted his belt. “If it was up to me, I would have told the generals to bomb Berkeley, that would have ended the war fast.” He took out his billfold again, came out with a business card. “You got a pen?”

  Matthew did. It was a black Smith & Wesson tactical pen, the kind you could use to bust out your car window if you found yourself rammed off the road into a frozen lake, or as a weapon if you were fighting up close. He handed it to the head of the biggest organized crime outfit west of New York, who started to scrawl a message on the back of the card.

  “Next time you’re in the market, bring this card into any of my dealerships, my boys will take good . . .” Ronnie began to say, but Matthew didn’t let him finish.

  He grabbed Ronnie by the hair and slammed his face into the sink, crushing his nose and snapping his jaw in a single move. Slammed him a second time, across his eyebrows, shattered his orbital bones. Split his forehead open like it had a zipper. Third time, he turned Ronnie’s head slightly to the right, aimed down an inch, then severed the top of Ronnie’s ear on the sharp marble edge of the counter, and dropped him face-first onto the tile floor. What teeth Ronnie had left clattered around him.

  Improvisational skills were a hallmark of good FBI agents. The Bureau even had its agents-in-training work with acting coaches and comics to refine the skill. Matthew liked that aspect of the job. Pretending to be someone else. Day like today, Matthew wasn’t sure if he was someone different or who he’d always been.

  Matthew got down on one knee, tipped Ronnie on his side, examined the damage.

  It wasn’t easy to tell the difference between Ronnie’s mouth and his nose, his eyes and his scalp.

  He’d live. Not happily. But he’d live.

  Matthew could put him out of his misery. Drag him into a stall, flip him onto his back, let him choke to death on his own blood. Maybe Matthew could pinch Ronnie’s nose to help death along. He’d last a minute, probably less. Even if his boys came in and found him, there was a good chance Ronnie would asphyxiate enough to get some decent brain damage, spend the rest of his life watching cartoons and eating Jell-O.

  Tough to run the Family with mush brains.

  But that was the easy way out.

  Painless, in the end, really.

  It had been three years since Sal Cupertine was disappeared. Matthew and Jeff couldn’t find him. The rest of the FBI couldn’t find him, not that they’d given it much effort. The public hadn’t spotted him, not even after all the news programs ran his photo. If Sal Cupertine was still alive, he was doing a good job of pretending he wasn’t, which was curious to Matthew. Unless he was living in a cave somewhere, he’d need a new face by this point, and it wasn’t like the movies: You could get all the plastic surgery you wanted, but your face was still your face. Maybe all this new facial-recognition software wouldn’t make an exact match, but a 50 percent match would be enough to get a warrant if everything else lined up. The FBI did a dry run at the Super Bowl a few months earlier, running 100,000 people in one day, arresting a couple dozen wanted felons. Small database searches made it easier—if Sal Cupertine showed up somewhere the government was looking for the most wanted criminals on the planet, he’d pop right up. And the technology was only getting better: The system they had at the casino updated every few months with new patches, predictive biometrics that could spot extensive makeup, nose jobs, Botox, even artificial aging, what the techs called Tanning Salon Soul Man Face.

  If it had a nickname, you were already beaten.

  So, yeah, maybe Matthew should have dragged Ronnie into a stall and tortured him for answers, but then what? Ronnie wasn’t the boss of Chicago because he was stupid. Maybe Ronnie Cupertine knew where Sal was at one time, but surely that time had passed. Sal Cupertine had spent fifteen years on the streets of Chicago killing with impunity. He knew people were looking for him. If he’d left his wife and kid alone for three long years it wasn’t because he was enjoying his life. He’d poke his head up eventually. And Matthew would be there waiting.

  Matthew picked up his Smith & Wesson pen and Ronnie’s business card, took some time to wash his hands, strands of Ronnie’s hair filling up the sink, buttoned up his jacket so the flecks of Ronnie’s blood wouldn’t be visible on his white shirt, slipped his arrowhead name tag into this pocket. Wet one of Curtis’s towels, wiped Ronnie’s blood, hair, spit, and skin from the edge of the counter, tossed it in the trash. Checked his reflection in the mirror, then had a thought, got back down on the floor, shoved his hand in Ronnie’s pants pocket, came out with his billfold. Counted the cash. Five grand. He’d give it to Nina, save for fifty bucks to get his suit and shoes cleaned, then headed out, just as Ronnie Cupertine let out a low moan and shit himself.

  There were two guys lingering outside, heads down, pacing, backs to the door, talking on their phones. They wore identical Adidas sweat suits, though one guy had on white Nikes, the other old-school black Pumas. It was odd, since the Family guys tended to dress like they were in business, at least the ones who went around with Ronnie. These two weren’t even wearing Kevlar. He scanned them for weapons, saw both were going for fashion over utility, guns stuffed in the back of their waistbands, like in the movies. Matthew could shoot both of these guys between the eyes, or simply walk up and disarm them, before either realized how stupid it was to keep their guns behind them. At Quantico, during live-action fire drills, they’d practice on guys like this, since most of the time, if you’re FBI, you’re rousing assholes from their houses, not shooting it out with bank robbers armed with AK-47s on the streets of LA. These guys hadn’t received the memo, Matthew thought, that rolling with nines shoved up your ass was no way to conduct modern warfare.

  Everything was slower in Wisconsin.

  “Excuse me, boss,” Matthew said to the one in the white Nikes, and the guy turned around, surprised to find someone standing there. He had a cross tattooed on his neck—one with the full body of Christ splayed out, though it wasn’t especially well done, shitty prison ink making Jesus look more like a melted Kris Kristofferson—and one of those pencil-thin goatees.

  “What?” he said. He wasn’t Italian, which was odd. The Family didn’t usually use their affiliates for personal security. They didn’t mind having them sell their drugs or do their scut work, like Chema and Neto Espinoza had done, but it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for a positive work environment, Chema chopped up and dumped i
n a landfill, Neto murdered in Stateville. But everyone had bills.

  “You with the guy in the bathroom?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I think he fell down,” Matthew said.

  “Shit,” the man said, flipped his phone closed, pushed past Matthew, grabbed the other guy, and both disappeared into the bathroom, still not pulling their guns. Matthew could follow them into the bathroom and plug them both in the back of the head if he so wished.

  Instead, Matthew headed to his office upstairs.

  He still had another fifteen minutes on the clock, so he took a little time to run through the security footage, found the feed of himself walking in and out of the bathroom, wiped it from the system, wiped it from the backup system, too. The perk of being in charge. Tomorrow, he’d come in early, track Ronnie Cupertine’s movements through the casino, see who he played with, see if he met with anyone. Ronnie Cupertine could fly to Las Vegas if he wanted to gamble for real money, so there had to be something else to get him up to this shithole in the middle of the night.

  Matthew Drew, who’d spent six months as an FBI agent and another six months pretending to be one while searching for Sal Cupertine, locked his office and headed out through the service exit, saw that housekeeping hadn’t managed to get all of Killer’s blood out of the carpet, took a mental note to have that taken care of on Sunday, too, then made his way to the employee parking lot, where he was the only non-Chuyalla with a reserved spot. Found his Mustang, the piece of shit, got in, and called 911 from his cell, the operator telling him an ambulance was already on its way, again.

  4

  Jennifer Cupertine had come to arrange her life into three tidy segments: William. Work. Waiting. The William part came first now that he was back in school. Every weekday morning, like today, the last Monday of August, she’d drive him from their house in Lincolnwood out to Mount Carmel Academy on West Belmont, idle on the street until he walked through the front doors, not leaving until the security guard on duty gave her a nod in recognition. The guards probably thought she was nuts, waiting out there every day like that in Sal’s old Lincoln with the broken odometer, but that was fine. Everyone at Mount Carmel thought she was nuts, the result of never taking part in any of the car pools, never letting William take the bus on field trips, if she let him go on the field trips at all, insisting that she always drive him everywhere.

  If someone on the streets came for her son, Jennifer Cupertine was going to make them take her, too. She wasn’t going to let Becky the Soccer Mom die in her pink Juicy track pants just because it was her day on the calendar to drive the brats.

  So let them think she was crazy. She was saving their lives.

  Jennifer checked the clock on the dashboard: 7:39 a.m. The guard would be out in two minutes, three tops, then she’d head over to her office at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Work had a predictable monotony: a few hours of filing down in the archives, followed by some time at her computer on digital restorations, for which she’d found a surprising facility. The museum even picked up the tab for her night classes at UIC once she showed some promise, had eventually bumped her up to full-time, which was nice, though she got paid less than everyone else, since she’d only ever done a bit of junior college. Even the nameplate on her office door was slightly smaller than her office mate Stacy’s. The restoration work was meticulous and time consuming—she worked pixel by pixel on old photos, trying to correct color or fill in holes and tears, fix resolution, get them ready for shows—but it focused her mind, kept that free-floating fear from descending on her before she was adequately prepared.

  It wasn’t until Stacy went to lunch that she’d get online to look for Sal. She didn’t have the Internet at her house, not because she couldn’t afford it—though she couldn’t—but because she was pretty sure the FBI was watching all communications that came into and out of her home. She didn’t know if they could get into her computer, but she asked herself what Sal would do in this situation, and she remembered him telling her, years ago, when she finally understood what he did for a living, “Don’t open the door to strangers and don’t open the door to cops.” And then he paused and said, “No one we know would show up unannounced. But if they did, it wouldn’t be good news. Just . . . don’t open the door for anyone.”

  And what was the Internet but a big open door? So she used only Stacy’s computer to search newspapers for stories that might show evidence of Sal’s presence in a city—people getting killed “execution-style” was her prime indicator—or used only Stacy’s phone to make calls to hospitals and morgues when there were reports of people with Sal’s basic description found in ravines, or in trunks of cars, or washed up somewhere. She’d see if the person had a crappy eight-ball tattoo on his arm, raised and mottled. Sal’s wounds never did heal right, which made that tattoo a dumb idea in the first place, but that was before Jennifer exerted any control over his life. Sal was always getting infections—he’d break a toe and set it himself, it would grow back crooked, then the nail would fall off and he’d just suffer through it, maybe grab a couple of Jennifer’s amoxicillin from the medicine cabinet, until it became some festering thing and he’d finally haul himself to a free clinic, a place where he could use a fake ID and no one would care, people only really caring about who you were if they wanted your money.

  How Jennifer’s life had changed in the three years since Sal disappeared. How wary she’d become. Predictability was the one intangible thing in her life that Jennifer Cupertine appreciated. It all worked into a simple ebb and flow. Still, she woke up every morning a little farther from the person she’d been. If Sal ever came back, would he even recognize her? That was the Waiting. Waiting for her husband to return. Waiting for their next move. Waiting for someone to show up, knock on the door, and tell her the waiting was over, that Sal was dead—really dead this time—or that her time was up, too. A bullet to the brain for both mother and son.

  The bell rang and the last few straggling kids ran up the front steps of the school and then, one minute later, the guard came out, just like always. Except Jennifer didn’t recognize him. That gave her a moment of pause, but it wasn’t terribly unusual, the school did cycle through security personnel somewhat regularly, and someone would eventually tell the new person about the Crazy Lady in the Old Lincoln. But then the new guy walked all the way down onto the sidewalk, to the drop-off lane where Jennifer was parked, and motioned for her to roll down the passenger window.

  “How you doing, Mrs. Cupertine?”

  The guard’s name tag said he was called Horace. He was in his forties, but already had a belly that slid over his belt like an avalanche. He held the top of the walkie-talkie on his belt like it was a gun, probably an old habit; the school was real big about letting parents know that all of their security guards were either current or ex–Chicagoland PD. There wasn’t going to be some Columbine situation on their school grounds.

  Not that it mattered to Jennifer. She didn’t trust cops. Half of them worked for Cousin Ronnie, the other half were looking to kill her husband. If she came home and found burglars in her house, she’d let them walk out with her TV before she called 911. Last thing she was going to do was invite a cop into her house, since either way she’d probably end up dead.

  “What is it?” Jennifer said.

  “That’s real good,” Horace said, not actually answering the question Jennifer had asked. He was looking into Jennifer’s backseat. It was littered with stray toys, this morning’s empty juice box, two binders full of photos she took from her office three days earlier, with the idea that she’d get some work done from home, but which instead had languished back there all weekend. “Reason I come by today, I just wanted to tell you, Billy’s a real nice kid . . .”

  Before he could get the “but” out, Jennifer interrupted him: “William.”

  “Pardon me?” Horace looking at her now.

  “His na
me is William.”

  “People here call him Billy, so that’s what I know him as.”

  “That’s not his name,” Jennifer said. “If I wanted people to call him Billy, I would have named him Billy.”

  “I get it, Mrs. Cupertine,” Horace said. “I mean no offense.” He smiled at her, though he didn’t seem particularly happy about anything. “Thing is, these first two weeks of school, he’s already been getting into it with his classmates. You know, scuffles on the kickball field, pushing and shoving, nothing big, probably not even enough to warrant this conversation just yet. But what’s horseplay today, tomorrow could be three, four, five kids getting him on the ground. It’s just, I know you worry about him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I see you’re real conscientious about his safety.”

  “If William is having a problem,” Jennifer said, “I’m sure one of the Sisters of Mercy will call me.”

  “Maybe.” Horace nodded, as if he was considering this possibility. “But anyone here ever call you?”

  They hadn’t. Not even when she was late making tuition payments, which she had been for a few months, though she’d been smart about holding on to the money Sal had sent her, using it only for William’s school stuff, his clothes, whatever he needed to get along like the rest of the kids. But then the pipes burst last winter, and her cushion had a few less feathers in it. Some people in Chicago, ones with a little bit of history in town, knew you didn’t hound someone with the last name Cupertine about money. Not that the phone company or the electric company gave a shit. It was all automated now. The red overdue notices weren’t scared of her married name and no one was putting a gun in the face of the asshole who kept calling about her Discover card. Then last week she heard Cousin Ronnie had suffered some kind of neurological episode out on the golf course. Sunstroke or something.