Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  David couldn’t believe this shit. Ruben was pulling six figures and was pinching from the dead on top of everything else. “Have some fucking respect for yourself.”

  “I got a family, too, man,” he said.

  “Yeah,” David said, “that’s my point. You shame them.”

  David unzipped the bag, shook the jewelry out into his hand. The silver thumb ring was the kind of thing you could win for doing particularly well at Skee-Ball on Navy Pier, same with the toe ring, a turquoise number. The earrings looked real, since they were too small to be cubic zirconium—no one faked having a quarter-carat diamond, after all. The ankle bracelet was three bands of intertwined gold, probably valued at a hundred bucks in a kiosk at the Meadows Mall right now, worth a third of that.

  The ruby ring, however, was raised up in a gold base designed to look like a flower, though the gold had turned rough in places, dimpled with age. David ran his pinkie through the inside of the ring, felt how smooth it still was there, as if it had never been off a finger. He slipped it into his pocket, put the rest of the jewelry back in the Ziploc, looked over at Ruben. He had his shoulders hunched forward now, arms loose in front of him, was shaking out his wrists, like he thought maybe they were about to go at it. Fact was, if it came to a fistfight, David would probably have his hands full.

  He handed Ruben the bag. “That’s yours,” he said. “Do with it what you want.”

  “Okay,” Ruben said, “whatever you say.” David didn’t think he believed that.

  “You ever open the Talmud?” David asked.

  “No,” Ruben said.

  “Well, there’s a line in it that says it’s better to join the company of lions than assume the lead among foxes,” David said. “I’ve always liked it. You know, found ways to apply it to my life in situations where I’m unsure about my actions. This minute, Ruben, you’re a lion. Later on, you’re gonna need to decide if you’re a fox or not. I’m sorry Rabbi Kales had to threaten your family to get you here. I’m sorry you’re afraid now. Living with dread is no way to live.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Fear is physical. It’s normal,” David said. “Dread, that’s your morality showing through. That’s about you as a man, Ruben. That’s something I understand.”

  “I worked hard to get to this place in my life,” Ruben said, “so I don’t react well to this kind of activity. I left that behind. I’m about family now. Not that G shit. That’s not me. Rabbi Kales didn’t need to get down like that with me and then send you, you know, because that could have turned bad for you. You could be on this table right now, but I respect Mr. Savone too much for that. So I do my job, I go home, I see what this bullshit is with the planes, and I try not to think about this shit here. So I’m a fucking lion, homie. Don’t even question that.” He lifted his chin toward Agent Moss’s body. “But just to say? I do not condone what you did to Melanie.”

  “I’m getting that,” David said, thinking, But not so much that you ask why I did it. Ruben was smarter than that.

  “Okay,” Ruben said, then he wiped his hands together like a blackjack dealer coming off shift. Hands clean. “Last we talk about it, then.”

  David tried to imagine what it must be like to be Ruben Topaz. To spend most of your waking time with the dead but have no control over your own life. Dread was indeed moral, but Ruben had made his deals, too. Still, David had to plant a tree before he left. It was something Rabbi Kales had taught him. Talmud says to plant an acorn so that someone else may rest in the tree’s shade or eat the tree’s fruit, not so you may climb it.

  “You get her into the ground, everything looks good,” David said, “I’ll have a bonus for you. More valuable than that jewelry. Something for the holidays. Spread it around to the staff. That something you could make do with?”

  “Probably,” Ruben said. David thought Ruben likely had a pretty lucrative side business going with the personal effects of the dead, something he’d not considered before, something he couldn’t believe he’d missed. Jews were buried covered in their jewels. He doubted most of it made it into the ground. Mob guys? They had more gold chains than Liberace. Triad fuckers wore every gem you could imagine. These last few months had probably been good to Ruben. “Yeah. Could be that would help. The hourly people, they’ll want to get paid for today, even though we had to close.” Ruben planting his own tree.

  “Good,” David said.

  Ruben put the Ziploc bag back into the desk, found a new pair of gloves, and returned to work on Agent Moss’s body without saying another word, David watching him clean her for a few moments. He needed to get on the road, but there was something bothering him.

  “Was she religious?” he asked eventually.

  Ruben looked up. “I didn’t know her like that.”

  She wasn’t wearing a cross, but David supposed that didn’t matter. Not everyone wore their faith.

  “Are you?” David asked. Ruben’s giant cross was under his scrubs now, same with the Virgin Mary and her hard eight.

  “I have my beliefs.”

  “You mind if I say a prayer?”

  “I don’t think she was Jewish,” Ruben said, “whatever she was.”

  “It won’t affect her passage into the next life,” he said. “The prayer is for the living.”

  Ruben shrugged, so David went and stood beside him, stared down at the body. The cleaning solvent Ruben was using had a light lemon scent, like Pine Sol, and David was reminded of how quickly a body went from a person to a thing to a problem. In our wickedness, Talmud said, we are utterly consumed. And yet, the body. Always the body, left behind for those with earthly problems to worry on.

  “In your hands, O Lord, we humbly entrust our brothers and sisters. In this life you embraced them with your tender love,” David said. “Deliver them now from every evil and bid them eternal rest.” He paused. Not like how he paused during Naomi Rosen’s wedding ceremony, but because he found himself imagining Agent Moss’s daughter, the evil she would believe in, the evil that was real, the evil that was him. “The old order has passed away. Welcome them into paradise, where there will be no sorrow, no weeping or pain, but fullness of peace and joy with your Son and the Holy Spirit, forever and ever.”

  “Amen,” Ruben said.

  “Amen,” David said.

  He gathered up the bag of Agent Moss’s clothes, checked that he had her keys in his pocket, her ring, her phone. Pulled out his gun, let Ruben see it, ejected the clip, inspected it to make sure it was full, jammed it back in. Kept it in his hand.

  “I’ll be back tonight,” David said. “The Temple, the school, and the funeral home are closed. I’ll reopen the temple in the morning for services; we’ll see about the school, depending upon what the news is. Either way, I expect it to be a busy day. Could be a big day for heart attacks and strokes. If it gets bad, could be some suicides, too, so maybe place a call to Jerry Ford first thing tomorrow, get him ready for an influx.” Ruben nodded slowly, watching him. “Soon as you’re finished, go be with your family. I’ll expect you here first thing in the morning. We clear?”

  “Yes,” he said. The radio on the floor bleated out a warning. There might be a plane headed to the White House. “What do your books say about aliens blowing up New York?”

  “It wasn’t aliens, Ruben,” David said.

  “Whatever, man,” Ruben said. “You got something I can take home to my wife and kids? Some prophecy?”

  “I don’t believe in prophecy,” David said.

  “What do you believe in?”

  David had a day in front of him. Could be he’d need to come back and kill Ruben Topaz and his entire family, though he hoped it didn’t come to that. “Kingdoms arise and kingdoms pass away,” David said. “Israel endures for evermore.”

  “We’re not in Israel,” Ruben said.

  “It’s the idea.”


  “My kids,” Ruben said, “they don’t get the idea.”

  “Everything dies,” David said. “But maybe everything that dies someday comes back. Tell them that.”

  Ruben took this in, David wondering if Ruben would ever hear “Atlantic City” or even remember this conversation . . . though David had a sense maybe the things happening today would be hardwired. His kids would just want to know that all the dead people might show up again one day. A little magical thinking. And, if David was any indication, the dead coming back happened with more frequency than people really thought.

  David stuffed his gun back into his coat, picked up the bag of clothes, and headed out.

  “You even really a rabbi?” Ruben asked before David got to the door.

  “You really an undertaker?” David asked. He thought of something, came back a few steps, grabbed a box of disposable gloves.

  Ruben looked around the room, at the body of Melanie Moss, back at David. “I suppose I am,” he said.

  “Then I suppose I’m a rabbi,” Rabbi David Cohen said.

  12

  Eight hours from Las Vegas, David pulled off the road in Dayton, a few miles outside Carson City. He’d made one stop already, thirty minutes in the parking lot of the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, just to make sure the bread crumbs were being left in the right places, Agent Moss’s Blackberry plugged in the whole time, ringer off, the GPS pinging into outer space, tracking him, watching the phone glow with each new call. He answered the phone a few times, stayed silent, heard a man, a woman, another man, a child, all saying some variation of “Hello? Can you hear me?” and then he would hang up or wait a few seconds for the phone to lose its signal, the northern stretch of desert through Nevada a cell phone graveyard until you went through the little towns that sounded like country songs—Coaldale to Hawthorn up past Walker Lake into Stagecoach. He’d come this way once before, so he knew the path, except he’d ended up in Reno that time, where he dumped Hopper’s car, made some phone calls, stole a car from the airport, and drove home. He’d need to make different plans today. He had a feeling people would be looking at every car and truck that came in and out of airports for a while, had a feeling some darkness was coming down, the news on the radio growing more bleak by the minute, the Towers now dust, the Pentagon all fucked up, that other plane ditched in Pennsylvania, government in a fucking bunker somewhere.

  Talmud said not to be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief, pay attention, finish your fucking job, which David was trying to do. Still, David understood that this was one of those days that people were going to remember with crystal clarity, the kind of day where you remembered precisely where you were when you first heard the news, where even small, insignificant things would seem larger in memory. He’d need to get his story straight. The radio. On the way to work. Canceled school immediately. Went home and called my family. Stayed glued to the TV all day. Couldn’t believe it.

  Except Rabbi David Cohen didn’t have any family. Yet another inauthentic moment he’d need to create in order to seem normal. David couldn’t even share real horror with real people. And wasn’t that some shit. If he were home, what would he be doing? Telling Jennifer it was going to be fine. Keeping William away from the TV. Thinking about where all of his guns were. That if some motherfuckers showed up in Chicago, he wouldn’t wait around. They’d get in the car and head north. What was Jennifer doing on her own? What was she telling their son? Had she bothered to call Sal’s mom? Christ. His mom. She’d be out of her mind. She was scared of flying as it was, said it was dangerous. Maybe she was right.

  That said, he’d picked a good day to fuck up. Better than the last time, at any rate. What is one murder on a day of so many? He wouldn’t be heading out of town in a frozen meat truck, but he also wasn’t going to chance anything by rolling into Reno, not with cameras everywhere, so midway through the trip he decided Dayton would be a good place to execute the first part of his plan.

  It was an Old West town on Highway 50 that hadn’t been sufficiently revitalized into a tourist trap yet. It was still just old and west, hardly looked like a town: two gas stations, Dotty’s Casino, the Pizza Factory (“We Toss ’Em! They’re Awesome!”), windswept clapboard houses with shitty boats on blocks in the driveway, and an actual Main Street, which had the old red-brick Union Hotel in the middle of it, a saloon and flophouse from 1870, according to the sign. The rest of the street was dotted with similarly decrepit buildings that David imagined one day would become art galleries, gelato stores, places to get saltwater taffy and fudge and various kinds of jerky, one of those joints that sold candles with your name on it, a Starbucks, a handmade jewelry shop, or something else called a shoppe, David never sure what the dividing line was.

  He’d picked Dayton for a reason, and on the other side of Main Street, he found what he was looking for: Across a two-lane frontage road, where yellow flags snapped in the wind atop twenty-foot-tall poles, a giant billboard touted new starter mansions surrounding the Exclusive! Arnold Palmer–Designed Signature Course at the Dayton Valley Golf Club! Easy Access to the Dayton Executive AirPark! If You Vacationed Here You’d Never Leave! This Way! He’d been getting real estate mailers about this place every week for the last year, an outfit called YourDesertHomeSource.com mailing him postcards of his very same Summerlin home cut-and-pasted into the countryside in Dayton. Get away from it all, the mailers said, in your own home!

  David wound through the development—it was already mostly built out, a hundred-plus homes encircling a verdant golf course—until he found the remaining model homes, all lined up along La Costa Avenue near the intersection of Palmer and Royal Troon.

  David crept slowly around the block of perfect homes filled with no one, the fake street empty even though the houses kept their blinds opens, lights on, TVs running. That was the con, David knew, to imagine that house was yours, those blinds ones you chose, that light your safety, that TV your escape. There were no cars, no people, even the real estate developer’s trailer was closed, just a flapping yellow flag out front, a closed sign hung in the window. David didn’t see any cameras anywhere, and why would there be?

  Everything inside a model home was an imitation, and even still, the developers locked the good-looking stuff down. Back in the day when he and Jennifer thought they might move to Batavia when he got straight—whenever that was, since it was more her dream than his—Jennifer would drag him to open houses of new developments and they’d imagine their lives, Jennifer pointing out how couches were anchored into the carpet, TVs screwed into the bureaus, even pillows were tied discreetly into place. He had the vague notion then, even still, that getting some boys together and robbing model homes might be an easy score, breaking into a house where no one lived the sort of thing that seemed like a no-brainer; but then he saw that the leather sofa was pleather, that the TVs were off-brand, that the refrigerators were hollowed out, just shells, no motors. The boys could come in with pickaxes and take out the copper wiring, but no one wanted to sweat to get paid, they wanted the score, and the score wasn’t something you rolled up your sleeves on. It was something that dropped at your feet, you turned it around the next day, or the next hour, and then you bought what you wanted with the cash, which was usually some H, or a girl, or you tossed it on some dice and it was gone, all the same.

  When he and Jennifer did buy a house, in Lincolnwood, it was older—built in the ’60s—and had some character, nothing granite inside, nothing stainless steel, just 1,600 square feet of dark wood floors and drafty windows, fully grown trees in the front yard where he hung a tire swing, a backyard you could have a BBQ in and not feel like your neighbors could hear your every word, a single-car garage, which was fine, because they only had the one. It wasn’t Batavia and he wasn’t a Straight Guy, but it was normal enough that he could raise a family, not run into the wives and sons and daughters of the people he had killed.

  Not often, anyway.


  His Summerlin doppleganger was the last model, the largest they currently offered: two stories, 4,500 square feet, a home theater, a built-in gym, imitation hardwood floors, a three-car garage, RV-compatible parking. It didn’t have the six-foot wrought-iron gates or the cherub fountains David had—people in Dayton didn’t seem like cherub people, much less people who needed an extra level of protection in case the U.S. Marshals came crashing through the gates—and he was also pretty sure it hadn’t been wired up with CCTV and bugs that fed directly into Bennie Savone’s home. Nor did the house have a closet that had been retrofitted into a soundproof gun safe, racked to the ceiling with handguns and rifles, nor did it have a bookshelf stacked with the holy books of the Jewish faith, or a portable foundry in the backyard to melt evidence . . . though the sign out front did say all the houses were LEED certified and customized to fit any buyer. That got David wondering who’d done the original construction upgrades on his house in the first place.

  David parked alongside the white picket fence to his fake yard, across the street from a green belt. It was surrounded by hip-high iron fencing, put up to make sure no one got too close and smudged the paint, or fucked with the flower bed, or yanked at the artificial grass. You could only look at your future. Touching wasn’t allowed.

  He put on his hat, snapped on a pair of disposable gloves, got out of the car, took Agent Moss’s purse from the backseat, wiped it down with a handy-wipe, dropped the antique ring into it, zipped it up, and tossed it over the fence.

  Someone would find the purse tomorrow, someone decent.

  Someone looking to buy a house.

  Someone that would eventually get that ring back to Agent Moss’s daughter, if Ruben was even right about that. Or maybe it would be the next day. Maybe next week.