Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  That was two.

  David looked to Rabbi Sigal. “Rabbi Kales supports this?” Sigal asked.

  “Yes,” David said. Kales’s choice of support was irrelevant, but at some point, one of these rabbis was going to call him, because whenever David made a move, they called Rabbi Kales, even though he was retired, even though he was losing his mind, even though, even though, even though . . .

  Rabbi Sigal retrieved his file, examined it for a few moments, closed it again. “This world,” he said quietly, “will turn on us if they get the chance.” He cleared his throat again, got a little louder. “You are a good man to begin this process, Rabbi Cohen. I cannot let you do it alone.” He rose, but kept his fingertips on the tabletop. “‘Let the trumpet be blown, let the standard be flown, now set we our watch.’” He slapped the table. “We will pay half these first days,” he said to David. “There is no discussion on that.” He pushed the file back to the middle of the table. “The rest of you, pay as you can, pay as you must. This is a time where frugality is tantamount to silence.” He grabbed up his belongings—a pair of glasses, his keys, a black-and-white cookie wrapped in a napkin—and Rabbi Roth and Rabbi Goldstein instinctually did likewise. When Rabbi Sigal declared a meeting was over, it was over. That’s how it had been in Las Vegas for about forty years. A decision had been made.

  Yehuda wisely stayed seated while David walked the men out, Rabbi Sigal a little unsteady on the stairs. He’d be in bed in twenty minutes. Maybe fewer. He lived at TPC in a home overlooking the thirteenth fairway. It was worth about two million out the door. David had gone to a cocktail party there last year. Best as he could tell, Rabbi Sigal did not have a safe room filled with guns, but he did have a medicine cabinet filled with heart-disease, high-blood-pressure, high-cholesterol, and high-anxiety medication.

  “Your call to action is pretty tight,” Yehuda said once David returned.

  “You think so?” David said. He picked up a handful of napkins, cleared Rabbi Sigal’s dishes, dumping the remnants of his food into the garbage, did the same with Rabbi Roth’s and Rabbi Goldstein’s. He’d poisoned only Rabbi Sigal’s food, as he was the only one whose inhibitions and emotions David wasn’t sure he could control. He needed the man to be a touch addled.

  “Do you really think Osama Bin Laden is going to fly to Las Vegas to kill Jews on a Tuesday morning?” Yehuda picked up his folder. “Because I’m doing the math? And we’re talking a G a day, right? If I’m spending that much money, at the end, I want to have killed Bin Laden.”

  David sat down next to him. Took a black-and-white cookie from the platter, bit into the white side. Chewed it as though it didn’t make every part of his face feel like a red-hot anvil. “I thought you were a pacifist,” he said. “Now you’re an assassin?”

  “I get you, Rabbi,” Yehuda said. “You and me, we’re about the same age, right?”

  “I’m almost forty,” David said. “So, no. We are not about the same age.” Yehuda might have been thirty. He might have been younger.

  “Why not just take a portion of this money and get every member of Temple Beth Israel a gun and a shooting class? Make your own IDF.” He held up the spreadsheet. “This bottom line, that’s not gonna work, unless there’s some other bounce on the backside. Give everyone guns, there’s a bounce on that. You teach these people how to shoot? You bring in a reputable gun manufacturer to sell them the right guns, what’s suitable for their situation? That’s good for the community, too, not just for your temple. There’d finally be a whole team of good guys with guns.”

  David tried to imagine where Yehuda learned to talk. It was interesting, though, how he suddenly devolved into a kind of quasi-gangster parlance while talking to David, as if he thought that was their vernacular, as if David was the kind of rabbi you could talk guns with and it would be just fine, perfectly fine. Which made David think Yehuda was smarter than he let on.

  “If the Kabbalah Center cannot afford one thousand dollars a day,” David said, “I can help you with a loan.”

  “The Kabbalah Center is for profit. I’m not looking to give money away. Here’s what I can tell you. If I do a seminar at the Mirage one weekend, say, and you and I talk about responsible gun ownership, bring in some Jewish person from the ATF, for instance, have him talk about why owning a gun isn’t a license to commit crimes but to stop them, we’d be difference makers.” He took a sip from his Diet Coke, let out a little belch. “We’re progressive, we live on the right side of town. We partner up? We help a lot of people. I could even start doing seminars here. It’s a great space.”

  “I’ll consider that,” David bit into the black side of the cookie. Chewed it slowly. “I don’t know if you remember, but I caught your show one time.”

  “You came to the center?”

  “No. The community college. When you were calling yourself Da Truth Tella.”

  “Oh, that was just marketing for the college kids and the soccer moms who grew up on rap music.”

  “I came with Mrs. Meltzer and Mrs. Helms. They were very impressed, I’ll say that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Yehuda snapped his fingers. “I remember. You look different now.”

  “My face changes,” David said.

  “You’ve got a distinctive voice, though,” Yehuda said. “Real persuasive elocution.”

  “What does my voice make you want to do?”

  A smile worked at the corner of Yehuda’s mouth. “Honestly? It makes me want to pay attention. You’d be a good teacher.”

  “You graduate from college?”

  “I did a couple years at UCLA when I got out of the IDF. It wasn’t for me.”

  “What is for you?”

  “Faith?” Yehuda said. “Helping people. Also, real estate.”

  “I see,” David said. He wondered where Yehuda would be in ten years. Prison? Maybe. Or on TV. He wouldn’t last long in Las Vegas, that much David knew.

  “Joanie—Mrs. Helms—is doing a yoga piece for us,” Yehuda said, when the silence got uncomfortable. “You should try it when you get out of surgery. Helps with healing. Mind, body, and soul.”

  “I look like I need that?”

  “Don’t know until you get in that mind space,” Yehuda said.

  “Would that be a good way for me to become healthy and wealthy?” Yehuda looked confused. “That’s what you were selling when I came to your show. I liked it, especially the part where you managed to get people to pay you in order to make them wealthy. Enlightenment, Engagement, and a Healthy and Wealthy Future. That’s how it went, right?”

  “It’s just a slogan,” Yehuda said.

  “To you. To them, it’s a path. But that’s quite a thing, selling people something they already have. Ice to Eskimos, my father used to say.” Actually, his father used to say, Like selling pussy to hookers. “But getting Jews to build a pyramid for you? That’s a whole different level, Yehuda.”

  “Look,” Yehuda said, carefully, David seeing that maybe this fuck was starting to realize who he was dealing with, at least on some atavistic level, since Yehuda had the street smarts of a mime. “I appreciate your offer here, but it doesn’t engage with the center’s philosophy. So. We wash our hands of it.”

  “I will seek that which is lost,” David said. “And will bring again that which is driven away, and will bind up that which is broken, and will strengthen that which is sick.”

  “What’s that?” Yehuda asked.

  “It’s supposed to be your philosophy,” David said. “Ezekiel 34:16.” David looked over both shoulders, fucking with him now. “Between us, Yehuda, confidentially, as your rabbi, are you even Jewish?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “So,” David said, “when I contact my friends in the IDF, they’ll have a record of you?”

  “Of course,” Yehuda said.

  “Yehuda Stein,” David said. “I gue
ss there’d be ten thousand of you. Who was your sergeant?”

  “What is this?” Yehuda said. “Are you Mossad or something?”

  “What if I am?”

  “You should be out hunting Nazis and you’re here, hunting toddlers for your swimming classes?” He started to get up, but David put his foot behind one of the chair’s back wheels, pinning Yehuda to his spot.

  “You’re not excused from the table,” David said. “And you don’t get to wash your hands of anything. Didn’t work for Pilate, not gonna work for you.”

  “It’s not in our profit model to give up seven grand a week for some doughnut eater, whether you like it or not,” Yehuda said. “So unless you’re prepared to get a letter from my lawyer for falsely imprisoning me here, you’ll let me leave now.”

  This made David laugh. It was, in fact, the funniest thing he’d heard since the fucking meat truck dumped him in Las Vegas three years ago. Motherfuckers and their lawyers.

  “Let me explain business to you, Yehuda,” David said. “Your profit comes out of Temple Beth Israel’s bottom line. And the bottom line of Temple Beth Am, Temple Beth Shalom, and Congregation Beth El, as well. It would be a shame if those people found out that the Kabbalah Center is patently unsafe for Jews. That, in fact, it’s showed up on a list of places the 9/11 bombers scoped out. Then one day, maybe a swastika gets tagged on your window. Then there’s a fire in a Dumpster. A stolen car gets driven into the building. Maybe someone breaks into the center and burns a cross inside your hookah lounge. All of those things could happen, conceivably, in this climate.”

  Yehuda tried to exact the right words from his mouth. “Is this a shakedown?” He laughed, like it was crazy. Because it was crazy. David had done his homework on young Mr. Da Truth Tella, just for a moment like this, when he could take what he wanted from him. “I mean. You’re basically threatening me? Right? You’re telling me you’ll put me out of business if I don’t pony up for police protection?”

  David pulled Yehuda’s chair closer to him. “I know what you are,” he said, his voice just above a whisper. Yehuda swallowed hard, didn’t say anything, because up close to Rabbi David Cohen? All you really saw was Sal Cupertine, rippling beneath the skin. “I know your con. I know your escape. I see everything you’ve ever been and ever will be.” David shoved Yehuda’s chair away, stood up, began to clear the rest of the table clean. “So pay or don’t pay,” he said, brightly now; this was just another day at Temple Beth Israel. “That is up to you.” He smiled, clasped his hands together, held them under his chin, a thoughtful pose he’d stolen from an interview with Steve Jobs he’d caught in Dr. Melnikoff’s waiting room a few weeks ago. “But understand this: I will open a Kabbalah Center right here, on Temple Beth Israel’s property, and I will charge double for your miracles, your conspiracy theory numerology, and your red fucking yarn. And because I have the moral authority to teach the bullshit you spout, you will end up sitting alone in that overmortgaged warehouse you call a place of faith. That BMW outside? It will be a constant reminder of your vanity. Your home in the Lakes? All your rented leather furniture? Gone. Your Olympic Gardens girlfriend? Gone. Even your Judaism will be gone, because you’ll start to wonder how a Jew could do this to another Jew. It will be a crisis so profound that you may eventually start looking for a gun of your own to end the persistent, nagging feeling in your mind that it all could have been avoided if you’d just said yes to me. But it will be too late.”

  Yehuda watched David for a long time, not speaking. David wiped off the table with a napkin, put Saran Wrap over the cookies, took the manila folders the other rabbis had left behind—none of them bothered to take the documentation, because it didn’t matter, they weren’t going to be shamed by not paying, which is what made them different than Yehuda, who wasn’t encumbered by such emotions—and dumped them into the garbage, too.

  “Who are you?” Yehuda said, finally.

  •

  When David got back to his office, after Yehuda agreed to the protection plan, he found Harvey B. Curran waiting patiently, sitting in the same chair Jeff Hopper had sat in a few years earlier. Esther was at the reception desk with a giddy smile on her face.

  “I apologize if I kept you,” David said.

  Curran still had a patch over his eye, and judging from the indention the strap made on his skin, he wore it constantly.

  “No worries,” Curran said. He got up and gathered his materials: a reporter’s notebook, a small tape recorder, that damn Day Runner that David had reassembled in the Bagel Café parking lot. “I’ve been telling Esther here war stories.”

  “I read him every day, Rabbi,” Esther said. Of course she did. Esther controlled both the writing of the checks and the flow of gossip in the temple, which meant reading Harvey B. Curran’s column was required if she wanted to whisper her concerns about Rabbi Kales’s daughter being married to that goniff Bennie Savone, a man so corrupt he’d been paying Esther’s salary for a decade. The ultimate double cross, David thought, neither of them knowing anything about the other, but being almost entirely dependent on each other’s discretion. Wasn’t that something.

  “I should come here more often,” Harvey said once they were in the short hallway leading toward David’s office. “Good for the ego.”

  “Talmud says to be exceedingly humble,” David said. “Even if you have to fake it.”

  “Well,” Harvey said, “with this thing on my face, I’ll take what I can.”

  “I’m sorry you’re still suffering,” David said. He unlocked his office door and let Curran in.

  “Me, too,” Curran said. He sat down at one of the four chairs around the coffee table and David shut the door behind them and sat across from him. “You’ve redecorated,” he said.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “No,” Curran said. “But I’ve seen surveillance photos.”

  “Not recently, I hope,” David said.

  “No,” Curran said. “This was before your time. FBI had pictures of Bennie Savone taking a meeting here before the temple opened. He and Vic Acosta? You know, the guy who gifted the government Panthers?”

  “I know that situation, yes,” David said.

  “Fifty years Miami has been trying to make a move out here,” Curran said, “and they still haven’t gotten it right. Anyway, all the girls at Panthers were needle junkies back then. Place was HIV-on-a-Stick. Mr. Savone apparently called Mr. Acosta for a meeting, held it right here, and advised him to clean up his game before it brought down the whole industry.”

  “That’s good advice,” David said. “If it happened like that.”

  “It did,” Curran said. “Acosta was wired. He was an active snitch. Just something interesting.”

  “Any recent surveillance photos I should know about?”

  “No, I haven’t seen much recently,” Curran said. He waved at something in the air, a bug, or some dust, or a thought. “Screw it,” he said, and when he saw that David was observing him with open interest, he said, “I might lose my eye.”

  “Really? That still happens?”

  “That was my thought,” he said. “But I can’t shake this infection.” He waved at whatever was in the air again. “Anyway. That’s not why you asked me here. You don’t need to hear about my personal problems.”

  “It’s fine,” David said. “Maybe you’ve noticed that I’ve had some medical work done in the past and that I’m in need of more work?”

  Curran put up a hand. “I have no idea what the correct answer is here, so I’m not even going to attempt to parry with you, Rabbi. I’ve learned in the last couple months that I am both easily offended and horribly self-conscious, both things I thought I’d left behind in junior high.”

  “Who is your doctor?” David asked.

  “Whoever Kaiser sends me to,” Curran said. “I’ve seen three or four different people. They keep shuffl
ing in and out. Today was a new guy. Tomorrow will be someone else. It’s the factory system over there. Barely even medicine.”

  “No, no,” David said. “You need a specialist.”

  “I can’t afford that,” Curran said. “The paper’s insurance is for crap.”

  David went to his desk, scribbled a number down on a piece of paper, and gave it to Curran. “This is Dr. Melnikoff. He is the best surgeon in town. He will take care of you. Or will know someone who can.”

  “He’s not on my plan,” Curran said. “I looked.”

  “He takes on a few cases every year on a pro-bono basis.” Or he’d start.

  “I can’t do that,” Curran said, as David knew he would, but he didn’t hand the note back. Interesting. “I’d lose my job and end up on the front page. But the paper is so short staffed, they’d probably have me write the story before I left.”

  David closed his eyes. Put a finger to his lips. Humbled himself before God. “See him anyway,” David said, when he opened his eyes a few seconds later. “Maybe he would do work on a discounted basis. If you paid for it, irrespective of the cost, that would not be unethical, would it? Even one dollar is payment.”

  Curran ran two fingers across the edges of the patch, David thinking he probably didn’t even notice he was doing it. “I don’t know,” he said, but it was in there now. An idea of what might be possible.

  “He’s a good man,” David said, “and you’re a good man. I could talk to him on your behalf. He’s going to work on me shortly”

  “When?”

  “After Hanukkah.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Of course,” David said.

  “I’ve just . . .” Curran paused. “I’ve heard things about him.”

  “Harvey,” David said, using his name for the first time, “nobody lives in Las Vegas because they hate to gamble. Talmud says all Israelites are mutually accountable for each other, and while I know you are not Jewish, I am, and you would be referred by me, which Talmud says makes you an honored guest in Dr. Melnikoff’s care.”