Gangsterland

by Tod Goldberg

  David tapped his index finger on his nose, trying to get the pose right. “In his poem ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’ Longfellow calls our people trampled and beaten as the sand, but unshaken as the continent.” David hoped Claudia never managed to stumble on the poem, since he was taking a lot of liberties with the line in terms of context—though context, Rabbi Kales had told him, was rarely important when making a point. He set the book back down on his desk and leaned toward Claudia. “That’s very powerful, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Claudia said. She closed her eyes, and David saw a tear trying to escape from the corner of her right eye. Crying women had no timetable, this much David knew. He needed to get her out of his office.

  David reached over and clasped Claudia’s hands. They were ice-cold. Maybe her problem was really poor circulation. “Trust in the Torah,” David said, his voice just above a whisper. “That’s where your problems will be solved. I think you know that.”

  “What I don’t understand, Rabbi—” Claudia began, but David cut her off.

  “Suppose a dream doesn’t come true,” David said, hoping Claudia wasn’t much of a Springsteen fan, or if she was, that she favored his later records. “Is it a lie? Think about that, Claudia.” David stood up then, which made Claudia stand, too, which then made it very easy to usher her out the door of his office and into the hallway . . . where instead of Jerry Ford, David found Bennie Savone waiting for him. Surprisingly, he wasn’t on his cell phone. Instead, he was standing there holding his daughter Sophie’s hand and looking impatient. Claudia just gave him a polite nod and made her way down the hall.

  “You got a minute?” Bennie asked.

  “I’m supposed to be meeting with Mr. Ford,” David said.

  “Yeah, he had to cancel.” Bennie and Sophie sat down inside his office, Bennie in the chair Claudia had just vacated and Sophie on the floor, where she immediately opened up her backpack and started pulling out dolls. Sometimes it was difficult to tell if Bennie was speaking in code or not, though since David had just seen Bennie outside chatting with Jerry, he assumed that it was true that Jerry had to cancel; particularly since neither Bennie nor his daughter were covered in blood.

  Sophie was Bennie’s youngest—she was only five; he had another daughter, Jean, who was thirteen—and, from what David had sussed out during his time at the temple, she was blissfully unaware that her father was a sociopath. She favored her mother in the looks department, which would also serve her well for the long term, and from what he’d experienced with her when the Tikvah Preschool visited the temple every Thursday for lunch, she was an unusually lucid conversationalist.

  It was David’s job to come by and smile at the children, say a few words to each, make them feel like God had just strolled in for a bite, thus ensuring their parents wrote out a big fat check at the end of the month for no other reason than their children were happy. In truth, it was David’s favorite time of the week. For the hour he spent going kid to kid, he didn’t have to pretend. He just sat down next to them and asked them about their day, their life, how things were going and never how things had been, which was different from what he normally dealt with. With the people of parenting age, it was always about their childhood, how someone had fucked them up and only God or David could help them deal with the past, like it was some constant growling beast that lived next door that needed only to be fed and watered and everything would be okay. The senior citizens all wanted to bitch about how things were better back then, and wanted assurances that they were right, that the world had turned to shit but that they, of course, weren’t to blame.

  Sophie seemed mostly preoccupied by her mother’s health—last week, when David sat with her for a moment and chatted her up, she told him that her mommy might need to have a “hystericalectomy,” which David found both oddly charming and terribly sad, not sure if she’d put the words together or if she’d overheard her parents talking.

  David closed his office door and sat down behind his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  “I got a call last night,” Bennie said. “Seems there’s been some developments in Chicago. You know a guy named Fat Monte?” David cut his eyes over to Sophie. She was deep into a conversation between Barbie and Ken about the need for them to get a horse. Bennie didn’t seem to care, which was presumably the subtext he was trying to impart to David.

  “I did,” David said.

  “Pulled his own roots a couple weeks ago,” Bennie said. “Put one in his wife’s head while she slept and then one in his own. Wife’s a vegetable. He’s dead.”

  “I didn’t know he had a wife,” David said. Fat Monte used to be the kind of guy who liked to fuck hookers and strippers, said it was better than having to deal with any bullshit afterward. Fat Monte had a kid living down in Springfield, he remembered that, though he wondered if anyone else did.

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “You know a fed named Hopper?”

  Hopper. That was the Donnie Brasco reject on the hotel bill. “I heard he died,” David said.

  “No such luck,” Bennie said. “Apparently, he’s been looking for you on his own time. Fat Monte spent his last minutes alive talking to him on the phone. He’s got his snout in a bunch of business up there, trying to figure out where you are.”

  “I thought I was dead,” David said.

  “Yeah, well, you are. This Hopper didn’t seem to care about that.”

  Maybe that explained Paul Bruno showing up in ribbons. And if Fat Monte felt enough pressure that he had to kill his own wife—or at least attempt to—and then himself, that meant this guy was digging closer and closer to something Cousin Ronnie wouldn’t like, something that made Fat Monte fear enough for his own life that he cut out the middle man.

  This didn’t make sense to David. Why would the feds be looking for a dead man? And if the feds knew he wasn’t dead, or at least one of them knew, or suspected, then maybe his wife knew, too. Or suspected. Particularly if Chema hadn’t made it back to give her his wallet. He doubted he had. What was it Rabbi Kales had said? Dismembered and burnt. If Chema and Neal were dead, and now Fat Monte was dead, who was left that knew enough about that last night, other than Ronnie? And it still didn’t explain Paul Bruno getting it, unless that was just for talking.

  “I got something to worry about,” David said.

  “Not yet,” Bennie said.

  “That’s wasn’t a question,” David said.

  “This Fat Monte, he a talker?”

  “He’s a company man,” David said. How many falls had Fat Monte taken? Three? Four? Enough to earn some serious credit in Ronnie’s book, plus however many blood jobs he’d done—the kind of stuff David stopped doing years ago, the arm breaking, the eye gouging, all that baseball bat and screwdriver shit—but if he was snitching on the murder of FBI agents, there wasn’t enough credit in the world for that. That was the thing. David just didn’t see Fat Monte doing that on his own accord. Which had to mean this Hopper had enough on Fat Monte to prosecute him for some big-league tickets. “I don’t make him for a snitch, really.”

  “He’s just the kinda guy who pumps one in his wife and then puts his brains on the floor?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Between this shit at the club and this asshole, we may need to do some housekeeping,” Bennie said.

  “Daddy,” Sophie said suddenly, which made David flinch. He’d practically forgotten her. “You said a bad word.”

  Bennie looked down at his daughter. She was still on the floor with her dolls. “Two, actually,” he said.

  “That’s two dollars,” she said.

  “You shaking me down?” Bennie said. Just a dad talking to his baby girl.

  “We have a deal,” she said. She stood up and put one hand on her hip, the other out flat. “Pay up.”

  Bennie pulled out his wallet, thumbed through the bills, came up empty. “All I’ve got is fifties,” he said. �
�You got any small bills, Rabbi?”

  David didn’t have a wallet anymore. For the first time in his life, he was now a money clip guy, because he’d given Chema his wallet to give to Jennifer and then never felt right getting another. His mind turned over the connections: the dead feds, Chema, Fat Monte, all that shit, right down to Bennie’s kid asking for money and Bennie asking David for it. It was some kind of Talmudic parable. What had he read? The treasures which my fathers laid by are for this world, mine are for eternity.

  David peeled a five from his fold and handed it to Sophie. “I heard him say three bad words yesterday,” David said.

  Sophie squealed in delight and then immediately went back to her dolls. Bennie watched her for a few moments, a smile etched into his face like granite. “A real shakedown artist,” he said.

  “It’s in the genes,” David said.

  “On her mother’s side,” Bennie said. “Speaking of which. This housekeeping. You up for a spring cleaning if it comes to that?”

  It wasn’t a question of whether he was up to do his job—he’d do it. The issue here was scale. What Bennie was alluding to, apparently, involved closing the circle even closer . . . which would likely mean the end of Rabbi Kales. Maybe not now. Maybe not next month. But at some point. That would have ramifications beyond the usual, since Rabbi Kales was Bennie’s father-in-law. Bennie also had something on the old man, that much was certain, though Rabbi Kales had never been as candid with David as that day after their first meeting at the Bagel Café, at least not about matters concerning anything other than the Jewish faith, and Bennie hadn’t betrayed any secrets, either.

  The issue with Rabbi Kales knowing the truth about David and about the money being pushed through the temple in all its illegal forms wasn’t that he was likely to suddenly be investigated by the feds and break. No, the issue David had gleaned over the last two months had more to do with something far more common: Rabbi Kales felt profoundly guilty. He was beginning to take stock of his life, and that made a man do stupid things. And now here Bennie was floating out a series of potential problems that vaguely included Rabbi Kales, too, probably just to see how the good Rabbi David Cohen would act, even in front of a kid. David wasn’t sure how much Bennie intuited about Rabbi Kales’s emotional state, though he wouldn’t be surprised if Bennie had the temple bugged, too.

  For fuck’s sake, David thought. That was probably true. Bennie probably knew the entire temple’s secrets, though David couldn’t imagine Bennie had the time to sit around like the FBI, monitoring a wire for the slightest hint of something illegal.

  “Whatever mess needs to be cleaned,” David said, “I can clean it.”

  Bennie sighed. “All this crap,” he said, “you’re the only guy I trust right now. You’re the only guy who can do what needs to be done.”

  Bennie reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two envelopes and placed them on David’s desk. One had the logo from Jerry Ford’s company on it—LifeCore—and the other was plain white. David slit open the envelope from LifeCore and saw that it contained a check for seven thousand dollars, payable directly to the temple’s performing arts fund, along with an official letter from Jerry Ford thanking the temple for its dedication to the arts.

  “Something wrong?” Bennie said.

  “You tell me,” David said. He showed Bennie the check and the letter.

  “Tax write-off for the business,” Bennie said. “Last year, the Wild Horse donated ten grand to outfit the entire Little League. All legal in this town. Isn’t that the rub, Rabbi? Twenty years from now, there won’t be any need for people like us. Everything will be on the level.”

  David opened up the other envelope. Inside was a photocopy of a driver’s license for a man named Larry Kirsch. He had a Las Vegas address, and his fortieth birthday was coming up in April.

  “I need you to clean that up,” Bennie said.

  “Who is he?” David asked, which was stupid. He never asked that question. But this didn’t seem like some random job, since he was the first person Bennie had asked him to kill since Slim Joe, and in light of the shit going down at the club, he knew Bennie was trying to keep his criminal activity on the down-low.

  “He built your face,” Bennie said.

  “I thought you said that guy had an accident.”

  “That was the guy who did your jaw,” Bennie said. “Make it look like a house fire or a cougar attack or something. Last thing we need is another ring on the chain. Know what I’m saying?”

  He did know what he was saying. If there was someone who needed to be killed and it was just some civilian, someone like this doctor, that made it a murder, not a mob hit, and that meant you couldn’t have some monkey do the job, because they’d invariably fuck it up.

  “Just tell me when,” David said.

  “Soon. You do it before Valentine’s, maybe I can surprise Rachel with a cruise or something.” Bennie tipped his head back and closed his eyes, kept them closed while he talked. “I’m sleeping four hours, if I’m lucky, what with Rachel being up half the night. She doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep.”

  “She still not well?” David didn’t know how to properly address this issue, nor did he want to, but it seemed like Bennie wanted to talk about a whole host of things today. The strange thing was that more and more, Bennie was coming into his office for conversations that started first as business and then spiraled into whatever was going on at home. “She still got that problem?” he finally continued.

  “Yeah,” Bennie said. “Two beautiful daughters, I’m not complaining, right? I just thought, down the line, maybe we’d try for one more, see if we could get someone I could throw a football with. Doctor’s telling us no. And then there’s the pain. You can’t just take a Tylenol for what she’s going through, so she’s stoned on Ativan half the time.”

  “He who bears his portion of the burden will live to enjoy the last hour of consolation,” David said.

  Bennie whipped forward, his eyes open now.

  “It’s from the Talmud,” David said. “Moses.”

  “I know what it’s from,” Bennie said. “My father-in-law likes that one. You believe that crap now?”

  “No,” David said. “It’s something I read that stuck with me. I’ve got all kinds of quotes at the ready.”

  That was true, mostly.

  What was also true was that David kept finding himself with these tiny earthquakes of epiphany, particularly when he read about the sanctity of life. He wasn’t particularly well-read in his former life—mostly Sports Illustrated and whatever paperback he picked up at the grocery store to flip through while he waited on a job, though he was particular enough to know that he hated Tom Clancy and anything about the Mafia, so he stayed away from those true crime books, too, since he was also somewhat worried he’d find something he did in one of them—and thus the mere process of digesting all these religious texts was filling his brain with whole new pathways of thought.

  He wasn’t sentimental about most things, and he’d been good about keeping Jennifer and William on the back burner as much as possible; but every now and then he’d read something in the Talmud or the Midrash that he’d immediately be able to apply to his own issues, and suddenly he’d have a way to deal with what he’d previously thought was a problem only he’d ever had. Which, he also recognized, was ludicrous.

  “She wants to take you to lunch,” Bennie said.

  “Who?”

  “Rachel. You listening to me, Rabbi?”

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea,” David said.

  “She needs someone to talk to who isn’t going to just throw pills at her, give her some spiritual advice.”

  “And that person is me?” David said.

  “You’re having lunch with her tomorrow at Grape Street,” Bennie said. “This isn’t a negotiation.” His cell phone rang then, and Bennie looked at the incoming number with something close to disgust. “My lawyer,” he said under his breath, so his daughter wouldn
’t hear. “I gotta take this. You watch Sophie for a minute?”

  “Sure,” David said. Bennie stepped out of the office, and in few seconds David could see him pacing out on the sidewalk, always pacing. He was a man with problems, that much was true, though David sort of admired him, all things considering. He had this long con rolling, he had the strip club, he had this in with the Jews, which gave him some protection in the court of public opinion—even Harvey B. Curran was taking him light in his column lately, talking about how people who go to strip clubs can assume that the bouncers aren’t all a bunch of clergymen and should treat them accordingly and how Bennie Savone was doing so much for the community—and then, well, there was this little girl sitting on the floor talking to her Barbies.

  Over the years David had found it difficult to hate someone who cared about their kids. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t still kill the person, only that it made him wonder who the person was before they got tossed up in a situation with the Family.

  One day, David’s own son, William, would get curious about him. David knew that. And what would he find out? That he was a psychopath. Jennifer would try to tell him otherwise, but the kid, he was smart, sensitive, too, like Jennifer was, and he’d figure out his father was a piece of shit. And then maybe he’d figure out his grandfather was, too, because no good man gets thrown off of the IBM Building. How far back would William take it? To the beginning of Chicago? David’s own father used to tell him that their great-grandfather was one of the guys running liquor when the World’s Fair came to town in 1893, but who knew, really? Maybe William would find out all of it and realize he came from a long line of criminals and he’d become a fed and would one day knock on the temple door to arrest his old man.

  Some things, David thought, kids just didn’t ever need to know about their parents. David moved from behind his desk and sat down on the floor next to Sophie.

  “What are Barbie and Ken up to?” David asked.