Gangsterland

by Tod Goldberg

  Rachel exhaled deeply, again. “I guess I’m not,” she said. “Bennie isn’t exactly forthcoming with these sorts of matters.” She paused. “I guess I could ask my father, but he’s already advised me that I’m being foolish, for any number of reasons, even considering this. But you understand, don’t you, Rabbi Cohen? I have a right to be in a marriage that I find fulfilling, don’t I?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Let me ask you a question. Do you think any of this has to do with your recent medical problems?”

  “No,” she said . . . too quickly in David’s opinion.

  “Because I know how going through the change of life can make one start to reevaluate one’s choices from a place that is more emotional than reasonable.”

  “How do you know that, Rabbi? Do you have a lot of experience going through the ‘change of life,’ as you put it?”

  “Talmud tells us to look not at the pitcher but at what it contains,” David said.

  “It contains bullshit and recrimination and lies,” Rachel said. She flagged down a waiter and asked for another bottle of wine, this time a Chianti. “Rabbi, I’d be curious what you know about your body betraying you. Do you know I’m going to need a hysterectomy? Do you know that? Don’t you think that I’d like my loving husband around when I was going through that? Doesn’t that sound reasonable to you?”

  “Lower your voice,” David said. This time, he used his old voice intentionally.

  The waiter came by and refilled Rachel’s glass and then left the bottle in the center of the table. Rachel picked it up and examined the label. “Last good thing that came out of Italy,” she said quietly. “Do you know where I went to get married?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Florence,” she said. “This was 1982. I was twenty-two, and Bennie, he was a big shot, thirty years old, money falling out of his pockets, that’s what I thought, anyway. But you know, when you’re young, someone with a thousand dollars seems rich. I wanted to get married at Temple Isaiah when it was still down on Oakey, but because Bennie wasn’t Jewish, they made a real stink about it. My father was a rabbi there, so he didn’t care, obviously, but the board wouldn’t let it happen for political reasons, which is just a fancy way of saying they didn’t want to have Bennie’s family showing up in photos inside the temple, not when one of their members was about to run for the Senate. So Bennie says, Fuck them. He said that to me. I remember it clear as day. He said, Fuck them. So he flew my family, all of my friends, all of his friends and family, plus anyone who was a member of Isaiah that wanted to come, flew everyone to Florence, and I got married at the Great Synagogue of Florence.”

  “That sounds like a good time,” David said.

  “It was,” she said. “But it took me until recently to realize he didn’t do it out of a sense of justice, or even to make me happy. He did it out of spite. Maybe I should have seen that back then, but what do you know when you’re twenty-two?”

  “You think you know everything,” David said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “That’s so right, Rabbi. You think you know everything. You think your whole life is going to be what it is at that very moment, can’t imagine anything ever being different, can’t imagine you’ll ever feel differently about the things you don’t care about, if that makes sense. A year later, my mother would be dead from ovarian cancer, and all of a sudden, I realize how young I am. That all I want is my mommy. So here I am now, with these two girls, and I’m realizing my entire marriage is based mostly on spite. That is not a pleasant experience, Rabbi. I don’t want my daughters to look back and think that their mother let them live a horrible life.”

  The problem David faced on a semiregular basis when talking to his congregants was that he just couldn’t relate to their issues, but Rachel’s problem was one that David had become intimate with since the night he found himself in a frozen truck filled with meat and nothing but time to think. It was hard, after having a kid, not to start thinking about your legacy. Though, admittedly, David hadn’t really started contemplating what he was leaving behind for William until he was already gone, which was strange since he’d been thinking more and more about his own father, and his trip off that building.

  Still, he couldn’t very well just let Rachel sneak out in the middle of the night, particularly since he was pretty certain he’d be the one who’d have to chase her down.

  “My advice,” David said, “is that you need to look inside yourself first and see precisely what you’re dissatisfied with. I think you may find, ultimately, that your husband is not at fault here. Let the Torah speak to you.”

  Rachel pushed her plate of uneaten bow-tie pasta and vegetables to the side of the table so she could make room for her purse, which she turned over and dumped onto the table. Among the items was a Saturday night special, a little silver-and-black Lorcin .380, a piece of shit, really, mostly a paperweight.

  “Do you see this?” she said.

  “The gun?”

  “Of course the gun,” she said. “Why aren’t you freaking out?”

  “It’s not pointed at me,” David said. “And I’m not scared to die.” He picked up the gun and examined it on his lap. Nice weight to it, actually, though David couldn’t believe Bennie allowed his wife to leave the house with anything less than a nine. Then it occurred to him: He probably didn’t even know she was packing . . . and that was probably the point of this little exercise. David wrapped the gun in his napkin, wiped it down, and then set it back on the table with the napkin on top of it. “It would be a good idea to put the safety on, otherwise you might kill your purse.”

  “I have to carry a gun because of my husband, Rabbi. Today, I’m going to pick up Jean and take her to softball practice, and I’m going to have a killing machine in my purse. Because of him. And because I think people will try to hurt me when I’m with him,” she said. “Or hurt my children. So don’t tell me this is somehow my fault. Okay?”

  Half the restaurant was already eavesdropping on their conversation now, never mind all of the staff. Peopled tended to notice the word “gun,” and if the restaurant had anything approaching halfway decent lighting, they would have all been under the tables after she dumped the .380 next to the salt and pepper. “I’m a mess. Jesus. I’m a mess,” Rachel said quietly. She patted her face with powder from her compact, which made it look like she was trying to hide something. “How’s this?”

  “Better,” he said.

  Rachel gathered herself, even tried to smile. “I’m not asking for your permission, Rabbi, I’m asking for your guidance. So please, Rabbi, please, give me some idea of hope.”

  He needed to get out of this conversation and this restaurant. “Okay,” he said. He was in an absurd situation, he recognized. Here he was, a man who’d spent his entire life killing people, sitting across from a woman with a gun, attempting to convince her that the world was a safe and good place, even in the face of what he knew was a terrible decision on her part, a terrible decision that could ruin his own life even more. “Your husband is not trying to hurt you,” David said calmly.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because if he wanted to hurt you,” David said, again, calm as can be, “my understanding is that you’d already be hurt.” Rachel’s eyes widened, but David kept staring into them, hoping she’d get the subtext he was trying to impart, without revealing too much about himself in the process. “So my idea for hope is this: Live your life for yourself and your children, but do not put yourself in a position where your husband is forced to act . . . irrationally.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rachel said. “He’s gotten to you, hasn’t he?”

  “No one has gotten to me,” David said.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Mrs. Savone,” David said, “I have never been more honest than I am right now. I’m a rabbi, I’m not an idiot. I get the same newspaper as you. It’s all right there.”

  Rachel stared at David for a long time, then chuckled to herse
lf. “I should have seen it,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it.”

  “Seen what?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.” Rachel looked at her watch. “I need to go,” she said, a smile wide across her face now, as if she’d discovered something particularly fantastic. “I have an appointment.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” David said.

  “I was going to get Botox, if you must know,” she said. She stood up and came around to David’s side of the table, kneeled down next to him so he could really see her face. “Do you see these lines around my mouth?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You are a liar.” She touched him lightly on the face, just under his left ear, where his beard still didn’t grow correctly. “You almost can’t see your scars anymore.” She let her hand linger on his cheek for just a moment, then smiled again, this time in a way that seemed terribly unhappy. “Dr. Kirsch did my face, too,” she said.

  That afternoon, David sat on a chaise lounge out by his pool, smoked a cigar, and tried to figure out the best way to escape. It had warmed up into the low seventies, the sky was a deep blue, and in the distance he could hear the sound of children laughing.

  David got up from the chaise lounge and walked the perimeter, tried to gather his thoughts into a straight line, see if he might be able to make some decisions. If Fat Monte was really dead—and David didn’t doubt the veracity of the information Bennie had given him, only that sometimes people in the Family who were presumed dead ended up alive—that was one less impediment to his returning home, or at least one less person who might hurt Jennifer and William. Not that Ronnie wouldn’t be happy to farm that out to the Gangster 2-6, or just some tweaks willing to kill a family for a grand a head, maybe less.

  No, if he wanted to get back to Chicago and be assured of his family’s safety, he’d need to have Ronnie put out to pasture. Because the more he thought about it, the more David began to suspect that none of this was an accident, that there’d been a plan in place to get Sal in trouble, that preyed on his desire for a better life, a dangling carrot that moved him out of the shadows (where he frankly enjoyed working) and into what amounted to a business meeting with the FBI. Sal Cupertine should have died that day. Four against one. But once he was out on the streets, Ronnie must have moved on to plan B.

  Jewish custom said to meet all sorrow standing up, and that’s what David was trying to do. Ronnie clearly wanted him gone, which meant there was something he didn’t want him to learn, something that would eventually matter enough to David that he’d kill his own cousin.

  Problem was that Ronnie was nearly impossible to get to. He was never alone, even out in public, kids on the street running up to get their pictures taken with the used-car salesman/gangster from the TV. And no one local would be dumb enough to take the contract, not even one of the scads of crooked Chicago cops, half of whom were on Ronnie’s book, anyway.

  David was getting way ahead of himself, indulging in the same fantasy he’d been having for months now. He needed to handle Las Vegas first, then worry about Chicago. Except for one thing: He needed to get some money to Jennifer, let her know somehow he was still alive without tipping off the feds. Ah, the feds. Jeff Hopper, another dead man that was suddenly alive. Another person he needed to handle.

  A brown Southwest plane flew overhead, and David traced its path as it descended down toward McCarran Airport. Every forty-five minutes, the same brown plane would pass overhead, either coming or going, David wondering if anyone ever bothered to look at what was really underneath them: a fetid sunburnt bowl of dust in the middle of nothing. Just another Pleasure Island, filled with liars and thieves.

  Money. That was the first order of business. He had to figure out a way for Jennifer to get a good sum, in case Ronnie cut her off, because now that Monte was dead, he’d be tightening the noose in order to keep her quiet.

  Problem was, he didn’t quite know how to get her money in a way that wouldn’t be tracked. This would take some finessing.

  What David also knew for certain was that Dr. Kirsch needed to disappear, though David couldn’t very well make it look like an accident, not with Rachel aware of . . . something. And what did she know? That he’d had plastic surgery? What did that prove? Nothing. Nothing at all.

  Except Rachel Savone knew her husband was in the Mafia. And now she thought she knew something about him, something that wasn’t possible to prove, because there was no David Cohen. He didn’t exist. Yeah, he had all the right papers, but how far would those papers take him? If Bennie wouldn’t let him go inside a casino for fear of the facial recognition cameras, he sure wasn’t about to go into the airport or even out of Las Vegas.

  David needed to have a conversation with Rabbi Kales. A candid, open conversation where David made it clear that he had no problem killing him unless Rabbi Kales let him know what Bennie had on him. And then, if need be, he’d handle Rachel, too. He wasn’t about to let Bennie know about her plans, however, because then it would be an order to make her disappear. No, first, he’d make sure the funeral home was willed properly, see that it was left to the temple, not to Rachel, and if that meant he did it with a gun to Rabbi Kales’s head, then so be it.

  But how long would it take for the feds to start sniffing up the freeway from the strip club and into Bennie’s personal life? How long before they saw how much money he’d donated to the temple? How long before there was a subpoena to look at the temple’s books? David figured that Bennie was smart enough to avoid that sort of impropriety—he was sure of it—but that didn’t mean the feds wouldn’t want to eventually sit down and talk to him just to make Bennie sweat.

  David went inside the house and came back out a few minutes later with a yellow legal pad, a ballpoint pen, a glass of Macallan 30 year, and his copy of the Torah. He made a list of all the people he needed to deal with locally—including, eventually, the bouncers who’d beaten the tourist in the first place, since they were out on bail pending trial, and who knew what they might say—then ripped off the page and made a list of all the people in Chicago he needed to deal with, with Jeff Hopper’s name on the top. He tore that page off the pad and folded both it and the Las Vegas list together and shoved them in the Torah, so he’d have easy access to them, a reminder as to why he was doing all this in the first place.

  He then made a short list of all the materials he’d need: guns, some decent knives in case he decided to go that route, steel-toe boots, gloves, bleach, some S.O.S pads, hollow-point bullets, a length of rope . . . It had been a long time since he’d put together a decent murder kit, so he had to remind himself of all the important instruments he liked to keep nearby.

  Which reminded David of one other important detail. He went back inside and came back with the bottle of Macallan, the Yellow Pages, and the telephone. He poured himself another drink and flipped through the phone book, finally landing on the listing for building supply outfits. The first one listed was A & A Construction Supply, which David thought was cheating, since he was sure there was no one there actually named A or A, so he scanned down the page until he landed on Kerby’s Machine Tools Direct & Rental. The store was located out on the other side of Craig Road, about ten miles away. There wasn’t much development out that way yet—a casino, of course, and an overpriced movie theatre, but no decent houses, which was perfect, since no decent houses meant the Jews weren’t thick on the ground. Last thing David wanted was to run into one of the Israelites while he was busy doing his other job. He’d practically screwed the pooch with Rachel today, and that was when he was at least quasi-prepared.

  Kerby’s answered on the first ring.

  “Yes,” David said, “I’d like to rent a portable foundry.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rural southern Illinois had become one blurred grain silo and field of dirty snow. Jeff Hopper sat in the backseat of a black Chevy Suburban driven by Senior Special Agent Kirk Biglione, marking time by the distance between cities he
’d never visit—Pontiac to Normal to Lincoln and beyond. A person could hide out here forever.

  “You comfortable back there, Hopper?” Biglione asked. Jeff didn’t respond. “Be happy you’re not in cuffs,” Biglione said, which made the guy sitting next to him up front, an agent named Lee Poremba whom Hopper worked organized crime with years previous in Kansas City, turn and glare. Turns out no one found Kirk Biglione amusing.

  They’d been driving south on I-55 for nearly five hours, headed for Kochel Farms, located between Divernon and Farmersville, the middle of the middle of nothing. The plan was to meet up with the U.S. Marshals to serve a warrant right around kickoff of the Super Bowl, hopefully ensuring that no standoff would occur, the FBI always preferring to do their raids on days when they knew family would be around—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Super Bowl Sunday—or when they knew even the worst dirtbag on the planet was likely to be home sitting on his sofa. Not that Jeff believed they’d roll up on the place and find the farm’s owner eating chips and salsa with Sal Cupertine.

  Kochel Farms had been owned by a man named Mel Kochel Jr. since 1979. The farm and the thirty thousand head of cattle that were routinely slaughtered to fill up grocery stores and fast-food restaurants around the country had been around much longer than that, started by Mel Sr. back in 1959, but the day-to-day operations of the farm had been transferred recently to Mel Jr.’s son Trey.

  There wasn’t a hint of criminal activity related to the Kochel family, unless one considered Trey’s speeding ticket in 1992 an act of domestic terrorism. In the weeks since Fat Monte’s suicide, every conceivable avenue into the Family’s involvement with the farm had been investigated, and all the FBI had been able to prove—and even this could be met with some reasonable doubt—was that one of the Family’s bars in Bridgeport, the Sidewinder, occasionally bought ground beef from a distributer who occasionally got meat from Kochel Farms. In essence, the only relationship was one of mere happenstance.