Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  Slim Joe smiled. “I might have tried some words on him.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He mostly just cried,” Slim Joe said. “Then he said he wouldn’t tell no one about Bennie. I guess he heard about some job Bennie was planning.”

  David was both confused and surprised. Confused that they’d even attempt to run the body business under the nose of a real rabbi since it seemed far too risky a proposition, and surprised it had taken so long for Bennie to act on what would be a readily apparent situation. If Bennie had something on Rabbi Gottlieb, like he did on Rabbi Kales, it was more likely that Rabbi Gottlieb would have run to the police, so David assumed that whatever Rabbi Gottlieb learned was not because Bennie or Rabbi Kales tried to get him into the business. The poor fucker probably found out about it by being a good and diligent human being. The wrong kind of guy to kill, in David’s opinion.

  “Personally?” Slim Joe said. “I think it had more to do with him touching the kids. That’s what I heard.”

  “He was molesting the kids?”

  “Allegedly,” Slim Joe said. “Bennie told me he had to go.”

  David doubted that. If it had been true, Bennie would have done the ugly himself. One of his kids was in that school, after all. Sounded more like a way to get Slim Joe interested in doing the job. A little motivation beyond the chance to just kill someone. He remembered needing that starting out. “That your first job?” David asked.

  “Yeah,” Slim Joe said. “It was fucked-up at first, but now I feel like I got a taste for it. Hoping you’ll show me some moves down the line. Heard you were the fucking Grim Reaper in Chicago.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “You know,” Slim Joe said, “I got the Internet.”

  “So you know my name?”

  Slim Joe licked his lips, reached over and flipped on the AC, even though it was only about fifty degrees outside, and then didn’t say anything. His silence was answer enough.

  “You tell anyone else my name?”

  “Nah. I keep the omertà like it’s my job, homie.”

  Clearly, David thought. “You didn’t mention me to your mother?”

  “Naw,” he said. “I mean, I told her I met someone who was down with our idea, like, who had some real faith on it, because she knows Bennie thinks it’s bullshit, but she’s been knowing him for all her life and knows he’s all about big-dollar gigs, not this small-business shit.”

  “So,” David said, “at no point did you say my name to your mother.”

  “That’s what I said.” Slim Joe was getting angry now, which meant he was probably lying. He’d have to tell Bennie that. “On her grave, I swear it.”

  “You don’t swear on someone’s grave before they’re dead,” David said. “That’s like asking for them to be killed.”

  “Really?” Slim Joe seemed baffled by this.

  “That’s what the Torah says,” David said, not that he thought that was true, but sometimes, like right before you’re about to kill someone, it’s just easier to lie.

  Ten minutes later, they were pulling down Hillpointe, the temple coming up on the right, the cemetery and funeral home on the left, signs everywhere for the schools, Stars of David poking out around every corner. It was Sunday, so there was no construction going on, but there were a few cars parked in the temple’s lot. Across the street, however, the cemetery was empty, and though there were lights on at the funeral home, there weren’t any cars in the front lot, which was good. This was going to work out fine. David instructed Slim Joe to pull through the service entrance to the funeral home and then back behind the main building, where there was an alley between the home and the actual morgue where the bodies were unloaded. The entire lot was surrounded by a seven-foot brick fence and then rows of full-grown weeping willows, which must have cost a fortune to have planted, though David again had to admire Bennie’s forethought. It looked pretty, sure. More importantly, between the brick wall and the trees, all views were completely obstructed. Sound was duly muted, too.

  “Park here,” David said, “and keep it running.” Slim Joe did as he was told, because that’s what he’d been trained to do, though David could see he found this whole proposition dubious.

  “So, what’s this job?” Slim Joe said. “We gonna rob some graves?”

  “You don’t know about this place?” David asked.

  Slim Joe looked around. “Well yeah,” he said. “Isn’t this Bennie’s big deal?”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah, I mean,” he said, “it’s why I had to off the rabbi and it’s why you’re here, right? Run this game? You thinking we cut out Bennie and go it together? Bonnie and Clyde style?”

  “No disrespect?” David said, and Slim Joe just stared at him, not getting it. Whatever. David had learned enough. Slim Joe knew too much and probably told at least his mother about David, maybe even his real name. He reached over and turned on the stereo until the car filled with the sound of nothing but bass. There were some lyrics in there somewhere, David was sure, but he couldn’t make them out over the dusty-sounding boom-de-boom-de-boom-boom of the bass and the boo-ya of the shotgun fire the song employed as, David assumed, menacing authenticity. Like anyone still used shotguns.

  Slim Joe opened his mouth to say something, and David shoved the TEC-9 in, felt Slim Joe’s front teeth crack and give way, and squeezed the trigger once, putting a bullet right through Slim Joe’s medulla oblongata, David’s preferred sweet spot, and into the headrest. The human skull was the best silencer in the world, and the nice, new ergonomic safety design of modern headrests provided plenty of sound cushion, too. The rap music, however, really did the trick.

  He set the gun back on his lap, took out a small packet of wet-naps from his pocket, and carefully wiped the gun down and then put it in Slim Joe’s hand, made sure his prints were all over it, and then dropped it on the floor. He then took a few moments to wipe down all the surfaces he’d touched, pulled out Slim Joe’s phone and wiped that down, too. It was more than he needed to do, more careful than he needed to be by a mile, since no one would ever find Slim Joe’s body or this car, but still: You were either a professional or you weren’t. No need to be sloppy just because you feel like you’re in control.

  David checked himself in the rearview mirror, made sure there wasn’t any spatter on him—last thing he wanted was to be walking around with bits of Slim Joe stuck to his face—then killed the Mustang’s ignition, took one last look around the car to make sure he hadn’t left anything important sitting about, and then stepped out into the late morning.

  It was brisk outside with a nice breeze, not like the gales that came off the lake back home, and Rabbi David Cohen caught the whiff of cooking meat coming from somewhere in the neighborhood. It was about ten thirty, pretty early for someone to be having a barbecue, though not outside the realm of possibility in a twenty-four-hour town like Las Vegas. Steak and eggs, that’s probably what it was. Yeah, that would work, the idea of red meat finally starting to sound palatable. Hit the whole plate with a little Tabasco, maybe get some breakfast potatoes, maybe a nice cigar, call it brunch.

  David walked across the street to the temple, where his Range Rover was parked, let himself in the back door with his keys, avoided the actual synagogue, where he heard some laughing and talking, like maybe there were a couple of people having a normal conversation, unaware that there was a dead gangster about one hundred yards away, and then entered his office. It was still dusty and dark with all the books stacked up on the shelves and the floor, plus all of Rabbi Gottlieb’s non-personal effects—stacks of probably unread issues of The New Yorker, articles clipped out of the Review-Journal, a corkboard filled with coupons for free car washes. He’d clean the place himself, let a little light in, see what he could get rid of. This was his place of business now, so he didn’t want to get too cozy, because cozy was soon lazy, and he wasn’t ever going to be that.

  He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket
, then dialed out on the office phone.

  “You done?” Bennie asked. Not even a hello.

  “Yeah,” David said. “He’s back behind the mortuary, just like you said.”

  “Anyone see you there?”

  “Only Slim Joe,” David said.

  “Okay,” Bennie said.

  “Listen,” David said. “His mother, she probably knows my name.”

  There was silence for a moment, followed by a long sigh. “Shit,” Bennie said. “He could’ve been running the Wild Horse in a couple years, you know? Dumb fuck.” He paused for what seemed like a long time. “Well, she would have begun to wonder why he wasn’t calling anyway. All right. I’ll send someone out to Palm Springs in the morning, get it taken care of. You good? You need anything?”

  “Steak and eggs,” David said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want some steak and eggs,” David said. He thought for a moment, then added, “and buttermilk pancakes.”

  “Go get yourself some steak and eggs and buttermilk pancakes then,” Bennie said.

  “You want your new rabbi out eating a nonkosher meal?”

  “Jesus,” Bennie said. “You think you’re on a cruise ship? Anything else?”

  “Couple cigars,” David said. “And some breakfast potatoes, with the skin on. Maybe some of that blueberry shit. Compote.”

  “Jesus,” Bennie said. “You should’ve told me this before you did your job, I would have had Joe get this shit together.” David heard Bennie cover the phone and then shout for his wife, Rachel. David couldn’t make out what Bennie said after that, but when he came back on the line, he said, “How you want your steak, Rabbi?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For the first two weeks of December, Rabbi David Cohen woke up each morning at 5 a.m. and ran a few miles on the treadmill while listening to a series of Hebrew language tapes. Rabbi Kales gave him the tapes the day after David took out Slim Joe. David had gone into the office that Monday morning, as he was ordered to do, and Rabbi Kales began saying things to him in Hebrew, and when David didn’t respond, he stopped and examined David’s books, which David still hadn’t completely unpacked, and pulled out a slim workbook titled Modern Hebrew for Children.

  “You didn’t read this?” Rabbi Kales asked.

  “I tried,” David said.

  “What do you mean you tried? You’ve read a hundred books; you’ve read most of the Midrash! And you only tried to read this?”

  David didn’t think he could learn another language. He’d read the first ten or fifteen pages, about the alphabet and phraseology so that kids could figure out how to say prayers and maybe prime them for their bar mitzvahs, and it just wouldn’t stick. He’d never had any facility with Italian, either, though he thought that had more to do with his mother. After his dad was thrown off the building, she didn’t let anyone speak Italian in the house, said it was the sound of his father’s stupidity and malice, the sound that had left her a widow, the sound that left her to raise a son alone.

  “I’m not good with other languages,” David said. “You’re in America, speak English, that’s my opinion. Otherwise, get the fuck out.”

  “Your xenophobia is lovely,” Rabbi Kales said, and when David didn’t respond, he added, “Only Jews speak Hebrew, and even then, in America, not a great many. But a rabbi who doesn’t know passable Hebrew is like a fish that cannot swim.”

  Rabbi Kales gave him a series of cassettes, narrated by what sounded like an entire city of thousand-year-old Jews; he told David it was important for him not just to learn the words, but also to get familiar with the voices.

  At first, David couldn’t find the thread of the talks—the accents were too pronounced—and sometimes he couldn’t tell if the person speaking was a man or a woman, their voices so thick with age all he could hear was syllables. It wasn’t until he realized that whenever they spoke he started to run faster, began to sprint, that it all made sense: He couldn’t understand them because he didn’t want to hear what they were saying.

  Knowing that Rabbi Gottlieb had been tortured just a few feet away from where he was attempting to learn Hebrew began to bug him, which is what got David to start jogging outside.

  Out in nature—in the re-created nature of his gated community—with hills and curves and stones in the road and 7 Series BMWs blocking part of the communal sidewalk, which David was sure was against the HOA rules, he found himself forced to concentrate more on his own footfalls than what was coming into his ears, and the result was that he began to hear the stories, began to understand the old voices, began not to be creeped out by them.

  It was beneficial, the tapes and jogging out in public, Rabbi Kales telling him how he needed to get integrated into society, to not fear his congregants, to start acting like a rabbi, particularly with the holidays coming up, where he’d be asked to take on a more interactive role. Since killing Slim Joe, he’d spent most of his time getting schooled by Rabbi Kales at the temple, meeting a few people here and there, learning functional Hebrew directly from Rabbi Kales and the tapes. It was hard, particularly since Rabbi Kales had him learning two new languages: Hebrew and what the rabbi called “dignified language,” which basically meant he wasn’t allowed to swear anymore. At least not out loud.

  While he jogged, he’d talk back to the tapes, which meant he did little more at first than nod at the other joggers he encountered, or the people rolling into their homes after the conclusion of their 9 p.m.–5 a.m. shifts at the hotel (or casino or strip club or wedding chapel or wherever else all these people seemed to flow in from), the neighborhood as busy at 5 a.m. as it was at 5 p.m. The town kept meth hours, which was unnerving. David had spent so much time over the last fifteen years doing work in the dark that he’d become comfortable alone in the shadows. Here, everyone moved under the cover of darkness. It made David feel unbalanced. Or more unbalanced, anyway.

  So he shouldn’t have been surprised when at five thirty in the morning on the first day of Hanukkah, he came around the corner of Pebble Beach Way, heading toward Sawgrass Street, and found a man in a suit standing there. He was about David’s size—a little over six foot, fit, but not overly so—but looked to be a decade up on David in age. The first thing David thought was that he was a fed. He reminded himself he wasn’t supposed to be paranoid, that no one in Las Vegas was looking for him, and that he didn’t look like Sal anymore, a fact that surprised David every time he looked in the mirror, particularly now that he had a full beard speckled with bits of gray.

  Still, his first inclination was to snap the guy’s neck and keep moving. There was something wrong with this idea, David now understood, even if it seemed simpler than whatever was going to come next.

  The man approached him without any trepidation, already talking, though David couldn’t hear him over the cassette he was listening to. The man didn’t appear to have a gun, or handcuffs, or any kind of walkie-talkie or a cell phone, and was standing next to an idling Mercedes. Not even the best fed got to roll in a Mercedes, so David removed his headphones and tried to look surprised and not murderous while still maintaining enough distance that, if need be, he could act on whatever volition he had. Not paranoid. But not a fucking pussy, either.

  “Sorry, sorry,” the man said. “I didn’t see you had phones on.” He extended his hand, and David shook it. “Jerry Ford. Like the president, except I’ve got all my hair, at least for now.”

  David didn’t respond. He was trying to figure out why this man had been lying in wait for him. He looked vaguely familiar in the same way people in dreams look vaguely familiar.

  “I live right here,” Jerry said, when the pause became awkward, “and have been meaning to come out and chat with you. Seen you every morning and just didn’t make the connection before. Sort of expected the whole mishegas with the crap hanging off of your clothes and whatnot.”

  The butter-yellow house was three blocks from David’s, and the Mercedes—a butter-yellow convertible—registered, too.<
br />
  “Not crap,” Jerry kept on, “never crap, God, but, what do you call that stuff that the Hasids wear around their waist?”

  “Tzitzit,” David said. Rabbi Kales had warned him that once people knew he was a rabbi, they’d have all kinds of questions, the pressure of which made David stay up every night and, even before the jogging, wake up early every morning. It was the same schedule he kept back home, anyway, just with more reading.

  Jerry snapped his fingers. “That’s it, that’s it,” he said. “I don’t know why I was expecting the full black getup with the . . . how do you pronounce that again?”

  “Sit-sis,” David said.

  “Oh, like you’re telling your sister to take a seat, right?”

  “Right.” David wasn’t positive this was correct. He was positive, however, that he had the authority to be wrong and not be challenged, which he rather liked.

  “I don’t know why I thought that,” Jerry said. “Rabbi Gottlieb, Rabbi Kales, they’re both like you, right?”

  “I never knew him,” David said. “Rabbi Gottlieb.”

  “Helluva nice guy,” Jerry said, in a way that made David doubt the sentiment. “Never took him for a drunk. Never took him to be much of a boater, either, but then who knows, right? Private lives of rabbis must be a thing of great mystery.”

  “I’m sorry,” David said. That was something Rabbi Kales had imparted to him lately: Start conversations by saying I’m sorry, and people will assume you’re apologizing for being very busy, even when you’re just trying to get away from them. Then just say but, and if you’re lucky, the person on the other end of the conversation will get to their point or leave you be.

  “No, no, I’m sorry, you’re a busy man, I’m sure,” Jerry said. “And I just ambushed you on your run like some kind of criminal. I keep odd hours, like you, and thought this might be the one chance I had to chat with you for a minute, finish a business conversation I never got to finish with Rabbi Gottlieb.” Jerry fished a business card out of his suit jacket pocket and handed it to David. “I own my own biomedical business, and I’ve been trying to get into a conversation with the funeral home at the temple, where, it should be noted, I am a member in excellent standing.”