Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

“They’re going to clean houses,” Sophie said, “just like you and Daddy.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rabbi David Cohen never returned to the scene of a crime. It’s how people ended up getting fingered by previously forgetful witnesses or caught on surveillance cameras. And yet here he was pulling into the same parking spot Slim Joe had used in front of the tanning salon on his last day alive. Of course, no one had bothered to report Slim Joe missing, since he was the kind of guy most people were happy to not see again—and David never bothered to ask Bennie about Slim Joe’s mother, but it was safe to assume she was on a permanent vacation now.

  Since Bennie had instructed David to never set foot inside a casino on account of their facial recognition software, David couldn’t really complain about Rachel Savone’s desire to meet at a neighborhood restaurant like Grape Street even if it happened to be in the same shopping center as Slim Joe’s favorite tanning salon. It was one of those restaurants David would never visit on his own—he had a standing policy that forbade him from ever going into a joint that had a chalkboard outside, and this place, he saw when he got to the front door, had two, one with a list of the day’s specials, another with a list of appropriate wine to go along with each special.

  David walked back to his car and, as discreetly as possible, removed the butterfly knife he kept in his sock, and put it in the glove box. No need to tempt fate, particularly since the idea of spending an hour anywhere talking to Bennie’s wife without some kind of medication—be it in pill or liquid form—had him considering ways to potentially kill himself, not to mention anyone who might make him, something he was always wary of when out in public, even though he still didn’t recognize himself in the mirror.

  This all had the potential to turn black quickly. But before he could make a break for it, Rachel pulled up in her little silver Mercedes convertible, the top down even though it was only about sixty degrees outside. She was on the phone, and when she saw David she waved at him but didn’t hang up.

  David watched her for a few moments, tried to decide if he found her attractive or if it was just that he hadn’t spent any time alone with a woman—in a physical way—in almost a year. It was easy for him to dismiss these thoughts at the temple, since most of the women there were so wracked with worry or guilt or some kind of existential crisis that he wasn’t able to look at them as women at all. They were just bundles of problems clothed in expensive leisure wear.

  With Rachel, though, David felt a small sense of familiarity. It wasn’t that she reminded him of Jennifer exactly. As far as he could tell, they were completely different from one another in almost every plausible way—Jennifer would no sooner drive around in a convertible Mercedes while talking on a cell phone than she would ride on the back of a motorcycle with her ass hanging out—except in one sense: They were both married to bad men.

  It took a special kind of woman to decide that hitching up with a mob hit man and freelance professional killer (or, in Rachel’s case, a Mafia boss who probably didn’t kill a lot of people with his own hands anymore but likely had done a fair share of that sort of thing back when they were dating) was a fun way to spend not merely a few dates but also the rest of her life.

  Maybe it was exciting at first, when everyone was young and stupid and watched a lot of dumb movies, but once things got solid, once bills came due and there were kids and broken radiators and car payments and funerals, along with all the other tiny disasters that made up the daily life of a married couple, you had to want it. You had to call what you had love. You had to look at that person in bed next to you and respect him, even if you knew the truth about what he was.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Rachel said when she finally reached David. “It’s been a crazy day.” She was wearing a light blue sweater set, black trousers that widened around her ankles, so that David couldn’t see her shoes, no sunglasses. She had on the same jewelry she always wore—diamond earrings, the simple gold necklace, the nice wedding ring he’d first noticed at the Hanukkah carnival—and carried an expensive-looking handbag.

  “I just got here,” David said.

  “If you’re anything like my father,” she said, “you’ll just love this place.”

  “What about Mr. Savone?”

  “Oh, he won’t come here,” she said. “He won’t go anywhere near a wine bar.”

  After ordering, it took Rachel twenty minutes to finally address the purpose of their meeting, filling up the time with idle chatter about the temple before letting them both get in a few bites of their Caesar salads. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just sitting here babbling. You must get so tired of listening to women babble.”

  “It’s fine,” David said, because it was, for the most part. She hadn’t yet asked him to solve anything, which was different than every other conversation he’d had over the last two months.

  “No, no, it really isn’t,” she said. “When my father was your age, he didn’t have to deal with what you have to deal with. He could come home at the end of the day and not feel like he’d been party to every single injustice of the world, just the ones facing the Jews.” She took a sip of wine—she ordered a bottle of Merlot immediately upon sitting down, and most of it was gone—and then stared at David for a long moment. “Why don’t you have a wife yet, Rabbi, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Married to the job,” David said. It was a line he’d used about ten thousand times since taking his position at the temple, every young mother in the place wanting to set him up with a single friend, every old-timer wanting to introduce him to their daughters or granddaughters.

  “Everyone says Las Vegas is a great place to be single,” she said, “but I don’t believe that. It can be pretty lonely if you’re looking for a girl to start a family with.”

  “Well, that’s not my priority right now.” David tried to smile at Rachel, but it didn’t feel natural. It never felt natural. It wasn’t that his face still felt like a mask, though it did; rather, it was that he’d spent so many years trying not to smile, growing up so hard, anything that was happy had the elastic snap of shit, so it was easier to just treat everything evenly. Once he got in the business, he didn’t want to be one of those assholes who ended up with a nickname like “Smiley” or “Gums.”

  “If it becomes one,” she said, “let me know.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “My father says you’re an excellent young rabbi,” Rachel said.

  “Your father is a kind man.”

  “My father can be an asshole,” Rachel said, without a trace of anger, “but I love him.” She took another sip of her wine and then refilled her glass with the rest of the bottle. “I’m sorry we haven’t had the chance to talk much, because everyone says you’re an incredible listener. Claudia Levine thinks you’re wonderful.”

  “Yes, well,” David said.

  This got Rachel to smile. “My father teach you to say that?”

  “It’s taught on the first day of rabbinical school,” he said, and they both laughed.

  “This feels good,” Rachel said. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”

  “If you could just laugh and cry in a single sound,” David said.

  “Maimonides?” Rachel asked.

  “Springsteen,” David said. This made Rachel laugh again. David took a sip of his wine, felt his face get a little warm, felt the muscles in his shoulders relax a bit. It wasn’t like drinking Scotch, but at this point, it was better than drinking water. Maybe things would turn out okay today.

  Three tables over, David saw a familiar face. “Is that Oscar Goodman?” he asked.

  Rachel looked over her shoulder. “Everyone comes here,” she said.

  “Looks like he’ll be mayor,” David said, trying to make conversation, but also trying to figure out just how connected the Savones were.

  “It will be good for the city,” she said. “He was on the board at Beth Shalom for years, so he knows what it’s like to work with intractable ideol
ogues.”

  So that answered that.

  “What has my husband told you about me?” Rachel was still smiling, but David could see that something had hardened inside of her, that she’d moved on to the part of the conversation she’d been dreading, too. He found that to be somewhat of a relief. For once, even ground.

  “Nothing, really,” David said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I find that hard to believe. He spends more time with you than he does with anyone, except for his lawyer.”

  “What we talk about is . . .,” David began, but Rachel waved him off.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “It’s confidential.”

  “Actually,” David said, “it’s mostly business related. Your husband has been very good to the temple. I really can’t thank him enough.” These were sentences David had practiced a thousand times in preparation for anyone asking about his relationship with Bennie Savone. “We’ve also had many interesting talks about his faith, which, as I’m sure you know, is a constant challenge.”

  Rachel shook her head and laughed again. “Rabbi,” she said, “I appreciate that you’re trying to be polite, but you don’t need to be. I know who my husband is.”

  “He’s said you’re unhappy,” David said.

  “Understatement of the year,” she said, “and we’re only in January, so maybe I should include last year, too.”

  “And that you’re not well, physically.”

  This time Rachel didn’t laugh. “I’m glad he’s aware of these things. I’m glad he can talk to you. It would be nice if he could talk to me.”

  “He’s a complicated person,” David said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  “He’s not complicated,” she said, “he’s a liar. There’s a difference, if you don’t mind me saying, Rabbi.”

  Thankfully, their waiter arrived and dropped off their lunch. David ordered the chicken Marsala on Rachel’s recommendation, though now he realized he probably wasn’t going to get a chance to enjoy it since Rachel was already dabbing at her eyes in a futile attempt to save her makeup from the tears. He took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket—the advantage of wearing a nice suit every day, David now realized, was that you were forced to be a gentleman around crying women, even if you didn’t want to be—and slid it across the table.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Look at me. Crying in the middle of a restaurant.”

  “The Talmud tells us that even when the gates of heaven are shut to prayer, they are open to tears,” David said.

  “I’m going to leave him,” she said.

  David looked around the restaurant, tried to figure out if there was any way Bennie might have bugged it. The guy behind the bar pouring wine into tiny tasting glasses, maybe he was wired up. Maybe the waiter. Maybe Oscar Goodman, walking out right then, was headed off to report directly to Bennie.

  “I’m sorry,” David said. “Did you say were considering leaving Mr. Savone?”

  “Not considering it, doing it,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. My father, he won’t listen, tells me to just suffer through it. I can’t talk to my girlfriends about it. I can’t talk to anyone, really, except for you.” She reached across the table and took David’s hand. Everyone always wanted to touch his hand, as if whatever wisdom he might have could be delivered through the sweat of his palm, which, in this case, might have been closer to the truth, since David was certain he was sweating like a Baptist preacher. “I’m not a young woman anymore, Rabbi. Don’t I deserve to be happy? Don’t I deserve to be loved by someone capable of love?”

  “You’re still a young woman,” David said.

  “I’m thirty-nine,” she said. “I’ll be forty in six months. That will make it official.”

  “I think you need to consider all of your options here,” he said.

  “That’s what I’m doing,” she said. She covered his hand with both her hands now, making a minifurnace that was heating his entire body.

  David examined the table for something sharp, but the waiter had taken the steak knives from the table. He didn’t know what he was looking to cut, anyway, other than maybe his own arm off at the wrist. At this point, he could probably do the job with a spoon.

  “You have to consider your children,” David said, figuring that was a good place to start, a good way station for Rachel while he figured out what he was going to do with this information.

  “They wouldn’t miss him,” Rachel said. “Sophie might, I guess, but Jean knows what kind of man her father is. Thirteen going on forty-five, that one. I’m not going to wait another ten years for Sophie to get the picture, Rabbi. I can’t do that.”

  David flipped through his mental Rolodex looking for some kind of Talmudic interpretation of divorce that would make Rachel realize the error of her ways. Not that the Talmud forbade divorce—the Jews were pretty forthright on it, much to David’s surprise, allowing that a life in a bad marriage was no life at all and that a divorce, while not a great option, was nonetheless an inevitable one. And this wasn’t even a modern interpretation.

  Still. This was not acceptable.

  “Have you thought about marriage counseling?”

  “He’s not the marriage counseling type,” she said.

  “Yet you think he’s the divorce court type.” Rachel flinched in her seat, and David realized he had slipped into his old voice, that his cadence was off. Shit. Still, it gave him an opening to remove his hand from her grip. He cleared his throat. Took a sip of wine. Grabbed a waiter, asked for a knife. Cut a piece of chicken, dipped it in the Marsala sauce, put it in his mouth, chewed as deliberately as he could . . . and all the while, Rachel stared at him in something like muted wonder.

  “Maybe I can’t divorce him,” Rachel said, her voice sounding resigned. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t leave him.”

  “Do you think you’ll just run off? You think you can do that?” He cut another piece of chicken, swirled some pasta onto his fork, swallowed it all down without even chewing. There was that voice again. “How will you survive?” Dammit. “Financially. How will you survive financially if you just run off? That’s something to consider.” Another bite of chicken. A gulp of wine.

  “Well,” she said, “eventually I’ll inherit the funeral home from my father.” She sat back from the table and exhaled. “It’s not a business I’m interested in, but it’s not like there’s ever a down season, if my father is to be believed.”

  “Rabbi Kales is a long way from being dead,” David said, though he wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Was it possible that Bennie didn’t know this salient bit of information concerning the funeral home? David didn’t imagine Rachel would want to be the owner of a funeral home that was laundering money . . . and bodies . . . for the Mafia. And then there was the new tissue business . . . and whatever else David and Bennie could dream up. More importantly, it was the cash cow that was going to get David back to Chicago, back to Jennifer and William, back to Sal Cupertine.

  Oh, he thought, this will not do.

  “Of course, of course,” she said. “But you know he’s been slipping, mentally, for a while now. I’m sure he hides it well when he’s at work, but, Rabbi, there’s a reason you’re here now, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” David said.

  “My point is, my father is not going to be able to run the business for much longer regardless,” she said. “I’ll need to get power of attorney, so if need be, I can step in to handle his affairs. I don’t want to, but if my husband won’t support his children, what choice would I have?”

  That Rachel wasn’t aware her father was not running the funeral home, even now, was a concern. If she began digging—or had a lawyer start digging—that would not be good. David didn’t like the idea that he might need to kill Bennie’s wife. He also didn’t like the idea of going to prison.

  “Let me think for a moment,” he said.

  “Of course, of course,” Rachel said.

  David
had learned that if you really wanted to get people to listen to you, it was important to pretend that you needed a moment to listen to God before coming up with a proper answer to something. David did this by closing his eyes and breathing slowly. Except when he closed his eyes, he wasn’t talking to God as much as he was trying to figure out how not to choke the life from the person sitting in front of him.

  In this case, he was trying to decide if it would be better, all things considered, to simply follow Rachel out to the parking lot, and as she was walking up to her car, shoot her once in the back of the head. Except he didn’t have a gun on him. Just that knife, which was now in the car. He could stab her in the throat with a fork, but that felt too personal, and, generally, people tended to notice a person geysering blood from her neck in the middle of a crowded parking lot.

  And, he didn’t kill women. It seemed like an irredeemable trait, even among a series of what would normally be highly irredeemable traits. Yeah, the Russians and the Kosher Nostra in Chicago did it, but they did it for reasons completely unlike this one. This was an issue of preservation, not to collect a debt, which, actually, sounded like a better reason on the face of things. But, still. He had to take that option off the table. What else was there?

  Reason, he supposed. He could attempt to reason with Rachel. Or maybe he could lead her to see the folly of her ways by pointing out how fucked she was if she even thought she could walk out on Bennie Savone.

  “It was my understanding,” David said, his eyes still closed, “that your husband helped your father purchase the funeral home. Is that correct?”

  “That was years ago,” she said. “That debt has been paid, I’m sure.” David couldn’t tell if there was any sarcasm in Rachel’s response or if he was looking for . . . something, anything, to get an idea of what Bennie had on Rabbi Kales.

  He opened his eyes and tried to be as soothing as possible, tried to make Rachel change her mind based solely on answering simple questions. It was a tactic he learned from some old hard knocks in the Family when they tried to get information out of people before whacking them. “Are you certain?”