by Tod Goldberg
“Well,” Sarah said, then poured Kristy a glass of Johnnie Walker Black, even though Kristy hadn’t ordered it, “you fake it better than all these assholes.”
HOW DO YOU dress to pick out your final resting place? Kristy opted for jeans and a black sweater, the same necklace she’d been wearing since her sixteenth birthday, a pair of white Chuck Taylors. Can you bring your dog with you? Kristy decided yes and put a leash on her black-and-white cocker spaniel, Bingbing. What about your gun? Kristy never went anywhere without her gun. When she pulled up in front of Temple Beth Israel, however, and saw Rabbi David Cohen standing out front holding a tiny red notebook and wearing a tailored black suit with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, she had second thoughts about the gun. Because the rabbi looked . . . concerned. Which is when Kristy realized Rabbi Cohen probably understood what might compel someone who’d been attending his temple for only a few months to suddenly inquire about a cemetery plot. Why anyone would, for that matter.
But wasn’t that the job of a rabbi? To take on the weight of your concerns? To receive your pain and reflect it back in hope? To meet a dying thirty-six-year-old on a Wednesday morning in Las Vegas and show her the fanciest dirt he could offer? And she was so worried that some mob button man might walk up behind her and put one in her ear that she needed her nine? What did it matter? She was already dead.
So Kristy parked, took her gun from her ankle holster, slid it into the glove box before Rabbi Cohen made it to her car. She rolled down her window.
“Do you mind if I bring my dog?” Kristy asked.
“Of course not,” Rabbi Cohen said. He put his hand through the window, let Bingbing sniff him. “How old is he?”
“Nine or ten,” Kristy said. She got out, let Bingbing bound out after her. “The vet thinks he could be as old as eleven. I got him from that shelter over on Charleston. I’ve only had him for six months. I just can’t imagine who would give up an old dog.” Not that she was surprised by how many awful people there are in this world.
“You never know how bad someone else’s life has been, what causes them to make decisions we might think are deplorable, but which, to them, are the only reasonable options.” Rabbi Cohen stared at her for a moment. He had brown eyes with flecks of green in them, a thick beard, and she saw that he had unusual scarring around his eyes, like maybe he’d been in a fire as a child. Maybe he’d fallen from something. His face had the quality of a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces jammed into the wrong spots, like she used to do when she was a kid, too frustrated to make it all work out right. “So,” he continued, “instead we should celebrate the mazel that brought you to Bingbing.”
“Well,” she said, “that is an optimistic worldview, Rabbi.”
“You have a choice in this life,” he said, simply.
For the next twenty minutes, while they walked through the first phase of the cemetery, beyond the founding members of the temple who’d already slipped this life—the Lippincotts, the Goldblatts, the Siegels, the other Siegels, the other-other Siegels, the Winers, the Wolfs, and a seemingly endless line of Kales—Rabbi Cohen told her about the various pricing options. He started at $2,300 for a single plot with a standard stone—in what looked to Kristy to be an already pretty busy part of town, as it were, three crews of men shoveling dirt at various spots in the field, a backhoe at each spot, which might explain the cost, since it looked like an expensive operation—and up to $10,000 for a more elaborate plot in a more desirable location.
“What does that mean?” Kristy asked.
“Have you ever been to the penthouse of the Bellagio?” Rabbi Cohen asked.
“No,” she said. “Have you?”
Rabbi Cohen smiled. Or tried to. He had a weird mouth, Kristy saw. It was like half of it worked as it should, and the other half seemed lost in thought and had to be reminded to act. “No,” he said. “But I’m told it’s like no other place in the hotel and has a view of the entire valley.” They walked up a slight rise, which knocked out most of Kristy’s breath, to a portion of the cemetery that was as yet undisturbed by the dead. Red Rock Canyon loomed around them, casting everything in a peaceful amber shadow . . . until you turned and were assaulted by the nearby sprawl of sand-colored homes and, farther away, the jutting spire of the Stratosphere, along with a nice view of half of humanity landing at and launching from McCarran. “Welcome to the Bellagio,” he said.
“Those houses feel very close to us,” Kristy said. “If I got in early, could pick I which direction I wanted to face?”
“Of course.”
“Because the idea of spending a million years staring at Southwest planes isn’t terribly appetizing, Rabbi.”
Rabbi Cohen marked something in his notebook. “Very well,” he said. “Canyon-facing it is.”
“I’ll need to find $10,000 first,” she said.
“Can I ask you the impertinent question?” Rabbi Cohen said, but then he didn’t. He just waited for her. It was a method she often used when interrogating people.
“Six months,” Kristy said. She told him about the rare cancer. About her prognosis. About her brother, the only person in her life, really. And she didn’t know where, exactly, he was. The kind of work he did in the Marines was the kind of work one didn’t talk about.
“I see,” Rabbi Cohen said. “Do you have life insurance?”
“The bureau gives me $203,000 in death benefits,” she said.
“The bureau?” When Kristy didn’t respond, Rabbi David Cohen said, “What you tell me is confidential, Kristy. I’m your rabbi.”
She was allowed to tell people she was an FBI agent. Only the covert parts of her job were classified. But in Las Vegas, where half the people were about an inch away from a RICO charge, it was like telling someone in East Germany that you worked for the Stasi. “I’m an FBI agent,” she said.
“I hope I’m not under investigation,” he said.
“Are you in the Mafia?”
“Mafia doesn’t exist.”
“Then you’ll be fine,” she said. She looked back toward the Strip. “Do I even want to be buried here? Who would come to visit me?”
“I would come,” he said.
“My brother is a Marine,” she said. “He’s never been here. He’s one of those guys who gets dropped into a country, does his job, and gets pulled back out. I don’t see him making a special point to come and leave flowers.”
“I told you,” Rabbi Cohen said, “I will come.”
“You know what’s crazy? $203,000 is the standard life insurance. If someone murders me, I’ll get an extra $100,000. I know a lot of married agents who don’t tell their spouses about that. But does that make any sense to you?”
“It doesn’t,” Rabbi Cohen said. He wrote something else in his notebook. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I just . . .” Kristy stopped herself. For some reason, she didn’t feel comfortable talking about this in front of Bingbing. She reached down and unclipped the leash from Bingbing’s collar. “Do you mind if I let him run around? He’s been cooped up in the yard.” Rabbi Cohen told her he did not mind. “Go ahead, Bingbing.” Kristy patted Bingbing on his butt, but he just stood there, looking at her. “Go ahead,” she repeated, but he didn’t move.
Rabbi Cohen got down on one knee, in that nice suit of his, and put a hand on top of Bingbing ’s head—he had huge hands, his knuckles covered in a latticework of tiny white scars, Kristy thinking maybe he’d been a boxer in a previous life, or maybe he just liked punching trees on the weekends—and stroked the length of her dog’s body, came back up and scratched inside his ears, then pressed his face against Bingbing’s, rubbing his check against the dog’s cheek. Rabbi Cohen stood and Bingbing trotted off toward a murder of crows in the distance, near where two generations of Ulins were lined up like dominoes.
“What happened there?” Kristy said.
“The smell here,” R
abbi Cohen said, “is highly disconcerting to dogs. It’s on me, constantly, so I thought Bingbing might be reassured if he knew it wasn’t something to fear. That it could be on a living thing, too.”
Rabbi Cohen had an unusual voice. In it, she detected a hint of the Midwest. But there was also something maddeningly precise in his diction, as if every word he said was constructed in his mouth for the most profound effect. She supposed it was something religious figures were taught. It gave him the presence of thoughtfulness even when he probably didn’t give a shit.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“All over,” he said. “My father was military.”
“Not a lot of Jews in the military,” she said.
“I would have gone,” he said, “but I felt called to the Torah.”
“I’m a terrible Jew, Rabbi. I’ve been to shul ten times in my life and it’s all been in the last two months. How does that position me for whatever comes next?”
“For all the toil of our lives,” Rabbi Cohen said, “the only thing we carry into eternity are the fruits of our noble deeds.”
“What if I’m not a very noble person?”
“Is that true?”
“I’ve killed.”
“More than once?”
When she was in Naval Intelligence, she’d overseen some dark ops overseas. Probably dozens of people died because of her work. As an FBI agent, she’d killed two men, popped quite a few others. She wanted to feel bad, in light of where she was in this life, but the plain fact was that she didn’t. “I don’t know how many,” she said. And she was suddenly exhausted. Physically. Mentally. Nothing seemed like reality anymore. She spied a bench shaded beneath a blooming honey locust, so she walked over and sat down, made sure she was still in Bingbing’s field of vision.
Rabbi Cohen sat down beside her. “There has always been something terrible coming for you, Kristy.” He tried that smile again. This time it actually seemed to take. “Intellectually, you must know that. Your story has already been written. All of our stories have. So tell me what you’re really scared of. Not what you fear.”
For the entirety of her thirty-six years, Kristy Levine had avoided giving almost anyone access to her interior life. Not even Len really knew her . . . and they were once the same person. Her last boyfriend, a lawyer named Seth she met in a chat room for Las Vegas Jewish singles, broke up with her for that very reason, telling her he never felt like she allowed him into her life, even though they lived together for three months.
“I’m scared that I will kill myself,” she said. “And I’m scared that I might put myself into a situation where someone else might kill me. One to the back of the head sounds so much better than three months of chemo followed by three months of slow death.”
“Don’t invite that into your life.”
“It is my life,” Kristy said, and then she just let it all out. How she’d spent her entire career chasing down the worst-case scenarios, first in the Navy, and then in the FBI. How her days in Las Vegas were spent digging into the worst tendencies of people and how the banality of evil had crusted her over with cynicism and anger and how this fucking thing inside of her was probably growing out of that very cynicism and anger, because she’d never smoked a day in her life, had never taken anything stronger than a drink. How she ran fifty miles a week at the gym, how she hadn’t had a cheeseburger since Reagan was president. How she had let bad people die so that she could lock worse people up. How her own morality had become fungible the longer she’d worked in law enforcement. How her singular focus, for her entire life, was to never be in the attic, while her body was slowly burying her in the basement.
Rabbi Cohen retrieved a small packet of Kleenex from his pocket and handed it to her. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. “Tell me,” he said. “What month were you born?”
“May,” she said.
“Ahhh,” he said, as if that solved everything. “Talmud tells us whoever is born under Mars will be a shedder of blood, be it surgeon or assassin. So it was fated. You can’t blame yourself for decisions made by God.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” he said, “for it to still be true.” He waited a moment, as though he were contemplating an equation, then said, “Do you know of Bennie Savone?”
“I could pick him from a lineup. If he wasn’t already in prison.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Rabbi Cohen said, in a way that made Kristy think he did know about all that. It was impossible that he didn’t. Kristy hadn’t worked the case, but Savone had ended up getting nicked on a conspiracy charge and was busy playing spades at a federal prison upstate. He’d been on the front page of the Review-Journal for a month. The words mob and boss always appeared before his name. “He and his wife, who is Jewish, funded the initial expansion of this cemetery.”
That was also well-known. Bennie Savone was married to the daughter of Rabbi Cy Kales, the founder of Temple Beth Israel. Kristy had seen the signs for Savone Construction every time she’d come to temple, had watched the construction foremen pulling away from the work site—they were building a full high school adjacent to the temple—in black-on-black Lincolns, which was not normal. She’d even thought she might run a few plates . . . but then decided, no. She wouldn’t go looking for malfeasance in her off-hours. That’s how it was in Las Vegas. Everyone on the hustle, everyone OG in something.
“It’s good to fund things you’re interested in,” Kristy said.
“I know you’re trying to be amusing. And I appreciate the effort. But let me tell you: This bench you’re sitting on, all the benches you might encounter on these grounds, they were paid for by his family. Do I think Mr. Savone pays for all of this because he loves the Jewish people? Well, he loves his wife. He loves his children. But he is not Jewish; he will never be Jewish. Even if he were to convert, he couldn’t possibly know what it feels like to truly care about our people.” He lifted his chin, as if to point to the cemetery staff across the way, digging a plot. “And certainly not our dead. That is genetic. A link to thousands of years of trauma. That exists in you.” Rabbi Cohen squeezed her elbow, to get his point across, and her entire arm went numb, all the way up to her shoulder. “My advice to you is this, Kristy. Cling to the good. That is what the Talmud tells us. Release yourself of the regrets and the anger.”
Bingbing came loping back toward them. He had something in his mouth, which Kristy couldn’t quite make out until he dropped it at her feet and ran off.
A crow.
Minus its head.
She’d never let Bingbing kiss her ever again.
“Oh my god,” Kristy said. “He’s never killed anything before. I’m sorry.”
“No, no, don’t be ludicrous.” Rabbi David Cohen took the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and draped it over the bird’s body. “It’s his nature.”
A WEEK LATER, Kristy was sitting at her desk, changing the beneficiaries on her insurance policy—she decided she’d leave Temple Beth Israel $50,000 for some benches that weren’t bought with blood money—when there was a knock on her open door. She found Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba in her doorway. He ran the organized-crime task force in Chicago, which meant he spent about a third of his time in Las Vegas, the tendrils of both The Family and The Outfit still poking into the strip clubs in town, less so the casinos, since all those were run by multinational hotel companies. And the ones run by individuals like Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn might have been ripping people off on video Caribbean Stud, but they were doing it legally, and nobody was getting tossed in Lake Mead for their troubles.
“You have a minute?” Poremba asked.
“One sec,” she said. She saved her changes, sent it off. Just like that, her afterlife was settled. She’d already put down $1,000 to secure her room in the Bellagio’s penthouse, as it were. She closed her computer. “You in town to pick up Moe Green? Word is he and Fredo are up to no good.”
&n
bsp; “The Corleones were supposed to be a New York family,” Poremba said.
“Secret?” Kristy said, “I’ve never seen any of the films.”
Poremba closed the door, sat down across from her. Kristy didn’t know Poremba well but whenever he was in town, he stopped to pick her brain about what was happening on the streets, since Kristy ended up doing a lot of surveillance work. He said, “You’re not well.”
“I just don’t like mob movies.”
“No,” Poremba said. “I mean you’re sick.”
“Just getting over something,” she said. Truth was, she’d lost seven pounds in the last week.
“This morning,” Poremba said, “we rode the elevator together.”
“We did?”
“I was behind you.”
“Okay,” Kristy said. She was out of it this morning. The chemo made her brain feel like a hive of bees.
“You live alone.” It wasn’t a question.
“I have a dog,” Kristy said.
“You have a bald spot in the back of your head,” Poremba said.
Her first impulse was to reach back and feel for it, but that would be a tell. If you know something isn’t true, you wouldn’t even bother to check. She’d been taught that by an agent not so different than Poremba, in an interrogation class at Quantico. So she said, “I’m sure it was just the light in the elevator.” She’d had two chemo appointments already. Her hair wasn’t supposed to start falling out for another week, though she’d proactively purchased two wigs. They both made her look like Barbie’s friend Skipper.
Poremba said, “Look at your desk.”
She did. Strands of her sandy-blond hair were littered across every surface.
“You want to talk about it?” Poremba asked. “Friend to friend.”
“Are we friends?”
“Even if we’re not,” Poremba said, “you look like you could use one.”
“I’m dying,” Kristy said.
“Immediately?”
“Eventually.”
“You’re in good company, then,” Poremba said. It was the kind of thing agents said to one another. The black humor of the job was that something bad was coming for everyone. Prepare for every day like it might be your last on the job, your last on the planet, too. Just like Rabbi Cohen told her.