by Tod Goldberg
Tara and Neil.
How many couples had he married in the last three years? Twenty? Thirty? Which didn’t make David feel any better. His entire life as Sal Cupertine had been lived as a ghost, and now here he was, rolled up in the lives of common civilians.
“That was beautiful,” Rabbi Cohen said when Michael finished his vows, something about Naomi’s smile making him think of brighter days ahead. David was pretty sure Michael was high. His eyes were almost entirely black, nothing but pupils staring back. Probably did a couple bumps before the ceremony, or chopped up his little brother’s Ritalin, maybe stole a prescription pad from his father’s office and got himself and his best men Adderall for the big day, since all six of them were fidgeting messes.
Or maybe it was just that Michael was shit-scared. David had seen that look once or twice before in people, back in his old line of work. This kid is fucked, David thought, but wasn’t absolutely certain who he was thinking of: Michael, Naomi, or the unborn child in Naomi’s belly, who was already named Dakota, even though they didn’t yet know the sex.
David poured two glasses of wine and set them between the bride and groom, along with a third empty glass.
“In our tradition,” he said, “wine is a symbol of the transformations we go through as people. From the dirt grows the vine, which grows the grape, which is picked and goes through the sour period of fermentation, and then becomes the wine itself, which becomes the warmth of your body when you drink, which creates a sense of euphoria in your mind.” David paused then, as he always did during this portion of the ceremony, and made a point to look directly at both the bride and groom, as Rabbi Kales had taught him: Tilt your head, smile, but not with too much joy. Think of something sad at the same time, so that there is also something slightly mournful in your face. Sigh before you begin again. Lower your voice an octave. It will sound like you’re quoting something even if you are not.
“Such is the beautiful journey we make as people, and, together, Michael and Naomi, you’ll make as husband and wife.” David poured both glasses of wine into the third glass, then held it up. “From many, we have one.”
He handed the glass to Naomi and she took a tiny sip, barely enough to wet her lips. Naomi gave the wine to Michael, who downed it like he was doing a shot, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and pumped his fist. In that moment, David saw Michael’s entire life unfold in front of him. It was a future of SUV payments he couldn’t afford, tight black short-sleeved V-necks under sport coats, and vague notions that maybe having someone knock off his physician father would alleviate some of his financial burdens. Thing was, a few years ago, Sal Cupertine would have taken that job.
David began the chant of the Sheva Brachot, the Seven Blessings, first in Hebrew—Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha-olam, bo’rei p’ri ha-gafen—and then in English. David thought the blessings were fine, if a little generic—thanking God for creating everything, essentially—but it was the sixth one where he really had a beef: Blessed art Thou, O Lord, King of the universe, who has created joy and gladness, bridegroom and bride, mirth and exultation, pleasure and delight, love, brotherhood, peace, and fellowship. Soon may there be heard in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the jubilant voice of bridegrooms from their canopies, and of youths from their feasts of song. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who makest the bridegroom to rejoice with the bride.
David didn’t believe God created joy and gladness any more than he thought God was responsible for pain and suffering. He’d dealt enough in those last two to know that God was very rarely involved. It wasn’t God who’d put Sal Cupertine on the streets of Chicago disposing of people for the Family. It wasn’t God who packed Sal Cupertine into a frozen meat truck and hustled him off to Las Vegas, sold him into this long con after he killed three feds and a CI. No, that was his cousin Ronnie.
However, if God was responsible for anything these days, David thought it was for moments like today—when there was a real spirit in the air, when love felt like a tangible thing, yet somehow otherworldly—and the fact was he felt pretty Jewish in those situations, since he was the one who was supposed to be keeping the candle lit, so to speak, and if there was one thing he did, it was his fucking job.
David finished the blessings. Took in the guests. What Rabbi Kales called “accounting”: See who is being moved. Add them to your list. Then, at a later date, make them account.
Jordan Rosen openly sobbed with joy, clutched his wife’s hand, kissed it.
Tricia Rosen, back from Berkeley with short hair now, dabbed at her eyes and nodded at Rabbi Cohen in that way young people do when they believe in something beyond their present emotional experience.
The flower girl was asleep across Mrs. Solomon’s lap, Mr. Solomon stroking her hair.
The grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins, the second cousins, the friends, the alter kockers who flew in from Portland and Seattle and New York and Toronto and Israel, everyone paying a debt for having shown up for some other distant cousin’s wedding or bris or funeral. Jews were pretty good about showing up, no matter the occasion. They all looked too much alike for David’s comfort. All brown hair, thick eyebrows, pale-to-light-olive complexion, too much hair on their forearms, too many gold necklaces, too many Coach handbags, too many of those pimp watches with gold bracelets young men seemed to be favoring of late, constantly spinning them around their wrists, the links catching hits off the sun. Not enough men in ties. Too many women in sandals. It just wasn’t right. You come to a wedding, you should dress with the dignity of a funeral, because who the fuck knows when you’ll ever see the couple again, and who the fuck knows when they’ll see you again. So you get your look right, you don’t glam it up, you don’t whore it up, even though it’s Las Vegas. No one ever got kicked out of a place in Las Vegas for dressing elegantly. If David was going to wear the tallith, the least everyone else could do was put on a fucking tie and some closed-toe shoes.
In the back were the professionals: the lawyers, the accountants, the doctors, the investment guys, the real estate team, the city councilmen, the casino executives, Andy from Summerlin Rolls-Royce, Carter from JetVegas, Kendra from Caesars Palace Forum Shops Private Shopping Concierge Services, the local ABC meteorologist—Ginger or Bianca or something in between those names—in a plunging red dress, all of them clustered near the bar, talking the whole fucking time, but pausing now, David’s eyes on them, sensing that the big moment was about to happen, when God left and the party started. Behind the professionals, the tuxedoed catering staff set up the elaborate dinner under pitched white tents. The three-piece wind ensemble unpacked their instruments.
And, watching from his lawn, stood Bennie Savone.
David wrapped the wineglass in a clean white towel and held it aloft for all the guests to see. “Talmud says the breaking of the glass is a symbol of the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem,” David said. “But I believe it is to remind us that there are sharp edges in life.” Pause. Chin tilted up half an inch. “Thus.” Pause. Octave down. “We must temper joy with the remembrance of and preparation for sorrow.” David found the oldest person in the audience—one of the Solomon clan, David had met him earlier, cousin Louis from New York, wearing a yarmulke made of fine silk, Louis telling David its entire provenance, which involved a tragic summer in Poland, a month stuck at Ellis Island, his mother dying at thirty-seven, and then, eventually, a very successful furniture business in upstate New York, where he was considered the Sleeper-Sofa King of Troy—and extended a hand in his general direction, everyone turning to look at the old codger, as if he were the living embodiment of the Exodus. “For we are the witnesses of history.” Pause. Raise the voice. Smile. Tilt the head back down half an inch. “Love needs no permission. For we are taught that ahev is a natural convergence of giving and being open to emotion. And so, Michael and Naom
i, I tell you to make your own traditions, but keep, too, our shared history close, remembering, always, that your people are our people.”
Rabbi David Cohen set the wineglass down in front of Michael and Naomi and was just about to tell them they could kiss, but he didn’t get the chance. The couple both began to curb-stomp the living shit out of the wineglass. Then Michael swooped Naomi up into his arms and kissed her flush on the mouth, both of them wide-eyed and laughing through the kiss, everyone shouting Mazel tov! Mazel tov! even though Naomi had sliced her foot open on the glass and had stained the hem of her wedding dress with blood.
2
Lovely ceremony, Rabbi,” Bennie Savone said. He was standing at the bottom of his lawn, eating from a bag of sunflower seeds and watching Sophie, the youngest of his two daughters, pedal boat around the lake. He wore a polo shirt and shorts, no shoes, a court-mandated ankle bracelet. Technically, David could visit Bennie whenever he wanted, since house arrest allowed for visits from clergy, but Bennie didn’t want to take that chance. He’d done six months inside on a Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice beef related to the vicious beating of a patron at the Wild Horse by two of his bouncers, still had another five months of home detention, and didn’t want to give the feds any reason to start looking at his associates. But he’d sent a message through Rabbi Kales.
“I expected to see your wife at the ceremony,” David said.
Bennie said, “Rachel and Sarah aren’t currently speaking.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know,” Bennie said. “Rachel doesn’t tell me shit these days.” He offered Rabbi Cohen the bag of sunflower seeds, but David demurred. “My guess is that Sarah told Rachel something she didn’t want to hear, like maybe she didn’t want some criminal’s wife at her daughter’s blessed day.”
“There were plenty of criminals there,” David said.
“Maybe she just doesn’t like me,” Bennie said, which was probably true, too. She had good reason.
Bennie had been picked up in 1999 and charged with conspiracy, which meant the feds had free rein to find whatever shit they could uncover, though the only thing that stuck was the obstruction charge on the beating, which wasn’t even a federal charge. Bennie kept his books clean, paid his taxes, made sure his boys at the club paid theirs, made sure the girls did, too. Not that they were running an entirely legal enterprise, only that Bennie wasn’t dumb enough to make it obvious. Bennie’s lawyer, Vincent Zangari, got him a quickie plea deal just in case the dentist died before they could get to trial, which would have been bad, since then Bennie would be looking at an accessory charge on a murder, which was a mandatory twelve-year RICO sentence. As it was, the fucker was paralyzed and breathing through a hole in his neck, which made him a pretty convincing witness, even if he couldn’t talk.
Bennie called in some favors from the judicial bench, made sure he wasn’t going to be doing time in some ass factory, ended up getting six months in the minimum-security wing up at Warm Springs in Carson City—which was like doing time at a Radisson: shitty, but not torture—followed by six months home detention.
And that calmed shit down.
For a while, anyway.
Then the owner of Panthers Gentleman’s Club—a local named Vic Acosta, doing front work for some low-level Miami boys—skipped town after getting indicted on tax evasion a few months ago and the feds seized his club. The IRS was owed fifteen million, which they weren’t gonna get selling the building, so they figured they’d recoup it on the pole. They brought in the U.S. Marshals to run the joint, which wasn’t great for business, even after they dropped the price of lap dances from twenty dollars to ten. When that didn’t work, they got a food license, started to move steak and lobster in addition to tits and ass, tried to cater to gentlemen, as if gentlemen still came to Las Vegas. Still nothing. So they tried an Italian buffet, started giving the girls health benefits, since they were now federal employees, figuring they’d get some high-class girls that way, not realizing conventioneers didn’t want a high-class girl. Their last big move was a billboard on the Strip advertising Actually Legal Girls.
That got the national media interested, everyone from 20/20 to the Today show to the National Enquirer coming to town to do stories on how tax dollars were paying the hourly wages of lap dancers, which eventually dovetailed into tales of how antiquated the Italian American Mafia had become. While the Chinese Triads were training teenagers to hack half the world, the Mafia was still running protection schemes for a couple grand a month. While the Russian Mob was counterfeiting credit cards and stealing a million dollars a week from gas and oil companies overseas, the Mafia was running sex rings and blackmail scams. The Mexican Cartels owned an entire fucking country . . . and the Mafia was breaking city councilmen’s legs for unpaid debts on the Super Bowl. And who was scared of the Mafia anymore, anyway, when kids on the block had automatic weapons? People got shot in the head just for waking up and going to school.
Then they made it personal: Talking about how Al Capone had morphed into that Teflon pussy John Gotti. How Joseph “The Animal” Barboza, who ate the faces of his enemies, gave way to the likes of Sammy the Bull, who only stopped snitching long enough to write a tell-all book and flirt with Diane Sawyer on TV, all while still under witness protection. Or how Whitey Bulger had skipped Boston with the FBI’s assistance—not that he was real Mafia, just a dumb Irish thug, not that it mattered to Al Roker, that giggling fuck—long before Sal Cupertine, the Chicago Family enforcer known as the Rain Man—Matt Lauer acting up, too, the fuck: “I see that, I think of Dustin Hoffman, don’t you, Al? Not threatening in the least”—got away with killing three FBI agents and a CI, and then got shipped out of the city in a truck full of frozen meat. And now this fuckwit Vic Acosta, who lost his club to the government and didn’t even have the good sense to burn it down first.
David caught it all one morning while he sat at his kitchen table, eating his oatmeal, the one food that didn’t hurt his jaw. His old face flashed on the screen for ten seconds, the first time David had seen it in a couple years, along with some grainy video of him ordering a tuna sandwich inside a Subway in Chicago. David thinking how nice it would be to eat a sandwich without it sending white hot pain into his nasal cavity and out his ears, thinking, Shit, I hope Jennifer doesn’t see this. Thinking, Shit, I hope my mother doesn’t see this. Even if he hadn’t seen his mother in fifteen years.
First couple years after he dropped out of high school, he was deep in the life, and she was still in Chicago, going by her maiden name, Arlene Rigliano, because she’d given up the Family. He’d bump into her on the street, she’d act like he didn’t exist, and he was so hard, he didn’t want to believe he’d ever been someone’s kid, so what did it matter?
Except one time. He and Jennifer were in Target, buying mouthwash and cereal and greeting cards, that real-life stuff, and suddenly his mother came around the bend in the paper towel aisle. It was just the two of them there under those bright white lights—Jennifer still lingering in the vitamin row, adding up how much they’d spent; Target an indulgence for them in those days, they were so broke, they had to keep track of every dime, bouncing checks not the kind of thing Sal Cupertine wanted to get nicked for—Sal done up in a leather duster like he was in a western, Arlene white haired, wearing high-waisted pants, pushing a cart filled with laundry detergent, ice cream, cottage cheese, Diet Pepsi, the opposite of how Sal remembered her. When his dad was alive, his mother was always in designer jeans and ribbed turtlenecks, coral lipstick, perfect hair, a glass of wine or a Marlboro red in her hand. Then his dad got thrown off a building. Maybe it would have been different if they both hadn’t seen it happen from Billy Cupertine’s convertible, waiting for him to come back down from an errand he had to run, be gone two seconds, that’s what he said, and then fifteen minutes later he came back down all right. After that Sal’s mother couldn’t even put a comb through her hair for a few years, b
arely made it out of bed, started to take up with men who drove TR7s. By then, Sal was under Ronnie’s sway.
“Look at you,” she said, stopped there at the end of the aisle, right next to a display of Bounty, the contempt in her voice metallic. “A real professional.”
“That’s right,” Sal said. He was twenty-six. He didn’t know shit. Wouldn’t for years. His mother was just the lady who didn’t want him to be in the Family. If he had a time machine, man, he’d use it to punch himself in the gut.
“They murdered your father,” she said.
“Someone was going to,” he said.
“If only they’d waited a few years,” she said, “you could have done it.”
A boy and girl came running into the aisle, chasing a blue ball that came bouncing past, stopped, looked at Sal, and ran in the other direction. He had that effect.
She tilted her head to the right, tried to look around Sal, saw Jennifer back there. “She looks well.”
“She is.”
“You have any kids?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t,” she said, then she just turned around, left her cart where it was, and walked out. Sal played that scene in his head a hundred times, a thousand times, all the different things he should have said, though never once did he tell Jennifer about it. His mother lived in Arizona now, remarried, that was the story, which meant she was close by, could be in Las Vegas, even, dumping quarters into the slots at Treasure Island.
Then his face on the TV melted away into a shot of a U.S. Marshal in a shirt and a tie, sitting in his office at Panthers, talking about the perils of running a strip club. The Mafia in Las Vegas a big fucking joke.
David didn’t think it was funny. As it was, every time some hump in New York or Chicago or Miami got busted doing some gangster shit, they’d drag Sal Cupertine back into the news for a few days, sure to mention that the FBI was offering a $500,000 reward for his capture now that they admitted he wasn’t dead. David conveniently got a head cold whenever that happened, kept his face away from the public, since Las Vegas was filled with bounty hunters, professional and amateur, the town the last stop for fugitives. Every other week America’s Most Wanted would feature some pedophile asshole who was last spotted on camera inside the ice cream parlor at the Frontier, or would note that some white supremacist militia wacko was apprehended in the parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall, the trunk of his car filled with ropes and handcuffs and diapers and brass knuckles and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It was only a matter of time before John Walsh spent thirty minutes talking about Sal Cupertine and then what? Jennifer would see that, for sure. His mom, too. And everyone else, everywhere. David would have to fake shingles for a month.
