Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Most of it,” David said.

  “What do you mean most of it?” Rabbi Kales said.

  “I knew how it ended,” David said. The book was an account of the Jews in Warsaw during World War II, Rabbi Kales of late stacking the Holocaust books on him. David had read fifty books on the topic in the last nine months or so. Fact was, reading the books left him so enraged, he found himself questioning the effect on his mental health. Like he needed anything else.

  “Did you get to the part about the 1943 rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto?”

  “Yeah,” David said. A couple hundred Jews, armed with ten rifles among them all, put on a guerrilla campaign for a month against several thousand German soldiers, managing to kill just under two dozen of them and hastening the wholesale killing of hundreds of Jews, which included the Germans setting fire to the ghetto and then filling the sewers with poisoned gas to drive out whoever might be hiding.

  “What did you make of that?”

  “From what point of view?”

  “As a Jew.”

  David picked up a piece of lox with his fingers, as he’d seen other people do in the past. Jews liked to eat with their fingers, picking raisins out of a kugel or an apple from a Waldorf salad. He put the lox in his mouth, chewed it this time. It was smoky and salty and tasted too much like . . . fish. He swallowed it down, followed it with a gulp of coffee, which now tasted like it had been spiked with a salmon farm.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” David said. “They knew they had no chance. Right? They had two automatic weapons. Two. Germans had tanks and planes. So what was the use? Wouldn’t it have been better to hide? Tactically? They’d already seen the trains leaving and not coming back.”

  “True, true,” Rabbi Kales said. “And there are some who say the rebellion only hastened the extermination of other Jews. That it made the Germans realize that putting the Jews to work, even for a short while, was foolish. That as long as they lived, they would fight. Never mind the substandard labor they performed. So why do you think they did it, Rabbi? Answer your own question. Why would they stage a rebellion they knew would fail?”

  Whenever Rabbi Kales referred to David as “Rabbi” he knew he was attempting to impart something larger, to remind David that no matter how much he wanted to pretend he wasn’t a rabbi, he was, at least functionally. David looked around the restaurant. There were plenty of non-Jews in the place today; the medical offices nearby had emptied out for lunch, so there were Asians, Mexicans, African Americans, young people, old people, the place filled up with people who had an hour for a sandwich and weren’t particularly invested in the cultural history of the food—they just wanted some corned beef on decent bread.

  “To show the rest of the world that the Jews were dangerous,” David said. “That even if they knew they were going to get killed, they’d resolved to take as many Germans out as possible, too.” It was an edict David found appealing.

  “Why? What’s the use of killing other people when you’re dead, too?”

  “So maybe word would get out?” David said.

  Rabbi Kales nodded once. “Go on, Rabbi.”

  “So ten thousand years later,” David said, “some other Jew would hear the story and fight back, if there were any Jews left.”

  Rabbi Kales smiled. “I believe that all to be true. Because, you see, there was no postwar for them,” he said. “They were doomed.” He reached over and took David’s water, spooned out all of the ice, then took a sip, coughed, took another sip. “This was vengeance. The only vengeance worth anything, in my opinion, is holy vengeance. It wasn’t personal, it was historical. You should finish the book.”

  “Not business?” David fucking with him a little bit.

  “No,” Rabbi Kales said. “There was no business in this.” He took another sip of water. Coughed again. “But that is another thing I have been thinking about of late. What is the value of business if it does not provide some other, larger worth? This place, for instance.” He took a bite of his bagel, chewed it. “It’s a business, but it feeds us, it provides a place to gather, you go into the bakery and buy a dozen black-and-white cookies, it gives you joy.” He pointed out the window, toward the Strip. “Even my son-in-law’s gentleman’s club has some larger worth, if you examine it absent of its prurient qualities. A lonely man can spend a few dollars to feel an approximation of love for four or five minutes. That is not without its worth. Business should always be about something larger than itself.”

  “But let me ask you something. In this little morality lesson, what about the girls at Bennie’s club?”

  “They are there by choice,” Rabbi Kales said. “They are not slave labor, are they? Do they not pay their rent by providing a sliver of emotional well-being to these men? Can they not pick their own shifts? Work when they choose?”

  There was something at work here, Rabbi Kales trying to get to a point, David only now seeing the steps he was setting up, from giving him the book in the first place to this shift in conversation. “They pay for it down the line,” David said. “Deluding other people isn’t the sort of thing that stops bothering you.”

  “Then you must always be aware that the larger good should outweigh the potential bad. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto understood that.”

  There it was.

  “That’s how you do it?” David said. “Just like that?”

  “That’s part of it,” Rabbi Kales said.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna work for me.”

  “You have a long life to lead, Rabbi.”

  “Not if my face collapses on Rosh Hashanah.” He scooped up some of Rabbi Kales’s cream cheese, spread it on a piece of lox, ate it. That was a little better. He could see the appeal, kind of. “What do you think Dr. Melnikoff will charge?”

  “That, you’ll need to discuss with him,” Rabbi Kales said. “Whatever the amount is, I’m sure my son-in-law will approve the expenditure.”

  “I can’t take any money from him,” David said. “I walk out of his house with a duffel bag of cash, we’re all going to prison. He was crying poor to me the other day, anyway,” David said.

  “That’s the nature of your people, isn’t it? That crime doesn’t pay?” Rabbi Kales smiled then. A joke. That’s where they were now. Men who joked. Because they’d gotten away with it. “I will speak to Irving on your behalf,” Rabbi Kales said, “as your rabbi and his. How you choose to proceed will be up to you. All will be confidential, however you decide. If need be, you front the cash and I’m certain Benjamin will reimburse you.”

  “What makes you think I have a bunch of cash sitting around?”

  “You’re a man who waits for a rainy day, aren’t you?”

  David didn’t have much of a choice either way.

  “You’ll do it this week?”

  “Yes, of course, Rabbi,” Rabbi Kales said. “If my mind doesn’t go completely before I remember to do so.”

  “I heard you pissed all over your daughter’s sofa.”

  “Technically,” Rabbi Kales said, “my son-in-law’s sofa. No self-respecting Jewish woman owns a leather sofa.”

  “You want to talk to me about it?”

  “It was just a bit of show,” he said. “Doing as I’m asked.”

  “Okay,” David said. He didn’t believe him.

  Rabbi Kales finished his bagel, sat back in the booth. “Now I need something from you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I would like to take my granddaughters to see Israel,” he said. “While I can still travel.”

  “Bennie won’t have that,” David said. There was no fucking way Bennie would let Rabbi Kales out of the country, much less out of Las Vegas, not at this point. He sure as fuck wasn’t going to let Rabbi Kales takes his two daughters with him, too.

  “My son-in-law can’t even walk to the end of his drive
way,” Rabbi Kales said. “How could he prevent me from getting on an airplane?”

  “Just try to leave. See what happens.”

  “I want you to come with me,” Rabbi Kales said. “In fact, you need to. If you intend to do this job, legitimately, you must go. You cannot run the largest Reform synagogue in Nevada without being expected to visit Jerusalem on occasion. There are duties related to that job. This is one of them.”

  “We’re not the largest,” David said.

  “We will be,” Rabbi Kales said. “I have faith in your methods.”

  “It’s a moot point. My paper isn’t good enough. Not to get into Israel, anyway. Out of Vegas, maybe.”

  “We will get you paper that is.”

  “How?”

  “That would be my son-in-law’s problem. If you tell him this is something we must do, it will be incumbent on him to figure that out for you. His Chinese friends I’m sure could help. I do not expect that he’d want you to be arrested in front of his children.”

  “He won’t let me walk into a casino,” David said. “He’s not going to let me near an airport.” America was a good ten years behind Israel when it came to things like security. He’d never make it out of customs.

  “This stage we’ve built,” Rabbi Kales said, “is useless without actors. Benjamin must be made to understand this. You are a rabbi. Rabbis go to Israel. If you wait until I am unable to travel, or I am gone? Rabbi Cohen, I promise you, the play will be over. Let Benjamin solve this problem.”

  David thought about this. “My Jewish isn’t good enough, either.”

  “Going to Israel will help with that,” Rabbi Kales said. “Plus, now that you are Mossad, it will give your story more credence with Dr. Melnikoff if you needed to visit Israel periodically. And imagine how much easier it would be to teach your bar mitzvah student—what was his name?”

  “OG Sean B.”

  “Charming,” Rabbi Kales said.

  “It’s the Berkowitz family. They’re new.”

  The Berkowitzes had moved from Cleveland into one of those dirt-yellow starter mansions in the Trails early last year, Sean’s father, Casey, some big shot in the MMA world. First couple months, everything was cool. They came to temple, donated money, got Sean into the Academy, everyone got free tickets to cage matches, Sean’s mother, Kate, spearheaded a cystic fibrosis fund-raiser, Sean made friends with the boys who played soccer. David sometimes ran into them at Northside Nathan’s, his pizza spot, splitting a veggie pizza and a platter of antipasto. Or he’d be wandering the aisles of Organized Living, imagining what Jennifer would be buying if she were next to him, and he’d come around the corner and there they’d all be, a cart full of containers, big smiles. A normal life. Everyone seemed happy.

  David fucking hated them.

  Back then, Casey looked like he’d been born inside the menswear section of a Dillard’s, always in a navy-blue suit, black wingtips, and rimless eyeglasses, always wanted to talk to David about how MMA was actually less brutal than boxing, that he worked in the sport only because the business model celebrated the fighter, not the promoter, and was more fair all around. “I can get you front row to anything. You just tell me.”

  “I don’t believe in fighting as a sport,” David told him. “It’s barbarism.”

  “I get it, I get it, I get it,” Casey said. In David’s experience, if you had to say something out loud three times, you probably didn’t believe dick. “But let me know if you ever want to go, just for the spectacle.” Then he leaned in. “Or if you want to make some money, I sometimes have the edge on a match. You know. Who is injured. Who is ’roiding. No guarantees, but better than what the Review-Journal knows.”

  “Steroids aren’t going to stop someone from kicking you in the face.”

  “No,” Casey said. “But they help when you’re choking someone out, in my experience.”

  Not in David’s.

  “I’ll keep that all in mind,” David said. And he would have, but before he got the chance to explore that money angle more directly, Casey ran off with a ring girl named Lexus, moved into a house that looked like a Nagel print over in Desert Shores, and then everything went to seed. Casey jumped deep into a new life as a full-time asshole. All slicked-back hair, Hugo Boss jackets over white V-necks, distressed jeans with holes in weird places, and facial hair designed to look threatening. Lexus was the kind of woman who wore cowboy hats and boots but had never ridden a horse.

  Back in Chicago, the Family had a rule that if you left your wife, you bought her a house in another fucking city, you shared custody of the kids, you paid your share of alimony and child support, plus something extra around the holidays, you kept it nice, didn’t freak the fuck out if she got remarried, everyone civil, for the good of world peace, as it were, and that way, no one got murdered watching a Cubs game at Harry Caray’s. You left your wife, you didn’t rub it in the whole family’s face. You built in some distance. Casey Berkowitz didn’t get that memo, so he was living three Starbucks away from his old life, and his wife, Kate—they weren’t even close to being divorced yet—was living in Charlie’s Down Under, a bar and video-poker shithole over on Lake Mead.

  David spotted her car there three or four times a week, which was easy, since she drove a red Mercedes with personalized plates—flybenz—and tended to park backed-in wherever she went. David considered Kate’s backing-in the adult equivalent of her son’s obsessive tagging, which not coincidentally had started about a week after Casey walked out. Kate didn’t have a job, so sometimes David would see her at Charlie’s at 9 a.m., sometimes he’d see her there at 9 p.m., sometimes he’d be unable to sleep and would go for a drive, keep himself away from the telephone or the TV or any other bad decisions, and he’d see flybenz backed into a space in front of Charlie’s at 3 a.m. David was tempted to go in and sit beside her, have a drink, tell her he could help her.

  Because the fact was, David thought it was just a matter of time before Kate got into her car after a few too many White Russians, drove over to Desert Shores, and took a tire iron to her husband and his girlfriend while they slept. That’s how normal people end up in prison. David understood the compulsion. It was a fucking embarrassment to be cheated on. It was better to be a widow. Widows got casseroles and rugelach.

  It was, David thought, a favor he could do.

  It was a favor he would like to do.

  Corporate guy like Casey, he’d have life insurance. Kate Berkowitz and her son, OG Sean B, could get out of Las Vegas, go back to Cleveland, start a new life before Casey got indicted for fixing fights and they lost everything. Give them a chance Jennifer and William never got.

  Maybe, it occurred to David now, this was that chance. Could he get his family to Israel eventually?

  “And then what?” David said. “We get there and you disappear into the Dead Sea?”

  Rabbi Kales laughed. “David,” he said. “It’s a salt sea. I would need to wear cement shoes to disappear into the Dead Sea.”

  “You know what I mean. How do I know you’d get back on a plane?”

  “How do I know you’d get back on a plane?”

  “I’m not staying anywhere alone,” David said. “I’m already alone.”

  Rabbi Kales clapped his hands lightly in front of his face, tapping the tip of his nose with his index fingers, then spread his fingers out like a peacock. It was something he did when he was thinking. At first David thought it was one of his stalling techniques, but the longer he spent with him, the more he saw it was one of his authentic moves.

  “There is no postwar for you, Rabbi Cohen,” he said, quietly. “If this is the life you’re going to have, it is going to get smaller and smaller, until you’re underground, waiting to die. That is your fate. You must embrace that if you are to survive. You are to be a real rabbi? A real rabbi goes to Israel. We convince Benjamin first. But it’s something you must r
econcile.”

  “Rabbi Kales,” David said. He was himself for just a moment. “The only way I get on a plane is if my wife and kid are on it, too. You figure out a way to make that happen, I’ll fly to fucking Tehran with you. I don’t care. But I’m not risking my life to do you a favor that gets me deeper into this life. That ain’t happening. I understand your point, about being a rabbi, I do. And I respect it. I want you to know that. But if the Chief Rabbi of Israel comes to town, wants to sit here and have blintzes with me, and then asks me a question I’m uncomfortable with? Or indicates that he does not believe I am a real rabbi? I will follow him to the bathroom and I will drown him in the toilet. I will kill his entire security team. I will blow up his plane. Whatever it takes. No questions. Don’t ever think otherwise.” David paused, let Sal Cupertine go back where he belonged. “Now, if you want to go to Israel with your granddaughters, I will advocate for that. If you think it will help Temple Beth Israel, absolutely, you should go. But your daughter, Rachel, will stay here. And if Bennie tells me to keep you here and you try to leave, I will do my job.”

  Rabbi Kales spread a bit of cream cheese on another piece of lox, ate it slowly. “You know, David,” he said, “there will come a time when there is no one for you to threaten, when people are no longer frightened of you. If you’re lucky, you will be my age and, b’ezrat hashem, your family will be with you. But you will still be looking over your shoulder. You will always be looking, waiting. You must figure out how you will live then, when this romantic notion of yours is fulfilled. You have figured out this idea of how you might die, how you will take out all the people who attempt to do you wrong, but you have not figured out how you might live. Your wife, your son? There will always be a gun pointed at them, David. You will not always know who is pointing it.” He sighed. “My advice? When they come for you? Surround yourself with other Jews. They will die to protect you.” He raised his chin again, pointed it toward the window. “In the meantime, help your friend.”

  Harvey B. Curran had finished his breakfast and was now in the café’s parking lot, attempting to pick up pages of newsprint, bits of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Review-Journal sprinkled around him like dandruff, his notebooks, pens, his Day Runner, his keys. It was like he’d been turned upside down and dumped onto the ground. He knelt down to pick up what he could, but it was apparent that depth perception wasn’t currently his friend.