Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  So David waited. And waited. “But,” Dr. Melnikoff said eventually, “I think we can make it thirty-five thousand.”

  David waited some more.

  “For Israel, though, I guess thirty thousand is appropriate.”

  “For Israel,” David agreed.

  “And I’d prefer to have that up front,” Dr. Melnikoff said.

  “I’ll pay ten up front,” David said, “and the balance after I’m content that the surgery has been successful. I suspect if this were being handled through insurance, there would be a thirty-day billing period, correct?”

  Dr. Melnikoff shifted in his seat. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Of course. That’s fine.”

  Fucking shtunk. “Fine,” David said. He reached into his pocket, came out with a rubber-banded roll of bills. He got up and set it on top of his X-rays. “That’s five. Come by the temple tomorrow and I’ll give you the balance.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Melnikoff said, “yes, that sounds perfect.”

  David took out his wallet and thumbed through the bills. Put another five hundred directly into Dr. Melnikoff’s hand. “I’d like you to find a different tissue bank,” David said. “For privacy purposes.”

  “We’ll find the best tissue bank. World class.” Dr. Melnikoff put the money into his pocket.

  “Thank you,” David said.

  “Rabbi Cohen, can I ask you one question and then, I swear, this is the end of any awkwardness on the topic?”

  “If you must.”

  “I’ve never worked on anyone like you and so, of course, I have a million questions that I understand you cannot answer. So, this comes from a place of great suffering. My wife, Connie? You never met her?”

  “No,” David said. “She passed before I arrived here.”

  “Right, of course. Well, her family? Most of them died in Poland. Lodz. She got out just in time, went through Ellis Island, the whole thing, had a very clear memory of it. But her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the entire family never got out. Very sad. Very sad. She carried them with her forever.”

  “I understand,” David said.

  “So, I just want to know. For her, you understand.” Dr. Melnikoff lowered his voice, and for a moment all David saw was Irving Melnikoff, a man who loved his dead wife. “Did you ever get to kill any Nazis?”

  9

  The south-facing guest rooms on the ninth floor of the Chuyalla Indian Casino and Resort had the best views in the whole place, which wasn’t saying much. During the day, if he squinted, Matthew Drew was pretty sure he could make out the glint of the sun off Mill Lake Falls in the distance, though that might have been wishful thinking, since it was five miles away and across I-41. Below, a phalanx of orange earth movers tilled the land for what was going to be a championship golf course and, one day, a hundred condos and time-shares. The Chuyalla had a master plan for the area that also included a movie theater, a resort-style trailer park, which sounded like a misnomer, an outlet mall, maybe even a water park. At the moment, though, all they had were mounds of dirt and huge billboards with fanciful renderings of what the future might look like, all with the same slogan: The Chuyalla Difference: Tradition. Family. Excellence.

  “Can you imagine living out here?” Matthew asked his sister, Nina. She was packing up her school books and an overnight bag. Since the week after he beat down Ronnie Cupertine, he and Nina had stayed in adjoining rooms in the hotel.

  “They’ll never build all that crap,” she said. “And spoiler? You are living here.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. He pulled the curtains back a few inches and surveyed the land, looking for . . . what? Snipers?

  It wasn’t that he was worried.

  Not really.

  He’d erased all the video. The cops hadn’t shown up. No foot soldiers from the Family arrived with bats. Management hadn’t even come to him with questions about yet another ambulance showing up at the property.

  None of which seemed right. At first, Matthew waited for someone to poke their head up, if only so he could bash it in. As the days wore on, he started to worry that the silence was worse. But then newspapers in Chicago reported that Cupertine was sadly going to miss the film festival he underwrote as he was hospitalized with some “minor issue,” which Matthew obviously knew was a lie, and then carried a jaunty quote from the man himself, which Matthew also knew was a lie. Because at the very least, Ronnie was going to need full facial reconstruction surgery. He might not see the light of day for six, nine months. Maybe longer. So that got him thinking: Why would the Family put Ronnie’s name and physical location into the press unless they wanted people to know where he was, that he was alive, and that if you’d taken your shot, you’d missed.

  Letting Matthew know he’d failed.

  Letting him know they knew he was looking for information.

  Whoever he was.

  Matthew doubted the two fucks tasked with guarding Cupertine had been forthright with their bosses about what they’d seen that night, doubted they could even pick Matthew out of a lineup, but that didn’t mean the Family wouldn’t start poking around, maybe start looking to see who the Chuyalla employed, cross-referencing that with people who might have a legit beef with Ronnie Cupertine. How long would it take for them to figure out that Matthew Drew once worked at the FBI? That he’d partnered up with Jeff Hopper? That he’d been looking for Sal Cupertine? How long until every motherfucker Matthew had sapped on the game floor was holding a contract on his life?

  Which is when Matthew got . . . concerned. He started thinking about his sister, started worrying about some hard knock kicking down her apartment door and putting one in her face, too. That if Jeff Hopper had been concerned enough to force Matthew out of town after Fat Monte killed himself, maybe Matthew should be concerned for his own skin. Or at least his sister’s.

  Better to be safe.

  Nina walked over to where he stood, yanked the drapes open wide. “Get some light in here. You’re going to get rickets.” She walked off into the bathroom, started to gather her belongings, so he cinched the drapes a few inches. She had class tonight, back in Chicago, and then all day Friday, so she was going to spend the night with her friend Veronica, then be back Saturday. Maybe Sunday. There was a party she wanted to go to.

  “Okay,” Nina said a few minutes later. She looked around the room. “I think I have everything I’ll need. You’ll get the rest of my stuff moved?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Matthew said. The Native Mob had the entire ninth floor rented out this weekend, including the Presidential Suite, where they had a full buffet and open bar working, and were taking bets on all the football games, the NFL season kicking off on Sunday. So Matthew and Nina needed to find new digs. Plus, Matthew needed to have some plausible deniability: It was one hundred dollars just to get in the door with the Native Mob’s sports book, but then you could bet whatever you wanted—the spread, over-unders, prop bets, straight up—provided you had cash or chips. This wasn’t a leg-breaking operation, since you had to pay up to make the bet, no credit offered, and the Native Mob paid out immediately. At least that’s how it had gone this summer during the NBA finals, which went off without incident. They were quiet, professional, and tipped.

  Basically, it was a service to the community.

  The Chuyalla said it wasn’t Matthew’s problem. It all seemed sort of quaint. If you were in Las Vegas, you could bet on the number of times someone scratched their ass in the Super Bowl and it was legit, but 1,700 miles away, it was a federal crime. Matthew didn’t mind looking the other way on victimless crimes like betting, but he couldn’t very well pretend not to see something that was sleeping next door to him.

  “I’m going to be up in the Eye in the Sky all weekend,” Matthew said, “so when you get back, just wait for me in the lobby, and then we’ll get a new room for you.”

  “Why don’t
I stay in Chicago? Veronica would let me crash for a week if you’re still worried about the security at the apartment.”

  The apartment they rented in Chicago was your average six-story box with a buzzer entry. The building was filled with UIC students, which meant you could walk in with an aircraft carrier strapped to your back and no one would say shit. Matthew didn’t stay in it very often these days, but he still paid most of Nina’s bills. That was one thing this job was good for: He made money. He could put a little away every month, keep Nina feeling comfortable, not have his mother stressed out in the process.

  “Not yet.”

  “Then when, Matthew? Because the drive back and forth to campus is getting old fast.”

  “Another couple of days,” he said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m not worried about anything,” Nina said, “other than your propensity to jail me in a casino.”

  He hadn’t told Nina what, precisely, he had done. He couldn’t. If she knew Matthew had beaten up the head of the Family, then he’d need to explain everything else. So instead he said some shit had gone down at the casino and some bad guys had threatened his family and the Chuyalla took this seriously and insisted Nina come stay with him while the tribal police investigated.

  It was, in a way, the truth. Or at least true enough to get her to move upstate for the last few weeks of summer, with the idea that the hotel was the safest place they could both be, since Matthew had a whole security team working for him here. But now school was back in session and she wasn’t going to miss her senior year of college—particularly not since Matthew had already helped her out with the tuition—for something as nebulous as a threat.

  “Let me give you something,” he said. He went into his room, unlocked the closet safe, came back holding a Glock. “Take this.”

  She put her hands up. “Really?”

  He popped the magazine out, examined it, popped it back in. “This has a full clip. You want an extra one?”

  “Jesus, no,” Nina said. “Who do you think I’m going to need to shoot thirty times?”

  Matthew handed her the gun. “I want you to keep this on you at all times.”

  “You want me to bring a gun onto a college campus?”

  “No one is going to search you,” Matthew said, “because you’re not going to be breaking any laws. But keep it in reach. So, not at the bottom of your backpack. Keep it in the front pocket. Or in your purse. Okay?”

  “If I decide to roll up into a club on Friday night,” she said, “do I shove it under my belt? Is that how you do it?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Nina,” Matthew said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s been three weeks, Matthew. If I eat another BLT from room service, I’ll kill myself.” She hefted the gun in her hand. “Or take out twenty-nine bystanders and then kill myself.” It wasn’t the first time Nina had handled a gun. When they were kids, their father used to take them hunting, and after that shit with the Family a few years ago, Matthew took her to the range, got her comfortable with a gun again. Nina was pretty good with an AR-15, tended to go wide and to the left with a Glock, but she’d gotten better the more she did it, and soon enough was plugging center mass. She dropped the gun into her purse. “Satisfied?”

  “Anything weird happens,” Matthew said, “don’t fuck around. Pull the gun and shoot. Even if you just shoot into the ground, they’ll know you’re serious.”

  “They. Great.” She gathered up her bags and headed to the door. “When’s your next shift?”

  “I’m on an overnight,” he said. He was going to his little apartment in town today, maybe pay a bill, maybe eat a sandwich, catch a nap. Then he’d be back on at 9:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday he’d be pulling twelve-hour shifts, the casino expecting big business. “You need something, call me on my cell.”

  “A shower wouldn’t hurt you, bud,” she said.

  Matthew pulled up the casino’s security cameras on his laptop and watched Nina wind through the hotel and then out into the parking lot, where she loaded up her car and drove away. He clicked back over to the parking lot cams, waited to see if anyone took off after her. All he saw were two old women with matching oxygen tanks and cigarettes shuffle into a minivan.

  He needed to get the fuck out of Wisconsin.

  •

  “Hey, Skip,” Purvis said. “You maybe want to check this out?”

  Matthew Drew pushed away from his desk in the surveillance room and stood behind Purvis. He was one of Matthew’s better guys—he’d been on a Stryker Brigade team in Desert Storm and was the only halfway decent Chuyalla on his team, meaning he actually didn’t mind kicking his own people out when they did stupid shit—and so Matthew scheduled him whenever he thought things might get thick on the floor.

  “What do you got?”

  “I don’t know. Could be nothing. Could be we’re about to get wet up.”

  On screen, Matthew saw a line of blacked-out Suburbans pulling into the parking lot. It wasn’t an undercover operation, that much Matthew could tell when he zoomed in on the SUVs and made out their government plates. Standard FBI practice was to cover those up on a covert operation, not that it was ever covert to show up in five SUVs, but it meant there was no element of surprise involved.

  It was 10 a.m., the first Sunday of the NFL season, which meant the hotel and casino was teeming with people—a couple hundred were in the convention hall to watch the Packers play the Lions on four giant screens, the three bars inside the hotel were decked out in green and gold and rammed full of drunks in cheeseheads, hollering for blood, and the gaming floor was wall-to-wall with high rollers and nickel-slot players alike—so if the FBI were showing up, it was because there was someone here they really wanted to embarrass. If they wanted to pick up Matthew for that Ronnie Cupertine thing, they’d just kick down his apartment door and grab him whenever they wanted.

  Matthew thought they’d be respectful about it. He still had friends in the Bureau. Guys he’d gone through the academy with, junior agents who used to eat lunch with him in the Roosevelt Building cafeteria, go out for a drink at Fitzgerald’s, talk about how when they ran the Shop; they were going to get Geraldo Rivera back in town to bust open another of Capone’s old vaults, then shove Ronnie Cupertine inside.

  Just a bunch of jokers.

  Playing at this thing.

  It wasn’t even real to most of them, because of course it was ludicrous. Everyone thought they’d end up working for Jack Crawford in the Behavioral Science Division, because they didn’t realize Silence of the Lambs wasn’t based on a true story. Thought they’d be Joe Pistone, doing that Donnie Brasco deep-cover operation, stomping people to death, hoping they’d get the chance to talk like gangsters, even though they all had degrees from the best colleges in America. Thought they’d be doing hostage negotiations and bank robberies and talking Libyans out of hijacked 747s, which made sense. They’d all wanted to be FBI since they were ten. Matthew had been the same way, thinking he’d be on tactical assaults, and then ended up here, a Sunday in September, working at a casino.

  And anyway? It wasn’t a federal crime to beat an old man up. Someone wanted to arrest Matthew, they could just send a street cop.

  “You want me to contact tribal police, Skip?” Purvis asked.

  “Give me a sec,” Matthew said.

  The Suburbans parked and ten guys in FBI windbreakers stepped out. None of them took out their guns. That was a good sign. Matthew shifted the feed to the cameras on the private roads leading into the facility. There were three black vans idling on the side of the road. Paddy wagons. Another white extended van was pulling down the road, along with a tow truck, but neither was close enough to pick up their plates.

  Matthew zoomed back in on the group of agents.

  He recognized Lee Poremba walking abreast a taller man he didn’t re
cognize, then the other eight held back a few steps, moving in single file. They all wore polo shirts under their windbreakers, a couple looked to have Kevlar, all of them radioed up, but Poremba and the other guy had on shirts with ties under their windbreakers. Neither wore tactical gear.

  Poremba was the senior special agent in charge of the Organized Crime Task Force in Chicago. Matthew had met him during the time he spent in Springfield on Kirk Biglione’s aborted trial, and before that, Jeff Hopper had vouched for him, told Matthew he was the only decent guy left in the Bureau, that he’d given Jeff and Matthew a head start to apprehend Sal Cupertine first, once they knew how he’d escaped, because Poremba thought Jeff had earned that right. One morning in Springfield, a year ago now, Poremba sat down next to him at the Ramada coffee shop, the two of them not supposed to be talking, since Matthew was there to give damning evidence of the FBI’s incompetence. If he’d gotten the chance, Matthew was prepared to lay out exactly how the FBI had fucked up the whole Cupertine affair, but that chance never did come. But that morning, Poremba just sat there, eating his two fried eggs and sourdough toast in silence, until right before he got up to pay his bill. “Wanted you to know,” Poremba said, counting the bills in his wallet, not looking up, “that if I had any say, you’d be on my team, right now.”

  “Okay,” Matthew said.

  “You did good work on Cupertine,” he said. “You’re solid with me, just so you know.” He turned and looked at Matthew then. “I think about Hopper every day. I shouldn’t have let him go out there. I’ll always regret that.” And then he was up and gone.

  Matthew believed him. On both counts.

  “You ever seen this guy?” Matthew asked Purvis now. He zoomed in closer, to the agent beside Poremba. On his windbreaker was the logo for the Milwaukee field office.

  “No,” Purvis said.

  “He’s never come in on gaming issues?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”