Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “What are you talking about?” Matthew said. Lynwood was a village thirty minutes south of Chicago. Matthew had driven through it, but never stopped. “My car is parked right out back.” He turned around in his chair, to point out his Mustang in the lot, which is when he saw an agent standing ten feet from his car, a blast shield at his feet. The white van he’d spied earlier was pulling up. “Is that a bomb unit?”

  “Your other car,” Poremba said. He pulled an envelope out of his jacket pocket, opened it up, unfolded a two-page report. “A ’91 Honda Civic.”

  “That’s my sister’s car,” Matthew said. It had been his car when he was in high school and college. He’d given it to his sister Nina when she moved out to start at UIC. Hadn’t even bothered to get it reregistered in her name.

  Poremba and Wilmore shared a look. “She live in Lynwood?” Wilmore asked.

  “No,” Matthew said. He stood up. Went to the window, watched as a man in a full bomb suit stepped out of the white van, along with a German shepherd. “She’s in an apartment by UIC. Where I used to live. Last few weeks, she’s been staying with me. Up here.”

  “Why’s that?” Wilmore asked, but Matthew was already out the door, Poremba catching up to him at the service elevator, sliding between the doors just before they closed.

  “Where you going?” Poremba said.

  “I need to go,” Matthew said. “I need to find Nina.” He wasn’t thinking straight. He pushed the button for the first floor. He needed to get out of this building. This fucking place. Did he understand Poremba right? Was he . . . working for the Family?

  “When was the last time you talked to your sister?” Poremba asked.

  “Thursday.” Was it Thursday? No. Wait. He was getting confused. He’d worked an overnight this week. Matthew took out his cell phone, scrolled through the numbers. “Friday. I talked to her on Friday.” He turned the phone around, showed Poremba the call log. “I called her. 9:47 a.m. I was coming off shift.”

  “What did you talk about?” Poremba asked.

  “Bullshit. You know, whatever. School and work and . . . and . . .” Matthew stopped himself. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “I need you to calm down,” Poremba said. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.”

  “Why are you here?” Matthew asked. “The other guy. What the fuck is he doing here?”

  “I came to talk to you,” Poremba said. “Like I said. If I just showed up by myself, that would look suspicious. So I picked a day to come out where we could have a conversation, Special Agent Wilmore could handle his business, and you wouldn’t be endangered.” He paused. “I’ve been waiting for the right time.” He paused again, Matthew aware that he was reading him, working through the playbook for a situation like this. “And then another thing happened and my timeline changed. And this happened, with the car, so we moved everything up. Now. You talked to your sister on Friday. Was she going somewhere?”

  “She was at the library, studying,” Matthew said. “She had class that day.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know. Ten?” He tried to concentrate. They passed the fourth floor. The third. “Yeah. She has a ten o’clock class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Criminology. Sometimes she calls me after class, if she has a question.”

  “Okay,” Poremba said. “She the type of person who goes out at night?”

  “She’s in college.”

  “Okay. Is she the type of person who wouldn’t notice her car was missing for a day or two?”

  “No. She hid with me in Walla Walla for two weeks while Jeff was working with your office chasing down leads on Sal Cupertine,” Matthew said. “She doesn’t know everything, but she knows enough that she came with me when shit got bad, okay? She’d be alarmed if something was out of whack.”

  “Okay,” Poremba said. “Okay.”

  “She’s not some sorority girl,” Matthew said. “She knows how to handle herself. I taught her. She’s got a gun. She’s . . . she’s not an idiot, Special Agent Poremba.”

  “I know she’s not,” Poremba said.

  Matthew hit the call button on his phone. There was some mistake here. Maybe Nina met someone at a bar last night, hasn’t even been back to Veronica’s yet. Or got drunk and slept at a different friend’s place. That’s what college students do—they meet people at bars. They sleep on friend’s couches. They don’t answer their phones at 10 a.m.

  No service.

  Fucking elevator.

  He pushed the 1 again, again, again, until finally the doors opened.

  “Hold on,” Poremba said, but Matthew was already gone, past the laundry, the break room, the staff kitchen, then out the double doors to the loading dock, into the sunlight, the air cool, barely sixty, fall finally here, and then broke into a run, arriving in the staff parking lot at the same time Agent Wilmore came sprinting out from the opposite direction.

  The German shepherd was circling Matthew’s Mustang, the agent in the bomb suit a foot behind the dog, the leash taut.

  “Ease up,” Agent Wilmore said. He put a hand on Matthew’s chest. “Let’s ease up.”

  Matthew grabbed Agent Wilmore by his wrist and snapped it. One move.

  Poremba ran up behind Matthew, out of breath.

  “Agent Drew,” he shouted, “stop.”

  But Matthew was almost to his car now, he hit the call button on his phone, put the phone to his ear. Took out his car keys.

  The German shepherd and the agent came around to the back of the Mustang.

  “Agent Drew,” Poremba shouted, “get away from the car. We need to clear it.”

  This would all be figured out.

  The German shepherd reared back on its hind legs, began to claw furiously at Matthew’s trunk. The agent in the bomb suit pulled the dog away, turned, and shouted something, but Matthew couldn’t make out what he was saying from inside the blast helmet. The agent let go of the dog, started to rip at his suit, unfastening it at the neck, peeling it back, shook his helmet off, screamed, “Get the fuck away!”

  But Matthew was there already.

  He heard what the agent heard.

  The sound of a cell phone ringing in the trunk.

  Matthew pulled his phone from his ear.

  Five rings.

  Six.

  He hung up. Hit redial.

  There it was again. Unmistakable. The German shepherd howling now.

  10

  Tuesday mornings, Rabbi David Cohen met OG Sean B at Temple Beth Israel at 7:00 a.m. to go over his bar mitzvah curriculum. Which meant David had to get to his office around six if he wanted to prep, have a cup of coffee, take a decent shit before the kids started showing up for school next door, which brought the parade of parents, each of them with some new problem only David could solve through his deep interpretation of the Talmud. That his interpretation usually boiled down to some variation of three edicts—Don’t be an asshole; Clean your own house; and Sometimes, you look the other way, which was actually a line from a song—didn’t seem to bother anyone, since none of them had read the Talmud anyway. So by 5:57 a.m. on the second Tuesday of September, David had already done five miles of road work, hit the heavy bag for thirty minutes, bundled four grand in cash to drop in a safe deposit box, and was now in his Range Rover, driving through the still-dark streets of Summerlin, headed to the temple.

  To get his mind right for twelve hours at work, he was listening to yet another bullshit book-on-tape about Kabbalah—his third—since he couldn’t bear to read the pretentious shit. But Kabbalah was all the congregation could talk about, half the people thinking it offered them some profound enlightenment, the other half believing it was the end of the Jewish faith. Today he was learning about the mystical uses of self-mortification to purify the evil in one’s soul, an idea David was sure wouldn’t land particularly well with a
nyone, since it would require a relationship to shame that simply wasn’t present these days and recognition that their problems were not, in fact, part of God’s grand plan.

  It sure wouldn’t work on OG Sean B. His tag was multiplying across the city; everywhere Rabbi David Cohen went, he saw another reminder of this niggling problem. Coming out of the funeral home, David saw it on the transformer box facing Hillpointe. Reading a magazine in the toilet at the Barnes & Noble on Rainbow, it was etched into the grout at David’s feet. Even up on the Summerlin Parkway overpass, which David was pulling toward now, the tag was there in front of him, three feet high and upside down, just as it had been for the last ten days or so:

  OG Sean B 187.

  What kind of OG let someone dangle them upside down off a fucking freeway overpass?

  The kind that really wanted to be noticed, David thought, which wasn’t all that different from how plenty of real OGs acted, like Cousin Ronnie in his absurd used-car commercials, though in this case it was probably less of an elaborate con and more a cry for help. OG Sean B wanted someone, anyone to pay attention to him, didn’t matter if the attention was negative. He was like a dog that pisses on the rug just to get punished for it.

  Also, 187 didn’t even mean anything in Nevada. It was the penal code for murder in California. Here it was just another number that had been co-opted to mean you were tough. And it wasn’t clear to David if the 187 was meant to indicate Sean was going to murder someone or if he was about to be murdered.

  “How do you know someone isn’t framing me?” Sean asked last week when David confronted him about the overpass, the kid not smart enough to get the spray paint and Sharpie ink off his hands before playing dumb. He was like his father in that regard.

  “You need to have an enemy in order to get framed,” David told him. “You have any enemies?”

  “Would I know?” Sean asked. Since school resumed in August, David had encountered a steady run of teachers, parents, local businesses, and neighborhood HOA presidents asking for the kid’s head. The HOAs were the more pressing issue, since they were threatening to have OG Sean B shot if they caught him alive, which was technically legal in Nevada, the state’s Use of Deadly Force laws being pretty lenient, particularly as it related to people committing crimes on private property. David didn’t care for most laws, but that one seemed fine. Still. It made him look weak, this bullshit, and eventually, someone was going to call the cops, because eventually everyone called the cops when someone fucked with their property.

  It was an accumulation of tsuris without an easy solution. And then, yesterday, it came to a head.

  “He’s a menace, Rabbi,” Roberta Leeb, the seventh-grade math teacher, told him. She’d stopped him on the sidewalk in front of the funeral home, David coming back from putting another Triad body into the ground. A teenage boy, judging strictly from his torso, since he didn’t have a face, the whole thing sliced off, a seam around the ears and scalp, meticulous, surgical work, but a fucking waste of time as a torture device, since the only person horrified by it was the one doing the work. “A real criminal, if you want my opinion,” Roberta continued. “Having him anywhere on the campus is tantamount to a violation of Hebrew law.”

  He wanted to go home, take a shower, get the bits of dirt out of his hair and from under his nails; every funeral they did was a soil-throwing affair, even on a windy day. Didn’t matter what end of the death spectrum he worked on, end of the day, David was picking someone else from his skin.

  “Tell Dr. Lupus.” Dr. Lupus was the principal. He was in his seventies, had known Rabbi Kales since they were kids in New York. He came to work about twice a week, spent the rest of the time at his place in Sun City either playing gin or drinking it. David didn’t think he’d make it through the year. He was mostly a series of tremors.

  “Please,” Roberta said, in that way. “Let’s take some responsibility here, okay?”

  “How’s his attendance?” David asked.

  “Perfect,” Roberta said.

  “If he were such a major criminal,” David told her, “he wouldn’t come to class.” David hadn’t gone to a day of high school after the eleventh grade. “He’d be too busy moving his weight.”

  “What does that even mean?” Roberta said.

  “A man, however fallen, who loves his home,” David said, “is not wholly lost.”

  “He’s not a man,” Roberta said. “I’m asking you to handle this situation. He’s beyond my reach.” She leaned forward and brushed dirt from the arm of David’s jacket. “Anyone I know today?”

  “No,” David said. “Out-of-town guest. Someone who always wanted a view of the mountains.”

  Roberta was in her forties. Rabbi Kales had recruited her from the Levine Torah Academy in Henderson, a private school David was busy putting out of business. If they didn’t close up shop by next semester, there was a good chance there would be a significant structure fire on campus. “I could be next if I have to deal with that little fucker one more day, pardon my language.” She dug into her purse, came out with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you mind?”

  “Yes.” David didn’t like the teachers smoking near the school. Bad optics. She shrugged, shoved the cigarettes and lighter back into her purse, came out with a pack of Nicorette, pushed a square of gum into her mouth, David watching her hand shake the whole time. Hard to work a full-time job with a full-time addiction. “You interested in Kabbalah at all?” David asked.

  Roberta actually recoiled. “You’re not one of them? All spiritual cleansing and the Light of Hashem?”

  He was not. But it occurred to him the thing that pissed people off about OG Sean B was the same thing that pissed them off about Kabbalah: Both showed a lack of respect for the faith. Jews weren’t supposed to act that way, and by doing so, did damage to everyone, and God wasn’t going to be able to unfuck it for the rest of them. This Kabbalah problem he blamed primarily on Madonna. She was all Jewed up these days, kept talking up the healing powers of the Zohar in interviews (at least according to the Casual Torah Study Group ladies who couldn’t shut the fuck up about it), and had started to wear a scarlet thread bracelet to ward off the ayin hara in every photo. The Casual Torah Study Group ladies kept bringing in People to show David the horror! the shanda! khas vesholem! like he needed some evidence apart from their fervor, ironic since he was pretty sure they hadn’t given a fuck when she was covered in crosses, writhing on a stage in a wedding dress.

  That was the thing with Jews, David had learned: They didn’t really trust converts all that much. They abhorred their iconography being co-opted, which made perfect sense, historically speaking. The problem with being hunted for the last two thousand years was that they were always waiting for the wolf to once again show up at the door, dressed just like them.

  Two of the most aggrieved Casual Torah ladies, Joanie Helms and Millie Meltzer, even convinced David to join them at the community college over on Charleston to watch a free speaker pimping himself as Yehuda Da Truth Tella prattle on for ninety minutes about numerology and the Ten Spheres of the Sephirot. He was purportedly from the Kabbalah Center in Tel Aviv, though David was pretty sure he’d seen the same guy hawking cell phones at the Meadows Mall. Not that Joanie and Millie seemed to care, both of them taking notes like high school freshman the whole time. The grift was done so expertly that, ten minutes in, they’d both forgotten their Talmudic grievances and were openly sighing and nodding in agreement, just like everyone else in the room.

  David caught Yehuda’s eye about midway through, no easy task in a room of 250 people, and held it for a few seconds, let Yehuda take him in in full, con man to con man, but Yehuda didn’t flinch, his patter so tight that when he looked into the face of an actual contract killer he still trundled forward. David could have pissed on the floor and Yehuda would have said it was a sign from God.

  It was all bullshit. A mixture of cheap
mysticism and Reiki healing with a little Hebrew tossed in, basically Scientology for Jews, without the thuggery, spacemen, or the booth at the farmer’s market. David saw nothing revolutionary in the “truth” Yehuda was telling, Kabbalah had been around since the Middle Ages after all, but he did appreciate the hustle. At the end of his talk, Yehuda passed out registration forms for a three-day seminar taking place at the Mirage in October—with the promise of “Enlightenment, Engagement, and a Healthy and Wealthy Future!” The Yentas flopped their black Amex cards out like they were dealing blackjack.

  Soon, David was stocking scarlet bracelets in the Judaica store at the temple. Thirty-five bucks—cash only—got you a piece of red string that David snipped from a ball of yarn he bought at Joann’s. He then had Linda Barris and Ed Geyer, the thousand-year-old volunteers who worked the spot on Saturdays after services, make little signs that said the string had been personally blessed by both Rabbi Cohen and Rabbi Kales, who’d taken on an exalted position in people’s minds since his “illness,” as if his proximity to death somehow made him all the more holy, with all proceeds going directly to the Barer Academy’s Scholarship Fund. The fund was bullshit, since no Jews in Summerlin wanted to be known as the “needy Jews,” and yet the fund was a money tree, the dead being particularly kind to it, always good for a few thousand in their wills.

  David was pocketing that bracelet money directly, averaging about a G a week—in fact, the money he’d bundled this morning and had stashed in the passenger seat of his Range Rover, along with his gun, was mostly bracelet cash—everyone in the congregation was wearing the bracelets now, even the men. Jordan Rosen had one on either side of his Rolex. It was shit work making the bracelets—though David sort of liked the monotony, found it psychically calming—and in that way, it was just like the old days, David happy to do an odd job if it meant something in his pocket. But it was also like the old days in that people thought something David did was actually protecting them, when in fact it was all an elaborate con: You were going to die. You were always going to die.