Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Personally,” David said to Roberta, “I think Kabbalah is a scam. But I read something interesting the other day.”

  “If it involves crystals or vortexes,” she said, “I’m not interested.”

  “No,” David said. For someone who didn’t believe in Kabbalah, she sure knew a lot about it. “The Safed, every night before they go to sleep, do a meditation forgiving anyone who has made them angry or damaged their property, either wittingly or unwittingly, as well as anyone who has pondered such an action.”

  “So they even forgive people who think about doing things to them?”

  “Right,” David said. “And they ask that no one be punished by God for having done or thought about doing bad things to them. Basically, they absolve the whole world, every night. Start fresh the next day.”

  “I don’t agree with that,” Roberta said.

  “I don’t either,” David said. “But maybe try it for a week.”

  Roberta chewed her nicotine gum for a few seconds, contemplating.

  “Where are you from originally, Rabbi?” she asked eventually.

  “All over,” David said. “My father worked for the military.” He had the whole backstory he’d been given memorized, little details added over time to flesh out the small things, as many things that were kind of true as possible, so that he wouldn’t slip up. The military part Rabbi Kales gave him. Jews in Israel served. Jews in America did not. He’d never need to worry about anyone asking a follow-up question, because they didn’t want to sound like weaklings, and the fact was they thought military service in America was beneath them.

  “See, I grew up here,” she said, which David already knew. He knew where every single teacher at the Barer Academy had come from and where, in a way, they were headed: Bennie’s lawyer delivered a dossier on each of them when they were hired, including information David might need down the line, details on their addictions, who they were fucking on the side. Roberta was relatively clean. Smoked a little weed her husband, Don, got from a coworker at UNLV. No children. Labrador named Lucy. Owed $189,000 on her house, which had an ARM loan, which was like getting sharked by the Bank of America. “I remember when where we’re standing was still desert. We’d come out here and drink on Friday nights. The cops would let us mill around for a few hours, then they’d show up and we’d all have to pour out our beer and go home. No one ever got arrested unless they really mouthed off. And even then, they wouldn’t get charged. Their parents would have to come down to the station and pick them up, which was a whole production.”

  “You were kids.”

  “That’s right,” Roberta said. “But you know what the difference was? The cops didn’t think we were jerks. They’d grown up here, too, so they knew getting wasted in the desert was just what kids did. Rites of passage are important, Rabbi.”

  “I agree.”

  “Then you’d agree pretending you’re a gangster is not a rite of passage,” Roberta said. “It’s something you do when you’re seven. Cops and robbers, all of that? You keep doing that after puberty hits, you’re not pretending anymore. You’re a budding sociopath.”

  “Maimonides said . . .” David began to say, but Roberta cut him off.

  “Save your quotes for Shabbat,” Roberta said. “Not everything is about the twelfth century. If that kid isn’t out of my class by end of business this Friday, I’m quitting and you can teach pre-algebra, Rabbi. I’m not having some trench-coat Columbine wannabe in my classroom. His other teachers feel the same way, so brush up on your history and French, too.”

  The problem David had, other than his empathy for OG Sean B’s living situation, was that OG Sean B was going to stand in front of a few hundred of his closest friends and relatives on his thirteenth birthday in December and speak Torah. Temple space was already booked, along with the ballroom at the Performing Arts Center for the after-party. The temple had also contracted the DJ and the catering, the bartender, the flowers, secured a magician, reserved a “hype man” to get the kids dancing, Cold Stone Creamery was doing a pop-up ice cream parlor, and then there was going to be a paintball tournament on the undeveloped grounds west of the cemetery, some sort of desert warfare simulation. Ninety-five thousand dollars out the door. It wasn’t all profit, of course, but David was going to get his. Roberta Leeb was not going to stand in the way of his money.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” David said. He heard something move into his voice, didn’t try to stop it, having seen how well it worked with Casey Berkowitz. He leaned down toward Roberta, about five feet nothing and a lot of that was frizzy hair. “Meantime, don’t threaten me again, Roberta. I don’t react well when people threaten me.”

  “Don’t make me,” Roberta said. She stepped off the sidewalk then and headed back toward the Academy’s parking lot. By the time she reached her car—a red Miata—she was already smoking.

  It was, Rabbi David Cohen considered now, how it always went in Las Vegas. No one was ever willing to just walk away with credit on the machine. The proof was all around him. A steady stream of SUVs exited off the Summerlin Parkway and headed south toward the half-built gated communities that now advertised no doc loans! on the billboards. When the Howard Hughes Corporation started to build out Summerlin, the idea was that the neighborhoods would be filled with doctors from the Summerlin Medical Center, lawyers from the Village Center Legal Park, gaming executives from the Resort at Summerlin, maybe a few white-flight types coming in from Los Angeles to buy golf course homes at TPC, but certainly not the strippers, professional Texas Hold ’Em players, and other cash-only professionals they were attempting to lure in now.

  The stethoscopes and white collars had come, sure enough, but there weren’t enough of them, which is how all master plans got ruined, David had learned, particularly from reading Rabbi Kales’s books about the Holocaust: Once you ran out of the people you wanted, you either diluted the pool or started killing the minorities. So now the developers had to pimp to two diametrically opposed lifestyles: the luxury set who spent their disposable income on golf, tennis, teeth whitening, and hair plugs . . . and the aspirational existence of upwardly mobile charlatans.

  You had cash these days, the developers didn’t give a shit if you got it bouncing your ass on tourists’ dicks, going all in on pocket twos, or treating brain cancer. As long as you were prepared to pay a variable rate of interest, as Roberta Leeb was, you could have a brand-new home with an unfinished yard and access to a community pool, no questions asked. It was ruining the neighborhood. The Jews of Temple Beth Israel were already getting restless, moving farther and farther west into newer and more expensive developments opening in the foothills of the Red Rocks, places with exorbitant HOA fees, which kept out the riff-raff who could only afford their homes and not the land around them, ghettoizing their own exclusivity. Places like the Lakes at Summerlin Greens, where David lived, were equally filled by wealthy families, geriatrics who thought Sun City was one step from a feeding tube, girls named Star, and vampiric twenty-five-year-old poker players who wore sunglasses at all hours and flew model airplanes over the common areas.

  Most of the SUVs streaming by David this morning were driven by young women—strippers and cocktail waitresses coming back from their shifts—and middle-aged, tanning-bed-orange white guys in red shirts and black ties, Gotti haircuts, cigarettes burning between their fingers. David really saw these young women only in the early morning, but he ran into these corporatized pit bosses every day, at all hours. They still talked and dressed like mobsters, except they didn’t have to kick up, were content to pull six-figure salaries from the MGM and Steve Wynn in exchange for paid vacation and a 401k. Used to be a pit boss had some actual sway, maybe would smack the shit out of you for some card-counting bullshit, but the assholes David saw were just costumed performers, guys so tough they answered to Human Resources and handed out punch cards for free steak dinners. No one was smacking the shit out of any
one for Steve Wynn’s bottom line. That was up to the lawyers, like the ones Dr. Melnikoff was surely dealing with regularly.

  Not that David thought it should be different.

  No, in fact, what he felt was simple pity.

  It was going to be part of the lesson he taught OG Sean B today. He who humiliates himself will be lifted up. He who raises himself up will be humiliated. Casey. OG Sean B. These assholes? All the same, all playacting at the shit David had done. And if they knew what David knew? If they had to sleep with that? There was a difference between mitigating a dispute at the pai gow table and killing four Donnie Brascos in one night, and yet these guys spent their lives fronting like they were the kind of people who did wet work. Pitiful. What was a kid like OG Sean B supposed to think? The whole culture of this town was upside down, and the longer he lived here, the more David began to believe that Las Vegas festered and abided evil. In Chicago, yeah, the Family sold drugs and killed people, extorted money and ran rackets, but if you didn’t come looking for the Family, you’d never see them. The Rain Man wasn’t going to show up at your house and kill you for cheating on your taxes or running a red light.

  Maybe Israel was the place he and his family should go. The wars there at least had precedent, and everyone had a gun. A fair fight. Wouldn’t that be nice.

  These men driving by him craved the stink he couldn’t wash from himself in a thousand Days of Atonement. And frankly, David wasn’t sorry about a lot of the things he’d done, which made him pity these men more. They wanted to be Al Pacino, not Sal Cupertine. That would be in the lesson, too, David thought. The Jew is born civilized, he’d read that, and though he didn’t believe it, it’s what made mensches out of meshuggeners.

  The light changed and David caught the eye of the driver of a black Ford Expedition lagging through the intersection. He was olive-skinned, which wasn’t something David saw much of on this side of town—maybe a Mexican or Persian, hard to tell precisely in the coming dawn. His hair was cut close, and he had one of those thin goatees favored by douchebags everywhere, his face illuminated by a glowing TV screen mounted next to the rearview mirror, the blonde beside him watching it with a kind of slack-jawed wonder. The Expedition was going maybe fifteen miles per hour, slow enough not to be terribly dangerous, but it had been raised up on monster truck tires, like it was going to assault Gaza.

  David gave the man a nod as they passed each other, and the man nodded back. The night shift and the day shift crossing at the time clock, punching in and punching out, everyone driving tanks. The grind was real and, man, it was armored.

  •

  When David pulled into his parking space at the temple, a quarter after six, there was already a car in the lot, which was strange. It was a black Cutlass, white water spots on the hood, windshield a corona of dirt from the wipers, and it was parked at the edge of the lot closest to the street, perpendicular, covering three spaces at once.

  This time of the morning, there were usually a few cars up the way at the Barer Academy, janitors and the rent-a-cops getting the place turned on.

  At the funeral home and mortuary across the street, the morning guy, Miguel, would be coming in around seven to start the pickups from the hospitals and hospice facilities around town, if he wasn’t already doing an emergency from the overnight, someone waking up to find their spouse dead beside them. Ruben and the rest of the staff came in around eight, unless there was an early service on the books. If there was a body coming from one of their partners, Ruben handled that himself, drove the hearse to the pickup—usually the private airfield in Henderson, or the muni out in Boulder City, or if it was coming in a car, they’d meet out in the desert—brought it inside, handled the paperwork, removed the organs if they were getting repurposed, had the staff clean the corpse, or not, get them into their coffins so David could do his show.

  Jerry Ford and his LifeCore van usually showed up around nine thirty for any donations from the morning shift, and then walk-ins would start at ten, crying families looking lost and afraid.

  This morning, however, there wasn’t a soul anywhere. No one jogging. No one walking a dog. The American flag hadn’t been raised in front of the school yet. There weren’t even any planes in the sky, which was odd, since 6:00 a.m. was when Southwest and United and American started launching people back to their lives, seven days a week.

  Just this black Cutlass and David.

  It was probably nothing.

  David got out of his Range Rover, walked over to the Cutlass, peered inside the driver’s side window. There was a small clipboard stuck with Velcro onto the dash, marked Mileage Log. Each line had a place to put the date, the beginning mileage, and the ending mileage, and then a place for initials, David seeing the same two up and down the page: MM.

  Today’s mileage started at 45,912.

  The day before: 45,427.

  Almost five hundred miles in one day.

  On the passenger seat sat a red accordion folder filled with carefully filed documents. Maybe fifty or seventy-five pieces of paper, also what looked like glossy photos, though he couldn’t make out anything specific, and then maybe a third of the documents and photos had yellow or pink sticky tags jutting off them. Next to the folder was a phone charger, a ripped-open package of Tide Sticks, a Nikon camera. There was a foam cup in the cup holder, an inch of coffee in the bottom.

  A wire coat hanger dangled from a hook in the backseat.

  There was a lint roller on the floor, next to a lockbox.

  Shit.

  David walked around to the back of the car, looked at the plate.

  us government

  FA34119

  for official use only

  FBI? ATF? Maybe U.S. Marshals. Maybe all three.

  He couldn’t kill them all.

  He had two choices. Run or fight. He had a Glock in the Range Rover, full clip, fifteen rounds. He had the four Gs in the car, plus all that cash in safe deposit boxes around town, including one up in Pahrump, an hour away. If he could get that far. He doubted it. Fifteen rounds weren’t going to be enough to take on a full federal assault team. He’d take out a few, sure, and then what? He’d be the guy who killed six feds instead of the four already on his sheet. So they’d give him six lethal injections instead of four? If he made it that far. They’d probably just plug him right here. Save the taxpayers some cash.

  If the feds were on him, it would be a production, even if he got away. Spike strips. Planes. Sharpshooters. CNN motherfuckers tracking him like O.J. This car? It was the tip of the spear. Maybe a diversion. When they grabbed Tony Camelia, a New York guy in Niagara Falls, they told him he’d won a free trip from his grocery store loyalty points, put him up in the Sheraton, even gave him the free breakfast buffet, then twenty-five agents put AR-15s on him at the waffle bar. All he’d done was kill a snitch. What would they bring for Sal Cupertine?

  “Maybe you can help me?”

  David turned and saw a woman in a black pantsuit, blue shirt opened two buttons, tall, almost six foot in her boot heels, walking across the street from the funeral home. Red hair pulled back from her face in a thick ponytail. Thirty, thirty-five years old. She didn’t have anything in her hands, no purse, no phone, but walked like she had something on her hip.

  “Is this your car?” David said.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said. Not unpleasant. Not pleasant. Maybe didn’t even hear the question, still thirty feet away.

  In the distance, David thought he made out the bleating of a siren. He looked to his right, past the Academy, to where Hillpointe bled into Hills Center Drive, watched the intersection. A black Suburban crawled by, going north. A couple seconds later, another Suburban, going south. But then a Honda, a minivan, a Lexus. Nothing with a siren bar on top.

  Where were they?

  He turned back. The woman was only a few feet from him now.

  H
is own car sat twenty yards away, which meant his gun was twenty yards away, behind a locked door. His knife was in his pocket, but he couldn’t exactly gut a person in the temple parking lot. For one thing, her screams would wake the neighbors. For another, he didn’t know how he’d explain the pools of blood to OG Sean B, never mind the kindergarten kids when they began to show up in two hours, if he somehow managed to hide her body in time. And he wasn’t keen on killing women. In fact, he’d never done that. He needed to figure this out, fast, without getting shot.

  “Are you lost?” David said.

  “Rabbi David Cohen?” A question in her voice.

  “Is that who you’re looking for?”

  “Is that who you are?”

  “No,” David said, but then thought better of it. What if he got out of this situation? The lie would be a problem down the line. He looked to his left. No Suburbans there. But now he heard another siren. He was sure it was a siren. He tried to smile. It nearly worked. “Not until nine. I’m just David Cohen right now.”

  “Ah, okay,” she said, and nodded her head. She was in front of him now, a foot between them, professional distance, but didn’t put her hand out to shake, instead she put both her hands in front of her hips, index fingers pointed down, palms open, ready to move. She had freckles on her nose. A coffee stain, looked like, on the lapel of her shirt, those Tide Sticks probably coming in handy. He couldn’t see her gun, but the way her belt slung low around her hips, he knew it was there. “I’m Agent Moss. You’re in charge here?”

  “As much as a man can be,” David said. He closed his left hand into a fist, felt the leather strap of teffilin there. It was wrapped all the way up his arm, around his wrist, over his thumb, and then encircled his middle finger three times. It was going to be part of today’s lesson for OG Sean B, about the harmony of spirit and action, the rule of intellect over emotion, that the heart ennobles any calling. He slipped the strap from around his finger, felt it spool into his palm. “Is there a problem?”