Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “There is,” she said. “We need to talk about your operation here.” She pointed over her left shoulder with her thumb, toward the cemetery. David could see her pulse beating in her neck. Where was the backup? Already inside the temple? Or maybe there was a sniper on him from inside the Academy? Another from inside the funeral home? It made sense. That’s why no one was here yet. They’d cleared the buildings. Probably blocked traffic behind him. David looked up into the sky.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  And then . . . he heard it. The whoop-whoop-whoop of a helicopter. He couldn’t see it. But he could hear it. And the sirens. Were they getting closer? It was hard to tell. But there were three or four of them now, he was pretty sure.

  “I have a student arriving shortly,” David said. “Will it take long?”

  “Depends,” Agent Moss said, “if your answers satisfy me.”

  “Then maybe you should come back,” David said.

  “That’s not an option,” she said. “Is there some place private we can do this?”

  “Right here is fine,” David said. He wasn’t walking into a building to get shot. He got killed inside the temple, they’d have to knock the whole place down, or else it would end up a stop on a tour, like the Marie Calender’s on Sahara where Lefty Rosenthal’s car got blown up, or the stoplight on Flamingo where 2Pac got hit.

  “Okay,” Agent Moss said. “If that’s how you want to do it.” She took a step to the right, toward the passenger side door, and for a brief moment, David was behind her, which was all he needed.

  He pulled the strap of leather teffilin tight between his hands and yanked it around Agent Moss’s throat, twisted it in an X, compacting her carotids and knocking her out before she could even start to fight, spun her around toward the temple, where he figured the first gunshots would come from—if they were going to shoot him, they were taking Agent Moss out, too—reached down with his right hand and went for the agent’s gun, to give himself a fucking chance, yanked it from the holster.

  He came up with a Blackberry.

  Shit.

  He dropped the Blackberry, felt along her back, her left hip, kicked at her ankles. There had to be a gun somewhere.

  Nothing.

  He stood there, facing the temple, the agent hot against his chest, her legs twitching, waited. One. Two. Three. Tightened the strap.

  Waited.

  Nothing.

  He spun Agent Moss around toward the Barer Academy. If there was a sniper inside there, David would already be dead. He knew that. He also knew that he had about fifteen seconds before this woman was a fucking vegetable.

  He spun toward the funeral home.

  Maybe her partner was coming up behind David now. It wasn’t like in the movies. They wouldn’t shoot you in the back if you had an agent in your arms. They weren’t Navy SEALs. They were guys like Jeff Hopper, who didn’t even come at him armed. Or those three Donnie Brasco motherfuckers, geared to the teeth in a hotel room, and they couldn’t manage to hit him with a single bullet. They weren’t killers. They were office workers. Difference between shooting at a target and shooting at a person was that a person would always shoot back.

  Nothing. Nobody.

  He looked up into the sky for the helicopter, made one out in the distance, flying low, toward the Strip. He listened for the sirens. They were getting farther away now. Were they even sirens? Or was that only a ringing in his ears?

  He dragged Agent Moss back around to the driver’s side of the Cutlass, away from the street, dumped her on the ground, let the strap go. Tried to gather his thoughts. Let Agent Moss breathe for a second, before it was too late.

  It was 6:19 a.m.

  Why wasn’t David dead yet? Something was off. He rifled through Agent Moss’s pockets, looked for a wallet, some kind of ID, but she had nothing, just her keys. No handcuffs, zip ties. Wasn’t wearing Kevlar. He picked her Blackberry up off the ground, clicked open the mail. A page of messages scrolled down, all to a @nv.gov address. Which meant this was probably a government phone. Which meant it was probably chipped with GPS. Which meant she was being tracked. Or could be, anyway.

  Thing was, Agent Moss, she wasn’t missing. Not yet. She was where she was supposed to be.

  David pocketed the phone, then unlocked the Cutlass and pulled out the lockbox, which wasn’t locked. He looked inside, found a store-bought sandwich wrapped in plastic, a banana, two oatmeal cookies. He tossed it back into the car.

  Agent Moss’s right foot twitched, brushed against David’s heel. He looked down, watched her eyes, to see if they opened. A pool of fluid began to spread out on the pavement under Agent Moss. She’d pissed herself.

  David stepped around the car, popped open the trunk. A Samsonite overnight bag. A black Nine West purse, a worn hardback copy of The Bridges of Madison County inside it. Jennifer read that. Kept it on her nightstand for a year. He dug the woman’s wallet out of her purse, found her driver’s license. Melanie Moss lived at 1418 Snowflake Lane in Carson City. She was thirty-five years old. Had forty-seven dollars in cash, five credit cards, a Costco card. A Blockbuster card. A receipt from the Chevron on Rainbow. Twenty-seven dollars in gas, eleven dollars in snacks. A receipt from dinner at Houlihan’s, a shitty restaurant next door to the Courtyard Inn on Rainbow. She had a receipt from there, too. One night, government rate, eighty-nine dollars.

  Where the fuck was her FBI ID?

  Where the fuck was her backup?

  Why the fuck did they send her out here alone?

  Agent Moss let out a sound akin to someone trying to swallow wood chips. David walked over and nudged her with his shoe. She didn’t react. Red foam on her lips.

  He’d tried not to snap her windpipe. It was like asking a shark not to swim. Even Harvey B. Curran would understand that.

  It was 6:20. In forty minutes, OG Sean B would be here. In less time than that, teachers would start showing up to prep. The gym teacher would be outside, washing down the basketball court. The one goy on the whole faculty. Mr. Landers. If he saw David, he’d walk over, coffee mug in hand, would want to know about getting some new metal basketball hoops.

  And then he’d be dead.

  That’s how it worked.

  Wasn’t even a question.

  David hadn’t killed anyone since that FBI agent. Two years without killing. The best run of his adult life. Yeah, he wanted to kill Casey Berkowitz. But he hadn’t. He’d shown restraint. A little restraint. An iota. The best of him, he realized. That single iota that stopped him from walking up behind Casey Berkowitz and putting one in the back of his head. It was the difference between him and some Jeffrey Dahmer motherfucker.

  And now this.

  David pulled the bags from the trunk, tossed them in the backseat, then knelt down beside Agent Melanie Moss, felt for a pulse at the base of her neck. It was there. Weak. A whistle of air escaped from her mouth. He might not have snapped her windpipe after all. Not completely. Not that it mattered. David lifted her eyelids up with his thumbs, made sure she wasn’t playing dead, that she was unconscious.

  Sal Cupertine had been in the game pretty much since the moment his father hit the pavement in front of him. Thirty years now. Not a day had gone by when he hadn’t thought of someone he’d like to kill, someone he’d killed, or someone he’d seen someone else kill. And in all that time? He’d never hurt a woman. Not physically. Never imagined a situation where that seemed like the thing he had to do. Did it happen? Did other people do it? Sure. But Sal Cupertine, he wasn’t that guy. Never would be.

  The difference between never and once? That could be your whole life.

  Rabbi David Cohen wrapped the teffilin around Agent Melanie Moss’s throat one more time, pulled the strap tight, put a hand over her eyes, and snapped her neck.

  11

  Rabbi David Cohen parked the Cutlass behind the f
uneral home, locked the sliding metal gate behind him, went inside the mortuary, and called Ruben Topaz. It was 6:30 a.m. There wasn’t anything on the calendar for the day, which didn’t mean anything. Jews liked to get in the ground fast. If someone needed a funeral, it was just a matter of digging a hole and saying kaddish.

  “Estás viendo esa pendejada?” Ruben said when he answered.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Oh,” Ruben said. And then a pause. “Rabbi Cohen?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought this was Miguel,” he said, his words coming out fast. “You seeing this?”

  “There’s a client here,” David said.

  “A family?” Ruben asked. David could hear the TV on in the background, could hear a baby crying, Ruben’s wife talking in Spanish, another voice, a boy.

  “Not a family,” David said.

  “Miguel should be there in a minute,” Ruben said. “He can do a coroner intake.”

  “This isn’t something Miguel can handle,” David said. He never talked to Ruben about the bodies he was burying. They’d talk about the logistics of the ceremony, about whether or not Jerry Ford should be contacted about possible donations, about scheduling. But if there was a nineteen-year-old Chinese guy without a face and a fifty-something white guy with a bullet through his neck in the refrigerators, David didn’t ask Ruben if he thought it odd they were named Suzanne Adler and Anne Haber. Did Ruben think David was a rabbi? Yes. Did Ruben think David was at least as morally compromised as he was? Probably, or, at the very least, that Bennie Savone had some dark shit on him. Did he think David was a former Mafia hit man? David doubted it, highly. Rabbi David Cohen was just another in a line of dupes. The last one, Rabbi Gottlieb, ended up in Lake Mead, and Ruben probably thought David would eventually end up there too. “I need you to come in.”

  “Are you serious? Are you watching this?”

  “I’m at the mortuary,” David said. “I haven’t watched anything.”

  “We’re under attack, man! They’re blowing up New York. You need to turn on a TV.”

  David set the phone down and walked to the lobby of the mortuary, to the small TV mounted on the wall. All day long, a receptionist sat and watched game shows and read magazines and answered the phone. Her name was Bridget or Tania or Maggie. They never lasted long. He dug through her desk and found the remote, clicked the TV on. Watched the news. The president, a bunch of little kids standing behind him, said that terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center, that he was getting out of Dodge, and that God was blessing everyone. And then they were showing footage of a plane smashing into a building, over and over again. Confetti falling out of the sky, or maybe that was walls or bodies, the anchor saying all air travel had been canceled, that there were planes still out there, and no one was quite sure which were being flown by pilots, which were being flown by hijackers, maybe they’d start shooting planes out of the sky.

  David clicked the TV off, tried to piece together what he’d seen, what the fuck it meant. Took out Agent Moss’s Blackberry, turned off the ringer, because someone would be calling, eventually, then went back into the mortuary, picked up the phone.

  “Are you still there, Ruben?”

  “Yeah, man, Jesus, you see that?

  “Ruben,” David said, “I need you to listen to me. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah, man, yeah,” Ruben said. “What if they’re coming here? We got all these big-ass buildings. They could be here right now.”

  “Ruben,” David said, “the client is in the trunk of a car. I need you to call Miguel and tell him to stay home.”

  A baby screaming. Ruben’s wife—Carla? Carlene? Cara?—speaking Spanish, fast. The TV too loud. More screaming from the baby. The sound of Ruben breathing. Now two boys talking. Kids getting ready for school, everyone watching cartoons or Al Roker and then, boom, planes into buildings. William would be at school already, Jennifer on her way to work.

  “This coming from Mr. Savone?” Ruben said.

  “No,” David said. He thought about his next words carefully, decided it was the only solution. He’d figure out what was on the other side of it once Ruben got there. “This is coming from Rabbi Kales. And he says that if you’re not here in the next twenty minutes, you and your entire family are going to be in the trunk, too.”

  •

  By the time Ruben arrived, five minutes before seven, David had already canceled school, told his assistant, Esther, to notify everyone who worked at the temple to stay home, put up a closed sign on the funeral home, and caught Kate Berkowitz on her cell phone in the car to cancel bar mitzvah class, “in light of the morning’s event,” and even recommended a part of the Talmud she could read with OG Sean B instead, “to help understand the existential questions he will surely begin to ask”—Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world—and was standing outside, beside the Cutlass, waiting.

  Ruben usually drove a tricked-out red Ford F-150, being the kind of guy who liked to drive down to Laughlin with his wife and kids, hitch his boat—the Loco Motion—and a couple Sea-Doos to the back, spend the weekend on the river, David always hearing him tell Miguel how lucky he was, maybe he’d start hitting those dice again, like back in the day. David always wondered when that day was, exactly, since Ruben Topaz was no more than thirty-two, even though his oldest boy was already ten, then a five-year-old and a newborn, and probably another on the way, because he was Catholic. But David and Ruben kept it professional at all times, nothing personal. Both of them in their roles.

  Bennie Savone had known Ruben since he was a teenager, put him through mortuary school in Arizona, set him up at the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace, trusted him to run the entire shop, both legit and criminal. Families liked him. He was a good boss to the funeral home staff. Got shit done. Even volunteered to help coach the temple baseball team, since the Jews, man, they needed help with that. Was respectful to everyone. Firm handshake. Looked you in the eye when he spoke to you. Didn’t rip off the public on caskets, even cut prices for people who really couldn’t afford it—most Jews, all they wanted was a simple pine box, as per Jewish law, but those simple pine boxes had upgrades, too: silk lining, gold handles, inlaid platinum design work, make it nice for the graveside bit—or told them they could get a deal at Costco, since the real money was in the service. Plus, a lot of the dead were goyim who had married Jews, and so they didn’t want to be buried without them, thus they’d get the full open-casket show, which was more money, but Ruben, he was fair about that, too, didn’t gouge senior citizens burying their spouses or shocked out-of-towners tasked with getting their relatives into the ground. He was pretty good with flowers and linens, could arrange a plate of oranges to look like a rose; for five hundred dollars he could make a reception in the Home of Peace for twenty-five people, make it seem like it cost five thousand. Push came to shove, he’d bake cookies, cut up some apples, run down to the Bagel Café for a bagel and challah platter, some lox, comfortable and home-style. Whatever had to happen, Ruben Topaz handled it, always immaculately dressed, always empathetic, always ready with a tissue or a hug.

  A mensch, if David was being honest about it.

  This morning, though, Ruben rolled up in a black minivan, baby seat still in the backseat, UNLV sticker on the rear window, and got out wearing a pair of Adidas sweatpants, black Chuck Taylors, and a white tank top.

  David had never seen Ruben without a suit. Now he understood why: Ruben’s left arm was a full-sleeve tattoo of the Stratosphere hotel, the point of the tower disappearing under the strap of the tank top, and his right arm depicted the Virgin Mary tossing dice and coming up with the hard eight. Across his chest, just above the line of the tank and creeping up toward his neck, was the number 13. He was from the Barrio Naked City gang, which made sense. The Wild Horse was technically in BNC territory. Not a bad strategic
partnership. Explained why there were never any stories of Gs from BNC shaking down anyone at the club or shooting it out with Rolling 60s in the parking lot—a thing that happened at Cheetahs every other weekend—not that Bennie would put up with that shit. And not that David thought Ruben would be out calling shots or doing drive-bys, seeing as he lived on the outskirts of Summerlin in a nongated development called the Vista at Terra Lago, across the street from St. Anne’s Catholic school and church. David had a hard time imagining someone with two-carat diamond studs in his ears, or the diamond-studded cross around his neck like Ruben was also sporting this morning, getting much traction with the homies anymore. He was about as street as Rodeo Drive, even if he still had the ink from his old life.

  “You looking at something?” Ruben said.

  “You don’t have a shirt with sleeves?”

  “That’s where we at?” Ruben said. “We’re talking fashion? I wasn’t even working today, right?” It looked to David like maybe Ruben had a gun tucked under his tank top, shoved in his waistband, though now he didn’t trust his judgment on these matters. Not like David blamed him. Today was getting more and more fucked up as each minute passed. “My wife barely let me walk out. She’s scared as shit, so let’s do this, okay? I’m here.”

  “You have a gun there in your waistband?”

  Ruben looked down at his stomach like he wasn’t sure. “If I do, that change something?”

  “No,” David said. “Not unless you pull it out.”

  “Rabbi Kales here?”

  “No,” David said. “He sent me.”

  Ruben considered this. “Then no,” Ruben said. “I got nothing on me.”

  They stood there for a few seconds, both of them sizing each other up, Ruben in his gangster leisure-wear, probably a loaded nine on his body, David in his suit, his Glock now inside his jacket, both coming to some conclusions about the other, though David suspected Ruben’s were wrong.

  David shrugged, popped open the trunk.

  Ruben leaned in, got a better look. “Oh shit,” he said, and recoiled. “I know her.”