by Tod Goldberg
Motherfuckers would start disappearing, because the gangsters in Chicago had institutional memory, and David wasn’t just thinking about the Family. He was thinking about the Russians. The Mexican gangs. The Vice Lords. These were legacy businesses. The time to make money, the time to get over on everyday people—which is where real profit lived, not stealing from other gangsters—was when they were scared about something else.
Russians would be doing mortgage scams on old ladies first thing in the morning, would have fake charities for the victims by sundown, would be boosting expensive cars from the driveways of Streeterville redbricks by midnight, the blue glow of TVs in windows the sign that no one was paying attention to what was happening on their own street.
The Latin Kings would be selling protection to the migrant workers worried that they were about to be rounded up, because when war came along, Americans had a rich history of looking to put brown and yellow people into camps or drive them to the border.
The Vice Lords would turn on their credit card fraud game, park themselves in the suburban gas station mini-markets with card duplicators, ready for the rush of people like the ones standing in front of David right now. Buy twelve gallons of unleaded in Peoria, five hours later, in St. Louis, your entire bank account would be drained.
The Family? They’d be open 24/7 now. They’d amp up their marijuana and opiate distribution, since bad news meant people wanted to feel high, not paranoid, so they’d push their coke game to the side for a bit. They’d get their Gangster 2-6 corner boys loaded up with some good shit, or give their old shit a new name, rebrand existing products. They’d up their business in the colleges around Chicago and Milwaukee and Detroit, college kids always seeking an influx of drugs when the social order seemed tenuous, the Family learning that going back to the sixties. They’d get their guys who ran the high-priced girl business some pills—Oxy, Klonopin, Viagra—so visiting businessmen could have a real party, but maybe give them a roofie instead, take the motherfucker’s Rolex and black American Express and snap a few photos of him nude, with some girl riding him, start up that blackmail business, make some cash on the regular. Then they’d get some fresh girls into the highway strip clubs in the corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, start selling blow jobs at a cut rate for a few weeks, then make the product scarce, turn up the price, make that demand come alive again. Stock market would drop, the Family would start making lower-than-usual-interest loans. A month from now, the Family would come to collect, start moving that interest up, start taking cars, start taking jewelry, start taking electronics, start taking teeth. Two months, fuckers would be getting second and third mortgages to pay off the Family, but by then it would be too late. The Family would have someone make you a cash offer. For your five-hundred-thousand-dollar home, they’d offer fifty thousand and a clean debt, and you’d take it, quitclaim the house to some motherfucker named Gino, because you’d rather owe the bank whatever was left on your mortgage than owe the Family your fucking life. The Family would then sell that house and keep the profit, or they’d set it on fire, or worse, they’d live in it.
“Immediately following the first attack,” the president said, “I implemented our government’s emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it’s prepared.”
“That’s right,” Denim Jacket said. He looked at David, nodded his head like they’d agreed to something. Maybe they had, just by standing there together. “No one fucks with us.” David wanted to point at the screen and ask if this wasn’t someone fucking with us, what was? Everyone got fucked with. That’s what David had learned. What mattered was who had your back afterward. Last two thousand years or so, Jews had learned the hard way that it was easy for people to push their empathy to one side, the whole world a mob when no one was willing to stand up for you. Which, David thought now, was why Israelis were obligated to serve in the military. For days like today. You had to be in the company of lions.
“I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice,” the president said, and David immediately felt worse. They couldn’t find Sal Cupertine. How the fuck were they going to find who did this? Audacious acts were committed by confident people. That was the whole thing. Naming them meant nothing.
It was how the system worked.
Responsibility meant nothing.
The money was in retribution.
The FBI knew the Family was responsible for killing hundreds, probably thousands, of people since the turn of the last century, just in Chicago. All that happened as a result were a lot of movies, shitty TV shows, novels, and true crime books about guys named Vinnie the Ice Pick. Only a couple dozen consequential people did any real time. Mostly, it was only foot soldiers rotting in prison. David couldn’t see how this would be any different. Murder was an industry, from the street up to the White House. History didn’t sleep on this sort of thing. It fed on it.
He remembered his dad telling stories about listening to Pearl Harbor on the radio with his dad, knew all the stories about how the Five Families and all their associates helped the government for those few years. New York, Chicago, Miami, even those Dixie white supremacist fucks geared up. Sentences got commuted so guys who spoke Italian could assist on the docks with spying. Capos took to planes in the Pacific theater to bomb Japs. Humps were sent out to do up-close fighting in France. Cupertines and Gambinos and Bonannos crossed the Rhine and shot krauts in the back as they fled.
Everyone came back heroes, the whole nation saved by gangsters.
Except a lot of those motherfuckers came back from the war with a taste for killing, knew how to do it more effectively, passed that shit on through the generations, figured out that if you could desensitize a young guy, you wouldn’t have to worry about him getting tossed up, end up going state’s because of the night terrors and shit. David was nineteen the first time he did a legit hit, but by that point, it was semantics only, seeing as he’d beaten and tortured dozens of motherfuckers by then, had left plenty of people for dead.
Thinking on it now, surrounded by these terrified people in the fucking Walmart Supercenter, it seemed stupid.
When he cut off Otto Agostini’s right hand and left foot, did he think the motherfucker just got a hook and a peg leg and then moved to St. Louis or Memphis or Detroit, went to college, got married, had a couple kids, everything was cool? Or what about when he and Fat Monte were dispatched to stomp out a Bandido who’d come up from Springfield to try to move girls and coke up around UIC? He and Fat Monte were both barely seventeen, amped on speed themselves, giddy to fuck someone up. They’d found the Bandido on his chopper parked out on Taylor Street, pulled him off, went to work on him right there in front of Pompei, left him with his fucking hip bone pushed out through his jeans, one eye in the gutter, all his fucking teeth in his throat, set his bike on fire, dinner crowd watching like it was a mime show on Navy Pier. Fat Monte maybe even cut him with his knife, he wouldn’t say afterward, but Monte, he liked knife work, slice a guy in the ribs, he might not even feel it, then twenty minutes later, he’d be walking down the street, fall down dead, his spleen bleeding out into his gut.
And truth was, no one was safe anywhere. Everybody dies, baby. That’s a fact.
Which was the problem. Sal Cupertine was alive. Sal Cupertine’s wife was alive. If motherfuckers in Chicago started to make moves, if Ronnie was already in the hospital, then that meant someone might come for Jennifer, close that circle up tight. David had Ronnie’s guys at bay, but if Ronnie was done, whomever he’d trussed up in the past might want to make a statement, kill the Rain Main’s family, show that they were scared of nothing, because, really, who the fuck was gonna be upset if the Rain Man’s family was on a slab somewhere, what with the whole fucking world coming to a burning end?
That’s what David couldn’t shake. He’d missed so many days with Jennifer and William. Knew tha
t when he eventually did get back with them, nothing would be the same. Maybe they wouldn’t love him anymore. Maybe he wouldn’t know how to love them anymore. How many shitty days had they experienced alone? And then today. If Sal Cupertine came to Rabbi David Cohen, what would David tell him? That Talmud says you know a man’s true character by his anger. That a hero is one who converts an enemy into a friend. That one must not wait for a miracle, one must create his own outcome.
“Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve,” the president said, “for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me.”
David closed his eyes and recited the prayer along with the president, whispering the words in Hebrew: Gam ki aylaych b’gay tzalmaves lo ira raki atah imadi, shivt’cha umish-antecha, haymah y’nachamuni. Ta-aroch l’fanai shulchan, neged tzor’roy, dishantah vashemen roshi, kosi r’vayah. Ach tov vachesed yird’funi kol y’may chayoy, v’shavti b’vayt Adonoy l’orecha yamim. David opened his eyes and the others watched him curiously, a guy with a fucked-up face canting and muttering Hebrew probably an unlikely thing in the Carson City Walmart. They didn’t even have a Jewish cemetery in town. David knew that well enough. The Kales Home of Peace advertised in the local paper; Jews were always willing to go the extra mile to be buried with one another. They ended up putting three or four dead Carson City Jews into the ground a year. That was about a hundred thousand. Easy cash.
“Amen,” David said, figuring, well, build that bridge before it burned down behind him.
“Amen,” Denim Jacket said.
The TV went black and then Tom Brokaw was there. David peered around. Everyone was in tears.
“We’re totally fucked,” UNLV said. “Did you guys watch that shit? We’re fucked. We’re totally ass fucked here.”
“Language,” a woman hissed. David turned, saw a young boy, maybe six or seven, holding his mother’s hand, tears streaming down his face. The mother was in her twenties, still dressed in her cocktailing outfit—a low-cut black dress under a Carson City Nugget Casino windbreaker, though she’d ditched her heels for a pair of white New Balance sneakers—and had a cart filled with groceries. They’d stopped to watch the news just like everyone else, but now the kid was crying. “It’s all right, Evan,” the woman said. “Just listen to the man on the TV, nobody else.” She glared at UNLV. “Have some respect, okay? Jesus.”
“Whatever.” UNLV stalked off.
“Maybe this isn’t the place to bring your kid,” David said, before he could stop himself. One thing he didn’t abide, ever, was people telling him and Jennifer how William should behave in public. And really, David wasn’t even talking to this woman, wasn’t talking about this kid—he was talking to Jennifer, telling her in his head that she needed to get William out of the room, that he didn’t need to be seeing this shit, and somehow, it just fell out of his mouth when he saw the crying kid, who was now wailing.
“It’s okay, Evan,” the woman said. Now she was glaring at David. The kid was howling like a part of him was pinched in some farm implement. The woman put her hand over the kid’s mouth, which only made it worse, no one ever quieting down when someone tried to cover their mouth, that was the shit that made everyone crazy, in David’s experience both as a father and as the kind of person who had to muffle screams periodically. “That was very rude of you,” the woman said to David. “On this of all days? Unbelievable.”
“You’re right,” David said. He shouldn’t speak to her, he shouldn’t speak to anyone. “I apologize.”
This seemed to take the woman by surprise.
“Thank you,” she said.
Tears welled up in her eyes.
Shit.
David was in it, just like he’d been in it all day, like how he’d been in it his entire life. This woman, though, no rings on her fingers, this kid Evan at her side, was fucking him up. Was this what Jennifer looked like in public now with William? She worked in a museum, he knew that, so maybe she didn’t wear some uniform that made her look like a cross between a stripper and a hostess at Denny’s, but was she spending her nights buying groceries in a fucking Walmart with her crying kid? Would Jennifer let William cry in public? William, he was sensitive, not like Sal had been. Sal remembered him, three years old, already staying up all night in bed worried about the world. Sal found him one time, eyes wide open, sweating, Jennifer thinking he was sick, but no, he just had questions, so Sal sat down on the edge of the bed, held his hand.
“Why are we here?” William asked, and Sal thought, This is not what I’m paid to do. Thought: How the fuck should I know? Thought: I’m too close to this question. But William wouldn’t close his eyes, wouldn’t stop asking that question, over and over again.
“We’re here to love each other,” he told William that night. “That’s it. Just the three of us. Everyone else? I don’t know their purpose, but this family? It’s for that.”
That seemed to satisfy William, but it fucked up David, because now, when he tried to figure out that very question—Why are we here?—that was the only plausible answer he could come up with, no matter how much of the Torah he read, no matter how much of the Talmud he studied, no matter how much theology and liturgy he processed, all the world’s religions, none of them had satisfying answers. And then this shit? People flying planes into buildings? David strangling some innocent woman to death for parking in the wrong place? David planning on killing someone else, just for an RV to get himself back to Las Vegas?
“This day has been so fucked up,” the woman said, and then she was ugly crying—snot, shuddering, gripping her kid to her body, like someone was trying to wrestle him away from her. She reached into her cart, ripped open a box of Kleenex, blew her nose.
David looked at the woman, then down at the boy. “You’re fine. We’ll all be fine.”
“Are all the people dead?” the boy said to David.
“Evan,” the woman began to say.
“No,” David said. “It’s a natural question. Because he should know that man is born with his hands clenched but that he dies with his hands wide open. That’s in the Talmud. It’s a lesson to learn early. Death is just . . . another thing. That is all. Nothing to fear.”
“The what?” the woman said.
“Talmud,” David said. “Jewish holy book. Like a study guide to the Bible.” The kid stopped crying for a second, tried to process what David was saying. So David added, “You can cry as much as you want.” He looked back at the woman. “There is meanness in the world. That is what I’m trying to say. Wise to reckon with it head on.”
“That’s the Talmud, too?”
“No,” David said. “Bruce Springsteen. It’s just something I think about.”
“Are you a . . . priest?”
“No,” David said.
David left because it was becoming clear to him that he wasn’t himself, that something had come undone today. He pushed his cart outside to the garden section. There was a teenage girl working the register, gauge earrings, a pierced nose, hair shaved up one side of her head, black eye makeup. She’d come to regret those things, David knew, just like how he’d come to regret a lot of the choices he made before he turned eighteen.
“May I borrow your phone?” David asked the girl.
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“I need to call home,” he said. “I don’t have a phone.” She didn’t answer him, like she was computing his words. “I need to call my wife and child. I need to do it right now.”
“Okay,” she said. She dug into her pocket, came out with a cell phone, handed it to David.
“No,” David said and gave it back to her. “The store phone.”
&
nbsp; “That is against policy,” she said, but she handed him the receiver. “Dial nine,” she said. “I’ll give you some privacy. I’m going to smoke a cigarette.”
How long would that give him? Five, maybe seven minutes. He’d timed it out before when he’d had to take out a guy on his smoke break. “Maybe have two.”
She undid her apron, put it on the counter, then dug a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, a Zippo, walked over to a gate that led out to the parking lot.
All of David’s exit plans had been predicated on the world staying pretty much the same. Cops and robbers and all that bullshit. But this was new. This was a problem. It would take him a couple days, but he could get most of the cash out of the banks. But then what? He didn’t have the proper paper to get out of the country, just like he’d told Rabbi Kales. Oh, he had a fake birth certificate, a fake social security card, a fake Nevada driver’s license, all enough to get around in Las Vegas, enough to pass muster if someone came looking for him at home, but that shit would wilt under real scrutiny, and David had a feeling real scrutiny was about to come.
He had about two hundred thousand in cash back in Las Vegas. So maybe he takes Roger’s RV, drives it back to Las Vegas, hits his banks in the morning, gets all he can, drives to Chicago, picks up Jennifer and William, the three of them on the road for the next year, maybe two, maybe three, never put down any roots at all, wait out history. That kind of cash could last a while, but if he needed extra, he’d do some jobs. Not hit jobs. He could rob a bank. That would be easy. He could rob drug dealers. That would be easier. Some Boise coke dealer? He could rob him twice a week.
Bennie Savone would come looking for him. Ronnie—or whoever replaced Ronnie—would too. The FBI, they’d now be looking for three people, one of whom was a kid, which meant it would be national news, again. The Rain Man Kidnaps Wife, Son. He could see the headline already. If the press unraveled his Las Vegas story, then he’d have every client Bennie had searching for him, too. So he’d have the Triads on him. Crime families in Cleveland and Memphis and Detroit. Some pimp shit from LA. The tribes in Palm Springs got rid of three people this year, two the previous, their casino business starting to take off, which meant they’d be pushing bodies more and more often. Not a lot now. But enough that they’d send someone to make sure David didn’t say shit. Then he’d have the Jews looking for him, too. Pissed off Temple Beth Israel congregants he’d fleeced would hire private detectives, retired Mossad motherfuckers chasing him to every corner of the planet, the Jews taking that blood oath seriously.
