by Tod Goldberg
“Always happy to help a man of the cloth,” Gray Beard said.
David watched them drive off, then went back to the tea shop, bought another Hokkaido for the road. The Talmud taught that soldiers fight but kings become heroes, and for a long time, David believed that, even before he knew what it meant. He’d been a soldier in a war his entire life, protecting men who would let him die.
It was time to become a king.
16
Grace, the Talmud said, was given to those who were merciful.
Rabbi David Cohen didn’t exactly believe that was true. Rather, he believed that you were either endowed with grace or it was a thing you spent your entire life searching for, a pure thing recognizable when it arrived. He understood that Christians held grace in a different view, that the resurrection of Christ allowed for God to give grace to everyone, which meant each person had the capacity for grace, even if they didn’t use it. You didn’t need to do anything. You merely had to believe. And then you deserved grace.
Which David thought said a lot about the world these days. No one was willing to earn shit. Everything was birthright. It was a thought that had plagued David of late, thinking about how if he were still in Chicago, and Ronnie was sick, he’d be running the Family. Who would come at him? No one. Because even though Sal Cupertine wasn’t a capo, wasn’t ranked at all, just did the dirty work, everyone in the Family understood the nature of things. He was a Cupertine and so he was the Family.
Which is why he was out here, in Las Vegas, with a new face, even if it was tearing apart at the seams. Ronnie never did want someone coming up behind him. He would run the Family until such time there was no Family. He’d die and take it all with him. Reputation as important to him as anything else in the world. He’d be the last don. He’d be legend.
Sal Cupertine would have given him that grace. Because Sal Cupertine didn’t want that fucking job.
But that didn’t mean he wanted someone else to have it.
The Talmud also said that there were four classes of people who must offer thanksgiving: those who have crossed the sea, those who have traversed the wilderness, those who have recovered from illness, and prisoners who have been set free. In no case was being merciful required, but it reasoned that any of those four kinds of people would naturally be endowed with a sense of grace, if not the thing itself. So Rabbi David Cohen preferred to think that grace was given to those who fought through some shit and came out alive. That being trapped somewhere—at sea, in the woods, in your body, or in a cage—required you to perform outside your normal character, contrary to your nature.
It wasn’t about belief.
It was about action.
•
David walked out onto the front steps of Temple Beth Israel’s Performing Arts Center and watched the children playing across the way at the Tikvah Preschool. Below, the leaders of the largest Jewish congregations in the city pulled into the parking lot, one by one, in their German luxury cars. Rabbi Joseph Sigal of Temple Beth Am in his black Mercedes E-class. Rabbi Sherman Roth of Temple Beth Shalom in his silver BMW 528. Rabbi Jason Goldstein of Congregation Beth El in his white Mercedes E-class, which seemed out of character for an Orthodox Jew, but these were unorthodox times. Even Yehuda Da Truth Tella, now going by the more staid Yehuda Stein, in a tricked-out electric-blue BMW X3, the logo for his new Red Rock Kabbalah Center, which had opened in a space that used to be a Tower Records, splashed over the entire driver’s side of the car. Today, the Monday after Thanksgiving, wasn’t about grace. It was about protection. The first stage of his exit plan. The safety of the Jewish people of Las Vegas. Because Gray Beard was right. Everybody was losing their minds.
David had called a meeting of leaders of the community, reminding each that the Talmud said you should never expose yourself to danger, since a miracle may not save you. “We must present a united front during these times,” David told each man, individually, when he phoned them. “We must be one and the same. We must show that the Torah is our connection, that the tribal segregation of our beliefs is a mundane thing during these dark times.” David didn’t even ask Rabbi Kales for advice; he knew that appealing to their fundamental mortality was the ticket.
Not that anyone needed any convincing. Security had been a debilitating concern for all the people at Temple Beth Israel since the events on 9/11 . . . and it turned out to be a transitive property valley-wide, all the shuls going batshit once it was revealed that many of the hijackers had visited Las Vegas to plan the attacks and get lap dances all over town. (Girls at Bennie’s club, the Wild Horse, had even gone to the press, saying they were pretty sure they’d danced for them and that they were shitty tippers, Bennie telling David last week, “When all this shit blows over? Those girls will know for sure if they danced for those guys, because they’ll be together again.”)
Everyone at Temple Beth Israel was installing security systems in their houses, sons and daughters were being enrolled in Tae Kwon Do, as if Al-Qaeda were going to show up to do hand-to-hand combat with eleven-year-old Jewish kids at the Fashion Show Mall, and old-timers were coming in to talk to David about building attics in their open-concept homes. Jews had a tendency to horde when shit got bad—it was even in the Talmud: “A person should always have his money at hand”—and the result was that donations were down 65 percent, the giving during the High Holidays almost negligible, everyone bunkered in their houses, waiting to die. And it wasn’t just charitable giving: Business at the Wild Horse was down close to 50 percent. The hotels and casinos had picked up a little recently, at least according to what they were saying publicly, though the idea of getting on a plane and flying out to stay in a high-rise in Las Vegas wasn’t what anyone wanted to do during that first month. But that didn’t stop Las Vegas. The city had rolled out a new marketing campaign—Freedom to get away from it all!—because losing your house to Sheldon Adelson was what freedom meant. Whatever you lost in Vegas, ends up washed into new casino construction in Macau. That would be a more honest slogan. But as business picked up on the Strip, as more and more people were driving into town from San Diego, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, even from southern Oregon, so, too, did the fear. Anyone could drive into Las Vegas. What was stopping some lunatic from pulling up to one of the temples with a car bomb?
Nothing, David knew.
Turned out, you could kill someone with your bare hands right in front of a synagogue and no one would notice.
As predicted, the cops had shown up a few days after Agent Moss’s disappearance. They simply walked back her last steps. David confirmed that he’d seen her, described what she was wearing, even recounted their conversation as it happened, before he broke her neck, that he’d called in Ruben, who confirmed that when he arrived, she was already gone. Carson City cops didn’t even send one of their own—a Las Vegas cop handled it, took a statement, moved on. They spoke with David for seven minutes. They spoke with Ruben for less than that. Fifteen minutes, including the time it took to walk from the temple to the funeral home, and Melanie Moss was someone else’s problem. A missing person. A tragedy.
But the world was filled with tragedies big and small these days.
A few days before Thanksgiving, David ran into OG Sean B’s mother, Kate, in the Lowe’s garden section. Kate cornered him by the pesticides, where he was picking up a few things. She looked a wreck. “Why is God letting this happen?” she asked him.
He wanted to tell her to get the fuck out of town. Take all her money, get Sean, and go. Because she didn’t know about bad news. She didn’t know what it was like to have squirreled away cash in banks he was scared to walk into now, the government with eyes on where money was flowing. He’d managed to get about one hundred thousand out of safe deposit boxes on September 12, but he had at least fifty K in a bank up in Pahrump, not far from a brothel the hijackers allegedly visited, and another fifty in a run-down Wells Fargo across the
street from the Econo Lodge where one hijacker had supposedly stayed, just a block off the Strip. But with the FBI crawling around that entire neighborhood looking for evidence, he didn’t want to walk into the wrong place at the wrong time and end up facedown with a gun on his head. He wasn’t about to go anywhere near the Strip that first week . . . and then, after that? Well, it had only gotten worse.
He was getting squeezed everywhere.
Last week, sitting in Dr. Melnikoff’s waiting room, a show was running on TLC called Daring Escapes, and five minutes in, some asshole wearing a zoot suit and a leather duster was shown sneaking into the back of a refrigerated meat truck. David realized he was watching himself, or some fictionalized version of himself where he wore fucking zoot suits. David got up from his seat and turned the volume up, the voice-over saying, “This vicious hired killer had one more job: survive being frozen to death until he could get his hands on the truck driver.” David thinking, I didn’t touch that fucking truck driver. It was 43 degrees in that truck and I had ten blankets. And a chair. The next scene showed him shivering and blue, icicles in his hair, cooking raw meat using a Zippo, shoving it into his mouth like he was starving to death. The next scene, the truck was opening up to a beach in California, “Sal” was jumping out, guns blazing, except “Sal” for some reason had a machine gun and riddled the truck driver with about thirty bullets, before he dove into a waiting Lincoln Town Car and was whisked off.
The show posted Sal’s grainy photo, the same one they always used, from the Subway in Chicago, along with information on how to claim the reward for his capture and conviction. David looked around the waiting room. There were two women David was pretty sure were strippers, judging from the pervasive body spray and their ongoing conversation about cup size and tip-outs; a thirteen-year-old boy with a huge nose, who was mostly staring at the two women; the boy’s mother, who was flipping through an US Magazine and breathing with such venom that it sounded like she was snarling; an older woman, maybe in her sixties, who kept tugging at her neck. None of them had even noticed the TV. But it didn’t matter. It was in the popular culture now. He was no longer the Rain Man. He was Mr. Meat Truck.
Even if Bennie somehow got him a passport, he wouldn’t go near an airport. Not now, anyway. He doubted he could get on an Amtrak train or a Greyhound bus. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea of giving his fake license to pick up Sudafed at Rite-Aid, didn’t like the big sign that said smile you’re on camera next to the CCTV inside Walgreen’s, even though he paid cash everywhere, so no one was tracking his cash movements, at least. But it was the proliferating cameras that had him worried. Before, he was pretty sure no one paid any attention to that shit, like at the Walmart in Carson City. Maybe Walmart and Walgreens and Rite-Aid and Target weren’t doing black ops for the government, but now? All this Patriot Act shit? He wasn’t so sure.
Given all this, his goals had changed. Before, it was about getting his wife and kid and getting the fuck out. Now? It was about staying alive long enough to find them; it was about securing a financial future in Las Vegas, where he was now trapped, so that when the door opened, there’d be no hesitation. That meant keeping Bennie in a place where he didn’t control all the money. That meant keeping Rabbi Kales in a place where he wouldn’t snitch to Bennie—or his daughter, Rachel—if he began to feel like David was overstepping. That meant no more unforced errors. Safety, above all else.
The Torah said, those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above and those who turn others to righteousness will be like the stars forever and ever. He was going to do that. Keep the righteous in his sphere, and keep them indebted, so that when it was time to bounce, they wouldn’t turn on him.
So, in light of all that, a container of pesticide in his hand, David told Kate, “God does not wish us to know why there is so much bad in the world, why the good must always be tempered with evil, because if we knew, we might consent.” It was something the Lubavitcher Rebbe had said, but Kate Berkowitz didn’t seem to grasp it.
He took her by the hand. Because he was taking everyone by the hand these days, all of Temple Beth Israel a ball of emotional ruin. “What you need to do is simple, Kate. After Sean’s bar mitzvah, you need to leave Las Vegas. You need to leave your cheating husband and his girlfriend behind. You need to not pack any of Sean’s clothes when you leave, just put him in the car, and when you get somewhere else, buy him clothes that make him look like a mensch. Because, Kate, if I may say so? He’s not tough. He will never be tough. And this is a world where you cannot fake toughness anymore. Let him be articulate and smart, but do not let him be tough. Does this make sense to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. It does.”
“And you need to stop drinking,” David said. “Sean needs a stable parent. That needs to be you.”
Kate tried to take her hand back, but David held on. “I am trying to help you. I am trying to help your son.”
She looked away. David let go of her hand. “I’m so lost,” she said. “I’m feeling so lost.” She was crying now, so David took his handkerchief out from his suit pocket, handed it to her. She blew her nose, folded the handkerchief, put it in her purse.
“Can I,” David said, “put a friend in touch with you? Just someone for you to speak with?”
“I’ll take whatever help you can find,” she said.
He would give her that grace.
•
Now, as the rabbis and Yehuda began to climb the steps, he was more confident than ever about what needed to be done to keep everyone safe. This house would not be burned to the ground.
David greeted each man as they came up the steps with a handshake and a grim smile, as much as that was possible, the right side of his face not quite right this morning. He’d been on antibiotics for eight weeks now and the only tangible results, best as David could tell, was that his eyeballs didn’t hurt when his lips moved. There was a constant metallic taste in his mouth, like he’d swallowed a gun, but never any blood. Dr. Melnikoff told him it could be a variety of things, most likely that the titanium rods in his mouth needed to be replaced, too, which would be another five grand.
“Sweet place,” Yehuda said when he walked in, pulling up the rear. He took off his sunglasses and pointed up at the face of the Performing Arts Center, a solid glass wall stretching three stories high. Inside, the performance hall sat five hundred, plus practice facilities, meeting rooms, banquet space, concessions. It had been the centerpiece of Rabbi Kales’s fund-raising for a decade. David imagined it had also been a great way for Bennie to wash cash.
“Have you not been here?” David said. He knew that he hadn’t. Rabbis Sigal, Rosen, and Goldstein had visited a few times over the years, each of them at the invitation of Rabbi Kales, who’d known them all for years. Sigal had actually been Rabbi Kales’s boss at Temple Shalom, before both struck out on their own. When they saw each other now, they would talk like the old fucks in the game who had somehow survived all the wars and couldn’t remember why they’d tried to kill each other so many times. The difference being, Rabbi Kales honestly wished Sigal would die, his every move at Temple Beth Israel aimed at crushing Sigal’s congregation.
“I appreciate the invitation,” Yehuda said. “I know you and the other rabbis view me as an annoyance at best and a heretic at worst. Right now, this idea of a united front is a welcome development. We’re all Jews.”
“Except,” David said, “all the people who study Kabbalah who aren’t Jews.”
“Way I see it,” Yehuda said, “those are the very people we need to reach. Maybe it starts with a red string, maybe it ends with a bat mitzvah.”
“True enough,” David said. A white van pulled into the lot. “That’s the caterer,” David said. “I’ll be right in. Will you tell the others?”
“Of course,” Yehuda said. “I appreciate you asking for everyone’s dietary restrictions.”
“Talmud says the belly carries the feet,” David said.
David walked down the steps and the van’s side door slid open. Gray Beard sat inside, his long beard neatly trimmed but still halfway down his neck.
Gray Beard handed David two covered platters of food.
“That’s the order,” he said. He wore a pair of plastic gloves. “Soups and hot stuff is on the bottom.”
David lifted the lid off the top platter. There were several sandwiches and salads and desserts, each marked with a decorative flag for whom it was meant. “You put it together?” David asked.
“Nah, that was me,” Marvin said from the front seat. He also had on gloves.
“I need to wear gloves to serve this?”
“Nah,” Marvin said. “It’s cool. Precautionary, you know?”
“What about if I have someone take it from the platter and put it on some nice china?”
Gray Beard and Marvin exchanged a look. “Being careful never hurt anybody,” Gray Beard said.
It took thirty minutes for the five men, including David, to finish their lunch. They sat around a long rectangular table in the Performing Arts Center’s banquet hall, eating their chicken-and-matzo-ball soup—except Rabbi Sigal, who had borscht—their selection of sandwiches, their salads—potato, macaroni, kale for Yehuda—and wide array of cookies: pecan, shortbread, rugelach, black and whites, lemon poppy seed, coconut macaroons. David sat at the head of the table, Rabbi Sigal to his left, Rabbi Goldstein beside Rabbi Sigal. Rabbi Roth sat to David’s right, with Yehuda next to him, though with a space between them. The rabbis made idle chitchat during lunch, which meant each man went through a list of who was sick, who was dying, who was divorcing, who was cheating on whom, and, finally, who had gone bankrupt in the last sixty days, while Yehuda kept stepping out to take calls on his cell phone, David thinking maybe in addition to the Zohar, he might also be peddling pills. He’d respect him more if so.
