Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  Maybe that would be the end, then, of Sal Cupertine. William would be free of him. If someone died by the hand of Rabbi David Cohen, so be it. But Sal Cupertine’s ledger would be clear.

  David watched as the diaspora moved from the temple to the Performing Arts Center, two hundred and fifty guests ready for the fun part of the afternoon. They’d begun to gather en masse below, in the center’s parking lot, about where Gray Beard and Marvin had parked. There were two men at the bottom of the stairs guarding a red velvet rope, per Casey Berkowitz’s instructions, their paramilitary uniforms replaced today with black suits, sunglasses, and earpieces. Part of it was just for looks—OG Sean B would be envied for having a couple hard motherfuckers in suits working the line—and part of it was that this was just how these guys dressed for events: The security firm David contracted specialized in black-tie functions and private security for celebrities and dignitaries. David had hired five extra security guards for the day—or, well, the Berkowitzes had hired them—owing to the local luminaries set to attend the party. MMA fighters. Rappers. Rumor was Carrot Top or Danny Gans might show up, but David doubted that.

  The head security consultant, an off-duty Las Vegas Metro Narcotics Division detective named Alex Behen, came out of the Performing Arts Center, finger to his ear, listening to something. After a moment, he came and stood beside David, watched the gathering crowd for a few seconds. He was armed with at least two guns that David could make. He also drove a black-on-black BMW that cost more than David’s burned-down house in Chicago.

  “Problems?” David asked.

  “No, no, everything is fine,” he said. “Suspicious-looking car down by the temple during the festivities, drove away, one of the patrols picked it up on the back side of the cemetery, which seemed weird, so we called the plates in, made sure it wasn’t some white supremacist asshole. It was a rental, which we we’ve been told to keep an eye on. That and U-Hauls. He came back down by the home, so we knocked on his window. Just a lost tourist from the Midwest, nothing to worry about.”

  “Thank you,” David said.

  “Can I tell you, Rabbi?” Detective Behen said. “On my thirteenth birthday? I think there were six of us. Probably cost my pops a hundred and fifty bucks, all in.”

  “Talmud says that we should not be so ostentatious as to arouse envy,” David said. “I do not think Mr. Berkowitz adheres to that axiom.”

  “I don’t judge,” the detective said, which David understood immediately to be bullshit. Everybody judged. It was the essence of being human.

  Beyond the crowd, David saw one of Jerry Ford’s LifeCore vans pull out of the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace parking lot, passing the Home’s hearse on the way back in. This was the mortuary’s busy time of the year, the dead tending to pile up after Hanukkah, the old-timers sticking around for one last show before checking out. The temple lost Winnie Kaplan, Howard Edelman, and Alice Apple within forty-eight hours. All in their eighties, all people David knew. None of their deaths was a tragedy, per se, but when combined with everything else, it was all a little depressing, particularly since Alice Apple had died while getting liposuction and David was due to go under the knife tomorrow. There wasn’t much for LifeCore to take from them, but the temple had made a nice profit this week on another shipment from the Triads, a sudden increase in business from the Midwest, which David thought was probably a reaction to Ronnie’s being off the books for two months now, and more business from the tribes down south, this time shipping another Mexican Mafia OG. This one had an old bullet scar on his right side, beneath his rib cage, in addition the new one through the back of his mouth. Some fucking life. Survive getting shot just so you could live long enough to get shot.

  If there were any funerals for the next few weeks while David was out of commission, Rabbi Kales would come out of retirement for them, or they’d get Rabbi Roth to assist, provided the bodies were legal. Most of the congregants would probably prefer Rabbi Sigal in such a case, but he’d been very ill of late. It frankly did not look like he was going to make it. A tragedy.

  “Mr. Berkowitz and his lady friend are in the hall,” Detective Behen said, “and I’ve got a guy who’ll stay between them and Mrs. Berkowitz at all times. There will be no awkwardness, I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t want to be out of line here, Rabbi, but I wanted to tell you how much that donation the temple made means to all of us,” he said. “I didn’t know about it until I saw it in the newspaper the other day, so, just to say, me and the boys here? We appreciate the support. This is a crazy time to be law enforcement. Equal parts honor and fear. You know, before all this with the planes and everything, craziest thing I ever saw was that bank heist in LA when they shot it out on the street. But now? I’m not worried about assault rifles and body armor. I’m worried about sarin gas and anthrax. We’re not trained for that.”

  “Who is?”

  “Well, we’re gonna be. Feds think Las Vegas is going to be the location of a holy war or something, so every other day, there’s another bulletin. Look out for this guy, look out for that guy, look out for a truck filled with manure, look out for a bus loaded with nails and propane tanks, I mean . . . it’s a whole new world out there.”

  “It is,” David said.

  Behen strode down the steps and unhooked the velvet rope and the celebrants came rushing toward David like ants. Many of the kids had already untucked their shirts or ditched their itchy sport coats and dresses entirely in favor of jeans and sneakers—they had a busy day ahead of them, with the paintball war setup, the rap concert, the MMA demo, the DJ, the pop-up ice cream parlor. It was only noon. The party was set to go until 9:00 p.m. David would be home long before that. He was due to be at Dr. Melnikoff’s surgery center at 8:00 a.m. He would be kept overnight and then released back to his house, where he’d hired a series of visiting nurses to take care of him. It wasn’t the best situation—that would be waking up to Jennifer beside him, spooning soup into his mouth, but that wasn’t happening—but he couldn’t be alone for the first three or four days. It meant cleaning up the house a little—he couldn’t very well have some visiting nurse stumble into a room full of automatic weapons—but that was a minor inconvenience.

  A limo pulled up to the front of the Performing Arts Center and Rachel Savone got out with Kate Berkowitz. Bennie’s wife was the one person at Temple Beth Israel who David thought might be able to provide Kate Berkowitz with a welcome ear, and maybe a little help, without spitting out the woman’s plight to every other person in the city. So after he’d encountered Kate at Lowe’s, he gave Rachel a call, asked her if she could do him a small favor. But now here they were together, in front of everyone.

  For the next ten minutes, David shook the hands of his congregants as they came by, then took the praise for the lovely ceremony from Kate’s family in from Ohio—grandma, wearing so much gilded shit on her body she looked like King Tut; Kate’s brother Logan and his wife, Barbara; Kate’s brother Teddy and his wife, Gwen; a sister who didn’t give her name, too busy with the screaming two-year-old in her arms—took a dozen more kisses on his cheeks from the yentas, then smiled approvingly at the children, who slowed their running when they got near him, or who hushed their voices, or who dipped their heads in deference.

  Maybe he was a good rabbi.

  It wasn’t something David thought about most days, because the fact was most days he concerned himself with how the fuck he was going to get gone with everyone at Temple Beth Israel’s money. Though, in reality, it was money they were going to spend anyway, either at Temple Beth Israel or someplace just like it. He wasn’t putting motherfuckers on the street. The Steins and the Rosenbergs and the Coopers weren’t going to be on food stamps. David would eventually leave, whether in good standing or in shackles, and Temple Beth Israel might crumble in his wake, but wasn’t that what every rabbinical teaching was all about? That the temple never lasted.
What lasted was Israel. What lasted was faith. No walls could house it, no single man could possess it. That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased to be problem was simply an issue of scale: He was more Jewish than the rest of them.

  When most of the guests were inside, Rachel and Kate finally came up the steps, arm-in-arm.

  “Hello, Rabbi,” Rachel said when she reached David. She let go of Kate and put a hand to David’s face and kissed his left cheek gently. Rachel had been in the front row of the service, as she always was. “You did a very nice job with Sean.”

  “Thank you,” David said.

  “My father has taught you well. He always was good at getting the least Jewish among us to rise up in the name of the faith when their time behind the bimah came.”

  “Indeed,” David said. This one. She’d try to break him every time she could. David understood that. “Sean spoke Torah truthfully today.” He turned his attention to Kate. She had on sunglasses, a slate-gray dress underneath a gray Burberry trenchcoat, and matte red lipstick, a sort of a Jackie O look. “You should be very proud of your son,” David said. “I was very moved by his sentiments.” Sean had spoken on the topic of freedom and restoration of the spirit as embodied by Judah Maccabee, pretty much the last Jew you wanted to fuck with, the guy who made Hanukkah possible, who told his men to “fight manfully,” a quote David suspected OG Sean B would eventually tattoo on his chest in Hebrew, because irony was lost on him. “He’s a very bright boy.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Kate said, as if they were in the middle of an entirely different conversation, “that I should redo my bat mitzvah. It didn’t mean anything to me when I was thirteen, but I think having the Torah study now would be good for me. Do you think that could be something we could do, Rabbi Cohen?”

  David glanced at Rachel. She raised her eyebrows slightly. “Are you planning on staying in the area, Kate?”

  “For a little while,” Kate said. “I’m not going to let anyone dictate where I live.”

  David looked again at Rachel. She was done helping him. “We’ll consider all of these options after the new year,” David said. He lifted his chin up, met the gaze of Detective Behen, who was watching from a few yards away. “Will you escort Mrs. Berkowitz in? Mrs. Savone and I would like to talk for a moment.”

  “Sure, boss,” he said. “It would be my pleasure.” He came up, put an arm through Kate’s, and took her inside, David and Rachel watching until they disappeared into the assembled crowd.

  “She’s a mess,” Rachel said.

  “I see that,” David said. “I appreciate your help.”

  “She just needed a friend,” Rachel said. “And Xanax.”

  “She seeing anyone? Like to talk?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re for?”

  “I don’t think she views me that way,” David said.

  “I got her an appointment with a therapist I know,” Rachel said. “We’ll see if she goes. The Xanax has been helping, anyway. Keeping her out of the bars, which is good. Last thing she needs is a DUI or to be impregnated by a bouncer.”

  “Don’t let either of those things happen,” David said.

  Rachel stared at David for a long moment. It was something David had grown somewhat accustomed to, Rachel Savone the kind of person who appraised you before speaking. In David’s case, he always assumed she was trying to decide whether or not to reach into her purse, pull out the snub-nosed number she kept there, and attempt to put a bullet in his face.

  “I don’t work for you,” she said, “and I’m not one of your sycophants, so I’d remind you to talk to me with a bit more respect. I’m still Bennie’s wife, Rabbi.”

  “Are you?” David said.

  “Home detention makes the heart grow fonder,” she said. “And anyway, I’m helping Kate despite you, not because of you.” She shook her head. “Why does every man I come into contact with think they need to tell me how to be?”

  “I know you’ve made bad choices in the past,” David said. “That makes me think you don’t always know the path forward.”

  She stared at him. “Next you’re going to tell me it’s not personal.”

  “No,” David said, “that was very personal.”

  She dug into her purse, came out with a pack of Marlboros—shook one out, lit it up.

  “You smoke now?” David asked. Her husband, Bennie, had survived thyroid cancer.

  “Not at home,” Rachel said. She blew out a stream of smoke, turned her back to David, looked down Hillpointe, facing the Barer Academy, the temple, the aquatic center, the rolling greens of the cemetery, the funeral home, the undeveloped property, huge parcels of the desert devoted to Jews, living and dead.

  “All this,” she said, but didn’t complete her thought. Which was fine. David wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of it. “You nervous for your surgery tomorrow?” she asked after a time.

  “No,” David said. “Just happy for the pain to be ending.”

  “You think the pain will end?” Rachel said. “That’s what you think?”

  “I understand that you don’t like me, nor trust me,” David said. “But I am not a man like your husband and I am not a man like your father.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “Rachel,” he said, “I am merely trying, each day, to be a better person than I was the day before.”

  “How is that working for you, Rabbi?”

  “Most days? I fail. The Talmud says, either companionship or death, and what I take that to mean is you are either part of something larger or you are part of nothing. I attempt each day to be part of something larger. Do you?”

  “If you had children,” she said, “you’d know what a foolish question that is.”

  “Then you should stop smoking.”

  Rachel took a long drag from her cigarette. “Did my father mention that the assisted-living facility has been sold?”

  “No.”

  “The new group raised prices twenty-five percent,” she said. “They own facilities in Wisconsin that look very nice, but no one likes to pay more for what they already get.”

  “I’ll talk to them about it.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “He can afford it. But it got me thinking about that area over there.” She pointed to the vacant field, where a group was setting up a vast paintball demo for OG Sean B and his friends. “What would it take for us to open our own care facility?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something to consider, Rabbi,” she said. “The Talmud does say that one who does not visit the sick is like one who sheds blood. No one would have an excuse.”

  “I’ll look into it.” He would. “Rabbi Kales wants to go to Israel with your girls.”

  “It’s all he talks about.”

  “He wants me to go as well,” David said.

  “So go.”

  “I need you to tell your husband that it would be prudent.”

  Detective Behen came back outside then, held open the door, called out to Rachel. “You need an escort, ma’am?”

  “That would be fine, thank you,” Rachel said. She looked back at David, smiled. “Please don’t kill me for talking to the police,” she said quietly. “It would be a terrible end to a beautiful day.” She touched his face again, this time just with her fingertips, and David flinched. “You’re so naïve, Rabbi Cohen,” she said. She took one more puff of her cigarette, then stomped it out. “It almost makes me like you.”

  Rabbi David Cohen’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Ruben.

  David watched Rachel walk into the Performing Arts Center her father built, using the money her husband washed, on the arm of a cop that was now on the payroll of the Mafia, and the only person who knew all of those things, and more, was him. Rabbi David Cohen owned them all.

  “What is it?” David said into t
he phone.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Ruben said, “but we’ve got a problem.”

  David went down the steps, walked off toward the street, away from the security.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I picked up clients that I’m uncomfortable with.”

  “That’s not something I care about,” David said. “And it’s not something you should concern yourself with, either.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I figured that would be your answer,” he said. “So what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna leave this lady and this kid right here and you can take care of it. I’m gonna get a job at Arby’s, I don’t give a fuck.”

  A lady and a kid.

  “How old?”

  “I dunno, man. They didn’t come with no ID.”

  David had put down a couple hundred bodies during his time in Las Vegas, legit and criminal. The only nonlegit woman he’d buried was Melanie Moss. No nonlegit kids ever came through. That wasn’t the job.

  “Boy or girl?” David said.

  “You have to put the pieces together to know for sure, but looks like a boy to me.”

  Nobody would touch Jennifer and William. Nobody. He kept telling himself that.

  David checked his watch. “Don’t fucking move.”

  •

  David found Ruben in the morgue. There were body bags on two of the three tables. On the third, Ruben’s assistant, Miguel, worked on a body David didn’t recognize and hadn’t been told he’d be burying. A fifty-something man with a profound head trauma . . . which is to say his head wasn’t on his neck, so Miguel was reattaching it.