Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  At first, he was going to pick up Jennifer and William and make a run for it, but he knew that would end poorly for everyone. So he did the only thing that made sense to him: He called his cousin Ronnie Cupertine, his only direct relative still in the Family, but who now split time between Chicago and Detroit, since he had used-car dealerships in both cities. Ronnie was one of those guys people on the street assumed was connected, mostly because he looked like such a cliché with his affinity for pinkie rings and pin-striped suits. He ran ads in the Tribune where he’d make used-car buyers “offers they couldn’t refuse” and comical spots on TV where he dressed in a zoot suit and carried a tommy gun, called the other dealerships “dirty rats,” and promised that the credit agencies would be taking “dirt naps” when he was done with them. The joke, of course, was that he was a real fucking gangster, and most of the cars he came upon and was thus able to sell at such a cheap rate were chops from Canada, bought in bulk.

  “I fucked up,” Sal told Ronnie. In the background, Sal could hear a cartoon playing on the television. Ronnie had four kids, all under thirteen, all in private school. A real bastion of society.

  “What happened?”

  “I took out some company guys,” Sal said. It was probably the wrong thing to say. Sal was using a cell that he ripped new SIM cards from about twice a week, but Ronnie always thought he was being bugged, even though he routinely went around his house with a metal detector and the Family always kept a couple guys in the phone company. The whole world was changing, and no one in the Family knew dick about computers or technology. They knew only enough to be paranoid.

  “Where are you?”

  “Driving around,” Sal said, but in truth he was parked across the street from Ronnie’s Gold Coast manor. Built in the 1950s, the house was three stories high with a basement that Ronnie had turned into a fully operational sportsbook, though he’d become so rich that he used it now only to host parties and Vegas Night fund-raisers for the Boys & Girls Club. Used to be in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Ronnie would run a full casino out of the place, but the Jamaicans with their online books and the Indians with their casinos had made all that sort of high-roller action obsolete. Why bother getting in with a bunch of gangsters when you could do it legally?

  The house was surrounded by a six-foot wrought iron gate and towering old-growth hackberry and bur oak trees, which gave the place the appearance of a fortress, even if there was now a hopscotch course chalked on the sidewalk out front. If someone wanted to roll up on the place, they’d need a team of well-armed arborists with them.

  “Get off the fucking road,” Ronnie said. “They got cameras everywhere.”

  “Where should I go, your place?” Sal teasing him now, letting him know that he could bring Ronnie down with him if he wanted. Sal didn’t want to do that, not yet, but he wanted to make sure Ronnie knew the stakes.

  “No,” Ronnie said, “are you crazy? My kids are here.”

  “So I can’t see my cousins anymore, Ronnie? That’s how it is?”

  “Sal,” Ronnie said, “let’s not get melodramatic here.”

  “Then where, Ronnie? You tell me where to go.”

  “I can’t have you here if it gets hot,” he said. “You have to understand how that would look.”

  “Maybe you should try to understand how I look,” Sal said. “I’m picking brains out of my hair, okay?”

  Ronnie didn’t say anything for a minute, which Sal didn’t like. Ronnie was one of those people who thought he always knew what was what, which struck Sal as funny since Ronnie hadn’t even graduated high school. Now he was a self-made millionaire, or that’s what people thought, when in truth he was just another link on the same crooked chain.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Ronnie said eventually, “that place where we played kickball.”

  Ronnie was fifteen years older than Sal, but all the kids in the family—the actual family—had lived around the block from the Winston Academy and used to use their big grassy field up over on the other side of North Seminary to knock the ball around. It was a pretty good neighborhood to grow up in, but now the boutiques and espresso joints were creeping in, replacing everything. It had been years since Sal had been over there during the daytime, not since he’d gone into the school to break the principal’s arm. Gave the guy a compound fracture on orders from way up the line. Guy didn’t even owe anything, which made Sal think there was something larger at work, but he never bothered to ask. Asking wasn’t his job.

  “Okay,” Sal said.

  “Monte will be there. You go with him while I sort this shit out.”

  “You need to get Jennifer and William to a stash house,” Sal said.

  “We’ll do that,” Ronnie said. “One thing at a time.”

  “I’m sorry I fucked up,” Sal said, because he was.

  “I know you are,” Ronnie said.

  “I just, you know, lost it. I saw that they were feds, and, you know, I just saw all the dominos at once. It seemed like the only thing to do.”

  “Are you high?”

  “No,” Sal said. “A little.”

  “You should have walked away,” Ronnie said.

  “I don’t walk away,” Sal said.

  “See,” Ronnie said, “that’s the problem.”

  Ronnie cleared his throat, then didn’t say anything. For a few seconds, Sal listened to the sounds of his little cousins screaming in the background. This was not good.

  “Jennifer’s sick,” Sal said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Ronnie said.

  “The kid, too,” Sal said.

  “Sal,” Ronnie said, “I can see you on my security cameras.”

  “I’m just saying that she needs to be taken care of, that’s all.”

  “Just meet up with Monte. We’ll get this shit done with. Sunday, you’ll come over and we’ll watch the Bears.”

  “Yeah,” Sal said, “we’ll do that.” He hung up without saying good-bye because it was April and no one was going to be playing football for another six months.

  And now here he was, bumping down a pockmarked road off the highway, Neal hitting every possible divot, no one in the Corolla saying shit, everyone just acting like they always drove out to a farm in the middle of the night. Where were they? Missouri, maybe. No, they hadn’t been gone that long. Indiana? Wisconsin? Sal was disoriented from the darkness and nauseous from the smell of Fat Monte’s sweat.

  “Where the fuck are we?” Sal finally asked.

  “Ronnie said to bring you out here,” Fat Monte said.

  “Where is here?”

  Fat Monte shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

  Great. Sal ditched his nine in a gutter after the Parker and now had only his five-shot .38. He was pretty sure he could take out Fat Monte without a problem, but trying to get at Neal and Chema would pose some problems. They were dumb kids, but you didn’t need to be smart to shoot a gun, plus they both surely had automatics.

  “What about you, brown boy? You know where the fuck we are?”

  Chema turned in his seat and glared at Sal. Fat Monte then said, “We’re almost there.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know where we were going,” Sal said.

  “I don’t,” Fat Monte said, “which is why Chema has the map. Tell him we’re almost there, Chema.”

  “We’re almost there,” Chema said, no emotion in his voice at all.

  A few minutes later, Fat Monte’s cell phone rang. He looked at it and then handed it to Sal. “It’s Ronnie.”

  “You okay?” Ronnie asked when Sal picked up.

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “Should I be worried?”

  “You caught three feds, so yeah,” Ronnie said.

  “What about the Mexican?”

  “Not sure yet, no real chatter on him,” Ronnie said. “Probably a legit guy working both sides. Channel 7 didn’t mention him. Channel 2 called him an informant, so who the fuck knows.”

  “They say my name?”

  “You don’t kil
l three fucking FBI agents and not get on the news.”

  “They put my face up?”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie said. “Cops are at your house right now. It’s not a good situation.”

  Shit. That meant the last phone call he received from Jennifer was likely not really from her. “You didn’t get my family out?”

  “Maybe you’re not understanding the magnitude of this situation.”

  “Jennifer,” Sal said, “is solid, Ronnie. You know that.”

  “Everyone breaks sometime.”

  “She won’t,” Sal said, but he really didn’t know. She knew what he was, or at least she knew the version he gave her, and that was basically the truth: He did bad things to bad people. And she knew that other people considered him one of the bad people, too, had no notions that he was somehow a superhero or vigilante. They’d talked over the years about what to do in the event the police came looking for him, so she knew to keep her mouth shut, knew that she couldn’t be made to testify against him, knew that if the police were looking for him, he was likely already gone.

  She also knew that gone could mean a lot of things.

  “We’ll see,” Ronnie said. “Meantime, we got you a bus out of town.”

  “Listen to me,” Sal said, he turned away from Fat Monte and tried to lower his voice, but it’s tough to be discreet in the backseat of subcompact. “If it comes down to it, I’m not going to be all polite and shit. Just be aware of that. This isn’t some movie. I’ll take a couple with me.”

  “We’re aware of that,” Ronnie said, and he hung up.

  We. All this we shit. Ronnie’s way of telling him that he’d pissed so far up the rope that it wasn’t just Ronnie deciding his fate. Sal clicked off the phone and handed it back to Fat Monte, who then opened the back of it, took out the SIM, and crushed it under his shoe before tossing it out the window. “You wanna give me your phone?” he asked Sal.

  If he did, Jennifer would have no way of reaching him. Maybe ever.

  “Not just yet,” Sal said, and Fat Monte just shrugged again. It wasn’t as if he was going to call 911. And it wasn’t as if he could call his wife. Nevertheless, he liked the idea that he still had one small connection to the outside world. As long as that lasted, he was still alive.

  The Corolla veered right, and suddenly the rough patch of road turned smooth—or smoother, anyway—and Sal could make out the farm with a bit more clarity. There was a main house, what looked like a several warehouse-size barns just adjacent to the house, and half a dozen grain silos. The headlights passed over the glint of thousands of eyes out in the pasture. Cows. As the Corolla got closer, Sal could also make out a big rig and two smaller trucks as well. There were figures milling about—maybe ten men moving back and forth between the barns and the trucks, each with a dolly stacked high with boxes.

  Sal rolled down his window and was immediately assailed with the stench that can come only from a slaughterhouse: a mixture of piss, shit, the iodine stench of raw meat, and the earthy smell of grain. It reminded Sal of road trips when he was a kid—his father always stopping at big corporate farms that had diners or restaurants attached to them, convinced that they had the best food on earth because they had everything fresh. His father dead now, what, twenty-five years? Thrown off a fucking building.

  The Corolla pulled to a stop next to the big rig, but Neal didn’t bother to kill the engine. “This is the spot?” Neal asked.

  “Yeah,” Fat Monte said. He got out of the car and walked toward the sprawling barn, none of the guys with their dollies giving him even a second glance. With the Corolla’s headlights illuminating the landscape, Sal could see that the men all wore matching uniforms—navy-blue Dickies, gray button-down work shirts with a logo over one pocket, blue baseball caps, and gloves, though it was a pleasant evening, all things considering—and that the trucks all had the same logo, too, on their sides: Kochel Farm Fresh Meats. Condensation flowed out of the back of the refrigerated trucks, which explained the gloves.

  Sal reached down and touched his .38. He’d put one in Chema, one in Neal, and then he’d make a break for the darkness. With all these civilians as witnesses, Sal had to hope Fat Monte wouldn’t open up on him, though who knew what people were capable of anymore. He didn’t want to kill Neal. Didn’t even want to kill Chema, but Sal recognized he was about five or ten minutes from being ground into a patty and loaded into a refrigeration unit bound for a supermarket somewhere between here and California.

  He looked out his window one last time to make sure he knew where he was running to, and when he did, he saw something that made him sit upright: Fat Monte was standing maybe twenty feet away, talking to a bald guy holding a couple of blankets, a toddler by his side. Three, maybe four years old. Hard to tell in the dark. What the fuck was a little kid doing there?

  “Chema,” Sal said, “I want to apologize.” The Latino kid nodded his head but didn’t turn around. So tough, he couldn’t even take an apology like a man. “And I want you to thank me, too.” This got him to turn around.

  “Yeah, why’s that?”

  “Because I was about to shoot you in the back of the head, and I decided against it.” Chema swallowed once, but stayed silent. “Way I figure it, you owe me a pretty big favor.”

  “What about Neal, were you gonna shoot him, too?”

  “Probably,” Sal said, “but Neal and I got some history. I used to watch you when you were a baby, whenever your mom had to run an errand or had one too many White Russians. Maybe you don’t remember that.”

  Neal looked at Sal in the rearview mirror and said, “I thought that was just a joke.”

  “Nope,” Sal said, “true story.”

  Outside, Sal saw the bald man hand the toddler one of the blankets, and the kid ran it over to the big rig. Fat Monte and the bald man shook hands, and Fat Monte started to make his way back to the Corolla. The two smaller trucks pulled away then, too, leaving just the big rig.

  “So what is it you want me to do?” Chema asked.

  Sal pulled out his wallet and handed it to Chema, who immediately pocketed it. “Couple weeks from now, mail this to my wife. Same address as on my license.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Sal said. “There’s maybe two grand in there. Make sure there’s two grand in there when my wife gets it, too.”

  Chema bit at his bottom lip but didn’t say anything for a second. “Your wife,” he said finally, “she like Mexican food?”

  “Not really,” Sal said.

  “My girl makes these Mexican wedding cookies, maybe something like that?”

  “Sure,” Sal said. “If not, my son would eat them.”

  Chema bit at his lip again, and Sal couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his head.

  Fat Monte opened the car door before Chema could respond.

  “Neal, Chema,” Fat Monte said, “give your coats and shirts to Sal.” Neal and Chema looked at each other once in mild surprise but did what they were told. At the same time, Fat Monte took off his jacket and handed it to Sal, too. “Put all this shit on over your clothes.”

  “Where am I going?” Sal asked. He was out of the car now, layering shirts and jackets on top of his own suit jacket and button-down, the way he always dressed for a business meeting.

  “I don’t know,” Fat Monte said. “But my guess is you’re gonna be in the fridge until you’re at least a couple states away. The truck is only gonna be at forty-five degrees, so it’ll be like springtime in Chicago.”

  Forty-five degrees. Sal could live with that.

  Fat Monte walked Sal over to the big rig, and the two of them stood for a moment at the bottom of the loading ramp. They watched one of the uniformed guys inside the truck clear a spot. There were maybe ten blankets, a pillow, a flashlight, a couple of bottles of water, a box of Ritz Crackers, a walkie-talkie, even a chair. All the comforts of home, surrounded by boxes of ground beef. When the worker saw the two of them, he said, “This gonna work, boss?
”

  “That’ll be fine,” Sal said.

  “You start having a problem, just get on the walkie-talkie and the driver will pull over,” the worker said.

  They had all the angles worked out, which made Sal think maybe this wasn’t the first time the Family had smuggled a man out of town this way, which gave him an odd bit of relief.

  “This is where we part ways,” Fat Monte said.

  “How long we know each other?” Sal asked.

  “Couple concurrent sentences,” Fat Monte said, being funny now, which gave Sal pause. Fat Monte wasn’t exactly known for his quick wit.

  “Ten years for robbery,” Sal said. “Another fifteen for assault.”

  “That’s about right,” Fat Monte said. “Listen, I need your phone and your piece.”

  It was polite enough, not an order, which made Sal willing to hand them over. Fat Monte threw the phone onto the ground and then crushed it under his shoe, but didn’t bother to pocket the .38.

  “You ever come back to Chicago,” Fat Monte said, “I’ll have to kill you and your entire family, and I don’t want to do that.” Fat Monte clapped Sal once on the shoulder and then walked back toward the Corolla.

  It wasn’t five minutes later, after he had found a reasonably comfortable way to sit wedged up against a wall of meat, that Sal heard the two quick gunshots.

  CHAPTER ONE

  David Cohen. Sal Cupertine rolled that name around in his mouth. David Cohen. When he was a kid, he hated his own name, probably because every kid on the block had an uncle named Sal. But as he got older, he started to like it, started to see how it conveyed a sense of power and menace, two things he liked, at least in the abstract.