Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  David was biblical, which had its own worth. Sal wasn’t a religious man, never had been, and he certainly couldn’t be if he killed people for a living. Residual guilt and remorse he could deal with, but trying to reason with an entire other life, one that started after death? Sal couldn’t be bothered with that shit.

  Cohen. Well. That was something else all together. Sal had known a fair amount of Jews in his life, and the Family always got along with the Kosher Nostra that moved ecstasy and counterfeit paper around the college campuses; those guys were mostly Israeli and Russian Jews, the days of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky pretty much a thing of the past once they figured they could get rich by owning Hollywood and the banks. The Israelis and Russians in Chicago were young and respectful since they viewed the Family like something mystical they’d seen only on television and in the movies.

  All those guys were named Yaakov or Boris or Vitaly or Zvika, and they had thick accents and wore vests and big watches and drove Range Rovers, so everyone knew they weren’t your local Rosenblatts and Levys. With real business, though, they were ruthless. They’d send a message by killing a guy’s dog and girlfriend; fuck him up emotionally for the rest of his life without ever actually putting hands on him. Someone owes you money, you break their spirit and they will pay you forever, they said, and though he hated to admit it, Sal saw the wisdom in it. The problem was that the only way the Family had stayed in business for so long was that they didn’t hurt innocent civilians or pets. You kill a guy’s kids or dog, that’s the sort of shit that ends up in the newspaper and actually gets investigated. Kill some shitbag, it’s just a dead shitbag. Kill four federal agents, and your entire world could change.

  But David Cohen? That wasn’t a tough guy. That was a guy who fixed your glasses. That was your lawyer.

  “David Cohen,” Sal said, but it didn’t sound quite right and probably wouldn’t for another two weeks, or at least until he got his jaw unwired.

  Six months he’d been gone, and during that time no one had addressed him directly or looked him in the eye. Seven days he’d spent in and out of refrigerated meat trucks while they figured out what to do with him before they finally dumped him in Las Vegas.

  Or at least he was pretty sure it was Las Vegas.

  The local newspaper, the Review-Journal, had a columnist named Harvey B. Curran who spent half his time writing gossip about all the “wiseguys” in town and the other half writing gossip about the people who were taking bribes from the “wiseguys” in order to further whatever their aims. And there was the fact that Oscar Goodman was probably going to run for mayor, every night on the local news another feature about how he’d revitalize the city and bring back that Rat Pack vibe, no one even giving a shit that he was the mouthpiece for fucking Mount Olympus—Lansky, Leonetti, the whole Scarfo family.

  Everything was all out in the open. Except, of course, for Sal. Six months he’d been in the same house, not allowed to walk out the front door, only out back, only at night. Not that he’d been up for any travel, not with the litany of surgeries he’d gone through: a new nose and chin, a bunch of teeth ripped out and replaced with permanent implants. They’d lasered off his tattoos, shaved his head, got him to start wearing glasses. And the last thing, he hoped, was this new jaw. Even the surgeries had been done in secret—driven in the back of a windowless van in the middle of the night and hustled into a doctor’s office, Sal shot up full of anesthesia and then waking up back in the house. It was at the point now where he didn’t even bother taking the pain medication. Every part of his body hurt, and all the Percocets in the world weren’t going to make it any better, not while he was being held captive in an elegant two-story house with a saltwater pool, indoor hot tub and sauna, full gym, and a good five hundred cable channels pumped into every room in the joint.

  And now this: David Cohen.

  Sal was doing curls in the gym when Slim Joe, the kid who lived with him, came in and handed over a stuffed manila envelope.

  “What’s this?” Sal asked.

  “Bennie told me to give it to you,” Slim Joe said. “I didn’t ask any fucking questions.” Slim Joe didn’t ask about shit. Which was probably good. But Sal could set the house on fire and Slim Joe wouldn’t bother to ask why, he’d just sit there and watch it burn, particularly if Sal told him that it was being done on Bennie’s order. Bennie was Bennie Savone, a name which didn’t mean much to Sal when he was living in Chicago but which apparently carried weight in Las Vegas . . . enough so that he showed up in Curran’s gossip column fairly regularly. He ran a strip club in town called the Wild Horse, but what the column always alluded to was his marriage into a religious Jewish family, the Kales, who weren’t involved in any wiseguy business. Unless you counted Bennie’s father-in-law, since he was the rabbi at Temple Beth Israel.

  Not that Bennie had mentioned any of this to Sal. In fact, Sal still wasn’t entirely sure how he’d ended up hiding out with the Savone family, since the Family in Chicago wasn’t in business with them prior. It wasn’t his place to know or to ask, but the way Bennie treated him—respectful, but also clearly as a subordinate—indicated to Sal that whatever deal had been made was not a short-term arrangement. That, and all the surgeries to change his face.

  Sal took the envelope into his bedroom and emptied its contents out onto his bed. There was a birth certificate, a social security card, college transcripts from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, even old utility bills, all in the name of David Cohen. And affixed to a copy of a rental agreement for the very house he was already staying in—an agreement that was drafted that very same day between himself and the temple—was a Post-it note written in Bennie’s careful cursive: This is you. Commit it to memory, Rain Man. All of it.

  Rain Man. He hadn’t heard that name since Chicago.

  There was more: a family tree that showed David Cohen’s genetic history, all the way back to Poland in the 1800s; a weathered gold-leafed copy of the Talmud; a yarmulke.

  “David Cohen,” he said again.

  Sal Cupertine got up from his bed and walked into his bathroom. It was the nicest bathroom he’d ever had: travertine floors, a sunken Jacuzzi tub, two sinks, a stand-up shower with a rainfall shower head and built-in seating area. At first, Sal couldn’t figure out a pressing need for the seating area, unless you took a lot of showers with other people, which then made him miss his wife, Jennifer, so acutely he felt sick. He covered the seating area with shampoo bottles and soaps and towels, whatever he could find, really, so that it was now just a shelf. At the far end of the bathroom was a walk-in closet roughly the size of the bedroom he and Jennifer shared in their house in Chicago. It was so big, in fact, that it had a closet of its own: a cedar-lined coat closet that was kept cooler than the rest of the house by a separate air-conditioning unit. The closet was filled with designer clothes: a dozen suits, dress shirts, slacks, sweaters, shoes . . . all still with the price tags on them. One pair of shoes was marked down from seven hundred dollars to five hundred, or about what Sal would reasonably expect to spend on shoes for an entire year.

  The whole house, really, was beyond what Sal could ever have afforded, though it was certainly within the grasp of someone like his cousin Ronnie.

  Or maybe someone like Rabbi David Cohen.

  The truth was, for the last six months Sal had been trying to figure out a way to escape. He didn’t know where he planned to escape to, exactly, since he knew that going back to Chicago would be murder—either at the hands of the cops or at the hands of the Family. Fat Monte made that clear enough. No one had said anything to him about what went down in Chicago with the Donnie Brascos, but Sal knew for certain that if the Family let him live, they had a higher purpose for him or, more likely, managed to get something in exchange for him from the Savones, since killing the feds had to have caused a big problem, the kind of problem that would ripple through all the families, would cause innocent (or relatively innocent) men to get strung up on other charges, just so the Tribune and
Sun-Times would have something positive to report.

  Besides, if he showed back up in Chicago, he’d have, at most, only an hour to get in and out before someone caught wind of his presence. Between the snitches, the cops (even the crooked cops would turn his ass in—that went without saying), and the feds, never mind average Joe Q. Publics out there looking to pick up a reward, the odds of him getting dimed were high. Still, he entertained ideas of snatching Jennifer and William in the middle of the night and riding off for Canada . . . but then he was always struck with a question he simply did not have an answer for: And then what?

  It was a question that paralyzed him with its simplicity. Ronnie had promised to get his family out in due time, a promise Sal realized was empty almost as soon as the meat truck took off that night, but he still woke up each morning and searched the bed for Jennifer. Sal had managed to survive fifteen years in the game by keeping strict habits. Even the smallest ones were not easily broken.

  Sal leaned down and turned on the Jacuzzi and watched for a few moments while the tub filled with water, the jets sputtering to life. A year, he thought. A year of being Rabbi David Cohen, and he’d have some money, some connections, a way to get out of this mess. He’d already done six months, after all. What was another year? Maybe he could get Jennifer and William to Las Vegas, though he knew the feds would be watching them for a good long time, just in case he tried to make contact. So maybe two years. Yes. Two years. Two years and he’d make his move.

  So the Rabbi David Cohen went back into the bedroom, picked up all the paperwork he’d been given, and set it all on a chair next to the Jacuzzi. He then stripped out of his clothes and got into the tub, let the jets pound away at his back and neck until he began to understand that Sal Cupertine—all the things he’d done, all the people he’d loved—was, for the foreseeable future, dead.

  And then he began reading.

  It took three more weeks, but by the time David Cohen was due to have his jaw unwired, Bennie deemed it safe for him to go out the front door of his own house. It was two weeks before Thanksgiving, and David had spent the previous weeks reading and reading and reading, every day some new rabbinical text dropped off at the house with specific instructions of what should be read. David appreciated the attention to detail that was going into his cover, but he couldn’t help but think it was all a bit overboard. Was anyone going to walk up to him in the grocery store and demand to know his opinions on different parts of the Midrash? Or when he was putting some guy out, was he supposed to stop and educate the fucker on what it meant to be a veteran of history and the whole idea of noblesse oblige? It seemed excessive. The readings all came with corresponding quizzes—ten or fifteen questions written in florid cursive that David was to complete and return. He didn’t bother to cheat. He just answered the questions and hoped whoever was grading him took into consideration that he’d only barely passed high school, though that had more to do with falling for Jennifer in senior year than anything else.

  The weird thing—one of the weird things, anyway—was that since David received his new identity, Bennie hadn’t bothered to show his face at the house. He usually showed up for the midnight doctor’s appointments to check on the progress of David’s various operations, firing questions about healing time and when it might be appropriate for David to increase his physical activity, ironic since Bennie was a good one hundred pounds overweight. So David knew his concern wasn’t entirely altruistic. David didn’t mind his visits. It was better than trying to make conversation with Slim Joe.

  On this day, however, Bennie pulled up in front of the house and then called Slim Joe, who then handed the phone to David. “You ready to get that shit out of your mouth?” Bennie asked.

  “Since the day it happened,” David said.

  “Then let’s go,” he said. “I’m out front.”

  “Really?” David said.

  “It’s a blessed day, Rabbi,” Bennie said, and then he hung up.

  David walked out the front door, and he felt mostly normal, except for the fact that he didn’t have a gun on him. He hadn’t had one all this time, of course, but now here he was out in public, or as public as a house behind a private gate can be, and he realized that it was the first time in twenty years that he didn’t have a weapon of some kind on his person.

  “You look good,” Bennie said when David slid into the passenger seat.

  “I’m down thirty pounds,” David said. He hadn’t been able to open his mouth for almost six weeks. He’d gone to sleep in some doctor’s office one night after midnight and woke up the next morning with incisions on either side of his head, back behind his ears, that felt like someone had hit him with a hammer, which, in fact, they had. They’d broken his jaw with a hammer and chisel, moved it down, smoothed out all the rough edges, and then locked him up. Talking was hard enough; having Slim Joe make him protein shakes nearly induced suicide. “Maybe I should get my jaw wired,” Bennie said. “My wife’s dream.”

  Bennie drove down the long driveway and waited for the gate to open. It was at least twelve feet high, David saw, and there were cameras mounted on each corner, though David had never seen a closed-circuit TV in the house. He’d remember to ask about that. Bennie turned right, and David realized for the first time that he was in a neighborhood of homes just as sprawling as the one he’d been living in. Just as sprawling and, he noted, just the same. No character, David thought as they drove, just a bunch of houses painted somewhere between brown and mauve, each with a fountain with spitting cherubs out front. Where were the walkups and Craftsman homes? Weirder still were the street names: Anasazi, Hualapai, Turquoise Valley.

  As they drove, David also noticed full neighborhoods on one side of the street and then nothing but empty lots on the other with elaborate signs promoting the next new community, always with names like The Lakes at Town Center Commons, and always with a smiling white family rendered in a drawing. Not even a pretense of being politically correct or multicultural. His own housing development was called The Lakes at Summerlin Greens, not that he’d seen a lake or any greens. Though judging from the land movers he saw out in the empty fields, both were coming at some point.

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

  “Summerlin,” Bennie said.

  Summerlin. David had read about this place in the newspaper. A master-planned community built by Howard Hughes. “Why does everything look the same?”

  “Welcome to Las Vegas,” Bennie said.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, David soaking in the world. They kept going around traffic circles, made all the more absurd by the lack of other people on them. “Where are the casinos?” David asked.

  “The Strip,” Bennie said. He pointed to the south. “And then there’s a bunch of little shit holes around town. Places to play cards. Get a drink. See Eddie Money play. That sort of thing.”

  “The casinos,” David said, “that part of what you do?” He’d avoided asking any questions about the operations of the Savone family, but now that it was clear he was going to be spending some time around these parts, it felt prudent.

  “Nah,” Bennie said. “Not on the front side. We got influence in restaurant and hotel unions, we got a few cement and steel contracts, we run a couple construction outfits, we get some influence on the books, but you can’t just buy a casino anymore. It’s not like it used to be. Place like the Bellagio? You’re talking ten thousand employees. And anyway, it’s an open city. Half these other families aren’t smart enough to figure how to avoid prison time just by signing the wrong box, so I just let them, and if they come to me for advice, I’ll give it to them. We’re all better off if we can work together out here, but if you don’t know how to form an LLC, that’s not my problem. I’m happy to let some other family try their luck on the low-hanging fruit, find out how rotten it is these days, you know?”

  David didn’t, not really. He was straight muscle in Chicago, paid primarily not to know, and that had been fine,
at least until recently. He understood that the Family in Chicago made a lot of their money on heroin and cocaine, but the real money came from garbage and landfill, mostly. City contracts, he understood, brought in the real cash. And that was another reason why the feds typically kept their distance: No one wants to have garbage piled up on the streets. But the nuts and bolts of the economy were left to people further up the line, like his cousin Ronnie.

  “This Jew stuff,” David said, but then he stopped himself. He’d forgotten about Bennie’s wife and kids. “No disrespect intended,” he continued, “but I don’t understand it.”

  Bennie scratched at something on his neck. He turned onto the Summerlin Parkway and then onto I-95 heading south and all the while staying quiet. Which was fine with David. He was content not to say another word for the rest of his life.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Bennie said finally. There was an edge to his voice. Annoyance, maybe. Maybe he was going to pull over and shoot David in the face. There was no telling, but David was pretty sure that Bennie wasn’t the kind of guy who’d want to fuck up his upholstery, never mind his suit, a perfectly tailored Armani number that must have been expensive. “You go to college?”

  “No,” David said, though it felt like all the reading he was doing now was making up for that.

  “You ever been overseas?”

  “Canada a couple of times,” David said. He didn’t mention an overnight business trip to Jamaica, figuring there was no good reason to let Bennie know about that. Three hours there trying to decide how best to dispose of five dead Jamaicans.

  Bennie scratched that spot again on his neck, and David noticed that he had a bunch of little red bumps running from his Adam’s apple all the way to his chin. Razor burn; but the spot Bennie was scratching was actually a fine raised line that was a deeper shade of red. He’d noticed it before, not thinking anything of it, but now that he was up close he could see that it was a surgical scar. That or someone tried to slit his throat.